It´s hard to believe I´ve already been settled in my site for a month now. I´m pretty accustomed to the sights of sounds of the ´big´city of La Esperanza. The rains are starting to come, which is good because it gives my eyes a break from the dust, but it´s not a whole lot of fun walking in the pouring rain either. I´ve had a plethora of experiences already in the first month, from teaching physics in Spanish to translating for a dentist extracting teeth to examining water systems for expansion. I am now a pro (más o menos) at maneuvering over, under, or through barbed wired fences.

After a 3 month whirlwind of training in Santa Cruz and Santa Lucia ending with us swearing in at the US embassy in Teguc, I have arrived permanently to my new home in La Esperanza. I moved in last Friday, and have been settling in, meeting people, figuring out what I am going to be doing for the next 2 years. The first week has been a somewhat atypical experience, since the group I´m working for, World Vision, had it´s yearly regional conference in Tela, which happens to be located about 5 hours away on the beach. It was a good introduction to the people I´m going to be working with, though not much work was accomplished and following a schedule is a foreign concept. I met too many people and know I won´t be able to keep anyone straight for a good while. Fortuneately the volunteer I´m replacing is still here for another week and has been great at showing me around even making up a cheat sheet of people´s names for me. And then yesterday, I went up to one of the villages for a Lenca cultural day, involving some skits, speeches, and traditional food and dancing. Getting out to the community was an adventure with a one hour drive on a little dirt road in a car that had seen better days, and then a one hour hike through the mountains. Fortuneately it didn´t rain leaving the mud roads unpassable.
La Esperanza seems like it will be a great place to live, with fruit and vegetable markets abounding and pretty much all the basic necessities and trivilities are available in town. It´s nice to be settled down with a home base. This week I´m going to be getting introduced to some of the villages with water projects in various stages. I´m also going to start teaching a physics class which should be interesting considering I´m still struggling with the Spanish. I´m looking forward to 2 great and challenging years and hope that I can do a decent job and have some success with the water projects.

I am currently in La Esperanza, my home for the next 2 years. It is a small city of about 20,000 people located about a mile up in the mountains, making it about the coldest place in Honduras. I´m returning to Santa Lucia tomorrow to finish my last two weeks of training, before moving in here permanently. Training has been great, but I´m excited to finally be settling down and beginning working on water systems.
My time in Honduras has been full of excitement and adventure, which is partially why I haven´t really written anything on the blog until now. Some of the highlights are cliff-jumping behind a marvelous waterfall, hiking through forests and through barbed wire fences to follow existing water systems, drinking cerveza and playing games with other volunteers and Hondurans, constructing pilas and latrines, living with 2 wonderful families, being unaware of what´s going on around me since I couldn´t understand Spanish, and eating baleadas, platanos, and other Honduran specialties.

Arrival in Santa Cruz de Yojoa

Everyday is a new adventure. I wake up to the sounds of roosters and dogs without knowing what to expect. I have 3 months of training in Santa Lucia and Santa Cruz in language, technical, and cultural aspects before being sworn in as a Peace Corps Volunteer.