"The past is never dead. It's not even the past". - William Faulkner

In a hot, stuffy, squeaky wood-panel room in Philadelphia, a man sat down in a wooden chair at a wooden desk with his quill pen in hand and his ink-well to his side. It was only a letter to a man, he thought. Just a mere mortal one thousand miles away on an island across the ocean.

He had been put in charge of the task by a group of men who called themselves a congress, despite the fact that no one else in the world recognized them as such.

He was prepared for the task and what was at stake, and although hesitant at first, he knew that he was the best man for the job, so long as he had his books, which were surrounding him in the room. There were three open in front in front of him, and they were slowly releasing voices from the past, thoughts from thinkers long gone, all talking at once, all hitting on the same subject but not quite in unison. He was to be their conductor, someone to synthesize and organize the sounds, and out of them, create a new but familiar tune: a symphonic blend of the past and the present of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

And so he started to write.

Two-hundred and thirty-four years later, heirs to the experiment that his letter spawned, we find ourselves grilling hamburgers and hotdogs, drinking cold beers in fields and on lawns and beaches across a continent.

Kids with smeared flags painted on their cheeks won't sit still all day. Moms will be wearing their visors and sunglasses. Fathers and sons will be playing catch. Everyone will be sweating, and seeking ways to cool off in the unwinnable battle against the summer's relentless heat.

But by dusk, everyone will be frantically searching for the best spot to spread out our lawn chairs, and under the stars we'll watch our friends' and family's faces light up with flashes of symbolic freedom in the form of fireworks.

As we see the mini-explosions of colored dots and lines in the distance against the black sky, no matter our age, we'll be taken back to some other time and place in our nation's history: Philadelphia, Yorktown, The Cumberland Gap, Gettysburg, Pearl Harbor, Selma, New York and Washington. Grandfathers and fathers, brothers and sisters and daughters and sons who wore the uniform, who marched on Washington, who cleaned up debris, who sat at lunch counters when they weren't supposed to, who said she could vote because she was a person too, who made unpopular choices, who failed, who committed crimes, who incited revolutions, who won a revolution, who didn't take responsibility for their despicable actions that didn't represent the country, and those who did.

These events- our collective history- are real. We've lived some of them. Our forefathers lived through the rest. And that's what makes this holiday real.

When Jefferson sat down to write that letter, a Declaration of Independence to King George the III of Great Britain, he gave us something to touch, to read and to point to and say, "This is where we come from. This is when we began". He gave us "self-evident" "Truths" that we hold, such as equality, and "Rights" that are "unalienable" and "endowed" to us by our "Creator". We know them to be "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness".

But most of all, Jefferson gave us something to believe in. He left us the eternal task of striving to turn his words into a reality, both in their "felicity of expression" and their substance. He left us a document- which we celebrate every Fourth of July in the exact way he and the founding generation predicted- that is our secular soul, that unites us under the all-inclusive label of "mankind", regardless of our place in the world and our place in history.

Tonight, after the fireworks leave our ears ringing with freedom, we'll talk about some of those thoughts as we wait in traffic on the way home. We'll mention some of those dates and some of those people, and we'll talk about Jefferson and Adams and Washington and Hamilton, bringing them all to life for a while, talking about the things we remember about them and the things that we think we remember about them.

But when we get home a little bit later than we usually get home, we'll put our heads on our pillows and get back some of the energy that the heat took away from us. And the day- The Fourth of July- will change into a date- the fifth, on which we'll get back to work and we'll continue writing and living the history that has been endowed to us by our Creator, our grandfathers, our parents and our neighbors, and of course by a letter to a king written two-hundred thirty-four years ago in a small wooden room during a hot summer in Philadelphia by a young Virginian, philosopher, architect and writer named Thomas Jefferson.

If I asked you to tell me about one day of your life, what would you say? I'd say that you'd say (and that I'd say) things that are usually said, like:

- What time you got up

- What you had for breakfast

- That you got to work a little bit late because of some idiot on the interstate

- Why your boss pissed you off

- That you had salad and breadsticks for lunch at The Olive Garden

- That you avoided the guy who no one likes who also happened to be eating lunch at The Olive Garden today

- That you got home from work and didn't feel like doing much of anything, so you watched Lost and went to bed

Maybe, if I were a close friend of yours, you'd include things that dipped below the day's surface.

 

And maybe- just maybe- if I were like family to you, you'd tell me how those things affected you.

 

But what about that moment- first thing in the morning- when you opened your door to the outside world and you looked up at the sky for the first time and realized just how big the world really is? Would you tell me about that or would you skip over it?

 

And about that lunch of yours- would you share with me that you shared a laugh with a friend you thought you'd never have and because of that you got back to work five minutes late and sat back down with a smile on your face?

 

Would you tell me that you told your dad that you loved him after you got off the phone with him when you talked to him like you talk to him every night?

 

You might.

 

But then again, you might not.

 

Because how can you fit twelve hours of thinking and feeling into five, ten, fifteen minutes of words? Words. Those "vague shadows of the volumes we mean.  Little audible links, they are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes" (Theodore Dreiser).

 

On Friday, I read that someone I knew from my childhood and adolescence had died way too God-damn early. Our lives were always fully connected but never quite intertwined. But that didn't and doesn't matter. I knew Allen. Allen knew me. I know Clint and I know his family.

 

The last time I saw Allen he was in typical form- the way that I'll always remember him. He was sitting in a leather chair in his friend's basement with a beer in his hand. He had on a soft yellow polo shirt and khaki shorts that weren't ironed but weren't wrinkled. Two of his- our- more boisterous friends were telling a story that they had told a million times before, and the whole room could hear.

 

Allen's eyes were fixed on the scene but I could tell that his mind was in the past. He had lived the same story, and I had, too. It was about how our present friends were going to fight two non-present friends because of what some other people said about what our present friends had done.

 

The two guys in front of us made it seem like they had made all the right moves and had played everything smooth.

 

But Allen didn't let them finish their story.

 

"Yea right, you didn't do that at all man. You said something stupid that made no sense and then you made a face like you were about to piss your pants," he said, and he re-enacted the scene with his face without losing the look of being relaxed in the chair.

 

He finished it off with a laugh that let us know that he was on our present friends’ side of the fight- then and before- but that he wasn't going to let an opportunity to do what he did best slip away from him and from us. We all laughed with him- like we usually did- and the topic of the story changed from the fight to our friend's inability to remember anything correctly.

 

Allen sat back in his chair and took a sip of his beer and watched our friends fraternize before us.

 

I can't make it to Allen's funeral or to his viewing, so I don't know what they'll say about him. I don't know which stories Clint's going to choose to share with everyone. I don't know which stories my friends are telling each other right now or how many beers they're drinking as they tell them.

 

Although, I think what they’ll do is try to do what I've tried to do here: they'll try to make everyone else remember Allen the way that we remember him.

 

But after knowing someone for so long there’s always much more left to be felt than one could ever possibly say.

 

Allen lived for almost twenty-three years.

 

That's 8,395 days.

 

And as you can see from what I've written in this piece, there's no way that one can put a life- or a day- into any number of words.

Clouds and gray. 

Scarves and rain. 

Wrapped in wool blankets in bed all day.

Lost in a book.

A cozy nook.

Warm porcelain and té and café.

Pan de maíz,

Your favorite treat.

The smile on your face gives it away.

It's not a day,

But a way

To return to life: Bogotá's Sunday.

How long have I been here?

Too long.

Why do I answer my own questions?

Because I'm the one who asks.

Sometimes it's more fun to pack and unpack

than to only be on the road.

Sorry for being so cryptic,

but sometimes it's more fun to guess and guess

than to believe you actually know.

Phil and I were talking about the little apartment in Mexico we lived in together after we moved out of Becky's. Mexico was only two years ago. I asked him if he thought he would still know his way around Cholula if he were teleported there. He said he thought so, and he bet that I would, too. But I don't think I would. My dreams don't take me back there often enough to walk the streets, and I've already forgotten how Indio tastes. Though I do remember that we would put a ton of lime in it. We did that with all of our beers up there.

I'm sure that if I drank one it'd flood my mind and make those memories float to the top. I'd see Becky, eyes wide and hand over her mouth when she saw the video of her son stealing money from my wallet. My heart would race and my hands would shake as they did when I first saw it.

Then I'd see the smiles of three wanna-be ramblers taking off for Veracruz on the Saturday morning of Carnaval, knowing that there wasn't a hotel room available in the entire city. My back would hurt again like it did later that night from sleeping on our friends' stiff floor. And like the next morning, I wouldn't be able to stop laughing at the sight of Phil sleeping in that closet- sunglasses and one earplug- and hearing his risqué-theory about the banging noise in the middle of the night coming from the room next door. Then I'd see Glenn half-asleep outside of our room, dumbfounded because no one let him in despite his persistent and noisy knocking.

There's a post on this blog called "Actualización". It's got my name on the top of the page, but I'm pretty sure someone else wrote it. I can see him. He's sitting in a flimsy plastic chair at a square plastic desk. He's thinking that his set-up is better suited for a patio. But, it's in his bedroom, pushed up against the cyan cement-wall. In front of him, two glass panes are stuck inside a punched-out, rough-edged hole revealing housetops and their crumbling cement walls that can't keep their rebar skeletons from poking out. He lets out a little snicker when he sees it. That's Mexico, he tells himself. They do that down here. That's how they build their houses. He knows all about that kind of stuff because of some books he read back in Chapel Hill.

He's writing to let the world know that he's made the decision to study abroad in Mexico. He didn't go to Argentina or Spain like everyone else at UNC. To him Mexico's different. It's authentic.

He says he eats up every minute of his Greek Philosophy class. His professor's quirky and esoteric. Aristotle is wise and eternal. He says he understands them both.

His school's a feast of United Nations. American and French are the main courses. They come with a side of everyone else. But he wants the local flavors. He's wants the real Mexican college-experience. But more so than that, he wants you to know that that's what he wants.

I remember my time in Mexico despite his posts, not because of them.

I hop from the sidewalk onto the bus. Up above the sky plays tricks on my mind. Sunset, or sunrise? Mom and dad always say that grandpa hated this time of day.

I place two ratty bills in the driver's hand. He's got it stretched out over his shoulder. His eyes on the road, he throws the money to the side and starts feeling for the correct change. I turn and scan for a space not filled by a tired face. Out the window Barrancabermeja is passing by. It looks like it could use a good bath. Two greasy coins clink as they hit my palm, and I'm off to slip into a seat between a sweaty campesino and school-girl. The girl's eyes want to ask me what I'm doing here, but they're stuck in a stare. Mine ask her if she's ever seen blue eyes before.

"At the corner", I shout from the back.

We swerve to the curve- though we're on an empty road- while I surf down the aisle.

"Gracias", I say to the bus-driver.

"A la orden"

Through the gate and a "buenas" to Carlos. I hope he's already unlocked my classroom. Groups of students are playing with balls on the brick. Soccer and table tennis. There's one that's a mixture of both. It's called "fútbol-tenis".

Up the stairs and the students' stares make me aware that I'm the only native speaker who's been their teacher. I throw them a question in English and they catch it with something that's in between a head-shake and a nod. They're frozen from the draft of my strange sounds. I listen to the fans swirling above. The breeze pushes some papers off of my desk. A couple of chuckles. Then some Spanish. A mosquito bites my little toe. Let it all fall down. Like James Taylor said. I can't even remember the question. Finally, a response blows my way.

In two years, at another desk, the next version of me will be reading what I'm writing about Colombia. He might say that he knows how I feel about Colombia. To prove it to you, he'll describe an empanada de bocadillo y queso:

"Sweet and creamy. Chewy, fruity and flakey. I can still feel the oil between my fingers. It's coating my lips as if I had just eaten one a couple of minutes ago. That's what Colombia tasted like."

When you see him, tell him he's wrong. He can only tell you how Colombia tastes to him. He wouldn't have the slightest clue as to where a bite of that fried delight took me earlier tonight.

And I'd give you a "yea", but I'd follow it with a "but" (per usual). Words are important. If you're going to label me, at least listen to my take on its definition.

My good friend Ryan, author of another expat blog, recently wrote a piece about this equivocal label. Before arriving to China, Ryan perceived The Expat to be "the boorish, culturally insensitive American or Brit… without cultural curiosity or a desire to learn the [local] language. The type who looks down his nose at his host country and readily abuses the special treatment afforded to foreigners."

Yea, ok. I'll go with that Ryan. But first let me trade two capital letters for two lowercase ones. Oh, the definite article can go too. "an expat". There we go. Much better.

An expat can embody the traits that Ryan mentions, that's for sure. He might drink too much or dress inappropriately. He might know that his young, attractive girlfriend is just using him for money. And he might not give a damn about anything or anyone, especially "these people" or "this place". But, as Ryan writes at the end of his post, we expats don't fit into boxes (except maybe in Japan. They call boxes apartments over there). And you can't just buy a bigger box with a broader definition, throw in all those who fit and ignore the leftovers.

By definition, I'm an expat. I am out of (ex) my country (patris or patria). Right. You already knew that. Sorry. But I refuse to use or accept any of its contemporary connotations.

When someone asks me where I'm from, I tell them North Carolina. I don't mention the U.S.A. I tell them about Bluegrass and about grits, and about how we talk funny where I'm from and how much I love that. I tell them that if they go to North Carolina they'll find some of the best people in the world, and that they'd be offered some sweet tea to cool off on a scorching summer day.

I also tell them that I have a love affair with Colombia. That I can't go a day without at least three cups of tinto and that breakfast just isn't the same without fried plantains. I tell them that, here too, I've found some amazing human beings. People who go out of their way to help lost gringos find the bus terminal. People who do favors without asking for anything in return.

And I tell them all of this in Spanish, sometimes good and sometimes broken, because most days- no, weeks- I'm surrounded by Colombians. And I like that. But, even though I do speak English with some of my Colombian co-workers, there's nothing like sitting down to talk with a friend from back home and not worrying about grading my language. I can say whatever the heck I wanna say the way I wanna say it, which is usually with a little bit of syrupy twang and a side of some home-cooked idiomatic expressions.

Expats leave home for a lot of different reasons, and they find themselves in many different situations and countries, surrounded by a variety of people. In those foreign and far-away places, we're just as peculiar, cheap, bad tempered, humble, or greedy- and able to change- as we were wherever we came from. And we don't come pre-packaged in expat wrapping. Being an expat is part of our existence, not part of our essence.

I came to Colombia, but I didn't leave home. I don't know how long I'll be here, or how long my idyll with Colombia will last. But, like my friend Ryan, I'm just doing whatever feels right and whatever makes me happy and keeps me sane. Trying to immerse yourself in another culture is extremely challenging. Being in another country away from everything familiar can be frustrating as hell. And confusing. It can bring you nights that tell you that you don't belong, and that you're really all alone. To feel better, you have to let all of that out with someone who looks through the same geographical and cultural lenses as you do. Someone who finds nights that tell him or her the same things. But you have to make sure your spending your time wisely. That your experience is worth all of the hardships. Life as an expat should be a beautiful balance of whatever-it-takes survival and graceful, controlled dancing with the local cultural. It's up to each expat to figure out their own equilibrium.

For me, that means spending a lot of time eating arepas de choclo con queso and learning the right hand gestures to wave down a bus while never accepting or joining the inevitable, premature-rush to get off. It's speaking Spanish as much as I need to- as much as daily life necessitates- and speaking English with other native speakers as much as I can. But over a cup of tinto at a Juan Valdéz Café, of course.

So, I suppose you could call me an expat. Which, to me, is something in between what I was and what I'll be. Luckily, I have the luxury of time on my side in order to decide. And I can pick and choose what I want to use from the good and the bad of the people I've met and the places I've been. That's why I'm here. I'm a North Carolinian crashing on Colombia's couch, lost in a world in which I'm trying to find what it is that I want to look for.

I placed my cell phone back on the pile of books stacked up on my suitcase that doubles as my nightstand. I put it down like I'd put anything else down. As if I hadn't just witnessed one of the mysteries of the universe.

Like most days, my mind didn't give my alarm clock a chance to wake me up. My phone and its blinding backlight said 5:55 am. Thirty minutes before my alarm was supposed to wake me up. Just like yesterday. Just like every day of the past week.

The cold, air-conditioned tile sent a shock through my body when my feet hit the ground. I never know it's coming, but it happens every morning.

When I opened my door and walked into the rest of the house, the heat latched on to me in its best attempt to suffocate me. I could almost see it swirling around me, looking to plaster its stickiness to any part of my exposed skin. I could even smell it. The liquid drops of fire burnt my nostrils.

The typical Barranqueño says that the mornings are really fresh and it’s the afternoons that really get you. I'm not sure if they're talking about life or the weather when they tell me things like that.

I trudged through the heat and into the kitchen to put on some water for my coffee. Ants had once again spent the night ravaging the crumbs that were on the intermittently cracked ceramic tile countertop, trying to beat the deadline of the morning sun and take advantage of the food that was left sitting out, discarded by those who had plenty. 

Those jumbo, white squares on the countertop make up the façade of what is a hollow, rectangular prism of cinderblock and cement. Like everything else in the kitchen, its surface is always hot, and coated with an eternal, thin film of sticky and soupy water drops. When it runs out of space and has no choice but to go vertical, two tiles in each row start the climb upwards, covering the half-assed, burnt-orange brush strokes of the house's cement walls.

But just before the ascent, an old blender's clouded plastic jar with a banana orange trim and two purple capped Tupperware containers of sugar and rice rise up like Fisher-Price towers from the countertop, quietly claiming their kitchen superiority. They're not new, but their not quite out of date. They do their jobs and they're dependable, but new ones will have to be purchased sometime soon. But not just yet. They blend in without disappearing, and they stick out without catching anyone's attention.

Hanging above the counter-top, deep-red wooden cabinets store a rag-tag team of utensils and dishware. Behind the doors adorned with detailed knobs, a coffee mug with its handle broken into two nubs awaits the day that someone will be brave enough to risk burning their hands to get their caffeine fix. It still serves its purpose. And no one really uses it.

Maneuvering their way through the wrought iron bars that separate the heat outside from the heat inside, the ants enter the kitchen through the top left corner of the window that's to the left of the countertop. Down the wall in a perfect line, they tiptoed around the two burner table-top stove connected to the propane tank by a pipe that crumbles a hole in the cement wall. They cross the once white- and now rotting - wooden bridge to the countertop on which the stove sits.

Finding their way through it all, possessed by the possibility of finding food, they go to work every night and every morning. Breaking it down bit by bit as a team of individuals.

They know they are working together, don't they? 

They bust their backs for ten to twelve hours a day to feed the queen. They might sneak in a bite for themselves every now and then. But in the end, it's all about the queen. 

They know that, don't they?

But all that's in the morning. In the afternoon, there's only the heat. Everyone else is resting, waiting, sitting in their doorways or on their porch with their shirts off. They're drinking a cup of coffee and trying to find any bit of escape from searching for discarded food and breaking the crumbs down bit by bit. They stink of stale sweat and the tips of their hair are always wet. 

The heat, too, rests in the afternoon. But it keeps moving ever so slightly as one mass, like a glacier of hot air taking its afternoon stroll to digest the day's victims.

I hovered over the scene for a couple of minutes. I watched the ants do their work. They looked so small next to the towers.

I grabbed the broken mug and filled it up with enough coffee to wake me up. Why hasn't he thrown this damn thing out already? Nothing here is new. Even the new plates in the cabinets are old. And that damn blender. How the hell does that thing still work?

But one thing puzzled me above all else. It all and they all exist despite the heat. The suffocating heat that relentlessly attacks every inch of everything, all day everyday. In the end- if there is an end- the heat will win. But it won't be because anyone gave up. It will be because they all melted away.

Everything that I had seen and experienced that morning- and the questions with which it all left me- reminded me of Barrancabermeja. It reminded me of its people. It reminded me that life here is hard to believe and easy to feel.

I used a napkin to pick up that broken coffee cup and I took the spoon in my hand and started clinking it against the countertop. The ants scattered about. Left, right, up, down, in the cracks and out of the cracks, between the towers and up the towers. They had no idea what to make of what was happening to them. Was it God? Was it Nature?

With them they took what they could of their prized possession and headed for home, wherever the hell that is. I watched them as they all found their way over the bridge and out the window. Back to where they came from. After a couple of minutes they were all gone. All that was left were the towers, the cabinets, the crumbs and the cracked tiles. And the heat. 

I took a sip of my coffee and I left the kitchen and the heat. I went into my air-conditioned room and closed the door. I turned on my computer and read about what was happening in other worlds.

Like most days, my mind didn't give my alarm clock a chance to wake me up. My cell phone and it's blinding backlight said 5:55 am. Thirty minutes before my alarm, just like yesterday. I put my phone back on the pile of books stacked up on my suitcase that doubles as my nightstand. I put it down like I put anything else down, as if I hadn't just witnessed one of the mysteries of the universe.

The cold, air-conditioned tile sent a shock through my body when my feet hit the ground. I never know it's coming even though it happens every morning.

When I opened my door and walked into the rest of the house, the heat latched on to me immediately in it's best attempt to suffocate me. I could almost see it swirling around me, looking to plaster it's stickiness to any part of my exposed skin. I could even smell the heat. It stung my nostrils as it wet them with drops of liquid fire. The typical Barranqueño says that the mornings are really fresh, and it’s the afternoons that really get you. I'm not sure if they're talking about life or the weather when they tell me things like that.

I trudged through the heat and into the kitchen to put on some water for my coffee. Ants had once again spent the night frantically breaking down the crumbs that were on the intermittently cracked ceramic tile countertop, trying to beat the deadline of the morning sun and take advantage of the food that was left sitting out, discarded by those who had plenty.

The large, white squares make up the façade of what is a hollow, rectangular prism of cinderblock and cement. Like everything else in the kitchen, it's always hot, with an eternal, thin film of sticky and soupy water on its surface. When they reach the end and have no choice but to go vertical, two tiles in each row start the climb upwards, covering the half-assed, burnt-orange brush strokes of the house's cement walls. But just before the ascent, an old blender's clouded plastic jar with a banana orange trim and purple capped Tupperware containers filled with sugar and rice rise up like Fisher-Price towers from the countertop, quietly claiming their kitchen superiority. They're not new, and not quite out of date. They do their jobs and they're dependable, but you know that new ones will have to be purchased one day. But not just yet. They blend in without disappearing, and stick out without catching anyone's attention.

Hanging above the counter-top, deep-red wooden cabinets store a rag-tag team of utensils and dishware. Behind the doors adorned with detailed knobs, a coffee mug with its handle broken into two nubs awaits the day that someone will be brave enough to risk burning their hands to get their caffeine fix. Utility is not lost on appearance, especially when no one in the house ever really uses coffee mugs in the first place.

Maneuvering their way through the wrought iron bars that separate the heat outside from the heat inside, the ants enter the kitchen through the top left corner of the window to the left of the countertop. Down the wall in a perfect line, as one, they carefully dodge the two burner table-top stove connected to the propane tank by a pipe that crumbles a hole in the cement wall. They cross the once white- and now rotting - wooden bridge that holds the stove and connects it to the countertop.

Finding their way through it all, possessed by the possibility of finding food, they go to work every night and every morning. Breaking it down bit by bit. Working individually as a team. They know they are working together, don't they? They bust their backs for ten to twelve hours a day just to feed the queen and maybe, just maybe, grab a bite to eat for themselves. But, in the end, it's all about the queen. They know that, don't they?

The sight in the morning couldn't be any more different than that of the afternoon, when the only creature stirring around the countertop is the heat. Everyone else is resting, waiting, sitting in their doorways or on their porch with their shirts off, drinking a cup of coffee and trying to find any bit of escape from searching for discarded food and breaking the crumbs down bit by bit. They stink of stale sweat and the tips of their hair are always wet.

The heat, too, rests in the afternoon. But it keeps moving ever so slightly in one big mass, like a glacier of air, taking its afternoon stroll and digesting the day's victims, looking for someone who made a bad decision to try and get something done during the dead time. They should have been resting, waiting, sitting.

I hovered over it all for a minute, thinking about the miniature version of Barrancabermeja on my kitchen countertop. It existed before I got here and it will exist when I leave, despite the changes that it will undergo when funds and investments come, despite new blenders, new tiles, new cabinets and new mugs. It exists and will exist- maybe in a different form- despite the periods in which cleanliness wins the fight against laziness and the ants can't find any crumbs. It exists despite the heat. The suffocating heat that relentlessly attacks every inch of everything, everyday. In the end- if there is an end- the heat will win. But it won't be because anyone gave up; it will be because they all melted away, bit by bit.

I took the spoon that I used to scoop up the coffee and started clinking it on the countertop next to the crumbs they were attached to. Chaos ensued. Left, right, up, down, in the cracks and out of the cracks, between the towers and up the towers. They scattered about and had no idea what to make of what was happening to them. Was it God? Was it Nature?

With them they took what they could of their prized possession and headed for home, wherever the hell that is. I watched them as they all found their way over the bridge and out the window. Back to where they came from. After a couple of minutes they were all gone, and all that was left was the crumbs, the towers, the cabinets and the cracked tiles. And the heat.

I took a sip of my coffee. I left the kitchen and the heat. I went into my air-conditioned room and closed the door.

But the ants would be back. They always came back. And they always will, as long as there are some soggy discarded crumbs lying around in cracks and in between blenders, waiting to be broken down bit by bit and to be carried off to feed the queen. Unless they succumb to the heat. Unless the heat melts them. Has the heat already melted them?

These pictures are from the first batch I have taken here at our FBT site. We have done so much, met so many people, and visited so many places that it was hard for me to select which ones to put up and which ones to leave on the hard drive. If anyone likes what they see here, and would like to see more on that particular theme, just let me know and I’ll be happy to put up some more.

Me and Tiziana

This is my host sister with whom I made the map. When I asked her to take a picture with me, she ran to her room and changed three times to get ready to take the picture. We took about five of them, and this was the one that she finally selected after a good amount of deliberation.

Map of Honduras

This is the map that my host sister and I made one night. We spent four hours doing this map for her homework. I taught her some coloring techniques along the way, and the next day her friend that lives next door to our training site told me that we made the best map in the class!

My Backyard

This is a picture from my backyard here at my FBT site. Our milpa is right at the bottom of these mountains to the left, about a 30 minute drive from our house. This view is always incredible, but early in the morning and late in the afternoon are the best times to sit on the back porch drinking a cup of coffee and looking at this view.

Aporreando

This is a picture of me aporreando, which is the word they use here for beating bean vines in order to get them out and dry them out. This is an extremely tiring job, and the way that I was doing it was very inefficient and ineffective. They man behind me was excellent at aporreando, and I was just left with blisters.

Coffee and Bananas

At an organic coffee farm that did most of their selling to Starbucks, we were able to see a lot of what we learned about the coffee production process. Banana trees and coffee trees are great complimentary plants, banana trees provide shade for the coffee beans as well as give farmers another crop to sell, and more importantly one that will always be able to be sold with minimal work.

Honduras

This picture is a great example of what Honduras looks like. Every time you turn around, you find yourself looking over the mountains and the valleys, and also next to a milpa. Beautiful trees, endless mountains and abundant amounts of green have been most of my experience here in Honduras up to this point.

Pineapple Plants

While a small pack of us were trying to find the rest of the group that went on a hike, we took a wrong turn and ended up on a finca with pineapples. We started chopping up some fresh pineapples with some machetes and the owners came out and started talking to us. Instead of being mad at us, they ended up talking to us for a while and we paid them for their product.

Me and my Piña

After eating a good amount of pineapple, we chopped down some more and took some for the road. As you can see, I was very satisfied by the end of the day, and ready to get back home and chop up some more piña.

Pictures from an early morning in on a tropical beach in Acapulco, Mexico.

Over the Hills

This picture may not be the best picture I have ever taken but, for a couple of reasons, I couldn't help put post it. The view is from the balcony of our hotel room in Acapulco, $60 a night split between 5 people for a room and an ocean front hotel. I would venture to say that we got a pretty good deal. While we really enjoyed the beach, we also enjoyed our surroundings, and this pictures gives you a good idea of where we were.

Boats on the Water

The tranquility of the morning in Acapulco was all around me as I took a walk on the beach, and I tried to capture that in my pictures. One of the most peaceful sights is that of boats floating in our cove and the suns early light giving everything a warm glow. This picture is one of my favorites due to its peaceful nature.

Down the Path

This picture is one of my favorites because of its depth, and how it almost leads you down a path from the beach past the island on the right, and to the hills sitting in the middle of the bay. The warm glow of the morning light also adds a nice touch taking you from shadows to light as you go down the path.

Solitude

As morning came to an end, I decided to try and take a couple from the patio area of our hotel. You really get for the laid back feel of our area in this picture, as the boats are just floating in the water and the flag is just flapping in the breeze, with no one in sight.

Boat Launchers

In case you were wondering how the boats got out in the water, here is a group of men rolling one of them along wooden cylinders. It was a great sight to see them use such an effective and low-tech approaching to putting their boats in the water, even though it was tiring just to watch them do it.

The Island

A view of the island in the middle of the cove. An oasis type island that was home to a restaurant which we did not end up going to, but still a nice sight to look at while sitting on the beach all day long.Be sure to come back and check out Sunset in Acapulco, which consists of pictures taken during our amazing dinner on a cliff overlooking the sun set over the Pacific ocean.

I feel like asking someone to make time stop for a day so I can try to figure out what just happened over the past seven weeks- maybe even the past two and a half months. FBT is over, which means that we are finished with the first chapter of the Peace Corps experience. The next step is to go back to our PST site for a week and a half. After that, we finally move into our sites in which we will be working for the next two years. The thought of settling down into one place and unpacking without having to worry about repacking in the foreseeable future is somewhat foreign. Since the end of April I have been packing and unpacking, checking in and checking out. It will be nice to settle in and unpack my two bags for at least a little bit. However, instead of talking about the future, the topic of this post is the past. Specifically, it is the recent past, a time period labeled as FBT in the Peace Corps *COTE.Seven weeks ago, having only spent a week in Honduras, I arrived in our FBT site with expectations of what I would learn and what I would know after FBT. At the moment, I'm not able to say everything that I learned and everything that I took away from my time here. I'm sure there will be moments in which something pops into my mind that I learned or heard during training. Right now, what I am able to say is that I am coming away more prepared for Peace Corps service than I was before I started. One important aspect of my new knowledge is Honduran Spanish. I have learned a ton of new words that are only used here in Honduras and in Central America. A lot of them aren't too useful or necessary, but they are nice to know. Although the useful new words have entered into my everyday vocabulary, one example being *cheque, the most important thing I learned about Honduran Spanish is that it's not about what you see, but how you say it. There are a ton of sound affects that are absolutely essential to your noise arsenal if you are ever to really speak like a Honduran. One sound is a very short grunt that is like a mix between a pig noise and a the sound that is made when exerting yourself. It is usually used when the speaker would like to exaggerate the quantity of something, and is usually preceded by a question. For example:Person 1- "La familia alla.. es de billete?" That family over there, do they have money?

Person 2- "Pig/Exertion grunt! Sí hombre, tiene muchísimo!" Yea,they have a ton!

There are a ton of sounds that Hondurans make, and I have yet to imitate all of them. I'm not sure if it's out of fear of not making them right or if it's that I just haven't accepted them yet into my feelings or emotions. If you would like sound recordings, feel free to send me your requests.Besides some of the sound effects that are strange to foreign ears, I feel extremely adjusted to Honduran life. For a lot of reasons, I have felt extremely comfortable here in Honduras since the beginning. I felt so comfortable that I decided to write to posts about it. Even with that being the case, I still felt apprehensive about adopting a lot of the cultural norms that they have here in Honduras. Although I haven't adopted all of them all (see above), little by little I have started to turn *catracho. One of the best examples of this comes from the typical Honduran tortilla. For the first month in Honduras, I made tacos with my tortillas. My family thought this was comical and called me Mexican. From what I have learned from the other aspirantes, this is a one of the quintessential gringo oddities in Honduras. After eating every meal with my little sister and always hearing about my mexicanness, I decided to try out the tortilla, *a lo catracho. I ended up liking it, and I discovered it's usefulness in helping my scoop up all of my food. Now, I eat my tortillas rolled up, with a little bit of mantequilla, and when there's some juice left over from the beans and chile, I make sure to sop it all up at leave the plate clean.Although I'm not one to complain, I think it's necessary to talk about some of the not-so-bright spots of FBT. After about a million feedback sessions, I think I can synthesize the group's common complaints. A lot of times, I think the inch deep mile wide approach to learning was not the most effective way to carry out our training. Because of the length of training and the breadth of subjects we were supposed to cover, this may have been the only way to realize FBT effectively. However, because of this method, I don't think that I retained a lot of the information. All in all, I don't think I learned as many technical skills as I wanted to, but I'm take this to be a positive. It's always better to be left wanting more and wanting to learn more on your own than to be satisfied with that which you already know. Maybe the Peace Corps has this in mind while they make the our COTE.Without any doubt, the best part of FBT has been getting to know and becoming close with my host family. More specifically, my host mom, my host brother, and my host sister. During my seven weeks here, there have been some rough times for them. Throughout that, they have welcomed me into their family like I was their own. My relationship with my brother has been solid throughout, and I'm happy that he will be here to be with my mom and my little sister. He's a solid guy, and I'm glad that we're now friends. My mom has been great throughout, and she has taken great care of me since the beginning. As time has progressed we have been able to sit around and talk about a lot of things. She is extremely open to trying new things and she is an extremely strong woman. She has done an extremely great job of raising these two kids, mostly by herself. That just leaves my little sister, who has been absolutely great during my time here. She has basically grown up without a dad, and you can tell. After the first few days of being here, she has gradually opened up to me and we have become good friends. Now she is more open with me than she is with her real I have spent a lot of the little time we have had together with her trying to teach her as much as I can. At times it was extremely frustrating, but there was no better feeling than when I saw her figure out something by herself and thinking through a question. I'm taking away a lot of traced drawings and a lot of originals that she has made for me, as well as a key chain that she bought for me and her cross necklace that she took off and gave to me. She has her fair share of gifts too, but I think that the best thing we are both taking away is all of the time we spent together. Leaving her and the rest of the family is by far the hardest part of FBT. I plan on visiting them once I have time to do so.

Me and My Sister

Like I said before, the main take home point from my FBT is that I am more prepared to be a Peace Corps volunteer than I was before. With the little bit of technical knowledge I have gained, I feel that I have a good foundation set for any future technical endeavor in my site. I feel confident that I will be able to learn whatever I need to on my own, and with the help of my knowledgeable colleagues. With respect to cultural awareness, there is only so much one can learn in a month and a half. However, I do know more than I did, and each day I learn something more. This type of knowledge isn't obtained through letters and words, only through living. With all of that being said, I feel extremely ready to be a volunteer mentally. I have already been through one tough situation here in Honduras, and here I am ready for more. Being ready mentally doesn't mean nothing is going to get me down anymore. It's actually the exact opposite. Knowing that there will be things that get you down and make you question your choice to be in the Peace Corps is what makes you mentally ready. With that knowledge you'll be able to fend off whatever comes your way and keep moving forward. Being here with a built in support group of friends, going through some of the same situations that will give us the blues when we are volunteers has kept us going yet toughened us up throughout these seven weeks. As time passes, I'll face tougher situations and I'll have to say goodbye to more people that mean a lot to me. However, this is nothing new. In a way, this is what I asked for when I signed up for the Peace Corps. And I couldn't be any happier with the way things are going.

*COTE in Peace Corps speak is Calendar of Training Events. In order to detach the acronym even further from its real concept, it is pronounced in Spanish.

*Catracho is the word that Hondurans and other Central Americans use for the adjective Honduran. Hondurans refer to themselves as catrachos also.

*A lo catracho means Honduran style in Spanish.

It's crazy how a man in a cowboy hat can shut down an entire country.Since Monday afternoon, H15 has been doing a whole lot of nothing. Since Mel Zelaya reentered Honduras two days ago, the whole country has been living under a 24 hour curfew. For us, this means that there are no training activities being carried out due to the inability of the staff to make it from Teguz to our location in the mountains above. For the rest of the country, it means that no supply deliveries are arriving to pulperias, no traveling for work or personal reasons, and no public transportation on which the whole country depends. Basically, since Mel arrived, Honduras has been experiencing not-so-cold-nor-white snow days, albeit with a little more tension and anxiety than the white stuff usually brings.

With all of this happening so close to our swearing in ceremony that is/was scheduled for Friday, the entire H15 class has been anxiously awaiting any sort of news from PC Honduras. On Saturday, we are/were supposed to move into our sites for good, as official PCVs. As you can see from my usage of slashes, we are not sure about anything. As we sit around and pass the days by visiting those who live close by, we can't help but have flashbacks from the DR and Miami. Uncertainty, with respect to what PC will do next, is an old acquaintance of ours.

One of the reasons that this latest chapter of The Glope that Never Ends has been full of anxiety is because we were given our site assignments late last week. The following paragraphs are only what I know as of now. Because this is the Peace Corps, please keep in mind that everything except the actual location is subject to change. Actually, I'm going to go ahead and say that it will change. There is no maybe when it comes to uncertainty in the Peace Corps.

For my job, I will be developing environmental education curriculum for the local *colegio and schools within my area, as well as teaching environmental education and teaching teachers how to teach the subject. Here in Honduras, the educational system is a very rigid hierarchy in which the teacher is seen as having the final word and all information is rote memorization. For example, a lot of their assignments are basically copying text and information that they were already given. They are not even forced to look for the information. Because of that, the kids expect to be given information and then to be forced to regurgitate it. In our system, the thinking process is rewarded more so than the final response. Basically, that is what I will be working to promote and develop, and even though environmental education is my subject, I will basically be trying to instill critical thinking skills, independent information gathering and analytical skills into the kids. That will hopefully be reinforced by some kind of curriculum that involves a wide variety of activities, dynamic learning, as well as traditional teaching methods. Basically, I will be trying to teach to all different learning styles, and trying to teach and convince teachers to do the same. My secondary projects will be up to me, and there will be plenty of opportunity to diversify my activities. As I said before, there is no guarantee that environmental education will be my main project. As I become more aware of what my community needs, I will change the projects. My region, just like most others in Honduras, is home to coffee production, as well as corn and beans. Also, I am living close to an enormous and diverse national park, Sierra de Agalta, that is well frequented by adventurous backpackers but not so much by anyone else. The domestic tourism within the region is rather developed for being in a place that is known as the "wild wild east" of Honduras, and for having so little with respect to trails and visitor services. The mountain is home to one of the biggest cloud forests in Central America. There is an impressive dwarf forest in the park as well. There is also a need for micro watershed management within the area. To top it all off, there are opportunities to connect the diverse group of NGOs that don't exactly work together on anything because of lack of organization. With all of that, I hope to at least be able to make in impact in one of these areas, if not more.

That which is not subject to change is where I will be. For the next two years, I will be living in the department of Olancho, extremely close to the city of Catacamas. The department is, in many ways, analogous to Texas. The culture and history of Olancho is what really makes a connection to Texas. During the colonial time, *Olanchanos were known as extremely independent and self reliant. They were known to have their own haciendas in which they made everything they wore, grew and cooked everything they ate, and built everything they lived in. As the years went on and Honduras became an independent republic, Olancho started to distrust the central government and became familiarly known as the Independent Republic of Olancho. Overall, the stereotype of Olanchanos as independent go-getters remains. The men there are also known to be strong and tough, carry their pistols on their belts, wear sombreros, always have their machetes, ride a lot places on horseback, and wear big boots, blue jeans with long sleeve shirts and bandannas. I will be right outside of a town called Catacamas, one of the largest towns in the department. I will be 15-30 minutes away and right next to a paved road with easy access to the city. I will have electricity and I will be living with the president of the patronato, the smallest form of community organization their is in Honduras with elected officials. My pueblo will have 1,000 people, and my counterpart will be the vice-president of the patronato. Having a bigger city close means that I will have constant and reliable communication, access to services, and work opportunities. Since not many Peace Corps volunteers go to Olancho, they usually send the ones that do go to pueblos that are close. The other H15 PAM volunteer that is going to Olancho will be 15 minutes away from me going up to the mountain. We will be able to work together on projects since his main job is environmental education also. There are also volunteers in Catacamas, Juticalpa, and Gualaco. I have named the living conditions for PCVs in Olancho "unified isolation" because there aren't many of us out there but we are all very close, geographically and with respect to relationships. Maybe the best thing is that I will be close to the city and close to my friends, so when we need to escape from the Peace Corps life we will be able to do so with ease, or at least in a certain way.

Now you can see that knowing all of this information has made this recent period of uncertainty a little more difficult to handle without anxiety. We know about our sites, about our homes, about our families, and about our new life. We have been preparing for this full time for the past three months. Sitting around and waiting for something to happen has put us all in a daze. Hopefully PC Honduras will knock us out of it sooner rather than later.

There is a famous saying about Olancho that every Honduran knows, even if they aren't from Olancho or have never been. It goes like this: "Es ancho para entrar, y angosto para salir". Translation: "It's wide going in, and narrow going out". This saying comes from the "wild wild east" stereotype about Olancho, and about how it is a rough place that you may not make it out of. I don't know about the "angosto para salir" part, but up to this point, it has not been so "ancho para entrar" for me.

*Colegio is more or less equivalent to high school in the U.S.

*People from Olancho are known as Olanchanos, for males, or Olanchanas, for females.

I haven't posted in a couple of weeks. Most of you have probably noticed, some of you may have been wondering when and if I would return, and maybe a few of you have been worried. Before you give up on me, let me explain what I have been doing. I promise it won't happen again.

If you aren't familiar with Peace Corps policy it might be useful to know that for the first three months in site volunteers are not allowed to start projects or spend the night out of site without Peace Corps' permission. We are also supposed to be integrating in the community in which we are living. For people in small sites like me this means, more or less, meeting every person. How one goes about doing this is left up to the individual. I learned quickly that this sounds a hell of a lot easier than it is. Walking up to people that I don't know in such a reserved culture as this one and trying to strike up a conversation is difficult. Most kids shout at me obnoxiously from their safe distances and when put face to face with me a magical force paralyzes their vocal chords and only affords them a wispy "bien" as a response to my "cómo está".

While it would be nice to actually speak with the kids instead of turning them into mutes when they enter a ten meter radius of me, it would be nicer if most women in the community didn't think that I was kryptonite. During the morning, my prime walking around time, the men are at work in the fields and the women are at work in the house. As I don't have any other way to meet people except for walking up and giving a big gringo smile and a non threatening "buenas días", there is ample opportunity for the women to hide from me or make themselves appear that they are too busy to chat with the *chele that just seems to walk around aimlessly. Most of the time, I stand at their stick and chicken wire gates until they hesitantly say "pase adelante" and pull out a pair of plastic lawn chairs in order to have our awkward conversations. For the most part, it's me that has been pulling teeth to tease out some sort of substance from these chats. I doubt that I will ever have as many sequential awkward conversations again in my life without something more familiar to break the chain.

Familiarity and normalcy here in my every day life are not normal nor familiar feelings, at least with respect to relationships. On the superficial level, connecting with Hondurans has been easy. I understand their humor, I listen to the same kind of music, and I like the same kind of food. I like to chop firewood in my rubber boots with my machete and load it on to the donkey and hike 45 minutes back home down the mountain in order to throw it into the wood burning stove. All of that is fine with me. That is part of what I came down here to do. However, I didn't just come to do things, I also came to be with the people. So far, I haven't really found anyone with whom I can relate on a deeper level. If I tell someone that I don't belong to their religion, a question that inevitably comes up here in this conservative little village of 400 in which there are two evangelical churches, they either try to convert me or tell me that I must come out of ignorance. They say that they are right and everyone else is wrong. When I talk about how women don't necessarily have to cook and clean all day and that they are not meant to serve men, I am told that I don't know how things work and that is not what the Bible says. When I talk about novels, "novelas", a glowing box of pictures instead of pages painted with words is what comes to mind. I am not sure if this is supposed to be part of the experience or if I am supposed to try to find other ways to relate. Maybe it’s neither, and maybe it's just the way things are going for me right now here in my site. Will I find someone here in this village that I can connect to on a deeper level? I don't think that I can answer that question with any certainty right now. What I do know for certain is that the superficial level of relationships at which I am hovering will not suffice for my two years of service.

* Chele is the word they use here for white, or for any light color

I’d like to start this post off by saying that I have already written this post before. Well, not this exact post. In fact, this post will probably turn out to be completely different than the one I already wrote and had to delete because of the ongoing theme of computer problems that has decided to enter my life. Since arriving here to my FBT site, my computer has decided that it would rather take vacation days than work after rainstorms. Considering that we are in the rainy season here, my computer is working as consistently as Honduran school teachers (who are on strike more often than they work, which means that kids are out of school a lot). Despite this inconvenience, I am able to use my computer when it doesn’t rain, and I usually take advantage of that time to load everything I can on my once reliable flash drive so that I can upload it to the internet whenever I am lucky enough to find time to go to the internet café on a day in which they speed is faster than a dial up modem. Yesterday, we took a trip to the nearest city to do just that, and a couple of other fun things. With flash drive at hand and full of fun stuff to post, I entered the internet café thinking that I was going to share the fun times we have been having at FBT with all of you reading this right now. When I plugged it in to the computer assigned to me by the owner, the computer decided to tell me that it couldn’t read my computer. The owner hesitantly assigned me to the only other computer that was not being used. Soon after sitting down, I realized that the virus that my flash drive was now infected with was the reason why no one was using the computer. To conclude this chapter of my computer troubles (or so I thought), I reformatted my flash drive and waited for the rest of the gringos to finish on the computer so we could go buy some *licuados. Later in the day after returning home, I went to go meet some friends at the fútbol field for our weekly game. On the way, at the main intersection where we got off the bus, I saw a black stick on the ground in the shape of a flash drive. Sure enough, it was my recently formatted/disinfected drive that had frustrated me earlier in the day. I picked it up, brushed off the mud and the rain, and went home to see if it still worked. Luckily, it did, and it still does (fingers crossed). Right now, I am running at full computer capacity. In other words, everything is working. More on this story as it develops over the next two years. Now that the first part is out of the way and you all have had a good laugh at my expense, I’ll begin my attempt to say what I had to say in the “lost post”. Basically, I said something to the tune of I am enjoying every minute of FBT. Ok, that might be an exaggeration. If you took out some of the minutes spent listening to boring technical powerpoints then that statement would be the truth. The second week of FBT was full of hands on projects and activities that were exactly what we were longing for after three weeks of abstract ideas and conceptual framework. On Monday, we built a *fogón mejorado at somone’s house here in our community. On Tuesday, three groups gave presentations on a certain type of latrine with the intent to prove that it was the best latrine for a specific area. On Wednesday, my Spanish class held a community *charla, the first one held by H15 with real community members. Based on our performance, we will have to really develop charla skills during our Peace Corps experience, since it is an integral part to community development and participation. On Thursday, we went to an integrated farm around two hours away from our *pueblo. The concept was really easy to grasp and absolutely amazing to see. Basically, the farm is a closed system in which nothing is purchased and everything from human waste to rainwater is used for the upkeep and production of the farm. The owner also provides community services such as free internet and a free library. He also runs a sort of exchange program in which you can pay for lodging at a very good price and help him work on the farm and learn about the way he uses partner plants, efficient use of land, makes compacted earth buildings and much more. For more details, e-mail me.Finally, on Friday, we had farmer shadow day, a day in which PCTs were sent in pairs to a local farmer to learn about the day in the life of a Honduran *campesino. José, the man with whom I worked is sixty years old and owns ample land that is used for cattle pasture and a milpa. We started off the day by cutting some sugar cane with machetes in a plot of land close to José’s house. Afterwards, we fed the leaves to the cows in the pasture that is a twenty minute drive away and planted the cane in a field next to the pasture so he could have more feed at a closer distance. My fellow PCT and I felt like true campesinos after we had chopped sugar cane with machetes, fed the cows and planted the cane, and eaten our *burra which consisted of beans, avocado, eggs, and of course, corn tortillas. If FBT keeps up like this, Peace Corps will receive some great feedback from the H15 PAMers. Continuing with the campesino theme, this morning I participated in more earth based activities when I woke up at five in order to go to the milpa and harvest the *elote. A truck filled with Hondurans dressed in dirty long sleeve shirts and jeans, and rubber boots came to our house around six and we climbed in the bed, machetes in our hands. We rode about thirty minutes down the road to the fields right at the edge of the mountains that can be seen from my backyard and continued to the huge milpa that is shared between my family and some community members. Right when we got there we jumped out of the truck, took our machetes and some cloth sacs under the chicken wire fence, and started to chop the corn stalks and throw the corn into the sacs. My job was stalk chopping with the machete. After about an hour and a half of chopping we had about 10 sacs full of corn and it was barely eight o’clock. Covered in sweat, I rode in the back of the truck content with our performance and I contemplated having a milpa of my own one day just to harvest it. Luckily I’ll have ample opportunity to do that during my two years here in Honduras. Speaking of our elote harvest, the product is being made into *montucas and tamales as I write this. Since I have some water boiling for some fresh *café de palo I’d better go and pour a cup before my host mom does it for me, which brings us back to the beginning of this post. Remember when I said that this post would probably turn out completely different than the “lost one”? Well, it did, because in the last one I talked about my family dynamic here at FBT. That story will be told next time, if my computer and flash drive decide to be reliable once again.Thanks for sticking with me until the end, if I could give you some montuca for your patience I would, you deserve it.

*Licuados are fruit smoothies that contain a whole heaping of sugar, some type of fruit, and milk. A licuador here in Honduras is a blender.

* Fogón mejorado literally means a bettered stove, but in this sense it is an outdoor stove that controls the heat produced, uses less firewood, and also channels the smoke up through a chimney. Other fogones don’t have these features.

*A charla, literally a chat, is the Spanish term for an informal gathering in which information is presented.

*Pueblo is the Spanish term for a smaller sized town.

*The word campesino is encompasses a lot of different people that are usually agricultural workers. They can own their own land, work on land, and do a whole variety of other jobs that have to do with the campo, the field/country. The word literally means someone from the campo.

*Elote is the term used here in Honduras for whole corn, which is usually white and somewhat hard.

*Montuca is a food made from corn meal steamed in either a the corn husk or banana leaves. It is almost the same as a tamal but it contains meat on the inside.

*Café de palo (coffe from the stick/branch), as opposed to café de bolsa (coffee from the bag) is a term here used for pure coffee. Coffee that is sold in bags here is usually mixed with other substances such as grounded up avocado seeds, grounded rice, etc. to give the impression that there is actually more coffee in the bag.

Up to this point this blog has been, more or less, specific to certain situations that I have faced here in Honduras and how I these situations have made me feel. Writing a blog in this fashion is rewarding since I am able to share these feelings with everyone and because I am able to look back and relive these moments in my mind. However, no combination of words, even the best chosen in a perfect structure, can do justice to that which runs through the human mind. Something is always left out. The vivid colors of the world are sometimes painted dull by the words we choose to describe them. Instead of once again doing what I always do, I tried to do something different this time. In this post, I have tried to talk about how I feel about my experiences instead of how a certain experience makes me feel. Instead of looking at one experience as a part of what I am going through as a Peace Corps volunteer, I have tried to take all of them together, as they are in reality, and share the sum of my experiences with you. Let me know what you think.

Sometimes I am extremely happy that I am doing what I am doing. I am contented by the fact that I live in a small village in the middle of one of the most rural departments in Honduras. At times, life enchants me with its simple pleasures of swimming in a cold mountain stream and eating bananas that I picked off a tree in my neighbors yard. The local and fresh food satiates more than my rumbling stomach and the clear, cool waters cleanse and tranquilize much more than my body.

Sometimes I am extremely frustrated, lonely, and fed up with dealing what I deal with. The daily battle of having a conversation is much more than nerve racking. I try to open up and share what I feel, which a lot of the time is received by a nod, some unsatisfying and drawn out "sí" or, at times, much less. I have found out during my time here that my breaking point is made of rubber. It's susceptible to changes in temperature which either make it extremely flexible or absolute and unforgiving.

There are days in which I don't know what to feel, or I feel all that is possible for a human being to feel in matter of moments. I feel loved when the little girls that I live with run up to me as I arrive at home and do all they can to tackle me and bring me down to the height at which they see the world, only to give me kisses. I ponder my arrival from another planet when I pass groups of boys and receive their blank stares of confusion after I give them a simple "hola". I feel fear when I am attacked by dogs, I feel excitement when someone tells me that they are going to high school and they want to learn, at least in part because of something I said. I feel trapped and judged by the eyes of those that stare, and I feel liberated by the protection offered by the trees and the mountains, the anonymity of the city streets, and the comforting and distant voice of an author telling me a story and sharing their truth through the pages of a book.

Sometimes, when I acknowledge the reality that I face, everything converges in my mind at the same time and I feel it all at once, overwhelming me and confusing me, leaving me disoriented.

Sometimes, especially when I try to trap between these lines that which runs through my head on a daily basis, I feel like I am looking at the sum of my experiences through the eyes of someone else who sees and feels what I see in feel but who, unlike me, can actually make sense of it.

Here I am, at the end of my first whole month here in Honduras, sitting at home and writing this post while the rest of my PAM group is carrying out FBT. The events of the past week were so unexpected that they don't even feel real. Whirlwinds of time separated by hours that never seem to pass is the way I feel this past week has gone. Everyone always says that the Peace Corps can be a battle within one's self, and that you never know what to expect. I took this at first to be superficial. By this I mean that when it comes to not having expectations, I thought they meant expectations of site placement, of job placement, and of housing. Now, I know that not having expectations means something else. Going through this experience, you never know what is going to try to knock you down. Things that you have easily dealt with in the past or that you could easily deal with in other settings can take a big hit to your morale in this context. You never know what is going to pull out the rug from underneath you, or how hard you’re going to hit the ground. At the beginning of last week, I started to have pain in my side. Because most people have had some kind of digestive problem at some point during training, I chalked it up to that and went on with my daily affairs. No matter where I am, I usually take the wait and see if it gets better approach to any medical issues that might arise, unless I know right away that they are serious. After a couple of days of pain without any bettering, and with an impending camping trip on a semi-isolated mountain, I decided to call the doctor and make an appointment to get checked out. After being prodded a couple times in the side and a couple of lab tests, the hospital in the closest city told me that I needed to stay for observation, and if the pain didn't get any better they were going to take out my appendix that night. Because that hospital didn't really seem like a good place to get surgery, a confirmed fact by the two power outages that occurred in the short time I was there, I decided that the hospital in Teguz would be better. After arriving to the hospital in Teguz, being prodded and tested a lot more, they realized that I had appendicitis and decided that it was necessary for me to get surgery right then and there. Up to that point, I hadn't believed that I was really going to get surgery in Honduras. I didn't think that there was really anything wrong with my appendix. I thought that my spontaneous act of being precautionary was now being carried out to an extreme. I wanted everything to slow down and I wanted to have more information. The whole process was being carried out in Spanish up to this point, and I knew I understood- but did I really? Was I really going to get surgery in a hospital in Honduras on a day in which I woke up thinking I was going to go camping? Finally, during the pre-surgery prep time, the *PCMO arrived to talk to me about the situation and to tell me all of the details about my now confirmed and Washington authorized surgery. Knowing that this was the best thing for me and knowing that there was really nothing I could do about it, a rule of life that I like to remind myself of frequently, I just went in the bathroom and put on my gown to get ready for surgery. Before leaving the bathroom, I realized that there was one thing that I could do about this whole situation, so I turned around and looked at myself in the mirror, and just started laughing. Life takes you around blind corners that you don't know are coming. I was in a hospital that I knew very little about in a country that I had been in for a month where I didn't know anyone except the PCMO that I had only spent a combined twelve hours with, and everyone was speaking my second language and no one spoke my first. I knew how ridiculous the situation was while I was in the middle of it, and because of that I produced a healthy laugh that I'm sure left the people who were waiting with the rolling bed confused. The operating room didn't lack its flare of Honduras either, as the surgeon made sure to tell me right after I started to feel the anesthesia that all of the surgery was in God's hands. I wanted to tell him that I'd rather it be in his hands, guided by what he learned in medical school and not by a force about which I am not sure exists, let alone its ability to perform appendix surgery. After being stretched out and put to sleep, I woke up speaking slurry Spanish forty minutes later with a nasty pain on my side. After thanking the PCMO for being there with me during surgery, I started on my first installment of what was to be a night long plead for pain medicine. After a long and lonely night in the hospital room, I woke up feeling a lot better and without too much pain. I was relieved when I realized that I could actually get up and use the bathroom in the bathroom, a big accomplishment after the night before. Although my body was starting to feel better, and the worst was over, the real battle had only begun. I didn't know that I hated to sit in a little room so much at the beginning of the day. I didn't know that spending the day in a room like that was a real mental challenge, especially when there was no friend or family member to talk to in person. I was hungry and I wasn't allowed to eat. I was bored and I was too mentally fatigued to read and/or think. I wanted the nurses to tell me what they were giving me in my IV and not look at me as if I was crazy when I asked them what it was. I wanted to know when I was going to get out the hospital, how I was getting along, and how my friends were doing back at our PAM site. I wanted to know what I was missing out on, and I wanted to be confident that I was in good hands. At the end of the day, however, I realized that I all I really wanted was to get out of the hospital, and that my inability to do so made me think that I wanted all of the other things. Sitting around in a small room for two days with a weak body puts thoughts in the front of your mind that you usually don't pay the slightest attention to. My logical side kept telling me that my situation was no big deal, that I really wasn't going through anything at all. All of the outside forces kept making me believe otherwise, and thankfully I got out before I was forced to listen. Now that I am back at home in our FBT site, I feel that things are getting back to normal. The Peace Corps isn't letting me do too much for the rest of FBT, and that doesn't make me happy, but my mental situation has been bettered by my wonderful Peace Corps Family and the community here. Everyone here has been super supportive and I have been kept busy by visits, phone calls, presents, and good quality person to person time. When I walked down the street yesterday for the first time since being back, three people that I didn't know stopped to ask me how I was doing and if I was recovering well. When I bought bananas at the *pulperia, the owner gave me double what I paid for and told me to keep resting. There are drawbacks to being semi-famous as a gringo in a small Honduran pueblo, but I think that the benefits outweigh them. All in all I feel that this has been a good mental test for what is about to come my way. Two years without much contact with my friends, without much English, without anything that I am used to. I thought I was ready, and I still know I am, but now that every situation here in the Peace Corps has to be handled with caution yet with confidence. Things that might just bark in other settings may have actually have some bite here. With that foresight, you can avoid or mitigate the impact. At the very least you, after thinking that appendix surgery in Honduras was a big deal, you will be able to laugh at yourself and soon realize that it's just one out of many blind turns that are taken during life.

*PCMO is Peace Corps speak for Peace Corps Medical Officer

*A pulperia is a general store, there are tons of them all over even the smallest pueblos in Honduras

At certain points of time during training, it felt like this was just one big summer camp and that there was nothing scheduled for us after swearing in. In a way, those thoughts had some truth to them. Besides arriving to our sites the day after swearing in, there really hasn't been anything scheduled for us new PCVs, and there won't be anything for a while. That being said, this is the part of the adventure that we were looking forward to when we filled out our PC applications over a year ago. No one really ever really wanted a schedule anyways. Most of us embarked on this experience in hopes of filling our days with whatever we saw fit, whatever came up, and whatever we could find. We thought the days would be filled with highs and lows. We knew we would have to be creative in our methods of passing the time. We knew we would be lonely, but we knew it would be worth it. We knew at certain points that we would think about home, or what we would be doing if we didn't take this route. After five days of being in my site, I have already experienced most of what I expected and more. I assume that this is how life will be for the next two years. This how they told us life in the Peace Corps would be, and for the most part, they were right.One thing that I didn't expect coming into this experience was the volatility. Every thirty minutes my mood is apt to change, and this is only from going to house to house getting to know people. I can't imagine how it will be when we actually start carrying out projects. And it's not only that I will go from being excited to frustrated in a matter of minutes, a lot of times my reasons for feeling one way are lost when my mood changes. A couple of times I have asked myself why I was frustrated with the last person, or why I was so excited just a short while ago. However, a couple of times, I have known exactly why I have been frustrated, and it's going to be something I have to figure out during my time here in Olancho.In my village of about 400 people (Peace Corps did not do their homework when they told me that I had about 1,000 people) there are two Evangelical churches, and no Catholic church. If anyone is openly religious in this *aldea, they go to the Evangelical church. For the most part, the people that attend the churches are very into their faith, and I have been told (and I have experienced) that one of their main missions is to spread the word of the Bible and of Christ and to convert those who do not believe. After our first town meeting, an older man of the village stopped me and invited me to attend a gathering at the church. Happy to be included in any part of the community, I warmly acknowledged that I would love to come one day to get to know more of them and talk to more members of the community. Apparently, this answer was not sufficient, and he proceeded to ask me if I believed in a whole number of key pillars to his faith. Trying to be as delicate as I could, I stated that I respected his religion and was happy to be included in a gathering, but that it was not for me. I also mentioned that I came to this decision after already being acquainted with the religion, and that I had already heard what he was saying many times before. Once again, wrong answer. Getting out of the conversation and telling the truth about myself instead of being disingenuous were my intentions, and I consider my strategy and my realization of doing so as my first Peace Corps failure. In every PCV presentation, a lessons learned subheading is included to discuss the results and suggestions of the case study. So here it is, for the first time as a PCV. Lessons Learned: don't necessarily tell the truth about yourself and don't necessarily think that your way of thinking is going to click with a HCN's way of thinking. Explain yourself in in this context and weigh the benefits of having the village really get to know things about you such as your religious beliefs before you spout out that you have your own way of being religious, which will probably sound ridiculous to someone like this old man in my village.On the other extreme, it is always a relief to find people who just "get it". Now, let me see if I can explain what getting it means in this context without leaving most of you in the dust as you ask for a *jalón. In this context, people who get it are the ones that aren't looking for results overnight. They are the ones that know it is going to take all of my two years-if not more- to see major progress with our projects. They are the ones that ask for help if they need it, instead of clamming up and being afraid to talk. They are the ones who want to experiment with new methods and who aren't afraid to take risks. Thankfully, one of these people is my host dad, who is also the president of the patronato. With his leadership, this community has been decently organized for the past ten years. With his leadersihp and the help of a lot of other people who already "get it" in this community, we are going to be able to do a lot of good here. However, this is dependent on a central part of this scheme.

More than anyone else, I am the one that has to "get it" here. I am the one that has to know what he's doing, the one that has to work hard to learn the things that I don't know and know what I do know well. I am the one that has to be patient, to work with the ones that do get it and don't get it, to work with the Evangelicals and the others, with the men and with the women. When I came into this, I knew that I would be doing this type of work, and I knew it would be important to the people that I would be working with, but I never knew how much. From the time that I have arrived, I have been treated with the upmost respect regarding my knowledge, my training, and my decision to live in the small village in one of the most rural departments of Honduras. When I tell people that I love it here and it is beautiful, they don't believe me at first. They are thinking to themselves, why would a gringo come here to live here when he has a million other opportunities. Hopefully by the end of my two years they will realize that I am learning as much from them as they are from me. Even though I don't belong to their faith, the Evangelicals say that it is a blessing from God to have me here, and that we are going to be doing a lot of good for this community. I better get to work on "getting it" because this isn't a game, this isn't training, and this isn't just a way to spend the next two years a gain some experience and learn about myself and others. I have to "get it" because I am working with people's livelihoods in a community that does nothing but plant corn and beans, where the average family lives on what my family lives on for a month. I'm confident that we will be able to do some good together, and I'm happy to be experiencing days in which my mood drops from high to low and climbs back up to high before lunch time. I'm happy to be lonely sometimes and feel the whole community behind me at others. I'm happy to miss home when I'm here and miss my home here when I'm away. I'm happy with what I chose to do, and after nine months of waiting and three long months of training filled with doubts at times, I'm finally doing it.

*Aldea is the Spanish word for village, and it is one of the official classifications for communities here in Honduras

*HCN is Peace Corps speak for Host Country National

*Jalón here in Honduras is a ride with someone you do or don't know (literally a pull). It is similar to hitchhiking but everyone does it in Honduras and people are more than happy to give people jalones. Please pardon my weak attempt to fit that word in this post.

*The patronato is the organization that acts as the local unit of government in aldeas in which there is no mayor.

I've left Honduras and I won't be going back.

If you ask the people that were closest to me during the time in which I was internally deciding to leave or to stay, they'll tell you that they weren't surprised when I announced I was leaving for Colombia. If you ask the people that knew me during PC training and didn't hear from me much after I arrived in site, they'll tell you that they never thought I would be the one to have ET-ed* before the new year. If you had asked me before leaving for Honduras back in June, I would have told you that I never imagined that I would be out in less than six months. But if you asked me in October when I arrived to my site, I would have told you that I couldn't imagine living there the way I was living for two full years.

There are a myriad of reasons why I left my little village in Olancho and decided to take my life in a different direction. However, I can place most of them into three larger categories. The first one, which I have labeled Honduras, focuses on the aspects that are unique to Honduras and have nothing to do with my desires to be somewhere else. They also have nothing to do with the Peace Corps. These are all external factors that acted upon me, or made up my environment, and how they made me feel. This category is part of today's post

The second category deals with the Peace Corps, PCVs, my job assignment, and everything else that has to do with the organization. This post will come in a three days from now.

The third and final category focuses on my personal feelings about what I want to do with my life, where I want to be, what kind of place I am looking for, and why Honduras didn't fit into these ideas. The title for this section is College Football's Walt Whitman, and will be posted in one week from today, along with my closing thoughts.

Before I begin this three part series, let me add in a bit of a disclaimer. I don't write any of this to offend anyone. If I have, I am sorry that you have taken it this way. What I say is a mix of my personal experience and the general experience in Honduras. The purpose of this post is to explain to everyone why I will not be back in Olancho. I think that you all have a right to know, and I know that I need to do this for me as well.

Honduras

I have a very strange relationship with the country of Honduras and its people. In a way, it embodies the potential that exists in the developing world. A beautiful natural habitat that has yet to be destroyed completely, abundant international agencies and development workers striving to make it a better place, and to top it off one of the friendliest populations that I have ever been in contact with. The simple life to which we should all aspire has been learned and practiced by Hondurans for years. There is nothing more beautiful than seeing family and friends spend hours and hours together sipping coffee on their front porches just for the sheer enjoyment of each other's company

On the other hand, Honduras has an obscure and somber side to it. The country has the highest murder rate in the world. Every two out of three PCVs have some sort of incident in Honduras during their time there. More than one PCV has been raped there over the past year. Whether you are walking down the street, riding on a bus, or leaving your home unattended, you always run the risk of something, minor or major, happening. In Honduras, dogs are treated poorly, they are not valued, and they are seen as somewhat of a nuisance. Yet in Honduras this culture of crime is embedded so deeply that Hondurans will stoop low enough to steal your sick puppy out of your backyard. I know because it happened to me

Most of the said external factors were clearly visible during training. I was mentally prepared for most of them before I arrived in La Jagua. However, the context in which I lived affected me the most, and also surprised me the most.

At the beginning of your time in the village, you are bound to hear a lot of misinformation. You are bound to hear beliefs that make no sense to an educated mind. Here are a couple of examples: bathing after exercising will do something just short of killing you, drinking something hot and eating something cold (or vice-versa) will make your stomach explode, drinking coffee with lots of sugar and a little bit of lime juice is good for a cold, sugar doesn't make you gain weight, lard is not bad for you, white people burn slower in the sun than dark people, and possibly my favorite, if you have an open wound you can't go into the cemetery for fears of the odors entering your wound and rotting you from the inside out (remember, I had surgery in Honduras…). Because you are an educated individual and you are there to help everyone out in anyway you can, when you hear something like this you like to make the effort to tell them that what they are telling you isn't exactly true. Maybe you just want to focus on the important ones (i.e. the ones that could improve their health). Whatever it is, it will more than likely be met with raised eyebrows and a surprised face. This is no shock, as you are telling them something that they have believed to be true their whole lives. However, after a while, you decide that you're wasting your breath because no one even remembers you saying what you did, and if they did remember it, they chose not to believe it.

After a little while in the campo of Honduras, you start to realize that life is rough around the edges. At most houses, adults scream at kids in rough voices with absolutely no concern for their feelings or the opinions of those who are near by. If the adults aren't screaming, the kids are either running around playing and having the time of their life or they are working around the house. There is never a dull moment, and sometimes you are as happy as you can be along with the kids or you try to cover your ears to shield them from all the yelling.

Fortunately for the kids, the dogs and other animals get the full blown version of this rage: screaming accompanied by some sort of violent blow. Shoes, sticks, rocks or fists are usually the weapons of choice. The lack of creativity that plagues Honduras seems to have reached it's limits when it comes to finding new ways to beat animals. At first you say that you shouldn't beat animals, and that they are your friends. You think that you can show them your gringo ways of respecting animals. You will say this until the dogs growl at you every day. When you receive your first dog bite after a group of four attacks you, you will then precede to carry a stick around and shout at the animals just as the Hondurans do.

If you would like to escape this somewhat disturbing environment, you can walk down the dirt road a little ways. Even though Hondurans may question you when you leave, since they are very domestic people, you brush it off and say "this is what we do where I'm from to clear your mind." While you may hear some shouting as you walk by the adobe houses, you will be spellbound by majestic seas of rolling mountains and golden corn stalks. That is until you find yourself face to face with a couple of drunks that are trying to tell you something declaredly urgent in what they claim to be English. Usually they are just asking you for a couple of lempiras* in order to buy another drop of guaro* to satisfy their vicious thirst. However, if you so happen to want to communicate with them and use your Spanish, which is always better than whatever English they speak, you may elicit a rise out of these volatile vagrants. A few times I was shoved by a couple of these guys because I "disrespected" them by speaking to them in Spanish.

After you immerse yourself once again in the natural beauty that proliferates in Honduras, you will be welcomely interrupted by absolutely everyone you pass along the way. A simple pleasantry will suffice with most, but with friends, it is a must to stop and partake in Honduran banter. You may even walk to the pulperia together and buy a Coke and some chips before you make it back to your house. When you do arrive home after clearing your mind of the madness of screaming adults, raging dogs, and belligerent and irritable bolos*, you lay down in the hammock and look up at the sunset and start to think to yourself "Man, this isn't so bad after all". Later that night, you find out that your innocent Coke with your friend at the pulperia wasn't perceived to be so innocent by the rest of the village. The word on the street is that if that girl keeps hanging out with you, she'll end up pregnant. After all, you are a gringo and she is a young Honduran girl. The villagers ask themselves "For what other reason would these two be friends?" Of course, you pay no mind to the gossip this time, but after it continues for a while and invades your professional life, you realize that it can't be stopped and brushing it off is easier said than done. Apart from the rumor I just mentioned, a woman in my village told everyone that I lined the girls up of my young women's group and had them all kiss me. Apart from this being untrue, a rumor like this is absolutely ridiculous. Yet, in a Honduran village, something so childish holds credibility because questioning what is learned from others is always out of the question.

Even though you come from a different place and you bring in a different background full of experience, world travels, and wisdom, after only a short while you find yourself screaming at kids, beating dogs, allowing gossip to affect you, and spending more and more time at home to avoid bolos and gossip. No matter what you do, you can't stop it, and your whole perspective starts to change. Your ambition fades and you start to embody the things that you once swore to change. Then you start to wonder, "why am I here?"

Out of all of these factors, there was something bigger that surrounded me in my village. This may have been what hit me the hardest. It certainly made my time extremely difficult. If you don't practice the Honduran brand of Evangelical Christianity, you can expect the talk around this subject to be worse than any gossip you will ever hear. Your arrival from a college town to this village of 400 with two evangelical churches can't possibly juxtapose two more different worlds for you. In the first days you hear that you need to leave ignorance behind. Once you tell them that you respect their religion but it's not for you, you will start to hear fiercer jabs. "If you don't accept Christ then you will go to hell", or "your not a full human until you accept Christ". After weeks of this, with no Honduran that remotely understands you, you decide that you will pay no attention to it and you will do what you want. However, you won't find many people that want to do what you want, because most of the things you are used to is either prohibited or discouraged. Hondurans in the campo, for very good reasons, don't read much. However, for reasons that are less easily explained neither do they discuss opinions without judging or have civilized conversation above the corporal level (i.e. the weather, food, money) except when it is about God. When the world revolves around the Church and you are not a part of it, to which world do you belong and who can you call your friends?

Even now, looking back with a bit more clarity, I can't really figure out what exactly made me want to leave the most. Obviously, the other two categories played important roles in my decision making process. However, I think that this category, the external factors of Honduras, impacted my decision the most.

Like I said at the beginning of this piece, I admire a lot of the qualities of the people of Honduras. And to tell you the truth, a lot of their ways that bothered me and hurt me are just cultural differences. I am no better than those who gossiped about me. I am no better than those who judged me for not being a Christian, and maybe I did disrespect the bolos by not speaking to them in English.

Despite the things that bothered me being cultural differences, I ultimately knew that I had the choice to keep putting up with them or not. I realized that in the end, Honduras wasn't the place that I would like to spend the next two years of my life, no matter how much admiration I have for those with whom I lived.

*ET is Peace Corps Speak (which I will now abbreviate to PCS for the sake of further confusion) for early termination. *Lempiras are the national currency of Honduras *Guaro is an abbreviated form of the word Aguardiente (literally burning water), which in Spanish is the generic term for the locally made- and usually cheap- liquor. Firewater is an English equivalent. *A bolo is a drunk

This video, made by my fellow PCT Jessie, gives you a peak at some of the activities we have done in training so far.

The dancing scene actually comes from a car wash, where you can get your car washed and drink some beer and dance while you wait to drive your clean and shiny car back home. The dominoes scene is a common sight in my barrio*. The scenes with the girl laughing and the skit were filmed at our training sight. We have to spice up the long hot afternoons somehow, and laughter is usuall the best way. Thanks to Jessie for putting this video together.

*In Spanish, barrio means neighborhood, but here in the DR, it is used to distinguish between the lower class neighborhoods (barrios) and the upper class neighborhoods (residenciales).

In some ways, it already feels like months have passed since we all arrived in Miami together and started our Peace Corps adventure. We have already become close as a group and formed deep friendships. Spending up to 17 hours a day together for two weeks allows for deep conversations. Our lack of amenities also forces us to bond and talk about things that usually aren’t very interesting or appropriate. In other ways, my time here feels like one big blur. Constantly being challenged in every day affairs that are mindless in the states gives no room for the mind to wander. Having to compartir* with my host family allows little, if any time for self reflection or down time. In reality, it’s only been fifteen days since I officially became a Peace Corps Trainee, and I don’t know whether or not it feels like more or less time than that.Before I comment on how things are going, I think it is important that I lay out what exactly I am doing with my days, where I am living, and where I think we are going. After arriving in the DR, all 51 of us moved into different neighborhoods in Pantoja, a municipality on the northern edge of Santo Domingo. Most of us live within walking distance to the training center, and we all live with host families. Some of us live with other trainees in the same house, some live in the same buildings but not the same house, usually with members of their extended host families. Most of the trainees live alone, but in the same neighborhood as many others. We are training at a beautifully maintained center called Entrena, where the grass is vibrantly green and extremely short, tropical fruit trees abound, and the majority of our days are passed. A typical training day consists of four hours of Spanish class in the morning, an hour lunch break, and then Peace Corps related sessions in the afternoon. These sessions touch on topics such as health, development philosophy, Honduran history, Honduran culture, safety and security, as well as cross cultural issues. A lot of coffee is consumed at Entrena, usually from the hours of one to three. A common saying here in Santo Domingo is that there are only two seasons: verano y infierno (summer and hell). As you might have guessed, right now we are in hell, and you don’t have to be here for long to realize that. In reality, the temperature is not much higher than that of the south right now. The average high is around 96, and the humidity usually hovers around 80%-90%. There is the occasional rain shower that usually does a nice job of cooling things down, but most of the time it does more harm than good as the city turns into one big steam room after a nice soaking. Back in the states, even though it’s hot, we don’t feel it as much since we live in nice air conditioned houses, drive in our air conditioned cars to nice air conditioned offices or stores, and sleep under blankets at night in our cool rooms. Here, the only air conditioning that I have felt was in the museum at the botanical garden. Some of us talked about setting up camp there to escape the heat. I have gotten accustomed to sweating all day, drinking more water than I can possibly fit in my stomach, scrambling for the seats in front of the fans at Entrena, trying to stay completely still whenever sitting/laying down, taking three bucket baths a day, and sleeping without a blanket and with the fan as close to my mosquito net as possible so I don’t drench my pillow in sweat every night. But don’t let what might sound like complaining fool you. I love the heat, and actually I am going to do all that I can to be in a hot climate in Honduras. For the most part, I am really enjoying my unexpected stay here in the DR. Unlike my stay in Mexico, I was lucky with my host family placement. I’m living with an older Dominican couple and their 25 year old daughter. Our downstairs is where my host mom’s other daughter lives, along with her husband and two sons, ages 3 and 2, and another trainee. The rest of the extended family lives on the block and is extremely friendly. We usually pass every night sitting in our narrow street, talking and watching people go by. The whole family is extremely sweet and everyone has a good heart. I’ve been fed a healthy diet of mangú*, plátanos fritos, spaghetti with cheeze-wiz sauce, salami, eggs, chicken, tostones, and potatoes. The other trainee and I usually make a big deal out of a dinner with vegetables, in the hopes that we will see more of them. Our efforts have been fruitless (or vegetableless) as of yet, and I doubt this will change before we leave on the 22nd. As I said before, a large portion of our days are spent at Entrena. Spanish class has been decent so far, but because I placed into the advanced group we have had very little instruction and have only been conversing in class. The people in my group are what make the class worth it, and our language class has become close during our time here. Apart from my language group, I feel that I have already made friendships that are going to last for a while. It has been pretty difficult to get to know everyone, and over the past couple of days I have made a conscious effort to talk to people that I haven’t gotten to know that well. We have definitely formed smaller groups within the larger one, which is to be expected with this many people. Usually these groups are made up of people living in the same barrios. Most of the people in H15* are extremely amicable, easygoing, intelligent, exciting and interesting people. There are very few that I feel like I can’t start up a good conversation with without much trouble. As of early this week, we are finally certain about our future in Honduras. The plans that were set for our departure on the 22nd have held up, and that looks to be the date in which we will finally enter Honduras, si dios quiere*. After our entry, we will start field based training on the 26th and finally become officially volunteers on September 26th. The state department has signed off on this so we are ready to go, rain or shine. Hopefully I will be able to post more frequently over the next couple of weeks. I don’t know what FBT living conditions will be like, but it seems that we will have some sort of internet access. I have yet to find a computer at an internet café around here that will run Skype. Hopefully I will be able to figure out something soon. Todo está bien por aquí en la República Dominica, así que no se preocupen por mi. Hasta la próxima. P.S. - I can’t believe I wrote this whole post and forgot to mention dominoes. Everyone here plays dominoes at all hours, and a good portion of every night is spent playing. On the way home from Entrena, a 15 minute walk, you can count more than 20 games of dominoes being played.

*In Spanish, compartir literally means to share. Its usage here in the DR is much more important than sharing something with someone. It is more about sharing yourself than your possessions. Spending time with others without any particular purpose and playing dominoes is a good way to compartir. .

*Mangú is a typical Dominican dish that is made up of boiled-mashed plátanos. .

*H15 is Honduras 15, the name of our training group.

*Si dios quiere, if God wants, is a common saying here when commenting on events that will happen in the future.

Although these pictures are not exactly scenic, they serve the mission of this site. My reason behind creating this site is to share with you the true experience of a Peace Corps volunteer, not to try to wow with the "exotic". I hope you enjoy them, or at least are able to get a sense of my experience through these few pictures I have chosen. Enjoy!

My Room in the República Dominicana

In this picture you can see my room in which I was living for three weeks in the DR. The fan was actually my second one, because the first one fell in the middle of the night and broke. Even though mosquito nets block a lot of the air, fans are necessities for decent sleep in the DR.

My Aula in the DR

This aula, Spanish for classroom, was our learning hut during our time in the DR. We spent many hot, wet, and steamy mornings sitting in this hut for four hours at a time speaking in Spanish while dripping with sweat.

My other room, this time from Honduras

My trip from the DR to Honduras was the cause for many changes in my life. My schedule was change, the climate was changed, and my living conditions were changed. As you may see, my lodgings in our PST site here in Honduras were much cleaner, larger, and more organized. Plus, there was no need for a mosquito net!

Mom at PST Site in Honduras

My family in my PST site in Honduras was extremely sweet, and cared for me like their own son. They were interested in me and my mom always boiled my water in the mornings so I could have warm bucket baths, which are incredible. Here she is working in the kitchen (the hut behind her is the kitchen with the fogón, the outdoor stove).

Outside of my Room

To add to my nice set up in my PST site, I had my own bathroom and my own entrance to my room. The first door next to the motorcycle is my own entrance, and the door that is slightly cracked open on the side that is parrel to my position as the photographer is my bathroom.

The Milpa and the Farm

The best part of my house at my PST site was the farm. My dad was an agricultor, and I helped him plant pepino and raddish on the slope in the foreground of the picture. In the background on the right, you can see my house. When I get back in September, I am going to help him harvest the corn in the milpa (cornfield) that you can see in the middle of the picture.If you enjoyed the pictures of the farm, be sure to come back and check out the video I took of a walk around of the entire farm. I will be posting as soon as I get some good internet with which I can actually upload the file. However, my narration is in Spanish so be sure to brush up before you watch!

After going to our milpa and cutting down corn stalks with a machete, we came home and enjoyed our harvest by making tamales and montuca. Unfortunately, it would have been difficult to bring my camera out to the milpa, so I decided to leave it at home.

All of the photos and the video below demonstrate the process of making, cooking, and eating montuca, a delicious Honduran treat that is made from cornmeal. It is similar to a Mexican tamal, although it drier and sweeter. Hopefully these pictures encourage you to try to make your own montuca at home!

My Host Dad and His Elote

My host dad here is usually a pretty serious guy, and he was pretty serious about his elote. There was no one more excited about this day than him. He talked about it all week, and he invited every aspirante that came over to our house during the week to either join in the cutting or come and eat the rewards.

Video: Making the Montuca

After all of the grains of corn are cut off the cob, they are ground up and turned into corn meal. The sauce from the night before with the meat is brought out, and the montuca is then prepared to be put into the pot by the process carried out here by my host mom.

In the Pot

After wrapping up the corn meal and the meat in the corn leaf, they are placed in a pot of boiling water above the surface of the water for one hour. The corn at the bottom is only used to elevate the montuca from the water so it doesn’t soak.

On the Plate

After an hour in the pot, the montuca is finally ready for our plates. Here is the finished product, still wrapped up in the pot and ready to be served.

Ready to Eat

The moment that my host dad (and the rest of my family that came over) had been waiting for. After spending all morning cutting down the milpa, taking out the ears of corn, removing the tusks and the grains, making corn meal, and finally cooking, the easy task of eating our finished product was all that was left.

What follows is my aspiration statement that was sent to the Peace Corps Honduras desk. The Peace Corps asks that we write these statements for the host country due to the fact that they do not receive much of the information the Peace Corps has already collected on each volunteer. These statements allow for some sort of familiarity with the motivations, abilities, and aspirations of the volunteer before they arrive in the host country.

Nothing is as complicated as it is perceived to be. This thought has gradually developed into one of my core beliefs over time. Because of this, the foundation of my being is a collection of attributes that do not leave any room for the contemplation of impossibilities. Unfortunately, I realize that I may not always strive for excellence in everything that I do. But when I believe that what I am doing is important, there is nothing that discourages me from its realization. My determination is not quelled by belittling voices. My attention to detail is not disturbed by an overwhelming amount of information. My exhaustiveness does not dry up, no matter how many dead end roads, and my perseverance is not blocked by even the largest of mountains. I am looking forward utilizing these life lessons during my time in the Peace Corps. I understand that the art of preparing oneself for the Peace Corps is toeing the fine line between expectations and realities. There is much to be done in Honduras, and one more able body for two years will not be enough to quench the people’s thirst for a better collected life. Solving every problem in the country, or my community, is not my goal. Instead, my goal is simply to sustain the determination to help in every possible way. Whether it is by building a latrine, facilitating cooperation between two opposing groups, or by simply putting a face to Americans during a time in which stereotypes abound, I plan on doing all that I can to assist my community during my two years of service, without thinking about my limits. Success depends on the strength of personal relationships, and personal relationships are built on trust. Because of this, my primary goal during the first stages of my service will be to build the relationships that will facilitate cooperation throughout my two years. One of the ways in which this will be accomplished is by committing myself to the indefinite improvement of the community. I will also build trust by immersing myself in their culture and demonstrating that I am willing to work within those parameters. Building meaningful and trustful relationships, above all else, is my strategy for working effectively with my colleagues in Honduras. My ability to adapt to new cultures is rooted in my essence. My father’s family is entirely Italian American. All four sets of my great grandparents came over from Italy around the turn of the century, and because of that they lived in a world that looked just as Italian as American. To add to this, my paternal grandfather’s job moved the family around the world, spending significant amounts of time in Germany, France, Brazil, and the Congo. Their stories live in my imagination, and because of them, I have never let my physical surroundings bound my mind to its geographical location. On the other hand, my mother’s family is almost entirely from the American South. While they did their share of moving as well, due to the military, their hearts and minds remained in the south no matter where they were, and that is where they mostly remain. These varied tributaries of my background join to make a sea of diversity in my mind and in my essence. Because of this, I have always been interested in that which all cultures have in common, in spite of their differences. That is what drove me to study Latin American Politics, Latin American History, and Spanish at the University of North Carolina. That is why I studied abroad in Mexico during the spring of 2008. It is also why I am interested in the history of my own country and state, and at the same time it is the reason why I have traveled to countries such as Colombia, France, and Italy. Most importantly, it is one of the forces that pushed me to join the Peace Corps. As my life continues, I realize that I will always have more questions than answers. I know I have much to learn about everything, and the skills needed to fulfill the duties of a Peace Corps volunteer are no different. From my Peace Corps training, I hope to gain the technical skills needed to be an effective member of an agriculturally rooted society. In order to carry out my duties as a Protected Areas Management Advisor, I will need to further my knowledge of Honduran ecosystems, and learn how they function, their current statuses of preservation and/or degradation, and their importance to Hondurans and the regional environment. To work with local governments, NGOs and local businesses, I will need to delve into the nuances of the political and gubernatorial systems of Hondurans and how they interact to effect the protection of the environment and the well being of Hondurans. The only thing I am certain about with respect to how the Peace Corps experience will affect me is that, without a doubt, it will be a life changing experience in many ways. I know that one career path that interests me is the field of environmental protection. I also know that, no matter what the field I end up working in, I will want to be making a positive impact on the world. My experience will give me a head start in learning how to cope with obstacles, how to circumvent barriers, and how to overcome what may be considered impossible. It will also be very humbling in sorts, as it will teach me the amount of work that is necessary to accomplish a seemingly small feat. However, I am sure that in the end the results will far surpass the prices. The hardships, victories, and relationships will help me to develop myself as a person as well. In the same way I am unsure of the future of my life’s work, I also know there are things about myself that I am currently unaware of. Some of these are certain to be revealed during my time in Honduras. I know that Peace Corps service not only affords me the opportunities to give to the community with which I am living, but also to get to know myself. By both of these tasks I am entirely humbled- and exceptionally excited.

If you haven't already heard, on Sunday morning, the president of Honduras was arrested by the Honduran Military, taken from the presidential palace in his pajamas and deported to Costa Rica. Since I'm not in Honduras yet, I can't comment on the situation on the ground. For that, you can check out BBC News' Americas section.However, I am able to comment on the current status of Honduras 15, the Peace Corps group with which I will be serving in Honduras. Staging will still be held tomorrow in Miami, as scheduled. The big change of plans is where we will be going after staging. Instead of heading straight to Honduras to begin the first part of training, we will be heading off to the Dominican Republic in order to start our language training. While we are there, the Peace Corps will monitor and asses the political situation in Honduras. There is not a date in which we will leave for Honduras, but the Peace Corps office estimates that we will spend around three weeks in the DR at a location that has not been announced as of Monday afternoon. As of this time, the Peace Corps office has stated that they fully expect Honduras 15 to serve in Honduras.I will be sure to let everyone know as much as I can after staging tomorrow, when I am given more information. For now I will be looking over some information on the DR and making final preparations to leave the country for over two years. I hope that the situation in Honduras works itself out peacefully. While I am extremely excited to be able to see another country and spend a good amount of time there, I am anxious to get to Honduras and learn about my new home. I suppose this is one of the reasons why the Peace Corps states that volunteers should be as flexible as possible, because you never know when a coup d'état on Sunday will send you to the Dominican Republic on Wednesday.

This is my first video made in Movie Maker, so its not too fancy. The video and pictures come from San Cristóbal de las Casas in Chiapas, Mexico.

Walking around San Cristóbal de las Casas on our last evening in Chiapas, killing time before we left for our 12 hour bus ride to Oaxaca, we went to the big market. On our way we stumbled upon this group singing in this plaza type area. The photos come from the same night, and in them you can see just how high up we were. In case you were wondering, yes, it was extremely cold.

I had been in Colombia for a while when the fog lifted and a moment of clarity hit me. All of the sudden I found myself on a plane destined for a city in which I never thought I would end up. I had just finished my CELTA course in Bogotá, the backbone of my "plan Colombia", and I had left the city with the prospect of a good job waiting for me in Bucaramanga. From the plane's window I could hear the sea of mountains that covers the land in Carlos Vives' voice and accordion, and I could taste it in Avianca's surprisingly good coffee. I felt at peace, content with my life and the choices that I had made for myself. Looking down from high above, I knew that I would be visiting my new home for the first time before I even landed.I guess when you look at the dates, it really hadn't been that long since I arrived in Colombia. A month and a week, maybe a bit more. But if I learned anything from Honduras, it's that time isn't measured in days or minutes. It's measured in moments.I had no idea what to expect from life when I left Honduras and then North Carolina. All I knew is that Colombia was where I wanted to be. After a month of readjustment from Honduras, I left North Carolina with a couple of suitcases full of bubble-wrapped books and some clothes. A job with a stable income, a group of friends, and a place to call home were variables that were yet to be defined. I had enough money saved up to try things out for a couple months, and the Colombian boarder patrol gave me sixty days to find my way through the maze that is job searching in Colombia. And if all else failed, I had a return ticket back to the States for before those two precious items- time and money- ran out.I had been there before, but I arrived in Bogotá like a kid from the south seeing New York City for the first time. The people, the buildings, and the faces that were different from mine and different from one another. The air was smoggy and most days were hazy. I could find anything I wanted just around the corner, and along the way people would always be shouting out prices of everything that I would never want. I always paid attention to my shoes clicking and clamping against the concrete as I walked briskly to wherever it was that I was going. Every now and then, I would check the soles and the sides to see if I had any mud caked on, a habit I picked up in my village in Honduras. But whenever I thought about mud or I was afraid of a dog, I felt the tall buildings that were constantly hovering over me and telling me that I was ok, that I was out of the place that I had come from. After living in a rural village of 400 people in a country of nearly eight million, a cosmopolitan city of eight million felt more like my dreamworld's version of a Hollywood set in which everything was familiar but nothing was the same.For five weeks the rushed pace of life that is Bogotá consumed me and my moments. Between work and play I grabbed bites to eat, checked out some interesting places, and said hello and goodbye too many times. By the end of my course, I had once again learned to live on a schedule and in a city without feeling like villager who's just in town to sell his produce. Then, I got a call from someone in Bucaramanga saying that they wanted me to come work for them. And just like that, without knowing what had just happened, my time in Bogotá had run out.Everything was ready for me when I stepped into the language institute director's office at the Universidad Industrial de Santander in Bucaramanga. The director's comforting voice let me know that, once again, I had made the right decision to just pack my bags and head out of town. The previous week of them not returning my e-mails and phone calls had worried me, and the thought of losing the opportunity to teach English at a major Colombian university prompted my spontaneous trip to Bucaramanga to figure out what was going on.She handed me all of the paperwork that I had sent her in one of my e-mails, and starting filling out a contract template with my details after a couple minutes of talking. As she was explaining who I would be teaching and what kind of money I would be making, I started to replay the last year of my life in my mind.In March of 2009 I discovered the inexplicable happiness that just being in Colombia gives me. Unfairly, in return, I gave Colombia a half hearted attempt to find a way to come back sooner. I could only manage a job interview in Medellín that proved to be fruitless followed by the desperation of sending resumes to language institutes by e-mail. Partly because of my ineptness and apathy, and another part due to my lack of familiarity with the system and willingness to take a risk, nothing worked out for me and Colombia. And then life happened. Honduras happened.So there I was, looking back on my journey from Colombia to Colombia, with more than a couple stops in between. My life had been up in the air since the previous March. But, one year later, high up in the air on a plane to Bucaramanga, my life was finally about to land. And as it turned out, the destination couldn't have been more perfect.

This page is a list of the books that I feel are worth sharing, and a selection of the ones I am currently reading and have currently read.

Currently ReadingStephen Miller, Conversation: A History of a Declining Art

Miller presents a well written history of an activity that is rarely thought about. In the 18th Century, conversation was viewed as an art form. According to James Boswell, "conversation is the traffick of the mind; for by exchanging ideas, we enrich one another". Kevin J. Hayes, The Road to Monticello: The Life and Mind of Thomas Jefferson

This book chronicles, above all, the intellectual development of Thomas Jefferson. While most think of Jefferson as our third president, this achievement was not important enough for him to engrave it on his epithet. Above all, Jefferson was a gardener, a scientist, a philosopher, and like the rest of us, a human being. The good that Jefferson represents should be emulated by all of us. Any study of him is merited by that which we can take away and apply to our own lives, and this biography certainly provides ample examples.

Recently ReadHenry David Thoreau, Walden

Eduardo Galeano, The Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent

John C. Chasteen, Americanos: Latin America's Struggle for Independence

I'm not surprised that I still remember how my high school football coach would recite poetry to us. In a muffled, deep-south voice he would start off every practice with the same line from a poem written by some famous college football coach. "Boys, this is the beginning of a new day…". It's hard to forget a good ol' country boy coach reciting poetry to his team in preparation for two hours of smashing into each other.

What does surprise me is that five years later, in a country I didn't know existed in those days, the same poem would help me make a life decision.

I knew before I left the states that the probability of the Peace Corps placing me in a small site was high. Just mentioning the Peace Corps conjures images of adobe huts, dirt floors, and an American wearing a pair of soiled jeans posing with his pitchfork and someone that doesn't look like him. As is the case with most Peace Corps aspirants, this novelty and simplicity of village life excited me. It's one of the reasons why I signed up to leave the familiar and easy life behind. All those books and poems I had read- and all those Jefferson quotes that were stuck in my head- told me that I would be happier living in Nature. Thoreau even wrote a book about the benefits of going "off the grid". With Jefferson and Thoreau behind me, how the hell could I go wrong?

But, excitement wasn't the only emotion that took advantage of my mind's open gates. Fear- excitement's version of your coolest friend's annoying little brother- also tagged along and decided to keep me company during the lead up to my departure. Sure, living by yourself on a pond in the woods growing beans and reading books sounds lovely. But everyone always forgets that whenever he was lonely and tired of beans, Thoreau could easily walk into town and have a pleasant conversation over a cup of hot clam chowder. And don't even get me started on Jefferson's duality.

Living in a village meant doing without- and I'm not just talking about things. I knew I would find a way to deal with the lack of amenities. Besides, putting a headlamp on at two in the morning to find your way to the latrine twenty yards out was romantically rustic. It was the lack of social, intellectual, and expressive outlets that worried me. Where and with whom would I go to discuss all of my pipe dreams whose mentioning keep me from the black abyss of intellectual stagnation? To what book store could I go to spend my free time and all the money that I don't have browsing and buying titles that keep my curiosity piqued? Most importantly, where could I go to have a couple of beers, a glass of wine, and a good time with peers that were searching for the same thing? Looking back, I realize that I was ignoring the facts. I knew before I left that the whole village thing wasn't for me.

Despite the uncertainties, I set out for Honduras with the hope that the serenity of a three mile-per-hour world would quell my lingering anxieties. However, after a couple of months of being chased by dogs, judged by evangelicals, and sitting around without much to do, the fundamental human question that always has terrific timing showed up in peace's stead: what exactly was I doing with my life?

And so, in a little adobe hut in the middle of Honduras' "Wild Wild East", I suddenly found myself recalling words of wisdom from an unexpected source. I could hear them in that same muffled, deep-south voice. Only fragments of the phrasing were left in my mind, but the message remained flawlessly intact. It went something like this: we trade in our finite time for our experiences, and we can't get a refund, so we better make sure we're getting what we want for the price we're paying.

I still wanted to be in Latin America- the Latin America that I knew before Honduras- nor had I forgotten about the café pipe dreams, the bookstores, and the wine and peers. I wasn't happy without all of that. I wasn't happy in my village.

After a couple of weeks of soul searching, a farewell tour of eastern Honduras, and words of inspiration from college football's Walt Whitman, I decided that, while I wasn't getting ripped off, I could get more bang for my buck somewhere else.

And that somewhere else is where I'll be heading in a couple of days.

Colombia.

I hope I see you there.

Finally I am putting up pictures from my site. It’s been a while since I arrived but I felt the need to collect a good sampling of life here before I posted something that allowed you to form an opinion. So here it is, a fine sampling of life in La Jagua, Catacamas, Olancho.

La Jagua

As you may know, there is only one road in my village, and this is the view of the road in the direction leading up into the mountains. You can see the houses covered in lush vegetation built on the base of the mountains.

Mi Casita

This is the house in which I am currently living, my host family’s house. It is a very typical Honduran campo house (or at least it was before widespread immigration changed it all) made of adobe, wood, and tile. The floors in the bedroom are of cement but the kitchen, the bodega and the porch floors are dirt. There are only three bedrooms.

My Host Family

This large group (minus the one in the cowboy hat but plus one youth not pictured) is my host family without my host mom and dad. In total, there are eleven of us that live in this house. Luckily, Peace Corps requires that we have are own room.

Up the Mountain

This is the view from my host dad’s plot of land, about a 15 minute walk up the mountain from our house. It’s a beautiful area with a perfect mix of nature and hillside agriculture. If you venture higher, the view just keeps getting better.

Jochito and his best friend el Burro

One of my host brothers (actually the nephew of my host parents) goes out almost every day to bring back firewood for our wood burning stove. He is always extremely excited to go and loves to be up in the mountains alone with his best friend the donkey.

El Padrino

Graduations are a big deal in Honduras just as they are in the States but they are a lot different here. In the ceremony, the person graduating picks a madrino and a padrino to escort them up to the stage to get their diploma. I was picked to be the padrino for someone in my village. Here we are, padrino, graduate and madrino coming back from the stage.

Me and Patuca

One of the dogs in my house (we have four) had puppies so I have decided to take one. This is my puppy, Patuca. He's named after the longest river in Honduras and the second longest in Central America, which is born right here in Olancho. He is almost double the size of all the other puppies and his dad is really big so it looks like he's going to follow suit. He is about a month old.

La Jaula

In the States, if you want a dog cage you take a shower, get dressed, get in your car and go to a large store and pick out the best one out of an almost endless selection. Here in Honduras, you slip on your rubber boots, put on your dirty jeans and a dirty long sleeve shirt, grap your machete and you walk up the mountains to find a good tree to cut off some limbs and you haul the wood back on your shoulder. This is what we did one morning for my new puppy.

Carolina

This is who occupies the cage, my puppy Carolina. She came to me one day without me expecting it when my host dad pulled up in the front of our house and pulled her out of the car. She had been abandoned by the owners because she is a female and she had spent the previous three nights out alone in the bushes. She was covered in dirt, fleas and ticks when I got her and right when I saw her I told my host dad that I would take care of her. She has since regained all her life and is feisty just like every other healthy puppy. Dog treats and toys are hard to find here in Honduras so if you have any desires to make Carolina and Patuca happy please send a package!

This post was written a couple nights after arriving in Honduras, before our move to FBT. I hope you all enjoy and are not confused by having to go back in time for one post.It's been one month since the Honduran Army decided to throw expresident Mel Zelaya out of Honduras in his pajamas. Since then, my plans have been changed numerous times. The day after the golpe de estado* we were informed that we would be going to the Dominican Republic instead of Honduras the following day in order to start our training. Those three sweaty weeks in Santo Domingo were uncertain times for those of us in H15. We found out early that the Peace Corps, like life, leaves you with more questions than answers. When were we going to Honduras? Would we ever get to Honduras? Would the Peace Corps send us home if we weren't able to go to Honduras? How long would the Peace Corps wait before they gave up on us? What would we do if that happened? Finally, about two weeks ago, we learned that we were definitely going to Honduras on the 22nd. Our group of 50 was excited to hear the news, and we finally felt like we were going to be doing what we had in mind for ourselves before June 30th. After leaving my barrio in Santo Domingo without thinking twice, I spent the night in a monastery with the rest of H15 thinking about how my new home would be. Filled with anticipation, I went to sleep expecting to start my Peace Corps adventure in Honduras the next day. A little after I woke up, I realized that I had forgotten one of the basic rules- or survival skills- of being a Peace Corps volunteer: no expectations allowed.After arriving at the airport, all 50 of us with all 150+ of our bags, we soon learned that we wouldn't be making it to Honduras that day. This time, instead of being the Peace Corps' decision, the weather decided that we wouldn't be entering beautiful Honduras. Due to our flight out of Santo Domingo being delayed, we were going to miss our connection to Tegus*. We would be spending an unanticipated night in Miami again, and then fly to Honduras the next day. The group morale remained strong despite the setback, and everyone remained hopeful that we would be going to Honduras the next day. We weren't without our doubts, however. After all of the changes that had occurred in our itinerary up to that point, we knew that there was nothing for sure with the Peace Corps. After 15 hours of traveling we finally arrived in our hotel and were met by a Peace Corps Washington staffer with whom we were already acquainted well due to our extended staging three weeks before. We were comforted by his presence, and also by the fact that we were reviewing the logistics of going to the airport the next day to finally "go home". Our anxiety returned in the middle of the meeting when his phone rang and his face became serious. Before he actually said anything, his eyes told us that we wouldn't be going to Miami the next day.We were told that we would spend four more days in Miami. We all had our doubts and didn't believe anything. After we had been through so much, we didn't know what to believe. Over the past month we were given many important dates that later became meaningless. We weren't really sure about anything anymore. And the worst part, at least for me, wasn't the fact that I didn't know when/if we were going to Honduras. I knew that we would go eventually, and that the Peace Corps would take care of us during the meantime. For me, the high risk of losing members of H15 was the worst part of our extended layover. All of the anxiety and preoccupations that other trainees had before leaving for the DR, or the those which had augmented with the uncertainty of our situation in Honduras, were sure to be exacerbated during our stay in Miami. I was certain I would lose some of the friends that I had become close with over the previous three weeks, and that Honduras would lose some good volunteers as well. My worries became reality when, on the day before our scheduled departure, a fellow PAM volunteer decided that Peace Corps was not right for them. Their decision was bittersweet for the rest of the group. We knew that the decision was best for this person, but we also knew that we were going to miss them for the next two years.Finally, on Monday, July 27th, almost one month later than our expected arrival date, we made it to Honduras. The *gripe dominicana that I had developed since leaving that country wasn't enough to suppress my excitement. We arrived at our beautiful training center that afternoon, and we sat around for a while drinking Honduran coffee and enjoying the cool Honduran breeze and a view of the pine-covered mountains. I am typing this now as I sit in my home here outside of Tegucigalpa, where I will be staying for a much shorter time than expected. This is unfortunate because I have been blessed with a beautiful host family. My dad is an agricultor*, and a guided tour of our plot of land with corn, cabbage, bananas, lemons, carrots, and other plants has been scheduled. My host parents' son lives next door, and his nine year old son from Brooklyn is visiting for the month along with his friend. It's nice to have other native English speakers around the house, if only to say a couple of words. Our home is nice, and I am well taken care of. All the happenings of the past month have made it easier for Honduras to enter into my heart. Even before entering the country, I felt a longing to be here. Whether it was the fact that in my imagination Honduras would cure all of the bad aspects of the DR, or the fact that we weren't allowed to come, Honduras felt like home before I arrived. Now that I am here, I feel even more at home. I know that I am on a high right now, but I honestly think that Honduras is a perfect fit for my Peace Corps service. I also know that there will be moments in which I will doubt that statement's veracity, but only time will tell. For now, I am going to ride this high for as long as I can, and enjoy the coffee along the way.

*golpe de estado is Spanish for coup d'état. It's literal translation, both in French and Spanish, is a hit to the state.

*Tegus, pronounced "teh-goos", is the common way to say Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras.

*gripe means both the flu and the cold in Spanish. There is no distinction between these two sicknesses in Spanish, so it is easier to classify something as la gripe instead of deciding between the flue and a cold.

*agricultor is someone that grow crops for a living.

It's already December, but it still feels like July. About that I am sure. But July 2009 or another year's July, I can't say.

Two months have passed since I arrived here in this tiny village in the middle of cowboy country Honduras. When I walk all up and down our only road (it's called a road due to its purpose only) and everyone shouts "Oi Juan!" as I pass them I feel like I have been here forever, or at least longer than two months. I've even made some relationships that trick my mind into thinking that I really have known some of these people all my life. I pass most evenings with my group of friends watching telenovelas or random movies in English on TBS that only I understand and am forced to explain, singing songs, playing confusing games that usually aren't played by people over 12 where I am from. However, what we do more than 90% of the time is what I enjoy most: sitting on the porch in the dark Honduran night talking- or not- about nothing and everything while we spend time together. There are moments in which my mind tricks me into thinking that I have grown up here and that these friends are my friends from home. From time to time a word or two of English slips out because my mind tells me that they are friends from places that I've already left.

Usually, when I am confused or I feel completely out of my element I feel like it's still the day in late July when I arrived in Zarabanda. Living in the campo means that Spanish is encoded into a secret dialect that sometimes only other people from the campo can understand. My host dad may be the best (or worst) and can speak entire phrases without being understood. I have learned to crack the code decently well, but there are still times in which I'm left out in space and I feel like I'm just the gringo that doesn't even know what *puchica means.

As the mystery that we call time passes I am starting to see and feel myself change into something new. A mix of what I was and what I am and what I will be. I'm not exactly sure if I can say that these changes are good or bad. Maybe you can't classify change objectively. Maybe it's just something different from what was. Right know all I can say with certainty about this change is that I am adapting. This doesn't mean that I am turning into a Honduran, or that I do exactly what they do or think that how they think. I look at my new ways of thinking about things, the new ways I act, the new things and do, and the way I cope with them as my human survival instincts kicking in. Two calendar years in Honduras can't be survived with a mentality from North Carolina.

Out of everything new that I've picked up or noticed since I left the States to do what I'm doing, what I think I understand the most is that time is what you feel, especially in the Peace Corps. Sometimes two months feels like twenty two years and sometimes you still feel like you felt the day you left. Time, especially in the Peace Corps, is cryptically spent. You don't really know if you’re getting more or less out for what you put in.

P.S. If you are curious about how Peace Corps volunteers in Honduras spend Thanksgiving, check out my friend Jessie’s post and also her pictures. If I didn’t know any better I’d say her words came out of my mind.

*The word for bitch in Spanish (everywhere) is puta, but here in Central America they say puchica as a euphemism. It can mean something like "holy shit!" or it can be as simple and non vulgar as "dang!". If you want to say something to someone specifically, in this case Pablito, to the tune of "Damn Pablito!" you say "Puchica vos!".

Even though I have been physically removed from Honduras for almost a month now, without control, my mind still wanders in and out of the small country in which I left six months of my life and a lot of good friends. Whenever the Honduran country code 504 appears on my phone, the world that I was so accustomed to comes rushing back to the forefront of my mind. It takes over all of my thoughts and changes my mental context. I suddenly find myself stuck in a web of friends that, before coming back to the States, my mind had filed under the "Honduras" heading. Just by seeing those three damn numbers on a little screen my sense of location is blurred, along with the crisp-dividing lines that my mind uses to organize the different worlds in which I have walked.

Other than receiving those phone calls, I cannot predict when or what will take me back to Honduras. Sometimes there are physical reminders. When I am sleeping in my bed, all warm and cozy, thoughts of bugs and sweat come creeping and crawling back to me, just like those things used to do on me while in Honduras. Other times, I look around and see all that each and every one of us have here in the states. I think about what my Honduran host families would say if they lived here with us.

Yet, while both objects and phone calls take me back to Honduras, the sensation of dislocation that acts upon me is dependent on the actor. When I think about the differences in daily life, food and nutrition, sanitation, infrastructure, education levels, etc., my intellect is that which travels. When I think about my friends, it is my emotions that decide to take the journey.

I'm not exactly sure why, but the circumstance of being strangers in a strange land is miracle grow for familiarity. Without a doubt, the friendships made while in the Peace Corps are of the deep and meaningful brand. You know, the kind that will last forever. In just a short period of time, the people that just happened to be geographically close to me turned into people that I will travel long distances to see again one day in the future. The relationships that I started in Honduras are definitely not the reason I chose a new direction for my life. On the contrary, leaving some of the best people I have ever spent time with in the infant stages of our friendship made my exit out of Honduras both wonderful and emotionally arduous.

On the other hand, the organization that is Peace Corps and my expected job turned out to be something very different from what I was looking for. When you sign up, the Peace Corps makes it very clear that this job isn't for everyone for various reasons. Some people realize that they don't want to be away from home for so long, and some people have issues with the challenges brought about by being in a foreign land (i.e. culture and language). While these issues didn't bother me too much, I realized that the Peace Corps wasn't for me because of something else.

During field based training in the Peace Corps, there are three interviews in which job assignments and location preferences are discussed with project teams. While I stated certain preferences (a larger site and a structured job), I also informed my project team that I trusted them and their ability to place me in a site in which I could succeed. Because of that, I told them that I was open to other suggestions. When site announcement day came, I soon found out that I had been placed in a site that was one of the smallest in our groups with absolutely no structure with respect to job and project opportunities. No volunteer had lived in my site before, and therefore nothing was established with respect to projects and relationships. With my lifelong attitude of taking what I could get and trying to be happy with it, I, of course, decided to give the village and myself an opportunity to prove my preferences wrong.

After a couple of months in site, I had reached a point in my "work" at which it looked as though there was potential for me to be busy and productive. I had a somewhat consistent young women's group set up, along with two possible projects that were going to be headed by the local university. However, that which the university was going to be doing was somewhat foreign to me. Agricultural issues are not my forte, and that was precisely what they were going to do. The young women's group, however, focused on abstract concepts such as building self-esteem and personal development, two matters I am much more qualified to deal with. Unfortunately, these had nothing to do with my project. This wasn't exactly a problem, but it's not the ideal situation either.

However, nothing on the ground in my site that was related to work was driving me out of Honduras. I was extremely happy with the young women's group, and I knew that my role in university's projects would be limited to people management. This type of work was something I could do effectively. The young women's group was highly rewarding, and I regarded it as something important. The university projects were specifically related to my Peace Corps project, which made up for the fact that I wasn't really interested in them. With respect to work, what made me realize that the job wasn't for me was something that Peace Corps told me about their plans for me in my village.

Out of respect for the organization and the person that said this to me, I am not going to mention how I was told nor the name of the person that told me my job description. I am not even sure that this is something that would be seen as negative in the eyes of anyone in the Peace Corps administration. It was very bluntly said to me in a formal setting in which my job description was being laid out to me.

After a couple months in site, I was told by the Peace Corps that what they wanted out of me was for me to organize my village, accustom them to a Peace Corps volunteer, and to get things ready for the next volunteer to come in (in two years) and carry out projects. In other contexts, this would have been something to work out with the Peace Corps and to get to the bottom of. In my situation, face to face with the hardships of Honduras, I realized that I would be fighting a battle to stay in a place in which I wasn't really happy. It just didn’t make sense for me to go through all of what it would have taken in order to obtain a better job assignment.

Put into the context of that time and that place, hearing those words come out of that person's mouth didn't contribute to me leaving Honduras nearly as much as other factors did. I knew from the beginning that the Peace Corps was ambiguous and that there was very little oversight. Even though I didn't know the expectations were going to be set so low by the Peace Corps, it didn't come as a surprise when I found out. However, while I can't be sure that I would have stayed in Honduras if Peace Corps had placed me in a larger site with a structured job, I am certain that giving me exactly the opposite of what I preferred was not the smartest decision if they really wanted to utilize me effectively and keep me there for two years.

In the bigger picture, the issues with my job and the Peace Corps were just a minimal force combining with much larger ones to push me out of Honduras. The huge presence of my friends and what they mean to me kept pulling me back in hundreds of times greater than my petty qualms over employment were pushing me out. In the short time I have lived here on this planet I have learned that people and my relationships with them are what I hold to be the most important things in life. My time in Honduras once again confirmed the veracity of that belief.

Even though I felt somewhat undervalued professionally by the Peace Corps, I know that during my time in Honduras I made a lot of close friends that value me personally. And whenever I see those three Honduran numbers on my screen and I am reminded of all those that I left behind in Honduras, all I have to do is pick up the phone and hear the voice of one of my friends to know that with e-mail ,Skype and most importantly, memories, I can take all of them with me wherever I go.

This first post from Honduras contains some good news and some not-so-good news. The good news is that I am finally here in Honduras, my home for the next two years and some number of months. I love it here so far, and I have a lot to say about my new homes, families, and training. This brings me to the bad news. Although I have a lot to say, and a lot to show with pictures, I am lacking resources that enable me to share all that I have. One of the problems is the internet here in our FBT site, or better said, the lack of it. Opening the page to write this quick update took over 5 minutes, and I could be here all day waiting for it to be uploaded. According to the man at the counter, there are days in which the internet is super fast, and days like today when we are limited to a dial up modem simulation when using the internet. When I am able to travel to the nearest city I will be have a whole host of entries for your reading pleasure, and some pictures and videos for your viewing and listening pleasure.The most important resource that I am lacking is time. I am learing that FBT may be more about time management than about techincal training. The Calender of Training Events (shortened to COTE, prounced coh-teh, in true government fashion) has our activities planned down to the minute for the next seven weeks. In order to write and post pictures, I need time. To travel to the nearest city to upload everything, I need time. So far, time has been exactly what I haven´t had much of. I am thinking that the Peace Corps might have an hour and a half session on how to manage our time wisely, due to the lack of time we posess from all of the hour and a half sessions we have every day. I may be jumping the gun on this, but from my experience so far, Honduras feels like perfect fit for my Peace Corps experience. I will have more on this in the upcoming posts, but for now, anyone can contact me on my Honduran cell phone. In order to do so, you will first have to use the contact page to write me an e-mail and ask for my number. You can then go to www.tigo.com.hn and send me free text messages, or if you are feeling very generous, add saldo* to my phone. I hope to be hearing from you in the next couple of weeks. You will be hearing from me as soon as I find a better internet connection. But of course, as always here in Latin America, everything is dependent on si dios quiere.

*Saldo is the word used here for credit on your phone. Since phones are prepaid, you have to buy minutes before you can talk, and the balance on your phone is your saldo

I had been in Colombia for a while when the fog lifted and a moment of clarity hit me. All of the sudden I found myself on a plane destined for a city in which I never thought I would end up. I had just finished my CELTA course in Bogotá, the backbone of my "plan Colombia", and I had left the city with the prospect of a good job waiting for me in Bucaramanga. From the plane's window I could hear the sea of mountains that covers the land in Carlos Vives' voice and accordion, and I could taste it in Avianca's surprisingly good coffee. I felt at peace, content with my life and the choices that I had made for myself. Looking down from high above, I knew that I would be visiting my new home for the first time before I even landed.I guess when you look at the dates, it really hadn't been that long since I arrived in Colombia. A month and a week, maybe a bit more. But if I learned anything from Honduras, it's that time isn't measured in days or minutes. It's measured in moments.I had no idea what to expect from life when I left Honduras and then North Carolina. All I knew is that Colombia was where I wanted to be. After a month of readjustment from Honduras, I left North Carolina with a couple of suitcases full of bubble-wrapped books and some clothes. A job with a stable income, a group of friends, and a place to call home were variables that were yet to be defined. I had enough money saved up to try things out for a couple months, and the Colombian boarder patrol gave me sixty days to find my way through the maze that is job searching in Colombia. And if all else failed, I had a return ticket back to the States for before those two precious items- time and money- ran out.I had been there before, but I arrived in Bogotá like a kid from the south seeing New York City for the first time. The people, the buildings, and the faces that were different from mine and different from one another. The air was smoggy and most days were hazy. I could find anything I wanted just around the corner, and along the way people would always be shouting out prices of everything that I would never want. I always paid attention to my shoes clicking and clamping against the concrete as I walked briskly to wherever it was that I was going. Every now and then, I would check the soles and the sides to see if I had any mud caked on, a habit I picked up in my village in Honduras. But whenever I thought about mud or I was afraid of a dog, I felt the tall buildings that were constantly hovering over me and telling me that I was ok, that I was out of the place that I had come from. After living in a rural village of 400 people in a country of nearly eight million, a cosmopolitan city of eight million felt more like my dreamworld's version of a Hollywood set in which everything was familiar but nothing was the same.For five weeks the rushed pace of life that is Bogotá consumed me and my moments. Between work and play I grabbed bites to eat, checked out some interesting places, and said hello and goodbye too many times. By the end of my course, I had once again learned to live on a schedule and in a city without feeling like villager who's just in town to sell his produce. Then, I got a call from someone in Bucaramanga saying that they wanted me to come work for them. And just like that, without knowing what had just happened, my time in Bogotá had run out.Everything was ready for me when I stepped into the language institute director's office at the Universidad Industrial de Santander in Bucaramanga. The director's comforting voice let me know that, once again, I had made the right decision to just pack my bags and head out of town. The previous week of them not returning my e-mails and phone calls had worried me, and the thought of losing the opportunity to teach English at a major Colombian university prompted my spontaneous trip to Bucaramanga to figure out what was going on.She handed me all of the paperwork that I had sent her in one of my e-mails, and starting filling out a contract template with my details after a couple minutes of talking. As she was explaining who I would be teaching and what kind of money I would be making, I started to replay the last year of my life in my mind.In March of 2009 I discovered the inexplicable happiness that just being in Colombia gives me. Unfairly, in return, I gave Colombia a half hearted attempt to find a way to come back sooner. I could only manage a job interview in Medellín that proved to be fruitless followed by the desperation of sending resumes to language institutes by e-mail. Partly because of my ineptness and apathy, and another part due to my lack of familiarity with the system and willingness to take a risk, nothing worked out for me and Colombia. And then life happened. Honduras happened.So there I was, looking back on my journey from Colombia to Colombia, with a more than a couple stops in between. My life had been up in the air since the previous March. But, one year later, high up in the air on a plane to Bucaramanga, my life was finally about to land. And as it turned out, the destination couldn't have been more perfect.

I'm not surprised that I still remember how my high school football coach would recite poetry to us. In a muffled, deep-south voice he would start off every practice with the same line from a poem written by some famous college football coach. "Boys, this is the beginning of a new day…". It's hard to forget a good ol' country boy coach reciting poetry to his team in preparation for two hours of smashing into each other.

What does surprise me is that five years later, in a country I didn't know existed in those days, the same poem would help me make a life decision.

I knew before I left the states that the probability of the Peace Corps placing me in a small site was high. Just mentioning the Peace Corps conjures images of adobe huts, dirt floors, and an American wearing a pair of soiled jeans posing with his pitchfork and someone that doesn't look like him. As is the case with most Peace Corps aspirants, this novelty and simplicity of village life excited me. It's one of the reasons why I signed up to leave the familiar and easy life behind. All those books and poems I had read- and all those Jefferson quotes that were stuck in my head- told me that I would be happier living in Nature. Thoreau even wrote a book about the benefits of going "off the grid". With Jefferson and Thoreau behind me, how the hell could I go wrong?

But, excitement wasn't the only emotion that took advantage of my mind's open gates. Fear- excitement's version of your coolest friend's annoying little brother- also tagged along and decided to keep me company during the lead up to my departure. Sure, living by yourself on a pond in the woods growing beans and reading books sounds lovely. But everyone always forgets that whenever he was lonely and tired of beans, Thoreau could easily walk into town and have a pleasant conversation over a cup of hot clam chowder. And don't even get me started on Jefferson's duality.

Living in a village meant doing without- and I'm not just talking about things. I knew I would find a way to deal with the lack of amenities. Besides, putting a headlamp on at two in the morning to find your way to the latrine twenty yards out was romantically rustic. It was the lack of social, intellectual, and expressive outlets that worried me. Where and with whom would I go to discuss all of my pipe dreams whose mentioning keep me from the black abyss of intellectual stagnation? To what book store could I go to spend my free time and all the money that I don't have browsing and buying titles that keep my curiosity piqued? Most importantly, where could I go to have a couple of beers, a glass of wine, and a good time with peers that were searching for the same thing? Looking back, I realize that I was ignoring the facts. I knew before I left that the whole village thing wasn't for me.

Despite the uncertainties, I set out for Honduras with the hope that the serenity of a three mile-per-hour world would quell my lingering anxieties. However, after a couple of months of being chased by dogs, judged by evangelicals, and sitting around without much to do, the fundamental human question that always has terrific timing showed up in peace's stead: what exactly was I doing with my life?

And so, in a little adobe hut in the middle of Honduras' "Wild Wild East", I suddenly found myself recalling words of wisdom from an unexpected source. I could hear them in that same muffled, deep-south voice. Only fragments of the phrasing were left in my mind, but the message remained flawlessly intact. It went something like this: we trade in our finite time for our experiences, and we can't get a refund, so we better make sure we're getting what we want for the price we're paying.

I still wanted to be in Latin America- the Latin America that I knew before Honduras- nor had I forgotten about the café pipe dreams, the bookstores, and the wine and peers. I wasn't happy without all of that. I wasn't happy in my village.

After a couple of weeks of soul searching, a farewell tour of eastern Honduras, and words of inspiration from college football's Walt Whitman, I decided that, while I wasn't getting ripped off, I could get more bang for my buck somewhere else.

And that somewhere else is where I'll be heading in a couple of days.

Colombia.

I hope I see you there.

Even though I have been physically removed from Honduras for almost a month now, without control, my mind still wanders in and out of the small country in which I left six months of my life and a lot of good friends. Whenever the Honduran country code 504 appears on my phone, the world that I was so accustomed to comes rushing back to the forefront of my mind. It takes over all of my thoughts and changes my mental context. I suddenly find myself stuck in a web of friends that, before coming back to the States, my mind had filed under the "Honduras" heading. Just by seeing those three damn numbers on a little screen my sense of location is blurred, along with the crisp-dividing lines that my mind uses to organize the different worlds in which I have walked.

Other than receiving those phone calls, I cannot predict when or what will take me back to Honduras. Sometimes there are physical reminders. When I am sleeping in my bed, all warm and cozy, thoughts of bugs and sweat come creeping and crawling back to me, just like those things used to do on me while in Honduras. Other times, I look around and see all that each and every one of us have here in the states. I think about what my Honduran host families would say if they lived here with us.

Yet, while both objects and phone calls take me back to Honduras, the sensation of dislocation that acts upon me is dependent on the actor. When I think about the differences in daily life, food and nutrition, sanitation, infrastructure, education levels, etc., my intellect is that which travels. When I think about my friends, it is my emotions that decide to take the journey.

I'm not exactly sure why, but the circumstance of being strangers in a strange land is miracle grow for familiarity. Without a doubt, the friendships made while in the Peace Corps are of the deep and meaningful brand. You know, the kind that will last forever. In just a short period of time, the people that just happened to be geographically close to me turned into people that I will travel long distances to see again one day in the future. The relationships that I started in Honduras are definitely not the reason I chose a new direction for my life. On the contrary, leaving some of the best people I have ever spent time with in the infant stages of our friendship made my exit out of Honduras both wonderful and emotionally arduous.

On the other hand, the organization that is Peace Corps and my expected job turned out to be something very different from what I was looking for. When you sign up, the Peace Corps makes it very clear that this job isn't for everyone for various reasons. Some people realize that they don't want to be away from home for so long, and some people have issues with the challenges brought about by being in a foreign land (i.e. culture and language). While these issues didn't bother me too much, I realized that the Peace Corps wasn't for me because of something else.

During field based training in the Peace Corps, there are three interviews in which job assignments and location preferences are discussed with project teams. While I stated certain preferences (a larger site and a structured job), I also informed my project team that I trusted them and their ability to place me in a site in which I could succeed. Because of that, I told them that I was open to other suggestions. When site announcement day came, I soon found out that I had been placed in a site that was one of the smallest in our groups with absolutely no structure with respect to job and project opportunities. No volunteer had lived in my site before, and therefore nothing was established with respect to projects and relationships. With my lifelong attitude of taking what I could get and trying to be happy with it, I, of course, decided to give the village and myself an opportunity to prove my preferences wrong.

After a couple of months in site, I had reached a point in my "work" at which it looked as though there was potential for me to be busy and productive. I had a somewhat consistent young women's group set up, along with two possible projects that were going to be headed by the local university. However, that which the university was going to be doing was somewhat foreign to me. Agricultural issues are not my forte, and that was precisely what they were going to do. The young women's group, however, focused on abstract concepts such as building self-esteem and personal development, two matters I am much more qualified to deal with. Unfortunately, these had nothing to do with my project. This wasn't exactly a problem, but it's not the ideal situation either.

However, nothing on the ground in my site that was related to work was driving me out of Honduras. I was extremely happy with the young women's group, and I knew that my role in university's projects would be limited to people management. This type of work was something I could do effectively. The young women's group was highly rewarding, and I regarded it as something important. The university projects were specifically related to my Peace Corps project, which made up for the fact that I wasn't really interested in them. With respect to work, what made me realize that the job wasn't for me was something that Peace Corps told me about their plans for me in my village.

Out of respect for the organization and the person that said this to me, I am not going to mention how I was told nor the name of the person that told me my job description. I am not even sure that this is something that would be seen as negative in the eyes of anyone in the Peace Corps administration. It was very bluntly said to me in a formal setting in which my job description was being laid out to me.

After a couple months in site, I was told by the Peace Corps that what they wanted out of me was for me to organize my village, accustom them to a Peace Corps volunteer, and to get things ready for the next volunteer to come in (in two years) and carry out projects. In other contexts, this would have been something to work out with the Peace Corps and to get to the bottom of. In my situation, face to face with the hardships of Honduras, I realized that I would be fighting a battle to stay in a place in which I wasn't really happy. It just didn’t make sense for me to go through all of what it would have taken in order to obtain a better job assignment.

Put into the context of that time and that place, hearing those words come out of that person's mouth didn't contribute to me leaving Honduras nearly as much as other factors did. I knew from the beginning that the Peace Corps was ambiguous and that there was very little oversight. Even though I didn't know the expectations were going to be set so low by the Peace Corps, it didn't come as a surprise when I found out. However, while I can't be sure that I would have stayed in Honduras if Peace Corps had placed me in a larger site with a structured job, I am certain that giving me exactly the opposite of what I preferred was not the smartest decision if they really wanted to utilize me effectively and keep me there for two years.

In the bigger picture, the issues with my job and the Peace Corps were just a minimal force combining with much larger ones to push me out of Honduras. The huge presence of my friends and what they mean to me kept pulling me back in hundreds of times greater than my petty qualms over employment were pushing me out. In the short time I have lived here on this planet I have learned that people and my relationships with them are what I hold to be the most important things in life. My time in Honduras once again confirmed the veracity of that belief.

Even though I felt somewhat undervalued professionally by the Peace Corps, I know that during my time in Honduras I made a lot of close friends that value me personally. And whenever I see those three Honduran numbers on my screen and I am reminded of all those that I left behind in Honduras, all I have to do is pick up the phone and hear the voice of one of my friends to know that with e-mail ,Skype and most importantly, memories, I can take all of them with me wherever I go.

I've left Honduras and I won't be going back.

If you ask the people that were closest to me during the time in which I was internally deciding to leave or to stay, they'll tell you that they weren't surprised when I announced I was leaving for Colombia. If you ask the people that knew me during PC training and didn't hear from me much after I arrived in site, they'll tell you that they never thought I would be the one to have ET-ed* before the new year. If you had asked me before leaving for Honduras back in June, I would have told you that I never imagined that I would be out in less than six months. But if you asked me in October when I arrived to my site, I would have told you that I couldn't imagine living there the way I was living for two full years.

There are a myriad of reasons why I left my little village in Olancho and decided to take my life in a different direction. However, I can place most of them into three larger categories. The first one, which I have labeled Honduras, focuses on the aspects that are unique to Honduras and have nothing to do with my desires to be somewhere else. They also have nothing to do with the Peace Corps. These are all external factors that acted upon me, or made up my environment, and how they made me feel. This category is part of today's post

The second category deals with the Peace Corps, PCVs, my job assignment, and everything else that has to do with the organization. This post will come in a three days from now.

The third and final category focuses on my personal feelings about what I want to do with my life, where I want to be, what kind of place I am looking for, and why Honduras didn't fit into these ideas. The title for this section is Me, Myself and I, and will be posted in one week from today, along with my closing thoughts.

Before I begin this three part series, let me add in a bit of a disclaimer. I don't write any of this to offend anyone. If I have, I am sorry that you have taken it this way. What I say is a mix of my personal experience and the general experience in Honduras. The purpose of this post is to explain to everyone why I will not be back in Olancho. I think that you all have a right to know, and I know that I need to do this for me as well.

Honduras

I have a very strange relationship with the country of Honduras and it's people. In a way, it embodies the potential that exists in the developing world. A beautiful natural habitat that has yet to be destroyed completely, abundant international agencies and development workers striving to make it a better place, and to top it off one of the friendliest populations that I have ever been in contact with. The simple life to which we should all aspire has been learned and practiced by Hondurans for years. There is nothing more beautiful than seeing family and friends spend hours and hours together sipping coffee on their front porches just for the sheer enjoyment of each other's company

On the other hand, Honduras has an obscure and somber side to it. The country has the highest murder rate in the world. Every two out of three PCVs have some sort of incident in Honduras during their time there. More than one PCV has been raped there over the past year. Whether you are walking down the street, riding on a bus, or leaving your home unattended, you always run the risk of something, minor or major, happening. In Honduras, dogs are treated poorly, they are not valued, and they are seen as somewhat of a nuisance. Yet in Honduras this culture of crime is embedded so deeply that Hondurans will stoop low enough to steal your sick puppy out of your backyard. I know because it happened to me

Most of the said external factors were clearly visible during training. I was mentally prepared for most of them before I arrived in La Jagua. However, the context in which I lived affected me the most, and also surprised me the most.

At the beginning of your time in the village, you are bound to hear a lot of misinformation. You are bound to hear beliefs that make no sense to an educated mind. Here are a couple of examples: bathing after exercising will do something just short of killing you, drinking something hot and eating something cold (or vice-versa) will make your stomach explode, drinking coffee with lots of sugar and a little bit of lime juice is good for a cold, sugar doesn't make you gain weight, lard is not bad for you, white people burn slower in the sun than dark people, and possibly my favorite, if you have an open wound you can't go into the cemetery for fears of the odors entering your wound and rotting you from the inside out (remember, I had surgery in Honduras…). Because you are an educated individual and you are there to help everyone out in anyway you can, when you hear something like this you like to make the effort to tell them that what they are telling you isn't exactly true. Maybe you just want to focus on the important ones (i.e. the ones that could improve their health). Whatever it is, it will more than likely be met with raised eyebrows and a surprised face. This is no shock, as you are telling them something that they have believed to be true their whole lives. However, after a while, you decide that you're wasting your breath because no one even remembers you saying what you did, and if they did remember it, they chose not to believe it.

After a little while in the campo of Honduras, you start to realize that life is rough around the edges. At most houses, adults scream at kids in rough voices with absolutely no concern for their feelings or the opinions of those who are near by. If the adults aren't screaming, the kids are either running around playing and having the time of their life or they are working around the house. There is never a dull moment, and sometimes you are as happy as you can be along with the kids or you try to cover your ears to shield them from all the yelling.

Fortunately for the kids, the dogs and other animals get the full blown version of this rage: screaming accompanied by some sort of violent blow. Shoes, sticks, rocks or fists are usually the weapons of choice. The lack of creativity that plagues Honduras seems to have reached it's limits when it comes to finding new ways to beat animals. At first you say that you shouldn't beat animals, and that they are your friends. You think that you can show them your gringo ways of respecting animals. You will say this until the dogs growl at you every day. When you receive your first dog bite after a group of four attacks you, you will then precede to carry a stick around and shout at the animals just as the Hondurans do.

If you would like to escape this somewhat disturbing environment, you can walk down the dirt road a little ways. Even though Hondurans may question you when you leave, since they are very domestic people, you brush it off and say "this is what we do where I'm from to clear your mind." While you may hear some shouting as you walk by the adobe houses, you will be spellbound by majestic seas of rolling mountains and golden corn stalks. That is until you find yourself face to face with a couple of drunks that are trying to tell you something declaredly urgent in what they claim to be English. Usually they are just asking you for a couple of lempiras* in order to buy another drop of guaro* to satisfy their vicious thirst. However, if you so happen to want to communicate with them and use your Spanish, which is always better than whatever English they speak, you may elicit a rise out of these volatile vagrants. A few times I was shoved by a couple of these guys because I "disrespected" them by speaking to them in Spanish.

After you immerse yourself once again in the natural beauty that proliferates in Honduras, you will be welcomely interrupted by absolutely everyone you pass along the way. A simple pleasantry will suffice with most, but with friends, it is a must to stop and partake in Honduran banter. You may even walk to the pulperia together and buy a Coke and some chips before you make it back to your house. When you do arrive home after clearing your mind of the madness of screaming adults, raging dogs, and belligerent and irritable bolos*, you lay down in the hammock and look up at the sunset and start to think to yourself "Man, this isn't so bad after all". Later that night, you find out that your innocent Coke with your friend at the pulperia wasn't perceived to be so innocent by the rest of the village. The word on the street is that if that girl keeps hanging out with you, she'll end up pregnant. After all, you are a gringo and she is a young Honduran girl. The villagers ask themselves "For what other reason would these two be friends?" Of course, you pay no mind to the gossip this time, but after it continues for a while and invades your professional life, you realize that it can't be stopped and brushing it off is easier said than done. Apart from the rumor I just mentioned, a woman in my village told everyone that I lined the girls up of my young women's group and had them all kiss me. Apart from this being untrue, a rumor like this is absolutely ridiculous. Yet, in a Honduran village, something so childish holds credibility because questioning what is learned from others is always out of the question.

Even though you come from a different place and you bring in a different background full of experience, world travels, and wisdom, after only a short while you find yourself screaming at kids, beating dogs, allowing gossip to affect you, and spending more and more time at home to avoid bolos and gossip. No matter what you do, you can't stop it, and your whole perspective starts to change. Your ambition fades and you start to embody the things that you once swore to change. Then you start to wonder, "why am I here?"

Out of all of these factors, there was something bigger that surrounded me in my village. This may have been what hit me the hardest. It certainly made my time extremely difficult. If you don't practice the Honduran brand of Evangelical Christianity, you can expect the talk around this subject to be worse than any gossip you will ever hear. Your arrival from a college town to this village of 400 with two evangelical churches can't possibly juxtapose two more different worlds for you. In the first days you hear that you need to leave ignorance behind. Once you tell them that you respect their religion but it's not for you, you will start to hear fiercer jabs. "If you don't accept Christ then you will go to hell", or "your not a full human until you accept Christ". After weeks of this, with no Honduran that remotely understands you, you decide that you will pay no attention to it and you will do what you want. However, you won't find many people that want to do what you want, because most of the things you are used to is either prohibited or discouraged. Hondurans in the campo, for very good reasons, don't read much. However, for reasons that are less easily explained neither do they discuss opinions without judging or have civilized conversation above the corporal level (i.e. the weather, food, money) except when it is about God. When the world revolves around the Church and you are not a part of it, to which world do you belong and who can you call your friends?

Even now, looking back with a bit more clarity, I can't really figure out what exactly made me want to leave the most. Obviously, the other two categories played important roles in my decision making process. However, I think that this category, the external factors of Honduras, impacted my decision the most.

Like I said at the beginning of this piece, I admire a lot of the qualities of the people of Honduras. And to tell you the truth, a lot of their ways that bothered me and hurt me are just cultural differences. I am no better than those who gossiped about me. I am no better than those who judged me for not being a Christian, and maybe I did disrespect the bolos by not speaking to them in English.

Despite the things that bothered me being cultural differences, I ultimately knew that I had the choice to keep putting up with them or not. I realized that in the end, Honduras wasn't the place that I would like to spend the next two years of my life, no matter how much admiration I have for those with whom I lived.

*ET is Peace Corps Speak (which I will now abbreviate to PCS for the sake of further confusion) for early termination. *Lempiras are the national currency of Honduras *Guaro is an abbreviated form of the word Aguardiente (literally burning water), which in Spanish is the generic term for the locally made- and usually cheap- liquor. Firewater is an English equivalent. *A bolo is a drunk

In case the archive is too much opening and closing for you, here is a list of all the posts from Somos Americanos.

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I am an avid reader. That also means that I am an avid book sharer. Here is a list of my posts that list the books I am reading and the books I have read, or at least the ones I feel good enough about to post.

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These pictures are from the first batch I have taken here at our FBT site. We have done so much, met so many people, and visited so many places that it was hard for me to select which ones to put up and which ones to leave on the hard drive. If anyone likes what they see here, and would like to see more on that particular theme, just let me know and I’ll be happy to put up some more.

Me and Tiziana

This is my host sister with whom I made the map. When I asked her to take a picture with me, she ran to her room and changed three times to get ready to take the picture. We took about five of them, and this was the one that she finally selected after a good amount of deliberation.

Map of Honduras

This is the map that my host sister and I made one night. We spent four hours doing this map for her homework. I taught her some coloring techniques along the way, and the next day her friend that lives next door to our training site told me that we made the best map in the class!

My Backyard

This is a picture from my backyard here at my FBT site. Our milpa is right at the bottom of these mountains to the left, about a 30 minute drive from our house. This view is always incredible, but early in the morning and late in the afternoon are the best times to sit on the back porch drinking a cup of coffee and looking at this view.

Aporreando

This is a picture of me aporreando, which is the word they use here for beating bean vines in order to get them out and dry them out. This is an extremely tiring job, and the way that I was doing it was very inefficient and ineffective. They man behind me was excellent at aporreando, and I was just left with blisters.

Coffee and Bananas

At an organic coffee farm that did most of their selling to Starbucks, we were able to see a lot of what we learned about the coffee production process. Banana trees and coffee trees are great complimentary plants, banana trees provide shade for the coffee beans as well as give farmers another crop to sell, and more importantly one that will always be able to be sold with minimal work.

Honduras

This picture is a great example of what Honduras looks like. Every time you turn around, you find yourself looking over the mountains and the valleys, and also next to a milpa. Beautiful trees, endless mountains and abundant amounts of green have been most of my experience here in Honduras up to this point.

Pineapple Plants

While a small pack of us were trying to find the rest of the group that went on a hike, we took a wrong turn and ended up on a finca with pineapples. We started chopping up some fresh pineapples with some machetes and the owners came out and started talking to us. Instead of being mad at us, they ended up talking to us for a while and we paid them for their product.

Me and my Piña

After eating a good amount of pineapple, we chopped down some more and took some for the road. As you can see, I was very satisfied by the end of the day, and ready to get back home and chop up some more piña.

It's crazy how a man in a cowboy hat can shut down an entire country.Since Monday afternoon, H15 has been doing a whole lot of nothing. Since Mel Zelaya reentered Honduras two days ago, the whole country has been living under a 24 hour curfew. For us, this means that there are no training activities being carried out due to the inability of the staff to make it from Teguz to our location in the mountains above. For the rest of the country, it means that no supply deliveries are arriving to pulperias, no traveling for work or personal reasons, and no public transportation on which the whole country depends. Basically, since Mel arrived, Honduras has been experiencing not-so-cold-nor-white snow days, albeit with a little more tension and anxiety than the white stuff usually brings.

With all of this happening so close to our swearing in ceremony that is/was scheduled for Friday, the entire H15 class has been anxiously awaiting any sort of news from PC Honduras. On Saturday, we are/were supposed to move into our sites for good, as official PCVs. As you can see from my usage of slashes, we are not sure about anything. As we sit around and pass the days by visiting those who live close by, we can't help but have flashbacks from the DR and Miami. Uncertainty, with respect to what PC will do next, is an old acquaintance of ours.

One of the reasons that this latest chapter of The Glope that Never Ends has been full of anxiety is because we were given our site assignments late last week. The following paragraphs are only what I know as of now. Because this is the Peace Corps, please keep in mind that everything except the actual location is subject to change. Actually, I'm going to go ahead and say that it will change. There is no maybe when it comes to uncertainty in the Peace Corps.

For my job, I will be developing environmental education curriculum for the local *colegio and schools within my area, as well as teaching environmental education and teaching teachers how to teach the subject. Here in Honduras, the educational system is a very rigid hierarchy in which the teacher is seen as having the final word and all information is rote memorization. For example, a lot of their assignments are basically copying text and information that they were already given. They are not even forced to look for the information. Because of that, the kids expect to be given information and then to be forced to regurgitate it. In our system, the thinking process is rewarded more so than the final response. Basically, that is what I will be working to promote and develop, and even though environmental education is my subject, I will basically be trying to instill critical thinking skills, independent information gathering and analytical skills into the kids. That will hopefully be reinforced by some kind of curriculum that involves a wide variety of activities, dynamic learning, as well as traditional teaching methods. Basically, I will be trying to teach to all different learning styles, and trying to teach and convince teachers to do the same. My secondary projects will be up to me, and there will be plenty of opportunity to diversify my activities. As I said before, there is no guarantee that environmental education will be my main project. As I become more aware of what my community needs, I will change the projects. My region, just like most others in Honduras, is home to coffee production, as well as corn and beans. Also, I am living close to an enormous and diverse national park, Sierra de Agalta, that is well frequented by adventurous backpackers but not so much by anyone else. The domestic tourism within the region is rather developed for being in a place that is known as the "wild wild east" of Honduras, and for having so little with respect to trails and visitor services. The mountain is home to one of the biggest cloud forests in Central America. There is an impressive dwarf forest in the park as well. There is also a need for micro watershed management within the area. To top it all off, there are opportunities to connect the diverse group of NGOs that don't exactly work together on anything because of lack of organization. With all of that, I hope to at least be able to make in impact in one of these areas, if not more.

That which is not subject to change is where I will be. For the next two years, I will be living in the department of Olancho, extremely close to the city of Catacamas. The department is, in many ways, analogous to Texas. The culture and history of Olancho is what really makes a connection to Texas. During the colonial time, *Olanchanos were known as extremely independent and self reliant. They were known to have their own haciendas in which they made everything they wore, grew and cooked everything they ate, and built everything they lived in. As the years went on and Honduras became an independent republic, Olancho started to distrust the central government and became familiarly known as the Independent Republic of Olancho. Overall, the stereotype of Olanchanos as independent go-getters remains. The men there are also known to be strong and tough, carry their pistols on their belts, wear sombreros, always have their machetes, ride a lot places on horseback, and wear big boots, blue jeans with long sleeve shirts and bandannas. I will be right outside of a town called Catacamas, one of the largest towns in the department. I will be 15-30 minutes away and right next to a paved road with easy access to the city. I will have electricity and I will be living with the president of the patronato, the smallest form of community organization their is in Honduras with elected officials. My pueblo will have 1,000 people, and my counterpart will be the vice-president of the patronato. Having a bigger city close means that I will have constant and reliable communication, access to services, and work opportunities. Since not many Peace Corps volunteers go to Olancho, they usually send the ones that do go to pueblos that are close. The other H15 PAM volunteer that is going to Olancho will be 15 minutes away from me going up to the mountain. We will be able to work together on projects since his main job is environmental education also. There are also volunteers in Catacamas, Juticalpa, and Gualaco. I have named the living conditions for PCVs in Olancho "unified isolation" because there aren't many of us out there but we are all very close, geographically and with respect to relationships. Maybe the best thing is that I will be close to the city and close to my friends, so when we need to escape from the Peace Corps life we will be able to do so with ease, or at least in a certain way.

Now you can see that knowing all of this information has made this recent period of uncertainty a little more difficult to handle without anxiety. We know about our sites, about our homes, about our families, and about our new life. We have been preparing for this full time for the past three months. Sitting around and waiting for something to happen has put us all in a daze. Hopefully PC Honduras will knock us out of it sooner rather than later.

There is a famous saying about Olancho that every Honduran knows, even if they aren't from Olancho or have never been. It goes like this: "Es ancho para entrar, y angosto para salir". Translation: "It's wide going in, and narrow going out". This saying comes from the "wild wild east" stereotype about Olancho, and about how it is a rough place that you may not make it out of. I don't know about the "angosto para salir" part, but up to this point, it has not been so "ancho para entrar" for me.

*Colegio is more or less equivalent to high school in the U.S.

*People from Olancho are known as Olanchanos, for males, or Olanchanas, for females.

At certain points of time during training, it felt like this was just one big summer camp and that there was nothing scheduled for us after swearing in. In a way, those thoughts had some truth to them. Besides arriving to our sites the day after swearing in, there really hasn't been anything scheduled for us new PCVs, and there won't be anything for a while. That being said, this is the part of the adventure that we were looking forward to when we filled out our PC applications over a year ago. No one really ever really wanted a schedule anyways. Most of us embarked on this experience in hopes of filling our days with whatever we saw fit, whatever came up, and whatever we could find. We thought the days would be filled with highs and lows. We knew we would have to be creative in our methods of passing the time. We knew we would be lonely, but we knew it would be worth it. We knew at certain points that we would think about home, or what we would be doing if we didn't take this route. After five days of being in my site, I have already experienced most of what I expected and more. I assume that this is how life will be for the next two years. This how they told us life in the Peace Corps would be, and for the most part, they were right.One thing that I didn't expect coming into this experience was the volatility. Every thirty minutes my mood is apt to change, and this is only from going to house to house getting to know people. I can't imagine how it will be when we actually start carrying out projects. And it's not only that I will go from being excited to frustrated in a matter of minutes, a lot of times my reasons for feeling one way are lost when my mood changes. A couple of times I have asked myself why I was frustrated with the last person, or why I was so excited just a short while ago. However, a couple of times, I have known exactly why I have been frustrated, and it's going to be something I have to figure out during my time here in Olancho.In my village of about 400 people (Peace Corps did not do their homework when they told me that I had about 1,000 people) there are two Evangelical churches, and no Catholic church. If anyone is openly religious in this *aldea, they go to the Evangelical church. For the most part, the people that attend the churches are very into their faith, and I have been told (and I have experienced) that one of their main missions is to spread the word of the Bible and of Christ and to convert those who do not believe. After our first town meeting, an older man of the village stopped me and invited me to attend a gathering at the church. Happy to be included in any part of the community, I warmly acknowledged that I would love to come one day to get to know more of them and talk to more members of the community. Apparently, this answer was not sufficient, and he proceeded to ask me if I believed in a whole number of key pillars to his faith. Trying to be as delicate as I could, I stated that I respected his religion and was happy to be included in a gathering, but that it was not for me. I also mentioned that I came to this decision after already being acquainted with the religion, and that I had already heard what he was saying many times before. Once again, wrong answer. Getting out of the conversation and telling the truth about myself instead of being disingenuous were my intentions, and I consider my strategy and my realization of doing so as my first Peace Corps failure. In every PCV presentation, a lessons learned subheading is included to discuss the results and suggestions of the case study. So here it is, for the first time as a PCV. Lessons Learned: don't necessarily tell the truth about yourself and don't necessarily think that your way of thinking is going to click with a HCN's way of thinking. Explain yourself in in this context and weigh the benefits of having the village really get to know things about you such as your religious beliefs before you spout out that you have your own way of being religious, which will probably sound ridiculous to someone like this old man in my village.On the other extreme, it is always a relief to find people who just "get it". Now, let me see if I can explain what getting it means in this context without leaving most of you in the dust as you ask for a *jalón. In this context, people who get it are the ones that aren't looking for results overnight. They are the ones that know it is going to take all of my two years-if not more- to see major progress with our projects. They are the ones that ask for help if they need it, instead of clamming up and being afraid to talk. They are the ones who want to experiment with new methods and who aren't afraid to take risks. Thankfully, one of these people is my host dad, who is also the president of the patronato. With his leadership, this community has been decently organized for the past ten years. With his leadersihp and the help of a lot of other people who already "get it" in this community, we are going to be able to do a lot of good here. However, this is dependent on a central part of this scheme.

More than anyone else, I am the one that has to "get it" here. I am the one that has to know what he's doing, the one that has to work hard to learn the things that I don't know and know what I do know well. I am the one that has to be patient, to work with the ones that do get it and don't get it, to work with the Evangelicals and the others, with the men and with the women. When I came into this, I knew that I would be doing this type of work, and I knew it would be important to the people that I would be working with, but I never knew how much. From the time that I have arrived, I have been treated with the upmost respect regarding my knowledge, my training, and my decision to live in the small village in one of the most rural departments of Honduras. When I tell people that I love it here and it is beautiful, they don't believe me at first. They are thinking to themselves, why would a gringo come here to live here when he has a million other opportunities. Hopefully by the end of my two years they will realize that I am learning as much from them as they are from me. Even though I don't belong to their faith, the Evangelicals say that it is a blessing from God to have me here, and that we are going to be doing a lot of good for this community. I better get to work on "getting it" because this isn't a game, this isn't training, and this isn't just a way to spend the next two years a gain some experience and learn about myself and others. I have to "get it" because I am working with people's livelihoods in a community that does nothing but plant corn and beans, where the average family lives on what my family lives on for a month. I'm confident that we will be able to do some good together, and I'm happy to be experiencing days in which my mood drops from high to low and climbs back up to high before lunch time. I'm happy to be lonely sometimes and feel the whole community behind me at others. I'm happy to miss home when I'm here and miss my home here when I'm away. I'm happy with what I chose to do, and after nine months of waiting and three long months of training filled with doubts at times, I'm finally doing it.

*Aldea is the Spanish word for village, and it is one of the official classifications for communities here in Honduras

*HCN is Peace Corps speak for Host Country National

*Jalón here in Honduras is a ride with someone you do or don't know (literally a pull). It is similar to hitchhiking but everyone does it in Honduras and people are more than happy to give people jalones. Please pardon my weak attempt to fit that word in this post.

*The patronato is the organization that acts as the local unit of government in aldeas in which there is no mayor.

I haven't posted in a couple of weeks. Most of you have probably noticed, some of you may have been wondering when and if I would return, and maybe a few of you have been worried. Before you give up on me, let me explain what I have been doing. I promise it won't happen again.

If you aren't familiar with Peace Corps policy it might be useful to know that for the first three months in site volunteers are not allowed to start projects or spend the night out of site without Peace Corps' permission. We are also supposed to be integrating in the community in which we are living. For people in small sites like me this means, more or less, meeting every person. How one goes about doing this is left up to the individual. I learned quickly that this sounds a hell of a lot easier than it is. Walking up to people that I don't know in such a reserved culture as this one and trying to strike up a conversation is difficult. Most kids shout at me obnoxiously from their safe distances and when put face to face with me a magical force paralyzes their vocal chords and only affords them a wispy "bien" as a response to my "cómo está".

While it would be nice to actually speak with the kids instead of turning them into mutes when they enter a ten meter radius of me, it would be nicer if most women in the community didn't think that I was kryptonite. During the morning, my prime walking around time, the men are at work in the fields and the women are at work in the house. As I don't have any other way to meet people except for walking up and giving a big gringo smile and a non threatening "buenas días", there is ample opportunity for the women to hide from me or make themselves appear that they are too busy to chat with the *chele that just seems to walk around aimlessly. Most of the time, I stand at their stick and chicken wire gates until they hesitantly say "pase adelante" and pull out a pair of plastic lawn chairs in order to have our awkward conversations. For the most part, it's me that has been pulling teeth to tease out some sort of substance from these chats. I doubt that I will ever have as many sequential awkward conversations again in my life without something more familiar to break the chain.

Familiarity and normalcy here in my every day life are not normal nor familiar feelings, at least with respect to relationships. On the superficial level, connecting with Hondurans has been easy. I understand their humor, I listen to the same kind of music, and I like the same kind of food. I like to chop firewood in my rubber boots with my machete and load it on to the donkey and hike 45 minutes back home down the mountain in order to throw it into the wood burning stove. All of that is fine with me. That is part of what I came down here to do. However, I didn't just come to do things, I also came to be with the people. So far, I haven't really found anyone with whom I can relate on a deeper level. If I tell someone that I don't belong to their religion, a question that inevitably comes up here in this conservative little village of 400 in which there are two evangelical churches, they either try to convert me or tell me that I must come out of ignorance. They say that they are right and everyone else is wrong. When I talk about how women don't necessarily have to cook and clean all day and that they are not meant to serve men, I am told that I don't know how things work and that is not what the Bible says. When I talk about novels, "novelas", a glowing box of pictures instead of pages painted with words is what comes to mind. I am not sure if this is supposed to be part of the experience or if I am supposed to try to find other ways to relate. Maybe it’s neither, and maybe it's just the way things are going for me right now here in my site. Will I find someone here in this village that I can connect to on a deeper level? I don't think that I can answer that question with any certainty right now. What I do know for certain is that the superficial level of relationships at which I am hovering will not suffice for my two years of service.

* Chele is the word they use here for white, or for any light color

Finally I am putting up pictures from my site. It’s been a while since I arrived but I felt the need to collect a good sampling of life here before I posted something that allowed you to form an opinion. So here it is, a fine sampling of life in La Jagua, Catacamas, Olancho.

La Jagua

As you may know, there is only one road in my village, and this is the view of the road in the direction leading up into the mountains. You can see the houses covered in lush vegetation built on the base of the mountains.

Mi Casita

This is the house in which I am currently living, my host family’s house. It is a very typical Honduran campo house (or at least it was before widespread immigration changed it all) made of adobe, wood, and tile. The floors in the bedroom are of cement but the kitchen, the bodega and the porch floors are dirt. There are only three bedrooms.

My Host Family

This large group (minus the one in the cowboy hat but plus one youth not pictured) is my host family without my host mom and dad. In total, there are eleven of us that live in this house. Luckily, Peace Corps requires that we have are own room.

Up the Mountain

This is the view from my host dad’s plot of land, about a 15 minute walk up the mountain from our house. It’s a beautiful area with a perfect mix of nature and hillside agriculture. If you venture higher, the view just keeps getting better.

Jochito and his best friend el Burro

One of my host brothers (actually the nephew of my host parents) goes out almost every day to bring back firewood for our wood burning stove. He is always extremely excited to go and loves to be up in the mountains alone with his best friend the donkey.

El Padrino

Graduations are a big deal in Honduras just as they are in the States but they are a lot different here. In the ceremony, the person graduating picks a madrino and a padrino to escort them up to the stage to get their diploma. I was picked to be the padrino for someone in my village. Here we are, padrino, graduate and madrino coming back from the stage.

Me and Patuca

One of the dogs in my house (we have four) had puppies so I have decided to take one. This is my puppy, Patuca. He's named after the longest river in Honduras and the second longest in Central America, which is born right here in Olancho. He is almost double the size of all the other puppies and his dad is really big so it looks like he's going to follow suit. He is about a month old.

La Jaula

In the States, if you want a dog cage you take a shower, get dressed, get in your car and go to a large store and pick out the best one out of an almost endless selection. Here in Honduras, you slip on your rubber boots, put on your dirty jeans and a dirty long sleeve shirt, grap your machete and you walk up the mountains to find a good tree to cut off some limbs and you haul the wood back on your shoulder. This is what we did one morning for my new puppy.

Carolina

This is who occupies the cage, my puppy Carolina. She came to me one day without me expecting it when my host dad pulled up in the front of our house and pulled her out of the car. She had been abandoned by the owners because she is a female and she had spent the previous three nights out alone in the bushes. She was covered in dirt, fleas and ticks when I got her and right when I saw her I told my host dad that I would take care of her. She has since regained all her life and is feisty just like every other healthy puppy. Dog treats and toys are hard to find here in Honduras so if you have any desires to make Carolina and Patuca happy please send a package!

Like to watch instead of read? Here is a list of all my video posts from the past. Enjoy!

Honduras 15 Training in the Dominican Republic

This video, made by my fellow PCT Jessie, gives you a peak at some of the activities we have done in training so far.

From Agua Azul, Palenque, Chiapas

This video comes to you from the beautiful state of Chiapas, Mexico. The video gives you all the persuasion needed to make up your mind to take a trip.

Folk Singers in San Cristóbal

This is my first video made in Movie Maker, so its not too fancy. The video and pictures come from San Cristóbal de las Casas in Chiapas, Mexico.

"Somos Americanos" chronicles my time spent in Latin America. The phrase somos americanos ("we are americans" in Spanish) encapsulates the main sentiment that drove me to study Latin American Politics and History, and also Spanish. It is what drives me to live in the places I live. Americans don't just live between the Rio Grande/Bravo and Canada, and they don't all have blond hair and blue eyes. We come in all different colors, we speak a variety of languages, and we live in a region that used to be called the "New World".I am am alumnus of The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where I earned a B.A. in History and a B.A. in International Studies. Although I was always somewhat interested in Latin America and Spanish, I fell under the influence of a couple of great professors at UNC. For the past five years I have been studying Latin America and I have been living on and off in Latin America.As you may have noticed, the subject of some of the posts on this blog is not just my current place of residence, but also other countries. In the Spring of 2008, I studied abroad in Puebla, Mexico. In 2009, I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in a village close to Catacamas, Honduaras. There are posts from each of those time periods that are in the archives of this blog.In my spare time, I enjoy, among other activities, conversing, spending time outdoors, playing sports and spending time with quality people. I am an avid listener of the "Thomas Jefferson Hour". I enjoy learning, and I consider myself a curious person. I read widely, and I am currently attempting to give myself the classical education I never gave myself or received before.

I urge you to contact me and use the comment boards. In order to send a private e-mail, use the contact page that I have created for this website. It doesn't matter what the subject is. I welcome any dialogue as long as the message is not commercially motivated or hateful. If you have a suggestion, a critique, a question or a response, please share.Thanks a lot for partaking in my life in Latin America. I encourage everyone to come visit me. I promise all of you that an interesting experience awaits you.

Up to this point this blog has been, more or less, specific to certain situations that I have faced here in Honduras and how I these situations have made me feel. Writing a blog in this fashion is rewarding since I am able to share these feelings with everyone and because I am able to look back and relive these moments in my mind. However, no combination of words, even the best chosen in a perfect structure, can do justice to that which runs through the human mind. Something is always left out. The vivid colors of the world are sometimes painted dull by the words we choose to describe them. Instead of once again doing what I always do, I tried to do something different this time. In this post, I have tried to talk about how I feel about my experiences instead of how a certain experience makes me feel. Instead of looking at one experience as a part of what I am going through as a Peace Corps volunteer, I have tried to take all of them together, as they are in reality, and share the sum of my experiences with you. Let me know what you think.

Sometimes I am extremely happy that I am doing what I am doing. I am contented by the fact that I live in a small village in the middle of one of the most rural departments in Honduras. At times, life enchants me with its simple pleasures of swimming in a cold mountain stream and eating bananas that I picked off a tree in my neighbors yard. The local and fresh food satiates more than my rumbling stomach and the clear, cool waters cleanse and tranquilize much more than my body.

Sometimes I am extremely frustrated, lonely, and fed up with dealing what I deal with. The daily battle of having a conversation is much more than nerve racking. I try to open up and share what I feel, which a lot of the time is received by a nod, some unsatisfying and drawn out "sí" or, at times, much less. I have found out during my time here that my breaking point is made of rubber. It's susceptible to changes in temperature which either make it extremely flexible or absolute and unforgiving.

There are days in which I don't know what to feel, or I feel all that is possible for a human being to feel in matter of moments. I feel loved when the little girls that I live with run up to me as I arrive at home and do all they can to tackle me and bring me down to the height at which they see the world, only to give me kisses. I ponder my arrival from another planet when I pass groups of boys and receive their blank stares of confusion after I give them a simple "hola". I feel fear when I am attacked by dogs, I feel excitement when someone tells me that they are going to high school and they want to learn, at least in part because of something I said. I feel trapped and judged by the eyes of those that stare, and I feel liberated by the protection offered by the trees and the mountains, the anonymity of the city streets, and the comforting and distant voice of an author telling me a story and sharing their truth through the pages of a book.

Sometimes, when I acknowledge the reality that I face, everything converges in my mind at the same time and I feel it all at once, overwhelming me and confusing me, leaving me disoriented.

Sometimes, especially when I try to trap between these lines that which runs through my head on a daily basis, I feel like I am looking at the sum of my experiences through the eyes of someone else who sees and feels what I see in feel but who, unlike me, can actually make sense of it.

Here are some of my favorite pictures from food markets during my time in Mexico.

Veggies

This picture comes from the market in Cholula, the place where I lived and went to school. This market, like most other markets, was extremely crowded on the Sunday afternoon (just like every Sunday) when we went. This woman actually had her back turned to me when I started to frame the picture, but right when I snapped it she turned around, and I'm glad she did, as her face makes the picture all the better.

A View from the Ground

From the same market and same day, another view of some of the beautiful vegetables on display at this typical central Mexican market. Quesillo

This is Queso Oaxaca (Oaxacan Cheese), some of the best cheese I have ever had. It has a consistency that is very similar to mozzarella, but a distinct flavor that is hard to describe. It is available at some local grocery stores, we buy ours from Food Lion.Mango Flowers

One of the greatest things about Mexico is the amazingly cheap, delicious, and abundant fruit. As one of the world's leading producers of mango's, Mexicans have come up with creative ways to sell and market mangoes on the streets. They even put chili powder on them (mango con chile).Mole

Oaxaca is famous for it's chocolate, and Puebla is famous for their mole (a sauce that contains chocolate among many other things such as peppers). This is a picture of freshly made mole from a chocolate shop in Oaxaca.Grillos

Who doesn't love eating grasshoppers? I, for one. Even though I never tried these things, I can tell you that their smell make them unbearable to stand near for a long period of time. I usually don't go for things that I can't stand to smell. However, as you see in this picture below, people do actually eat these things.Who Eats Bugs?

This is a group of people eating the fried grasshoppers from the previous picture. Need I say more??Thanks for checking out some of the many pictures I took while in Mexico. Be sure to check out more photo posts as I get them up, as I plan on posting my pictures from Mexico City, Acapulco (these are great) as well as Chiapas. If you like this post, feel free to share it using the links below!

Pictures from an early morning in on a tropical beach in Acapulco, Mexico.

Over the Hills

This picture may not be the best picture I have ever taken but, for a couple of reasons, I couldn't help put post it. The view is from the balcony of our hotel room in Acapulco, $60 a night split between 5 people for a room and an ocean front hotel. I would venture to say that we got a pretty good deal. While we really enjoyed the beach, we also enjoyed our surroundings, and this pictures gives you a good idea of where we were.

Boats on the Water

The tranquility of the morning in Acapulco was all around me as I took a walk on the beach, and I tried to capture that in my pictures. One of the most peaceful sights is that of boats floating in our cove and the suns early light giving everything a warm glow. This picture is one of my favorites due to its peaceful nature.

Down the Path

This picture is one of my favorites because of its depth, and how it almost leads you down a path from the beach past the island on the right, and to the hills sitting in the middle of the bay. The warm glow of the morning light also adds a nice touch taking you from shadows to light as you go down the path.

Solitude

As morning came to an end, I decided to try and take a couple from the patio area of our hotel. You really get for the laid back feel of our area in this picture, as the boats are just floating in the water and the flag is just flapping in the breeze, with no one in sight.

Boat Launchers

In case you were wondering how the boats got out in the water, here is a group of men rolling one of them along wooden cylinders. It was a great sight to see them use such an effective and low-tech approaching to putting their boats in the water, even though it was tiring just to watch them do it.

The Island

A view of the island in the middle of the cove. An oasis type island that was home to a restaurant which we did not end up going to, but still a nice sight to look at while sitting on the beach all day long.Be sure to come back and check out Sunset in Acapulco, which consists of pictures taken during our amazing dinner on a cliff overlooking the sun set over the Pacific ocean.

This is my first video made in Movie Maker, so its not too fancy. The video and pictures come from San Cristóbal de las Casas in Chiapas, Mexico.

Walking around San Cristóbal de las Casas on our last evening in Chiapas, killing time before we left for our 12 hour bus ride to Oaxaca, we went to the big market. On our way we stumbled upon this group singing in this plaza type area. The photos come from the same night, and in them you can see just how high up we were. In case you were wondering, yes, it was extremely cold.