Honduras...Por fin!

Hey everyone,
Well after playing around in the Dominican Republic for three weeks and in Miami for a few days, I finally got here. It´s been quite the rollercoaster ride so far, but I have to say that it´s been worth it. Honduras is beautiful and the people here are unbelievably welcoming.

We came in three groups on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of last week without any problems or delays. We immediatly traveled from the airport in Tegucigalpa to a little town in the countryside. I lived in a village called Las Cañadas with a family that had three sons who were 12, 9, and 7, as well as two neices and 2 nephew (neices were 20 and 11, nephew 4). My host dad is a wood carver and has a store in a nearby town that is called Valle de Angeles, which is mostly a tourist town. He makes everything from little knick knacks to coffee tables to beautiful doors with scenes of mountains or villages protruding out. It´s kind of hard to explain, but trust me, they are really really really good.

On Sunday we came to a new town called San Antonio de La Cuesta which is in the department (which is like a state) called Comayagua, and we will be living here for 7 weeks. We came here for our Field Based Training (FBT), which is where we learn about actual technical skills we will need in our service. Our group split up by project, so instead of 50 people, we now are down to 17. I think I´m going to enjoy this part of training the most because I will be learning about natural resource conservation practices and we´ll have a lot of hands on training sessions. My family here also has three sons who are 22, 16, and 9. I am the first volunteer they have ever had live with them, so they ask me lots of questions about the U.S. and are very interested in everything I say. Our house always has electicity but we only get water on certain days. So that means it´s back to bucket showers. Living in Miami for 4 days and having hot showers got me spoiled, and now the showers here are SOOOOO cold! I´ll say this though...I am really awake after my shower in the morning.

A typical day here consists of 4 hours of language training from seven thirty to eleven thirty in the morning (sorry, the three key doesn´t work on this computer), then lunch for an hour and a half (during which I come back to my host family´s house), and then from 1 to 5 we have technical training. This could consist of anything from researching latrines, to building a wood burning stove, to visiting local farms to ask farmers about crop management and diversification, to listening to other PAM volunteers talk about their projects. We will also be going to camp out at another volunteer´s site to see how his ecotourism and coffee farm management projects are going.

Hope everything is going well at home, and thanks to everyone who has emailed me or messaged me in some other way to give me encouragement and support. It´s good to know you all are thinking about me, and I want you to know that I am thinking about all of you too.

If anyone has any questions or if there are other things you want to know about, feel free to email me at miles.corcoran.pchn@gmail.com.


Miles

PS...I know I haven´t put up many pictures at all, so I´ll try to put up a bunch in my next post.