On the ride to my parents' house, chauffeured by the woman I still knew only as "Mother's Embassy Friend," I stared out the window of the car, struck by the strangeness of the place. The vehicles racing alongside us were familiar to me in that they had four wheels, a steering column, and were covered in metal, but here they seemed to operate on a different set o fprinciples. Vehicles that long ago would have been relegated to the junkyard in the United States tentatively puttered along here, held together with bungee cords and electrician's tape, as if no one had bothered to inform them of Newton's laws of motion. And the cows and pigs we passed by were different too. Personally not an expert when it comes to farm animals (to this day my father's greatest disappointment has been raising four children, none of whom shares his enthusiasm for livestock), I am not competent to describe the exact nature of their dissimilarity, but they felt foreign to me. They were unmistakably Honduran.

But the strangest sight of all were the signs that appeared along the road. Even after I painstakingly translated one of them with the help of a Spanish dictionary, its meaning still eluded me: "Don't leave your rocks on the highway>" This kind of warning just didn't appear along the California freeways. There were Slippery when Wet, Dangerous Curves Ahead, even the occasional Falling Rocks signs, but never before had I come across any request to kindly leave my stones elsewhere.

I turned to my father who was seated next to me in the backseat, figuring that after having lived in the country for nearly a year, he'd be able to help me make sense of the signs, but my mother was quick to interrupt.

"Honey, they put them up because so many people have been leaving their rocks on the highway," she explained. I waited for my mother to complete her explanation, but clarity was not her strong point.

"Dad," I said, turning to my Mensan parent, "Why is everyone going around carrying rocks and leaving them on the highway?"

"When their cars break down, which they do a lot, instead of using triangles or flares to divert other cars, they pile rocks on the road so that traffic swerves out of the path of their vehicle. But a lot of people get their cars fixed and leave the rocks. Hence the request-"

"Please don't leave your rocks on the highway."

"Exactly."

Twenty minutes later, successfully having avoided all the rocks in our path, we arrived in my parents' neighborhood, the ritziest area in town, where a two-story, three-bedroom Spanish colonial-style house ran my parents hour hundred dollars a month, a price way out of reach of all but the wealthiest Hondurans. My younger sisters ran out to greet me, and after a round of gleeful screams and boisterous hugs my father insisted on having us all go inside so that he could show me around the place. Heather and Catherine, who had already taken this tour upon their separate arrivals, had found it so amusing they insisted on going one more time.

"Wait till he explains about the toilet," Heather whispered to me as we huddled around the amenity, the first time I could remember that four Dales had entered the bathroom at the same time.

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