Hi All,

June flew buy! I have some good photos for you all but I forgot the connecting cable to my external harddrive so I couldnt post them today. What I do have is my project proposal that Im going to paste here. Ive been trying to figure out if this opal poject is a good idea, if it will work, and find people to work with. The next step is to go to peace corps. and give them this project proposal, of which they will say yes go ahead or no, find another project. Im a little worried they will say no to this becasue its so far away from my site and because theres been a few problems with peace corps and the opals in the past. But hopefully, as you will read, the idea is too good to miss and they will let me do it. So here it is.

Project Plan

Laura Vietti, PAM Hondu-9

Introduction

This is a revised version of my original Project Plan and I feel I first need to explain how I came upon the project and provide justification for why I want to do a project so far away from my designated site.

I’m a geologist and am highly interested/ passionate about rocks. I had heard from tourists that there are opal mines in Honduras, and naturally I wanted to visit them, but I didn’t have any more information. Several months later I was at a Pace Corps. gathering and I mentioned Honduran opal to another volunteer and they told me that the mines are actually located near another PCV´s site. I quickly identified that it was Erandique, Lempira, the site of Ryan. I made plans with her for a visit and went to Erandique a few weeks later.

In Erandique I purchased some opal, but more importantly I talked to the locals about what they are doing with it. The general consensus was that they are selling it in its natural form in Erandique.

My site is adjacent to a very popular tourist destination of Copán Ruinas and I knew there would be a market for Honduran opal and asked one of the miners if he would like help developing contacts in Copán Ruinas to sell the opal, of which he enthusiastically said yes.

The next step I made in pursuing the opal project was to make sure there was an interest in Copán as well to sell opal. I spent several days talking to both tourists and store owners about the opal, opal products,. and potential prices.

I learned that tourists have a slight interest in buying raw (uncut unpolished) opal, but would much rather buy (at a higher price too) opal products such as figurines or jewelry. However, I found very few artisans who knew how to work with the opal, but are interested in learning. This led me to the conclusion that there is a group of interested, trainable people who want to learn how to work with the opal in Copán Ruinas and in Erandique.

Thus, I propose this project of developing products and a market of Honduran opal in Erandique, Lempira and Copán Ruinas, Copán. My site is currently Santa Rita, Copán and I never was intended to work in the actual towns, but because I am very close to the already volunteer saturated Copán Ruinas, I will be close to one of the proposed project areas. I intend to spend much time in Erandique as well, but I can stay at the other volunteer’s house.

Part A: Project Background- Site Perspective

Site Profile:

Erandique, Lempira is a large pueblo located an hour south of the main road between Gracias and La Esperanza. The town is large and spread out, with roughly 3000 people (vague guess). There are three main parks, each with a large church. Erandique is removed from most modern towns, although it has both electricity and water, and as a result it isn’t very influenced by the more rapid paced moving North Americanized Culture. Erandique has several pulpurias, a few general stores, a hotel, one comedor, and one internet provider. There also exists a coffee cooperative. Erandique´s main source of income seems to come from small farming as well as brick production.

The environment of the Erandique region is a dry tropical pine forest with a very mild climate. The area is mountainous and the main rock type is volcanic ash derived. As a result of the ash, roads are extremely difficult to manage during the wet season, soils are quickly washed away, and more importantly there is the presence of opals in the rock.

Opal is a form of silicate rock with a very similar chemical formula to quartz. Opal differs from quartz because the silica atoms and molecules are arranged in a very different manner, and water molecules are locked with in the molecules. Precious opal (meaning it displays color like the rainbow) forms when the molecules align in a distinct set pattern and when light reflects off the molecular arrangement it is diffracted into separate colors based on their wavelengths (very similar to how light is separated into specific color bands after is passes through a prism.) Thus, each color the opal displays is dependant on how the opals molecules are arranged.

There are many types of opal in the world, most derive from volcanic hydrothermal fluids, and the mines near Erandique produce two types. The first type is a white clear colored, highly colorful opal. This opal occurs as tiny nodules or as white veins criss-crossing the host volcanic basalt. White opal, however, is more common in the world, The Australian Opal mines being the most famous.

The second type of opal found in Erandique´s mine is much rarer and in fact can only be found in Honduras. This opal is black matrix opal and is formed when there is no space for the opalescent volcanic hydrothermal fluids to go so it is forced to reside in the tiny rock pores with in the black volcanic basalt. As a result, the black matrix opal appears as a black rock that sparkles with all colors. Black matrix opal can be found in other parts of the world, but Honduras is the only location where the opal has so intensely saturated the original basalt that individual opal grains cannot be distinguished.

There are several opal mines near Erandique, and in fact the entire Opalaca mountain range is littered with opal localities, but the main opal mine under Erandique´s jurisdiction is called the Tablon mine internationally, or locally known as the Gualguire. The Gualguire mine is owned by the Erandique municipality and all residents have the right to work in the mines.

There was a previous volunteer in Erandique who was working on a similar project that I propose. He advised the town of Erandique not to sell the mine to a mining company in the USA. Erandique followed his advise and didn´t sell, keeping the mine locally owned. The mine company in the USA felt it was the PCV´s fault for being refused the purchase of the mine and in turn sued Peace Corps. Peace Corps. decided to administratively separate the volunteer to avoid a large lawsuit (this information is not fact, but what volunteers and community members have told me.)

Currently there is no company working with the opal mines, or in the process of negotiations (according to the municipality.) The locals are left with very little instruction on how to mine, market, and create products using the opal.

There are no protected areas with in the region, but the opals are a non-renewable natural resource that should be cared for and used efficiently. The area is extremely poor (one of the poorest in Honduras) and any revenue to subsidize their farming will help their quality of life. Also, training on better mining, non-destructive environmental practices would be highly beneficial when the mining process is still technically undeveloped like it is now, to prevent problems later on.

Aside for Erandique, I plan to work in Copán Ruinas, specifically in the development of artisan products. Copán Ruinas is a major tourist destination and thousands of tourists come to visit the town and Mayan Ruins a year. Copán Ruinas has a large number of souvenir shops frequently visited by the tourists, including a jewelry store. The majority of souvenirs are not Honduran produced and come from Guatemala. There is a need for Honduran derived products. After an intensive study of the shops and artisans I have identified several people who are familiar with Honduran opal, but don’t know how to get it, or how to work with it, but are very interested in both.

Problem Analyses/Causes

The main problem I have identified is the missed opportunity and inutilization of the Honduran opal, and lack of marketing knowledge. The people of Erandique know what opal looks like, and they know that some people will pay money for it, but they mine it with out very much knowledge of how rare and special the stone is. Currently, only a very few percentage (about 10 people) of the Erandique population work in the mines. This is in part due to that mining opal is very labor intensive, tedious work. The miners then sell the opal from their house to the occasional tourist who travels the long distance to Erandique (7 hours on 4 different busses), and they sell the opal in its natural uncut/ unpolished form, usually in glass jars filled with water (water increases the light diffraction making opals show more color reflections.)

The current price of the opals sold in this manor is 20-50 lempira a piece (generally 5 cm cubed) or for 100 lempira a bottle. I’ve looked on the internet and found that the Honduran opal should be sold for $10-500 a carat for the black matrix opal or $10-1500 a carat for the white. There is also a store in Tegucigalpa that sells small cut and polished black matrix opal for $30-40 and $80 for a small figurine. As one can see, buying opal for $2 can quickly generate a profit of $40, all on one small stone. The necessary steps though to achieve this profit are to 1) cut and polish the stone to a desirable product, and 2) then to find a place and market where people are willing to pay these prices ( Copán Ruinas, San Pedro Sula, Roatan, and Tegucigalpa.) The people of Erandique don’t know how to do either, and this is the problem.

Another problem is that by nature, mining is a destructive process to the environment. The current mining processes involve pounding a deep small hole into the ground and dynamiting the hole with the goal of removing rocks covering the deeper laying opal.

Luckily, this process is done on a small scale and not too much damage has been done. I estimate 2km square area has been affected but over time and with more destructive mining techniques, more damage will occur. There is very little knowledge among the miners about how destructive mining is to the environment, and no reforming is practiced, this is a problem

Problem Statement

Precious Honduran opal is being mined on a small-scale near Erandique. Lempira, and has the potential to generate a good source of income for local artisans and miners, greatly needed to improve their quality of life. The locals, however, have no knowledge of how to create desirable opal products, or of how and where to sell the opals; here in lies the problem because without this knowledge they cannot generate a profit from the opal. Mining by nature is environmentally destructive, and the Erandique miners are unaware of its affects and how to mine in an environmentally friendly manner.

Efforts to Address the Problem

The locals of Erandique are generally not trying to create opal products (such as cut or polished stones for jewelry, jewelry, or figurines,) and are only selling their opal in its natural form in glass bottles from their home. Occasionally someone will travel to the market in San Pedro Sula and Copán Ruinas to sell the opals, but for a very low price. There have also been individual cases where a local has tried to cut opal and polish it, but the result is often still very crudely done, wastes precious opal, and still sold for a very cheap price.

The locals have not developed any type of plan to work with the opals and generally just wait for tourists to buy it and have jewelers in the USA make products.

I plan to address this problem by first creating a way for people using local resources from the tool store to cut and polish opal in a professional fashion. The next step would be to teach the locals how to create opal products and possibly how to sell the opals.

I also plan to work with a group in Copán Ruinas to do the same thing, as well as identify good contacts and store owners who are interested in selling opal in their stores to the tourists.

Some tourists have expressed interest in visiting Erandique to look for opal, I feel that developing a full out ecotourism project in Erandique is too progressive for the current stage of development of the opals and Erandique. I would like to in turn work with a local of Erandique to create a pamphlet or brochure describing how to get to Erandique, contacts of hotels and restaurants, products, and people to visit to buy the opal. This will hopefully make the long trip to Erandique more effortless and more tourists will go, bringing more revenue to Erandique.

In regards to better mining practices, nothing is currently being done, nor are their any plans. I would like to give charlas demonstrating the negative affects of mining on the environment, as well as help develop solutions to better ecologically friendly mining techniques. One final hope is to bring in an engineer to asses the mine to help effecientize the mining and create more opal yield.

Part B: Peace Corps Participation

Project Purpose

Santa Rita is my official site, but was only meant to be a ´central base´ while I worked on the aldeas in the surrounding area. I feel World Vision and other organizations have saturated the area and I am not needed.

However, in Erandique Peace Corps. is needed because there is little or no NGO presence or support in the area, and they need help in development. Some general results I expect from helping the community is a general better utilization of the community’s precious, one of kind resource opal. And, to make the maximum amount of money with it, but at the same time keeping it sustainable and environmentally friendly. I also expect to see more awareness in the mining practices and less destructive techniques.

Goals and Objectives

My goals and objectives are to work with the locals and miners of Erandique to develop and teach them ways to professionally cut and polish opal, create opal jewelry, and create other opal products like figurines. I also intend to help them develop and help sell their opals to an interested market.

I also plan to teach a group of artisans and jewelers in Copán Ruinas, a highly tourist visited destination, how to buy Erandique opal, make opal products, and identify stores willing to buy opal from these groups for a fair price.

Lastly, I would like for more tourists to travel to Erandique to spread revenue to non opal businesses (hotels, pulpurias, comedores), and my objective with the help of a local to create a pamphlet/brochure/map with directions, contracts, and advise on how to travel to Erandique.

In regards to the mine, my objective is to increase environmental awareness and help develop more sustainable ecologically-friendly mining techniques.

Major Volunteer Tasks

- Develop lapidary technology using readily available material in Honduras

o Rock Tumbler

o Grinding Wheel

- Look for funding sources

o Peace Corps

o Organizations developing Honduran handicrafts

o Funding from United States

- Training of myself

o Edwin; how to cut and polish opal

o Augustine: how to create stone carvings

o Gato; how to create jewelry

- Workshops training people in Erandique

o Advertising workshop in Erandique

o A series of workshops

 Develop Interest and show the people whats involved, ask them to start aquiring materials

 How to make the Lapidary equiptment

 How to cut and polish opal using lapidary equiptment

 How to create jewelry and figurines with opal

 Marketing and Selling Opal

- Similar workshops in Copán Ruinas, and potentially Gracias, Lempira

- Develop a tourist pamphlet with

o Direction and instructions of how to get to Erandique

o List of Hotels and places to eat in Erandique

o List of opal products found in Erandique

o Contacts of people who sell opal products

- Give Charla on affects of mining and the environment

- Bring in a mining engineer

o Develop better and more eco-friendly mining techniques

o Help increase mining yield

Its pretty ambitious I know, and if I even do half the stuff I want to I think it would be a really good project. Next time Im in copan with my memory thing ill post all my pics and hopefully i will be able to give you all a verdict on my project. If they say no to it, I dont know what I will do, and theres even a chance i might come home. But I wont think about that for now.

I still fail on keeping this thing up to date, and so much has happened I don't even know where to start. I think what I'm going to do is just put the pics up and explain what they are and you should get the gist of what's been happening. In a sentence, the two bigs things that happened is Jen (good friend from college) came to see me in Honduras, and I went home!! Then the rest of my time has been trying to reajust to honduras. So here goes:

This first pic is of my and Jen on our way up to Volcano Pacaya, I opted to take the "taxi" as they were calling the horses, and jen walked. The walk/ taxi ride up was steep and at a really high pace. It was nice though because almost the entire way up we were going through a cloud forest with the myst surrouding us, which you can see in the photograph. The horse didn't have a name, but my guides name was Lago.

This was one of my first views of live active running lava in my life it was amazing. Let me begin with the story before going on too much further. Jen told me she was coming down and I was trying to think of what we should do, of which I immediately thought of the beach. But after asking her and hinting that there's an active volcano near by, she decided that would be better than the beach. So it became like our geology pilgrimage for probably the only two blonde geologists in central american to go see an active volcano. The picture you see here is after we had walked on the lava field for a good 20+ minutes and then all of a sudden we could see the hillside glowing. You can also see a buch of people who came before us up closer to the lava.

This is a picture of what we were walking over almost the entire time to reach the lava. It was hot glowing rock, but solid enough to not move and form a cool crust that we could walk over, although, like this one, we could periodically see deep down there. No tripping aloud on the volcano!

Here's our first up close moving lavaflow, it not the flowing riving type, but it was still moving considerably. The interesting part about lava flows that I never even considered before is how loud they are! Everytime a chunk of lava became cool it would solidify like brittle glass and break off so it sounded like glass constantly being tumbled down the mountain.

This is a picture of the flows up the hill, there was one actual "river"of lava and thats what you can see. It was pretty high up there though. There's also a crater at the top of the volcano but apparently it was spewing lava like crazy (you know the type you see on the discovery channel spew) and we couldn't go up there.

Pilgrimage/ Mission accomplished! I promise I'm not that short, I'm just lower on the rock.

And Here's one final pic of the lava at night. We went up the mountain around 4 in the afternoon and didn't get back to Antigua Guatemala until 10:00, so walking down the volcano was all done in the dark and with headlamps.

This is a pic of one of our views walking down. The entire experience was sureal because we had the glowing lava behind us, clouds below us, we were walking in mist, and there was some nice lightning and thunder at the same time. It was amazing. If I could do it again, I would have paid for the option to camp up on the volcano, we just didn't have enought time to watch the lava, and from the camping spot you could see the lava coming out of the crater on top, it would have been a wonderful opporunity to sit there with your beer in hand, watching the volcano erupt, and with the amazing settings around us.

After Antigua. Guatemala and the volcano we went back to Copan for a relaxing day of non traveling. For this we went up to the natural springs about 45 minutes away from Copan Ruinas. We braught a .7 liter of rum and a big bottle of coke, sat in the river where the springs joined it, and had a wonderful relaxing time. The best part is that we were the only people up there, besides the occasional campasino (farmer) who came there to take a bath.

This is a picture of the river . There were natural hot tubs, if you will, in the river made by boulders. Then with the jungle surrounding us and the birds, it was a little piece of paradise.

On our last day in Copan, we were invited out to see our archeologists mayan dig site and we went. It was a few miles down the road from the main dig site and it was an actual excavation. It was wonderful because I've never seen and archeological excavation of this kind before and Molly and Dylon, the Harvard grad students who invited us out, gave us a grand tour. This photo shows some of the workers excavating and sifting. One neat thing about all the excavators is that the majority of them have over 30 years of experience and Molly and Dylon told me they are an amazing team to work with because they know what they are doing and what to look for. The site they were at is thought to be another noble compound, with a very surprising amount of sculpture (usually only reserved for the kings).

Left to Right, Gorge- an archeologist who studied in the states, but is one of the only archeologists who grew up in the copan area, Molly- Harvard Grad who has done alot of work on the Copan acropolis, and Dylon- another Harvard Grad, both he and molly are working under Bill Fash, THE archeologist of Copan. I'm really happy to have Molly and Dylon in Copan because I can talk science with them. They are just as passionate about their work as I am with rocks, so it makes for some great converstations.

I actually have no pictures of going back home, probably because I was soooo busy. Something funny is that one of my biggest goals or plans for going back was to sit on our big blue coutches and just watch endless hours of mind-numbing TV, and it never happened! Not that I'm too sad it didn't happen, it was just one of those things that I never got around to doing. I thermop I got to see my long lost brother, family, friends, relatives. I'm learning how to shape and polish opals, I went rock hunting, hung out with the dinosaur center crowd, helped out with a school geology field trip, went to the hotsprings, watched the new Pirates of the Carrabean, and of course, made it to the good ol Thermop Bars with Mikki and the crew!

My time back home was so much fun, it was actually too much fun. Instead of satisfying all those USA cravings I've had for the past year, it just reminded me of what I miss and love about being home. Hense, coming back was not my favorite. I'm still in withdrawl, but little by litle I'm getting back into the swing of thigns here. One thing that I'm glad I didn't miss out on and I came back just in time for, was to see the rain come in Santa Rita. We hadn't had a real rain in probably 3 or 4 months, so when they come, they come in forse. They usually show up in the afternoon with a big Thunderstorm front and then it just lightly rains the rest of the night. But one of the most fantastic things about it all is the thunderstorms.

This next pic is one that I took at about 8:00 at night. You can see we still have power, but I put it here as a reference to show just how dark it is. Then look at the next few pics to see just how intense the lighting is.

Needless to say it was bright!

This last and final pic is of all the dead bugs I had to sweep up the next day. Because of the rains, a whole bunch of larva were waiting just for this time to hatch out, and the next day the sky was filled with buggy flying things. Which was cool, until they got into my house. I awoke by a huuuge flying ant crawling on my face, and only to find 20 some more of them flying around in my house. The good news about them is that they were dying anyways so it wasn't like they could do anything bad, but it was still a pain in the but. So this is all the bugs I swept up.

Besides trying to adjust to honduras, I've been working alot on teaching myself how to work with opals, although I'll have some formal training soon. I'll put more pics up when I have them! Oh ya, and yesterday was my birthday. I went to Copan Ruinas to spend the night. It started out a little slow, but I ended up having one of the best birthdays of my life. Alot of my friends were there, I had good beer, good pizza, we got to make brownies! A whole bunch of hippies came in and played the drums, it was good!

This time it was only a few weeks since my last post. I'm trying to be better and I think its working! So after the coffee competition and spending easter inCopan Ruinas, I went to the hot springs near copan. They are about an hours drive away and we had a freind that drove us up there. I don't have any pictures of the actual springs because I was worried about loosing my camara. But here's some pictures of the way up. This first pic is of me, jen, ramon, and danny on our way up to the hotsprings. We were riding in the traditional honduran style, in the back of a truck!

Here's another picture of me and my frind Jenifer. She's originally from North Carolina, but showed up in Copan about the same time I did. She's been alot of fun and now partly owns a travel place to help people book tours and stuff. She's the one who helped make all of my families Christmas plans.

After that I went on an overnight trip to El Salvador, my first time in a different country since I started in Peace Corps. I went to visit and El Salvadoran peace corps volunteer whose project to do hazards mapping of the area, and I wanted to talk to him about how to create hazards maps, especially mudslide maps. It was alot of fun, and I wished I could have stayed over there for more than 20 hours. The picture below shows the walls in a town called La Palma, and a german guy/ hippy went there during the 60's and started some type of art revolution, especially in the style you see. What's really neat is that almost the entire town is painted or has some paintings on their wall in this style but stylized to each different artist.

This is a picture of York, he's the one who talked with me about the hazards mapping. I went up to his site for a few hours and then we came into a bigger town and met up with another volunteer and stayed the night at her house.

I'm having some difficulty writing about the next picture. But in short, I went to explore a cave about a 20 minute drive from my site.

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Me and my favorite petzl headlamp! And yes, that is bat shit on my shirt.

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This is one of the nicer travertine formations in the cave. This cave went really deep, someone said around 5 miles, but we didn't go in that far. This cave is carved through a limestone, but in also went through some conglomerate formations which is really neat, because we would be walking along and came across really big pebbles erroding out of the wall. Plus that's pretty rare for cave formations.

Here's the group inside the cave. Sorry it's fuzzy but thats how it goes. I think we only went in a 1km or two. The cave had a few scary parts, but for the majority it was pretty flat and easy going. The worst parts were sliding an all of the bat shit, and some large drop offs.

At the very start there was a scary part that involved hanging on the side of the cave with a 12+ something foot drop off and that was pretty scary and made my legs shake the rest of the way through the cave, then there were spots where everyone else traversed through the cave like you see, and I opted to swim it instead. This usually worked out excpet for that I forgot I had my cellphone on me and ended up breaking it.

The last big adventure that I just got back from yesterday was another trip to Erindique, where the opals are. Erindique is about 7 hours away from my site and involves taking 4 different buses. Below is a nice picture of the town. Another peace corps girl lives down there so I stay with her. I really like Erindique, its bigger than my site, but not as many people. It's just a really chill town. I think if I ever had to live in Honduras, I would choose Erindique to live.

Here's another picture of Erindique. The town has three large plazas and the mandatory (not really) associated churches.

This is a picture of the opal mines. The mines are about a 30 minute walk from town. Basically the mines are owned by the town and anybody from Erindique can work in them. What's crazy is that there's only about 8 guys who actually do. To mine the opal they first dig a hole in the ground an dynamite it to make it bigger, then chip away at the correct layer. There's isn't always opal at the bottom though, and it's pretty rare to come by. For example, nobody has found opal for the past month!

Here's me at the bottom of one of the mine pits. I don't think they found any of the basalt with fire in it, but if they did it would look like the rock that i'm holding here.

This is a picture of Erindique from a little bit below the mine. You can see the pine in the area. Sometimes its hard to tell the difference between there and Wyoming.

After I went to the mines, I went to the house of the main guy who sells the opal. His name is Juan and he lives with his sister Reina. Together they sell the opals to tourists who come to their house. In this pic I'm looking through a whole bunch of opal rocks trying to pic the best ones so that someone in Copan and carve mini sculptures and necklace pendants out of it. This has pretty much become my peace corps. project. Today I went and talked to Ana, the woman who owns a fair trade store in Copan Ruinas who is going to sell the opals, and a jewler who's going to make jewlery out of it. So far things look like they are going to work out and alot of people are going to make some money, especially the opal miners!

That's about all for now. I'm really excited because Jenifer, my friend from college is going to come to Honduras in less than a week! And then after that I'm off to the states. But before I leave I really want to get this opal project going so I've been extremely busy. Expect more on this later, and for those of you in thermop, you'll actually get to see some of these opals!

p.s sorry for the great amount of misspelled words, i don't have spell check and my spelling is horrible, but i do recognize that there's alot of problems here.

p.p.s Also sorry for the large amounts of cleavage I've shown in these pics. I'm going to start wearing a little more conservative clothing, its just that it's been so HOT here.

Hi Everyone!

So I know its been a little over a month since the last one, I'll try and be better about writing these! There's definitely no lack of stuff to write about, but sometimes I do have a lack of pictures.

I left off last time talking about learning how to put in irrigation systems, so here's few pics from that. The first one is of me and the crew learning about how to put them in in the desk top sense. We learned the physics about it all, what types of systems there are, when we should use what...yada, yada, yada. So we had a day of this, then a day in the actual field putting one it.

Here's a pic of the second day of the course, putting in an actual system in a town called El Transito. It was pretty simple, and I was impressed how fast we could put one in.

My official job during the entire thing was to be in charge of putting in the droppers. It was very technical, cut hole in pip, stick dropper in pipe, move down a foot, repeat steps. But it made me feel useful! Whats funny is that I saw my dad do this for years and never really knew what he was doing, but now that I learned about them myself i can help out now....maybe

After learning about them, I helped put in another system in a town called Nueva Armenia. What was funny about the hole deal is that it was raining like crazy while we were putting it in, so I kept on asking, 'why do they need the system' but apprently it gets pretty dry in the next upcoming months.

This sytem was a little more complicated and it involved three valves and two types of droppers because there wasn't alot of pressure. One thing that was interesting is that the farmers were always a little wary at first when they saw me because to them women are not supposed to be in the field. They usually ignore me at first, but by the end of the day that at least except that I know something more than womanly duties (little do they know i know nothing about cooking and cleaning :-) ) But I always hope that at least I'm helping change their opinion of women an ounce of an iota. (don't ask what units those are)

Here's one more pic of the system and the people from World Vision and the campasinos they built it fore. But here's the first test and it worked!

The next thing I did in late febuaray and early march was go down to Tegucigalpa and then off to my friend Annie's site to look for some pretty honduran rocks for one of my projects. Don't have any pics of that.

Then I turned right around and left site again for two more weeks. The first part of the trip I went to a town called Erindique, about 7 hours away from where I live now, to look for some Honduran Opals. The Honduran opals are AMAZING because they are a black matrix opal, so it looks like opalized sandstone, and its only found in Honduras. Here's an example of one.

I'm trying to start a project for Peace Corps to help sell the opal in Copan Ruinas, the really touristy town. The people right now are waiting for tourists to go to their houses in Erindique to buy the opals, but I'm talking with store owners in Copan to see if they want to sell the opal. Everyone I've talked to who has seen the opals I braught up Love them and there's almost too much interest. But I'm really excited because I think this will actually work and I can say this is definitley a project that I have done on my own. Here's another opal

I'll explain more about this project and stuff later, but so far things look really good and I'll post more pics of the mines and stuff later.

Here's a pic of myq favoritqeqqqqqqqq beqcauseq itqs raw opal, and itqs gorgeqouws

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After the opals I went straight to Tegucigalpa to meet up with another peace corps girl to go to national park called Montana de Yoro to help out with a reptile herp study. I stayed up in the could forest for a little over a week and had a blast, but the jungle beat me up a bit, it wasn't easy. When I get pics I'll write more about this.

Then I came back to town and hung out for a while, and the next thing I did was help out with a really big regional coffee competition. One of the organizations I work with is putting on this competition of over 200 coffee producers in the area to find the best coffee. The last week of March was the finals of the competition and it was a really big deal! They braught in judges from Colombian, Japan, Costa Rica, and Honduras. Here's me helping out at the check in.

Here's a pic of the gallery outside the competition where people convened and there were some vendors.

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Happy Valentine's Day all! Since I have no one in particular to say this to, you all are my valentine. Just humor me, it'll make me feel better :-)The last few weeks I've been getting back into the swing of things with working. It all started with Reconnect at the end of January, this is where my group from training got together and shared experiences plus learned a little more. It was good to see everyone, and it went by way to fast. But is was really good at motivating me again. I don't have any pictures of the actual reconnect, but I did take pics of the trip afterwards to the only Honduran lake.

The first part of Febuary I took a mini-class with my counterpart at the World Vision office to learn how to put in irrigation systems. Nothing too complex but it did involve the logistics of calculating how much pressure we have from the source and crazy stuff like that. I should have some pictures of that coming up pretty soon. The other big news that I have to say is that I found a kindof lap simming pool in my town! Who would have thought that in little ol Santa Rita Honduras there's a decent or at least passable lab swimming pool. I think its only half the size of a regular pool, but it's not kidney shaped and i kinda breath hard after doing a set. Plus its in this beautiful little valley with jungle surrounding it, so evertime i'm done with a set, i can look up and admire the gungle. Plus my tan is getting pretty good. I'll include some pictures of this in a while as well. So that's all for now. I'm off to go check out a coffee competition in a bit, so now I'll just explain the pics.

This first one is of me getting a hitchhike from La Entrada to the Peace Corps house in Santa Rosa. I don't like hitchhiking alone, but when I'm with my frind Jamo, i feel safe enough to do it. Getting rides in the backs of trucks, or camiones, as this one is called is awesome, except when its raining. Its too bad its illegal in the states.

After reconnect a buch of us went to the lake of Yahoa to have fun and celebrate a birthday. These next few pics are of the boat ride out. Here's the group of us, more people came later that day, so this isn't all of us.

This is the jungle around the lake. Its supposed to be one of the best reserves in Honduras with lots of rare birds. It was pretty

Here's a pic of the girls. It's Laticia, Laura C., Molly, and me.

There's ALOT of fishing on the lake, probably to an unhealthy level. The major catches are bass, and tilapia, a freshwater favorite down here.

And one final fun pic of me, molly, and jo. All these guys were in my Protected Areas Management training group so we've got a bit of history behind us

These last two pics are from the Family Vacation and I had to include them. This one is of me at the Bird Park in Copan Ruinas. This is one of my favorite places to go in Honduras because is so peaceful, in the jungle, and lots of neat birds to look at.

And this one is from Roatan. We heard about this iguana farm and thought it would be interesting to check out, so we did and discovered a driveway a womans house filled with hundreds of iguanas. She told us there were some 2000 or something iguanas there. I thought it was funny because everyone knows about a crazy old cat woman, but in this case it was a crazy old iguana woman, :-) I shouldn't laugh too much cause this is probably what I'll end up being.

p.s sorry for all the misspelled words, i blame second grade, an internet time limit, and my brain crowded with spanish words.

It's almost the end of January and this month flew by! Not exactly cause I was the busiest of people, but because I had tons of fun. After everyone left for christmas I didn't see a bunch of them, and the last two weeks people have been trickeling back to Copan, so of couse we all have to get together. The next few pics are some of the people I hang out with, and really the only pics I have of this month.

In Copan Ruinas there's lots of people who travel, show up here and like it so much they stick around for a while. This guy, named Ken, is one of them. I actually met him 4 months ago, but liked it so much he came back to hang out for a while. Really nice guy who I think is somewhere off in Peru as we speak.

Let me explain the bread. My stomach doesn't always do well with great quantities of hard alcohol, but if I eat bread all night I don't get a hangover. So this is me and my stomach saving bread. The girl I'm with is Missy. She just showed up and is the girlfriend of Dan, see below. She came here to hang out with her hubby so he wouldn't have all the fun.

This is Dan. Dan is the owner of Sapo Rojo, a bar here is Copan that I pretty much spend alot of my time in when I'm doing the bar thing. He's from around Sacramento California and deided to come down to Central America and own a bar. He found Sapo Rojo on the internet, came down and liked it, then baught it. He actually came to work on the bar about two weeks before I showed up to site, so its kinda nice to have someone to share experiences with because we're going through it kinda at the same time. Only difference is he didn't get 3 months of training.

One of the things I also did was a Canopy Tour above Copan Ruinas. Canopy tours are when they hook you up to a harness and zip-line and you glide through the forest. The reason I got to go, was because new owner took over the tour and they wanted to promote it to the locals so we could get people to go. So for one day they let everyone come for free to see what it was all about. I'm not in this pic, but kinda shows what we looked like. You're seeing Dan, Missy, Jamo (other peace corps volunteer), and Sid. Mom and Dad- you might recognize him from the hotel here in copan.

This is a pic of the actual Zip line. I think its Dan who's in the middle, but this individual cable was a kilometer long and by far the most fun! There isn't too much of an actual canopy here, give the area a few years, but we were able to swing from hill top to hill top. What happens is they hook you up from your harness to the line and you hang on the the cable with one hand leaning back and your legs extended out front and crossed for balance. Then to break you just lean back and use the glove's special leather to brake. It was pretty scary the first time because I had no trust in the glove to stop me, but it worked!

Here's one more pic of a cable during the tours. THis was the last one, there were 14 in all, and this cable braught us down to the river to fly over it. Beautiful once again.

So thats all the pics I have for now. My goal is to get through Jan and Feb, mostly because they're during a lull of the year, and I'm sure things will pick up after I get through them. Next week will be busy because I have reconnect, a time to meet up with all the peace corps from my group and talk about what we've been doing. Alot of them I havne't seen since swearing in about 5 months ago, so this should be fun. Thanks for reading and I'll write soon again.

It's almost the end of January and this month flew by! Not exactly cause I was the busiest of people, but because I had tons of fun. After everyone left for christmas I didn't see a bunch of them, and the last two weeks people have been trickeling back to Copan, so of couse we all have to get together. The next few pics are some of the people I hang out with, and really the only pics I have of this month.

In Copan Ruinas there's lots of people who travel, show up here and like it so much they stick around for a while. This guy, named Ken, is one of them. I actually met him 4 months ago, but liked it so much he came back to hang out for a while. Really nice guy who I think is somewhere off in Peru as we speak.

Let me explain the bread. My stomach doesn't always do well with great quantities of hard alcohol, but if I eat bread all night I don't get a hangover. So this is me and my stomach saving bread. The girl I'm with is Missy. She just showed up and is the girlfriend of Dan, see below. She came here to hang out with her hubby so he wouldn't have all the fun.

This is Dan. Dan is the owner of Sapo Rojo, a bar here is Copan that I pretty much spend alot of my time in when I'm doing the bar thing. He's from around Sacramento California and deided to come down to Central America and own a bar. He found Sapo Rojo on the internet, came down and liked it, then baught it. He actually came to work on the bar about two weeks before I showed up to site, so its kinda nice to have someone to share experiences with because we're going through it kinda at the same time. Only difference is he didn't get 3 months of training.

One of the things I also did was a Canopy Tour above Copan Ruinas. Canopy tours are when they hook you up to a harness and zip-line and you glide through the forest. The reason I got to go, was because new owner took over the tour and they wanted to promote it to the locals so we could get people to go. So for one day they let everyone come for free to see what it was all about. I'm not in this pic, but kinda shows what we looked like. You're seeing Dan, Missy, Jamo (other peace corps volunteer), and Sid. Mom and Dad- you might recognize him from the hotel here in copan.

This is a pic of the actual Zip line. I think its Dan who's in the middle, but this individual cable was a kilometer long and by far the most fun! There isn't too much of an actual canopy here, give the area a few years, but we were able to swing from hill top to hill top. What happens is they hook you up from your harness to the line and you hang on the the cable with one hand leaning back and your legs extended out front and crossed for balance. Then to break you just lean back and use the glove's special leather to brake. It was pretty scary the first time because I had no trust in the glove to stop me, but it worked!

Here's one more pic of a cable during the tours. THis was the last one, there were 14 in all, and this cable braught us down to the river to fly over it. Beautiful once again.

So thats all the pics I have for now. My goal is to get through Jan and Feb, mostly because they're during a lull of the year, and I'm sure things will pick up after I get through them. Next week will be busy because I have reconnect, a time to meet up with all the peace corps from my group and talk about what we've been doing. Alot of them I havne't seen since swearing in about 5 months ago, so this should be fun. Thanks for reading and I'll write soon again.

Hi All!

Hope everyone had a great Christmas and a Happy New Years. Tonight is newyears, but I figure by the time people read this it'll be afterwards. December has flown by. Mostly because I spent all my time waiting for my parents to come, and then 2 weeks with them. I'm still in withdrawl right now since they left two days ago! We had a great time, a little fustrating at times, but the days we weren't traveling it was wonderful. And the days we were traveleing, well it was an adventure, and thats a nice way of putting it! So I'm just going to describe some of the vacation through pics. Although these are only the pics that I took and mom has a whole bunch more, so this in no way represents all of the trip.

The night before I went to San Pedro Sula to pick up the family, there was a really cute preschool christmas presentation in town. This pic is of me with my two favorite empleadas 'maids or helpers' from the house I live in. I'm not quite sure of their names but they are awesome. P.S. the girl on the left is beatiful, just a bad pictur of her here.

Here's a pic of the actual christmas presentation. There were about 20 to 30 preschool to second grade kids that my host aunt teaches at a bilingual preschool. What was amazing about the presentation is that these kids sung about 10 songs from memory and half were in english! I couldn't believe it. This was the 1st christmas thing ever and it went really well!

The first part of our trip was at the bay island of Roatan. It was great taking the fery over, but hell getting off because it took us an hour to get our bags, which we had plenty of! So we stayed on the prettiest beach of the island and here's just one of the sunsets we saw.

Everyday we went out of a snorkel excursion and here's some pics of some of the stuff we saw. I took lots of pics, but these are some of my favorites. So this one is of a fish and the reef. My camera is waterproof so thats how I took all these, and I think it did really well condsidering!

Here's mom and dad snorkeling away, no fish in this pic, but still really cool with the big deep blue ocean and them.

Here's my brother also on the beach. Since he swims everyday he wasn't too excitied about more water, but I think he was happy to be away from school were he could just relax.

I braught a tiny two dollar (i'm proud of this part) christmas tree with me and we had it out almost every night. So here it is on our deck. You can also see the amazing view we had from our house. We stayed at a little house right on the beach front, and after hours of looking at other properties on the island, where we stayed was definitley the best.

After an 'exciting' trip back to the HOnduran main land, we went to a national park called piko bonito. There we stayed at a really nice jungle lodge and went on a rafting trip. This is the only pic of all of us and its when we hiked up a little way to a water fall. The rafting trip was great and we all fell out of the boat at least once. I think I'm definitley going to have to try rafting again.

Here's more snorkel pics. This is me up close. The only one I have of me snorkeleing, of course a self photo......

And here's one last final pic of the snorkeling group. We finally got my dad to go snorkeling which was awesome. I think he really liked it and it sure beats sitting and watching us do it.

After Piko Bonito we went to La Ceiba, back to San Pedro Sula to drop my brother off at the airport, and then to my site and Copan Ruinas. Some times were intensly frustrating, other times were great! Copan was really fun because I actually knew my way around and there wasn't too much stress.

The whole thing was too short and sad to see them all go. But I think if they had stayed anylonger I would have gotten used to them being here, and it would have made their departure even harder then it was. So here I am not quite sure whats going to happen all this year. A year ago i don't think I quite grasped the fact that I would be here for the turn of 2007, but here I am. Parents helped me out with alot of good ideas to work on down here so I'll have plenty to do.

K, Thats it for now, HAPPY NEW YEARS!

Hi All, this letter is about 1 and a half weeks old because everytime i tried to load it the computer or internet would screw up and i lost everything so I would have to start over so hopefully this time it'll get to you all finally.

So I've done two pretty exciting things since I last wrote, the first being Thanksgiving in Honduras. I think all of the volunteers get a little, or very homesick during this time of the year so to make up for not being with family we all get together and celebrate thanksgiving. I was really impressed with what we were able to do. I think there are usually about three different Peace Corps Thanksgiving dinners in all of Honduras for the different regions, but they are completely organized by the volunteers. The one that I went to was in Santa Rosa de Copan, about a two hour bus ride from Santa Rita. I traveled with my site my Jamie, and we stayed a night before the actual day. The house in Santa Rosa is a Peace Corps house with something like 12 beds in total for people to sleep over on their way to far out middle of nowhere sites. I think there were a total of 35-40 volunteers who showed up, and the place was packed. But that was a very good thing because it was cold! I didn't know Honduras could get this cold. Its apparently supposed to be normal to be cold right now because this is also Honduras's cold season, but the crazy part is that there's no hint that its going to be cold, simply put, a cold front moves in and all of a sudden you can see your breath and have to wear all the clothes you own. But because I was soooo cold, and I'm guessing it was only in the 40's, I guess its good that I'm not in Wyoming where the 20's are warm right now.

The actual Thanksgiving dinner was wonderful. It was a cross between pot-luck and just showing up. We had two beautiful turkeys, pumpkin pies, mashed potatoes, green beans (I made that), other types of casseroles, home made eggnog, bread, chocolate chip cookies, and lots of other stuff. And the good thing is that we had plenty of food.

Also keeping in tradition, we had Turkey day- Football in the T.V. as well. So it was a really good day. There was stuff always happening which I was so thankful for because it kept me from thinking too much about not being home.

Then the second thing I did was go to a workshop on how to make coffee drinks. Yes, that means learning how to make espressos, cappuccinos, iced drinks, and specialty drinks. It was three days in San Pedro Sula and I went with ETEA, one of the organizations I work with. It was really fun, but also really frustrating. I say frustrating because imagine 25 hyper Hondurans hovering around only three espresso machines. Hondurans also don't have quite the same idea of waiting in lines, so it was complete mayhem. At one point I had to leave because I was so frustrated after being cut in front of for the umpteenth time! But I still managed to use the machines somehow. At the end we each had to demonstrate that we could make an espresso, cappuccino, and a specialty drink. Mine certainly weren't the pretties, but I think my specialty drink was the best of them all, of course I'm a little biased…… I made a simple cappuccino with amaretto and raspberry flavoring, but I didn't use very much so it was a really nice balance of all the flavors. Some of the people though used so much flavoring my mouth would pucker up from being too sweet, and you couldn't taste the coffee at all.

So that’s about it. Thins are really starting to come to wrap up as Christmas gets closer (pun not intended but funny), which means there's more going on, but also that I really can't start too many projects until after the season. I'm on the final count down till my family gets here on the 17th of December. I can't wait, and I'm trying to stay as busy as possible so the time will go faster.

So this first pic one of our yummy turkeys, They turned out really well considering our resources. The people are Lauren and Justin. They are seasoned volunteers in Copan.

Me and other girls from my original training group. They are Becky (PAM), Me, Shannon- Municipal Development, and Kathy- also PAM. The puppy is Cathy's but Shannon also has a new puppy. They were adorable.

Here's a pic of my Copan Ruinas, Santa Rita Group. There's 6 volunteers who all live within 15 mintues of eachother and here are two of them. They guy is Jamie or Jamo, he's my site mate in Santa Rita, although I think he's going to change houses to Copan Ruinas. His project is Business and makes web pages for lots of people. The girl is Quincy. She's been here the longest and is Municipal D

And here's a pic of the actual Thanksgiving Spread. It was awesome, and probably better than some of the Turkey days I've had before, mostly with the addition of Mahed Potatoes (inside joke with family) and there was no lack of food! Plus we had something like 7 pies.

Next are some pictures of the Coffee Workshop in San Pedro. Here's my first Espresso I've ever made. It was pretty difficult fighting over the machines but I was proud. The deal about the perfect espresso is that it should be dark, take 26 seconds to pour- not easy by the way- and have a certaina abount of foam on the top. I did ok, but I'm proud no matter.

This last pic is one of me, Lisa, and Salome. We did a quick coffee judging section where we taste tested three different types of coffee. The pic is of us showing which coffee was good and bad.

So thats all for now. I've done a few other things since then, but I'll write about them later. I have less than a week till my parents get here and I'm traveling all over the country before then so I'm going to be extrememly busy and have lots of fun! But I wouldn't have it any other way. If I don't write before Christmas- MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL, I'll be enjoying mine on the beach!

I know I know, its been about a month since I lasted posted this thing, But I promise I had a reason! A few weeks ago my computer plain out wouldn't turn on.....I can definitely tell you I slightly freaked in my mind. I use my computer almost every day for one thing or another, and thinking that I wouldn't have one anymore really scared me. Then I saw a fain flicker on the black box on the power cord, an my computer beeped, but then as soon as the light went out, my computer was out. So by then I figured out that it was just the power cord and NOT my computer! So the good news is that a few weeks later the family of my good friend Dan was coming down, so my mom sent the cord to his family, and just a few days ago they arrived in Honduras and I am now finally able to use my computer! Horray!

So what hav I been doing....not too much, but still keeping busy. I finally went to the Copan ruins which I will describe with some pics. Alot of my works kinda been put on hold right now without my computer, but it's given me a great break to study up on Spanish and the Mayan culture. Yes...how is my spanish....always getting better. The sucky thing is that when you live in one spot and always talk to the same people, you really can't notice anything getting better because even though i might be able to communicate one more thought more each day to them, i don't notice it, but after a month I think things really are different, but like I said: I just can't tell. K, so here's some pics

This first pic is of the Copan myan ruins right out side of my town. They are awesome, and I can't beleive I live so close to them! I could literally walk to them everyday if I wanted. The thing I'm standing next to is called a Stela, or somthing like that, but the Myan kings carved them usually in honor of themselves and included some type of story to go with it as well as a date. So they can date oll of these. I think there's about 22 of these in all at the ruins here.

I went to the ruins with a bunch of peace corps kids who came down to Copan Ruinas for halloween. Here we all are standing on top of a pyramid. This pyramid is one of the smallest there, to give you an idea, but it was easily climbable. I'm the one in red shorts kinda standing to the right.

What you are looking at here is a stela and an alter. They usually occur in pairs like that. But whats really gruesome about this one, and why i had to include it, it that the indentation you see in the alter is for putting either a human head or heart, usually the winners of the religious ball game they played, and then there are two rivulests spirling down for the blood. It was just too gross and graphic, so I had to put it up here.

This is a map I did for World Vision, the NGO that I work for. It shows western Honduras, and all of the places that world vision has agricultural programs, and then what type of agricultural program. It was pretty simple, but I was so excited to actually work with something I was good at.

This last picture are of my food friends Sarah, another peace corps girl in a town not too far from mine, and Tomoko, a volunteer in the peace corps equivalent of Japan. They are giving a small presentation on why its important to wash your hands to a group of kids. I wasn't really involved in this one, but went along to take pictures. It was really awesome and the kids loved it, especially the part when Sarah played a song, which you can see the words on the pink paper behind. Hopefully I can work with them on other ones they are going to give!

Thats all I have now. I'm not too sure what my Thanksgiving plans will be, but the idea is to make them as exciting as possible so I won't have to think about not celebrating it with my family! Take care and adios!

I've officially been in Honduras for four months!! I feel like there's something substantial about making the 4 month mark, maybe its that is 1/4 of a year, one season, or maybe just that I've been here longer than a summer so it feels more permanent. Anyways, I'm glad I made it this far, I'll admit that there's been times when I didn't think I would make it.

Since the last time I wrote, I've been busy, but thankfully not quite as busy as the month before. After visiting the Guacamaya coffee coop, I took a week off just to relax and learn Spanish, although I didn't really feel like it was that relaxing cause I was always doing something! I changed my room into another bedroom, which is smaller, but it has shelves, a desk, a dresser/hanger thing, and NOT a connecting bathroom vent into another room! Huray! Now I don't have to listen to my neighbor anymore. Although waking up is harder now because I have peace and quiet in the morning.

Then my next big thing was going into Tegucigalpa to my ArcGIS program, which turned out to be a lot harder than I planned. Usually getting to Teguz just takes two bus rides and I usually arrive there around 1:00 in the afternoon. But this time…. I got caught in a bus strike. Basically what happened is about two or three miles outside of San Pedro Sula (2nd biggest city in Honduras) all traffic on the roads came to halt because they drove buses none to bumber in the middle of the street as a baracade, and nobody could get into town my car. This meant that everyone trying to get into S.P.S. had to get out and walk. That’s all fine and dandy, I was just extremely worried because the Peace Corps told us that S.P.S. is the 2nd dangerous city in Central America (don’t ask the first, I don’t know it) and wasn’t too excited about walking 5 km alone to the down town center. But the good news is that I hooked up with a mother and her teenage son from Houston who were also on the bus, and a really cool guy from Israel. When we were walking, we ran into the actual strike, which wasn’t that big, but still obviously a protest. The were a bunch of people yelling every once in a while, 3 big burning tires in the road, and a road block made of buses parked so close to each other that we couldn’t pass through them, but had to go under them! On the other side we saw a SWAT-like car with a big water hose on the top to dispel the strike. It was interesting, thankfully not too dangerous, and I made some good friends with the people I traveled with. Unfortunately and fortunately there were still buses traveling out of S.P.S. on a different unblocked road, so I made it out of S.P.S on a bus later in the day. I say unfortunately only because I was looking forward to hanging out with David, Jenny, and Harry. So I then got into Teguc really late, but Annie picked up my GIS software for me and we went to the hotel (there’s another sort of long short story about getting to the hotel, but we made it!)

Then the next day I went with Annie to her site, a town named San Marcos de Colon, and it’s pretty much on the Nicaraguan boarder. It was beautiful there, and one of the prettiest Honduras towns I’ve seen. We hung out, went on a hike, made some food, and visited one of her counterparts. It was really good to see Annie again and see what other volunteers are doing in there sites. Definitely some things I was envious over, and some things that I liked more about my site.

Next I made the two day trip back to Santa Rita, I had to stay the night in S.P.S. which was cool because I went to a really nice mall for supper, and had a wonderful Quiznos sandwich, one of my first sandwiches in country. . And that’s about it from there. I’ve been working with Lisa (Swedish volunteer) on making a map and poster for an agotourism site. This weekend should be exciting because there’s a big Halloween party planned in Copan Ruinas. Hope everyone is doing well, I always love hearing from you all, definitely makes me less homesick! But sometimes a little more, but you all know how that goes.

Here’s some pics!

The first one if of Annie and me on a hike near her site. We are standing next to a tree that has partly grown its roots around a rock, definitely one of the neatest trees I’ve seen.

This next picture is of a tree that looks pretty normal when you first look at it, but it’s not at all. If you look there’s two different colors of wood, predominantly white bark, and then what appears to be one branch of dark bark. The deal is that there are two different trees here. The original tree was, kinda still is an oak tree, it’s the darker bark; but the tree has been completely surrounded by a parasitic vine/tree that starts growing around the original tree because it can’t support itself, then it completely surrounds the original kills it, but keeps the original shape. This means that when the oak eventually dies and disintegrates, the entire center of the parasitic tree will be hallow. Pretty neat stuff, this is one of the best examples I’ve seen of it.

This is a photo of a Zucchinis coop. The women are washing and boxing zucchini in bulk to be sent to Miami to sell in a supermarket, so if you’ve ever wondered where your veggies come from, they probably went through a process like this. I really liked seeing this part because I never really thought before about the process of putting produce in supermarkets, and especially knowing how far it travels!.

Here is my newest family member! He’s a tiny red eared some type of turtle, but he’s beautiful! I never though my next pet was going to be a tiny turtle, but I’m really excited to have him. Annie, who got him as a gift from her host family, named him Jesus (but in the Spanish way so it sounds like hey-suse), but that name is a little offensive to Hondurans, so I’m giving him a middle name of Tuga, because the Spanish word for turtle is tortuga, is cute. But honestly I really just call him 'little dude' So there ya go, I’m no longer alone! I have Tuga…..the next man in my life after Rambo (whom I still miss(p.s. rambo is my pet iguana for those who were wondering)).

And these next few pics are of the bus strike in Sand Pedro Sula. The first photo is a picture I took of a newspaper covering the bus strike, but I never saw it when it was that violent, but if you look at the people in the back of the picture near the bus, they are all trying to crawl under the bus to get through. Thats how we got through the bus baracade as well (a little hard with big packs though). The next two pics are from David, the guy I met and traveled with during the strike. There should be a pic of the burning tires, the crowd and police people, and one showing how the buses were lined up nose to bumper so no one could pass.

Hi everyone!

Here's what I have for you today. I went to a coffee business called the Guacamaya, which means macaw (as inthe bird). It was really cool and I learned alot about what happens to coffee to make it brown! The whole point of going was because Arnold, coffee expert tried their coffee and it wasn't very good, so he's trying to find ways to make it better, and he believes that part of the problem was in the toasting. So we went to see what we could do (he could do) to change the toasting to make it better.)So here's some pics to help explain it and what I did.

So by this stage the coffee has been picked, depulped (removing the fruit)and dried. And this is where the rest of stuff happens. This machine is for taking away the really thin husk around the coffee beans. I think Its like the husks around the rice. So we put the grains in the machine, and then magically at the other end comes out the oro(gold in english) which are the actual beans

The next stage is selecting all of the bad coffee beans out by hand. There's always deformities caused by either overripeness, plague, bugs, and just weird stuff. The reason they have to take them about is because they will toast at a different rate and the coffee won't all have the same flavor, and they usually add a sourness to the coffee. So thats what these girls are doing. Really tedious stuff, but all in the name of a good cup of coffee.

Here's a pic of the actual toaster. You load the best beans into the top and they drop into a barel that rotates over a gas fed flame. Then they dump out at the bottom. You are seeing Arold, the official coffee judge and knowitall about coffee using a very highly technical devise (flashlight that I think is twice as old as i am) to check the color of the coffee.

Here's a pic of the barell with a little window showing the coffee beans. The only way to tell when the coffee is ready is look through this little window and check the color. Its amazingly simple, but it seems to work just fine!

Here's a pic of the beans after they have just dropped. They are exremely hot and have to be kept moving so they don't toast and longer than they have to.

This is a pic of me and Juan Angel, another really cool employee of ETEA showing the before and after products. The toasting took a total of 50 minutes in toaster, then they need to cool, then they are ready to grind and drink!

After toasting two batches of coffee we did a little coffee judging to see if the toasting helped out the quality of the coffee. Its really interesting with lots of steps including smelling and tasting at lots of different stages . But the end result was that the coffee was really noticiablly different with the new roasting time and quantity!

Here's a good pic of a really nice old employee and I think her grandaughter, really neat people!

So thats about it for my coffee roasting experience. Like I siad, I'm learning more about this stuff than I every thought possible. Definitley a science, which makes it interesting to me. I've gotta go because there's this little girl screaming her head off and its echoing in the room, driving me crazy!!!! Adios from honduras.

Still been keeping really busy, almost too busy, but I've seen and done alot of things. Still working on the Feria

(Fair). Actually I don't really do to much except go to meetings and follow my friends around. But its good because the people are starting to become more familiar with me, and the hope is that when I am finally able to talk with them that they will want to talk and we'll have things to talk about. I realized that I have tons of pics of me doing me things, so I wanted to include some pictures of the people I'm working with. In Honduras there's a huge economic disparity. The majority of the people I work with in the office and other NGOs are of the upper class. They are pretty much just like Americans (usa) except for languange, and a few other things, and they are the ones that live in cities and big towns. Then there's the other side. The people that live in the campo (campo literally means field but here it means up in the hills or outside the towns) These are the people who literally live off the land, have their own farms, and very little money. They are also usually the ones who don't have enough food to eat because they have poor farming practises, and use up soil nutrients so they must go higher up the mountain and cut down the forest to do so. They aren't evil, mean, or mad, they are just simply trying to feed their family. But we are here to talk with them about how to keep the land they have now healthy and productive so they will have more to eat and don't have to move up the mountian. Sometimes I gather that they resent us, other times they just want free stuff, but I think the ones that care really listen to the advise and try to make a difference. The good news is that you really only need one campasino (a campasino is what I've decided is a cross between a hick and farmer, a little less derogatory than hick, but more derogatory than farmer (thanks dad!)) to try practising organic farming, soil conservation and other stuff, then when his products do well others see this and want to try.

The pictures below are of some campasinos and campasinas from the Feria, and are some of my favorites. The first is of a women named Rosa and the girl in the background in Moira. Rosa has 15 children, her youngest is 5. She doesn't have too much but she works hard and sells her small amount of produce. But to sell it she has to leave her house by around 3 in the morning to get to Santa Rita to sell it. Moira is one of the oldest looking chilren I've seen. I don't know how old she is, but I imagine 6 or 7. When I mean old, I just mean that her eyes look so much older, like shes seen and done more things that I have. Sometimes I feel she's my age just in a little girls body. But then when she smiles, she turns back into a little kid. Rosa Moira, and Moiras two sisters are my closest campasino friends. Just today one of the sister gave me 5 banans as a present, which is quite a bit of money for them (so I baught them some good cheese bread) but they initiated the jesture and it felt soooo good!

The next pics are of campasinos. At first they seem all gruff and mean, but as soon as I approach them they open up and are extremely nice. I always ask if I can take a picture of them, and they usually smile shyly and nod their heads, if I’m lucky, they will crack a joke about how guapo they are when I show them the pics. Really hard working, sincere men!

These next two pictures are of a farm that I went to visit. Arnold, the only guy in the group picture own the farm and his family built this really not-typical Honduran style home. The house and farm were beautiful, but I thought the best part was that when you look out the window, there is one of the best views of Honduras mountains I’ve ever seen, it took my breath away. But, I took too many pictures the night before and ran out of battery juice so I couldn’t take pictures, oh well I guess I’ll just have to go back! The people in the picture are the one’s I work the closest with. From left to right is Lisa ( a beautiful girl from Sweden who speaks perfect Spanish and English), Me, Salome (the women in charge of the NGO is santa rita, her name has an accent on the e, so it doesn’t sound like the meat), Solomes sister who doesn’t wrok with us, just came for the weekend, and Arnold (Arnold is from Honduras but studied in Texas, he’s also a professional coffee taster, its nice because he speaks perfect English). His farm/ ranch is also a juxtaposition because he own some 250 angus beef, which is not a typical Honduras animal. Plus its always bizarre to see cows in the jungle.

Next pics are of an area called La Cumbre. It’s about a 40 minute drive south of Santa Rita. I went up there with the ETEA group to help give a session on coffee farming. The deal with them is that they want to export their coffee, but they don’t know how. And its a lot harder than one would ever think. So we (I mean they) talked about how to make their coffee the required quality to ship off, and also trying to encourage them to work together because they need a minimum amount of pounds of coffee before it will even be looked at to sell. So the first pic is of a coffee processing machine. Almost every hill surrounding the area has coffee growing on it. Then they bring it to this plant that they are just now constructing, and here they remove the fruit around the seeds, ferment the seeds, and dry it. What kicks but about this is that it’s all done really close to where it was grown so the coffee will be of a better quality because it was immediately processed. The second picture is a beautiful view from the mountain. I think that a lot of the mountains you see are actually in Guatemala.

These last two pics are of El Rosario. A small town about 40 minutes north of Santa Rita. I really wanted to come here because a lot of the venders, I think all the people in the first three pics, are from this small town, and I really wanted to see where they came from and what type of road conditions they walk every Saturday to get to the fair. Getting to Rosario was a chore because the road was terrible, but Pedro, another guy from World Vision, did an excellent job driving. But, at the end the road just got too muddy and we couldn’t go any farther. So we got out and walked the rest of the way. The walking was rough going because it was all mud and raining! But we made it and it was definitely worth the trip. Rosario is beautiful! I think one of the best small town in Honduras. And I love the people.

The next pic is a typical Peace Corps photo I think. You know the one with all the happy but grimly host country kids. They were wonderful though! Everytime I took a picture they would be shy and sometimes run away, but then come running back to see the picture I took.

So I think that’s about it. I know I wrote a book, but I’ve done lots of neat stuff. I’m glad you all are checking out this page! Definitley worth the time I’ve put into it! Keep writing and talk to you all soon. Oh ya! I received my first package to my house in Santa Rita, so the address I gave you all works! So send away (hint hint hint )

I think I´m just about completing the end of week three in site! Only 23 months and 1 week left. OK, so its not that bad that I have to count but I´m still at a countable time frame.

Two major things have happened since I got here. The first is seeing Honduras´s Independence Day. It was really cute with a parade that all the schools participated in, a drum band, baton girls, and flags. It lacked some finesse, but considering their resources, they did an awesome job. The second exciding part of my life was going to my host moms wedding. I´ve got lots of pics so I´ll describe all through them.

K, First pic. This is of my hallway. Just for you all to get an idea of what my place looks like. My room is the second door (I know hard to see) but trust me its there. Its really nice and open.

Next pic is of my room. Its really spacious with a high ceiling. Its kinda of like a hotel room in the fact that there's an outside hallway and then my room. I have a bathroom in the back with a working HOT shower!. The only problem with the room is I don't have very much furniture, I own the green table and thats it. And the other problem is that there isn't very much privacy because there's screen vents into the other room. Not a fan of hearing someone else to their business (I think I've already mentioned this part) But its nice and I'm going to live here for a few months. The goal though is to move into another apartment in the same building, but it is its own separate private thing.

This next pic is of my prised geology map. Its really basic but its big and beautiful! Right now I'm starting on reading about Honduran Geology (I know took me long enough) but so far I'm really amazed by what is happening here. There's still alot to be found out it seems so I plan on working on some type of geology project in the future. But first I want to figure out what is known!

Here's a pic of the bride and groom. The wedding was beautiful and I think really similar to weddings in the states, but I haven't been to many so I wouldn't really know. The only problem was at the end the power went out so the wedding was cut kinda short- but really thats ok :-)

This is a picture of my balcony. If I had to choose one place that I spend most of my time other than my room, it would be here. Mostly because I have a view (not the best, a few obstructions) but its still beautiful, and the other bigger reason is because it's one of the only places I can get cell reception in my house. So if you all ever talk to me or get a letter from me, I'll be talking to you from here, or wrote the letter here.

This picture is of one of our loros, or parrots. It turns out that these guys are 23 years old, older than me! They're pretty cool birds that can say a few things like mami and papi, but thats about it. They aren't nice enough to hold and stuff, I think its because of the same things with iguanas, if they aren't held from the beginning and constantly, then they won't be nice. I'm thinking about getting a parot as my pet. The more I think about it the more I'm interested, but I still have a lot of thinking left to do!

Hi Everyone,

I'm officially a peace corps volunteer. I was sworn in on Thursday, spend Friday in Teguz, traveled Saturday, and spent my first whole day in site on Sunday. Those four days were absolutely crazy and I was so ready for a break just from those. But I really haven't gotten one because starting on MondayI was on the job! Monday I went to the offical World Vision office ( the NGO that I will mainly be working with) and spent all day there until 7:00 at night. What did I do: talk with people about what they do and about what I'll be doing, reading about what world vision is doing in the area, working on ways to create product labels cheap and easy to do for the natives here, and of course learning spanish and teaching a little english. Then the exciting part was on the way back from entrada to santa rita our car we got stuck half way through because there was a really big rain storm that created a large mud-slide on the road and we couldn't pass for almost three hours. It was funny because everyonce in a while a truck would get brave and try to cross, but they would just get stuck, then another one would try and they would get stuck. Finally someone called a big plow out and each vehicle had to pay 100 limpiras and the plow made a path. Keep in mind that the entire time is was dark and raining. But the part I liked the least about it was that all the cars were right where another mud-slide would occur, and from time to time we would hear big boulders dropping from above. It made me really nervise and I made sure we parked our car in a safe spot with lots of trees. But as it turns out, the area we parked got washed out as well later that night. Crazy!

Then yesterday, I went to a meeting about a Feria (or weekend local market) and could understand practically nothing, then in the afternoon learned how to taste or judge coffee. Yes! I repeat, I learned how to offically be a coffee-judge. Well not officially but I know about the aroma, body, acidity, taste, dryness, bla blah blah about coffee. I kept on thinking that this is such a cush job I have and how Scott of Dave would be perfect for this! But one things for sure. I will never look at coffee the same way again.

Today I showed up at a Santa Rita office and no one was really doing anything so I decided to take the day off, which I decided I deserved because I stayed out working past 7:00pm the previous two days. And I finally met my site-mate. He's a business volunteer from North Carolina. He's awesome and really into everything so I think I'm pretty fortunate. Not too much else.

I'm still really unsure about what I'm exactly going to be doing with Wolrd Vision, they want to be me working on this Feria thing (about 5 other organizations are working on this too), which is good. I'd like to do more later, but for now it seems like a good activity because I'm kinda useless with my spanish level. So the plan is to chill out, learn spanish, work where people need me, and in a few months started working on some of the problems in the NGO (mainly problems with being sustainable).

Also I have my new address. They don't have street names or anything so here's what you send it to.

Laura Vietti

Rdo= a. Elvira Bueso

Barrio. El Centro

Santa Rita de Copan

Honduras, C.A.

The other address still works, I just won't be able to get mail from it except maybe once every 2 months.

Thats about it for now. Heres the deal with the pics

1. Here's an image of one of the fine useful techniques I learned during training. I just wanted to give you all proof that I actually milked a cow :-)

2. Building Trails: in Catacamas we learned how to build steps in trails, so you can't really see our trail cause we are standing on it, but we're proud of it

3. Just another funny pic of us, but I liked it. The people from right to left are Charly, David, Rain, and me. We're in Talgua when we camped, yes we're a little intoxicated, and having fun!

4. This pic is of us learning about our sites. They when through each person individualy and told everyone where they're going, and a little about what we are going to do. Each one of us got a map of our site area, and a booklet explaining about the project and town. The people are annie on the left, me, and becky up front.

5. This pic is of swearing in day. I finally braught out the dress and made myself wear it. The other girls are Annie and Laura Chakerian. My mejor amigas. Annie is going way down south in the cournty- probably over a 12 hour trip to see her, and Laura is a little closer, but still probably over a 5-6 hour trip :-(

6. This is the entire Honduras 9 group.

7. Here's a picture of the gardin inside the house I'm living. Its beautiful with so many different type of tropical plants. My room is a large single room with a bathroom. I like it a lot but there's not too much privacy (there's alwasy something unnerving about being able to hear your neighbor going to the bathroom and such)And I share a kitchen with the family, but I'm sooooo happy because I finally get to cook my own foods.

8. This is a pic of the feria (fair or market). I loved it beacause all the campasinos (the farmers that live way up in the hills) had to ride their horses into town with all their produce. It was so interesting because the street had a line of cars on one side, and a line of horses on the other.

9. This is also a pricture of the feria. They braught in some dancers. It was a big deal because this was the very first feria so they tried to spiff it up

thats about all for now. Thanks for all your emails and letter- I can't tell you enough times how good those make me feel. Miss you all!

laura

Hi Everyone!

I just got back from Catacamus and I'm at the Peace Corps Office using the free internet, It's wonderful!! Catacamus was awesome and I was really sad to leave it. I don't even know where to start because we did so many different things. Field Based Training was supposed to be a more hands-on learning, which it was. I don't have pictures for most of the things I did in Catacamus, but I will soon.

So a typical day in Catacamus stared at around 6:20 in the morning when I would get up and wash my hair in the pila outside. My house there was really modern but it didn't have running water that often so I did alot of bucket baths and hair washing kinda in a huge sink. Then I would have breakfast that the house employee made me (usually beans, eggs, cornflakes, or pancakes). By 7:00 I'd be off to spanish class. Spanish class was usually in one of the houses that we stayed in. I went to two houses for spanish. Both were really nice high class families. A side note on the families is that we were told that the families that we stayed with were not considered the first pick because the last group that stayed in Catacamus were a little wild and almost all the host families didn't want to house more of us. So this time around all the families were new, and the organizers prepped us up for some pretty rough living conditions. But when we got there, all of our families were awesome, and the majority pretty upper-class. We know that it wasn't a true Honduran representation, but we figured that its still a part of honduras so that it's important to see both sides of the society.

Anyways, I went to spanish class for 4 long hours. Tough stuff but the neat things is that I can tell I learned something because I can communicate alot more (as opposed to before I left for Catacamus)with my host family here in Santa Lucia. Then I walked home for lunch, ate, and walked back to the central park for tech training. Tech training was awesome. We did lots of stuff at the Agricultural University in Catacamus: tree grafting, pest management, learn to make jellie, yougurt, marmalate, and picklethings, how to vaccinate chickens, vaccinate cows (I actually refused to do this one), clean cows against parasites, and milk cows. I also learned about watershed-management, how to build efficient wood burning stoves, and latrines. We gave several talks, in spanish, including an AIDs workshop and taught 7th graders how to put a condom on a plantain. Lots of good stuff.

The highlights of campamento were the two hikes we went on. The first was on watershet management and saw where a small aldea gets their water, but the best part is we got to swim in the river. I didn't think it would be possible due to some scary creaters, but no- its just fine. Then the second one was a huge hike up to another aldea that was long (that part wasn't so fun) but at the end we went into a wonderful cave that had paths and everything developed. Plus it was some of my first geology in Honduras which was also a huge plus. That trip we also swam in the river and camped out at the cave tourist center. It was like a huge slumber party with my PAM volunteers.

Another highlight was Dia Agricultura, thats were they dropped us off with a campasino (farmer) for a day and we worked with them on the farm to see what a day in the field would be like. I was paired up with a really nice couple, and I think they were kinda shy about women working so we learned how to make tortillas, these wonderful sweet corn tamales, ate a fantastic lunch, and the best part is that I spent the last few hours looking for fossils in the river bed! Of which I found two awesome ones. The first is a rock with hundereds of shell impressions, and the second was of a really nice piece with lots of torila fossils. Trying to explain what they are to the Campasinos was a little interesting, but I still tried.

So that's about it for Catacamus. I was told I was beautiful at least 5 times a day, and usually one marriage proposal every other day. Interesting stuff and it makes my self confidence go up. Now I'm back here and I'll know where my site is in T-minus 2.5 days, and I'll be in my site in T-Minus 5 days. So I'll hopefully tell be able to write something then.

Now for the pics:

1:This is a pic of me with the iguana my host family found in their second house up in a small aldea.

2. Here's a picture of my youngest host sister with the iguana. She's 2 years old, named Maria Ester. So the story with the iguana is that I told them about my iguana, showed them my picture, then when they saw one captured it and braught it home for me. The other two girls were really scared of it and Maria Ester was NOT! So this little two ear old terrorized the poor thing. Then the iguana got lost which was good but sad, because it had a string attached to the base of its body, then was refound and officially let go. So the iguana lived- a huge surprise for me! I probably would have kept the iguana, but I'm glad things happened the way they did.

3. Here's a picture of me on the hike up to La Florida

4. This is a pic of all the girls in my PAM group

5. A pic of all the guys in my PAM group

6. Here's a pic of me in the awesome caves. If you can't tell I'm extremely happy about being there, but really tired after the 8 hour hike.

So thats about all. Hope this wasn't too long, and will write again with me site information. Wish me Luck!! Its only the next two years of my life!

Hi Everyone, I think I´m officially in week number 7 and I´m in the town of Catacamus. So far I really really like Catacamus. Its about as east as I can go in the country and its a town of about 30 thousand people. What I really like about it is that it looks like a town of wyoming with a little bit more run down stores, plopped in the middle of a large valley in the jungle. So I almost feel like I´m at home here.

The people here are a little more real though, compared to the people in Santa Lucia, in that they are surprised to see gringas, and I get alot more cat-calls from the men here. But its not so bad being called beautiful on every street corner! Side note, cat calls from men is just a part of their culture and nothing to worry about. Honduran women get them to, just not a frequently.

I love my host family in Catacamus to. I live with the Garcia Family, a wife and husband with three girs. The girls are absolutley wonderful. The oldest-10 years- is a gem and has been helping me with my spanish and just talking to me. The next one is 9 years old and is pretty sweet, but really shy, and the littlest is 2 and is adorable (never thought I´d say that about a kids) but she is so curious and it always ready to smile and talk to me although I can really only understand two words she says.

I have spanish classes like normal here, except they are at our houses instead of a school. Then afterwards we have tech training. The tech here has been pretty cool. Last week I learned how to do several different types of tree grafting. I also learned how to make natural pestisides, and repellent for plants. Really neet stuff! Í´m also preparing a thing for teachers and students at the school here, but the teachers have been on strike for a long time and I don´t really know if we are going to be able to actually have school.

I didn´t bring my computer so the chances of me posting pics is pretty slim for a while. I wish I could though because I have alot to show. The internet here is also pretty fast, and there´s about 5 different places to go, Santa Lucia only had 2 sessions. Better go, but I´ll write soon again.

I´ve also wrote some repplies to your guys´s comments so check and see if thats actually working. Take care, and I miss you all so much. And for somereason I´m missing Casper alot right now. Don´t ask why, I think it has to do with the shopping areas. Later!

Hi Everyone, this is an email I wrote a week ago and am finally able to post it. I´ll write another one with a little more current info!

It's been about two weeks since I last wrote and not too much has happened that's new and exciting. The two big events have been dia cultural and an overnight field trip to a town called Campamento. Cultural day was really fun. It lasted about half a day, and it started with making some type of plato tipica (Honduran food dish) with our host families and then brining it to the school to share for lunch. But before the lunch each language class did some type of skit. There was a translation of the song born in the USA, an American vs. Honduran football skit, some other funny skits, and my group did a poem. I know, kinda boring but I think the poem was really tasteful in the fact that it was short, sweet, and didn't offend any of the other host families ( a few of the other ones did). The lunch was the best part, there were over 20 different types of food and tried every one! The food ranged from steak, chorizo, fried platano, tamales, some other fried stuff, fresh fruit, potato salad stuff, special drinks, guacamole, of course beans, special kinds of cheeses. I made rosquillas in miel with my host mom. Rosquillas are a very traditional type of bread, think of an upscale version of hardtack in the shape of a donut with a cheesy flavor. It's not so bad, but it needs to be saturated in some type of liquid before it's really edible. Usually I have it with coffee in the morning, but Mercedes and I put it in a sugar cane type liquid (tastes like raw sugar) and it actually was really good. This country loves their sweets,

The other big adventure I took was an overnight fieldtrip to Campamento (about 2 hours from where I am now) to look at a highly developed coffee growing business/ school. It's called IHCAFE, for Honduran café, but I think that it's an NGO dedicated to teaching people how to grow better, organic coffee. It was really interesting to see how everything worked, and how much is involved with the actual coffee growing process. For example: I didn't realize how sensitive the coffee beans are to any outside factor, and only five ruined beans can literally ruin a 50 lbs bag of coffee beans. It's really complicated and I'll never look at a cup of coffee the same. That night my project group spent the night at IHCAFE in these really nice barracks and went to a type of fair/ rodeo at Campamento. The whole ambiance of the town felt like an old western flick with the addition of electricity. Every guy here wears a cowboy hat, a western shirt, and usually a gun, plus these guys actually ride their horses. It's pretty cool to see.

The next event in my life is that I'm going to a city called Catacamas (about 4 hours from Santa Lucia) for field based training for a month. This means I get to back up and leave this host family for another. But I'll be back for two more weeks after field based training in Santa Lucia. I'm excited to move on, but also a little wary of going to a bigger city. That’s about all I have for you now. Thanks for the email and all! Don' know when the next time I'll be able to get to a computer in Catacamas, but I'll try. Talk to you all soon!

PIC 1:

is of my host mom (Mercedes) in Santa Lucia and her son Erik. It was her birthday.

PIC 2:

The second picture is of my chickens in santa lucia. I´m in love with chickens and am definitly going to have chickens when I move to my sight. Its the mom chicken with about 5 or 6 pollitos underneath her. Adorable.

PIC 3:

The third pic is one of us reciting the poem for dia culteral. The other girls with me are vinita, jonice and melanie.

PIC 4: This pic is of Annie and me. Annie is probably one of my best friends here. She´s from Alaska and went to school in Montana with a degree in animal biology, or something like that. We are in Campamento learning about coffee. Note the gaurd in the back with the big gun, its pretty normal :-)

PIC 5:

The last one is of me learning about coffee. The plants in the background are coffee plants, but really big ones and aren´t producing very good coffee so they are going to be cut down pretty soon. Miss you all and talk to you all later!

My big news this time around is that I got to finally go off on my own and see part of Honduras! Tthe area is beautiful. The reason I got to travel was because we had a volunteer visit weekend, thats where all of us were sent to different locations around honduras to talk with volunteers who are in our same project. I went to a small aldea or suburbish but more like small villige called San Luis Planes

. To get there I had to take a bus into Teguciglapa, a Taxi to the bus station, a 4 hour long bus ride to Santa Barbara, and then a 2 hour bus ride up a dirt road to San Luis PLanes. One thing that I{m really impressed with are the school buses here. They can go up the craziest roads. Sometimes I think that there is no way that the bus will make it up or down these things but they always do.

The site was a PAM site and I met Kevin and Kathy Donoher a married couple who are engineers from the school of mines. Kathy cooked the best meals I{ve had in honduras and I was so happy. San Luis Planes was beautiful and I can only hope that I will get a site similar to theirs. They had a little rough situation because the people expected them to just do things for them and they refused to just give them things so now they are teaching english, which is working out really well becuase the people are really interested in learning english.

Today I make my own garden plot of lettuce onions green peppers and tomatoes, its about 30ft by 20 ft so a good plot to start out with. Its hard work but the soil here is so fertile that they said it would be really hard for anything not to grow. The problem is that things grow too easily and we have to weed everyother day, and funky things like fungus and bacteria also grow really easily. But I still love it, I know, something I never expected either!

Im attaching four pics. The first is of me Kathy and Kevin with San Luis Planes behind us. What was interesting was that to get to the top of that hill we a few honduran friends of Keven and Kathys bushwack a train for us with machetes, although i think there was a previous trail, it just got grwon over. The second pick is of the fields in San Luis planes, the shorter bushy plants are coffee, theres banana trees, and I think thats all you can see. The cliffs in the back are a beautfil limestone, clacsilicate. The third picture is one of me with ruins of an old castle. I hung out in Santa Barbara for a day and hiked to the castle with Kevin, it was really cool, and it looked alot like a church, but we decided it was difinitley castle material. The last picture is me with a bunch of trainees and the volunteers we met with.

I think that{s all for now. Sorry my apostraphe key is messed up, and I think my english is getting worse because it{s being replaced with even worse spanish, but i{ll take as much spanish as I can get right now. Take Care all, still me everyone and I{ll write more soon.

Laura

Hi everyone!

So I thought I would write my letter on my computer first and then send it later over the internet so I have more time to write good stuff. I can't remember what I told you all before so there might be a few repeats.

I live with a family of a mother and son. The mother's name is Mercedes and son is Erik. I also live with a guy named Phillipe who is going to mary Mercedes in September. I like them very much but the language barrier sometimes makes things really difficult. Mercedes has had over 20 peace corps volunteers live with her so she knows how to handle us I think. The house I live in is pretty upper-middle class for Honduras. My room is really nice. It's about 5 meters by 5 meters. I have a full sized bed a sitting chair, dresser and closet thing. I have yet to see carpet in a house hear yet, and the tile on my floor is pretty nice, but it gets dirty a lot faster. I don't have my own bathroom but the bathroom that's here has a working toilet (not normal) and a semi-frigid- semi-warm shower. Although right now we are trying to conserve water because it only comes on Sunday and Monday and the reserve is getting pretty low. The house has electricity, but it's pretty expensive. The house has a TV, many radios (which are always on) a fridge, stove and microwave. So not too bad at all. But like I said, this is pretty high class for the majority of Honduras.

The second hardest thing for me (language being the first) is living with a family though. I've lived on my own pretty much for 4 years now and apparently I'm pretty darn independent. But in the Honduran way of life, women are not considered adults until they are married or turn 25. So I'm pretty darn adolesent to them and they treat me like it. Mostly just with stupid stuff like holding my hand down hills, telling me what to where outside, I don't have a choice at my food serving size, and I have no control over my own room. They explain things over and over that I already know, and continue even though I told them I understand. Oh ya, and there are rules and a curfew. It doesn't sound like much, but it really adds up on a day to day basis and I just want to tell them I'm not a 12 year old girl. Oh well, I'm sure this is a small price to pay for being here. Plus it is there house, although they are getting paid quite a bit to have me here.

I've never looked so forward to school in my life as I do here. Its really the only place that I feel even remotely comfortable and it’s a nice excape from my host family. School starts at 7:30 and goes till 4:30. It’s a long day but goes by pretty fast. I have on average 4- 6 hours of language classes, which I never feel I'm learning anything but they are the experts and I am starting to talk a little more. Then afterwards I have my tech training. I'm in the protected areas management program which is by far the best program of peace corps in honduras. The other programs that are training with me are Youth develeopment and Municipal Development. Tech training is so far my favorite because I'm outside learning stuff that is for some reason really interesting to me. The main goal right now of the training is to get all of us to the same level the Honduran farmers are at. So this means we are all learning how to farm and that stuff. But not the high tech farming of the states, but the very basic, everything by hand and basic tool farming. So far I've learned how to make different types of compost piles, how to till, and my favorite has been contouring hills using an A-Frame. I actually put contour lines on a hill, and it looked just like a topographic map, pretty darn cool.

Lets see, health wise, I extremely lucked out. I haven´t been sick once, knock on wood, and I think a large part of us have already gone to the hospital. Nothing serious so far. As for my original idea to get sick and over with in the first few weeks, not going to work! There are so many scary things here like several types of crazy bacteria, but parasites are the big one! Plus it´s not like I´ll ever get used to everything because the native Hondurans aren´t even used to this stuff. They have diarreah (sp) all the time! The other day on the news they found a new bacteria that grows so fast it causes death due to gastrointestinal, scary huh. And you ask why on earth I´m here. I´m thinking the same thing! But the good news is that I´ve had 8 out of 12 vaccines so I should be protected from most things.

I´m attaching some pics, I hope hope hope they work. The really nice looking house thing is my training center in Santa Lucia. It´s absolutely beautiful. The second house looking thing is where I live with my host family. And the last is a vista of Honduras.

Gotta go for now. Enjoy and talk to you all soon! Laura

Hi Everyone!

Sorry I haven't written in a while but the internet has been down so it looks like I won't be able to write that often. Right now I'm in Tegucigalpa(the captial) on a market visit so we can learn how to buy food, take taxi's and look at the bus situation. Things are going well! Language is still really hard but I'm sure it will come. I miss you all so much and wish you were here! Take care and talk to all later. Happy 4th of July from Honduras!!! - We got hamburgers so I celebrated a little.

Laura

P.S mail if F-expensive so I'm holding off on that for now, sorry all I promised mail.

Hola todos mis amigos (Hello my friends)

I´m at day four of my peace corps journey and so far so good! I left Washington D.C. on wednesday, flew to Tegucigalp Honduras and two hours later spent my first night with my host family. That first night was really really really hard on me because my spanish was extremely rusty and I couldn´t communicate with my family at all. It was so hard and I didn´t want to be inpolite, but all I wanted to do was sleep ( I never went to bed that night). I live with a woman named Mercedes and her husband Phillipe. Both are really nice people and I´m really fortunate that I have them. I think Mercedes has had many volunteers and most come into the country knowing almost no spanish so she knows how to handle us gringas like me!

School is going well, I haven´t officially had a real class day because everything up until now has been orientation stuff. Today I had a language interview to see what my official language level is and then they are going to put me in the right spanish class. I´m sure I´ll be put into a novice class.

The other volunteers are great. Everyone is so nice (no surprise for peace corps people I guess) but I haven´t really made any close friends yet. I´m sure that it will come with time.

Like I said, my spanish isn´t that good but already its getting better! I´m starting to feel like it actually is possible that I might be fluent by the time I leave Honduras. I think I´ll learn even more when class starts.

Right now I´m living in a town called Santa Lucia, its a small suburb of Teguc. and its up in the hills. Its a beautiful town with a small lake, flowers everywhere, and a big soccer field. I think its kinda rich so I shouldn´t expect that. I´ll try and download some pictures. The first should be a pic of my school, and the last is a pic of my house. I hope it works. Well, my time is almost up on the computer so I´ll talk to you all later!

Its currently 2:38 and I'm about ready to check out from the hotel and go to the airport. Just wanted to say good bye from my last moments in the states. Wish me luck- this is finally it! Miss you all!

Today was my first day as an official Peace Corps person! Yesterday I traveled from Riverton, WY to Washington DC. The flight and everything went much smoother than I ever thought it would. The only rocky part was saying good-bye to my parents, which hurt so much more than I thought it would; and I couldn't understand why because it wasn't like I was leaving the planet or would see them for two years, but my guess is that it's not the time but more the inaccesability.

I also had a great last two weeks before I left for the Peace Corps, my friends took care of me and we went out almost every night. I can't tell you guys enough how loved you all made me feel. Here's some picks of our fun times!

Lets see.... the other fun thing I did today was travel around DC and I went to the Smithsonian Natural History museum. The museum was great but I was a little sad. I went there with the purpose of seeing the giant squid ( I heard about it last time I was there but not until I had already gone to the museum) and the squid was gone, apparently they are making a new marine exhibit and took the squid how, I was sad but got to see some other cool stuff. Charity- if you read this I looked at their gold collection for the Centennial mine gold that was here at one time but didn't find it! However, I did find the most beautiful slab of Banded Iron Formation and vowed that I will own a piece like that someday!

I'm off to bed for now. I had four hours of intense touchy-feely-draw me a pciture to explain how you feel type work today and I'm exhausted. Half the time I could stop yawning and the other half I couldn't stop gigling cause it was funny in some kindergarden way. Although I shouldn't knock it too bad because it was really good to hear that everyone was feeling as anxious as I am, can't speak spanish, and is at least 40 lbs over the baggage weight limit. Take care and I'm off! Thanks again for the wonderful goodbyes!

Hi All! I'm off to serve in the Peace Corps in Honduras and I set up this journal thing so everyone can hear about my life and adventures without waiting weeks to hear from me (don't worry- I still plan to write all of you!) I'll try to add more stuff as much as possible, but I'm not too sure when I'll have the internet.

A little about my Peace Corps. assignment. I'll be part of the forrestry division of the Corps in the Protected Areas Management Program. The general idea for the the Protected Areas Management is that I will be stationed in a buffer zone around some type of protected area (most likely a cloud forest) and will work at environment education, increasing quality of life, tree farming, anything to convince the natives not to cut down trees or poach in the protected areas. I'm excited about the project and glad I was able to get into this program.

I'll write more about everything later, they kinda keep me in the dark so I'm not too sure what the details are, but I'll definitely let you all know when I find out. Wish Me Luck, and please write and email me!

p.s I just copied and pasted this from my profile