25. July 2010 by Fortunato Velasquez.

I cry when I see the state of the hospital that serves the community where I live.  The Dr. Roberto Suazo Cordoba Hospital in La Paz was built during the presidency of Dr. Suazo Cordoba, a native of the city, in the 1980s.  The hospital is located at the “El Soldado” round-about, the city’s busiest intersection and entryway to the mercado at the right of the picture on the bottom right where thousands of citizens of the outlying aldeas come on weekends to shop and be seen.  At the hospital is where most of the departamento’s babies are born.  The pictures are of the maternity ward.  I work with the Hogar Materno Grupo de Apoyo (support group), a group of cititizens and hospital employees who raise money to improve the quality of life for the hospital’s patients.  The Hogar Materno is a separate building where the aldeas’ poor pregnant mothers come down from the mountains to stay before they are ready to deliver, often staying there several days: the conditions there are even worse than in the pictures.  My present projects at the hospital are to help install a potable water system at the Hogar Materno similar to the one installed by ADEC (Agua Desarroyo para la Comunidad) at the Hogar San Jose for the orphan children, and to write an SPA grant (Small Project Assistance) to renovate the hospital’s maternity unit.  There is so much to do….

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12. July 2010 by Fortunato Velasquez.

I could kick myself in the butt.  Sometime during my five days at the Copan Ruins I inadvertently changed the setting on my camera from the small pixel size that allows me to post photos onto my blog to the larger size that doesn’t unless I resize them, which takes a long time, especially when there are hundreds of pics.  Included here are the few I did take of the Copan Ruins in the smaller postable size.  My pics of Cancun, Merida, Yucatan and Guatemala will have to wait.  The Copan Ruins are quite large.  The very top left pic shows the paved path one can walk to reach the ruins from the town named Copan Ruinas, the area once a suburban living area of the ancient central ruling center where the largest pyramids and stone buildings housed the government and its bureaucracy.  The top two left pics next to the sendero (path) show how as the centuries passed the pyramids were built larger by successive dynasties, on top of existing structures.  The door of the second top left pic leads to the building seen in the cutout, a huge ceremonial center called the Rosalillo, discovered intact with much of its original color.  The stellae and works of art positioned throughout the Copan Ruins made me imagine myself walking amongst the teeming population living here when the highly advanced civilization that occupied the Copan Valley nestled among forested mountainous peaks was at its zenith over a thousand years ago, one of many similar Mayan cities across Maya territory.  I have returned to my duties in La Paz and expect to be posting more pics in the smaller pixel size soon.

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3. July 2010 by Fortunato Velasquez.

No matter how humble, there is no place like home.  Copan Ruinas, Honduras; Guatemala; the beaches of Cancun on the Caribbean; the beaches of Merida, Yucatan on the Gulf of Mexico; the thousand-year-old stupendous stone buildings and pyramids my ancestors constructed to build their many magnificent cities; and all the colorful, intricate artisanry redolent of ancient culture created by beautiful people, my people, resurrected in me a pride that I realized anchors my presence to those first ancestors who rose from the middle American jungles over 3,000 years ago to build a far-flung, highly stratified civilization.  I am already planning another journey next spring to visit the ancient Mayan sites of Tikal and Palenque, this one to be entirely overland without a daily itinerary to hinder my movements.  I discovered on my recent travels that the freedom allowed to me by choosing my bus rides whenever lets me linger, wherever.  And at the end of the road, I come home to La Paz, Honduras.  I will post a few pictures after I wind down, for I am expecting a contingent of PCVs from the La Paz area to gather on my rooftop tomorrow for a Fourth of July barbeque. 

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