Chapter 6: Sliding
Perhaps fifteen minutes after we had all finished eating, I led the kids back into the water. They STILL hadn't turned on the big slides, but they had water flowing over most of the small ones and that satisfied the kids - especially the smaller ones. Of course, boys being boys, several of them were soon doing things that they were not supposed to such as climbing up the slides after going down them. It took them a while to figure out that the guy with the whistle was blowing at them and telling them not to do it. For the most part, I was right there playing around with the kids. Wilmer in particular, seemed happy about this and he kept calling "Padrino, padrino!" ("Sponsor, sponsor!" for those who don't know Spanish) trying to get my attention to join him on one slide or the other. I keep meaning to tell the kids that they can call me Victor, but where I live it's actually considered rude for a child to call an adult by his first name and I don't know what it's like in Honduras. A kid here would call me Mr. Victor if he knew me well - I really need to ask the translators what's the best way to handle it.
It turned out that we were waiting for the water park staff to finish lunch to turn on the main slides and at last they got them going. Well, actually, they didn't turn them all on, they sort of rotated which ones were on, but that wasn't an issue. There was no line to wait as the park wasn't very full and you can only go down one slide at once. The trick was that you had to walk up a substantial slope to get to the top (while carrying an inflated tube to ride on) so you'd get tried pretty quick doing it over and over. Carlos was somewhat intimidated by the size of the slides, but agreed to go with me. Needless to say, Jon and Wilson had no hesitancy about it and went down repeatedly. Carlos and I went down a few times and then I found Wilmer and asked if he wanted to go as well. He was even more intimidated than Carlos, but I could see he wanted to try it too. He and I went down twice but after that I was more or less worn out from lugging the floats up to the top, so figured we should try something more mellow as we only had about an hour left in the park.
Perhaps fifteen minutes after we had all finished eating, I led the kids back into the water. They STILL hadn't turned on the big slides, but they had water flowing over most of the small ones and that satisfied the kids - especially the smaller ones. Of course, boys being boys, several of them were soon doing things that they were not supposed to such as climbing up the slides after going down them. It took them a while to figure out that the guy with the whistle was blowing at them and telling them not to do it. For the most part, I was right there playing around with the kids. Wilmer in particular, seemed happy about this and he kept calling "Padrino, padrino!" ("Sponsor, sponsor!" for those who don't know Spanish) trying to get my attention to join him on one slide or the other. I keep meaning to tell the kids that they can call me Victor, but where I live it's actually considered rude for a child to call an adult by his first name and I don't know what it's like in Honduras. A kid here would call me Mr. Victor if he knew me well - I really need to ask the translators what's the best way to handle it.
It turned out that we were waiting for the water park staff to finish lunch to turn on the main slides and at last they got them going. Well, actually, they didn't turn them all on, they sort of rotated which ones were on, but that wasn't an issue. There was no line to wait as the park wasn't very full and you can only go down one slide at once. The trick was that you had to walk up a substantial slope to get to the top (while carrying an inflated tube to ride on) so you'd get tried pretty quick doing it over and over. Carlos was somewhat intimidated by the size of the slides, but agreed to go with me. Needless to say, Jon and Wilson had no hesitancy about it and went down repeatedly. Carlos and I went down a few times and then I found Wilmer and asked if he wanted to go as well. He was even more intimidated than Carlos, but I could see he wanted to try it too. He and I went down twice but after that I was more or less worn out from lugging the floats up to the top, so figured we should try something more mellow as we only had about an hour left in the park.
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