Greetings from Cantarranas!! (Well, actually a few towns over in Valle de Angeles, where there is actually internet.) The pic to the left has been our new home the last 2 weeks. If you follow the long road on the far right of the picture, you'll see a white building at the top of the road. This building is the entrance to the town cemetary, and we live very close, just a few houses away.

Our new family is a young grandmother, her grandson who is 4 years old, and her daughter who is home only on the weekends. (She goes to a university in Tegucigalpa during the week.) They are a sweet family and their home definitely has a cheerier and more welcoming atmosphere. Its not that our Santa Lucia family wasn’t nice, but they have had aspirantes (trainees) stay with them several times a year for the past several years. With this family, the experience still has the novelty factor. We have a small room (maybe a 1/3 of the size in Santa Lucia) and although we’ve been cursing having a lot of luggage at the moment, we know we’ll be thankful when that wonderful day comes that we get our own house.

The grandmother (her name is Belinda) is a sweetheart. She treats us fantastically!!! She is a great cook and will very patiently tell us anything we ask about Honduras, as well as patiently listen to our (okay my) broken Spanish. Her grandson, Eric, is wild about Javi and can't wait for him to get home from training everyday. He doesn't have any male role models around so his favorite thing is to play fight with Javi or have gun fights. He has a small speech impediment and has troubles saying his ¨r's,¨ so he calls me ¨sayita.¨

Cantarranas is a very tranquillo town. There are palm trees and colorful buildings, with a beautiful white and yellow catholic church in the middle of town. The people are friendly and it definitely has the feel of a community. Chickens run around free, as do many street dogs, and there are donkeys, horses, ox, and occassionally a fat pig in the unpaved streets. Some of the kids in town have learned our names so they will shout them out at us as we pass by. Eric has recently just gotten three baby chicks. The first day we got them I got very excited and wanted to hold them all the time. Right after this particular picture with the pollito was taken, it pooped in my hands. Nice.

In addition to the language training and normal business sessions we have on weekdays, we've been doing a few activities in the local schools as well. As an advanced Spanish speaker, they've placed Javi in the local high school to teach a series of 7 clases about goal setting and professionalism. (Javi speaking now -->) There are 22 students in my class ranging from 16 to 25 years old. Many kids go to school for a while drop out to work and help the family and then sometimes go back to school again. I have done four classes to date and some have gone well and then others not as much. We have covered how to resumes, cover letters, and different interpersonal skills that could help them professionally. It has been a great experience getting up in front of the students and trying to relate with them.

(Sara again) As an intermediate speaker, the Spanish teachers had us give a 30 minute presentation to a class in elementary school. My grade was 5th grade. I survived as far as my Spanish goes, and I think they had fun. We played 2 games and then talked about the cultural differences between Honduras and the US. I felt like a movie star in there. They wanted me to say things in English, just so they could hear someone speaking a different language, and they would jump and clap. They were surrounding me before and after class asking me a million different questions and lavishing me with compliments. Like I said, movie star!!!

I know this is getting long, but I've got one more topic I wanted to write about. We don't get to post that much right now so I want to make it good.

Cantarranas has problems with water – basically that it comes infrequently and randomly with it not coming at all sometimes. When I say infrequent and random, I mean every few days; when I say not-at-all, I mean after the usual few days have passed and water still has not come. We have not yet experience the not-at-all, but I figure that will eventually happen while we are here since we will be here a little over 5 weeks in all. To deal with water coming every few days, Hondurans use something called the “pila.” I have not yet explained the pila phenomenon. We had one back in Santa Lucia too but our host family had back-up tanks so that you didn’t notice your water use as much. The tanks provided running water, showers and flushing toilets. The pila is where you store your water if you do not have running water all the time. It is a big cement box that comes up to about the waste level. It’s open at the top, with a cement scrubbing surface to the side. You wash your dishes here with this water, you wash your clothes, you wash your hands, you fill your pot of water to cook with, you flush the toilet with this water (with buckets), and you heat this water to take a shower (also with buckets).

When you see how much water you use, because you can see the water level going down every day in the pila, you realize how much fresh water people need to conduct their daily lives. And we are by no means big spenders of water in this house. Take for example the bucket showers I mentioned above. We take our showers outside in a brick bathroom that has an open ceiling. It’s actually nice (except for when it is a chilly morning) and kind of feels “natural.” There is bucket of stove-heated water in the shower with a smaller bucket next to it that you use to pour the water on your body. The larger bucket can’t hold more than 7 or 8 gallons of water, and this bucket is enough water for Javi and me both to take a shower. I was asking the other day to a friend in one of my Spanish classes how much water the average shower-taker in the States uses. He said 22 gallons. Also, according to him (Sean is his name), the average toilet flush uses 2.5 gallons, versus here I can’t see us using more than 1/2 - 1 gallon to flush with a bucket, unless someone has had a particularly nasty episode of diarrhea. Our outside toilet is the picture to the right and shower to the left. Its super clean because Belinda cleans the bathroom EVERY day, it just looks a little rougher because its not what we're used to back home.

Well thats it for now, kids. Thanks for your continued readership and we will post again when we get the chance.