Javi has made a full recovery from his bout with dengue fever. He’s been back in action since about Sunday of last week (that would be the 13th). If it comes up, many people here in Comayagua say that they’ve had dengue once before, and what they remember most was the way their body ached. I think Javi would agree.

We had a great week at work. This past Thursday, Friday and most of Saturday we attended the PCC’s (Programa Colonial de Comayagua) annual planning meeting which they held at a charming hotel in Valle de Angeles. (Valle, if you remember, is where we would check internet and make calls while we were in Cantarranas last month.) The meeting was supposed to be held at the lake but plans were changed last minute on Wednesday night due to some scheduling issues with the conference room we were going to use. What’s funny is no one told us, and we had packed clothing for the hot and humid lake, and lots of bug spray. Valle is in the mountains, there are few bugs and it gets quite chilly at night. We’re not sure if Ana Carolina, the director and our counterpart, was too busy (she is an extremely busy and overworked woman) or if no one thought to tell the random gringos that had started showing up at their office recently, but we didn’t find out until we were on our way out of town, and the driver started heading south on the highway, instead of north. We are pretty flexible people and were not too offended by their oversight, but having only tank tops and sandals wasn’t fun at night in Valle. However, we learned A LOT about the PCC and the people who work there. We have meaningful projects and we really think the work they do there is valuable.

(Photos - top right, in front of the fountain at the Valle de Angeles hotel. Bottom left, us sitting on the planning meeting.)

We were given our own room at the hotel and three solid, tasty meals, all courtesy of the PCC. This was EXTREEMLY appreciated by us, since we could not have paid for it otherwise. We were also happy to use the opportunity to catch up a bit on our budget. You see, we are each “paid” 4000 lempiras a month by Peace Corps, which is about $200 a month, or $6.67 a day. (This amount is in addition to what they pay for our housing.) In Honduras, $200 a month is both a lot of money and next to nothing to different groups of people. The people that we work with at the PCC would be considered part of the small middle class in this country. They have a decent standard of living and can afford apartments in the historic center of town, go out to eat and go to the bar, some drive cars and they have stylish new clothes. We are not exactly sure what they make, but we can definitely tell you that $400 a month between the two of us does not buy this lifestyle. Then there are many people in this country who live off of much less, and you have only to walk a little ways out of the central district of Comayagua, look out the window of the bus on the highway, or walk the streets of Cantarranas to see how obvious that is. A lot of things cost the same as in the States, maybe not housing, but lots of food, toiletries and housing items do. Plus, we have the American base near by, which we hear adds to inflated prices for both food and housing here in Comayagua. We have been having trouble staying within this budget, especially since we have to eat out most meals due to the less than sanitary condition of the kitchen in the host family house we have to live in right now. It seems like all we do is eat and use internet (and occasionally call our moms) and we spend more money than we are given. So we are stuck in a strange socio-economic limbo here in Comayagua as Peace Corps volunteers. Many people think we are “rich” (at least in a Honduran context) contractors from the base, since that is the situation of most all the other gringos in town. We also work with people who aren’t super wealthy by any means but definitely have more disposable income than we’ve got to work with. But then you’ve got the ultra-poor, so we ourselves are not truly poor, especially when you consider that we have the Peace Corps to pay our medical bills, generous family members to send us packages and who would help us out in a bind, and a small savings. There are stores full of imported household goods (25,000 lempira refrigerators, stoves, couches) which some Hondurans can afford, but many can’t, including us. We are feeling what it is like to have so many things for sale in front of you, but not be able to buy them.

In training, some of us would joke that we were Peace Corps “lite” here in Honduras, compared to other countries peace corps works in where volunteers work in physical conditions much more extreme than we deal with here. In some places, we have running hot water, cable tv, refrigeration, electricity and American fast food. Of course, there are volunteers here who do not have these things in the smaller villages, but we do here in Comayagua. But I don’t think we are Peace Corps lite, by any means. It is a different kind of a challenge to live in a place where there ARE things to buy (unlike the sticks of Africa) but not be able to buy anything. It’s also quite a different story to live in a country so affected by its giant neighbor to the north. 1 in 7 Hondurans are illegally (a few legally) working in the US, many sending money home. This leads to a myriad of economic and social factors in this country. One I notice every day are “piropos” (“compliments” in Spanish but really catcalls) that are 80% of the time directed to me in English (“Hey baby, I love you…etc) learned in person or taught by a friend who spent some time working in the States. So while we might not have to eat dinner from a communal food plate like volunteers in Morocco or carry water from a well to our house like my step sister Chelsea did in Guinea, it is definitely hard and different and a challenge everyday.

Well, I got off track there and wanted to talk a bit about the PCC – what they do and what our place will be in that organization - but that will have to wait until another entry. This one has started to get long.

Last thing, I wanted to post this picture from our swearing in ceremony the day we officially became volunteers. The other two are our friends Kate and Sean. They are in the western part of Honduras (Santa Rosa de Copan) and we really miss those guys. But they've got a nice site so we will definitely have to visit!