Coffee, My Adventure in and Around El Palmital, and Viva Las Vegas!

(UPDATED 29 Julio 2006); Picture of my homestay hermano, Daniel and his hula-hoop, he can keep it going for around 10 minutes!

Buenos noches familia y amigos!

First of all, thanks so much for the comments you guys have been leaving on this page! It’s a lot of fun to read the short messages you all leave for me, it’s really encouraging.

Okay, where to start? It’s been a long time since my last entry, and A LOT has occurred since then. Two weekends ago all the trainees got to visit a current Peace Corps volunteer on site. I went to visit a guy named Andrew in a small farming pueblo known as El Palmital. After a day and a half at his site we met up with other trainees and volunteers at a local (and extremely dangerous) waterfall, had an adventure (more details to follow), and then journeyed on towards Las Vegas! Then, this past weekend the PAM (Protected Areas Management) training group took a “field trip” to IHCAFE, a research coffee farm in Campamento.

My volunteer visit was by far, the most fun I’ve had in country thus far. I visited an incredibly cool volunteer who lives in a beautiful site in the mountains near Lake Yajoa (if you’ve got a map of Honduras, it’s the big lake right in the heart of Honduras). Andrew, (known as Andrés by his community), lives in El Palmital, a small town consisting of primarily farmers. At his site I got a good preview of what my two years here in Honduras is going to be like. We met his counterpart, a local farmer with many progressive ideas, who grows all sorts of things on his land; coffee, oranges, rice, beans, and of course, corn. We visited Andrés’ own milpa, where he was practicing many cool farming techniques such as contour lines and live barriers for soil conservation, and no pesticides, a completely organic plot (very uncommon in Honduras). We also just hung out with the people he’s grown to know so well in his community. A lot of our time was spent just chillin’ out; talkin’ to people, walkin’ down the main drag in the town, eating churros (small bags of tortilla chips), listening to the horrible music on the radio (mostly mainstream 80’s stuff), and just being with the community. Andrés had made some great relationships w/ the people in El Palmital, and it was a great privledge to get to see that first hand.

After a day and a half in El Palmital, we went to waterfall closer to the lake, and had an …adventure to say the least. We broke so many US insurance policies my mom would freak (sorry Mom). We paid a “guide” 20 lempiras to “guide” us behind the waterfall. The waterfall was a good 14 stories high, and it’s the rainy season, so it was running extra strong. The guide took us through these great pools that were about as big as a large jacuzzi, but as deep as an olympic sized pool. We dove off of rocks 10-15 feet above the pools and had a blast. After that we pressed on behind the waterfall, most of the time I couldn’t even see b/c there was so much water splashing everywhere. Many times, we just grabbed arms and walked in the direction that the person next to us was pulling. After many “this couldn’t possibly be safe” feelings we made it to a small cave behind the waterfall and talked about how ridiculously crazy we were, then did the same to get out and back to the pools for more jumping a messin’ around.

After our day at the falls, we were exhausted, and decided to go spend the night in Las Vegas! There was a business volunteer (from ATL, Emory) who had his site there, and he invited us to stay there. Las Vegas was definitely one of the larger cities I’ve visited here in Honduras, and I’d say it lives up to it’s name. During the whole time hangin’ out and adventuring in the waterfall I got to know a lot of really cool current volunteers, and it was really encouraging to see that life as a volunteer during the next two years is going to be not only a HUGE learning experience and a chance to make genuine relationships with people living in a community, but a lot of fun as well.

Moving on, this past weekend, PAM visited a coffee research farm in Campamento. We had a great time learning about organic coffee practices and had a good time chillin´out together and getting a feel for our rad PAM team (The Green Team!).

So, I leave the beautiful town of Santa Lucia on Sunday and journey on towards Catacamas for FBT (Field Based Training). At FBT I’ll be with just the PAM training group. The other groups will be in other towns for their own respective FBTs. My living situation looks like it will be much different. I got a paper today describing my homestay in Catacamas, and it said I’ll be living with a couple and their grandmother, and …no kids, I’m kinda bummed about that, but I’ll make the best out of it I’m sure. Catacamas is also very different from Santa Lucia, it’s a dry and bigger city. Apparently, Santa Lucia is a very nice place for Honduran standards, kind of like the Buckhead of Atlanta. More to come…

That’s probably more than any of you wanted to know (except my folks who gobble it up!) I hope all is well, and thanks again for all your love and encouragement.

Hasta Luego,
David

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