On most days in April and September (the two hottest months), you can notice your skin start to crackle, and be met with the sensation of having an iron pressed against your cheeks. You shed about ten pounds of sweat just on the twenty-minute walk to school, and this at six-thirty in the morning, when the knife edge of the sun is just starting to slice its way through the eerie dawntime haze that envelops our scorching valley like a mushroom cloud. By ten a.m., teaching math or science or English in your classroom, which only has one rather ineffective fan, you start to get a bit dizzy, swaying from side to side like you have had a bit too much to drink. So, you drink a gallon of water before lunch. You marvel at the ability of your kids to run around screaming in the sun during recess, seemingly impervious to its relentless abuse. Some of these kids are as white as you are, with no melanin to protect them from being burnt the color of a fire engine. You spend recess sitting under the lone fan in your room, or else under the slightly better one in the teacher's lounge, sharing its cathartic breeze with four or five of your colleagues. If you are unlucky enough to have recess duty that day, then you seek out a swath of shade broad enough to give you a kaleidoscopic vista of a large portion of the property. If a child in the hot sun is misbehaving, you do your best to deal with the situation from afar, clinging to your outpost of heat relief like a stalwart soldier at the Alamo, refusing to surrender. The day's heat peaks at about one o'clock, and you are pretending it is not a burden, valiantly teaching on in the face of tremendous climactic adversity, still wondering why your kids are less bothered by the weather than you are. When the last bell finally rings at 2:10, you collapse in a moist pile of flesh and bones, feeling like a piece of chicken that has just spent the last seven hours being heated in a microwave. You are spent, and hope that you can leave school soon enough to get a ride home in the back of some parent's pickup truck, which is a usual form of commuter transportation in Honduras.
The kids are not as bothered by the heat because the human body has an amazing ability to adapt to whatever climate it is placed in. Over the long term, probably hundreds if not thousands of years, human beings have been able to eke out healthy lives in the least welcoming places in the world-the Arctic, the Sahara, umm, Cofradia. It must be that each human organism takes on certain adaptive characteristics that become part of his or her genetic makeup, making it easier for each subsequent generation to live in a given environment. Because the people of Cofradia have bodies that can withstand intense heat in a way that the gringo teachers cannot, when the weather dips down to seventy degrees, you will see Cofradianos wearing heavy fleece jackets. Ahh, the flipside to their adaptation, and boy do we gringos revel in the mild temperatures that are present during most of the rainy season, from mid-November through January. While our Honduran friends are dressed for a ski trip to Vail, we prance around in short sleeves and light pants, feeling warm rather than hot, and wishing that this three-month lull in the normal steaming state of affairs was not such a cruel joke.
The kids are not as bothered by the heat because the human body has an amazing ability to adapt to whatever climate it is placed in. Over the long term, probably hundreds if not thousands of years, human beings have been able to eke out healthy lives in the least welcoming places in the world-the Arctic, the Sahara, umm, Cofradia. It must be that each human organism takes on certain adaptive characteristics that become part of his or her genetic makeup, making it easier for each subsequent generation to live in a given environment. Because the people of Cofradia have bodies that can withstand intense heat in a way that the gringo teachers cannot, when the weather dips down to seventy degrees, you will see Cofradianos wearing heavy fleece jackets. Ahh, the flipside to their adaptation, and boy do we gringos revel in the mild temperatures that are present during most of the rainy season, from mid-November through January. While our Honduran friends are dressed for a ski trip to Vail, we prance around in short sleeves and light pants, feeling warm rather than hot, and wishing that this three-month lull in the normal steaming state of affairs was not such a cruel joke.
