The seal is for marksmanship and the gorilla is for sand racing…

September 16
OK so now it is Sunday and I am back home in Victoria. Yesterday was Honduras’ Independence Day—several Central American countries mark the same day as their liberation from Spanish rule—so there were parades all over the country. Unfortunately I was not back in my town as the day began but in the capital, Tegucigalpa, returning from the tail end of the “re-connect” water volunteers had had during the week. Apparently my town was all partied out from their celebration two weeks ago—it was the anniversary of the foundation of Victoria—and so by the time our bus rolled in around noon there was nothing left of the parade and whatever festivities had happened during the morning. Apparently it was one heck of a parade but I missed out. At night there was a “fiesta” which amounts to basically a town dance. And since only young people generally go and everyone who graduates from high school here leaves to go to college in the bigger cities, it was like a high school dance. Rock the house.

September 20
This is the first week I have been in Victoria in September and it is nice to be back. I had a meeting with someone from the Spanish NGO set up for earlier in the week, suddenly re-scheduled for today and then abruptly canceled. Such is the work here so far. This week the weather has been Pacific Northwest-esque, very unusual for the normally Arizona-like Victoria. There have been clouds at nearly all times of the day and the rains have begun earlier in the afternoon than normal and at night they have been intense. The first two days of the week it rained very hard and my newly patched roof did not stand up so well, which was a disappointment. Actually, when the guys had finished at the end of the first week of September they told me they needed to come back to put a final layer of cement mix along the corners but that was delayed because I had to leave the following week for my meeting with the other water volunteers. So in their defense they acknowledged the work was not entirely complete and the rains this week have been the hardest and most prolonged in a long time. I guess the silver lining to the leaks is that now the water is trickling down the walls of multiple rooms instead of falling in drops in the middle of the rooms. Nevertheless I spent several hours over the course of Monday and Tuesday nights running back and forth between the bathroom and main rooms to mop up the rapidly forming puddles and then wring out the mop in the shower and then do it all over again. And the cool thing that generally comes along with heavy rains is power outages, so we had a few of those going on, too. Actually those were intermittent, power leaving and coming back four or five different times over a two hour period at night, but then it would come back for good so nothing to cry about. So yesterday (Wednesday) afternoon I went to see the boss-man of the roof fixing crew, told him I was back in town and was there any way he could come by this week and finish the roof? He said he would come the next day and God bless him he came today and finished everything by himself. I can see where he put the final mix over the edges and he seems pretty confident it will do the job. Given the rains that have come so far this week I wont have to wait long to find out if he’s right.

In work news yesterday I walked with a gentlemen from a nearby town to see problems in the water system his town has. The town had a system built six years or so ago, tubes put into the ground, water flowing through them, tank built, etc., but the water never made it all the way to the tank. So the tank has been sitting empty for six years and the water that arrives in the tubes is some sixty meters below the tank. The town would like to build a new tank where the water arrives to now, but first I wanted to walk the conduction line and see where there were problems in the tubes. The gentleman who accompanied me walked the six kilometers from his house to mine, then we hiked into the hills of my town to see where the tubes to his system begin, and then we followed the tubes all the way back to his town. The general route was familiar to me because I had seen the area in the hills near my house where the tubes to his system begin and I run along the road that leads to his town generally a couple times a week. But since we were following the tubes to find leaks and cracks we were cutting through peoples cornfields and backyards so I got to see the route from a new perspective; it was pretty cool. In the afternoon after we had finished everything he lent me one of his horses and we rode back to my town—good stuff.

Oh, before I forget, Happy birthday to mr. Bacon from a couple of days ago and a huge congrats on the news, dude! You’ve got new email in your inbox…

September 22
Saturday today and while I had hoped the sun would finally come out and dry things out it’s been more overcast than even earlier in the week. The rains that have come since my roof was fixed have not, gracias a Dios, found their way into my humble home. It appears the boss-man who fixed things on Thursday was right to be confident. No more moving the fridge or laptop from room to room, no more running around mopping furiously to try and stay ahead of the puddles along the walls. Yes! I have started a little compost heap in my backyard, though, and I am worried that the recent rains are ruining it. Should a compost be covered? Normally it’s so hot during the day it bakes away any residual moisture from the night rains, but not this week. The ironic thing is I normally love this overcast, cool and slightly wet weather when I’m back in the States. But here it means clothes can’t dry on the line and my compost turns to mud.

Nothing exceptional has happened as the week has wound down. I just recently started reading “The Kite Runner” and so far I dig it bigtime.

Happy birthday, Hoonan!

September 24
Today I was supposed to leave for another village about a three hour hike from my town to begin another topo study. It didn’t happen. The intense wet weather we received in the region last week (today it was scorching hot again, not a cloud in the sky) apparently ruined what passes as a road that leads into that village. I was all packed up and ready to go and had three gentlemen tell me that it was not going to happen, probably not for months (when the rainy season ends), because the road is so bad, and that if I tried to make it solo I would surely die along the way. The road to this village is pretty rough in the best of times and is not navigable by car or bike but only on foot or horse. But the men giving me advice this morning described how I would lose the path in a sea of mud and slop along the way and find no one to help me and how even horses fall over trying to negotiate the path when it is this bad. Wow, I thought, and pictured the Dead Marshes that Frodo had Gollum lead him and Sam through on their way to Mordor! Was it the Dead Marshes? Cant remember for sure and I apologize to all the Tolkein fans but I don’t have any of those books out here.

So my plans for the week were scrapped entirely. But no worries, there is plenty of work to be done right here in my own town. It seems another companion of ridiculously heavy rains, the kind we received much of last week, is that the water system goes down here in Victoria. Yes, at the moment (Monday evening) we are approaching hour seventy two with no water coming to people’s homes. After my travel plans fell through I decided that the smart thing to do since I am a water volunteer would be to hike up to where the problems were and see if I couldn’t help out. At the very least I would learn something about Victoria’s water system. I hiked in the general direction of things, wasted about an hour not having any clue where I was going, at some point found myself on a hillside with a nearly 80 degree elevation angle to it (and there was corn everywhere—how’d they do that?!), and then fortunately stumbled across two gentlemen on their way to do the same thing I was going to do. They showed me the way and before long I saw three men repairing the tubes to Victoria’s water system. The problem, it seems, is that there are sections of tubes that run alongside, and even at points in the middle of, a not-so-small river that rushes toward the town. When heavy rains hit whole sections of tubes are washed away and the “capture box” where the system begins is filled completely with sand and rocks. Today, then, was spent watching how these guys added tubes to the missing sections and cut and sized them according to the system’s needs and then cleaning out the rocks and sand that had filled the capture box. I did very little personally aside from jumping in to help shovel out loads of sand but I did talk a little with the guy in charge of making the repairs and that was good. I was up there with the guys most of the day and when some of us came back repairs had been completed to one of the two sets of tubes running to the tank. But, unfortunately, it was not enough to help bring water to everyone’s homes because there is still nothing coming from my tap.

September 26
Whew! Water came back last night! Hallelujah! Every once in a long while there had been a very murky trickle dropping hesitantly from the outdoor tap I have and I collected and saved that like it was liquid gold. I was starting to get very non-picky about the color or content of what the tap sparingly released and what I used it for. But no more—now we can cook and wash and flush to our hearts content! Showers for all! Clearly this had a bigger impact on the gringo—the rest of the town was doing fine, I am sure—but I’ll be damned if this wasn’t my first briefly extended period sans agua. Perspective is needed, of course, because the communities I am visiting and attempting to help have no water system at all and often go to a nearby (or not so nearby) stream or well than can dry up considerably when the rainy season ends. Yes, I’ll take my perspective…just give me some water, too.

Reif, you have an email to read…oh, and happy birthday buddy!