A long march comes to its end...

Now it is Sunday and we have only a few days left here in Sabanagrande doing our field based training. The last two weeks have been fairly eventful down here and of course the sobering news of tragedy in Virginia reached us. People in our group heard the news by around noon on the 17th because we have a Virginia Tech alum who had been reached by her mother, I think, and other volunteers had been on the internet in the morning and passed it to everyone. It covered the front page of the papers here for three days but I needed to spend some time in the internet café reading American papers to fully understand the events. What an awful ordeal, all of our hearts go out to everyone affected, wherever you are.

In trivial news by comparison, we have nearly finished up work here in our current training site. The major work in the last ten days was two presentations to locals, the first a 4 hour HIV/AIDS lecture we gave to schoolchildren two Fridays ago, and the most recent a 2 hour presentation of the ins and outs of setting up and running a local water board to members of surrounding communities. The last was more daunting because it was on a subject we are just now learning about and was given to members of current water boards or people representing villages or towns looking to set one up. We are not sure we didn’t sound like a bunch of Borats in front of them, but it was a good experience.

Better news still is, as I have mentioned a few times already, we are leaving here in a few days. Tomorrow is the day of our site announcement, the day everyone has either been dreading or looking forward to for at least a month or two by now. It is easy to get caught up in the excitement and start sweating the details of your future location, but the truth is we do not have a huge say in the matter and even if we did, what exactly can we contribute? I do not know the country well at all, have only visited or briefly stayed in three towns, so it’s probably better that someone else is making the decision for me. I wanted rural and isolated when this began, before I knew anything, and I will stick with that—seems more like a true PC experience than living in a big town. But like I said, what do I know?

In somewhat sobering news from down here we have lost a member of our group of 51, someone from one of the other programs. All the information we have in our little site is second and third hand so I do not know anything for sure except that someone was sent home by the powers that be. Since we arrived in country over two months ago this is the first person to leave for whatever reason, so it’s a little sad because we all know each other more or less. It’s no good and hopefully the last time it happens.

For fun we have done a couple cool things on the weekends. Last weekend a small group of us went on a three hour hike to a small watering hole in a not-so-nearby town. We packed lunches, lots of water, and left around 9am. We got there at noon, ate lunch and then went swimming (pictures to come) in a great, secluded little section of a river, and at 4pm we started the trek back. When we finally arrived home it was nearly 7pm and my legs felt like I had just run a marathon—limping, awful pain everywhere, but somewhat delirious and euphoric! Then yesterday a group of us went halfway down that same road and then turned off and followed a trail to a small pond and waterfall which was at the base of a massive hill. It was great because the pond was insanely deep and you could climb up the rocks and jump off twenty feet or so. I have to say that at the moment we all decided to try and climb the rocks I felt a new appreciation for what my sister and brother-in-law do all the time—rock climbing is hard! And if we fell we were landing in a pool of water; the thought of doing it off the side of some mountain made my stomach a little queasy.

So that is all the news from Sabanagrande, all that’s fit to print. The upcoming week has us learning our sites tomorrow in a big announcement deal which I hope ends up happily for everyone, then Tuesday we have our goodbye party for the families, and Wednesday we leave. All the groups reunite in a city somewhere north of here, stay together for an afternoon and evening, and then we all go off to our new sites for two or three days to drop off our bags, meet everyone we can, and walk around. Then we all come back to Santa Lucia, our first home here in Honduras, for a week of wrapping up training. Swearing in happens in Tegucigalpa and then we’re done with training and embark on the journey. More to come…
Joe