Culture Differences

As we are sure you can imagine there are a lot of cultural differences between Honduras and the U.S. Some of them are really awesome, and some of them drive us crazy! We thought we would talk about some of them today so you can get a feel for Honduras and life here. One of the cultural differences that we really like is the closeness of neighborhoods. Since most people live in the same city, and many even the same neighborhood their whole lives, the neighborhoods are very close knit. Everyone knows everyone else and they look after each other. When someone needs help, there are lots of people there offering support, and things are safer because everyone is keeping an eye out. This is really nice for us, especially since we live in one of the oldest neighborhoods and everyone is very close. In the U.S. we did not know our neighbors and it is nice to be part of a tightly-knit community. One of the differences that is hard to get used to is the slow pace. Most people do things very slowly, especially walk, and they are also late to EVERYTHING. It is really frustrating when you are at a training, class at a school, or any type of meeting, and people show up an hour late. Another big difference is the way people use cell phones. Most people here have cell phones and they never turn them off. They ring in meetings, classes, even church AND they always get answered in the meeting, class, or church. At first this really bothered us, but then we started asking around and were told that one of the main reasons people answer their cell phones everywhere and do not put them on silent is due to the fact that it does not cost you anything to receive a call but if you miss it and have to call someone back, you have to pay. This made a lot more sense to us and although it is still annoying to hear cell phones ringing and people talking on them in meetings and such, at least we understand part of the rationale behind it. There are also a lot of catcalls (piropos as they are called here). This is impossible to get used to and drives Shannon crazy all of the time. Last week an 8-year-old yelled at her! Kevin gets some too which is also funny. An interesting note is that if we are together, we both still get them. Some men call Kevin their brother-in-law implying that they are going to marry Shannon. We just keep hoping that as people get more used to us the piropos will die down. That’s just a few of the cultural differences that we have noticed, there are, of course, a lot more…perhaps we will write about them in a future blog.