Reu - Spanish for “really really hot”

There are several different kinds of buses here. We already mentioned our experience with the microbuses (vans). When we went to Coban, we took a charter bus. For half the price of a charter bus you can also take a “chicken bus.” We were warned from the start about the “chicken bus” and we were advised to pay the extra for the charter bus. A workshop was organized for us to teach in Retahuleu on Sunday. When we looked into transportation arrangements we found that only second class buses travel to Reu. “Second class bus” is the technical term for “chicken bus.” Charter buses won’t go to Reu because the road from Xela is so terrible. Those of you who haven’t been here might be wondering what exactly a “chicken bus” is. Well, school buses that are no longer fit for children in the United States are sent down here where they are painted bright colors and fitted with super roof racks. As the primary mode of transportation, the buses are equipped to carry bushels, boxes and baskets filled with produce, products, and pets (that will become someone’s dinner). Besides the driver, there is an assistant who does all the work. He shouts the destination out the door at every person on the street. He collects the money during the journey. He carries all of the loads up the ladder to the super rack. He is also an acrobat. When things are in place on the roof, he bangs on the top of the bus to let the driver know he can put the petal to the metal. As the driver accelerates, the helper man climbs down the stairs, opens the back door of the bus and reenters the bus. He is quite adept at his art because he must go through the routine every time some one enters or exits the bus with a load. Chicken buses don’t have schedules. You can either go to the terminal or wait on any main road. There are so many buses that you don’t have to wait very long for one that is going where you want to go. We left the house on Sunday at 6:15 and hiked 45 minutes toward the bus terminal. Before we actually arrived at the terminal, we saw a Reu bus heading out. We flagged it down as it passed us and it actually stopped. When we realized that it was stopping, we ran to catch it. The helper man shoved us on to the bus as it pulled away. The bus’s momentum tossed us to the back of the bus where we made ourselves comfortable. We will use “comfortable” as a relative term. Though we didn’t know it then, we were experiencing great chicken bus comfort with only the two of us in the school bus seat. As the bus began to fill, we were very grateful to have boarded at the terminal. Naïvely I figured that when the all of the seats had two people in them the helper man would stop publicizing and we would not stop at every gathering of people along the road. Thankfully, we were the one of the last people to add a third person to our seat. School buses are much smaller than when we were kids (especially if you are 6’7’’)! Recent mudslides have taken out some serious portions of road. Places where the road used to be are now steep drop offs of 80 feet. Thankfully there are detours. The long detours are comprised of rough, make-shift dirt roads. Our ride was an hour and a half descent from Xela at 8,000 feet to Reu (on the coast) at about sea level. The charter buses have set some understandable limits. After experiencing the road, I would not want to attempt it in any vehicle of mine either. We knew the church was on the main road coming into the city, so we kept our eyes peeled. When we saw the chapel, we stood up and made our way to the front of the bus. Since there are very few “official” stops, that is what you have to do to show that you want to get off the bus. As we headed beck up the road toward the chapel, Mike reached in his pocket for the cell phone to check the time. It was gone! We couldn’t believe it. Thankfully, we knew where the church was and we were safe. Unfortunately, on Saturday, the day before, we paid to add 200 minutes to the phone. Here the cell phones don’t require plans, you just buy cards (like a calling card) that add more minutes to your phone. We arrived at the chapel in time to get to know the stake president and attend his ward's sacrament meeting. That was really nice, especially since last week we missed church because we were on the bus traveling back to Xela. The missionaries gave the talks in sacrament meeting, and we realized how much our spanish had degraded since our missions. It is getting better; at least we're noticing our errors more frequently and can correct them. The workshop wasn't exactly what we had expected. The stake employment specialist is an on-the-ball brother who had orchestrated a multi-week publicity blitz for all the wards and branches in the stake. Sixty people had signed up, and we had been advised that more might be coming, or less might be coming, depending on people's memories, how hot it was, how much chicken was in the tamales on the street, and some other arcane probabilities. It was scheduled to begin at 1 in the afternoon, the same time that our ward finished church, so we skipped our last hour of church to set up the gym so that it would be ready when the participants arrived. I’m not sure exactly how many were there because some people were there at the beginning, but not at the end, others came in the middle or at the end, but the main group was around 13. Most of those who did show up were there to pass off the requirement of attending the workshop so they could apply for a PEF loan. There was a notable lack of energy in the group, perhaps because they had just sat through three hours of church, and it was getting to be very hot and even more humid. We had the workshop in the gym which was difficult as far as acoustics go. The high ceiling, the ten ceiling fans, and the echo-producing tile on the floor and walls probably made it hard for them to hear us. It certainly made it hard for us to hear them. Happily, no one actually fell asleep, though it must have been a great temptation. We took a break about halfway through. The stake employment specialist had sandwiches and juice for the sixty people who had signed up, so there was plenty to go around for the fifteen or twenty who were there during the break. We've decided that six hours is just not enough time for a good workshop, and if it's in any way possible to do it over more than one day, it's highly recommended. That gives them time to do their homework, make some calls, talk about successes and challenges together, and begin to see results. In many of our weekend workshops, especially when people have travelled a long way, it's just not possible. This was the case in Reu as well. We hope that the participants do their homework and have success, but there's no way to really know. We finished up the workshop at 7 PM. We arrived at our hotel at about 7:30 and found that we didn’t really have anything to do. The pool looked inviting, but it was Sunday. Besides, we didn’t have any other clothes, just what was on our backs. We had a few slices of bread and two bananas to eat. We just laid on top of the sheets sweating. It was incredible how humid it was. We must have fallen asleep eventually. I woke up in the middle of the night because I was coughing and having trouble breathing. It must have something to do with the humidity, because the same thing happened in Coban. Thankfully, Xela is dry. The stake president picked us up at the hotel at 5:00 and drove us to the bus terminal in his little Chinese taxi, something like a golf cart, but a little bit faster. He said that Reu has something like 800 of these little mini-taxis in service, and that it's a pretty good job. We arrived at the terminal and boarded the bus. Since we were nearly the first people, we had our own seat! However, ten minutes after leaving the terminal the bus was filling up quickly. Soon we were three in the seat like everyone else. This time the entire aisle was also filled with people standing. Poor Mike had to put his knees up to his chest to be able to fit them behind the metal back of the seat in front of us. After about 45 minutes we tried something different to relieve Mike from the awkward position. He put his legs where mine would normally go (so he was sitting kind of sideways) and I crossed my legs over top of his. That helped for a while until our limbs had gone to sleep. During the two hours of thinking time on the bus, I took note of the bus’s capacity. The former school bus had 20 seats, which would comfortable fit 40 elementary school kids. There were 80 of us on the bus! This bus doesn't have anything loaded on top, but it is a pretty normal specimen of the buses here. Normally we wouldn't get this close to the front of a bus, but this one was parked.