Posts by jessica ochocki
Chicken Bus

The first chicken bus honked at four AM.

The second one blasted its horn at 4:20 a.m., or maybe 4:30. It didn’t matter. I was awake well before dawn, like every day in San Andreas Osuna, Guatemala. I wondered why I didn’t hear the other 30 people sleeping at the Finca — surely one of the twenty three Guatemalan Army personnel and seven Engineers Without Borders staff heard the blast horns designed to wake all possible passengers in a twenty give mile radius. I weighed what to do in the darkness before breakfast at six and chose to shuffle off to the shared toilet ahead of any others. 

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Landslide of Lessons

Someone posed the question "Name something important you learned from your dad" recently and I had to think about it some before I could come up with my answer. See, in my past, I would have answered out of a place of pain, snarky responses based on my limited perceptions at the time. I had reasons for these answers, sure. My parents split up when I was 6 weeks old and Mom - like too many single parents do - made the poor choice of sharing her feelings about my father with me.

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