Well, Michael, I did not find their buffoonery amusing...

It’s the last week in January now and its getting hot here. The dry season has kicked in now and the temperatures are climbing—apparently March and April are the worst here. The arrival of this new season means less in the way of mosquitoes and that our non-paved roads will not be made into mud. The flip side is it is now tick season and the roads here become extremely dusty…it’s a fair trade, I’d say. The tick thing would not be so bad if I were, say, a lame “Youth Development” volunteer (that’s for Gen…even though she doesn’t read this blog) and the most I dealt with the outdoors was my daily walk to school and back. But as a Water/Sanitation volunteer I find myself mostly cutting through land where the only path is the one created by the guys with machetes in front of me. OK, that’s all a little dramatic—Gen does much more than teach in the schools and I am not nearly as cool as what you might think a wat/san volunteer would be. Needless to say, the change in seasons and all that entails was made very clear last week.

The week in question I was finishing up the topo study for a community that already has a water system design but has significant problems. This is the system (I think I mentioned it in an earlier entry) where there are tubes in the ground (for the conduction line) and the tank is built and sitting atop the community. It’s just that the water does not arrive to the tank but somewhere 70-80 meters below—that says not enough pressure. But the other major problem is along the way there are several spots where the tubes, buried in the ground, have cracked and are leaking water—too much pressure. This system was built six years ago but there is no copy of the design so I decided to map the terrain again so we could see where exactly the problems were and then go from there. Step one was this past week when we finished the study. This week I put the numbers into our spreadsheet and did the design as much as I was able and will send it off for someone much smarter than myself to review—that is step two.

During the week where step one was accomplished I was formally introduced to the seasonal changes that wet to dry brings here in Victoria. The second or third day of the study I notice that the guy walking with me is consistently slapping at his jeans with a twig. Now at this point in my time here I had heard much of the tick (garrapata) and seen little—Gen was constantly picking them off her dog when I arrived in May of last year and on a couple of studies I did last month before Christmas I overheard guys talking about “garrapatas” several times. But I had yet to really witness anything myself (I had picked ONE tick off of me in the eleven months I had been here and that was during training) so I ask him what he is doing. He responds “garrapatas” so, thinking this is my chance to finally see what the fuss is about, I ask him to show me some when we come across them next. Not three minutes later he gets my attention and points at my jeans. I look down and my right lower leg is covered with at least two or three dozen little specs of dirt. Of course these specs of dirt are moving ever so slowly along my jeans and suddenly I realize the genius of having a twig in-hand to swat at my leg.

You guys may be old pros when it comes to garrapatas but this was a new experience for me. I had only seen them in the past once they had reached a much bigger size—I couldn’t get over how effing SMALL the ones we encountered were. You could fit several on the head of a pin, I shit you not, and only with the magnifying glass that I carry around on these studies could one see the legs at all. We did not seem to have any problems until that second or third day of the study and from then on the study would pause intermittently here and there for guys to get into various stages of undress to pick the damn garrapatas off. We stopped for lunch one day and guys were picking them off one another’s backs—that’s the kind of good time we were having.

I resisted the temptation to have other men pick off my garrapatas for me and by the weekend (when I was still finding them on me) I had picked off not less than five. I remember reading a couple of blogs of volunteers here in Honduras before I flew down and one guy mentioned having found a tick or two below the equator. At the time I thought it sounded like a pretty horrible thing to happen—now I know its not the end of the world. You just get the tweezers and pull the bastard off! The ticks were not the whole story, either, because somehow I got an even smaller insect on me that was leaving tiny bits up and down my legs and feet for four or five days after we finished the study. These guys are even smaller than the baby ticks and a friend at the health center said all you can do is wait them out—they feed on you for several days and then just die. The itching the bites were causing was awful, and I remember hating life the weekend after the study. So there you go.

This week has just been working on the spreadsheet and starting the design and fighting with Tek about being housebroken but it occurs to me that I did not write anything about the FERIA that Victoria held in the middle of the month. Every January Victoria hosts it’s feria which is sort of a state fair equivalent in the States. It generally lasts about two weeks and apparently is the major party in this town for the year. And now it’s done. But it was pretty impressive—there is one main street on the back side of town that was lined on both sides with vendors selling clothes and jewelry and toys; there were fairground-type games and a whole section of just tables where people were playing card games; mini-restaurants and bars were everywhere as well. Anyway, during the week this street generally got going with people around 4pm and was doing business until midnight—on the weekends it started earlier and lasted later. Victoria is generally a pretty tranquilo, laid back town but this is the type of small town event that EVERYONE comes back for. A large number of families here (as in many towns across the country) have relatives living in the States and a number of them were back in town—many I met told me they never miss a chance to come back and see the feria. Relatives who work or go to school in the bigger cities of Honduras were in Victoria as well for the feria—more people come back for the feria than for Christmas.

In addition to the main street of activities there were events planned throughout the two weeks. There is a local soccer league here and teams from Victoria played against teams from major cities and, in one case, against the farm club of the team that won the professional league title in Honduras. They built a mini bull ring and had several shows—rodeos which became not bull fights (no swords, no blood) but humorous shows wherein a man dressed as a woman would wave his red flag and dance around and avoid the bull. There were also dances every single night for 6 nights in a row, the final one being just for older people—someone told me no one younger than thirty was going to be allowed in. All told it was pretty exciting, especially because for the first seven months here I had gotten used to not a lot of people and not a lot of activity. The feria new and different and exciting but even before it was over I was ready for Victoria to return to its humble self. The one picture I took of the activity on the main street is going to disappoint you literal-minded folks…theres almost nothing to see. You artsy, creative types will appreciate how it hints at festive activity but leaves more to the imagination than anything else!! Right.

PS--Just read some of the ¨comments.¨ Yes, no pictures this week, there was no damn time--they are worth a lot of words (hundreds, perhaps?) As for the history of the Honduran ethnicities, c´mon! You´ll get what I give and like it. Its possible I can work in some social/political/historical commentary in the future, just dont hold your breath. More to come. Which are you all more interested in -- the Super Bowl or Super Tuesday???