Saturday, August 16, 2008

entrenamiento


Entrenamiento. That pretty much sums up our lives right now. We´re perpetually in training and will be for the next five weeks. For the most part everything´s going just fine. There will always be the adjustment of having to live according to a schedule that resembles that of a high schooler with long days in class and an early curfew, but we´re fortunate to have a nice host family, good friends, and an appealing little city in which to train. Our host family is composed of two parents and four children, two of whom are teens and two of whom are toddlers basically. We spend a lot of time just shooting the breeze with the youngest two, which is both fun and a good reminder that having kids is an enormous responsibility (needless to say, we´re not there yet).

For those of you who are reading our blog fairly regularly, our diet is still very similar to what we ate back in our previous community before transitioning to field based training. There´s a lot of rice, beans, tortillas, and sometimes we have chicken, cheese, salad or a bit of potatoes on the side. Generally speaking, we eat very well and as a result are in great health. The past two weeks we´ve each had colds, but we´re finally feeling a bit better now. Since it´s the rainy season here, we have pretty extreme tempature swings, which I would guess are between 70 and 95 degrees fahrenheit, contingent on whether it´s raining (the rainstorms are always downpours) or sunny. These temperature swings are, I believe, partly to blame for our colds. They also make life interesting from one day to the next, so there´s no complaining.

We´re currently starting our SDPs (self directed projects) which will take up a majority of our remaining time in FBT (field based training). Just a future warning, Peace Corps absolutely loves acronyms, so you`ll see them popping up in our blog from time to time. Emily and I will be running a few short workshops about food security, natural hazard mitigation, and HIV-AIDS with high school students in a neighboring town. In only three weeks or so we´ll get the news about where we´ll be living for the next two years and at the end of September we leave for our site, so we´re starting to anticipate the completion of training and the transition to our permanent location and roles here in Honduras. Please stay in touch, and as always email or post comments with anything you´d like for us to read.

¡Adios!

We wanted to add a few pics:

First night in Honduras


Dan washing clothing by hand


Just outside of town