Box from the states. Even the outside was happy with all the stamps!

So, in case you don't know your fruit trees, this house has banana, orange, and mango trees behind it. This was in the town with the monton de naranjas (mountain of oranges).

Random view.

Frijoles. this is how the frijoles in the cans look before they are cleaned and processed.

Cool view across a valley. This was after the rain that made the topo study more fun than normal.

Another week, lots of stories

An incredible story:

My host family just got back from Costa Rica last night. They were there to visit family members that they just found out about. Here is the story:

In 1954, what would be my host grandfather fled Honduras, supposedly for political reasons. His family never heard from him again, only the idea that he fled to Costa Rica. Well, the years went by, and wife raised the four children alone, and the children became adults, had children, and eventually those kids became adults as well. One of these grandchildren was very interested in the story, because he could see the pain in his father’s face when he talked about his father. He then set about investigating where his grandfather was. It turns out he died 12 years ago, but left behind another family in Costa Rica. My host Mom and several members of her family went down for a few days to visit and learn about what kind of man their father was, since he left when they were so young, they didn’t know him very well. My host Mom was so happy when she returned, she was telling me about what happened, and you could see a light in her face and eyes that just made her glow. The reunion went very well, and the children of this man got along well, and are happy to know their other brothers and sisters.

Later, I went to publish the last blog and pics. I then decided to check the post office to see if anything had arrived. The second I walked in the door the lady who works there started smiling and telling me that there was a new letter and a package. The letter was for T (we share the box), but the package was mine! It was covered in Simpsons stamps, and just looked so happy! The woman there told me that I could sign for it later because she didn’t have the right book with her (we enjoy a kind of nod-smile recognition, and it is kind of like going to my neighborhood post office in the states- Hi Dan, how is it going?). I left almost dancing and with a giant smile on my face.

In the package from Mom and Dad was some M&Ms, DVDs of “Deadliest Catch” and batteries. So, I sat myself down, chowing down on candy and watching the DVDs. Later I read every piece of paper that was used to stuff the box, all parts of a package are used here, volunteers have been known to sit down and read classifieds just to keep an eye on things in the states. I read the comics, well almost all the articles, did the crossword, Sudoku, and scramble puzzles.

S and I started running again today. She seems to want to run every day, I don’t know if I am up for that. We have entered into a pact that we will talk in only Spanish except for one day a week. It was really funny, she calls, and I hear “Hey, Jill, it’s Sara. Do you want to run? Oh wait, I wanted to talk in Spanish.” Then she repeated it all in Spanish. It was weird, because it was just so fast I was like, “what is going on?” During the run we did talk all in Spanish. I am quite proud of how far I ran considering we haven’t run in almost two months now. We finished right before the downpour.

Good news: The ATM is finally in! I will be able to check the balance on my account! I could walk into the bank to do that, but just going in, standing in line, and then explaining you just want to see the balance on your account is a little odd to say the least. Now, I can just go and see, no problem. First ATM in town. Now we are right up there with every luxury available. The weird thing about this town is how fast new things just pop up. The other day I discovered two new places to eat in one day. Then a building can be taken down and another one up in what feels like two days.

Back to work:

Now, rainy seasons normally consists of a shower in the afternoon that lasts from 30 minutes to an hour. Today did not fit the mold, it rained all day long, which was interesting because I was outside trying to do a topo study.

Chickens:

I have written several times about dogs, so I decided it was time to write about chickens. In the aldeas, they have chickens everywhere. Somehow they know whose chicken is whose although the don’t have fences that keep the chickens free so they wander all over the place. During training one day I fed some chickens out of my hand. Today I accidently fed a chicken out of my plate. Chickens wandering around the porch are normal, so I was just sitting there eating, and I set my last tortilla on the edge of my plate (which was on my lap). Next thing I know, this chicken is jumping up, and I really thought for a minute that it was going to jump on my lap. So, after being scared of attacking chickens for a second, I realized it was running away, with my tortilla in its mouth. That’s right, a whole tortilla.

Directions

I know a while ago I had written a little dialog of what happened on my first topo study, well, today something similar happened, and I feel like sharing.

Guy: We are going to go down here because there are three houses.

Jill: Ok.
(we pass one house)
Guy: There are three more houses over there.

Jill’s head: wait, I thought there was three houses in total.
One minute later:

Guy: We can finish this line today right?

Jill: Yeah, there are only three houses here.

Guy: No, there are seven houses to go.

Jill: You just told me three.

Guy: No, there are seven.

Jill: Ok, we can still do seven today, no problems.

A few minutes later.

Guy: Do you want to eat now, or after we finish the houses down here.

Jill: But there are 7 houses.

Guy: No, there are three.

Jill: What happened to the seven.

Guy: NO, there are only three down here.

We do one house.

Guy: Do you want to eat now, or wait to we finish the three houses down here?

Jill: Wait, shouldn’t there only be two houses left?

Guy: No, there are three houses.

I thought you would like this. I am sad to think of a time when I don’t get royally confused every day. For your reading pleasure, this is another funny example of a typical surveying dialog.

Woman: This is the last house.

Jill: Good (it had been raining all day and I was excited to go)!

I go to the house.

Guy: This is the last house.

Jill: Good! So, we only have the a few houses to do tomorrow.

Guy: There is one more house down there.

Jill: But she just said it was the last house.

Guy: It is the last house, but there is a house down the road.

Jill: So, it isn’t the last house.

Guy: No, it’s the last house.

Jill’s head: I give up.



Tennis:

So, I just had my second tennis practice and I had a ball (ha, tennis, ball, ha ha ha). I am teaching some people who I know and are around my age how to play tennis. This again, was only the second practice, so we reviewed the forehand and eventually I taught them the backhand. It was so good to kind of just hang out, and then to play tennis, I was in heaven. For those people that I have played tennis with and especially those that I have taught tennis to, they know how much of a stickler I am for form, so I was yelling “two hands, follow through” but it was all in fun.

The next night we played again. This time I taught them to hit volleys, the Paula way. I put them against a concrete wall and hit balls at their heads. It was great. I am really impressed with how they did too.

First time getting mad at work

Ok, so I have successfully survived several meetings with real engineers here (read: with experience) and without warning had another meeting this morning. This guy though was full of $%^&. I had to school myself so bad to keep quiet. Later, I got in the car with a few people, and Walther started to say something, and I just lost it. I was yelling in a controlled manner that he was wrong, that I am very confident in what I did, and really was trying to get the point across that he should not talk to me about this. It turns out he agreed with me. So, tomorrow I have to spend the day with this guy and keep my mouth shut, it’s a good thing that I don’t have that large a vocab of bad words in Spanish.

Working:

So, I returned to the town I started working on yesterday. It took forever! I really thought we would be done in a few hours, nope the whole day. I didn’t eat breakfast, worked hard all day and finally ate lunch at 3:30pm. I was so tired, annoyed and hungry. It’s done though! I did use my anger to my benefit though and blasted up the mountain side thinking, “that SOB, ya da ya da ya da.”

Next day: (sorry if this gets confusing following my timeline)

I completely forgot I had plans to work, and therefore was still in bed when I got a call saying everyone was in the office waiting for me. Oops. That comment was a bit of an exaggeration though. The annoying fake engineer was there, with these two old men who have a lot of experience in doing topo studies. So, one guy flat out tells me that my method was right (ok, so I asked and he says its valid) and the other one takes my lack of chatter as I don’t speak Spanish, and have never heard of the metric system. All day he was yelling out numbers five time in a row to make sure I got it. Even Walther was like, she does speak Spanish, and can do this. So, we did a bunch of work in the hot sun on the steep mountain. Why? Don’t know, even the cool older gentleman was like, you can just write the distance to the pila, which I already did the first time around. I liked him, at the end of the day he told me I did a good job with the topography. What can I say, I am a sucker for compliments.

Later we came back to town, I did a quick bucket bath (no time for shower), ate like a crazy woman, and then left for a meeting. I didn’t do a whole lot of talking (hey, I don’t talk a lot in large groups in English, why would I do it in Spanish?) but I understood everything that was going on!

Yet later, I again ate in a hurry because tennis starts at 6pm. Not surprisingly, they didn’t arrive on time. We go to the high school, we are using the high school gym for practice, and it was locked and we couldn’t find anyone with a key to let us in, so we talked for a while until it started to rain. I got home, relaxed, and cleaned my room finally, I haven’t had a lot of time the last few days. I get up, go to work, come home, eat in a hurry and leave, and come home so tired I just want to sleep. I have reconnect next week, I will suggest to anyone who is bored at site to start sports teams, it eats up a lot of time. To conclude the day I made an amazing glass of hot chocolate. When the volunteer nearby left, I scored a box of hershey’s cocoa powder, so I have made hot chocolate a few times. It is by no means cold, I am writing this in a tank top and it is still over 80 degrees in my room at 9:30pm, but its still something nice and creamy to have at the end of a stressful week. Next week I take my first travels in Honduras, stay tuned for the tales of the road.

Friends

Just so you don’t think that it is all work and no play, I am finally making friends here. People here have been friendly from the beginning, but there is a difference between friend and friendly acquaintance. I have one friend who is really my texting buddy, I haven’t seen her in a while, but we text a lot. This is an example of a text:
A! ke bien sem imagina q para usted a d ser emosionante bisitar todos esos lugares.
There are ones that are almost all abbreviations, and I have to sit there, with my head cocked to the side thinking “what does this say?” Normally if you just pronounce everything out loud, the point becomes clearer.
Other friends include those in the tennis team, a few at work, and people who are a part of my host families. Those are on top of the PCVs in the area.

A little education

Ok, while flipping through channels, I happened upon this movie that looked like your average B rated teen movie, so I passed it by. Later I just happened upon it again because there is not a lot on tonight, and it turns out that it was a very good movie, with a significant point. It was about how HIV/AIDS is understood in high schools and what happens when someone in the school finds out they are HIV positive.

Now, because this is my blog, and I can do anything I want in it, let’s review some of the basics about it. A large part of the Peace Corps mission is to spread the message about HIV/AIDS around the world; I am making sure it gets out in the US as well. And yes, I can do this in Spanish too.

HIV/AIDS

There are 4 ways to spread the virus: semen, vaginal fluid, blood and mother’s milk. That is all. This does NOT include saliva, so you can kiss someone with the virus and not become infected.

Tests: There is now a 20 minute rapid test. This is not 100%, but it is fast. To be really sure, go get a blood test, which takes a few days. You can go to a lot of places to get a free anonymous test, just google the nearest clinic. The test will not show a positive results for the virus for the first three months after infection.

Prevention: The only 100% safe way is to abstain from sex. That being said, there are ways to reduce your risk if you do choose to have sex. Use a condom. If the guy says that it feels better without one, tell him that a baby and AIDS feel like crap. My personal advice is not to trust people who say they are being monogamous. Also, if you get tattoo sit your tattoo artist down, and ask them to review their safety practices with you. Used needles can have blood in them, and you guessed it, if that needle has HIV positive blood in it, you can get infected. Same goes for doing drugs and using needles, but I know none of my loyal listeners do that, right?!

What is the difference between HIV and AIDS? I’ll be honest, I didn’t really understand the difference until we did our HIV charla. HIV is the virus. The virus without treatment will slowly wear down on your immune system. During this time frame, you look and can feel completely healthy. Eventually the virus wears you down to the point where you get really sick. This is AIDS, where you finally feel the effects of the virus, that is to say something like pneumonia can kill you because your body has no defenses left. It is not the virus that kills, it’s the subsequent infections you cannot fight off.

Now for a few HIV/AIDS myths:

You can tell someone has the virus by looking at them. False, you can look and feel normal for years.
Peeing after having sex prevents HIV and pregnancy. NOT!! Wrong system for women, and still wrong for men.
Pulling out early prevents the spread of the disease. False! Now, pulling out assumes that the guy will want to when the big moment comes, but he will have still released pre-seminal fluid, which can have semen (pregnancy risk) and thus can spread HIV.
Mosquitoes can spread the virus. They only inject their own saliva, there is no sharing of blood.
A mother will always pass on HIV to her child. Not so, there has been a lot of research into this, and while there is a strong risk, you can prevent passing HIV onto the next generation.
Anal sex is safer than vaginal sex. Whoa baby are you wrong. The anal cavity is not as used to stretching as the vagina, and thus can rip easier.
HIV/AIDS is a gay thing. NOT SO. The lack of education on this topic has made it a fast growing virus through the population, and the teenage and young adult percentage is growing. The CDC proposes that 300,000 people in the country have the virus but don’t know it. Therefore, always ask to see their negative test, and then still use a condom.

Ok, so, there is my health rant. What can I say, that movie made me cry. I am adult enough to admit that I didn’t know a lot about HIV for a long time. To me it was something in the past, or something I didn’t need to worry about. I was young and dumb. Luckily I never got in trouble. If you are wondering, yes I have been tested. The stats during the credits of the movie said that the CDC suggests regular screening of people over the age of 13. It is far past time that we get over the stigmas of HIV and start thinking about getting healthy. HIV is not like cancer, it can be prevented, and with enough education and dedication, we should be able to get rid of it.

If there is something else you would like me to spread to my masses, let me know, sin pena (without shame or embarrassment) and I will get the word out.

Always yours and making sure you are healthy,

Jill

pícs

I{m not sure if this made it already into the blog, but I really liked the picture, so when I went through my pics the other day, I decided it deserved another go.

This is a part of my town, normally it is not so hazy out. I live two doors down on the left side of the street on the right.

THis is another cool pic of a flower.

I liked this pic. It is a very steep canyon area that is planted with coffee and in the foreground there is a barbed wire fence with a vine growing around it. I do not know, something about the hardness of the barbed wire with the life and energy of the plant, made me like the pic.

This is the church in the city nex door.

Plaza outside the church.

quick update

A busy day:

Saturday was busy from start to almost end.

I got up, and reorganized the things for baseball and tennis practice. I made breakfast (first time in about two weeks) and called for a ride to the high school. We went to the school, but he forgot his keys to get in, so I talked to my friends and gave them the rules for tennis that I had written up for them. Later I tried to teach them how to play tennis. It was interesting. I had looked up all the verbs in advance, but most of them slipped out of my brain by time we practiced. We didn’t have much time before I went outside for practice. Baseball practice was so HOT! I lost my patience by the end of it. We were trying to teach the kids how to field, and another group was learning the correct way to bat. It went fairly well. We are hoping to have our first scrimmage match next week, if enough kids come. It will be interesting. We haven’t taught the kids how to pitch yet, so one of us might need to be the continual pitcher and catcher for this round.

Later, after a nap and shower to refresh my spirits, I left to go to the city not too far from here for the afternoon. I have a weeklong reconnect next week, and there is a ropa Americana party there. Ropa Americana is thrift clothes stores that are sold here, and you can find some interesting items for cheap. More details to come on the awesome outfit I have gotten.

I also got to say good bye to my friend there who is leaving this week, she has finished her two years and found an awesome job back home. It’s weird how fast it seems that people come and go.

Domingo (Sunday):

Weird, Domingo came first, so I started typing it, then realized it was Spanish.

The morning was just spent being lazy. The afternoon was spent sewing my costume for the party, which was all hand sewn. Crazy, but I didn’t have the patience to wait a few days to use a sewing machine. I finally finished late last night. It is great! Pics to come.

Pics

This is how drinks come when you get food delivered. You can see the soda in bags, in cups, in a bag.
The India Bonita competition.
India Bonita danza folklorica. The pics looked a lot better on my computre than they are showing up now, hopefully you can see them alright.

I believe this is the ¨traditional¨wear.
I can´t get away from them!
How Honduran´s do a picnic!

And, you may be asking yourself, how do you keep yourself entertained while waiting for pics to load on a slow connection? Answer: you clean out your cell´s inbox and outbox for text messages. It actually worked rather well to cast away the time.

Take care,

Jill

A few more weeks.

Sorry about the recent drop in blog writing.

Monday:

Another day off, how great is that! That was until I had messed up dates for my site visit again. I seriously must have confused it four or five times. I call my counterpart to let him know that my boss would be coming and needed to talk to him for a little bit, and he tells me that there might be a meeting that he needs to attend, and if not, the meeting wouldn’t happen due to threats of roadblocks. Ahh, I’m ready for the political mess to end. I finally cooked something decent that night. I have been eating really bad, and finally put the energy into making something different for a change.

Tuesday:

Site visit day. I had decided I would get up early, do some things before Carlos got here, and then the morning came, and that got nixed fast. Then, I remember that I forgot to tell me Mom that Carlos was coming, so I do that and she is worrying because he would be here in the house in an hour and she was still in her pajamas, and then the housekeeper was dealing with family business out of town, so the house wasn’t as clean as normal. It was cute.

I go to the office and he shows up within minutes. We go over some really basic stuff. How are you doing? How is integrating into your sites? Any safety and security concerns? How goes the Spanish? Nothing too exciting. Then we talked with Walter. I tried telling Carlos he would say I was perfect (except for not drinking coffee) and Walter’s answers were all positive. Then on to the family’s house, where the comments were even more glowing (go host Mom!). Next: lunch. Well, we don’t have anything too great here in town, just your normal stuff, but in the city 10 minutes away, I had heard rumors of a good place to eat meat. I have had a definite lack of meat, so that is where I wanted to go. I forgot how good meat can be. Best meat I have had in Honduras without doubt. It’s expensive so I wont be returning too soon.

The rest of the day was chilling out, enjoying that happy feeling in my stomach. I didn’t want to make dinner because I knew it couldn’t compare to lunch. That night my family had a birthday party here in the house. Now, my Mom has a group of ladies come over ever Tuesday for a church group, so I thought it was that, until I went to the kitchen and saw all of the stuff they had out. I did get some cake and ice cream!

Wednesday:

Back to Gold Creek. It’s a beautiful place, with good people, and monkeys in the jungle, but it is a long way away. Up and at’ hem very early. We go, have to go back to the dam site for some strange reason (still don’t understand why) and the theodolite we are borrowing for right now is different than mine, so I had to sit there and stare and think for a while to figure out how to use it. I think I figured something out. Then walking to do a re-route of the distribution network. Then doing even odder things at the tank site (after we decided which spot it would be at). This is where I saw my first live snake here in Honduras (I have been lucky). This is how the situation goes:

Stage: We are on a hill covered with brush, I am a few feet away from Walter who is leveling the theodolite.

Jill: Ahhhh!

Walter: Que paso? (What happened, literally what passed?)

Jill: Un serpiente paso! (A snake passed, I just like the way I could use paso in a different way and make it sound so snazzy, it might not translate right). For those of you wondering, the grammatically correct answer would have been Un serpiente me paso.

I moved really fast and then was constantly searching the ground for some of its friends that might still be slithering about.

We returned to town kind of late, but it was just as the Honduras vs Costa Rica World Cup elimination match started. Ok, I just started the computer back up again to mention this game. It was not what I expected. In the past Honduras has had a problem finishing games, allowing games in the last minutes. Not today! Two goals in extra time of the second period. For those of you who don’t watch soccer, extra time is that little bit of time that is added onto the halves to account for time lost during penalties, players faking injuries, etc. This is normally 3 minutes or so. Honduras scored twice during this. The second time, I was just like, there is no way that just happened. They beat Costa Rica, which if I remember right, had beaten every other team in our group (group includes the USA). Crazy. I am going to get a paper tomorrow to see if they are going to South Africa (site of tournament) or not. The announcer said that they were closer to going, but someone today told me that they had to win, and the US as well, for them to get through, but the US lost. I didn’t see that game, but it upsets me that they lost to Mexico.

Thursday I went to the office a little bit, and listened to a lesson on how to calculate volumes for about 10 minutes. Then they were going to move into a smaller room, and I decided I’d rather go home and study Spanish, than listen to that in a tiny room packed with people.

Friday was weird because I was supposed to go out to do more of the water survey, but when I showed up, no one was there. I was five minutes late, but that’s normally considered early in Honduras. In the afternoon S and I planned the baseball practice. We work well as a team, and her teacher’s knowledge of ways to get kids to do things is a great resource. T is on vacation, which is why she didn’t help plan.

Wow, we just had visitors. I found out that the grandmother in this house is actually a great-great-grandmother. Crazy, huh! She is 90 years old.

Finally I have started cooking something that is not the same hot dogs or spaghetti. Like when I lived out in Washington, I was really dull in my cooking for a while, and now and starting to branch out. My attempt at papusas the other day was actually kind of a disaster. I know my family had a non-stick pan, but it has disappeared. Therefore, it stuck a lot. I was trying to find the balance between lots of oil (not good) and sticking. Maybe I could bake them, now there’s an idea. A little grease on the bottom of the pan, flipping half way through, that might just work. I still have to learn to make the salads that go on top. The first is an onion salad with jalapenos but in brine, which is great. The second is a cabbage dry cole slaw type thing. The thing with cabbage is that you are playing Russian roulette with your health. It is known here for carrying a lot of bacteria, like the type that gives you diarrhea. Therefore, it has to be cleaned really well, and if not, you probably will get sick. They kept trying to tell me during training not to eat the salad (what would be the point in that) which I chose to ignore, instead just frequenting places that have a lot of other people eating them, figuring people wouldn’t return if they got sick from the food. I haven’t tried buying it and cleaning it myself. I don’t think my family washes the fruits and veggies here, so really, I am lucky I am not really sick anyways. I just figure I am hardening my stomach and other digestion organs, so that I will be able to eat almost anything without repercussions.

Saturday

Getting up Saturday morning for baseball practice is not one of my favorite things. It did go pretty well though. We did running and stretching, then a catching throwing drill. It is still hard for the kids to put the glove with the pocket up to catch. Later we created a puzzle, and each piece had a rule or idea about baseball, and the kids each had to read one, and then put the piece together, that way the kids learned all the rules. Because I didn’t think all the kids had listened, I used the picture on the puzzle (a baseball field) to reinforce the concepts. After that was a game of extreme rock, paper, scissors which is like a mix of the normal game and rover red rover. It was fun and the kids really enjoyed it.

Later S and I planned the next practice. We tried to look up baseball practice tips, but they were all too advanced for our kids. Then after thinking about how we could build a tee to teach the them to bat, we looked for tee-ball tips which worked a lot better since they were all about teaching the basics of baseball.

Later I tried something that may sound good to a few of you, liquid captain crunch. Not what it is actually called, but that is what it tasted like. This is the beginning of corn season, with the corn festival in a few weeks. There are a lot of interesting foods made of corn right now.

That night S and I went to an India Bonita competition which is a little difficult to describe. It is kind of like a beauty pageant for the kindergarten kids, but so much more. For the dances, the kids that could memorize the steps (move like this for a part of the song, then change a little) were in the front and the others copied them from behind. There was a “questions” portion which consisted of name, dad’s name, school name, teacher’s name. Then came the real impressive parts, the kids’ Mom’s had to create these “indigenous” costumes. There really was not much reality involved. It was cute, even though it lasted 2 hours through dinner time.

Sunday

I woke up, but stayed in bed today, my only day to do so. My Mom came to my door to see if I was up, which is unusual, so I got up and dressed to see what was up. We were invited to eat carne asada at her son’s house, then to go to his finca (farm) for corn and corn tortillas. They by the way, have a mini schnauzer. So, we ate, then went to the farm, where they strung up hammocks (I think I will bring about 10 home with me so that I can have my guests all lay in hammocks) and we ate corn and corn tortillas. Now, there are corn tortillas and then there are corn tortillas. These are not made of corn flour, but of mashed up corn kernels. My host Mom was so happy that I voluntarily put mantequilla on my tortillas. It’s easy to make her happy.

Monday:

4 hours of meeting! Not exactly what I call a lot of fun. The good news is that I understood almost all this time, but I still couldn’t keep my mind from wandering off track. The mail finally came! For some reason it never got delivered to town last week. I got a letter from Megg with pics of her new house, and surprise, surprise, pics of Daisy, who will always be my first nephew, no matter how many dogs or kids come later.

Tuesday:

So, people here have an ingrained excuse for being late, it is called Hora Hondurena. Today I got myself out of bed to get to the office, only to actually leave an hour and a half later. After 20 minutes of waiting I went back home, and ate breakfast and talked to my house family. I was not about to sit around forever. So, Megg, my host Mom says that you cat looks like a dog. Never had she seen a cat so big and fat before, it must be a dog in her mind, especially with the pics of Erik walking the thing in your yard.

We finally went to a town, called the Hardship. Well, it’s the closest translation. It was kind of a disaster. No one wanted to work. It didn’t need to take a lot of time, but it did. On the way back it down-poured and the high school students riding in the back of the pick-up got soaked. At that time I wasn’t so impressed with them, and thus thought it was funny. To be nice and make up for it a little bit, they got to go home early to dry off.

I got my first, “take me to the States” request today. It was kind of weird. She was calm about it, and understood that I couldn’t. I have heard that a lot of people try to pass their kids onto volunteers, thinking they will number one get the kids out of their hair, and number two take the kids to the states with them. Luckily, this has not happened to me yet. Relax, no kid adopting for me.

Ahh, I am so tired of writing (and at this point of a very non-connected update, you are probably sick of reading) because I fell really behind on my journal; I had not written for a little over a week, and had to check back here to remember what happened which day. Also, I have started writing the drills and activities we have done in baseball, this way we can give the book to whoever replaces us as coaches for the baseball team. The best thing would be that a Honduran takes over, but it might be whoever replaces us after we leave. I was also writing another copy for a friend who is starting her team soon, and then got tired of that and said she can copy from the book. I think it will be a good resource, because it has ideas on how to teach the concepts of baseball, and other activities to keep the kids busy. We have to get creative to make up for a lack of equipment, this isn’t like the states where every kid comes with their own glove, we have to get 15 kids through a practice with 7 gloves.

Wednesday

Well, not your normal day. I got to see cow testicles being removed, then eaten. Yes, they have Rocky Mountain Oysters here too. No, I did not try them.

We were gone all day and I worked for 1 hour. Actually, it was nice because the other times I was in the hammock and eating. I have finally come to terms with mantequilla and can eat it. Next, coffee.

Thurday:

Day off! Yeah, actually I am spending it planning baseball and tennis practices.