A gym, in Honduras¿ Nope...

November 1st, 2007 - From Brian
Hi everyone. It has been a few weeks since our last entry. Things are going well. It hasn’t rained in almost two weeks, so all of our clean, wet clothes are dry. Our walls have also almost completely dried up. It is pretty hot out on some days, but nothing too bad. Everyone keeps telling us that the weather will stay ‘cool’ like this for November, but then in December it really starts to get hot.
We’ve been keeping busy. We tried to join a gym……that’s one thing. But seriously, we have completely taken over 7th grade with the EDUCATODOS program. They were really behind when we got here, so the kids decided that they want to start coming three days a week, instead of two, so they can finish sooner and start their summer break. Right now the program in our site is pretty dependent on us and Peace Corps. We have a few ideas that we are going to try to implement next year to make it more sustainable. They are also re-writing some of the books, so we hope to get involved in the management of it as well.
The Riecken committee apparently found someone who is willing to sell some land in town for 150,000 lemps. They gave a presentation today to the municipal corporation (they, along with the mayor, set the budget for next year) to try to get the money to buy it. I am not sure how that went, but I think we are going to go see the land shortly. The committee hasn’t been that organized of late, and as of yesterday it looked like nobody was willing to sell the land. We’ll see if this helps.
I have continued working with the UMA (Unidad Media Ambiente; that is the environmental office in the municipality, and its only 1 person who works there because they don’t have the money to pay others. His name is Josue) recently. We went to the colegio (high school) to give some charlas (presentations or talks) to some kids about trash. Sounds exciting! But the trash is a big problem here, and in Honduras as well. People just toss their trash into the streets or wherever. It gets dumped in the hills and the forests. Next year, Josue, Jessica and I want to work with the colegio and escuelas to start a trash program and maybe start to fix the problem. I did go visit the local dump last weekend with some members of an environmental group that I have been working with. It is brand new, and they are worried that it is too close to one of the local water sources. It was pretty ugly, but I guess all dumps are. There are a few photos of it posted. That is Justo (pronounced Husto) in one of the pictures. He led us on a hike afterwards. He knows the area very well and is a nice guy.
We (I mean more Jess than I) have been making tortillas pretty regularly now. She learned how to make the dough and is pretty good at it. Neither of us can flatten them by hand, so we use the torteria. If you don’t make them perfect, which I never do, you get laughed at. We use the tortillas to make pupusas. They are kind of like quesadillas, except you put the cheese in the middle of the tortilla dough, and cook it all together. They are good.
We have been getting along with our host family very well. Our host dad took us to go look at a house for rent the other day (which we decided won’t work), and when we got back our host mom told us we could stay for as long as we want…..paying rent of course (I don’t know if our host dad liked the idea that much!). The original plan when we moved in was that we had to be out by December because they have family coming to visit a lot for the holidays. IF we want to stay, the visitors can all just use the other rooms. A very nice gesture. Our host mom will probably be a bit sad when Jess moves out. She loves to watch her make food and just talk as well. We’ll probably miss them a bit too, but it will be nice to have our own place. We have pretty much decided that we are going to move into Christine’s house, and we’ll probably make the move at the end of the month.
Last week one of the local teachers asked Jessica to come to her class and teach an arts and crafts activity (called manualidades in Spanish) to her third graders (all girls). We went to do that this morning. I tagged along for moral support and to do some painting. We mixed paint with water in plastic cups. They used straws to drop some of the paint on their papers and then other straws to blow it around and make random designs. It went very well. They loved the activity and made a ton of paintings. We are posting a bunch of pictures from it. We got 9 paintings, 3 pens, two stickers as gifts from the students. We want to put together a program next year where we teach kids about different artists, and cultures and then have them replicate a painting by that artist (kind of like Meet the Masters). One of Peace Corps goals is to teach people about our culture and others worldwide. Wish us luck with that. School ends for the summer next week and will start back up in February, so we have some time to work on it.

That is about it for now. Keep the emails coming. We love to hear from everyone.