Frozen in Time at 90°F

Somehow I’ve managed to be in Honduras for 8 ½ months now, I really don’t know how that has happened or where the time is gone, I’m almost 1/3 of my way through my Peace Corps experience….crazy! Although I’ve done a lot of things, met a lot of people, and gone a lot of places it still completely blows my mind that the time has been passing so fast. I feel like i have somehow fallen into a bizarre time warp that I can’t really explain. I will now attempt to rationalize a few time bending phenomena’s that I have experienced here.
Work days: People here wake up early because they go to sleep so early, there really isn’t much to do in Honduras at night. For this reason the general work day, at least with the people I work with, starts around 7, lunch around 11:30, and generally finishes by 3, this has been tricky because I prefer to start around 9 and go till 5ish, the problem is finding people who will do work after lunch, most days I will be the last to leave the health center around 4:30, besides the janitor everyone else will have been checked out for about 2 hours earlier, they usually leave me the lock and tell me to lock up when I’m done. This leaves an extended afternoon that mysteriously disappears, mostly I play soccer or nap. The evenings manage to go even faster, I honestly still haven’t figured out where the hours between 6 and 9 go.
Workshops: I have gone to a number of workshops with the Peace Corps, all of them have been very good and beneficial for my relationships with counterparts and work, but they make short work of weeks too. Usually these workshops start on a Tuesday or Wednesday and go till Friday. The problem is that traveling to these gatherings takes up time, because volunteers are all over the country workshops are all over the country too, the closest one I’ve gone to was 3 hours away the farthest 9 hours…traveling kills days.
Traveling: Fortunately for me I don’t mind bus trips and I have gotten used to the inevitable delays that are associated with Central American travel. It seems like no matter where you go it will always take way more time than you expect to arrive and that you will arrive exhausted, it’s just a fact of traveling here, for that reason you usually kill two days on either ends of trips and feel it for much longer. Honduras also doesn’t have night transportation and even if they did I wouldn’t trust it farther than I can throw a bus. Traveling has to be done early in the day or you run the risk of waiting forever or getting stranded in a sketchy bus station (almost happened to me in San Pedro).
Seasons: I would have to say that the most mind blowing aspects of time here is the passing of weeks, months, and seasons. Although there is technically a dry season and a wet season, a cold season and a hot season, it is hardly noticeable and very hard to judge time because it is nothing like the “normal” seasons that we are accustomed to in the US. It is hard to picture seasons because here every day is more or less the same, you can’t see the flowers blooming, the leaves changing, the cold weather setting in, holiday decorations, summer vacation (Honduran schools go from January-November) ….nothing. Talking to people at home has been the only way to picture what season I’m in, hearing sports scores, or weather reports. Even though I know I’m going to be home in two weeks it’s hard to believe that it will really be November, leaves will have fallen, school years started, holidays coming and going.