Three weeks...

Sunday day and I just returned last night from a three day visit to another volunteer’s place in the northwest, Santa Barbara. It is a department that borders Guatemala and I was in the city of the same name visiting a volunteer in his fourth year here. He just married a Honduran woman who he had known for nearly the entire time he had been in the city and in June they are moving back to the States. All aspirantes visited volunteers out in the country this weekend as a means to get outside of our sleepy little town, see how the buses work, and see a volunteer in his element. My experience was a great one because all day Friday we were doing Water & Sanitation stuff, the kind of thing I have been learning about for the past three weeks. This consisted of hiking through forests with a town local leading the way with a machete to cut through thicker vegetation so we could find a water source.

There were no trails and I did a lot of slipping and falling, nearly losing my shoes in mud a couple of times, but the whole time I kept thinking that this time last year I was sitting behind a desk pushing papers on my ship, occasionally walking around trying to find someone that had already left for the day. There was some down time as well, which may or may not have included a karaoke bar, but mostly it was just fantastic to see a different part of the country and get my hands dirty. Here’s a couple of shots of us at a site in a town where construction on a water-capturing box has begun, scenic and otherwise…

Lastly a shot of the town of Santa Barbara from the patio of my volunteer's place...

What else can I write at the moment? Our group is fifty one people total, I think, and while there are a lot of people who are just out of college, there are also a fair number between the ages of 24 and 30, too. In Water & Sanitation there are 16 of us, 12 guys and 4 girls, half engineers and half anything but—history, language, art majors and others. So at the moment we are all back in Santa Lucia and will be here for only one more week. Next Sunday we all leave for training in our distinct programs: Wat/San, Business and Health at three different places for 4 weeks of technical training. That is going to be a lot of hands-on activity as well and I am excited to learn everything I can about setting up and designing water systems. It will be cool to get closer with our programs and not have all fifty one of us around all the time but I think we’ll definitely miss being together as a group, too. What does all this mean? That this upcoming Saturday, aside from being St. Patty’s Day, will also be our one month mark in Honduras, and our last night together as a big group…good times.

Also, on Saturday I bought a cell phone in Tegucigalpa because it is apparently the way to go to communicate with other volunteers and also our program managers. So I will send out an email here in a little to see if I can figure out how it works. But it appears as though I can text anyone in the US for about 5 cents—how much it will cost for you to respond I have no idea. But you had better pay it, whatever the cost. It is going to be an 8 digit number and the country code for Honduras is 504, just so you know. On a similar subject, I am not in dire need of anything at the moment, but in the case that you do send a care package or five, write “books” on the list of contents. Volunteers tell stories of receiving things like GPS units and other expensive items as long as the inventory list only says books whereas anything else is a likely candidate for pilfering. Also, the address I gave in an earlier entry does in fact work, so have no fears. If we learn that it will change while we are out of our training center over the next few weeks I will update as necessary.

Nothing else at the moment, just another week of classes about to begin, so I will leave you with some promised pictures…

Pictures of the “pila” where the hand washing of all clothes is done, followed by my clothes hanging on the line to dry…it was a good day.

The view towards Tegucigalpa from the front porch where I am living now...