Drip Irrigation Seminar

In cooperation with Healing Hands, this week Mission Lazarus hosted a drip irrigation seminar for some men in the area. The guy teaching works for Healing Hands and has travelled to over 85 different countries. He was pretty interesting, and knows a lot about irrigation. Anyway, this guy is from Tennessee and doesn't speak Spanish, so I had the privelege of translating for him a few days this week. I learned more than the average person would probably ever want to know about composting, digging raised beds, and drip irrigation.
For example: To build a compost heap, there are several principle things that you need, such as organic materials, water, bacteria, heat, and pressure. To start, you build your base, about 2 meters by 2 meters, and build your first layer with coarse materials, such as small sticks or bamboo or something like that. Then, you cover with a layer of palm leaves, or some such thing. Pour on a layer of water, then continue to cover this with some type of large leaf, like a banana leaf. Continue with some mud, perhaps with a little manure mixed in, throw on some food scraps, maybe a little more water, some light material like green grass, or sawdust, add water, and continue to add layers...alternating between heavy layers like mud and manure, and light layers like grass and sawdust. It's important to remember that green grass is better than yellow because it's still alive and still produces certain bacterias that help the heap to decompose.

And that's leaving out the details.....

Trip to Copan Ruinas

Last weekend, the other interns and I decided to travel up to the northern part of Honduras and go see the infamous Copan Ruinas. The trip was quite an adventure from the get-go.
We started out with 12 of us trying to ride, along with Jarrod, in his truck. We quickly discovered that wasn't going to work, so we split up and some of us crowded into some vans with the group. We we got to Tegus, where we were stopping over for the night, we only had two hotel rooms reserved for 12 people. 5 boys in one room, 7 girls in the other. We waited for over an hour at the Marriott to see if they had any rooms, they didn't, then we went to another hotel, and they didn't have any rooms either, so we smooshed. Sure, we could've found some other place to stay, but we wanted to do it the difficult way. We woke up bright and early Friday morning, to catch a 5:45 bus...but it was already full by the time we got there. So we went and ate donuts, and came back for the 10:00 bus, but it was delayed due to a school riot in Tegus, and the bus couldn't get through to come get us!! Finally, about 11:30 we were off. At the next stop, San Pedro Sula, we missed our connecting bus, so we went downtown and ate at McDonalds, then caught the 6:00 bus to Copan. We finally reached our destination about 9:30. Oh, and on the bus they played 3 Bruce Lee movies in a row...with full audio....the "hi-ya"s overpowered all of our ipods.
The rest of the trip was a little less eventful, but fun nonetheless. We saw the ruins and reinacted some human sacrificing and mayan ball playing. It was pretty fun. Sunday morning we woke up really early, caught a 5:15 bus out of Copan, made it to Tegus about 12:30 to find out that the next bus for San Marcos didn't leave until 4:30. So, we went to the mall and ate at Fridays, then went back to the bus station to find that there was an accident in Choluteca that was delaying our bus indefinitely. So, we waited, in the smelly bus station with no water in the bathroom (yuck!) and finally we pulled out about 6:30.
Needless to say, it was a long day......but don't you just love Central American timeschedules??

Well, another week has come and gone, only 6 more. It's hard to believe the way in which time passes here. Things here move pretty slowly, and it's amazing the speed at which hours can pass and you have no idea where they've gone.

This is Glenda. She is in 3rd grade, and is simply precious. Glenda has trouble recognizing her numbers, so I've been working with her one on one, and some days I actually feel like we're making some progress. Hopefully by the end of the summer, Glenda will know her numbers backwards and forwards....Don't you just love those big brown eyes??

This is going to be the first home at Refugio Mision Lazaro. Ten children, along with 2 tias will be living in this house. It's not all the way completed, but they're working on it, and if I understand correctly, there will be children living here hopefully by the end of the summer!!

Well, due to lack of transportation, I did my first bout of hitchiking yesterday. It was really exciting....I had never done that sort of thing before. Two other interns and I stood out in the street, waved a truck down, told him where we were going, and hopped in the back. Unfortunately, the tire that I chose to sit on was wet, so I had a wet bottom for most of the morning. We arrived in San Marcos safely, ready to "pedir jalon" again next week!!

Last Saturday morning, as I sat in a rocking chair on our front porch, I looked to my right, and what did I see? Well, I saw this horse, with a huge tree limb tied to its tail, being forced to ride around in circles, doing what I can only assume was plowing. As a non-animal lover, even I felt bad for this horse and his pulled tail.

So, today for lunch I had the most amazing tacos. Well, not really the most amazing, but the best tacos that I've ever had outside of Mexico. And there was this salsa verde, that was creamy, just like my all time favorite salsa in Mexico City.

If you haven't ever travelled to Honduras, you should try to make the trip sometime. It is simply a beautiful country. Especially now, during the rainy season, everything is so green!! I love it...it is very calming to be able to look around and see nothing but green grass and trees and mountains. The above picture is my front yard. Yes, it is quite big and beautiful, and our house is kind of out in the middle of nowhere, but it's great - especially if you love bugs and mice. We also have recently discovered that we have a fairly small water tank, which adds an extra element to the Honduran Adventure. Just the other day, after a torrential downpour, we all arrived home to discover that we had no water - that means no drinking, no showering, no flushing, nada. So, another intern and I set out on a search of the guy that turns on the pump (we found out later that we can turn on the pump ourselves, which makes things a bit easier). Anyway, everything was muddy and slushy and, of course, living on a ranch there was lots of horse and cow poop mixed in with the mud, so you don't know what you're stepping in. First, we squeezed through a narrow opening in the barbed wire fence around our house, then headed down alongside the chicken and turkey coop, which had a nice aroma, and then we slid down a muddy slope to the gravel road. We went about 20 feet, then had to wade through a river, up some more road, and we arrived at our destination. Needless to say, at that point we were smelly, wet, and muddy, but we had a great time!!

I'm back helping at the school, and I'm having a great time. Having a great time, but glad everyday that I don't permanently work in an elementary school. The kids are really fun, and they love us gringos. The other day we left school to walk into town to make some copies, and when we came back the kids were at recess, and when they saw us coming, every single kid in the school ran to the gate...it's the closest thing I've ever experienced to being a famous person. Tuesday I teach my first lesson - I will be teaching kindergarten about water - where it comes from and how we use it. Also, on Tuesday we start English classes with the teachers.
Something really exciting happened this week. There's a little girl at the school named Andrea, who is about 4, and she has some sort of birth defect or something (sorry, I'm not very medical). Anyway, she doesn't have any ear canals, so she has a hard time hearing, and a doctor was here from Nashville and he brought her this headset thing that vibrates, converting sound waves into something, so that she can hear sound. It was so cool!! Right now they're working on fitting the headband so that it will fit her head. Above you can see Alli showing Andrea the headset for the first time.

Well, I just finished my first weekend and first day at school. So, the weekend was kinda boring. Friday night, Jake came over and made pizzas - they were yummy, it was just unfortunate that we didn´t get to eat until like 8 and we were all starving. Saturday we did absolutely nothing. The plan was to go swimming at Tres Pilas but it was cloudy and raining so that didn´t really work out. Saturday night we ate some really yummy, cheap Chinese food. Yes, it was yummy, even to me who doesn´t eat Chinese food.

Sunday was a bit more exciting. First of all, as part of my teaching Spanish to the interns, we are having Spanish Sunday every Sunday, which means that on Sundays absolutely no English is to be spoken, only Spanish. That made the day pretty fun, and everybody had a pretty good attitude, except for one, but I´m sure that things will be better by next week:) In addition to that, we started out the morning with horseback riding, which was pretty fun, it´s just a shame that I didn´t think to put any sunscreen on, as now my arms and face are now a nice shade of rouge. We went to church in the afternoon, and then to a place to eat some yummy hamburgers.

Today was a school day. I like school, I guess that´s why I´m a teacher. The kids are tons of fun to play with, and they love to tug and pull on us....sometimes it´s a bit much, but it´s cool that they are so excited for us to be there to help them. No real exciting stories there yet, but I´ll try to stage something tomorrow.

¡Hasta la vista!

Honduras

Well, I arrived in Honduras on Tuesday and it's exactly like I remember it yet completely different. This country is the most beautiful place that I have ever soon, it's so green and so beautiful, and the people just make it that much more special. I am so happy to be back here and I think it's gonna be a great summer!!
I did my first batch of Spanish lessons with the interns yesterday, and it went really well. I was very impressed with their knowledge, and I think we're gonna have a lot of fun, I just hope that I don't run out of things to teach them - some of them seem to know as much or more than I do!!
We are staying at a house on the ranch, literally out in the middle of nowhere, which is cool, until you start thinking about all of those scary movies out there about people staying out in the middle of nowhere. There are these giant toads that come up on our porch every night, and I'm talking huge, and they have really big poop. There's one intern who's gonna teach us how to "gig" the frogs - meaning kill, clean, cook, and eat them. I'm kind of excited.
Wednesday night I was reunited with my favorite beans - the red refried beans out of bag. I think maybe that's the real reason I came back :)
No real exciting stories so far, but I'll be back...