Hola! It's amazing how fast time has passed. We got back from FBT yesterday and are gearing up for the last week of training. It was hard to leave Yuscaran in some ways, but I was so excited to see my old host family and my neighbors. Fiona (the puppy) is twice as big now, and it's wonderful to be back in a place where there is internet and it doesn't take 20 minutes to load espn.com.
However, I do not have spell check, so please forgive any errors in this, as I am rushing and do not have time to edit!
Now that we're back from business training, I'll try to give more details on the last few weeks as well as the town we were in. The advanced Spanish speakers got to design a community project for the 6 weeks, to work on while the rest of us had language classes. They interviewed businesses and community members throughout the town and made a tourism website: http://sites.google.com/site/puebloyuscaran/. Please visit to increase the site traffic! It's translated in both English and Spanish, and also a cool way to read a little more about where we were living.
For Semana Santa, there were religous processions every day, and we got to witness the making of an alfombra, which is a giant sawdust carpet. Alfombras are a big tradition in Honduras during Semana Santa. I will post pictures when I get the chance. I also went with my family to Teguz that Saturday-Sunday, and we stayed at the house where their 3 daughters live. It was a fun trip -- great to have a break from the daily grind. They gave me tours of a couple malls and drove me around the city. On Easter, we went to their evangelical church and then out for a fancy lunch at KFC. Nothing says Happy Easter like 5 hours of church and a bucket of fried chicken and biscuits!
During the long weekend, we had several gatherings and really bonded as a business group - as boring as we thought the town was at times, we really got into a social routine, and I will miss having everyone so closeby. Our group has a lot of strong personalites, which had the potential for distaster, but wound up being a whole lot of fun. There was never a dull moment.
Last week, we did a really fun and exhausting project called a business simulation at the local escuela. We split into teams and worked with four different classes of 6th graders for five days. The first day we gave them charlas on business topics, and then we had them design a business and a product to sell. We spent the rest of the week buying materials, working on production, and promoting and selling the product. It was a ton of work, but the kids loved it, and I had a lot of fun as well. My group sold lapiz con flor -- flower pens. We bought boxes of pens, ribbon, and bouquets of fake flowers, and taped them all together. The product was very impressive, if I do say so myself! In the end, we finshed 2nd, but we made over 700 lempiras in two days, and I was so proud of the kids!!
Now that I've rambled for a while, I will say that we received our site assignments today! They waited until the end of the day to tell us, and it was a very stressful hour of speculation when they were revealing everything. If you're wondering why I waited until the end of the post to mention this, you know exactly how we all felt when we were sitting through policy and technical sessions this morning and afternoon.
I will be in the department of Intibuca, which is in the mountains more toward the western part of the country. My site is meduim-large sized, about 10,000 people in the city center and 20,000 total. The work there sounds like a great fit for me - there is a large technical high schoool that is looking for help revising its business and finance curriculum, a network of caja rurales (small microfinance banks) operated by the municipal government, and a large NGO that works on economic development through food security. I will have a sitemate from the health group, which is not common (larger sites have multiple volunteers, but it's rare to have 2 from the same training group). Either way, it will be nice to have another American around.
My site has internet cafes and modem coverage, so hopefully I will get better at updating. It has been a very eventful day, and I am so excited to enjoy this last week and get to my site!
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