Almost there

Buenos dias friends and family! I wanted to leave a quick update for you on our status in Cantarranas. There isn’t a whole lot to report since things have been moving along pretty slowly. In the last two weeks we had Semana Santa (week of April 2), which meant a half week of work and then a whole lot of sitting around waiting for the rest of the week to pass. Cantarranas doesn’t exactly have a lot of activities, so time moved slowly that week. As you all already know, there isn’t internet, there is no place to see a movie, theres only a few options for places to eat, and theres only one bar that isn’t a scarry ¨bolo¨ hang out (Honduran drunks are called ¨bolos¨). Theres the river, but it has a whole lot of trash and pollution so its not the greatest for swimming and cooling off. We did fine and had a nice relaxing Semana Santa, but its hard if you have lots of free time and are not in your own home to enjoy it. Javi is actually a lot better at the host family thing than I am, and he had less complaints about the long weekend than I did. But, we handle things differently. Mostly I am looking forward to being in our site, having a project, having independence again and having our own house. That is why we came down here, and we knew this time would be tuff and trying, but sometimes it is overwhelming and we get caught up in the tuff times we have right now.

Thankfully this past week (April 9) moved a bit quicker. We gave another charla in the schools on Friday. Part of the Peace Corps world wide initiative is HIV/AIDS education and recently they’ve asked everyone to participate regardless of where you are located and what your project is. We got a day’s training on Thursday on how to give the talk and then we were thrown right into it on Friday to give the presentation to a bunch of 7^th and 8^th graders. Although I thought it was random and I didn’t feel I was technically qualified nor did I feel I had good enough Spanish to give the talk, it actually went pretty well. I think the kids learned a lot and we survived talking about AIDS, condoms and sex IN SPANISH in front of PRETEENS for FOUR hours. Yes, four hours.

Next week is more language training and a business simulation with kids in the middle school. This will be the last hoop they make us jump through before we are FINALLY told our sites and projects on APRIL 23. After that we get to go visit our sites and then make the trip back to Santa Lucia for a few last days altogether. Then, on May 3, we are sworn in as volunteers at the Embassy and we will go off (all 51 of us in the three projects – health, business and water/sanitation) to our sites all over Honduras. We are going crazy waiting to find this all out.

So, my next posting should be where we will be living for the next 2 years.......

Until then....hasta luego.