May 06 2009

My alarm didn’t go off this morning. This meant that, not only did I not get up early enough to work out some and do a little reading, I was almost late for breakfast. The cook was supposed to be here for the first time this morning, but apparently hadn’t gotten here yet. Bread, jam, and a granola bar made for a sufficient breakfast.

Alvin met us for breakfast, but didn’t seem too appetized by our gringo food, and politely declined. He did, however, invite us over to his house for some coffee. With as delicious as it had been the night before, none of us could object. It is dangerous to send a group of caffeine addicts to a coffee growing region. Later in the day, we got a shipment of freshly roasted, La Union grown coffee for us to drink. I think that Alex had 5 cups, and nobody else was far behind.
Following breakfast, we made our first trips into the villages. Ed, Alex, and I sat in the back of Alvin’s truck, while everybody else was in the front. Here are some of the pictures that we got while driving around between the villages.

[this will be replaced with links to the pictures and video if I get them working…]
Unfortunately, pictures and the video will never be able to do justice to La Union. As we were driving, fog was slowly moving out of the mountains, hiding some of the peaks. One of the things that surprised me most, other than the sheer beauty, was the mountainsides that these people were working on. We saw one man standing about half way up a mountain which, no exaggeration, was around a 45 degree incline. About 20 minutes prior, Kelley and I had discussed how these mountains would make for great ski terrain if they had snow on them. I suppose that, if this is the only land this man’s family owns, he doesn’t have much of a choice.
It was really interesting driving around and talking to some of the people in these villages. The thing that keeps striking me is the sheer curiosity of the children which we encounter. At more than one location, children came running out to see us and were chasing the truck for as long as they could see us while we were driving away. We drove around to about eight villages, talking to school principals, local elders, and other people which Alvin introduced us to. Many of the people that we talked to were extremely helpful and said that they would pass the news around that we will be in town. Christian, a school principal in the town of Nueva Paz, even told us that the village has a protocol set up to get health information out to everybody. He told us that we can follow this, and our work should in turn be able to help improve this information network. Although I say we all talked to them, the reality of it was that Jose had many conversations, Derek threw out questions for Jose to ask, and a few of us took some notes from what was translated back to us.

We got back to the compound just in time for lunch, to find that the cook was there and had been cooking for a few hours preparing lunch. Awesome. She had made us some chicken with a spicy sauce, rice, and corn tortillas, along with tamarind juice. I can’t make any promises for 90 days from now, but this was pretty awesome. It definitely beats the hot dogs that we ate last night.
After lunch and a brief siesta, the team broke up. Derek, Jose, and Alex went to a town meeting of one of the villages nearby where they were talking about what we will be doing to about half of the town, and Kelley, Ed, Alex, and I went on a walking tour of La Union. This was quite the experience. We started walking in one direction, realized that we didn’t really know where we were going, and decided to try and find Alvin’s house. After a few circles and a little confusion, we got there, made a loop back to the compound, and decided to head for some ice cream. Again, after a few loops and several store which didn’t actually have ice cream (despite signs saying that they did), we found ice cream. I was so excited to get ice cream, I didn’t really care what I had, not to mention couldn’t read any of the labels, so I grabbed the first thing that I saw. After paying 20 Lempira (a dollar is about 19 Lempira) for ice cream, the four of us sat down and enjoyed the fruits of our adventure. We sat on the front steps of the shop and chatted with the girls who had sold us the ice cream, who attend the local school here in La Union.
Back at the compound, we sat around for a few minutes, talking about the walking tour and the meeting and, while we were discussing these things, Ed walked up and told us that he had found another English speaker. A minute later, up walked Jake, a Holland, MI native who is teaching English at the local bilingual school. We talked to Jake for a while and found out that we can get cell phones just down the road, and that we can buy minutes there too. The school that he works at is the same one which our translators will be coming from, so we made plans to go to the school tomorrow and visit their classes. Jake also told us that the principal of the school lives nearby, so Derek and Jose went and talked with him while the rest of us started dinner.
Dinner consisted of refried beans, flour tortillas, some type of salty cheese, avocados, jalapenos, chile sauce, and mayo. On par for the course, the dinner was pretty awesome. Derek and Jose arrived back around the time that we were all finishing and starting up a game of euchre. Kelley and I beat Alex and Alex 10-4. No big deal.

We discussed small things for the next few hours and then everybody decided it was time for bed. I am a night person so I decided that writing would be a better use of my time, though I may think differently at 5 am tomorrow. However, it is almost 10:30 pm, which is pretty late here. So, until next time, adios.

Patrick