Housing, food, work update...

We’ve been on the hunt for a new housing situation. The host fam thing is starting to get old, REAL OLD (even to Javi who has been cool with it almost the whole time). We’ve looked at some houses in a safe neighborhood that is near the center and our favorite sitting spot, Plaza San Francisco (see photo at right). We’ve got our eye on one that has a high wall (i.e. undisturbed hanging out in the front yard), a place for a hammock on the front porch and flower-planting potential. There are already some purple and pink flower bushes that grow along the wall which practically sold me before I even saw the inside of the house. We are waiting on Peace Corps before we can make our next move.

We are still eating out almost every meal (or making PBJ) to avoid the kitchen and we’ve definitely scoped out the good eating spots in town by this point. The other day I was craving a salad big time, and because Hondurans are not the salad eating types, it can be hard to come by (impossible, really). Wendy’s however, one of our fast food joints here in town, does have salads. We’ve eaten there a couple times just so I can get my green leafy vegetable fix. Well, iceberg lettuce fix at least, which reminds me its kind of sad when Wendy’s is your only option for salads in town. While we were eating there for lunch, a rather large overweight American man (presumably from the base) could be seen eating 2 large hamburgers with Biggie fries and drink. Its hard to escape that image, even in Comayagua, Honduras. DISCLAIMER: WE DO NOT PLAN ON EATING AT WENDY’S ONCE I CAN GET GREEN LEAFIES AT HOME IN A SANITARY KITCHEN. (Its kind of embarrassing to admit that we have eaten there while in Honduras.)

Work is going well. We attended our first Chamber of Commerce (Camara de Comercio) meeting last Thursday. We’ve gotten our first project with them, which is to evaluate their brand new website and help them with the placement of advertisements on the site. Today we spent the day looking at other Chamber of Commerce websites in the States doing a comparison between whats out there and what their site has, and we came up with some decent suggestions. Their site is at http://www.camaradecomayagua.hn/. Maybe in a few weeks it might look a little different.

At the Escuela Taller/Programa Colonial de Comayagua, we’ve been hard at work on the two projects we’ve got going there right now (see left, Javi "hard at work"). One project involves us looking at the administration process and flow of cash through the organization. We are interviewing different employees to get an understanding of what they do, and then we are mapping out their different processes. This not only allows us to get a closer look at their operations (and therefore understand what goes on there) but helps us to identify areas where they might streamline operations or do things more efficiently. We’re still on the understanding bit, since that process takes awhile (especially in Spanish). When we work on that project we start to feel like auditors again, Javi as the senior and me as the associate. Its kind of fun.

The other project is working on the business incubation program the school wants to set up for the students. (Reminder: the school teaches kids from the marginal neighborhoods of Comayagua in a trade – carpentry, metal work, electricity and construction – for free. The PCC then uses the students to complete some of the restoration work they are doing on the colonial buildings around town). The school wants to teach them entrepreneurial skills in addition to a trade, in the hopes that some might open their own businesses, therefore creating jobs for themselves and for others. We are there to help them set up the business curriculum and facilitate a “business incubator” where students would receive support and resources from the school in their second year of training if they were interested in starting a business. We have been busy researching the subject and making contacts with people who can help us create a methodology for this thing.

This weekend is Javi’s birthday, so we are thinking of getting out of dodge to celebrate the first day of his 29th year and get a little R&R away from Comayagua. Where we are going is still up in the air, but where ever it is, we’ll be sure to post a few pixs and write a little something.