Hola todos!

This has been a slow week. Next week I will be in the mountains all week, so at least I will have more work to do. Not to mention, only two weeks until the baseball try-outs.

Monday I didn’t do anything, was told that I was going to start a new project Tuesday.

Tuesday morning I go to the office to find out what was going on, only to find out there was a meeting with the funding agency, a Swiss development agency. I went to the meeting in the morning, and well, as you would think any funding meeting would be, I was bored. In what I have come to think of as true Honduran fashion, they kept talking about things in circles, never with direct to the point answers, so I was lost a whole lot of the time. At lunch time we went out to lunch. It was a little odd for me at first because I didn’t know I was invited, and once it was clear that I was going, was I supposed to pay for myself? It ended up being fine, and I discovered a nice place to go eat that is cheap.

Wednesday was more of the same. I just kind of bummed around, doing this and that. I went for a run with my sitemates, where I got my butt kicked again.

Thursday afternoon I went for a meeting in an aldea. I don’t know, because I had been chilling out, I hadn’t been speaking a lot of Spanish, and while I want to be more involved, at that moment I was just like, please don’t make me say anything. I was supposed to talk about some of the problems with their water system, but luckily the meeting got cut short before that! Ok, it was cheating out of my job, but the subject never came up, not my fault.

Its now Saturday night, and I have been thinking about going to use the internet for a few days now, I just can’t seem to get myself there. But, some interesting things have happened, so now I can share with you.

Friday I had my third tutoring session, and this one tops the list for the worse one. I tried talking to him a little about what I wanted, but he insists on going through this process. I am going to try one more time to get through, and then just cancel the tutoring sessions. It is just too painful, I just hope it doesn’t ruin the relationship I have with my host family.

So, Saturday morning, I have come to terms that the only way I am going to speak better is just to get more involved with the family and my community, and I am ready to get going and then find Wimbledon on tv. Now, with the French Open, it was on all the time, not so with Wimbledon, so I spent the morning watching tv instead of talking and instead of going to the internet café. Then, once the second match is over, I am pumped to get out of the house, and don’t you know it starts raining as I am putting my shoes on. Well, what is a little rain? I grab my umbrella and leave. No joke, 60 seconds later it is down pouring. Within a three block walk, the streets already have an inch to two inches of water running down them. I get to the internet café and it is closed (?!) and I have to walk back home. I was soaked, and I did have my umbrella with me, it was just raining that hard that nothing mattered, you were just going to get wet. I had to jump these huge streams of runoff just to get into my house. Twenty minutes later, it stopped (I have great timing). Well, after the rain stops for a little, I grabbed my raincoat and in my newly changed into dry clothing I head off for the grocery store, because I felt with my luck it was going to start raining in a minute. Not so, everyone was back out and doing their normal thing, I apparently need to develop this Honduran knowledge of when it is going to rain, and when it is not going to rain.

Later I met up with the sitemates to talk a little bit and to complain, because everything takes a little readjustment.

Let me tell you about rain for a little bit though. It is very hard to dry clothing here because it rains so often (once or twice a day, every day). There are no dryers here, everything gets dried by the sun. Right now everything is starting to get a little bit of a musty smell going on. I have clothes strung around my room almost all the time because when I bring it in from the clothes line (right before it starts raining), everything is generally not dry.

So, you may be thinking, what do Hondurans do? They suck it up and deal. No other way of putting it. I was thinking a while back that Hondurans have a lot of polyester clothes (not the cheap 70’s kind, but general low quality clothes) but they have a significant advantage here: they are easier to wash by hand, and they dry faster than cotton. Also, one day in the field I noticed a kid wearing a shirt with a ton of holes in it. Well, at that moment I thought that the shirt was probably handed down from one kid to the next and was probably very old. That could be true, but the other part is that clothes are hung on barbed wire fences to dry, and I can see a few holes being created that way.

Also, if one or two of you could send a little email or leave a comment (see comment below every blog) that says you are reading this, that would be great. At times I feel that I could just send out these as an email to five people, and reach the same audience, I just want to hear that you are reading it, because a good amount of time goes into thinking of ideas to write about, writing the blogs, and then going to the internet café to post them.

So, as some of you might have read, we are having a few political issues right now. Nothing violent or problematic, as always the Peace Corps is keeping a tight eye on everything.