If Honduras were the US then Olancho would be Texas--full of cattle, dirt roads, pistols, trash burners... The school directors, Blanca y Sangrario, plus four or five other employees of the school picked us up Sunday morning at 2am. After saying initials hellos we slept as best we could, distracted by gorgeous mountain dawn scenery and giant holes in the road. When we arrived in our town it was already 9am. Our assignments that day were to put our things in the apartment, eat lunch, and go to the grocery store (perfect schedule so far!)

Since then we have gone to the school (CECOM) each day for our planning and orientation. What a pleasure to work beside talented Honduran teachers! WOW, how am I going to keep these kids' attention?!? There are four English teachers for the elementary school: Chelsea (PK, K); Benjamin (1st, 4th); Stephanie (2nd, 5th); Aaron (3rd, 6th). When the older kids are learning in English, the younger are learning in Spanish. Halfway through the day the kids swap classes!
The last few mornings I have been waking up to rooster calls outside the window, but this particular rooster sounds just as much like a donkey. This is our back porch, home to our future amaca.

I feel incredibly optimistic about this year because the directors and teachers here are very supportive, the students are cute as can be, and my American colleagues are fun to be around. This was our first family dinner in the apt.

It's getting warmer.....

Greetings and Blessings from swampy southern sunshine state!

During the last two full days in the country I am completing some last minute preparations before I move to Honduras where I'll teach elementary English for eleven months in a Catholic School. Hooray!! This is a dream come true as I have wanted to improve my Spanish communication since seventh grade! What better opportunity than total immersion? I ask for your prayers during this time, particularly that God use my broken, inadequate teaching skills to somehow impart some English to these little ones. There is a lot about my living situation there I still do not know, but I trust I will make a warm home and come to love this place dearly.

As for my time here in Florida, between getting vaccines and filling prescriptions, my good friend and former housemate, bonesaw, has graciously opened his house and shared his stomping grounds. He drives an antique flatbed truck. dude.

Talking Hands--A Book Review

Margalit Fox wrote this excellent book about sign language. As a journalist with a masters in linguistics, she is well equipped to weave her readers into the marvelous and infinite language quilt whose fabric consists of inflected words and their speakers. Or in this case, their signers. She arranges this book (which happens to be the first she's written) in two alternating themes; she discusses the history and theory of sign language in the odd chapters and in the the even chapters she narrates a team of linguists documenting and analyzing the sapling sign language of Al-Sayid.

Fox places the discoveries of Al-Sayid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL) in the context of Israeli Sign Language (ISL) and American Sign Language (ASL)--ISL because of its proximal influence and ASL because Fox is American. ABSL started as a home sign just a few generations ago and the village children and grandchildren acquired it. Marriages between the deaf and hearing are common in Al-Sayid, so many hearing folks are also fluent signers. Deafness is genetically coded as having both recessive alleles, so it is possible for hearing parents who are each carriers of 1 recessive allele to birth a deaf child.

Whereas spoken language is built from phonemes (consonants and vowels) arbitrarily strung together by convention to form morphemes imbued with meaning, a speaker may comprehend an utterance. Insofar as those morphemes adhere to syntax and grammar, that speaker may understand a proposition. Considering the gamut of linguistic tools, an infinite breadth awaits a creative soul. Have you ever wondered how you may know what something says even though you have never heard or read it before? Nay, even if that proposition has hitherto never been constructed by the entirety of speakers, we are not manacled for we may miraculously fully understand it.

Similarly, signers articulate vast varieties of propositions--yea the tome of signs is growing--though they employ their arms, moreover their bodies, as articulators instead of the swift and nimble tongue like we speakers. A signer recognizes a word or phrase in terms of hand shapes, location, and movement. For example, both flat palms rubbing the chest in circular motion means enjoy. But both flat palms in front of the chest moving in a different circular motion (back, up, forward, down, back up, forward, down) means happy. "The hands turn out to be first-rate encryption devices. Hands can grasp and clench and push and tap and brush and thrust and slice and dive. Fingers can point and poke and wiggle and spread and curl and bend. These movements can be performed high in the air or low; in front of the body or off to the side; in contact with the face, chest, arm or opposite hand; rapidly or slowly; with straight or circular or repeated motions. Every one of these visual operations, meaningless in itself, can be conscripted to act as linguistic code, just as the acoustic signals of spoken language can" (pp98).

i)Fox, Margalit. Talking Hands: What Sign Language Reveals about the Mind. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007.