Tomorrow, Honduras.

I can think of no better time to start my blog than at this moment. I am sitting in my hotel in Costa Rica, coming off of a week of surfing, hiking and exploring and a month of travel. This morning I surfed a point break south of Dominical, Costa Rica, completely alone. I rode waves in 75 degree water looking back on a rocky beach with palm covered mountains in the background. Last month, I bounced around the mellow villages of volcano-ringed Lago de Atitlan in Guatemala, I swam in the crystal-clear limestone pools of Semuc Champay, and climbed the ruins of Tikal.

Three months I have been in the process of leaving. Moving furniture into storage, cancelling cell phone accounts, arguing with an unreasonable subletter, notifying banks, dropping my health insurance, fixing two broken car windows, paying my incorrectly filed taxes (never use a free tax service), fixing a flat tire that turned into a bent rim, dropping my AT&T cell phone plan, dropping it again because they didn’t cancel it properly, then dropping it once again because they still were having issues, and shopping around for med-evac insurance.

All of this preparation has, in essence, been leading up to tomorrow. Tomorrow I fly to Honduras: “home” for the next year. I am truly a master of denial. I am virtually unable to experience reality until it is right in front of my face. Sitting in my hotel room tonight it just hit me. BAM! It's here. A wave of anxiety has rushed over me.

What if I am an awful teacher? We have all had them. I had a calculus professor at Berkeley that turned me off of math for life. That asshole! I used to love math. What a huge responsibility it is to be teacher. Teachers, like parents, have the ability to destroy children or help mold them into adults. What a power. Mrs. Dunlap, my 10^th grade English teacher, taught me how to write. She single-handedly got me through college. Mrs. Barker, Mrs. Nieve, Sr. Ortiz (though I wouldn’t like to admit it) have been so formative in making me “me.”

More superficially, I am actually afraid of the heat. I have never experienced true weather. I am going to a steamy humid foothill region that is at this moment 90 degrees +. No A/C.

The first three weeks in Honduras, I will be living in a homestay. I just received a little profile of the family I am staying with. The parents are named Max and Juana, they have one boy who graduated from the school where I will be teaching and another boy who will be in my 9^th grade science class. I’m having a bit of anxiety about this homestay situation. Homestays are usually overwhelmingly positive experiences, but I have a knee-jerk reaction to them. In high-school, I lived with a family in Argentina with a bipolar abusive mother. Although she was never abusive to me, I the older brother would rail on the little brother, and then the mother would beat on the older brother with a wooden spoon. Talking about it now, it seems comical, but, at the time, it was pretty intense. Especially for a 13yr old California kid that was raised by an ex-hippie, flower power mom and an educator for a father in a household where we rarely raised our voices. Needless to say I am wary of homestays.

Tomorrow I fly to Honduras. How fitting that I am travelling on my mom’s birthday. I can feel her smiling. Regardless of the anxiety I am feeling, I know that this is what I am meant to be doing right now. It’s good to feel that certainty.