Siete de Abril

Whitney, Mohammad and I spent yesterday morning mapping Siete de Abril. SHH wants to administer an intensive survey to figure out what the primary, secondary, tertiary, etc. needs of the community are. We also want to have demographic profiles of the families. It was my first visit to the community and I was surprised at how much better it looked than the Mt. of Olives. Of course this is all relative. It´s still evident that there is a lot of poverty.

In any case, the three of us spent two hours drawing a map of the ¨streets¨ and ¨houses¨ in Siete de Abril. The reason why I used quotation marks is because it´s really not clear what counts as a home or even what pathway it´s next to. The whole place is like a maze and I definitely would not have visited parts of it if I hadn´t been mapping. It was a crazy hot day and I drank all of the water in my Nalgene by 11. The weird thing is that it was actually overcast. It felt like the heat was radiating from within my body. Nothing like sweating uncontrollably to make you feel alive. :)

We left the retreat center yesterday afternoon and will stay at Copprome for the remainder of the trip. There weren´t enough beds last night so a lot of the William and Mary girls elected to stay in the dorms with the Copprome girls. I shared two beds with Sravya and Rosalin. It was like a big slumber party. All of the kids wake up at 6am for school. Sravya and I slept through that, but woke up in time to run out to the road and see the kids board the bus. It´s amazing how much small gestures like waiting at the bus stop mean to these kids.

We tried to have a bonfire last night (we were having a party because it was the Mary Washington team´s last night) and just about every kid almost set themselves on fire trying to make smores. Reactions towards the fire ranged from refusal to go anywhere near it, to throwing rocks into the center of the flames, prompting an immediate shower of potentially hazardous sparks. Needless to say, we probably won´t be doing that again.

We saw the Mary Washington team off at the airport and are now looking at possible plots of land to buy for Siete de Abril´s relocation. I am thinking about going to Guatemala to visit a friend next week. Of course, everything is up in the air right now. We have an appointment with Oye tonight (the Honduran NGO that we partner with). I´m looking forward to talking to them more about the strategy for a sustainable Siete de Abril. We´re currently thinking about microfinance possibilities, but still have very little planned.

I´m here!

I arrived late last night and waited in the San Pedro Sula airport for Cosmo to pick me up. I was slightly amazed I made it at all because I thought I was going to miss my connecting flight for about an hour. I guess that´s what happens when the pilot doesn´t speak English very well and doesn´t think that anyone will notice when he says the wrong ¨local time.¨ Anyway, that´s besides the point.

When Cosmo and Co. arrived, they made me go back through the exit so that I could exit again...this time to a screaming crowd of college kids. I felt like a celebrity. There were cameras going off and high pitched shrieking and general confusion.

It feels good to be back in Honduras.

We´re staying at a retreat center about 10 minutes from the center of the city. I was at Copprome briefly this morning but all the kids were in class. Instead, we went to another village of displaced people. There are 51 families in this community. Their homes were bulldozed by the government as part of an USAID water oxidization plan. Of course nothing has come from this yet.

The children are all malnourished and zombie like. Their hair and eyes are light because their bodies aren´t producing the nutrients to provide color. They have no energy to run around and play. There isn´t much we can do to help at this point. We simply bought several hundred pounds of rice and beans, and some fresh water. A little over $200 worth. It will feed the community for 3, maybe 4, days.

We are now headed back to Copprome and then Siete de Abril. We´ve been up since 630am. The sun is intense and Gaku has been sick from the heat. The rest of us, however, are in good spirits and excited to tackle whatever we can.

I wish that all of you could be here to experience this with me...

Leaving for Honduras-Eve

Get excited for some sweet posts! Okay...they might not be very sweet. And they might not be very frequent. And we all might wonder what the purpose of this is anyway. As long as we can all curb our expectations, I think we'll be alright.

P.S. I need to re-pack my bags and am not prepared to leave tomorrow. Just wanted to let you all know that I am NOT pulled together. I also don't think I have enough pants to sustain me for a week in Honduras...good thing I'll be there for a month. Wait, what?