April 8, Easter Sunday
It has been awhile since my last entry and I know you have all been waiting on the edge of your seats...of course. Before I move on I want to wish my dad a Happy Birthday and one as well to Daniel Ramon. Feliz cumpleaños, the two of you!

Ok so at the moment it is Easter Sunday and I just returned from a trip to the north coast with my host mother and her 3 yr old daughter. As mentioned in the previous entry, the PC has forbidden us from travel outside of our current sites unless our host families go with us. As it turns out, I was the only one of the water/sanitation crew who was fortunate enough to leave town…pride and shame, I feel. The trip was nice and let me use the description of it to educate those of you who do not know much about Central America. We went to stay with a cousin, I believe, of my host mother in San Pedro Sula, which is up north and about 30 minutes drive from a great beach town. Here’s the education: Honduras is the only Central American country which has multiple cities the size and strength of a country capital. Outside of Guatemala City or San Salvador, for example, you have only much smaller towns and villages. San Pedro Sula is the industrial center of Honduras and as a city is nearly as large as Tegucigalpa, the capital. In point of fact, there is a third city in Honduras, La Ceiba, which is on the north coast, which can more than hold a candle to Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula, but let’s not get carried away.

So from Wednesday evening until Sunday morning we were in San Pedro Sula and on Friday spent the day on the beaches of Puerto Córtes. A very good Semana Santa which included a new dish called Sopa de Pescado Seco, a soup traditionally served during the holy week. All in all it was a great excursion from Sabanagrande and a pleasant few days away from all things PC. But what else have I left out?

The Sunday before my family and I (and another aspirante, Chris, who lives in the house of what is my host grandmother) went to the south coast for the day. That was a three hour bus ride each way in a yellow school bus full of evangelicals! I say that not as a bad thing, generally speaking, but we did listen to a CD of Christian music the entire time there and back—and the single disc we listened to consisted of only 7 or 8 songs. I know the words and the background arrangement to the entire collection of songs, my favorite being “En La Casa de Dios”. That beach was nice as well but at the moment I have to give my nod to Puerto Córtes and the north coast. More tranquilo in the south, perhaps, but there is a reason the masses flock north.

Moving on, what in the field of Peace Corps work and knowledge? A good question. First off, we constructed from scratch two latrines outside of a kindergarten that will be finished soon. That meant, among other things, digging two holes 2.5 meters deep, building a rock wall at the mouth of each hole, mixing sand, gravel, and cement mix and making a concrete cover for each hole, doing the same for the base of two latrines, then building the structures themselves out of wood and sheet rock, and finally digging a trench .5 meter deep and nearly ten meters in length. We also built an improved oven at the house of a local family. How is it an improvement, you ask? Another good question. The improvement is in the use of tiles built into the walls of the oven and the use of a certain mud, all to improve insulation. The final improvement is that the hole to put wood in is much smaller, so while one need burn less wood there is no loss in heat or cooking ability. Overall goal, of course, is reducing the amount of wood each family is using because one of the major issues in the country at the moment is deforestation. The idea behind both of these last two projects is to familiarize us with what types of side projects each of us may be involved in outside of our water and sanitation specific work. The latrine building is actually directly related with what we do but is an aside from the construction of water systems, which will be job number one.
Some of you have asked, “Well Joe, it is laudable (and very impressive) that you teach children ages 6 and 7, how to use a computer at the local grade school. It requires patience and mental fortitude and a knowledge of the intricacies of the Spanish language to such a degree that surely few could even attempt such work. But what, exactly, does it have to do with water and sanitation?” A question that gets to the heart of the matter and I am grateful for that. The short answer is nothing at all. The longer answer is that the PC language staff has determined that instead of sitting through Spanish class five days a week, some few, some of us lucky few, will have the opportunity to use our language skills out in the community. It is not really panning out all that excellently to this point, though, because on occasion the teachers just do not send us students. Well, ok, that happened once and then another time the school principal did not expect us until the next day so we could not teach that day, either. Either way I think we are moving on to a new project this upcoming week, so please just calm down with all the intense and leading questions. I didn’t expect the Spanish Inquisition.

Unfortunately, friends, thats all the time I have for the moment but expect more soon.
Joe