(Yesterday was Sunday and, as such, I have decided to take a day of rest. The group ended up being not terribly busy, but made sure that everything was ready to start in the field today. Also, sorry for the delay in the posting. I am in Honduras.)
Day one. A strange feeling after having been here for over two weeks, but the adventure really just began today. We began the day at the normal 5 am, with breakfast at 6. We made sure that everybody had cameras, scripts, and whiteboards. After a rousing round of Hail! to the Victors, we were off to the school to pick up the students. With them on board we headed to my team’s destination—El Pinabetal.
El Pinabetal is situated near the top of a mountain, along a single main road that extends for a few miles. There is a fork in the middle of town which leads downward, eventually ending up in Gualciras, the destination of the other teams.
So there we stood, over a year in planning, several weeks of preparation in La Union, three days of orientation, and we were finally there. On one hand, the excitement was almost unbearable; on the other, the realization that I would quickly find out whether or not the past year had been well spent.
As it turns out, pretty well. The first house was a rush of adrenaline, even though I was not the person actually going into the house. I was half expecting the woman to chase us out and tell us never to come back. Fortunately, not the case. Although a little bewildered, she slowly came outside and allowed us to take her picture. We had a few houses that were not sure at first but, within a few hours we had done one of the three branches of El Pinabetal with everybody agreeing to participate.
Overall, it was a great day. Everybody that we talked to was more than willing to cooperate. The biggest problem that we ran into is that people didn’t feel presentable, and went and changed or checked to make sure they were looking good before allowing us to take their picture. By 2 in the afternoon, my team was finished. As I was told, Gualciras was a more difficult town, with more homes and a much larger geographic area, but they also finished in a reasonable time, getting home just as we were finishing a celebratory orange.
One story, which apparently has been told to many of you already, is definitely worth repeating. It involves Derek and Guillermo the bull.
As a part of network analysis, it is important that almost all people in a network are included, which means that we need to do everything in our power to get every house in a village we are in. As we were waiting for the bus to get us to go home, we saw a house in the middle of a field, up on the top of a ridge. Derek walked down with a few other people, while the rest of us waited in the bus.
While the others were talking to the people in the house, Derek started to wander back some towards the bus. Enter the bull. We had seen several bulls in the field, but they were all a ways off from the ridge Derek was on. Guillermo, as he has been nicknamed since, wandered up the ridge and took a particular interest in Derek. He started to walk directly towards Derek on the ridge, and Derek realized this when the bull was about 50 feet away. He walked away quickly, but found himself stuck on the edge of the ridge with only a small tree and about 10 feet separating the two of them.
I thought this was a pretty funny situation in which to find our fearless leader, so I suggested that somebody get a camera. Then I leaned forward to the student in front of me and asked if Derek was going to be alright. No. Was the reply, while chuckling. He then told me that throwing rocks at it should make the bull go away. I yelled this to Derek, who couldn’t find any. At this point in time, people were coming up from the house they were talking to and another Vida Abundante student found a large branch and threw it at the cow, who looked at them for a minute, and then slowly walked away.
Back at the compound, we ate dinner, feeling satisfied with the amount of work that had been done that day. It was not yet over, though. In order to survey tomorrow, we had to go back through the cameras and match all of the names with pictures, a daunting task when we took almost 700 pictures during the day. Needless to say, since this was our first time, things were a little chaotic and it ended up taking about twice as long as we had initially expected.
We are fortunate that there are many hard workers on the trip, or we would have been up all night. As it were, several of us ended up coding until about 1 am, a smaller number up working on computers until 2, I am told that Alex was helping Bret until 3, and somebody saw Bret going to bed when they got up at 5:30 am.
That pretty much sums up what was a very long, but productive first day in the field here in La Union. So, until next time, adios.
Patrick
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