Not yet a rainy day

(Old news: The last pictures I put up on Facebook were with a connection too slow to add descriptions. The student elections were to form a student government which will help organize all the festivities of the schoolyear as well as see to complaints of other students. The other photos were of processing sugar cane. This process takes almost a whole day, and because all the kids knew to come to dip wooden spoons in the foam so they could lick the cachasa, it was a very festive event.)

Today while brushing my teeth, washing my towel or washing dishes (I can't remember which), I noticed a straight, branchless palo (tree) that I hadn't seen before through the gap in the bricks in front of my pila. There is another that stands above my neighbor's house that I now see out the window while lying in my hammock.

On Saturday, May 7th, as we wrapped up an amazing Mother's Day celebration at the school, I was eager to leave the lunch to find the source of gritando (barks, yips, whoops and hollaring learned by Honduran men sometime in boyhood used to celebrate or emphasize someone's foolishness--a direct ) from outside. However, I had a few invitations yet to extend to women who might want to enter our newly forming group that will soon be selling canned vegetables in the markets of towns down the mountain.

After finishing a large plate of fried chicken, cabbage and potato salad, tortillas and rice, and cleaning the walls of mother's day decor, I snuck out while some were still chatting to see where all the men were from the community; I could still hear them whooping nearby. What I saw nearly silohetted by a sinking afternoon sun was strikingly like the statue to Iwo Jima. Over 20 men were gathered in a tight band lifting a pole high over their heads, and after a few minutes when it fell into an 8' deep hole, the shouts erupted again. I helped lift poles for the remainder of the afternoon, and what we accomplished was to give the appearance of a town that almost has electricity. So that's the big news in Sinacar; they say by the end of the month, there will be streetlights in a town that's never had electricity apart from solar panels, alternators, gas-powered generators, and batteries. I'm worried Peace Corps won't feel so much like camping anymore.

This season in my part of Honduras the Cucunachinas (sp? june bugs) are hatching like crazy and each evening you hear sounds like rain on the zinc roofs. Subsequently, each morning you feel somthing like autumn leaves beneath your flip-flops, as their lifespan appears to be one night. The warblers and many raptors have migrated north now; so I suppose you're all enjoying new signs of Spring back home. It's still summer here, and has been since I arrived apart from a brief spell in Nov-Dec that kinda felt like fall. However, this is the dry season, and sometime in May the rain normally falls, so I expect that shortly I will pull the rubber boots out of the corner. I suspect that when it's pouring rain here and 70 degrees and sunny back in North Dakota, my friends and family will finally have a one up on the weather! At least I will still have mangoes, platanos, bananas and a wonderful neighborhood of friends here to not become over nostalgic!

I'll try to write more faithfully; especially once I have an outlet!