Settling in...

It's been over a month now that I've been living in my tiny, lightless community in the mountains of western Honduras. I bought myself a cowboy hat and tall rubber boots to fight the sun on sunny days and the mud on rainy days, but I still don't really fit in with all the campesino coffee farmers.

Sincacar is a pueblo that lies mostly on a finger ridge stretching down from the mountains in the Guisayote Protected Area. Houses rise off the ridge in clusters and it reminds me of the plates on the back of a stegasaurus toy of my 3-year-old host brother. Only the sides of the ridge are a patchwork of corn and bean patches, and all different aged coffee fincas (the older fincas are beneath the shade of Guamo and Trumpet trees, the younger fincas are naked so that the sun can quicken the growth of new trees). I've visited most of the homes now, after helping with a census of all the homes that have children for next year's school year, and about 1/3 are fairly clean and well-kept, and 2/3 are plain adobe or mud homes with rusting tin roofs and crudely formed cooking stoves that use too much firewood. But the quality of life is phenomenal. Families spend 4-6 hours together every evening, community meetings being a form of entertainment, draw people from all sides of the mountain, and the rest of the time is passed with playing cards and a crude form of Rummy. I'd prefer spades or Pinochle, but it takes me a while to teach new games, and they prefer to stick to their traditional "Con Quien."

In the beginning, other than spending lots of time visiting with as many people as possible, I'm spending lots of my time in the school. The students and parents want me to teach English, so I am, but because most of the 1-3rd graders can only read bits and pieces of Spanish, I'm sneakily spending 3/4 of my time working with Spanish. And while I teach words and phrases in English to the 4-6th graders, I'm learning lots of new vocabulary, including, as you could imagine, the local street words. As my Spanish improves I plan to do more and more teaching of natural sciences, and hopefully I can implement the environmental education curriculum that has been developed for HN.

I also plan on working with local NGO's who are located in cities down the mountain, to try to be a ambassador between the community and NGO's. I think there is a big disconnect in the ideas of each. I also think the NGO's have the funds that might help to accomplish projects that could really help: irrigation, construction of more efficient, improved stoves, etc...

I am sorry if I've been slow to keep in touch, I think that's the toughest part of living without electricity, the batteries in my cpu and cell phone are always dead. I'll hopefully be better able to keep in touch if I get the mini solar panel my mom has sent, and possibly a wireless modem from a local phone company.

Love and miss you all!