09.15.07
The week has been one of the busiest thus far. It’s all coming to a close—the FBT, the Mundi-D Group, the families, El Paraiso, la Yunta, el Parque, Café D’polo, casa de cultura, charlas, cernos, cenas, aspirante-ism. It has been an excellent time, leaving El Paraiso will not be tear-less. Part of me just isn’t ready to walk away from this phase, yet I’m too anxious and excited not to. People in our group I will miss. But there are no good byes now, after all, we still have 2 years of discovering Honduras ahead.
Monday was día cultural with the families en casa de Susan. Each aspirante prepared a traditional Honduran dish for la cena. In contrast to the Honduran food, our group prepared various American cultural-type activities. One group did pin the tail on the donkey; my group did the hokey-pokey; and another group did a charla on their home states. There were also family members that presented different Honduran cultural aspects, such as a traditional dance group, a poetry reading, a few skits, and instruction on how to dance la punta—a dance that originated amongst the Garifunas on the North Coast.
Tuesday we left early for los llanos for our tourism fieldtrip. During the trip we visited a finca, rode horses (some of us rode mules), we cut down sugarcane with machetes to make sugarcane juice, we learned about cows and coffee, we made fishing poles, dug for worms, and did some fishing (I caught my first fish!), did some hiking, shucked some corn, planted some plants, and eventually we got a fire to light to roast marshmallows. The trip was fun, minus sleeping on mats, all in one large room that was once a restaurant. It was freezing and the shower in the morning even colder.
I imagine that was once all Peace Corps training was about—how to be adult girl and boy scouts.
Thursday my group started construction on our bulletin board project in el parque. The current volunteer in El Paraiso designed it, and my group along with Jorge, Junior, and a few people from the community helped us put it in place. We still have the cork to glue, which we’ll finish Sunday.
Friday marked the start to the celebrations for Honduran’s Día de Indepencia. All the students in the lower grades marched in their parade through the town yesterday, and today it will be the colegio students marching in costume while performing their dances and music.
My group did our final presentations for SDP, sharing our ups and downs in integrating into the community and attempting to execute all the projects we were trying to accomplish during the past month. There were a lot of ups and downs and expectations unmet, yet overall everyone seemed to walk away from it with a positive attitude, a lesson learned, and a better understanding of a phrase that Jorge so often says: “It Happens.” (Meaning “Shit Happens.” ie: corruption, unfulfilled promises, human error.)
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