Training, My First Visitor, and a Trip to Tegucigalpa

¡Buenos tardes familia y amigos!

Training is going extremely well! I’m far from Spanish proficiency, but I’m getting there. We’ve had current PCVs come to train us, and they say by the end of the two years our English will be at an all time low.

The technical training is a lot of fun. We go out to the thinka (farm) often, and I’ve already started to develop callous spots on my hands from all the machete/shoveling work we’ve been doing. Last week we learned about compost piles, and this week we learned how to use an A frame to map contour lines on a hillside, for use in preventing erosion. Lots of the other trainees in other groups express their jealousy of the PAM (Protected Areas Management) volunteers, b/c we get to play outside.

Last week I had my first visitor! Lori, a good friend from Athens (cyclist, ecologist), is doing grad work at a close by university and she dropped by Santa Lucia last week for the bit of time between lunch and dinner. We hung out with the kids the whole time; hide and seek, watched a bit of world cup, tag, uno (the kids are big cheaters!), and frisbee. It was cool to see a familiar face, even if it was only a few weeks after I had left the states. She’s scheduled to work with a Peace Corps volunteer on site for a week during the first week of August which should be cool. Unfortunately, I’m not a “real” volunteer quite yet, I’m still in training, so she won’t be able to request my site.

I officially suck at soccer (fútbol), but I play every other day here. Sometimes I miss the ball, and yesterday the other team scored a goal because I was in the way and the goalie couldn’t see the ball coming at him. But, hopefully if I keep playing, things might start to get better. Espero.

I visited Tegucigalpa for the first time yesterday. It is a very smoggy, crowded, and poor city. It was sort of an assigned exercise; we were told to haggle rates with the taxi drivers, negotiate prices at the market, and inquire about bus fares at the bus station. We also visited Peace Corps Headquarters which is in the middle of Teguc. Headquarters has a big library of old books that volunteers leave for others, and I found “The Brothers K” by one of my favorite authors, David James Duncan, so I was stoked. There is also way too many books in that library by Grisham and Koontz, so if you’re about to join the Peace Corps and you’re reading this, don’t bring any crappy books, we already have plenty!

So I guess that’s it from me for now. I hope you all are doing well, I miss everyone already.

The picture is of three of the four kids I mentioned in my previous post. From left to right; Sarai, Josue, and Genesis. They´re so much fun.

Hasta Luego,
David