Monday, July 28, 2008

Daily Life

I just thought I´d put a few little things in here about our daily life. Food usually consists of rice, beans, avocado, eggs, cheese and lots of tortillas. Our host family is also fond of ¨mantiquilla¨which roughly translates to butter, but in this case is a lot closer to sour cream, and they eat it a lot (though are kind enough to put it on the side for us so we can choose not to eat it). We also have coffee at least once a day and sometimes we have it with dinner as well. Hondurans like their coffee with lots of sugar and milk, but the coffee is good, so we´re not complaining.

We are currently visiting another volunteer and are experiencing a completely different climate from where we are training. In our training site, the rainy season is really felt, with almost daily torrential downpours. Everything stays pretty humid and damp, which is causing our clothing to mold, something we are learning to avoid through proper ventillation. Here, at our site visit (we´re shadowing another Municipal Development - Muni D - volunteer), the sun is intense enough to keep us inside in the early afternoon. We are enjoying seeing another part of the country and actually finding out what another volunteer is doing (she only has one month left, so has accomplished a ton in her two years). During our visit so far, we have attended a drag-race and followed our volunteer around the construction of the park she has helped plan, amongst other things. Until next time...que le vaya bien (that it goes well with you).

Sunday, July 20, 2008

Our first couple of weeks

This is our first opportunity to use the internet other than to dash off a quick email to our parents to let them know we arrived safely. We took the bus to a neighboring town and are sitting in an internet cafe. We live with a host family in a rural mountain town and are enjoying learning about the culture of Honduras. Monday through Friday we have classes from 7:30-4:30 and Saturdays we have class only in the morning. Our classes focus on language (we usually have 4 hours of Spanish class each weekday), culture and job-specific training. There are three project groups training at the same time: Youth Development, Protected Areas Management (PAM), and Municipal Development (our training group).

We usually wake up around 5:30 (which sounds obscenely early, but we go to bed around 9:30 so it´s not that bad) and take turns showering. Our first few days we took bucket baths, but our family has since installed an electroducha (which is an electric showerhead that heats the water), so we now have hot showers, a luxury we are enjoying while it lasts. It is the rainy season now, so it is common to have torrential downpours for many hours of the day, but when the sun is out, it is fierce. We are learning the basics of life here, such as washing our clothing by hand and hopping onto a packed bus. As part of our formal education, we learn about different Honduran ethnic groups, and yesterday we were able to meet with representatives from 7 different groups from around the country. We spoke with them, sampled their food, and learned about the specific issues each group deals with.

We´re playing lots of soccer with the neighbor kids and we´re enjoying trying all sorts of new food. We hope all is well with all of you and look forward to hearing from you soon. We may not be able to respond in a timely manner, but we will try to get back to you as soon as possible.

Love,

Daniel and Emily

Tuesday, July 8, 2008

Until our next post...

Hello everyone. We just wanted to post once more on the eve of our departure to share a bit of news, which is as follows: we'll only be posting sporadically, and certainly not very often over the next few months due to limited internet access during training. However, stay tuned and please continue to write emails - we'll be very pleased to receive them. Best wishes and we look forward to being in touch.