A couple of days ago on page 10 of one of the national newspapers there was an article about the phone company having turned back on the telephones for main office of the San Pedro Sula fire department. San Pedro Sula is the second largest city in Honduras with a population of 400,000 and for a few days it was impossible to call the fire department to report a fire because they hadn’t paid their phone bill for several months and it had been disconnected. Even with this act of benevolence on the part of the phone company, the seven branch fire stations were going to remain shut down for the time being. Sound amazing? Welcome to life in the developing world.

In the story above and subsequent ones, it is important to make clear that I’m not disparaging the culture or the people. Both are tops with me, but with all the little challenges you are faced with here, it helps to see the humor.

Take for example the trip earlier this week to the post office to get a post office box. Few people trust the postal system to actually deliver their mail so the post office itself isn’t a happening place. I’ve been there four or five times and have only seen a couple of other customers in all. When I told the clerk I needed a box she called out to a coworker to ask where the ledger was of the post office boxes (picture a very small office with very few places to put things). The coworker pulled out of a dilapidated file cabinet a ledger that looked like it could have been the missing torah. Somehow the coworker knew of a specific PO Box that was available. Great. Cost $7 for the year and $2 to have a key made for it. I gave them a $10 bill. They had no change.  A post office not having change might seem strange to you, but here it is just par for the course. Fortunately I had $9 in change. As I was leaving I realized that the box they had assigned was going to be too high for the girls to reach (hopefully once or twice a week they’ll be able to run in to check for mail while Ellen and I lazily wait in the car). So I went back to the co-worker and asked for a different box. “Oh look, if you had told me before you could have had this one [he points to one about 3 feet off the floor], but now that it has been recorded [referring to the torah] we can’t change it”. Hoping that he was mistaken, but definitely not wanting to piss him off since he was going to be responsible for putting mail in the box, or not, I asked if I could speak again with the first woman, who appeared to be the supervisor. He acquiesced and after I mentioned my daughters she appeared to agree, but because she was SO busy could I please come back tomorrow when things weren’t so hectic. “Don’t worry” is kind of the nation refrain and they said it in harmony as I walked back into the tropical heat, defeated once again.

The whole reason I needed a PO Box anyway was because I have to register my car (the car I purchased 2 months ago and am still trying to get title to). The government’s registration form requires a deliverable address. All the other forms (for the cellular phone, gas and electricity, bank account…) have a long space to put in either a street address or a description of where you live. Our landlord assured us we didn’t need an address (the house is probably 10 years old and hasn’t had one yet) and we didn’t until this form. The most official address we’ve been told is “The second house down from the Channel 19 antennas.” Fortunately a PO Box is just as good as a street address and when I went back the next day they had already reassigned the box. I also tried to purchase 259 stamps, but they didn’t have any, They said not to worry and come back tomorrow. (Update - they didn't have them the next day, but they did the next week.)

With a P.O.Box proudly in hand I went back to the Vehicle Registration office to finally register the car, but it was closed and will be closed for an undeterminable amount of time. Apparently they are making changes to the vehicle registration program and getting rid of personnel. The last time they did this the office was shut down for four weeks. My dream of actually registering our car will have to wait.

Let’s go shopping at the mall. A couple of weeks ago we went shopping for souvenirs. After ringing up our purchases the clerk ran our credit card, but it didn’t work. She ran it again. Same thing. Then she told us it hasn’t worked for 21 days, but you never know when it’ll start working again. This was when we used our new checks drawn at a local bank (opening the account required two letters of reference and only when we got the check book did we learn that Ellen couldn’t cosign until she got two more reference letters – of course Ellen is a shady looking character). It’s always nice to get more established and simplify your life and we thought the checking account would do this. And it will, but we had to return to the store twice when our new checks didn’t go through because I signed them Will Bullard and William Allen Bullard instead of William A. Bullard. Most signatures here look like they were created by a toddler just learning to scratch lines and make a doctor’s handwriting look nice. I have one of the few legible signatures in this country and it burned me.

Shopping done let's get in the car and go home. Easier said then done, because at the exit of the mall is a guard that has to check the registration papers of every personal vehicle as it leaves. Theoretically this is to cut down on car theft, but I would be very surprised if any of the guards are even literate. They usually make an act of looking at the registration papers, then without even verifying the information they hand it back. This wouldn’t be such a big deal if it didn’t often cause a pile up of cars waiting to leave and require an extra five minutes to get out of the parking lot.

The teacher strike that shut down school for five weeks ended on Monday. This is good for the students and good for everyone since teachers have a nasty habit of taking over key bridges and shutting down entire towns for half a day. The government is going to double their salary next year.

So life offers a few surprises now and again here that make life frustrating at times, but never dull. Even with the cultural quirks I really enjoy living here. The people are as nice as they can be and suffer my Spanish stoically. The mountains behind the town are dramatic and the vegetation exotic. There is a reason that Honduras is off the tourist path, but it’s still a great place to live.