More Tamales!

Hi Everyone,

We just completed our second to last full week of Field Based Training. We leave next Tuesday for Santa Lucia, and we´ll be reunited full time!! This week was kind of slow for both of us as far as our Tech training was concerned. We had Hurricane Felix come through (kind of) on Tuesday. That cancelled school for two days, Tuesday and Wednesday. Jess´charlas were canceled those two days, and mine was cancelled on Wednesday. My last two days of internet charlas were cancelled because the woman in charge of the computer center left on Thursday to register for classes, and decided not to come in on Friday. It was frustrating because this was something the community memebers wanted, but the lack of communication by some people caused it not to happen. I did get to visit an agriculture school early in the week and saw the biggest pigs I´ve ever seen in my life. I also went to a cigar factory in here town. It was very interesting to see the process for that and how they roll all of them by hand. I´ll post some pictures of those two.

Jess wants everyone to know that she is alive, and here in El Paraiso with me this weekend. We went to visit a coffee field yesterday with my host mom, Jordan (the guy from the water park and other tamale trip) and some others. I had never seen a coffee plant until yesterday, so it was interesting. It was up in the mountains, and incredibly beautiful. The people had a corn field as well, so we made tamales again. Jess got some practice making them. This time we were spared having to pick the and shuck the corn, and really didn´t do much work making them. We did use a hand molino to grind them, which was a lot harder than the motor one I used last time. Again, I´ll get some pictures up probably tomorrow.

Like I said, this is our last full week in these sites. Saturday the 15th is Honduran indepence day, and there will be lots of celebrations. It should be a fun day. Then on the 17th we get our final site announcements, so we´ll let everyone know when that happens. On the 18th, we head back to Santa Lucia and from there we only have just over a week of training left. These next few weeks should go by fast and be pretty exciting for us! Keep the posts and emails coming. We enjoy hearing from you all!

Love,

Brian and Jess