Best Friend Adventures (Part I)

Some of the craziest things I've done in Honduras have been with my best friends. Today I’ll share some of the ridiculous things I've done with my best friend who lived in the middle of nowhere. She lived about thirty minutes higher into the mountains than we did; this is when we lived in Zambrano. She was the first MK I met and my first MK best friend. She was also my only friend in Honduras at the time of meeting her.

                When we first met, neither of us liked the other. I thought she was a stuck-up farm girl and she thought I was a stuck-up city girl. We both were wrong. We ended up realizing how much we had in common even with her being a farm-girl and me being a city-girl. We only found out how cool the other was when I went to her house for the first time. My whole family came to hang out with her family. She took me and my sisters, much to my dismay, to their chili patch a little ways away from the house. I can’t remember the conversation we had but it ended well. By the time we left, I knew I made a new friend. I remember playing some kind of spy game; little did I know that this game was the beginning of many, many others.

                There were several games and stories we made up, with several characters, places, and plots. There are too many to count, so I’ll only tell a few that I can remember most specifically. The game we most commonly played was spies. We played in different places too. We played in her house, in a missionary couple’s house when they left for the States for a month or so. We played by the river, in land owned by others or by her dad. We played in San Francisco (the town thirty min. away from us) and in Botijas (the town she later moved to, an hour away from us), we rarely played at my house though as there wasn't as much space to run around. We had different names from our real names, we had a couple names but the ones we used the most were Autumn (me) and Summer (her). We would always pretend to be undercover as singers so no one would know we were spies. We always had male characters that liked us or were teaming with us. Their names changed quite a bit. We would dress up sometimes, but not that often since we ran outside and got dirty.

                On many occasions we would walk down to the river in shorts, t-shirts, and flip-flops and swim or play in the mud. As much as it sounds gross, it wasn't. People pay to bathe in mud, we had it for free. That’s what we told ourselves anyway. We would sometimes go past the river and play in this cabin-thing that was owned by some guy but he didn't use it.

We would go under barbed wire fences to get there and we’d play spies. If her family wasn't home for some reason, I remember we would end up walking throughout her house singing and dancing pretending to be undercover agents. During the time when the missionary couple was in the States we would go up to their little house and we would play there. We would first check on their cats, and then we would start our game. Many times we would eat the food there or make juice. We once attempted to make a smoothie, it wasn't the best but it wasn't undrinkable either. Once she moved to Botijas we had to find other places to play, as all the above places were in San Francisco. We would play in the cabin on their property or in the guayaba (guava) trees, also on their property. We would play in her house too, but not as often as there were people usually there. We’d sometimes play in the sugarcane as well. We mainly walked up the hill and further on into the middle of nowhere and we would just run around killing imaginary bad guys. We found a river once but we didn't go there very much since it was farther away. We sometimes went under barbed wire fences to get to a place we called the Three Pines, as three Pine trees were on the top of the hill. We had to stop going there because the owner realized we were on his property and didn't like it. We once got lost by walking in the woods, but we eventually came out at the dirt road. One time we had the brilliant idea of sun bathing at the top of a hill. We had to go high enough where people passing couldn't see us, but I do remember someone seeing us and that was embarrassing. We weren't in bathing suits, thank goodness, we were in shorts and t-shirts but it was still embarrassing.

We once walked down a dirt road with my sisters and one of her brothers and we came across this abandoned house, so we decided to check it out. We ended up trying to get into the house but it was locked. We walked around the whole house looking for a way in; as my friend said the owner wasn't living there anymore. The house, I should mention, was a whole story above ground, the bottom part was for cattle and then there was a staircase leading to the door of the house. So we walked around the house, on a ledge, looking for a window open. We found an open window and sent her brother in. I remember we also got the door open, but the place where the window was open and the place where the door was open wasn't connected or something weird like that. We explored the house but I think we scared ourselves into thinking someone was going to see us in this house that wasn't ours, so we left.

We never went back to that house or did anything like that again. Another crazy thing we did with my sisters and her brother was walking up the hill by her house as ‘crazy bandits.’ We dressed up weirdly and held fake weapons pretending to be stupid criminals. We were a family, with my best friend as the oldest (even though I was older, she was way taller), her brother and I were twins (apparently we were the same height and acted crazy when together), and my sisters were either twins or they were just the younger siblings. We laughed so hard that day, walking up that hill yelling silly things and ‘shooting’ stuff. It was a lot of fun.

Me and her in Botijas!

There were many things that we did together, her and I. There are many details and stories that I failed to mention, mainly because there are too many. I knew her for almost all the time I have lived in Honduras, so we had many memories. I had so much fun playing spies with her. I loved her then and I love her now. She’s my best friend. Although she moved back to the States, we still have those crazy memories to look back upon. I miss her and the times we had but at least I can remember and enjoy those memories instead of being caged up by sadness. Because there are many stories with her, she just may appear in a future post. Since this is part one, it means by other best friends have their stories as well!

Goodbye, until next time!