Sooo I was looking on wikipedia for info about this whole Tea Party hubbub that's been happening in the US, because even though I've been reading some stuff on it while abroad, it still doesn't make a lot of sense to me. So I read the article, then I look at the crowd photos somebody took of a march on Washington DC last year... and it's mostly become clear, but I hope for the sake of America that I'm making a generalization.

First look at the big crowd shot, like I did, and read the signs they have, look at some of the faces. No taxes, cut the government down to barebones, get rid of Congress, support the constitution, etc, you know, stuff that doesn't contradict itself at all.

Then look at the detail I found and attached here. First I only saw the creepy grandma looking askance at something she must think is very dangerous or disgusting, and so I made fun of her. Then I panned over to see what she might be looking at. It's a... black American woman! (gaspspsps!!!) Haven't we kicked those out of the country yet? This is why we need to secure our borders, America! Who gave her that t-shirt?!

I'm totally misconstruing the photo, right? Please, please tell me I am.

If you can't, feel free to try and post a caption. I hear that's a popular internet thing to do.

(source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_Party_movement )

Just to remind the world I'm a geek:

http://www.wowhead.com/?blog=147803

The impending Cataclysm patch sounds like it's going to be well-worth reactivating my account AND trying to get the wife to play.  I've been talking to my brother, who was kind enough to start playing it regularly once I was no longer in a country where WoW is a feasible hobby ON A DIFFERENT SERVER and AS THE DARN DIRTY ALLIANCE, about joining his casual guild that happens to raid regularly and it looks like I'll be moving to Eonar as a darn dirty alliance member.  And I'll go ahead and announce publicly that I'm seriously considering a $55 service fee to move my old Horde druid on Feathermoon over to Eonar and switch him to Alliance, because I don't want to lose the exalted reputations and PvP epic mount that I earned from my glory days in pre-revamp Alterac Valley.  That's how bad I am.

Before I was only excited about the new druid races and the redesign of a lot of the zones, but now I'm pretty excited about the streamlining of the talent system and stat models.

Somebody remind me that retroactive achievements, public titles and epix aren't worth $55, and I should just invest a month or so of gameplay to level a new druid up to 70 to match my old main character.

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-03-03/google-wants-u-s-to-weigh-challenging-china-in-wto-update2-.html

I've been following this story for awhile, ever since Google got hacked here.  China had been less than helpful in assisting Google with tracing the criminals.  That, and all the BS regarding internet here in China AND the mess of China basically banning World of Warcraft because Chinese MMOs couldn't compete with this foreign online game.

I feel like the world is totally justified in publicly backhanding unfair regulation of the internet.  If the US leads the vanguard, that's fine by me.  Heard a rumor through word of mouth that Obama offered a deal to China leading up the Copenhagen climate talks... if China went along with THE REST OF THE WORLD on climate protection, then Obama would tow the line a bit regarding Tibet and Taiwan.  China snubbed him, so Obama is chilling with the Dalai Lama, selling weapons to Taiwan, and (hopefully) trying to get the WTO to force China to open up it's internet, hopefully completely.

China-US relations are fairly strained right now.  And China is making noises like it wants to be the second nation after the US that will set up military bases around the globe.  ( http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/eo20100212a1.html ) That's a good set up for war on a global scale.  Or at least a lot of sabre-rattling for economic benefit.

So, awhile back (4th of July, 2008) my best friend was killed in a car accident.  I was stuck in Honduras working in the Peace Corps and basically couldn't do a damn thing for anyone back home, and I wasn't near anybody who had any idea who he was who I felt comfortable leaning on for support.  That was a rough time.

I'm not even sure why I'm writing this anymore.  I stumbled across a couple of his comments left on rockpapershotgun.com on an old post about an indie game, and I guess I remembered that I still haven't been home to Texas since well before he died.  Haven't talked to his family at all, haven't talked to more than one or two of my friends from there since it happened, haven't seen his grave.  I asked my dad to go to his funeral in my stead, said it was a nice funeral.  And I forget how I know it, but I know he has a Star Wars: Galaxies game manual with him in his coffin.  I bet he'd have a good laugh over that one.  We both liked them Bothemz.  It was a great game, and a horribly (charmingly) flawed game when it came out, and for awhile afterwards.  For some reason he and I never actually played MMOs on the same server.  I think the timing of choosing a server was off for SWG, and with WoW, my guild from SWG basically put me in a position of choosing to game with them or game with Cruz and HIS guild from SWG who I didn't know, so I chose to play with the people I never see outside of the game and spend non-WoW time with my real life friend.

But I digress.

I was writing because I don't have anyone left that I can say "Dude, remember that time when I had a random leftover bottle of tequila in my trunk from my trip to New Orleans, and we finished it off before going into Steak & Shake at some odd nighttime hour?"  Or remember that time when we had any other bajillion virtual adventures or told any of the other bajillion jokes no one else was around for?

That bites.

He even died before he got to play Left 4 Dead.  It's strangely appropriate, but that's the thing that nags at me most, only barely more than his plans for his girlfriend and college and life in general.  He was looking forward to a zombie co-op game like no game before it.  He loved zombies like the rest of us, but he was a huge fan of co-op gaming for the last few years of his life.  We did the Splinter Cell games at the time together... but that was really all that was out at the time.  He missed this whole co-op renaissance we're seeing now with Borderlands and Left 4 Dead and all the others.

That's just salt in the wound, I guess.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8430548.stm

So this guy (L.i.u. X.i.a.o.b.o.) was at the '89 T.i.a.n.a.n.m.e.n. democracy protests and based on other things I've read, he's presumably been watched by the Chinese Big Brother ever since.

He apparently helped write a petition criticizing China's government. "It called for greater freedoms and democratic reforms in China, including an end to one-party rule."

He wrote something.

And now China's condemned him to 11 years in jail for "subversion."

What. The. *&$%.

The more time I spend in this country, the more I'm disgusted by the government. I really want to ask some of my Chinese coworkers about this stuff, but I'm honestly a bit worried. I'm probably guilty of the paranoia that stems from conceit, but I genuinely worry about the government snatching away my visa if I talk to the wrong person. I'm dying to know about how they feel about stuff like this. Logically, if I mention this, it'll be the first time they've heard of it, since the government does such a smashing job of convincing its people that political news isn't important to the common citizen and also of blocking access to the information from anyone who DOES think it's important. Youtube, blogger, facebook, twitter, they're all blocked by the Chinese government. I have to jump through some hoops to access information I want and to communicate with the world. I even have trouble reading news websites sometimes. I'm not sure how the BBC website isn't blocked yet.

All signs are pointing at China taking the #1 In General slot from the US in less than 50 years. If you know me, you know I'm the last person to say America is a beautiful, perfect country... but I'm honestly starting to get concerned. If China doesn't start to show substantive proof that it gives a damn about individual rights (look at this case, look at their systematic efforts to assimilate and neutralize the T.i.b.e.t.a.n. people and their culture, etc) then we might have serious cause to worry.

We saw a mom hold her kid while it peed at the base of the stairs in the metro the other day. Someone could slip and die.

The government has no regard for human rights unless it suits them, and it seems like the people have minuscule social responsibility. (I know I'm making a very sweeping generalization, but to qualify and justify it would be another lengthy article).

If you haven't already figured it out, this blog is pretty much done.

The story ends with me accepting a surprise job offer to teach English at the same school as my fiancee (!) in China, quitting the Peace Corps, and moving to China. It all happened pretty fast, and I've been in China since February.

Life is good.

Ok, I wrote most of this up as part of an old email to my girlfriend a few months ago. I figure it's a decent bit of writing, and wanted to make it public to receive some criticism. I've reworked it a bit since the audience has changed, and cleaned up some digressions.

Thoughts?

Note: upon rereading this, when I refer to "war" I realized I picture the trenches of WWI or the protracted battles of WWII more than the current goings-on in Iraq, for example, but perhaps my opinions apply to it all.

---

May 23, 2008

Military funerals and war veteran graveyards and memorials seem to be among the few things that can almost without fail summon up a depressing cocktail of emotional extremes in me.

Tonight I want to examine exactly what I think of when I think about dead soldiers.

I am still in the process of reading Hannibal, and amidst Harris' new-found poetic bent, he wrote one editorial comment that struck me.

"Whether you believe in God or not, if you are a warrior Arlington is a sacred place, and the tragedy is not to die, but to be wasted."

The setting being Arlington National Cemetery across the river from Washington DC, as Agent Starling visits and contemplates the grave of a fallen comrade.

I have had the honor and privilege to walk amongst the snow white headstones of this cemetery, and to witness from afar a military funeral from the 21 gun salute to the folding and passing of the three-cornered American flag that draped the coffin of the fallen.

Under the privacy of my mirrored sunglasses, I cried as we watched the funeral progress. The tragedy is not to die, but to be wasted.

"[Starling] wondered how many like him had been wasted by stupidity and selfishness and the bargaining of tired old men."

That is the tragedy of war. That the leaders, the people the soldiers are supposed to respect and must trust with their lives, can and do send their wards into certain death, not for true glory or honor, but to make headlines or secure an economic asset to be exploited by the sugardaddies of the politicians at a later date.

Do not let my cynicism cause a misunderstanding. I am well aware that not all authority figures are corrupt or undeserving of respect or obedience. The battlefield can allow truly great tactical minds to shine, and can also allow the bravery and compassion of the good individual to shine through.

A beautiful thing about war and combat situations, I think, is that it presents an unforgiving proving ground to the individual warrior. That individual has a chance to make a decision in a very black and white environment, a decision that can be simplified in a way very few civilian decisions can be. The warrior can cower or desert, surrender and be at the mercy of his enemy, throw his life away without having blood on his hands, or fight and try to take the life of his counterpart on the other side of the battlefield. There are no politics involved. Only that warrior, his personal moral convictions, and his personal mental strengths and weaknesses. Some warriors break down instead of making a decision. War separates out the weak from the strong very quickly, but balances this fair judgement with the cold element of chaos found in the falling shrapnel of air-burst artillery shells.

War is beautiful because it gives the warrior a chance to stare down death's gaping maw and smirk fearlessly, in that moment proving his mettle to himself, giving him, regardless of whatever else happens, the hard-won knowledge of his own personal fortitude. War is worthless because that brave warrior can be cut down by chance. War is evil because it allows the privileged and powerful to send their brothers and countrymen, farmers and teachers, to an unavoidable, bloody and terrible, haunting and traumatizing fate.

When I see a veteran's grave, I always think of combat veterans, and I find myself jealous. I want a chance to stare down the maw of death and prove my mettle to myself. I naively think I am ready to suffer the permanent damage, the further loss of innocence that this entails. I am aware of my own mortality, but I have never really been close to death. Danger, yes. Treading water without a vest over a jagged coral reef as the Pacific Ocean repeatedly crashed over my head is probably the closest I've ever been to what I want, and I am proud of my thoughts and actions in that situation.

When I see a veteran's grave, I think of combat veterans being ordered to stare down the maw of death and test their mettle, whether they are personally ready or not. They signed the forms and were passed through the bureaucracy, and thus they are bound to oblige. That is not how this is supposed to work, and it is tragic. Eighteen year old children should not be ordered to eat, to dream of, to fixate on, to live with death; they should not be ordered to become the maw of death to be stared at by others.

The closest I think I can get to hopeless despair is when I try to immerse myself in the collective sorrow felt by those who are and those who should be physically present at a military funeral.

There will always be wars and rumors of wars, until the end of time. And modern warfare especially is a cold, dehumanized, detached and bureaucratic affair. War is honest when, as the warrior takes a life, he is haunted by the knowledge that the enemy he is killing is someone he must empathize with, someone who was born and raised by parents, someone who aspired to be a firefighter when he was young and innocent. War is honest when the warriors can look each other in the eye. I foresee war becoming less and less personal, less and less honest over the course of our lifetimes. I foresee war becoming more and more terrible.

Sunday, November 16

Today was a decent day considering I was working with a crew of kids. Since none of them know any better, I'm still having to scout ahead for a half kilometer every so often to make sure I'm not leading the pipeline into a dead end like a cliff or an acre of solid rock.

The kids are still throwing rocks at eachother and swordfighting with their machetes and yelling fake orders at eachother as if I were the one telling them to yell, just to confuse eachother. Darn kids. Kinda amusing, though, I'll admit, with the fake orders. You see, I'd send the kid with the rod on ahead for a couple hundred meters so I could take a long shot, and after about a minute I'd get tired of yelling, so I'd speak to someone close to me and have 'em yell what I said. Then, when I was jotting down numbers or something and done with the rod, the kid near me would then start yelling "No! Don't move, he's not done! Hold very, very still! This is important!"

So I'm not keen on babysitting, it IS distracting and far less efficient, but the kids could work when I told 'em to straighten up. But I don't want a slow, easy pace. I want to finish and get back to my home-sweet-internets.

It would save a ton of time if Adolfo from the first few days were back... he had a good head on his shoulders for finding nice tracts of gradually sloping downhill land free of rocks and ditches.

I'm starting to worry about getting the theodolite I'm using back to its rightful owner, a member of Engineers Without Borders living in my site for a couple months. He leaves for the US in a week.

During the walk back, as it does occasionally, I got struck with the immensity of the distance between me and my chick. Kinda like a punch in the gut, the way the pain lingers awhile. I thought of the positives of being in the mountains: the days are flying by, so this project makes 10 days basically vanish instantly and bring me closer to seeing her again, and I'm living for free while I work, so I'm saving money. Of course, the negatives counter these: I can only communicate with her from a bridge 10 minutes from the house I sleep in, and a call costs 10 (about 50 cents) lempiras per minute. It costs 1 L/minute to call the US, for comparison. And the project is taking longer than it should due to a lack of organization on the part of the community, which is frustrating.

It's raining as I write these notes by candlelight... I hope I can get to the bridge tonight for my 2 minute call to China, and I hope we can work tomorrow. Too much mud, too dangerous to walk on mountainsides.

To top off the wonderfully slow and inefficient day, my cell phone clock apparently got jumbled due to me turning it off whenever I have no signal, and the time displayed was much later than it really was. I think we left at least an hour earlier than I wanted. It was cloudy, so I couldnt tell how high the sun was. Very frustrating.

The kids at my food house like me.

Monday, November 17

Today was the best day yet! It started with me rushing off to the bridge in the morning (I usually only go at night) and calling my chick. That's always an instant morale boost. It reminded me that I can talk to at length soon if I finish the project quickly, so I ended up moving like a well-oiled machine as I leveled the theodolite, gave orders, made notes, and took shots.

A bonus was that the my community contact apparently was able to milk his cows an hour earlier (why didn't he figure this out a week ago?) so he gave us an earlier ride up in his truck.

I don't think I sat down once all day. We probably got up to our last stake at 8 am, and I had the team work til 4:30 before starting the walk back down the mountain.

We made significant progress. Like, double what I did yesterday with the kids, if not triple. I was super stoked. I don't think I've worked with that intensity and focus for so long since college right before exam week, when all the research papers happen to all be due on the same day.

One thing I noticed was that nobody really said anything or chatted until the last 2 hours, when I could tell they were getting antsy and ready to call it a day. Then the atmosphere lightened, and they started talking to me and eachother more.

One of the kids is still very eager to learn English. His enthusiasm is impressive. Kinda wish I had more time to dedicate to teaching him basic phonics.

And finally, the man who was sitting around with his machete doing nothing, just out of my line of sight the other day, he redeemed himself. I gave him specific instructions on what to look for in a good route, and told him that I welcome and suggestions or questions. We worked much better together today than that other day. I was pleased.

And now, ending the day, we've got a straight line, more or less, to the tank site. Clear sailing ahead! Should be finished soon.

Now that the finish line is finally in sight, I'm super stoked!

Tuesday, November 18

So last night, I think it was, I walked into the room I've been sleeping in for a week, and for some reason I reached for the nonexistant lightswitch in a house with no electricity. Random fluke of a muscle memory, I guess. I chuckled at myself.

Today was another great day. We'll definitely finish tomorrow. I'm stoked.

In my daydreams as I power through my work, I find myself empathizing with some made-up railroad surveyor in the American West a hundred years ago. Rugged, apparently untouched terrain, just you, your gear and your crew, and the great outdoors.

Among the best lunches of my life was today. I plopped down in the middle of a thin pine forest, ground covered in pine needles, on a 25 degree slope on the side of a mountain. I put my plate in my lap and looked out on the surrounding land. Crystal clear day, tons of visibility so I can see the entire huge valley, and we're still pretty high up. No longer so high up that my ears pop as we walk down the mountain, but still a great view. Super relaxing, very peaceful. Oh, best part: my lunch was baleadas! Beans, cheese, egg all snuggled in a folded-over flour tortilla. Delish.

I finally got to pull of some easy little parkour moves as I scouted ahead once to move our route around some rocks. Nothing too impressive, just a running jump onto a tree stump then onto a big rock, but it was still a bit of a rush. I have fun.

Heh, towards the end of the day, two of the guys were talking. One worked on both the previous two topo studies for this water project, and he named all the flaws in the others (dropping the pipes down a vertical drop and putting a 45 degree elbow so the pipes continue going forward... that totally kills your water pressure and fatigues the pipe) and then he said "This study is 'supermejor!' (superbetter!)" I felt good about myself.

One of the biggest decisions I have to make is to decide where to finally cross the unpaved road we were using to climb the mountain. If we cross too early, we have to deal with traveling laterally along a nasty 45 degree (or steeper) slope to reach the tank, but if we cross too late we have to put in a 45 degree elbow to turn the pipe towards the tank again. And right in the middle, the sweet spot, is a 15 ft thick rock layer. The other surveyors opted to go right through the rock. I realized they were completely sick of the project and didn't want to turn back, so they put the burden on the community to bury the pipes in that rock. But I have an idea. There's a tiny gulley that goes through what appears to be an earth-covered fissure between two ginormous slabs of rock. I spotted it early on during our drives up and walks down, and scouted the first few dozen meters myself. It's hidden, but it looks good. That's my target.

I like mountains. I often get asked if I like Honduras more than Texas. I always reply that I like the mountains of Honduras more than the plains of Texas.

My chick once asked me, kind of incredulously, if I'd ever even been to a farm. I now think about that and smile. I've walked down roads teeming with cattle on their morning commute. I wake up to the crowing of roosters with pigs and cows eating grass right outside my window.

As I went through my going-to-bed routine at the pila at my sleeping house, I walked past a pile of piglets sleeping between their giant mom and the wall of the house. All snoring faintly and twitching. Pretty freaking adorable. And during the day, they all run around in a herd and play and investigate and eat together. Even the little black runt of the litter, even though he's always trailing behind, he participates. I'm definitely off pork for awhile. Someday I hope I go back to being a vegetarian. Or at least a quasi-vegetarian.

Wednesday, November 19

The 19th is my favorite day of the month. Fun fact.

Gaaaaah, we were so close. We got to within 200 meters of the tank site. I could SEEE it. So close. But the sun set and I couldn't take any more measurements, so I had to call it.

It's a shame, too. For my work crew today, I got the two kids who have always worked with me, and Adolfo the Magnificent. 3 people, 1 adult. First thing I had to do was tell the kids to ignore the speech they got from my community contact beforehand, who said they only have one job, one responsibility. The rod kid carries the rod, and the stake kid makes and hammers stakes. If we don't multitask when necessary, we'll never finish.

So I told 'em that if they're not doing anything, but see something they could be doing, they should do it. Typically that consisted of swinging a machete while I wrote stuff down.

Adolfo and I spent the first 2 hours of the day scouting for a path through the labyrinth of large rocks and steep slopes. A daunting task. I used my old gradeschool maze-solving skills, and made a beeline for the goal: the narrow gap that I wanted to use to cross the road. Then we backtracked, only traveling along the route that we could lay the pipeline on. And wouldn't you know it, it worked. He and I got back to the most recent stake having trailblazed a footpath through the forest along the PERFECT path to get the pipes where they needed to go. I was pleased, and amused that I had applied a strategy that I picked up in gradeschool.

The downside was that the route went through some very, very dense plants. Tropical stuff. We'd gotten low down the mountain, finally. We had to chop our way through a dense copse of thorney vines. Probably took us an hour and a half. Today was the first day in Honduras that I really regretted not having my own machete. I borrowed the a kid's machete every so often to let him rest, and put my Maui-honed AmeriCorps skills to work. Felt good.

Not sure if I mentioned it, but i've been carrying my own theodolite this entire way, since probably the third day. On my shoulder. That thing is heavy.

I have ugly hands. Covered in puncture marks from thorns, scratches, dirt, abrasions. And they're tan where my wrists aren't thanks to my long sleeve work shirts.

I made an agreement with the two kids to meet me at 7 am so we could get out to the tank site and finish up in a half hour of work. Really no need for Adolfo to trouble himself for a half hour of work. If need be, I'd chop what was left. The kids have better accuracy and more experience with their machetes, but I can have a few extra years of upper body strength on 'em.

But we ran into my community contact, the work crew organizer, on the walk back, and I told him the plan, and he disagreed with me, saying I needed more people, that it would take 2 hours with just 2 people, and only 1 hour with 3. I resisted, saying I'd already formed my team, that he didn't know how much work was left, that it was no problem. Then he said something about "if you hadn't told (the woman who makes the work crew lists) that you can work fine with 4 people, you would have finished today."

Ladies and gentleman, Alex got visibly angry that night.

First of all, I said no such thing. I'd been telling this man for 10 days that I preferred crews of 5 people. That I had a system, and it worked. And I'd been getting groups of children, groups of 4, and today a mere 3. Then he tries to pin the blame for our pace on me. Forget the fact I'd been standing around waiting, or helping chop, for hundreds of meters of dense brush to be carved through. Surely it was my fault, for some off-the-cuff comment I have no recollection making. I was so POed. Add to the fact that the man talks faster than I can understand, AND that he started putting the palm of his hand on my forehead like I was a child or a dog while talking to me (I've NEVER seen anyone in Honduras do this to someone else, never had it done to me, if it's a cultural thing, it's rare) so I kept telling him to stop touching me, and after he did it 3 times, I told myself if he did it again I was gonna react physically. I was that angry and offended. The man whose lies/half-truths (my car is broken and cant give you a ride up the mountain, I have to milk the cows at the same hour every day, thats why we leave at 8 am rather than 6 am like you want) and ineptitude (seriously, how hard is it to get 5 men together each morning?) have costed me at least two days extra on this project... he tries to blame me for ANYTHING?

Yeah, that was my train of thought at the time. He was meddling with my plan, and accused me in a sentence. Eventually he backtracked quickly and settled on "all i was saying was that 5 people is better than 4! that's all!" and I backed off for the good of everyone involved. Ruined my night.

Oh, other fun thing was having to tell my one-day crew of 4 grown men that I was not, in fact, being paid to do this project by anyone. I'm a volunteer, donating my services to this community to help them out. A few people, including the man I got angry at, understand the implications of this. But people do warm up to you more once they find that out. I wish it were better-advertised because I hate bragging on myself.

Yeah.

I had french fries for dinner, to top it off. French fries and ketchup. For dinner. Seriously? There is no protein in that meal. The lady musta seen something in my expression, because she quickly asked if I'd like some beans and cheese as well, and I quickly said "Yes please!"

Tomorrow, I finish!

Thursday, November 20

We finished the project at 9:00 am. At last. We did about a half hour of work, like I expected. I'd been promising to give the one bright kid one last English lesson, and I told him I'd have time before my bus at 11:00 am, and he should stop by. I'd write up some notes for him to study.

So I pack up and wait at the bus stop/pulperia (corner store) on the unpaved main highway. Kid had to stop at his house beforehand, and I guess his mom saddled him with chores. So I wrote up the notes, just the alphabet with some example words in English with some basic pronunciation rules, and gave it to the shop owner woman to give to him. She gave me a free Pepsi. She'd also been giving me a free cup of coffee every morning while I waited for the truck to be readied for our ascent. Very nice lady.

So I waited for my bus, got on it, and after a very, very bumpy ride, I stepped back into my site at long last.

Now, the wonderful world of data entry awaits me.

Note: finished typing up the notes. 450 lines of data on Excel and 19 pages in my little notebook. Lots of survey data.

consider this an intermission during my great epic adventure in the mountains...

Inspired by this article:

http://infovore.org/talks/if-gamers-ran-the-world/

The author kinds fails at providing details of how individual games translate into real world skills, but it's a better-paced, more readable article because of it. If you doubt any of his game skill-related claims, comment, and I'll back him up.

I'm gonna try a little experiment. I'm gonna see if I can describe a favorite success story of mine from my World of Warcraft days to a mixed audience containing very few gamers, and see if it's effective.

So, back when I played WoW for at least a few hours every day, sometimes up to 18 hours in one go, including bathroom and food breaks (eaten at the computer, of course), one of my favorite things to do was PvP in the battlegrounds. PvP stands for "player versus player" and is characterized by putting your own character's abilities and magical items to the test against another character (something you can do when squaring off against computer-controlled AI monsters, too) and also putting your own understanding of game-based tactics and strategy, your own ability to recognize opponents' dynamic behavior and innovate and improvise new tactics accordingly, in the moment. You put all this up against other players, people just like you, and see who wins.

I'll never be happy until people recognize that this activity is no different than speed chess: you're presented with a self-contained world with its own rules and limits, be it a small tabletop grid or the sprawling land of Azeroth, and it's up to the player to analyze the rules and form strategies and combinations of moves to achieve a goal, as quickly as possibly. Even if you have the best strategies imaginable, if you can't implement them rapidly, you're doomed.

Now, what I've described so far is a basic duel situation. That's one player versus one other player. A battleground in WoW is a self-contained zone where players square off in teams, of about 10 people on each team, each controlling their own personal character that they've grown accustomed to playing. Each player has customized their own button controls, hotkeys, everything, and honed their skills, grown so used to the controls that the keyboard and mouse become extensions of their fingertips, rather than foreign hardware. It's all muscle memory.

These two teams of 10 have a goal. Me, playing a druid, able to shapeshift into a superfast cheetah or a tough bear or a deadly big cat, I prefered to play in Warsong Gulch, a standard map where the teams play capture the flag. The battleground is set up like you'd play in real life: two forts, roughly identical in structure, with an open field between them. My cheetah speed gives me an advantage as a flag-runner.

A common event on this map is a standoff. One rule is that an enemy flag cannot be placed on your own flag stand and captured for a point unless your own flag is there. So if both teams possess their enemy's flag, no one can score a point until their own flag is recovered. You do this by killing the opponent holding the flag, then clicking on the flag as it falls to the ground. It then magically appears on your own flag point, and you can then capture the enemy's flag.

During standoffs, each team splits in two. One for defense, protecting the ally holding the enemy flag, and one for offense, a team of hunter/killers who have to track down and eliminate the enemy holding their own flag. I found out, after playing extensively and almost exclusively acting as the flag-runner for my team, that I was exceptionally good at hiding with the flag.

I loved hide and seek as a kid. Unlike my friends, I always knew that if you get nervous and peek outside your hiding spot to see if you're being pursued, you get caught. Be patient, stay hidden.

In WoW, you're blessed with other forms of perception. The third person perspective means you're always watching yourself in addition to the world around you. You can use this camera angle to see around corners. There are also a few abilities that let you see player locations on a map, something that only two character types can do. Hunters and druids.

I became very good at hiding with the enemy flag in areas of the map that I knew are less-trafficked. Areas that the game designers put in only to act aestetically. Wagons sitting around, crates, fences with an occasional gap in it. Corners of the map. I'd hide in there, under my fort, behind the wagon, etc. I'd watch the enemy players scouring the earth for me from my hiding spots, using the hovering camera angle to my advantage. When the coast was clear, I'd relocate to a place I'd seen them already search, and give them a chance to search where I'd just been.

I once hid for 20 minutes like this. It's a small map, understand. It takes 30 seconds to cross from one end to the other of the map. 20 minutes is a long time to hide. I could only do this by anticipating the actions of my opponents. "If I were trying to find me, what would I do?" "They're apparently using tactic A, how best do I protect myself?"

One time I got discovered, and had to bolt. Using my superior speed, I quickly got ahead of my enemy before they could attack me. I ran around a corner, so they couldn't see me anymore, and hid behind a fence. They bolted past me, thinking I'd run to the safety of the inside of my fort. Just like in the movies, where the hero cuts into an alley and the bad guys rush past, oblivious.

I'd known beforehand that the typical player's camera angle is held low, to see into the distance, rather than high, to see behind nearby corners and obstacles. I do this myself most of the time. If I'd been my pursuer, however, I'd have recognized that I was passing obstacles, and popped the camera high as I was passing, just in case my enemy was hiding rather than doing the expected action of fleeing to the fort.

What's more, I stayed behind that fence for 3 long minutes. The entire enemy team passed me, mere feet away from me, oblivious. Then I spotted a hunter approaching, and knowing he could be tracking me, I got ready to bolt. As soon as I noticed his approach deviate from the route of his blind teammates, I knew he'd spotted me and was trying to close, so again I bolted, this time actually running into the fort because my teammates told me they had a defense group ready to protect me, but they didn't know where I was.

I ran into their arms, and turned into a bear, ready to take a load of damage.

Every standoff like this in which I could hide alone and protect myself freed up resources, my teammates, to rush the enemy and kill the enemy with our flag. Then I could rush into our own fort and win a point. We'd always leave a couple people in our fort to make sure the enemy couldn't capture our flag again as soon as it appeared, of course, but my powers of observation and improvisation were an asset to my team. Even my willingness to avoid fights was an oddity, it seemed. When confronted with one opponent, I was competent enough that I could usually win. But I knew that while I was fighting, that enemy was reporting my position, calling for help. Fighting has it's own rewards, personal pride, your name appearing higher on the scoreboard at the end of the match, etc. But actually winning the match by getting 3 captured flags counted more, and benefits the whole team. My restraint was also an asset.

So that's a long story, based on that one article, trying to give gaming some mental legitimacy.

How can regular encounters like that aid me in real life? What skills am I actually using?

Team-work. To succeed, I need to be able to look at my team, assess the skills they have because of their character class, and also their competency as a player, and understand how they're likely to act in a certain situation. Rarely do battleground skirmishes have formal plans rehearsed well ahead of time. Elite, tightly knit teams do, of course, but more casual pick-up games do not. Although, there is something to be said for the cultures that develop overtime, as certain effective strategies develop and are transmitted throughout an entire game community casually, through experience and observation. Trust is a huge factor here, too.

Pattern recognition, behavior analysis. Systematizing human behavior is a huge deal in academics and business and politics. In WoW PvP, you have to be good at this. You have to be able to know the options your enemy has at any given moment, and come up with counters as fast as possible. Real time tactical decisions, based on instant observation and analysis. Then you have to go back to team-work, being able to coerce your teammates to quickly agree with your analysis and follow your requests/orders.

Practice, motivation. Anyone who says a gamer has a short attention span or lacks the willpower to study or is lazy is either not actually observing a gamer or is not actually perceiving what is going on. I mentioned I played WoW for 18 hour stretches, right? What corporate employer doesn't want to employ someone who can work that long during crunch time? The problem is that the right job, the right process, hasn't been found in which the gamer can thrive. WoW deals with a rewards-based system. Good behavior is rewarded with in-game currency, more powerful items, and more skills. These rewards are then used so the player can accomplish the same goals more easily, and have a chance at tackling more challenging goals that were completely impossible before. If an employer can set a gamer going on something the gamer is passionate about, a complex problem, in which the gamer is free to innovate new procedures to go about tackling the problem, create their own tools, the gamer thrives.

Critical thinking, as mentioned in the article I started this with, is HUGE in defeating the major obstacles in a game. Sure, you can let other people tell you how to do it, but problem-solving is a vital skill for any hardcore gamer.

I'm bored now. Gonna mention another favorite moment from WoW:

I was in another battleground called Alterac Valley. It's much larger and more complex than the capture the flag match. A huge, sprawling area that takes a good 5 minutes to cross from end to end, filled with forts and roads and gold mines, all of which can be captured, used, protected and destroyed. Again there are two opposing forts, but this time the teams are 40 against 40. One time I actually led my team to victory, noticing the front lines of the conflict were not moving, that it seemed no one had any leadership or strategy, so I convinced 6 players to follow me in a flanking maneuver and snuck behind the front lines to capture a resource, distracting the enemy enough that it fell back to the resource, breaking their front lines and allowing my team to gain ground.

That's another story, though. This story is about a chance encounter in a destroyed fort. I was running back from my fort to the front lines after dropping off some gathered resources, and I went into a fort that had been ours to see if anyone was still inside. While there, an enemy warrior rushed in and attacked me.

Quick note: typically, one-on-one duels in WoW last 30 seconds to a minute. My feral druid faught this protected warrior for 5 minutes. Stalemates aren't unheard of when two skilled players go head-to-head. If both players know how to reach to taking damage and avoid further damage long enough to heal, fights could last forever. After 5 minutes, I realized none of my typical fast-kill strategies were working. Took a bit long to notice that, I admit. So I needed to figure out how to kill this guy, how I could either start doing damage super fast, or prevent him from incapacitating me momentarily so he could bandage himself and heal. I took advantage of the 45 second pattern we'd put together. I recognized about when he would incapacitate me and bandage over the damage I'd caused, and when I would stun him so I could cast a healing spell on myself. When it got to near the moment I expected him to get ready to heal himself, I changed from the bear form I'd been using to my cat form, and used an attack that causing continual bleeding damage, preventing the use of the sort of bandages he was using. I then was able to finish him off quickly.

I recognized that my usual standard operating procedures were falling short, so I reevaluated the situation, found an opening, and altered my tactics suddenly to exploit that opening to my advantage and achieve my goal.

How is that not a valuable skill in the real world? If not in business or the military, at least in Olympic fencing.

It's up to gamers to gain these skills, hone then, and learn to apply them in the real world. It's up to non-gamers to recognize that gamers aren't lazy or unproductive, they just need the proper outlet, the proper task and procedure to work in.

Closing thought: games can teach you how to think. In Honduran schools, thinking is rare. Memorization is focused on. I wonder how the grades of gamers vs. nongamers compare in Honduran high schools, and how IQ tests would rate then rate them.

Cheers.

Friday, Nov 14

Today we got out of that thick part of the pine forest. We got onto the open mountainside, with merely scattered pine trees. I'm finally able to take some good and long shots, quality shots of 200 meters or so, sometimes. But I have to follow the curve of the mountain, so I can't take shots as long as I would like.

My morale fell a notch today. My job is starting to feel like work. The honeymoon is over, I have my routine set in stone, and I just keep on trucking.

Place theodolite on tripod. Level theodolite. Spot previous stake, set back shot. Take left shot, take right shot, send the kid with the rod forward, take forward shots on both sides of any ditches or creeks, have a new stake placed on final forward shot. Fold up tripod, pack my notebook and pens into my backpack, advance with tripod on my shoulder to new stake. Rinse and repeat.

I feel like I'd be done already if I'd gotten anything of consequence done on my first 2 days, and if I didn't have to do those pesky side shots at every stake. Grumble grumble.

I finally took a bath today, after work! It was glorious. Yay bucket baths using river water.

And I got nice, chewy, glutin-tastic wheat flour tortillas for dinner. Second time so far. I love 'em so much more than typical corn tortillas. So I made some nice baleadas using the refried beans, cheese, and tortillas.

I get asked a lot of questions each night now that kids at my dinner house have realized they can talk to me. Even though they get shooed away after a few minutes by their parents who seem to think the kids are bothering me. Even if I say "the kids aren't bothering me, it's ok" the kids still get shooed away. Same thing happens with dogs.

I got some really gross food for lunch. I took the foil off my plate while sitting on a log in the woods, and I had rice, beans, and some sort of meat... it was like wads of fat. I bravely tried to take a bite.... but couldn't gnaw a piece into a small chunk. Not my cup of tea. So I asked my workers if they wanted some meat, if they'd maybe trade some of their eggs. Got myself more eggs, got rid of the mystery meatfat. Win. I felt like I was in the cafeteria at lunchtime.

We didn't get a ride down the mountain again, so we walked again. It's a long walk.

One fun moment: the kids working with me, whenever there was a lull, like while I was setting up the theodolite and taking the backshot and adding more lines to my notebook, these kids would climb a tree and harvest little yellow berries called nances. They're good. Pop 'em in, chew, spit out pit. Pretty sour, kinda sweet. Very popular. They'd give me a handful if they had a particularly successful harvest. So I'd stack 'em on the tiny shelf of the tripod next to the theodolite, and snack on 'em while I took my forward shots. I felt pretty pleased with myself about that. Not entirely sure why.

Saturday, Nov 15

Today was outright unsatisfactory. I got a different crew today. The experienced guy who had been my forward scout wasn't on the duty roster, so some other guy took over for him. He seemed incapable of acting independently for awhile, just did very literally what I told him to do. Maybe I'm being unfair.

We got to a section that was rough to get past, and I had to make a decision that would set the course for the rest of the project. A series of 3 deep gullies, followed by an old road with a steep bank on it's side of solid rock, then downhill, more gullies and rocks. After scouting myself for what seemed like 2 hours with a machete, and the 3 kids doing nothing, and the guy being really not helpful, I finally told him straight up I'd welcome advice. Told him I want to avoid gullies and rocks, etc etc. Finally we agree that it'll be best to go high, to get above most of the gullies, or at least to a spot where they aren't as deep. Hard to describe accurately. But it was frustrating.

Main complaint was, after explaining the plan to my two machete guys and sending them on their way and I went to my theodolite to start taking shots, I finish up, pack up, and move my theodolite to the next stake, and I see the two guys sitting there, doing nothing. They were just out of sight behind a small rise while I was working. I was like wtf. I got mad, scolded them. "You have your instructions, what are you doing sitting around?"

Still second-guess myself. Was I too hard on them? Was there actually work for them to do (yes, there was) ?

Other annoyance was the kids throwing rocks at each other, while trying to hold the rod steady for me. You can't hold the rod level AND throw rocks and dodge incoming rocks, kids. Work with me. I don't need to babysit you.

We left about a half hour before I wanted to because it looked like rain, and I was tired and grumpy.

I'm ready to be done. Once again, no free ride down the mountain. We walked.

Wed., November 12

Today we left at 8 am, an hour later than I was told we would. I sat around at my community contact's porch, got free coffee and a cookie from his wife. Apparently he has to milk the cows at the same time every day, and thus always gets back at 8 am. On horseback, coming in across a river behind his house, with probably 10 gallons of milk strapped to the saddle in heavy duty plastic jugs.

Thankfully he gave me and my guys a ride up the mountain in his truck. So even though we left later than we did yesterday, we still got there at the same time, but with more energy to work hard.

We got a full day's work in! It was great! Only thing I didn't like was the government water project guy told me he wanted me to take side shots to the left and right for about 10 meters at every point I set up my theodolite, giving him an idea of surrounding terrain and more data to play with if he needs to move the line to adjust pressure during the design phase. Good idea, yeah, but sooo time consuming when you're on a steep slope or surrounding by dense vegetation.

We got to where we left off yesterday and set up. First shot of the day: 200 meter shot across the corn field of death, owned by the most disgruntled campesino yet. Corn field is in a valley, so in theory it's not hard to shoot over it. So I do my backshot, then send 2 guys ahead (3 went) to scout for a place to start the pipeline up again. After a lot of shouting, I finally make out the 3 meter long rod through the trees, way past the farm. Apparently the property line didn't end at the corn, where I had a great view, but well into the forest. Efff. But I manage to get a clear reading, and we pack up and I carry the theodolite on the tripod on my shoulder like a real man.

I get to the spot they put the stake in at, set up, and aim to shoot the backshot, and I can't see the man with the treebranch marking the previous stake. What gives? Then my guys tell me they were having a hard time getting high enough to be seen, so they stood one guy up on top of a fencepost, with two guys steadying him, while he waved the 3 meter rod well above his head.

You see folks, that's not how you do surveying. The rod rests on the ground, so you know what level the ground is at, down to the millimeter. When a crazy Honduran is playing acrobat waving the rod at heaven as high as he can, what happens is something we call error. So I had the guy do it again, get into the same pose, and I measured him to figure out exactly high off the ground he was. Then we had to get the guy at the previous stake to basically cut down a tree and stick his white cowboy hat on it and wave it around so I could get my backshot. No avoiding it though if we have to avoid the corn field. I got my shots and hoped for the best. Worst. Shot. Ever.

The rest of the day was pretty straightforward. Lots of gullies to cross, which means lots of suspended galvanized iron pipe in the future. We were working across a slope of 20 to 45 degrees in certain places, in the thinner top end of a pine forest. Pretty view. Lots of flies. Biting flies.

It took me a bit to get back into the groove, but once I got my routine down, we moved along pretty well. Weather was good, sunny, no rain.

Yesterday during the meeting, the two rival communities called the county mayor and scheduled a meeting to sort things out. That'll happen tomorrow, and my presence is requested in case they need neutral technical information.

On the walk back down the mountain, we're still so high up we're above the mountain village, and as we're walking through they say there's a guy with a truck from World Vision who should be heading down soon, and we should wait to get a ride from him. So we do. We eat more sugar cane while we wait. Riding down this mountain is an interesting experience. Flying on an unpaved road, with rises and falls and twists and turns, with steeep slopes down to unforgiving rocks and trees... kinda unsettling. And bumpy. Walking is definitely more relaxing. Walking down. Hiking up, that's rough.

The World Vision guy apparently heard about my advice to the junta de agua at the mountain village and got my contact info, saying he'd like to stop by my site later and coordinate a training program for junta de agua organization and operation. I said that'd be cool, and I'd introduce him to my counterpart, who is probably more qualified than I am. He got excited.

I wanted to take a bath at my sleeping house, but they said since it hadn't rained in 20 days, they didn't have water to spare, but if I wanted, they'd take me to their bathing spot in the river. I said "Ah, nice, thanks, maybe tomorrow." So I washed my upper body off as best I could at the pila by the light of the full moon, then walked back out to the bridge with a knife and some sugarcane and ate until my woman went on her break between teaching classes. Then I called her. It was the highlight of my day.

Walked back, read a bit, slept.

Thurs, November 13

Same basic morning routine. Finally got inside the pine forest proper today while surveying. Lots of shade, lots more bugs (glad I still had some DEET repellent) and lots of babbling brooks to cross. Some of which, coming directly from the village above us, were orange. Not cool.

The two guys ahead of us with machetes had a rough idea already of the where the pipes needed to go and after giving them some more general guidelines, I sent 'em on their way, chopping away and resting as needed. We never really caught up to 'em.

I did get one moment to shine. The machete guys kept a straight line going throughthe forest, which included one spot where they forged ahead down a 45 degree slope to a rocky creek, crossed, and pressed on. They way the land was, to put a pipe there, it would have to be a pretty fancy suspended metal pipeline with wires and anchors and stuffsupporting it. I called the two guys back and said we should look for another place downstream to cross the river, because we could end up saving a good 15,000 lempiras in wire and concrete and pipe cost if we can find a more shallow crossing. After about 45 minutes, they forged a path to a location I helped scout that was perfect. we re-routed there and pressed on. I felt good, and I think I earned leadership points in my crew for making a clearly good decision.

Heh, I was working with one kid and one old man who were both interested in learning English. So after asking me for the time, the old man asked how I would say "once" in English. It's "eleven." So I spent a good 5 minutes leveling my theodolite and taking shots while repeating the english number and correcting his pronunciation. Got so ingrained in his head that he'd shout that at me every time he saw me in town for the rest of my stay. "Eleven!" "Yeah, that's it. 'Eleven.' See you around, Don Miguel." He's slightly senile, I think.

The kid was more curious. I told him I'd spend the walk down with him teaching him the alphabet. We reciting the alphabet back and forth for an hour or so before I couldn't take it anymore. Aren't kids supposed to have short attention spans? He had trouble with the English T sound, D and Z, and some others. I tried to explain tongue position and stuff, and it helped, but he trouble remembering everything I was telling him.

It was the same crew as yesterday, so we developed a rapport, with the same nonsense jokes repeated to get a laugh every time. One of the guys ate a lot of tortillas, and I gave him a hard time about it and we all kept exaggerating the numbers. I think by the end of the day we were all convinced the guy ate 80 tortillas a day. So silly, but it kept us all chuckling. Don Miguel drinks a lot of coffee... we did the same sort of jokes on him.

So other male volunteers integrate with their surveying crew by smoking and cussing in Spanish like a pro, I participate in tortilla jokes and teach kids English. Make of that what you will.

The meeting with the mayor got cancelled because the mayor backed out, so we got to work a full day where I thought we'd stop early to attend the meeting. That was a plus for me, but could be problematic for the towns.

We're still pretty high in the mountains, so I figure I'll be working til Monday or Tuesday.

My dinner house gets water from the river to fill their pila, it looks like, so I asked if I could use their shower stall and take a bucket bath tomorrow. They said it was fine since they had plenty of water. So tomorrow, I hike with a towel, soap, and shampoo all day to take advantage of the offer.

I head to the bridge again to talk to my chick and she tells me she's going out on a 4 day hike through some mountains to a beach and won't be back til Sunday, and she won't have cell reception til she gets back. So I wish her luck and get ready to focus completely on my job for a couple days.

More later!

Topo(graphic) study, surveying expedition, whatever they're called. I did one. 7 or 8 km, not sure because I haven't processed the data yet, but yeah, I was out for 10 days. I wrote notes every evening about the day, and now I'm gonna type 'em up and maybe flesh 'em out. Brace yourselves.

Monday, Nov. 10

So this is the second time I've been out to this community. The first time was called on account of rain and because the workers were too preoccupied with planting their beans than working to get a potable water system. So I left, and called my contact in the government water development program who asked me to do the study, told him I'd give him 3 weeks to organize the community, then I'd try again. I heard nothing from him for 3 weeks, he drives me today to the community, and I find out he's said not a word to 'em for the 3 weeks, even though he assured me the community was ready. Typical.

So I got picked up in his truck, got bribed with a free breakfast, drove out, and asked him to give me a better idea of where he wanted me to survey for this new pipeline. Two studies had been done before, but went straight through rocks and nobody likes to lay pipes in rocks. So my task was to avoid the rocks. i figured he had a better grasp of the lay of the land than I, but he didn't seem to, and basically walked me out to a vista and waved his hand and said "go over that way instead down over there" and then walked me back to his truck.

Unsatisfactory. I gave up on getting any form of support from the guy after that, and I'm not eager to work with him again.

So he leaves, and I find out the community got surprised last night with a call saying I'm gonna show up. So they're not ready, have no work teams organized, and politely suggest I rest for the day to prepare for the project. I'm glad I brought the entire Dark Elf trilogy by RA Salvatore to read, instead of just one book.

Room and board are just like last time, with me sleeping in a place on one end of the town, and getting my meals from a house about a 20 minute walk away. Had to walk out there to get lunch and dinner. But I was in a different room to sleep, with two windows instead of one, so i actually got some good air circulation.

One nice thing is that everybody remembers me and is pretty darn friendly.

Tuesday, November 12

So I wake up with the rooster crowing at about 4 am. Not terrible since I went to sleep around 9 pm, reading by candlelight. But not great. I roll around in bed for another hour, watching the dawn's light grow stronger out my window that looks out over the small cow pasture next to the house.

I wait at the community leader's house for a bit for the day's work crew to show up, and we leave late, as I expected we would. Community leader's truck isn't working right, so I interrupt before he suggests I waste another day and say we can walk the 8 km up the mountain to the water source and get started. He's hesitant, but I assure him I can handle it. So we walk past my food house and I pick up a bag with my breakfast and lunch in it, and we start up. Unlike the first trip up the mountain, I let someone else carry the 20 pound theodolite case.

We end up getting to the top of the mountain, to another community up there, at about 10 am. As we're passing through, 3 men approach us and start talking, saying they don't have good feelings about this water project, that they never gave permission to my contact community to take water from that certain stream, and that they're using that stream to water cattle and wash clothes. If the community starts drinking the water, they're afraid they won't be able to use the stream anymore. So they're passive aggressively ppreventing us from getting to the water source to start the project again.

I'm really POed right about then, but I hide it well. I volunteer my cell phone so the upstarts can talk to my community leader contact, and they argue a bit, saying they'll do a formal meeting the next day. In the meantime, I try to negotiate for permission to work for the day, just to get as much as we can get done. I basically just want the experience.

After an hour and a half, we finally disentangle ourselves with permission to work for the day, then wait til the meeting tomorrow.

So I get set up, get my crew briefed and organized, and start working. We get next to a corn field, finally out of the denser jungle-like forest, and then I realize 4 of my guys are missing. One comes back, and says "Alex... we better go." From what I could gather as I hurriedly packed up, the owner of the corn field was armed and didnt want us working near it.

So we start walking back down the mountain at around 1 pm. We get about halfway down, and get a call from my community leader saying he's organized a group and he's driving up in his truck (the one he said couldn't handle the drive) up to have a meeting TODAY with the other town. So we sit tight and wait for the cavalry.

And it's an impressive sight when it arrives. One 2 wheel drive truck loaded down with a dozen people, and as they pass us, slowing down, I see one guy in the back strapped with a sidearm, rifle with a scope, and an ammo belt. I whisper to one of my workers, asking why he's armed. He says the man is a judge.

In Honduras, the judges don't wear robes. They wear weapons.

So we hop in the truck and procede back the way we came. Of course, the mountain town complains that they didnt have time to organize, but over the course of the 2 hour meeting, people trickled in. Basically it was a contest between "You're gonna take our washin water and our cow water!" and "We don't have potable water for our children!" The mountain town has a water system in disrepair because, basically, they don't know how to collect and enforce water tariffs from the households so they can afford maintenance on the system. I gave a quick 5 minute explanation of how they're supposed to deal with that.

I basically sat out of the meeting circle for most of the time. A few of my workers found some sugarcane, and we spent most of the time whispering and joking around and eating raw sugarcane while the other people bickered. Not a chance am I getting involved in intervillage politics when guns are present. I've already had a tense meeting in a shack surrounded by 30 men with machetes, and I didn't enjoy it.

So, finally, after I am asked to step forward and explain how the surveying itself won't do any harm, and the water system itself won't take all the water from the stream. Also, I assure the insane farmer that I can avoid the corn field by shooting over it. Finally we get permission to do the study. I mention the fact we need to cross some private property lines, and the owner happens to be present, and with some pushing we get permission to hop their fences. Oh joy.

So we drive back down the mountain, basically wasted the second day in a row, only this time I'm tired from walking, too, and bored to tears by petty politics. I mention to my community contact, like I'd talked with my workers on the hike up, that I can ride a horse, and I'm totally willing to ride a horse up the mountain with my posse the next day instead of walking.

I got dropped off at my food house to get a homecooked dinner, and walked across town along the quiet unpaved road under the full moon with fireflies glowing among the shadows beneath the trees. Quite a nice walk. Just had to watch out for the cow poo in the road.

I checked the time on my cell phone and realized I had to pick up the pace. You see, the community has another mountain between it and the nearest cell phone tower, so to get reception I have to leave town and go to a bridge. From that bridge, down the valley in the distance, I have line of sight to the cell phone tower. I have to run because my woman is about to go to her morning classes, and I really wanna hear her voice. So I run. Then I get accosted by an old lady who simply has to tell me right now how excited she is to have me here helping their town, and she hopes her husband will be helpful the next day. Great, thanks, i gotta go rest, bye! I manage to get to the bridge, running with my backpack on, just in time for a 2 minute, 10 lempira a minute call to China. Win!

Afterwards, I walked back to my sleeping house and read by candlelight til about 8 pm, and passed out.

I'm gonna pace myself with this writeup... expect more soon!

I'm a lazy, lazy blogger.  I will continue to blame my woman for constantly absorbing all my creative energies.  This is an update to let the two of you who don't have facebook know I'm still alive, my leg wound has finally sealed up and is forming a nifty looking patch of scar tissue, and that life is going well in that I still have my health.

Don't expect much writing from me... I have lots of DVDs and books with which to zone out on.  I'm big on zoning out lately.  Email me if you're super interested I'll give you an update.

Somebody tell me how WoW:WotLK is looking.

Fun fact: I decided to go running and try some parkour for the first time in a long time around July 12, I guess it was. Went great for about an hour. I went out late, around 10 pm, kind of dangerous time to be out, but I figured if I warmed up I could get away from just about anyone by hopping up to the rooftops. I've been looking closely for unconventional roof access my entire time in-site. Can't really use it during casual training because it's kinda trespassing. Anyway, I went to the central park to do some precision standing long jumps between some concrete picnic tables. Went fine warming up on the two that were about five feet apart. Basically just to get my muscles to remember what it's like doing the landing. It's a very important step. But I think I progressed too soon to the set of tables that were about seven feet apart, because after gauging the distance with a couple running jumps, I think I was pretty worn out. My mistake. Went for the standing seven foot jump (I've done 'em before in the US just fine) and totally blew the landing. One foot hit the edge just right, my left foot slipped off and under the table leaving only my shin to absorb the impact.

Yeah, you can say ouch.

So I kinda bounced off the corner of the concrete table and landed on both feet and tried to just walk it off. For about 10 minutes. When the pain subsided, I halfheartedly tried to get back to running and jumping over railings and benches, but it was late and I was tired and I had probably just given myself another hematoma, so I figured I should head home.

Got home, sat on my bed, took off my shoes, go to take my pants off, and I see that there's a patch of skin missing from my shin, about the size of a quarter, and about as deep as two quarters stacked together. Not a bruise, not a gash, a round hole. Blood running down my leg from a couple inches below my knee all the way to my sock. I was angry, because I knew it was an infection risk.

Did my best to keep it clean and covered for a week. But realized it wasn't getting any better, and was probably infected. So I went to the doctor. And they set me up with some cream to fight the staph infection.

So I had a hole in my leg for the length of the EWB project, kicked the infection in time for vacation, got back, started going to the doctor daily to get my hole cleaned, and now, finally, as of August 26, I have a complete and sterile scab over the entire hole. Most serious injury I've received probably since I was 4. I better get a darn fine scar out of all this crap I've been through.

Pictures on facebook! But let's see if I can upload a single photo just for the two of you who don't have facebook...

Next story: me and the first EWB group.

Ok... I spent a week with these people from Michigan. July 21, I think it was, I went with the hired driver to San Pedro Sula to meet them... they couldn't speak Spanish much at all, their translator couldn't make it this trip. The driver was also a preacher and a barber, and he enjoyed talking about the former profession far more. I tried to see if he was willing to consider that not all Catholics will go to hell, and after that kinda zoned out.

There was a transit strike going on. Typically Peace Corps recommends we avoid travel during these strikes (they seem to happen about twice a month, they're national strikes of bus drivers and sometimes taxis) because they make life difficult. I'd never traveled during one because of that. It's neat. All the schoolbus drivers with customized and modded buses all park their buses sideways across half the highway, reducing the highways to 1 or 2 lanes. It took us awhile to get to the hotel the EWB were staying at.

When we got there, I went up to the desk and asked to call the room. They guy told me the room was empty, they'd checked out. So I look around, and there's a computer lounge with white people in it. So I hop inside and ask "Any of you from Michigan?" And all the gringos' faces light up and smile and sure enough, they're my people.

Spent the drive back having a blast chatting with the people. Told 'em all about my parents being from Michigan, talked about fudge and Macinac Island and stuff. I surprised myself with my gregariousness. Talked shop a little bit, but not much. One of the women told me she'd been trying to picture me based on our email correspondence for the past 2 months, and she said she pretty much nailed it. Good thing she doesn't REALLY know me. Maybe that means the act is still holding up. Eventually got back to my site, put 'em into a hotel and went home.

The next morning me, some people from my counterpart agency, and the EWB group met for a couple hours to set up a gameplan. Nobody in my counterpart agency speaks English, so I was the translator. Being the only translator between two groups of 5 is rough. But I think I did alright. I had to interrupt a lot and speak before I forgot things, and every once in awhile someone would start talking about a concept I didn't understand, and thus couldn't translate, so we had to wait for someone to explain the idea to me before I could translate it.

Um... drove out to the aldea and set the group up in a church. I'm kinda fuzzy about what we did that first day in the aldea...I guess we just took a tour of the work site, picked a spot for the water tank to be built... I did a lot of talking, and they did a lot of looking AND talking. That's the ticket.

Um, I guess I'll summarize. Spent the first night with them in the church to make sure the accomodations were adequate. Looots of attention from the kids. They swarmed the church that evening like zombies seeking brains. I played rummy with 3 of the engineers. The surveyor and his teenage son live about a half hour from my parents' new house in the US. Might go visit during my Christmas vacation. They were all really friendly, and it was a very welcome change of pace for me.

The first few days were the most taxing, because there were a lot of details that still needed to be worked out. But towards the end of my week, I felt pretty unnecessary now that everyone had their routines and directions. I worked a bit with the surveyor and got some experience using a total station way, way more expensive and fancy than anything Peace Corps will ever have access to. Like, a handheld input device with electronic touchscreen and Bluetooth that does all the calculations to get your X Y and Z coordinates automatically. Had some good chats with the surveyor. Highlight quote was "Alex... I get the feeling you have a few eccentricities." I thought about mentioning some of them, but decided to just say "Heh, yeah..." Had some excitement... like rushing to finish mapping a road before a scary-looking storm hit, then me accidentally kicking the tripod, screwing up the stabilizer thing (TILT!) and suddenly and subtlely being demoted from total station operator, not to merely rod boy, but to peanut prism boy. Ouch.

Had fun on the first Friday. They had slept in the village for 3 nights and felt like spending a night in my site for a change of pace and a proper shower. I showed them around town to a good place for lunch, helped with some small purchases, then walked them out at dusk to a good place for dinner. They sell big plates of grilled meats. Pork chops, sausages, steaks and chicken breasts. Nothing but meats and garnishes and sauces. And it's bar so we all got a beer. I said I didn't like any of the Honduran beers. They said they didn't find them nearly as bad as I made them out to be. "Alex, you're a snob" was one of the comments. We all got on well. On the walk back from the meat bar a volunteer buddy of mine called to tell me he just had a moment watching a falling star while pondering the nature of the cosmos, and thought it a really perfect moment, and was just about to make a wish when the falling star exploded into a cheapo firework. I told him I was working hard translating for an EWB group. Terribly difficult, unrewarding stuff, doncha know.

One of the nights I didn't sleep at the village, I went to a birthday party for the host mom of the volunteer at my site is leaving soon. The host mom is a really cool lady, maybe 65, maybe a bit younger. But she's probably the most friendly person in the city. My site buddy's host mom is up there, but yeah, this lady rocks. Has a wall of photographs of all her foreign visitors, tells everyone who visits her to sign the facade of her house, on the porch, with permanent marker, said I can come over whenever I want for a snack or some natural fruit juice or just to chat. I gotta give her a photo of myself and my chick, now that said photos actually exist. Anyway, I went to her birthday one evening and sat with her family for a bit. Had some snacks, then she comes out with two shotglasses, a plate of salt and limes, and a bottle of Cuervo, and we did a shot to celebrate. THAT, my friends, is a story right there. We had to get instructions on the order, though. Salt, shot, lime? I think of everyone in my site, I like her the most. Closest thing to an actual host mom I have in Honduras, I think. She said she's so nice to foreigners because she has like 4 sons working in the US, and they all tell her it's hard being away from your friends and family back home, because the locals never really accept you. So she understands my situation through them and wants to help.

My last night in my area was crazy. Ended up staying in the village with part of the group until about 8 pm or so because the rest of the group, someone from my office, and my volunteer replacement all got caught up in the next big city doing materials purchases.

Next up, the big vacation write-up and some anecdotes.

First, an old entry I didn't post immediately because something pretty devastating happened around the time I would have posted and I didn't feel like doing much of anything. Second, some of the stuff that has happened since.

July 1, 2008

In 29 days my girlfriend will be in the same country as me for the first time in over 4 months. And this month, boy, I am going to earn it whether I want to or not.

Lemme tell you a story. Last week I had nothing to do. I answered a few emails from Engineer Without Borders (EWB) about the project we've been planning since I got here and killed time, basically. This week was going to be the same, with one meeting at that aldea. Then, yesterday at 3 pm, when I figured I would check in at the office and check my email again, my boss sees me coming and practically drags me into his office with another office buddy.

Some background: there's another huge project we've been planning in an aldea I went to a week or two ago... 4 hour hard drive up and down mountains, risking life and limb on a one lane cliffside dirt road. Just to do the topographic study would likely take two weeks. I thought it was going to be months from now. My officemates apparently thought it would merely be weeks.

We found out yesterday it was happening today. We were freaking out. The municipal office for the federal organization that does water projects (my counterpart is trying to buddy up with the federal organization) went ahead and hired professional surveyors to do the topographic study there and they arrived yesterday afternoon. Panic mode.

The communities we'd be visiting needed to be briefed and ready to help us clear paths and whatnot, lodging needed to be arranged, people designated to cook for us, everything. We managed to postpone the trip by a day because it would have just been impossible to make preparations in time without postponing things. My counterpart wants me physically present for the project. I don't see why I need to be there, as the professionals can handle it, but I would indeed like to be there because it will be my first topographic study and I would like to learn a thing or two.

Let me explain why I don't want to go. The first project, that I've been working nonstop on, starts July 21. EWB arrives then. We still don't have a final design to submit to the local government for approval. Important people are on vacation, including the translator who would be able to quickly translate the design into Spanish for the head municipal engineer, and that head engineer whose approval we need is also on vacation for a month. We seem to be screwed. But the other municipal engineer says he can submit the design to his boss via email and get approval that way, hopefully in time to not upset the project. I'm very, very nervous.

At first I tried to translate an 18 page design draft document into Spanish last night. I stayed in the office alone until 10:30 pm last night just working on that. Then I gave up. This morning I spoke with the municipal engineer and got the above information, and was told I didn't need to go to all that trouble, just submit the numbers with Spanish labels, and a design for the water tank. Thank goodness. EWB had touched base with the Peace Corps volunteer they had worked with before me in my site for help with the translations, the one whose service is over with and who now lives in the US again. We were that desperate.

So today I'm working on the much more modest translation assignment, tomorrow I'm leaving town to work from sunup to sundown in el campo on a surveying expedition through the mountain jungle, spending the night out there...somewhere... and work all day again and that night coming back, hopefully, for the 4th of July to have a small party (too many people involved who had changed their schedules to attend to cancel, including me) and make sure things are going alright with my other project. Meanwhile the professional surveyors will still be out in the mountains doing the project without me. Apparently this is an acceptable arrangement. I feel like I'm being used for political motives I think I understand but can't really elaborate on without being disrespectful.

And to top it all off, I'm trying to move into my own personal apartment right now, too, hopefully on the 7th. I don't own any furniture or appliances. That landlord isn't answering his phone, but I've met with him three times to discuss Peace Corps housing policy and stuff. I'm very nervous, for no reason other than paranoia, that he thinks I've lost interest in the apartment.

More fun stuff: since the EWB translator is out of town, she can't make it here in person. My girlfriend arrives smack in the middle of the construction phase of the project, the day before my birthday, so I will only be around to translate for EWB for the first week. Thankfully another PC volunteer in a city 2 hours away agreed to take over for me on-site during my absence.

If and when the project design gets the stamp of approval from the municipal engineer, we can order materials for the construction projects, and hopefully get the materials to the site before we break ground.

Busiest July ever. I haven't been this stressed since final exam week in college.

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August 13, 2008

Ok, fun little stories from before the best vacation EVER:

So I went out to shadow the professional surveyor at the big two week long topographic study. Had a blast. It would have been the first week in July. First we rode out in a truck, got to the village, loaded our stuff into a church where me, the surveyor and his assistant could all crash. Then we hit the ground running and started the hike to the water source. The surveyor was a bit overweight. He had trouble with the hike. I followed him for about 20 minutes, then me and his assistance cut ahead with about 5 other guys from the village. We took a leisurely pace and got there in about an hour. Beautiful hike. Then we got to one solitary house about a 10 minute hike from the water source (a medium sized stream) and waited for the surveyor and his two guides to catch up. And waited. And waited. And waited. Eventually two more guys from a neighboring town showed up, said they wanted to tag along also. They were heading up to see the source right then, said the surveyor was still way out there, so I went along to the source with them. Wow. beautiful 20 foot high waterfall, solid rock all underneath the stream. Massive trees. Really cool mountain jungle stream. So we head back and it's starting to rain. The surveyor has finally showed up, and everyone, probably 15 guys, are crowded into this one room mud brick shack to stay out of the rain. The surveyor says he doesn't have the energy to make it back to the church to sleep, that he got permission to sleep in the shack. His assistant is staying, too. This family has 4 beds and 5 family members. I'm asked if I would like to stay, too. All sorts of conflicting thoughts about what would be most polite... I wise up, look around at the tight quarters, and say I can make it back to the church, so I'll sleep at the church. So we get going while the rain had lessened. Much more difficult hike when the downhill trails are all muddy. Only slipped once, and caught myself so I didn't muddy up my clothes.

Got to town, joked around with the guys walking with me about the good time I was gonna have with my girlfriend, got complimented for being in better shape than the surveyor, chilled at one house until my dinner was ready. Chilled with some kids, then asked to get escorted to the church. To rest. Yeah, I felt weird because I couldn't navigate in this tiny town. Lots of small hills, winding trails, and large yards with no distinct landmarks. I got the hang of it by the next day, though. Anyway, the church had an outhouse latrine, pour-flush so I needed a bucket. I also needed a key to the padlock on the latrine. A kid helped me tracked down the key. And a bucket. And got me permission to use water at the closest house. Chilled with two kids in the church, taught em some English, joked around, then they excused myself and I got set up to rest. Read my book til sunset... no electricity in the church. Called my girlfriend on my cell phone. Got real good service if I leaned out this one window and tilted my head just so.

Next day I got breakfast and hiked out again. The last time, coming back, it took about a half hour because I was all warmed up. This time I was carrying a bucket to measure the flow rate, and my muscles were still asleep, so it probably took 50 minutes.

Got to the house, waited for other guys to show up, then went to the source with the whole gang. The surveyor looked around, agreed that it was a good spot to build the dam (pretty much a channel made of solid rock, perfect to put up a single wall and make a dam) and the crew chief asked if his guys could start working. He got a nod and then shouted "Now, men!" And 15 guys with machetes started mowing down the jungle like a giant lethal weedwhacker. I stuck around with the surveyor and got some refreshers on how to use a theodolite, then took two guys with me up above the waterfall to try and get a measurement of the flow rate. We failed. We were using a 3" PVC pipe, trying to build an earthen dam to channel all the stream into the pipe, but there was too much water. I realized about halfway through it was futile, but I was having such a good time making a dam in a stream just like I used to do when I was a kid that I kept my mouth shut and just enjoyed it. We needed a 6" pipe at least, or a weir, or a float.

Got back down, caught up with the surveyor, learned what I could, then had to start heading back to town to catch my ride back to my site.

I got a horseride! The village I was at was pretty remote, so I borrowed a pack horse and the owner walked with me. I had my backpack on, so that's how I kinda justified not just walking with the guy. It was probably a 5 km ride. An hour and half going at a slow walk, I think. We got 3/4 of the way there, and my guide asked if I was doing alright, because there was a shortcut through a valley and river. Or we could take it easy and stay on the road. I went for the shortcut and the river, of course. So I rode this horse down a tiny narrow trail, steeeep slopes, and had a blast. Then we got to a river. Walked through it without much difficulty, had to lift my feet up in the stirrups to keep my boots from getting wet. Then we got to a deeper section of the same river, and this time I think the horse actually swam for a moment. My boots definitely got wet. It was neat.

Then we got back up to the road, and my cell phone starts ringing. I got a text from my chick asking me to call her, because she had to adjust our vacation dates. So I called, told her I was on horseback and we marvelled a bit at the juxtaposition of technology... again. And then I chilled in town, got some free juice, and waited for my counterpart to arrive in his truck. Pretty much the end.

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Stay tuned for stories about my first real project, a writeup about my vacation, and more!

Fun fact: I'm now renting my own apartment in my site. Finally living alone with a ton of space. 538 square feet or so. I measured it myself! But yeah, the annoying sounds of dogs barking and birds squawking and roosters crowing at all hours have been replaced with the sounds of air conditioner units, light urban traffic, and occasional loud music on weekends. I prefer it. Give me sounds of machines over sounds of animals any day. As much as I like the peace of the mountains and the occasional camping expedition, I love livin' in the city.

Ok, so, it's been almost two months. Sorry about that.

So, I'm gonna work on a two month writeup soon... it will be inadequate. Sorry in advance.

A sneak preview!

- I rode a horse! Through the jungle! And we forded a river on horseback! And then my girlfriend called me on my cellphone, so we talked a bit about contrasting levels of technology.

- We broke ground on my first project! It's... interesting.

- My girlfriend came to visit me! We spent almost two weeks together, went to Copan and Utila and saw Dark Knight in San Pedro Sula. It was glorious. Tons of photos on facebook.

- I'm going to be taking water samples from the new slow-sand bio filter pilot in the village of my first project. Pipettes and petri dishes and coliform detection, oh my.

Let's see...so for the weekend, Leala and Adam and I went to La Ceiba to do some shopping for necessary supplies that we can't get in our town. And since we were there, we also figured we might as well see Hulk 2 in the movie theater. I called my chick for a bit while everyone else shopped. We hung out with some other volunteers and went to dinner at sunset at a resort beach hotel's restaurant, poolside with the beach 20 yards away. I stood on the shore as the sun set, closer to my chick in the states than I'd been in a long, long time. Fun fact: when we got the receipt at the resort, the total was in both Lempiras and US Dollars.

Then after we ate, we all went to a discoteca to dance. It was a pretty upscale club. Laser lights, blacklights, glosticks, raised dance floor, etc. 100L cover for the guys, our girls got in free. Ate breakfast at a baleada joint in the morning and came back to Olanchito. Tried out an ice cream parlor in town for the first time, and it was delish. Definitely gonna become a regular there.

Monday I didn't do anything spectacular...mostly killed time in the office waiting for my people to show up at the same time so we could make a workplan for the week.

Tuesday I went to the aldea where my first project will be with a guy from the office and met up with the president of the junta de agua there. We needed to measure the flow rate of another water source we're thinking of using a year down the line to expand the water system of the town even more. It was probably an hour of hiking uphill most of the way, then lots of fun climbing on fallen trees to cross the creeks and stuff. I loved it. Finally got to a couple good spots on the creek where we could built a dam and measured the flow rate with a leaf acting as a funnel and a 5 gallon bucket. Time it takes for the creek to fill 5 gallons gives you data to calculate gallons per hour. Got pictures of the area, on my facebook. On the way back, we ate some food off the ground. Seed pod called guapinol, tastes dry and powdery, like flour, when you put it in your mouth, but you chew it a bit and when your spit mixes in, it tastes sweet, like chewing cookie dough. And they're huge, so you get a lot of food from each pod.

Wednesday we drove to another group of aldeas way in the mountains, 4 wheel drive truck is necessary. We did a modest hike through the jungle to do another aforo (water flow measurement) at a creek, then headed back to town to talk with the president of the patronato (town council) who gave us a sample of the bananas he grows, and they were possibly the sweetest bananas I've ever had. Real good. The guy from my office I was with bought a bunch and some cheese. He gave me some of the cheese. Every time we drive way out, we always seem to have people in town asking for rides back to Olanchito. The buses don't go way out to the mountains, usually, so hitchhiking is pretty much necessary for older people.

Thursday was fun. Adam called me Wedesday to see if I was still willing to help him give a charla (interactive educational presentation) to some people at the Health Center in his town, I said I wasn't enthusiastic but I'd do it. I think I talked about this earlier. Meh. Thursday also marked 4 months my chick and I have been an item, so it was a good day.

Friday was scary and cool. We went in our truck further out than I'd ever been, to 3 towns close to eachother in the same valley way up in the mountains. The furthest one just got connected to an actual road last month. Just foot and horse paths before that. That boggles my mind. The mission was to introduce me to the people of the 3 towns, because I would likely be living with them for a couple weeks doing a topographic study for a water system that would supply the 3 with potable mountain spring water. I'd be working with at least one SANAA engineer to make sure I don't make mistakes. This will probably be in November or December, I suspect. A few months away.

The mountain road... wow. If Peace Corps knew about it, they would probably say it's too dangerous to travel on. I spent the 2 hour drive on the one lane mountainside dirt road running through my head the physics of using parkour to escape out the window of a truck as it rolls down the side of a mountain. And that wasn't to pass the time, it was because I seriously thought it might come to that.

Anyway, so the first town we went to, the furthest one, had 2 guys show up to the community meeting. That's a terrible turnout. A sign of community not motivated or united or ready to work for their water system. Second town was pretty much the same. Third town, though, the biggest one and closest to my home had a huge turnout. Probably 80 people. I took a central seat and introduced myself awkwardly as I always do, never really knowing what information to give to group of people. Hi guys! I'm here to help you get the water you've been asking your government to give you for 30 years! And I'm from the US! But they were really awesome people. Campesinos in the mountains are usually a ton more friendly than city people, with noteable exceptions.

We got back after sunset, and one of the guys who got a ride gave us some of the cheese he was transporting to town for sale. Yay free food!

I hadn't done any shopping, and needed dinner badly. So I went to the supermarket, but it was closed, so I went to my site mate's host family's house ostensibly to buy some food from their pulperia. But I sat on the couch and told the mom about my week, and she asked if I had eaten, and I said no, so I got a couple free baleadas and talked to her daughter and her school buddy guy. Then the veteran volunteer chick showed up to get her free dinner too, and we hung out til my site buddy got home, and then hung out more until like 11 pm. It was fun and relaxing.

Saturday was fun. Hung out with my chick, then went shopping with Leala to browse for apartment stuff and get ingredients for her Thai cuisine dinner she's been planning for a few weeks. Adam showed up and we got ice cream. Met back up at Leala's and helped a little in the kitchen and hung out. Ate food, it was good. Leah showed up too, and the dinner conversation between everyone else, the French couple, Leala's host fam... it dragged on longer than I would have preferred. So I moved into the living room to watch the X games on TV, and Survivorman in Spanish (dubbed). I was exhausted, so I went home when the girls all went to the discoteca.

My life is alright, all things considered.

I think I have the greatest state-side support system ever. First my girlfriend and a couple friends from UNC Chapel Hill sent me like 4 bags of trail mix and a book and some candy and some other stuff that means a lot to me, now my parents and some family friends sent me what I think is the treasure they're looking for in Stevenson's Treasure Island, which I'm reading right now. Long John Silver and crew better wind up in Honduras, cuz I think I got their treasure before them.

Here's an inventory: (I write stuff when it means a lot to me, even if what I write is kinda dry.)

Trail mix:

5 bags fruit and nut mix off the shelf,

2 bags homemade trail mix (made with love)

4 bags off the shelf dried fruit

1 sm. bag dry roasted almonds

1 sm. bag dry roasted cashews

1 lg. can Planters mixed nuts

1 med. can mixed nuts (no peanuts!)

1 med. can cashews

1 med. bag cheddar sesame crackers for mixin

Fruit and nuts and cracker bits will be mixed and eaten as trail mix later. Yum! I will not go without lunch during a day-long aldea expedition ever again!

Clothing:

1 quality, genuine leather belt. no frills, nothing can go wrong

1 white linen long sleeve shirt (long sleeve to protect against El Sol)

1 magical white nylon outdoorsman shirt, tons of amazing features

1 white stretch cotton-spandex long sleeve shirt

2 pair olive green cargo pants

Misc:

1.5 lb bag organic raw cane sugar

3 organic chewy fruit strips (munchies! heck yeah!)

8 packs malt crackers with peanut butter, 6 cracker sammiches each

11 oz. bag Werther's Original hard candies

1 portable lunch with crackers, canned tuna fish, peaches and a cookie!

1 lg. jar of peanut butter

6 single serving peanut butter cups, 15g protein each!

100 men's daily multivitamins

1 stone cross pendant

1 rainbow WWJD bracelet. my chick loves rainbow!

2 burt's bees chapsticks, made to protect against sun (yay!) and snow (hahaaaahaaha, heh, ah, that's rich)

Canned goods:

2 lg. mandarin oranges

1 lg. sliced peaches

1 sm. vienna sausages

1 med. pineapple chunks

2 sm. mandarin oranges

4 sm. peaches

4 sm. mixed fruit

2 med. chicken breast

3 single serving chicken breast

3 single serving tuna in water (its gross in oil)

Wounded in action:

2 sm. can mandarin oranges

1 lg. can pineapple chunks

2 sm. cans with gaping holes i tossed at the post office (presumed dead)

We learned an important lesson today, men. It appears to be a good idea to put canned goods in a ziploc bag or two when shipping them to Honduras. They tend to rupture and leak orange and pineapple juice everywhere. Thankfully I could wash off the sticky from all the other cans and bags, and the cans that broke bad were not in the same box as the clothing. I was pretty crazy happy today opening these packages. I might have giggled, but if there were no witnesses, it didn't happen.

I think the 3 remaining wounded cans can be salvaged. They were promptly put in the fridge. I ate one of the mandarins...I'll wait 2 days to see what happens. I imagine they should be ok...seal was broken, but no bugs could get inside. No mold. Inside of the can was mottled and not attractive...but no metal flecks on the oranges. Anyone wanna save me from my own desire not to waste food?

Thank you all!

Also, I gave my first charla today. Another volunteer buddy from Health working in a nearby aldea asked me to back him up for a Water and Sanitation interactive presentation he was helping his counterpart agency with, and basically wanted me there for credibility. I was reluctant as I don't like public speaking, but I said ok, I could talk about water purification techniques (boil it, add chlorine, or use UV radiation from the sun on plastic bottles of water for a day). He'd then talk about the various diseases you get when you don't do what I say.

So I had no information other than that up until yesterday. He called and said we'd be part of a day-long shindig, with probably an hour to use just us. He said he wasn't preparing anything special, so I didn't either. I stayed up til midnight, working an hour and a half on copying info out of a manual onto notecards for myself. Correct, I did not prepare a lot.

He calls me at 7:30 am the next morning, this morning, and says he's crazy sick. Bad fever, totally not going to make our date. But he still would like me to show up for the sake of his counterpart, who still needed a Peace Corps WatSanner there to nod at things he says and maybe provide more off-the-cuff info. I grumbled. Probably too much. But said ok.

So I get to the aldea late a) because the bus was slow, b) because I got off too early. So his counterpart had to hunt me down in town and take me to the final destination. Got there, we huddled for about 10 minutes and got to it. They all did their thing, and I got up to do mine. They had stepped on my toes severely, talking about 2/3 of my purification techniques and defining all the basics I planned to talk about. Greeeeaat. But I told 'em I was gonna do a quick recap. Talked about solar disinfection for a good 10 minutes, I think. Got a lot of questions, I was definitely the expert when it came to that technique. They didn't stump me, I understood enough of what was said to make intelligent answers, and asked some of my own questions about the situation in the aldea and what they could do to deal with their water. I thought it went pretty well.

What else? I hiked around a lot again... took pictures which I'll put on facebook. Today was a pretty good day, all things considered. I think I performed reasonably well, though apparently I left the other guys hanging with a ton of time to kill afterwards. Meh, they handled it well and didn't give me any instructions beforehand.

Adam says he owes me. I see free ice cream in my future.

Some interesting things about Honduran culture I'm working on remembering to write up:

1) guys who cook for themselves are weird. evidence: somehow one of my office buddies got asking me about what I do for lunch, and I said I go home and make a sandwich or three from peanut butter or eggs, or have some cereal or something. he got a little quiet and leaned in like he was sharing a secret and said "I cook for myself too!" also, when talking to the woman who does my laundry, when I told her I do my own cooking most of the time, she actually recoiled in shock. Quite amusing. My office buddy and I agree that eating out for every meal gets expensive.

2) guys love their momma more than anybody. evidence: dinner conversation with the girlfriend of a buddy in town turned to my plans with my girlfriend and the status of my family. she said she expect i miss my mom quite a bit. i said i do, but i think i miss my girlfriend more. she was shocked and disagreed with me, saying that was impossible and i surely missed my mom more. i found it amusing. sorry, mom.

3) coins are worthless. it costs the honduran mint more to make their coins than they're worth, and they're so value-less that nobody uses them, except in emergency change-making situations. it's fun seeing how various businesses get around using coins. i first noticed it in a ciber in sabanagrande...the owner had a desk drawer literally full of coins that he never planned to get of. then in a supermarket here, my total was like 341 lempiras and 47 cents. i was given 341 lempiras paper, and a little peppermint-sized candy. no coins in the register. so i'm collecting coins to give as gifts when i get back to the states. i like coins, even if they're worthless.

Let's see...misc. happenings.

I saw a gringo backpacker pass my office 3 times as I was working on my computer, so I walked out and talked to him, asked him if he needed any help. Talked to him a bit, he's from France and had backpacked from Mexico City and was trying to get to Panama eventually over the course of 2 months or so. He looked like a typical modern hippie, with pierced and gauged ears, goatee, skater ponytail. I offered to meet up with him after my office closed and grab some dinner or something and he took me up on it. So I called Leala and she wanted to meet him too, as did my French neighbors. So eventually he showed up and the 5 of us sat in the French neighbors' place for an hour or so, then spent the rest of the night hanging out at various local houses hoping for a free dinner, but that didn't work out so we got Honduran tacos at a late night diner. Best commercial tacos in town, from what I hear, and they're one of few places open late that doesn't sell booze, which is a plus. After dinner we hung out a bit longer, and when people started getting sleepy the backpacker and I went and got a beer at the bar I walk past nightly on the way to the internet cafe. I'm friends with the bouncer now, we say hi and chat every once in awhile.

A few days later, the french couple invited me over for dinner and we had some baleadas and a semi-failed attempt at potato casserole. Too much cream, so it didn't stay together. But the flavor was spot-on. We talked for 3 hours at the table, laughing and sharing experiences in volunteering, observations about Honduran culture, etc. It was actually fun, and we definitely bonded.

I'm still working with Engineers Without Borders on final preparations for their arrival in mid-July. The community wants to dig out the foundation for the water tank and the trenches for some of the pipes before EWB arrives, and next week I'm going to bust out the Abney Level and pinpoint appropriate sites for the tank and for a slow sand bio-filter the engineers want to use in a pilot study to see if it's feasible. I'm kind of excited. And I had a few proud moments when I came up with a couple insights based on my own limited experience that actually changed the EWB plan slightly. It's fun being seen as even remotely helpful to a group of PhDs.

I'm kinda conflicted about sustainability. Is it better that I do the topographic studies myself to let towns get a water system more cheaply, or should I be teaching an officemate to do the studies? It seems better for sustainability to ONLY teach locals how to do things, and do NOTHING myself, alone. But when I do nothing, I have nothing tangible to be proud of, it feels like. There's a lot of glory in doing topo studies and seeing a town get water a year later. Then there's the funding aspect...I still have odd feelings about the EWB coming down to manage the project here. That ain't sustainable. That's a total handout. It's good that the people are gonna do some digging themselves, and I know they'll help mix concrete and be unskilled labor and whatnot, but still, all the funding is coming from the US.

The advice of the upper levels of the Peace Corps staff is "Remember, don't be a hero. Make heroes out of the people around you."

My morale is still pretty good. With all my internet use and the quality of cell phones here, I don't feel isolated at all, except in the physical sense. Didn't really feel any conscious homesickness until I called home while my dad was at work and heard his voice on the answering machine. Haven't heard that message in months, and it got to me way more than I expected it would. But yeah, I feel like my work is helping and useful, and I'm crazy eager to start feeling comfortable doing my own surveying work. Basically right now I'm a facilitator, translator, and lower level technical advisor... on a project that started a year before I joined the PC.

When I'm not working on that project, I'm working on removing viruses from the office computers and traveling around to other aldeas to view water sources and hear about water problems and try hard to look like I'm thinking about relevant things when I'm actually just gawking at the amazing junglescapes.

Also, a couple days ago, my landlady (I decided she's not really a host mom...nothing family-like involved in our relationship) made some soup and let me have some. We didn't eat together, thankfully, this time. There was a freaking chicken foot in my soup. knee to toenails. scaley skin. in. my. soup. i drank half the broth, then gave up. First time I ever seen that. I've seen what live chickens walk in. Why would I eat a foot? Seriously now.

Then I made lentils a couple days later and let her try it. She liked it so much she asked for more and made it her dinner. I call that a victory. I was quite pleased, especially after realizing halfway through that the recipe only called for half a bag when I had actually used the whole bag of lentils. I scrambled and salvaged it with added water and more heat and careful stirring. Used a ton of pepper and seasoned salt, and pulled it through. I don't consider myself a good cook yet, but I have conquered lentils. Next step: standard 3 egg omelette.

Last bit of news: I think, within a month, I will be living in a brand new, spacious apartment all by my lonesome. I am stoked. 2 bedrooms, a large living room and a kitchen compared to an 8 by 10 cell that I have now. It's only 2 blocks from my current place, closer to groceries and internet, further from my office. Gotta do a ton of paperwork to make the switch with PC clearance, but usually it goes smoothly.

Cheers.

So, my chigger bites got worse. Friday morning I got bit. I think I took the first pic Friday night, and posted on Saturday. Monday night after spending the afternoon and evening with my French neighbors, site buddy, and a French backpacker I accosted on the street during my lunch break, I went home around 1 am, took off my sock and found this beauty smiling up at me:

Profile view of my new sidekick. I was tempted to draw a little face on him with a felt tipped marker, but since I knew I was gonna lance him (in the FACE) soon after, I didn't want to risk getting an infection from the pen.

There he is, gents. Probably about as big as a pencil eraser in all dimensions. That's not a drop of water, thats a solid, semi-soft membrane of skin over the largest blister/sore/thing I've ever had sticking outta my body.I lanced the two big ones, my Deimos and Phobos, and doused 'em with alchohol. Then I put antibacterial salve on each bite and put a bandaid over the ones I lanced.Now, most of the bites are healing nicely. They don't itch bad at all. Not sure why only those two got so huge...I figure my socks irritated them or something. Placement on my foot meant they got more irritated by the socks or shoes than the others.

Chiggers. I think. Walking through tall grasses between alpine forests while scoping out a couple water sources. Wore sneakers (screw up number 1) because I didn't think we'd be hiking for an hour an half, and didn't use my DEET bugspray beforehand (screw up number 2) because I figured this hike would be like the others...on a decently-kept trail. Wrongo. First time we actually needed a machete to get anywhere, nobody used them. Dense brush, mud, good times if you're dressed for it. I wasn't, and now I have 26 pustules on my right ankle and foot, and 12 on the left that are just begging to burst on me. The two near my pinky toe are about 2 millimeters tall right now. They didn't get above my knees, thankfully.

Anyway, just a short post to whine about the insane itching I gots on my feets. All is well otherwise.

Alright, what have I been up to? I'm glad you asked. I'm just gonna throw highlights in...sorry for the infrequency, but somebody else is sucking up all my creative and correspondence energy.

Last week, a guy from the other office branch of my counterpart organization was doing some stuff in our office. He saw me working at a computer and came over and introduced himself. What was supposed to be a simple introduction turned into a mini status meeting concerning the projects taking place at the other office. He told me there are 3 aldeas he's working with that don't have power or water, and he's trying to convince them to stop doing damage to the forest in the watershed around their water source. I asked him if he thought the water sources for these aldeas were strong enough to support complete water systems, he said he thought so. I asked if he knew how to accurately measure water flows, he said he did and we talked about procedures a bit to verify we both knew our stuff. Then I asked if he'd be willing to take the flow measurements the next time he went out (the rainy season is about to start, so it's important to take these measurements before the rain picks up and exaggerates the minimum yearly rate...the community needs water year-round, not just during the rainy season when it's plentiful) and he said he could certainly do it and would get back to me with the results.

So yeah, I felt pretty awesome after that exchange. He's only a few years older than me, though, so I wasn't intimidated by age, though I'm sure he's more experienced than me. But yeah, that was the first task I handed out to someone here.

I also got introduced to an engineer working with the municipal Water and Sanitation department here in town, and summarized my training for him. He told me that if I can take care of the topographic studies and pass the data to him, he can use his experience and training to design the conduction lines from the water source to the storage tank, and the distribution networks from the tank to the houses for any communities we decide can support a water system. Between the two of us, we'll be taking care of 75% of the prep work before you can break ground on a water system. Only thing left is securing funding and actually making the supply purchases, and that is much easier to do once you have data and design to include in the funding request. Hiring surveyors and engineers for design work is very expensive, apparently. We'll be doing it for free.

I plan to coordinate with that engineer and with another WatSan volunteer during my first two topographic studies to look over my shoulder and tell me whn I make stupid beginner mistakes, and also to fill in some of the gaps from my training sessions, questions I still have about how exactly you can tell where you want pipes to be laid, ie roadsides versus pastures, gradual slopes versus sheer cliffs. I expect I'll do one topo study in the next two months, before my vacation at the end of July.

Most of my work time has been devoted to translating questions, answers and concerns and emailing and explaining things to Engineers Without Borders in the US, the people of my office, and the junta de agua (water management committee) of the first aldea I'll be working in. And by working, I mean looking over shoulders and asking practical questions and generally getting in the way, perhaps sometimes acting as translator. The volunteer here before me did topo studies and secured funding for at least 3 water systems right before she left, so my priority right now is to work with those communities and make sure the projects are actually finalized.

I think next week I'll be meeting with that first junta de agua again to give them more information. It's actually kind of cool...EWB wants to install a slow sand bio-filter as the main disinfecting and filtering system for the community water supply. One large filter located upsteam from the tank. The filter consists of many layers of fine, medium and coarse sand over layers of fine, medium and coarse gravel. Water comes in from the top, and leaves purified from the bottom. You have to run the system for a couple days so the impurities can collect on top of the sand, and the impurities will form a sort of film that traps microorganisms. Then the sands filter out the other solids. Only required maintenance is a monthly skimming-off of the film so it doesn't get so thick that it severely lowers the flow-rate of the water. The traditional method is to drip concentrated chlorine at a slow rate into the tank itself, which requires closer monitoring. Too much chlorine and it tastes terrible, too little and it isn't potable.

This week was kind of dull. The first two days I was basically waiting for a reply from EWB with nothing else to do, and the meeting with the municipal civil engineer took all of 30 minutes. So I tagged along with my office counterparts on a couple of their non-WatSan projects dealing with microbusinesses run in backyards of a few housewives (chicken eggs) and better small fruit and vegetable farming practices. I was bored. I have no interest or experience regarding chickens, eggs, or business. If I knew I was going to have no WatSan work, I would be willing to learn and help wherever I can, but I know I have work with water systems ahead of me, and I don't want to get invested in things I might not be able to follow through on. For now, I'm going to stick with what I know.

Speaking of which, another side project option is to work with the various school computer labs in the area. Apparently a volunteer before me worked so that various communities here could receive computers donated by Teachers Without Borders (nobody nowadays seems to have any regard for borders...I tell ya, sheesh). But as far as I've heard, all these computer labs have ceased functioning in the last couple years. I gotta play detective to figure out what happened, and what I can do to help. Meaning lots of meetings and interviews. I asked my PC bosses for anything they could give me, and I will talk to two contacts in town when I feel like I have time. Like I said, for the next few months, I just want to finish what the WatSan volunteer before me started.

Fun fact: in the last 7 days, I spent almost as much money at internet cafes to videochat with my girlfriend as I did on food and groceries. Pretty crazy, huh? I started recording my expenses a week ago, so I can start working out a personal budget. What's the protein value in grams of a single chicken egg? Anybody know? Because they only cost 3 lempiras (L) each...while a thin box of Honey Bunches of Oats costs 77L and a mondo size loaf of whole grain bread costs 32L at the supermarkets here. So eggs are the cheapest source of protein available. A box of Kraft Mac and Cheese costs 22L and there are 3 servings inside at 9g of protein per serving. One evening I was so hungry I ate an entire box in one sitting. I'm eating almost no fruit, but I'm taking multivitamins to compensate for the unbalanced diet. Protein and calcium are the weaknesses of the vitamins I'm taking. I drink a ton of water. I'm eating lots of peanut butter sandwiches. I have a feeling I'm spending money on internet at an unsustainable rate, and will need to cut back pretty soon. Something tells me 2 to 6 hours every day is a bit excessive, but I can't make a monthly budget with a single week of recorded expenses, can I?

My sitebuddy and I got invited over to the apartment of the veteran volunteer here twice since I last wrote. First time was for a small lunch party with two other gringos working in the area. It was nice. Second time was just to hang out. Had some smoothies, watched two movies on a laptop (Mr and Mrs Smith, which I happen to like quite a bit, and Four Brothers, which was pretty formulaic but not altogether terrible for an action movie). Spent a good 6 hours over there, then we went out to get some late-night dinner. It's much easier for me chill and relax and chat in English than it is in Spanish.

One last thing I thought was cool. One of the guys in my office has this idea to reduce pollution and create microbusinesses at the same time. There's apparently a problem in aldeas with people dumping their used kitchen grease in the woods or in creeks. Not good. He apparently thinks the grease can be used to make soap. He mixes it with pure chemical potassium, glycerin, lime juice for fragrance, and some coloring...and makes soap. So today he's going around doing little workshops to show people the process. It's a great idea, assuming the soap isn't disgusting and actually cleans stuff. You'd be turning your trash into a commodity. Either you make the soap from it yourself and use it, or sell it to the local soap-maker who can turn around and sell the soap wherever she wants. Generates income and cuts down on pollution. DIY, man. 4lyfe

May 8, 2008

I went on an adventure. Yesterday a man from my office took me to an aldea (village) up in the mountains that surround Olanchito. It is a pain to get out there. We got way too early to the bus stop, first of all, and had to wait 2 hours in the heat. I read my book for most of that time, but a teenager wanted to talk to me for about 10 minutes, too. We got onto the bus and drove around to various aldeas and eventually wound up at the end of the line, an aldea at the foot of the mountain. We restocked on water and had a snack at a pulperia (quickiemart) then started the hike up the mountain to the peak. I had my pack with my sleeping bag, clothes, trail mix (thanks, di!) and overnight toiletries. Maybe 10 pounds, not bad. We took two breaks, and I drank 1.5 liters of water. I should have brought 3 liters instead of two. We sweated a lot while we were at low altitude. But I rationed well and didn't get heat stroke. Two hours, 100% uphill. Beautiful views. We bonded as we walked up...I got him to laugh a couple times, and felt good. We walked through a herd of cattle grazing in the road. Bulls make me nervous. Not enough to give me pause, but I keep my eyes on those horns.

Once we got to the top, we went to the school to meet with the junta de agua, but we were late and they had already started a meeting of 3 communities to settle some border dilineation issues. So we waited. For an hour. At least the weather was lovely. So much cooler on top of a mountain than in the hot valley. We met with the junta, I introduced myself to the group, they clapped their welcome. We discussed the general things that need to be done before Engineers Without Borders comes to begin construction of the new water system. Gathering construction materials, mainly.

My primary goal for the next 3 months is to facilitate communications between two aldeas and their respective groups from Engineers Without Borders, make sure that everyone is on the same page, make sure that everyone is proceeding at a good pace with preparing for the project. At the same time I want to tag along on the surveying trips of some other volunteers in the area to really get a feel for a complete topographic study project.

So after the meeting, we walked to the other side of the aldea and chilled with the family that was letting us sleep in their house overnight. We sat around outside, and they chatted and I tried to keep up. I'm great answering questions, terrible at smalltalk. We took a look at the guy's farm around his house and I was pretty impressed. Small plots of plantain trees, pineapples, tomatoes, peppers, and other stuff, all planted on the mountain slope. Apparently my counterpart organization has been working closely with them to improve farming techniques as well.

Then we sat around as the sun set. I drank the cup of coffee that they offered me, and it was full of sugar so it didn't taste bitter at all, else I would have wandered off to dump it discretely. I'm not a coffee drinker. Gorgeous view, very peaceful. The house was an odd construction. Some walls were wood planks, most were concrete, metal roof like normal. Doorframes painted with a white-petaled flower motif. Just like the doorways in the kitchen of Serenity, the firefly class transport. We ate dinner in the kitchen by candlelight. Then me and the three older men sat around in the room listening to the battery-powered radio by candlelight.

We went outside after awhile, and stood around talking. The surrounding scenery was black against the cloudy sky glowing with the light from Olanchito in the valley. Fireflies everywhere. Dancing over and around and through the vegetables in the garden, the plantain trees, the forest above us, the rafters of the house. So nice. No electricity, no noise, just crickets and peace.

Right when I was about to turn in, the son flipped on the noisy gas-powered generator in the toolshed and all the lights came on and we went inside to watch a 2 hour futbol game on television. I was a bit surprised. I have trouble getting used to the contrasts in technology and construction techniques.

Watching sports bores me.

Went to sleep in my sleeping bag with the vents unzipped, set on a mattress on a bed suspended with twine. Not metal springs, not straps, but hand-tied twine. The family basically made their own bed. Very cool. A firefly was in my room in the pitch darkness...one of 'em gives you enough light to see. An old guy said 5 in a jar is like a lightbulb.

Everybody snored. It was hilarious. I laughed silently in the dark.

When I woke up at sunrise (5 am), I packed up my sleeping bag first thing, then went out and sat in the shade facing the vista and read my book until breakfast. Then we were given a tour of where they want to start the water system. One source, a dam at a creek well upstream from the town, in a mountain jungle area. Really cool experience walking to it. The dam needs to be built, the tanks need to be built, the conduction line from the dam to the two tanks and the distribution network from the tanks to the houses...nothing has been done except an initial survey by the volunteer before me. Whew. Lotta work.

The old man with us, while we were looking around the dam site on the creek, dug up a root with his machete, carved it into something he could carry, took a leather strap out of his pocket, tied it around the root, and threw the loop of leather around his shoulder like the root was a canteen to carry back to his house. He said it makes a good tea. That, my friends, is hardcore. I want to be able to do that sort of thing.

I drank the unfiltered water out of a hose from who knows where at the kitchen of the house we slept at....it was the only water available, and everyone else was doing. We'll see in a few days how that turns out.

The hike back was quick and easy. Downhill is niiice. Except the weather got hotter and hotter as we descended. Sad.

I also found the gamer enclave in town. There are 3 computers, and two walls of consoles. They have gta4 set up on the one 360. They're open til 10 pm, 2 hours later than anyone else. One night, two guys were playing gh3 until close, and I was talking to my girl til close, and we were all bobbing our heads to the music. Cultural integration, CyberAlex style. Downside is that while they have headphones, all the mics on them are broken off, and the one webcam that works has a built in mic, but it dies after an hour of use. It's really weird.

The end.

Life is good. It's hot here. But I finally got a fan for my room, so it's 5 degrees cooler.

Latest blog entry was more of a mass email I sent out. If I forgot about you, leave a comment, and I'll mail it to you, too.

These pics are for those people who don't got a facebook account. More pics of the bihawk to be found on facebook. Friend me if I know you.

FYI, I am now bald. As in, "welcome to the real world, Neo" bald.

Found out where I'll be spending my next two years.

City called Olanchito in the departamiento/state called Yoro.

35,000 people, commercial town. I will not be roughing it when I'm actually in town, but part of job will be walking to the outlying aldeas (small village of 40 or so houses) to do my work. My counterpart agency is some Christian NGO that is trying to elimate poverty and poverty-related health problems.

The volunteers that predeced me set up some computer labs in schools in the city, and my bosses are pretty interested in me pursuing the same thing as a side-project.

I'll have a site buddy, another trainee in the Health project. I don't know her very well yet, but my people like her, and she seems pretty cool, so I have a feeling we'll hang out fairly often. There is also another volunteer in the Municipal Development project already working in Olanchito.

The city is about 20 miles (?) from the north coast as the crow flies, kinda near La Ceiba, a big big city. Trujillo supposedly is the best beach in the country, and I'm in the site closest to it. The girlfriend and I will probably make our way there. I'm the furthest northeast in my group. My singing buddy is the furthest east...he'll be in central Olancho (departamiento). Supposedly that place is like the wild west...everybody is strapped with guns and machetes. I will visit him eventually.

That's about it, in a nutshell.

It's been awhile. Sorry about that...around the time last week I was gonna take care of this, I was just unmotivated. Then some stuff came up that was more interesting to me. Without further ado, I present to you highlights from the last couple weeks.

Apparently word spread of my computer know-how. I told a few people I had skillz, so a few people came to me with generic software problems...reinstallation of Windows, reinstalling drivers without the original manufacturer's CD, etc. And I helped a couple other trainees successfully. So one trainee told her family that I knew a bit, and asked me to head to her house to take a look. It was a desktop, one of the horizontal chasis that the monitor can rest on top of. Never worked on something like that before, but I figured out the locations of major components easily enough. The thing wouldn't POST. Never good. Got a basic history of the problems, found out that over the past 4 months of this thing sitting useless, a few overzealous teenagers had poked around in it, too. One guilty party showed up, I asked and he didn't even know he had to ground himself before handling components. Nor did he realize that if you remove the processor and heat sink, you can't clean off the thermal compound and put it back together again and expect things to go well. So with that knowledge, I isolated the motherboard and processor from all other components like I used to do on my own rig (this thing had a processor marked 1995, btw...oooold, so old I told them that the techniques I'm used to might not apply at all) but even then the motherboard wouldn't post. Oh, also, the kid removed the BIOS battery and put it back in and taped it there. Wow. And he had the CD drive chained to the HD and plugged into the one port on the mobo that wasn't labeled for the harddrive...that just won't fly. So I put all the wires where they were supposed to be...gotta give him some slack here because all the components were labeled in English, though.

So yeah, I told her I was pretty sure the problem was in the motherboard or the processor. Or both. But I tried to explain how much of a pain it is to replace either...tried to explain compatability issues and whatnot when dealing with old components. Recommended she ask another technician she knows to take a look and see if he agrees. She was worried the problem was just in the new monitor she bought, I told her I was positive it wasn't the monitor. Also that I would wager that the hard drive and RAM and sound card and CD-ROM were all also fine. I can't order components for her...can't help her shop since I'm not in this site very long...but it was a nice encounter. She was crazy grateful for me spending two hours working in her living room. Told me I was welcome in her home whenever I wanted. Said I was very friendly.

This can kinda tie in to my relationship with the internet cafes here. There's a cheap one at 15 lempiras an hour, and a nicer one at 20 lempiras an hour. The cheap one has a network protocol that, if it detects you're using a disproportional amount of bandwidth, starts reducing your bandwidth usage by closing all open or minimized windows on your screen. Without prompts or warnings. The first time this happened, it only interrupted conversations I was having with friends. The second time, I lost about an hour's worth of writing. I don't go there anymore.

The second one is nice. Computers of various quality, but 3 functional webcams, and no malicious network nazi software. I downloaded the Skype installer and Firefox installer onto my flash drive, so whenever I sit down at a computer, I install both and browse in style. Working on downloading all 60 megabytes of the iTunes installer so I can organize my iPod, too. Wish I could do that on this XO. So my chick and I spend hours upon hours talking to eachother. Sometimes video chats when bandwidth traffic is low, sometimes just voicechat like a phone call, sometimes just text. I'm there so often that the owners say hi to me in the streets. The place technically closes at 9, but I can stay in until almost 11 pm because they realize I give them a ton of business and zero hassle. They don't even watch me anymore...so I could theoretically rack up another 120 lempira bill and just walk out, because they trust me. Good thing for them I'm a good person.

But I decided that a good side project for me would to work with internet cafes in my site, and with computers in business offices, the mayor's office, various schools and businesses and see what I can do to make things better. Show people what I'm doing, walk 'em through stuff. Show the internet cafe people some of the better anti-virus and anti-spyware software. I'm positive a ton of these computers are crawling with that sort of malware. I don't have much experience with networks, but I imagine I can remember, or learn what I need from the internet.

So. We aren't just learning about surveying and water system design in these 6 weeks of WatSan training. We also learn about other stuff loosely related to sanitation, in the form of health. So one day we listened to some veteran Health volunteers give us a presentation on HIV/AIDS prevention. Put condoms on plantains. The statistics they gave were pretty bad. Estimates put HIV infection rates at 50% in some areas. Highest per capita infection rates in Latin America, if I remember correctly. This was all to prep us to give the same presenation to a classroom of high school kids in the area. We had about two days to prepare a 5 hour interactive talk.

So my group of 6 did. It went pretty well. There's a definite need for basic sex ed. here, I'm totally convinced about that. But it'll be awhile before I can see myself leading such a presentation on my own or with one buddy.

Begin sparsely-written section of the blog. Sorry for the poor quality. I'm a bad person.

My group of 17 worked on building two latrines and two pilas for two houses in an aldea a few miles away. One set for each house. Weird working for people who have no electricity, no bathroom at all, but they can still make calls on their cell phone. Their priorities are foreign to us. Mud brick house with a sheet metal roof held down by wires and rocks rather than nails.

Basically we had to hand mix a ton of concrete. Over 2 afternoons...about 5 hours each time. Good stuff. And I took down a 5 or 6 inch tree stump with a machete. Took about 10 minutes. Fun!

We went on a trip to a place called Nueva Armenia...there's a river there that chiseled its way into a thick layer of bedrock. Pretty cool. But it rained the day before, so I knew it would be muddy, so I didn't bring my trunks. I brought my computer instead. I read my girl's emails while everyone else is swimming and making fun of CyberAlex for bringing his computer to a river.

Then my buddy broke his toe jumping off a rock. But he's ok. Got a free ride to a hospital in Tegus. Now he walks like a slowzombie. After I read, I stowed my gear and went wandering on my own.

What little parkour experience I have is being put to good use here. I love that I can sprint along the rocks scattered in a creek without losing my footing once, making 8 foot leaps over running water only to land on all fours like a cat onto another boulder, gripping it perfectly so I don't slip and can position myself to hop to the next rock and keep running, one foot on one rock at a time. Confidence in my physical abilities. I haz it. Knowledge of my limitations, i haz that too. I couldn't do 2 years ago what I can do now, and I feel a great amount of pride.

Even if it still takes thoughts of a girl to get me motivated to go full tilt like that.

Everyone in my barrio knows me and says hi when I walk somewhere. I used to get a bunch of kids yelling stuff I couldn't understand at me as I passed them. Then after I realized they were saying "Hey, man!" in heavy accents, I stopped and chatted with them. Introduced myself, etc. Now I usually have a gauntlet of handshakes with kids to get through if I want to get out of my barrio. The friends of my family are my friends now. If we meet up in the street, we can walk together and chat for a bit, and I enjoy that immensely. I don't wanna leave this town or these people I've spent 6 weeks growing fond of. I don't wanna have to gamble again with a third town and a third host family in my real 2 year site. Can I possibly get this lucky again?

A contrast is that when I leave my barrio, I stop making eye contact and saying hi in a friendly manner. People don't know me outside of my barrio very well., save for the owners of the two internet cafes. There's one guy who is either mentally challenged or totally wasted on booze, or both, but he's really friendly and wants to chat with me for way longer than I'm comfortable with. But everyone else just stares at me (so I say hi, so they have to say hi back and then it's not awkward for me anymore) or whistles at me or says "Hey handsome" or "Hey baby." Not as much now as before.

Short blip about the worst thing I've had to do in Peace Corps so far. Does everyone know what a Water Board is? In Spanish, you call it a Junta de Agua. A water cooperative, I guess. Basically it's a board of trustees who oversee a town's water supply, from the water source, to the surrounding watershed, to the water system that collects and distributes it to people. They maintain it all, educate the people not to wash clothes or let their animals poop upstream, and collect a fee from everyone for receiving water, which gets spent on the salary of the plumber maintenance man and supplies for maintenance, like more chlorine. Typically a Junta has a president, VP, secretary, treasurer and more. That's it in a nutshell.

We got two days and 200 pages of manuals to read through to prepare to give a presentation (a "charla" or a chat) to an audience of locals on how to organize and manage a successful Junta de Agua. Then we got told our audience was gonna be existing Junta de Agua members. So we feared we'd be telling info to people who already knew it. We were overwhelmed with info and little time. We get to d-day, go time, and set up in our classroom as the adults walk in. People with far more life experience than us. We ask them right off the bat what they're interested in hearing about. They say they want to hear what we've prepared, then they'll ask questions later. before we start the first section, about the roles and duties of presidents, the two presidents of the two Juntas present tell us they (obviously) know all that already. and the treasurers knew their duties. So...we skipped over about 20 minutes of material and moved on. Then they basically tuned us out while we went over the rest of the basic info we'd been given. it was rough. Lots of filler. Then when one president asked for advice about how he could deal with the lumber company deforesting his watershed secretly and illegally at night, when the city didn't care and wouldn't help because the company brought money to the city, and the cops don't care. We didn't have an answer for him. In hindsight, apparently there are lawyers in Tegus who could help him file a lawsuit. But I have no idea how practical that is.

I'm glad this week is over. For a number of reasons.

Guess what! I got a bihawk. That's like a mohawk, but two, one above each eye, basically. It looks pretty darn good. It'll get shaved completely before I start working for real...not a good way to make a good first impression among conservative professionals...but for now it's a blast. I've always wanted to shave my head in a creative way, and so I have. One of my WatSan buddies did it, and he did it well. Gelled it up with my host brother's supply. First morning walk to class, I heard one "Que feo!"/How ugly! a lot of laughter, and two "Hola guapo!"/Hello handsome!. And there was a class of kids on a sidewalk with their teachers. All staring and giggling, so I said hi. The teacher smiled and said hi, and all 40 kids said hi. As I passed, they all started crowing like roosters. Reminded me of the lost boys from Hook. Call me Rufio. Basically got more of the same, sans roosters, the rest of the day yesterday. My teachers all liked it. One said she loves America because you can actually do wild stuff like this and nobody thinks twice. I kinda gotta agree. I like my subcultures. My boss said he wants his boss in Santa Lucia to see it before I shave it. That thrilled me. He said I looked like Darth Maul. He's a Star Wars fan. He also said he had always considered me one of the most normal people in the group. I laughed at that a lot, inside my head. Let's see...the gringos said it looks like devil horns from the front. Then one chick who asked me why I'd do that to myself said later it was growing on her. The guys told me I have balls. And last night, walking through the dark in all black to the internet cafe to talk to my girl, a group of a dozen or so teenagers were playing futbol in the street. I passed 'em and they all started chasing me. Not running, just keeping my speed and yelling at me to wait up. I kept walking, but turned and yelled that I had a date to meet, and if they wanted to catch up they gotta run. The kids in the front just kept yelling "Venga!"/"Come here!" and the ones in the back kept yelling "El Diablo!" I finally stopped and they all surrounded me. Some touched my scalp. Kinda forward, but that's typical here and I took it in stride. Everybody wanted to know where I got the idea, that they'd never seen hair like it before, if I saw it in the big city of Tegucigalpa. They thought the center airstrip down my head was hardcore. Fresh style, I guess you could translate it. See, weird thing about Hondurans to me. They'll make fun of you to no end if you try to ignore them. But if you humor them and talk to them, you'll realize they're just having fun with you, and they're generally nice people. They might keep laughing at you after you leave, but they're good at pretending to be nice while you're there. Or they could be sincere, and I'm just revealing my inner cynic. Talked with them about 5 minutes before I told 'em I really did need to get online.

Yesterday I also got my first thing in the mail from the States. My girlfriend and a couple good friends sent me various items, vitamins, a book, some keepsakes, trail mix. I like my people. I wish they weren't spread out all over the map. It was standard mail, and she sent it last week Monday. So it took about 11 days.

Today marks two months I've been with my chick in the US. The 19th. 19. Dark Tower, anyone? I forget...can good things be nineteen?

Somebody have a drink in honor of us, if you don't mind.

And now I have finally finished this blog entry. Good grief it took awhile.

I'm leaving for Santa Lucia tomorrow morning.

Easter Sunday, March 23, 2008

Today, I got called a "frijolero" ("beaner") by my host mom because I asked for some extra beans for lunch. As far as I'm concerned, that means I won at the Peace Corps. At least earned a ton of XP. I will sing the song by Molotov now to celebrate.

That is all, carry on.

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Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Today, I got called a frijolero again because I asked for more beans again during lunch. Must have more protein. I'm sorely lacking the the fruit department, and vegetables are just barely enough, I think. Beans and rice and eggs and bologna are cheap, apparently, because I'm eating a lot of it. I know fruit is expensive right now. I can probably get all the canteloupe I could ever eat right now, from what I hear. But I'm devouring any tomatos or peppers I get. Cabbage is popular. Onions for flavor in the beans, it seems. I get a tiny bit of chicken occasionally...like, part of a leg. Not a whole drumstick.

I scored some vitamin C chewable tablets from a buddy. I'm rationing them out to keep the scurvy at bay. I might need to break down and buy some OJ every other day when these tablets get eaten. They're so delicious. But yeah, I figure I could use some multivitamins. Coulda sworn I packed some.

Big event today was a field trip in the afternoon. We learned about watersheds and microwatersheds in theory yesterday, looking at topographic maps and whatnot. Boring. Don't get me wrong, I do and have always enjoyed looking at maps, but not for 4 hours.

Today, we went to the place we were looking at on the topographic map. About 20 minutes away by LandCruiser (these jeeps are so nice). We climbed a mountain. We were basically going uphill from a starting point (a well) to find all the area from which water would flow to reach the well, basically, to track potential contamination of the water source. Used GPS thingos to make waypoints. Used machetes to hack through the brush. We got halfway up the mountain and it was a straight pine forest, so we didn't machetes anymore. We left packs and machetes at a point we'd return to when we headed back and pressed onward and upward. I kept my machete. Just in case of chupacabras, doncha know. Made it to the top. They all took lots of pictures. The view was the best so far...top of a rocky vertical outcrop on top of a mountain. In La Trinidad. Then when it was time to head back, everyone else was in single file going down. I hate walking in single file. So I found my own switchbacks again and also ran down the mountain, Man-vs-Wild style. With a machete. I didn't trip at all. It's the parkour, I'm sure. Well, I didn't trip at all until the last 10 meters or so walking on the road to the cars. Totally wiped out on the dirt road. Tossed the machete so I could catch myself on my hands. Guess I needed to be kept humble. It didn't work. I know I'm awesome at the speed hiking.

Didn't really learn a lot. Water flows downhill, perpendicular to the elevation lines on a topo map. Not difficult to figure out which points are going to result in contaminated water flow to a downhill point. Microwatersheds are easy.

Supposedly next week we're shuffling our Spanish classes a bit, since we all changed proficiency levels. Who knows what'll happen. Saturday morning we get to drive at 6:45 am to Tegus for immigration stuff. I think this is the event that'll let us stay here longer than 2 months.

I'm reading Faust, courtesy of the Gutenberg Project, when I'm not writing or reading downloaded emails. I'm about halfway done.

Not sure if I mentioned it before, but I am drinking tea pretty regularly. Coffee is huge here...so all the adults pretty much drink it. I tell people I don't like it, because I don't, but I ask for tea instead. Whatever the tea is, it isn't bad. Lots of sugar. It's not in a bag, I don't think. It's some sort of tree bark. Sort of a burnt orange brown color. Lighter than cinnamon. I'm getting the hang of sipping hot beverages. I feel like the terrorists have now won, because Alex is drinking hot drinks now.

Another fun fact: Tigo is everywhere. Tigo is a cell phone company here...I think it has one competitor. By everywhere, I mean even the traffic cop uniforms of the National Police force have Tigo logos on them. Yeah.

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Friday, March 28, 2008 or so

Made a basic wood-burning stove out of clay bricks and mud we mixed up from dirt, manure, and water. Pretty interesting. Metal chimney, metal sheet for the cooking surface, lots of shards of ceramic tile inside as insulation to keep heat and reduce firewood consumption.

Also made an oven out of the same materials, and also a big 50 gallon (?) barrel. Like the kind you transport petroleum in. Barrel got heavily modified, rebar welded inside to form a two-level grill, chimney hole cut out in the side, and one of the circular ends got converted to a door/hatch. So you set this barrel on its side on top of an adobe slab. Then you take another barrel that has been cut vertically once and had both circular ends removed, so its more like a curved metal sheet than a barrel and you wrap the first barrel/grill with it so theres some space between them. This insulates heat. Cover the second barrel/sheet with the same mud mix to keep it in place and insulate more, plug a pre-fab metal chimney in the top, and poof. Bread oven.

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Saturday, March 29, 2008

Group bus ride to Tegucigalpa to get processed at the immigration building. I think we got approved for 2 year temporary residency or some equivalent, but they didn't really tell us what was going on.

The cool part was it was the first reunion of all of Hondu-12, the original 47 we had in Santa Lucia. Much socializing was done.

After the 4 hours there, we split up and someone convinced the bus driver to take us to the mall for a half hour so we could get food and shop at the grocery store. The mall is like any mall you'd expect to see in the US, honestly. Massive food court, arcade, etc etc. Two stories, escalators, white tiles, escalators. Only weird thing to me was the supermarket on one end acting as an achor store.

Two slices of a medium pizza at the Pizza Hut in the food court cost 64 Lempiras. A full medium pizza cost like 200 limps. So I starved myself. I'm a cheapskate. Thankfully I got some discarded sausage topping someone didn't want, and later got a good cheese and bread sandwich from someone who went to the grocery store and realized they had no fridge in which to store their edible swag. And I had some OJ when I got back to town and talked to my chick.

Also gotta tell you about all the fun liquids they sell in a bag. Remember the ice cream I got from that one guy? That's a normal way to package liquids. There's a brand of potable water they sell in breast-implant-sized bags, thick milkshake-like milk sold in a bag (very tasty...no corn syrup, just sugar), and you can buy liquados (like a smoothie or milkshake) at a restaurant on the highway nearby and they come in a plastic bag with a straw sticking out of it. Tasty. The novelty of the bags is wearing off quick but I figured I would mention it.

It was while indulging in one of the aforementioned milkshakes that I decided that nothing is more Honduras than a vast expanse of pine forest, with occasional palm trees scattered throughout.

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Tuesday, April 1, 2008

April Fool's Day? Not a big thing in Honduras, apparently. The gringos are having a bonfire tonight. I'll head over after I eat dinner in a bit. I had an insight. In AmeriCorps, writing my weekly blog was like a HUGE stress-reliever for me. Kept me connected. Here, the blog has taken a backseat. I'm spending most of my time writing to my girlfriend...so she's getting the bulk of my stress-relief. After writing to her, I feel very little motivation to write up a blog. Not sure if that makes sense, but I think it's accurate.

All the volunteers that come to visit and teach of stuff keep sympathizing with us about how dull and...odd the bulk of training is compared to the first 3 months of introductory time on-site. They basically advise we treat training as all introductory stuff, giving you all your options. You might only use one or two lessons from training in your actual job, and even then, you'll need to shadow a veteran volunteer for a few weeks before you'll feel confident doing the task on your own.

So yeah, I'm looking forward to the end of training for that reason. Eagerly awaiting the future for a few other reasons, too, but I'm trying to keep my reasons for being here at the front of my mind as much as I can.

I do have to give my host family props for two nights. Both times I was feeling antisocial and sleepy, so I was holed up in my room listening to music with the lights off around 9 pm. They usually go to sleep at 930. They called me out once to eat popsicles with them, and another time we all devoured a watermelon before going to bed. Yum. I think watermelons are sweeter here. Both times we talked and joked for the duration of the meal, and it cheered me up.

toodles

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Tuesday, April 2nd, 2008

Figured I should give you some "awww"-inducing info about the 1.5 year old girl in the host family. She's learning more and more words every day...learned my name, can say hola and adios when appropriate, but doesn't realize yet that you only need to say it once. So I can spend 5 minutes with her exchanging Holas and Adios's. Usually after it gets too much , the family breaks up the conversation somehow. She also tries to have conversations with me. 99% of what she says during these extemporaneous exchanges is unintelligible, to me at any rate. But they always crack up the family if they eavesdrop. A couple other neighbors indulge her in the same fashion, I've noticed, so I don't really feel like a silly gringo.

Also, remember how I said I was doing pullups and ab excercises on the railroad rail and cinderblock wall next to my room? Well, she's seen me doing it, and now can climb up the back of the couch like I climb up the cinderblock wall, and she does cheater's pullups on the side of the dining room table, and also tries to mimic the ab excercises I do while hanging over the doorway. The mom said she learned all those movements from me over the last two weeks. Youngest parkour enthusiast ever is in Honduras, and a neutral third party would agree she's adorable.

Also, I have a habit of heading outside my room to the yard every night to look up at the stars. Usually the family is still up, and sometimes they look with me and we chat, sometimes they let me meditate awhile on my own. But the little girl has seen me staring straight up, just craning my neck and standing still, so sometimes she'll look at me and say my name, then jerk her head up and look at the ceiling for a second before looking back at me again. Then I try to explain to her that there are no stars indoors, especially not during the day.

We also have lots of fun handing items to each other repeatedly. We can pass a water bottle back and forth for hours. Who needs computer games when you can play Pass the Bottle? Too bad Pass the Bottle isn't compatible with Vista. I hear the sequel will be, though.

The new Spanish class is turning out to be pretty cool. Current teacher is apparently a bit of an activist at heart, so she enjoyed the heck out of my presentation on the situation in Tibet with all the recent violence, and we talked about the death penalty today. I like talking about that stuff way more than recounting what I did over the weekend, or what I used to do when I was living in the US.

A couple interesting notes about Honduran culture: I might be repeating myself, but I doubt I mentioned it...when I was visiting the volunteer outside Santa Barbara a couple weeks back, he gave me some info. Most of the strangers etiquette we have in the US doesn't apply in Honduras, at least in the campo. You can cut in line, and nobody will mind. Evidence: people cut in front of you and just ask for what they want from the clerk, and get it. Even if the clerk was in the middle of handing back a customer their change, sometimes. You can stare at people passively to your heart's content. Evidence: everybody and their mother is going to stare at you. Which means you can say hello to pretty much anyone, and since they're looking at you, there's eye contact and they have to say hello back. I tested this, and it even works on the toughest-looking street thugs outside the billiards bar at night. Doesn't mean they won't cut ya anyway, but their mothers raised 'em right in one regard, anyway. You can even just pass someone on the street, say hi ("buenas" is sort of like "g'day" in that you can say it regardless of the time of day or night) without making eye contact with mirror shades on without turning your head at all, and pretty much everyone within 10 feet of you in every direction will say hi back, just in case. Can be a pretty fun game that you could never play in the US, except maybe in a very small town.

Speaking of phrases, you can say "Que le vaya bien" or "Vaya pues" instead of Adios when the other person is walking away from you. Both pretty much mean "I hope you travel safely," but run through the same sort of strainer England used to get "Goodbye" out of "God be with you." I think I already mentioned "Buen probecho." I have lots of fun saying single phrases to complete strangers.

Also, speaking of etiquette not bothering anyone, you don't HAVE to say anything to anyone, unless they're trying to talk to you in a civil fashion. You can pretty much get anyway with anything mild when dealing with strangers on a cursory level, said my volunteer. But on the other hand, some minor things (to Americans) are huge deals here. Never ever ever slam a car door. Close 'em with about 25% of the force you're used to using in the states. Get in the taxi, settle yourself, then reach out and slowly close the door behind you. Else the taxista will yell at you for trying to break his car. I was warned about this beforehand, early on, and then forgot in my first taxi way back when and got chastised.

I also downloaded the Skype installer onto my flash drive, so I can install it on any computer in any internet cafe and run Skype. Meebo.com was nice and all, but it ran so slowly on computers here. So if you guys are dying to talk to me, keep a Skype window running in the background and get my info from me. I'm online at least twice a week. Cool thing about Skype is that most computers have headsets and webcams, so I can video chat with my lady back home. We are quite stoked.

March 15, 2008

I still have an annoying cough. Comes and goes throughout the day. Really annoying. I went for a run this morning with a friend/trainee of mine around a futbol field. Showed her some basic parkour vaults in the central plaza in town. Felt real good to get exercise again. No cough until I started writing later this morning and afternoon.

I'm actually writing all this by hand. I loaned my laptop to my boss so he could use the good internet connection in his office in Tegus to download Gnumeric for me so I could hopefully use the WatSan spreadsheets like everyone else with a laptop.

Let's see...my new house. I rather like the layout. A main house with a living room (with a tv and stereo system). Two bedrooms as far as I can tell, a kitchen and another room with a hammock and two gates to the outside patio/backyard. Toilet and shower rooms aren't connected to the house. The wood-burning stove room is also not connected, nor is my own room. My room is brand new, 100% concrete, on the other side of the yard. Not a bad room. Heats up during the day due to poor ventilation, but the windows are enough to get it nice and cool during the nights. My room is huge compared to my room in Santa Lucia, but it has a work in progress feel. Unpolished concrete slab floor, only 1/2 the walls are painted, and there's a pile of scrap window panes in one corner with a can of paint. When my family helped me put up my mosquito net around the bed, they had to put nails into the walls and I used thread to suspend the net. It's pretty makeshift, but now I'm sleeping with a mosquito net like a pro. I only have 3 plastic chairs and 2 coffee tables to organize my stuff and keep it off the ground away from the ants that live in the cracks in the floor, but it's sufficient. Power outlet for my iPod, phone, and computer recharge needs. The main house is mostly concrete, but with tile floors, wooden rafters, and sheet metal roof visible above the rafters. No insulation, no real need for it.

Family is pretty cool. I was out late last night hanging with the gringos, and my mom said she'd leave the side door from the street to the inside patio unlocked. I got in, locked it behind me, brushed my teeth at the pila outside their bedrooms, and went to bed without waking anyone. My mom told me she got up at around midnight and worried for me, but saw I had locked the gate and knew I was home safe. Said I was silent like a cat. I said "rawr!" and made a cat claw pose in my head but I think in reality we just laughed together. She likes jokes, and I'm getting to the point where I can crack a few of my own. It helps when your audience is jovial to begin with, like this family.

The 12 or 13 year old boy and girl like to talk to me. The 6 year old boy is pretty shy, and we only really just exchange pleasantries. Hi, bye, bon apetite. If you ever see someone eating in Honduras, you can say "buen probecho!" and you'll get a "gracias" in response. Total strangers. But yeah, the 1.5 year old girl has learned my name and hands random items to me everyone once in awhile (money, photos, food, etc). My 18 year old brother has been busy lately. The cat is used to having its tail pulled and being dragged around the tile floor. Isn't big on getting petted, but rubs up against me every so often. It's a pretty cool cat to be honest. Indoor and outdoor cat. Boy cat.

I realized, walking through the streets, that sleeping dogs and cats invariably make me feel better about life in general. It's a comforting sight.

The other night I shifted in my bed and heard a crash from beneath me. I grabbed a flashlight and saw a metal bar between two broken wooden support slats had buckled and fallen. There was now a big pit in the center of my mattress. Today I finally fixed it. Lifted the mattress up (dusty! cough cough), snapped the metal bar in two with my beastly strength and put the two pieces at 90 degrees to their original position, now across the other wooden support slats. So it's much more comfortable now. Hopefully it will last.

A typical weekday! I wake up at around 4 am now when the dad gets ready to go out to do road construction a fair distance away. By this time, I'm cold so I put on more pj's and put my headphones back in.

Some random guy just came to the window of the living room in which I'm writing, bought some tortillas from my mom and gave me some "charamuscas." At a distance, it looks like the baggie of heroin Travolta buys in Pulp Fiction. It's actually frozen milk and sugar in a plastic bag. Bite off a corner of the bag and eat it like a freeziepop thing. Icy. So right now I'm basically sucking on the outside of a plastic bag that has changed hands more times than I care to imagine. But it's cold and sweet and free so it's good on this hot day. I just asked my mom and she said that guy is the son of her neighbor who is hosting another trainee buddy of mine across the street. So I didn't just take candy from a stranger. Honest.

Typical day, take 2. I sleep with my iPod on all night. Headphones fall out as I toss and turn. Wake up at 4 am, go back to sleep, wake up at 5:45 or so when my mom decides to start making tortillas by hand-grinding the corn to make the dough. Right outside my window at the wood-burning stove. My alarm is set for 6:07 am, so I listen to fast music to wake me up until then. Coooold bucket bath for a half hour. I make noises when it's time to rinse. Get dressed, eat breakfast, typically some sort of fried or scrambled egg, beans and tortillas. Kill time and walk to my 7:30 am Spanish class. Language in the mornings, return home for lunch, could be nice hot soup on a nice hot day, or another plato tipico with beans and rice and egg and heated cold cuts, similar to bologna. Also, "chop suey" is popular here. Fried noodles with veggies and meat tossed in. Back to class, at the library this time for tech training. Last week we did 3 field trips to practice surveying. After class at 4:30 I typically chat with gringos or go to the internet cafe for a couple hours, then return home for dinner at 7 pm.

Dinner is a variation on the same, but last night I had baleadas with beans and manteca. Manteca is this weird sour white butter sort of thing. Put ingredients in center of a white flour tortilla, fold tortilla in half, and poof, one baleada. I like them more with just beans and eggs inside, though. Then I chill with the family for a bit, do Spanish homework, get tired and get ready for bed. Brush my teeth at the pila (it's the above ground water basin for storage of water between water days, and for washing clothes...has a concrete washboard and drain for the grey water), do some stargazing at 9 pm and crash. Usually hard.

Next week is Semana Santa, or holy week. The whole country basically takes a week off for vacations and rest and celebrations, some with religious significance (palm sunday, good friday, easter) and some without. I have normal days Monday and Tuesday, a cultural day Wednesday with all the gringos and their families at the library, then freedom until next Monday. Should be interesting.

I'm gonna take a nap. Told my family I was gonna sleep a little...like a cat, and they laughed.

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Good nap. Ridiculous how much my iPod can revitalize me. Bed is definitely fixed sufficiently. Eating lunch at 3 pm right now. Egg with bologna-esque mystery meat cooked in, refried beans and rice and tortillas. This family likes spicy food and they always have some local brand tobasco on hand. Good people.

Slow day today. Dad and all the sons went to the beach. I can only go on trips if my whole family goes. So its me, the mom and the two girls. Older sister said it would be a boring day, I told her I enjoy dias tranquilos. Need to write, get some rest...good way to relax. I think we're going to play Bingo later. They play with labeled pictures rather than plain numbers here, so its good vocabulary practice right now.

For now, I'm gonna switch back to writing to my chick. Toodles.

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March 20, 2008

Random fact to give you some small insight: in this part of Honduras, if the light bulb in your ceiling starts flickering, it's not because the bulb isn't all the way tight, or is faulty. It's because the electrical current from the grid is actually fluctuating drastically. The PCVeterans tell me that you can murder laptop and iPod batteries by leaving them plugged in all the time here.

One month anniversary with my chick yesterday. Celebratory phone call with fairly good reception followed by fond thoughts exchanged via AIM for an hour or two. Pretty darn good day. Pretty much set in stone that she's coming to visit for my birthday for a week or two. We're going to Copan Ruinas. Plane tickets haven't been purchased just yet because I want to get a price for a hotel first so I know how long a vacation I can actually afford.

I am totally boppin out in my bed to Chuck Berry and Richard Hell and the Cramps. I want to do the Pulp Fiction dance with a certain someone. Pre-heroin OD scene. You know what I'm talkin about. Lots of Pulp Fiction references in this one, huh? My guitar-playing buddy loves the movie, has most of it memorized. He got dengue fever last weekend! He's the first in our group. We think he's pretty B-A. He's working on getting his appetite back now...got over the fever and the eyeball ache in a couple days. He said there was 24 hours where he just plain didnt want to move. So much so that he didn't. Just sipped water when he could lift his head. There are 4 strains of dengue here...catch one, and you're immune to it. Catch them all, and man, you need to learn how to use bug repellent, man.

Let's see...got my computer back. Got Gnumeric working, but there's a wonky bug when you import excel files...all the cell dimensions get skewed and apparently you have to manually reset them all so you can read the data in the cells. Tedious. There's got to be a better way.

The cultural day yesterday was neat. Spent about 2 hours the night before last shelling tamarinds. I'd forgotten how good tamarinds are raw. But the plan was to make a tamarind punch sort of thing, so we did. Used a blender on the shelled tamarinds. Poured boiling water onto the wad of tamarind goop to make a sort of tamarind tea, then ran the mix through a colender to have a smooth liquid drink. Add a lot of sugar, stir to dissolve it, then add ice to make it refreshing. Turned out very well. Made a big pot for 50 people or so, and it was gone. Lots of added sugar. Today I told my mom we need to make it again. She said if I'm willing to buy the sugar (most expensive ingredient) then she'll get the tamarinds. I'm totally gonna take her up on that one of these weeks.

Cultural day. Went to the local school near the central plaza (though they call it the parque, not the plaza) and there were dances by the schoolkids and a big potluck lunch. Found out I had to give a little speech about how I prepared the fresco de tamarindo about 5 minutes beforehand. Yeah, that was an awkward speech. My mom just yelled at me from the crowd everything I needed to say because I was drawing blanks. I ended by telling everyone it was the best fresco ever and everyone laughed, so I guess I did alright. Afterward, I found out that my Spanish skills have leveled up. I was novice high with a little plus sign, now I'm intermediate medium. So I went up two levels in 5 weeks...that's apparently pretty good. It's amazing how much better you can sound when you remember how to talk in past tense. Also, intermediate medium is what is required to be sent into the field at the end of the 3 months of training, so I'm golden.

So yeah, tamarinds. And now Kashmir comes up on my iPod. A couple fond thoughts, heading your way, Sarah.

Two wrong numbers on my cell phone in two days. Amusing. I'm sure they'll get back to their buddy and be like "Dude, I tried calling you but I got some gringo instead. What gives?"

Make that a ton of wrong numbers. And the call keeps getting dropped so I can't explain to these two people that I don't want to tell them who I am. They should be able to tell me who I'm supposed to be so I can tell them I'm not that person so they can leave me the heck alone. Not keep asking who they're talking to.

I finally realized I can take better-than-nothing quality pics with the webcam built in to my XO laptop. Got some shots from my rooftop mango paradise, some shots of the host fam. I'm happy in 'em. Aww happy Alex. I'll try to upload them in another blog post...I think it should go smoothly. Otherwise, I'll just make a new facebook album.

I'm gonna make a € sign just because I can on this keyboard. It's the small things like that that make me like this computer.

I helped my sister do some homework today. Halo is a direct cognate into spanish, and...and...I forgot the other words we looked up in the dictionary. I have terrible retention of trivia.

I would like to give a shout-out to Project Gutenberg. I downloaded a plaintext file with Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina" from their website...two freaking megabytes of .txt data. Ridiculous length. Tried loading it up on my laptop, and this text file locked up my XO. Let me repeat that, my XO laptop got pwned in the face by a plaintext rendition of classic Russian literature. So I went back to the internet cafe the next day and broke the file down into eight 200 kb chunks that my XO can stomach. Got Faust, Treasure Island, Paradise Lost, The Trial, Crime and Punishment and The Idiot also, and broke them down into chunks, too. Faust is actually pretty short...only one chunk. So I'll probably read it first, when I have nothing else to do. I have 2 years. If anyone has suggestions on other stuff I should read that I can easily get in free plaintext format, do let me know. Robinson Crusoe might be a good one... I can just imagine the man is actually crying out Wilson! Wilson! when I get bored. I don't really wanna try Moby Dick or David Copperfield. Anna Karenina sounds pretty boring, too. I'm looking forward to finally finishing The Idiot and Paradise Lost, though. I might take a stab at Proust. No Hemingway on the PG as far as I could tell.

I'm now up-to-date on my xkcd.com too. I love that comic. Had my second job interview with my bosses this week, too. They asked what I considered necessary to lead a happy life here. I told them that I need the basic necessities of life: food, water, clothing, shelter and internet access. My morale can soar with these things. Electricity is understood to be included with internet access. They said that would be totally fine.

Now I'm bopping out to Boys Don't Cry by the Cure. Seriously, I think I look like a 15 yr old schoolgirl when I dance around on my bed in front of the computer. Thankfully the webcam is off. Air drums and air microphone for the win. Who needs a PS3 to play Rock Band? Not this guy. I'm in a good mood.

Hey Mom and Dad...remember those albino-looking geckos that we had at the house and in the garage all the time? I have one in my room. He lives up by the ceiling and I like to think he eats any mosquitos that get repelled by the mosquito net. I need a name for my pet gecko.

Cheers, mates. Que le vaya bien.

Finally realized that not having a real working camera isnt an excuse for no photo gallery if I have a mighty XO laptop with built-in webcam.

This is me on the concrete slab roof above my room. Not too difficult to climb up, with or without a ladder. I really enjoy it up there.

A shot of some of the other parts of my barrio. The ladder there is going up to their water reserve tank, I think.

Slightly different angle. Check out the rebar sticking out of my roof. This was intentional so they can add a second room on top of mine at some later date. You are not hallucinating, by the way. That orange house IS a bit different than the rest of the houses in the area. Apparently a family of 4 lives there...they have a garage for their car and everything. Two stories, just for them.

This is the railroad rail that they used as a center reinforcement beam for my ceiling. There was 3 or 4 feet of excess, so they just left it. Maybe for the addition theyre planning to add...notice the cinderblock walls. But I use it to do pullups. Good for the grip muscles, and good for turning into a Spartan.

There is a mango tree that grows over my room. We can eat these right off the branch. Theyre not real mangos, theyre called green mangos. Crunchy like a crisp apple. They cut em into slices, and add herbed salt and chile sauce. Pretty good, and very popular. A gringo buddy compared them to the pickle in the US. Very popular, sold at a ton of roadside shops, but the green mango tastes better. I never liked pickles.

I think this is the first time my host mom had seen my laptop. Thats her and the 1.5 yr old. The shack is the wood-burning stove and secondary kitchen. By my eye is where the pila is. My front door is directly opposite the doorway they are standing in.

Host mom had to climb up to take a better look.

1.5 yr old felt lonely because she couldnt climb up to get a better look. That wall there, with the window, yeah, I can climb up that onto this roof in about 3 seconds. Feels good to have constantly bruised forearms again.

Later, I wrote some and the sun got lower in the sky. Then other host sister decided to hang out with me for a bit.

Pretty clouds...they look really yellow on this internet cafe screen. They were more pink. Cant really tell, but theres an occasional palm tree mixed in with the standard woods.

Thats Negro, our cat. He likes me. Hes pretty cool.

I have no idea why he puts up with this sort of treatment. Host sister decided to help me get a better shot of the cat. If anyone wants to add a caption and post it on lolcats, feel free. Just let me know if you do. I can try to get you the original file, too.

My host dad. This is the next day, inside the living room of the main house. This guy is pretty cool. Hes worked with theodolites and total stations, installed water systems of all sorts, and now works on road construction all over the country. Fun to talk to, and seems like a great dad. The kids love him.

Everybody else in the family except the 18 year old host brother...he wanders around town a lot. Friends are cooler than family, doncha know.

This is my room. My bed with iPod wires creeping up from the floor, table with misc. possessions on it, then my suitcase, then a chair with my backpack. Mosquito net around the bed, rigged up with sewing thread and nails in the concrete walls. Backpack, clothesline for my towels and sweaty clothes, second chair for laundry, mirror that has yet to be hung up. We needs big nails. Mirror, scrap panes of glass for my windows, my window, my red scrub brush thing for the shower.

And this is a shot of where I took all the other shots from. Door, chair for shoes, power outlet with surge protector for my iPod, computer and phone, bed again.

I feel like I owe you guys an update.

My boss is taking my laptop to his office in Tegus this weekend to try and download a spreadsheet application called Gnumeric for me so I can process topographic data with the big kids. So I cant really give you a home-written blog of epic proportions.

I CAN tell you that my family here is pretty cool, and far less experienced hosting PC trainees, so they´re way more curious about me and my habits. Not a bad thing. Food still rocks.

They have a 1.5 yr old little girl, and she just might be the cutest thing ever. Just starting to talk. Can learn a new word every couple days. Can shuffle along at a good pace, and feed herself.

Theres a son and daughter at around 10 or 12 yrs old, and an 18 yr old son. I´ve met a fair amount of the 18 yr old´s friends. I´m supposed to give one some English tutorials sometime.

So yeah, new routine is Spanish from 730 to lunch, then WatSan tech training with surveying and data processing spreadsheets in the afternoon. More or less. I´ve learned how to use a theodolite and a total station this week. Those are the surveying doodads you typically see on tripods used by road construction crews. More or less.

Ive spent far too much time on AIM these last couple days, says my wallet. However, I say I haven´t spent enough time. Life is full of conflict.

What else can I say real quick? Um...definitely feeling some tug back to the US thanks to some chick, but other than that I´m glad I´m here and look forward to not being in school again anymore. A black cat lives in my house. Its name is Negro, because it´s fur is black.

Gonna send this before the internet cafe decides to be only a cafe again.

It's February 29th. I've had a cold or something for 2 days...sneezy runny nose and cough...not terrible, but first real bit of unpleasantness. It's called El Gripe here. Gree-pay. As in, "estoy enfermo...tengo el gripe" / "i'm sick...i have El Gripe" So yeah, not really motivated to do anything, including writing up a blog. A cold front came through 2 days ago...apparently the pressure change or something is screwing me up. Or I caught a bug that's been floating around among the gringos. I call my peace corps crew The Gringos here because yeah, we're mostly white and individual ethnicities don't matter to me. I'm just here to mess with pipes. Glorified plumber, someone called me.

It's a bit after 10 here...did a lot of stargazing earlier this evening while the gringos waited around outside this one guy's house to buy cell phones. Got mine. We're all waiting until morning for the phones to hopefully activate...because we all put down a fair percentage of our cash for these things. not the wisest move in my opinion...but you can call me a lemming if you want. we'll see how it goes in the morning.

I have stories to tell from this week. big one is the trip to Tegucigalpa for a trial-by-fire survival spanish exercise. took a bus, a taxi, bought a melon, taxi, buses, taxi, peace corps hq, peace corps ride back home.

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It's definitely Thursday, and I think that makes it March 7, 2008

Um...so the trip to Tegus I mentioned earlier is pretty lame compared to the trip to Santa Barbara I made to visit a current PCV who has been there 9 months...but to sum it up, the open air markets are quite a trip. Well, the ones with butchers are, anyway. Think of a meat freezer...without the freezer. It woulda been considered hygenic back in the European middle ages. I'll definitely be heavy on the beans and rice and fruit when I start cooking for myself in many, many months. I was a little spooked about traveling around in cities...but that trip a week ago reminded me that all big cities are pretty much the same. Be aware, be smart, and you probably won't get messed with.

One quick note: I'd love to hear from anybody about global news. Simple stuff like "Hey, did you hear that Castro stepped down? Yeah, and Benazir Buto's party ousted the military in the most recent elections in Pakistan. AND (someone) beat (the other dem) in the Texas and Ohio primaries! (hint hint)" Don't need details...most of my attention isn't on global politics, but I don't want to be completely out of the loop either. How's the situation in Burma lately?

The good story is about my visit to the state of Santa Barbara to a PCV living in a small town there. He's also a WatSan technician (ie, no real engineering training), like me. Pretty good guy. The first night we just chatted about music (protopunk, mostly) and typical newbie-to-vet Q&A.

Had dinner at a typical restaurant. Family-owned, attached to the house, maybe 4 tables and 20 chairs. Small. Um...rustic. 4 walls, though. Not a bad place. I was and still am a bit sick, so I ordered some soup which turned out to be Honduran ramen noodles with chicken flavor (!) which was pretty good in my condition.

Went back, played with his half-doberman pet dog...it's amazing the difference between gringo-raised dogs and real dogs. Real dogs don't get pet much, and don't enter the house, and mostly just avoid the people that don't regularly feed them. Then his neighbor showed up while we were outside on his porch, and we got almost literally dragged to a closed restaurant where this guy procedes to ask for more beer in drunk campo spanish from the sleeping owner of the establishment.

Went back to the house and talked for 3 hours. I couldn't sleep because it would be rude, and I had to have a beer for the same reason. Best way to stave off dehydration? Beer. No really...Tyler Durden told me so. I'm not a big fan of Port Royale. Did listen to a couple entertaining conversations...cockfighting is totally legal and popular, so this guy was telling my PCV that all the best roosters are from the US, so next time he goes there for Christmas vacation, he should bring him back a fighting rooster. When we told him that airlines tend to frown upon livestock being transported across national borders, this man assures us that if he tells them the rooster is his pet (mascota) everything will be fine. A friend of his does it all the time.

The next morning we went to my PCV's office to meet up with a local engineer who wanted some help with a project...but he flaked out on us. So we went home in hopes of doing some work with the Excel spreadsheet that basically does all the number crunching for us after we do the surveying...tells us what kind of pipes, what sizes to use, and where we have issues with pressure along the line that we need to deal with, and most importantly, whether the system will work at all along the terrain we mapped. So we go home to work on the computer...and there's no electricity anymore. Hmm. So we take the computer to the local internet cafe/XBox arcade but they don't have power either. Se fue la luz / The light left. Learned that expression by heart. So...with nothing else to do, we took a bus to the capital and hit this A-MAZING internet cafe.

This place was brand new. My PCV said it's the best kept secret in town. unmarked doorway. No signs. you go up some stairs inside, pass some slum-like storage rooms that are apparently being renovated to be and currently are pigeon roosts with no doors...then you turn a corner, go through a glass door with well-oiled (normal by US standards) hydraulic damper, into an air-conditioned paradise of information technology. Soft lighting complemented by strip lights on the ceiling. First time I've been a wall-to-wall carpeted room in this country. Leather office chairs. Cozy. Pleasant. Relaxing. It was amazing. Only 6 computers, but they didn't have a ton of business, and they were the fastest I've used so far. I sat down and got busy. Hit up AIM, my chick happened to log in soon after so we talked for a good 2 hours. Read some blogs, talked to some other friends...shoulda read up on news and whatnot, but got distracted. Good times.

When we left to find lunch, I was quite literally taken aback when I set foot back onto the streets Santa Barbara. I had completely forgotten which country I was in while I was inside on the intarwebs. I'm not sure exactly what you call that sort of twilight zone moment...but it was easily the most significant kind of jarring moment I think I've ever had. Dust, heat, glare from the sun, noise...none of that inside that computar oasis. And the 2.5 hours only cost me like 40 limps. Cheap.

Oh yeah, the cell phone works. I will try to remember to put the number on my facebook so you can call me. It's free for me to receive calls, so feel free to call after 5 or 6. But I have a normal schedule now...so I try to get to sleep by 10 central.

Ate lunch at a typical bar/restaurant. Kinda cool. Walk through an open doorway, down a random hallway, then into a split level with an open wall to the outdoors. Crazy friendly staff guy. I had some french fries. They were good. I like the ketchup.

Went back to the house via the bus again and napped. Talked a bit...he has some good stories. 2 weeks ago he was surveying in a cow pasture...medium tall grasses...got 3/4 through and looked down and realized his pant legs and boots were crawling with ticks. Apparently ticks swarm. So he brushed them off as best he could and kept going. That night he took probably 100 of them off his legs, and maybe 50 more off his arms. He looks like he has chicken pox now as the bites all heal. Thankfully the ticks here don't carry any serious diseases, or so we're told.

I also pulled my first tick off my leg my last night in Santa Barbara. Was an interesting experience. Did it successfully...head was still attached to the tick and not to me.

The PCV also told me the story of his first visit to a work site. He told it well, and I don't have the energy to do it justice, but suffice it to say that spelunking through a subterranean water source full of bats to a hidden clean water source half a mile inside a mountain, and then surveying the cave, is not easy. And not all flashlights are as waterproof as the packaging claims.

Most insight I got was that it's totally possible for a liberal arts major to handle surveying, and even teach himself Excel and AutoCad. Yes, Dad, you read that right. AutoCad experience is a hot commodity in the water systems design arena of Honduras. You told me so. And WatSan workers don't usually experience the typical initial 3 months of drudgery and boredom searching for work and sitting around doing nothing. Everybody wants water, badly, so people tend to have you booked solid after the first month. And with work, for us, comes community integration. Also, the thing to do seems to be to hire a neighbor to do your laundry...because it's cost effective given the time it takes an American to do it, and we waste water, and soap, and can't rinse properly...or at least that's me.

Ended up doing some number crunching on the spreadsheet with him...so I now have experience with it. And I got some pointers on how to structure my data notebook while surveying. And found out exactly what a theadolite is. Theodolite? Spellcheck likes theodolite more, so I guess that's the right spelling. I can type much faster on this tiny keyboard now than when I first got it...even though my hands are almost on top of eachother they're so close together.

But yeah...had a good time. Traveled successfully...I can get a taxista to drive me where I want to go, I can haggle with reasonable success, I can get bus tickets to where I want to go, and I don't let my backpack out of my sight ever. I am never going to travel long distances with more than just a backpack. I'm still paranoid about theft...but it's a healthy paranoia.

I took some time off from school today and yesterday...two half days, basically, for me. Got it cleared through the proper channels. I should be sleeping, but meh, you guys get to profit with something to read. My nose is runny and I have a cough. Pretty sure I had a fever for a few hours while I was in Santa Barbara, but knocked it out with some aspirin. It definitely wasn't the climate change that screwed me up...I'm leaning more towards the flu vaccine they gave us last week. But vaccines haven't messed me up like this before...so I dunno for sure.

My host mom is awesome. She's given me soup and lots of tea. And even some Saltine crackers. I have to write up a report of my trip to Santa Barbara in Spanish for tomorrow...I dun wanna.

This Sunday I leave Santa Lucia for Field-Based Training (FBT) with just my WatSan group in a different city a bit south of Tegus. Supposed to be more rustic, with people not as used to catering to gringos. For example, hot milk with cereal, and tons of sugar with the coffee and tea is common here. But my family gives me cold milk and sugar in a small container on the side because they know Americans prefer it that way. The new family will probably be less understanding when I commit social faux pas, too. But we'll see. FBT is different because I'll be doing far more technical training than I have been, and less general CORE lectures about the goals and methods of Peace Corps in sustainable development (most of which is detailed explanations of why it's good to teach a man to fish, and why it's good to not tell him he's a moron for not knowing how to fish already).

That being said, I should mention that the main reason I'm learning how to build stuff and survey is so I can teach other people to build the same stuff and survey for themselves. Hence the importance of speaking Spanish well and being accepted by the locals. People don't want to attend lectures and workshops done by a stranger, but people here will definitely go if for no other reason than to support their friend and neighbor.

Again, as with any change of setting, I can't guarantee frequent computer use, but I do have a cell phone, and you can call me without charging me anything, and calls to the US are very cheap for me. But I have a pay-as-you-go plan so I still don't want to be making calls often. Texts are nice.

Take care, everybody.

Alex

PS: Justin, the singing career has stagnated. Havent been over to my neighbors to sing in awhile thanks to homework and sickness.