Photos from our Peace Corps Volunteer graduation ceremony on May 15, 2009 at the American Embassy in Tegucigalpa with his Excellency Hugo Llorens, U.S. Ambassador to Honduras, swearing us in to Peace Corps service.  That’s the Ambassador between me and one of my Honduran counterparts, Marlene, with whose mother I will live for two months in La Masica.  Also, my Health Project team of 12, and at Campo Zarabanda where we returned for lunch my friend Jen, and Jen and my friend Matt.

Twenty-four hours later I met Cuchita the pig who lives in my front yard but wanders the neighborhood.  Ah, from such lofty heights we tumble.  The old house in the photo is across the street from my new temporary home (the house where I live is, of course, much nicer).  The wooded area is also across from where I live; we live on a corner lot and the wood belongs to my host mother and is a pantry from where she regularly gleans food for our table.  The business end of the cows belong to one of several small herds that amble by each day in the mornings and in the afternoons.

2:30 AM, Thursday 28 May 2009:  I woke up with a start, the bed rocking and shaking beneath me wondering wha the?  It felt somewhat like the bed shaking in the movie The Exorcist where Linda Blair was fighting the devil.  The shaking went on for a long time.  And then the power went out.  Pitch black with no fan.  Hot.  Silence.  A series of aftershocks.  I stayed where I lay … heard movement in the house where I live with a little old lady of 82.  I heard her answer her phone; probably one of her daughters.  I fell asleep eventually (I had been sick with sinusitis for a few days and was taking antibiotics) but awakened a couple of hours later with cool fan breeze washing over my face when the power returned.  As soon as it was light the phone calls began.  I called in sick that morning and began receiving calls about the earthquake from all over Honduras from PCVs and PC staff.  We Peace Corps folk stick together.  All of my compañeros were okay.  La Masica where I live was untouched, even though the 7.2 quake’s epicenter was just a few miles off the coast.  I guess we dodged a bullet.

The rainy season has started.  It has been raining since I got here.  It is winter here in Honduras.  It´s raining but the weather is hot.  Next week I will go out with a medical team to a few of the outlying aldeas to adminster health care and health education.  Some areas are reached by 4X4 vehicle, others by horse, mule and donkey, others by boat.  

I arrived on the North Coast Saturday at 2:30 p.m. after getting up at 3:30 a.m. to finish packing.  A few of my compañeros and I spent our last Friday night at a local pupusa place in Santa Lucia until 11 p.m. celebrating our new PCV status and our impending transfers to all the four corners of the country.  We won´t see each other again until a scheduled gathering in September.  My new home for the next 2 months here in La Masica is much different than any of the other two places I have lived in Honduras.  There´s a pig in the front yard (being fattened for the holidays) and chickens and ducks in the back yard under my bedroom window and they all grovel in the dirt street out front with the occasional wandering herd of cows during the day.  I have taken many pics of our graduation at Santa Lucia and of the critters here locally but I will not post any until I get my own wireless internet connection, hopefully in a week or so.  It seems that any time I use my flash drive memory stick on public computers it is susceptible to virus contamination.  I can´t wait to get my own place!

The Saturday that our health project team left La Paz the priest from the cathedral blessed the building where the orphanage is moving into and we were invited, the nun knowing that we were leaving, as guests.  Our team of aspirantes has been working every Saturday cleaning the garbage and piles of refuse and moving huge piles of dirt.  Saturday a group of students from one of the local colegios arrived in conjunction with the benediction.  The nun did not know they were showing up but happily put them to work.  I spoke with their professor who said they didn´t know about the clean-up of the orphanage and would henceforth show up every weekend until the building was all cleaned up.  This is what sustainable development is all about.  We started the ball rolling and the locals then took over to finish the project.

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My friend Derrick and I went to the Museo de Arceologia y Antropologia in Comayagua Sunday to view the many fine artifacts excavated from sites in the Valle de Comayagua.  Comayagua was the first capital of Honduras following the Spanish invasion in 1502.  The capital was subsequently moved to Tegucigalpa but Comayagua retains its colonial charm and is a 30 to 40 minute bus ride from La Paz.  Some of the artifacts date from 9,000 years ago, like the Cave of the Giants in the mid left photo.  In the upper right is a copy of the cave paintings taken from the Giant´s Cave which is located in Marcala.  In the mid left next to the Giant´s Cave is a model of what the ruins at Yarumela must have looked like 3,000 years ago.  Only one of those mounds has been partially excavated, the ruin where I rode my horse to the top of the pyramid 3 weeks ago.  At the museum we met a young lady from England who is working as a volunteer for 5 weeks with a group of friends building adobe brick homes in a small town called La Esmeralda.

Sorry, I get carried away taking pictures.  La Paz is, of course, not all adobe buildings.  It is a modern small city with all the amenities.  But there are several adobe walls and buildings that have charm.  The building on the top right is located two doors down from the internet site I use frequently.  People live there; it has a spacious back yard.  My daughter Andrea wanted me to say a few words for Shari, an RN friend of hers who lives in Pennsyvania.  A few words about being an RN in the Peace Corps.  Well, one can´t practice as an RN.  We´re taken on as Health Educators.  Our forte is our experience in the health care field.  It helps if one has case manager experience in public health and with chemical dependent clientele as well as HIV/AIDS.  And especially Maternal and Child Health.  The training is very intense and geared toward facilitating sustainable development skills in the local populace.  One must also attain a certain level of Spanish language technical expertise.  Please log on to ask specific questions.

I went horseback riding Sunday with an old gentleman, don Ruben, I met who lives a few doors down from my host family.   That´s him riding his donkey as we rode to the ancient ruin site that predates the Maya Empire.  You can see the unexcavated hill in the distance over the lagoon (click on the pic) where we rode to the top to take photos.  We rode through a cow herd grazing near a water sewage treatment lagoon where no vehicular traffic is allowed.  Very little excavation has been done here at these ruins.  The photos above are from the tops of one partially excavated hill and one unexcavated hill.  The tree I´m standing in front of is a cactus (nopal) tree.  There was one larger than this one as we rode up the hill.  The hill on the lower left is the hill where we rode up to the top, it´s directly across from the partially excavated ruins.  I have never seen nopales this large.  I love my horse.  His name is Sarco, he has one blue eye and one brown eye.  After this week we have two more weeks inLa Paz.  I asked to be assigned here, but they will probably ignore my request.

Pictures of my adventures during Semana Santa.  The orphanage pics are self-explanatory.  I kind of mixed the procession pics in with the orphanage pictures.  I have many more pictures and will try and post more in a different site when I have the time after pre-service training to work on my weblog skills.  The Easter procession pics are made of colored sawdust and spread across the pavement over a length of several city blocks, kind of like Hopi sand paintings or Tibetan mandalas, then the procession of several hundred people walks over them while stopping at the 14 stations of the cross.  The orphanage work was done on Thursday and Saturday and the procession was on Friday.

Our group had a 4 day weekend off for Easter week.  Wednesday evening Nico, a PC Volunteer soon to leave for the states, introduced me to a group of 14 orphans and the nun who cares for them and who have to leave their residence,  the alcaldia  wants to turn the building into a museum.  They have been cleaning up an abandoned building for the past 3 weeks, the children, ages 3 to 12, with the nun, Hermana Edith.  I agreed to help them and that evening called my companeros to see if they would also help.  We all showed up the next morning to help clean up this building that has been abandoned for more than 25 years.  We helped again Saturday and will help every Saturday until we have to leave La Paz for Campo Zarabanda on May 10th for our permanent Peace Corps assigments and swearing in as Peace Corps Volunteers.  Unfortunately I am unable to post any pics at present.  I also have pics of the procession through the city on Good Friday.  I´ll try and post those later.