Waiting is Doing

Well, its hard to keep the posts going (and even harder for you to read them, I'm sure!) but we are trying to not slack off. This post is going to be a simple one with photos from another recent trip we took. On Thursday, week before last, we were asked to go on a trip with the staff and some of the students from the Escuela Taller. Good thing we are flexible because they were leaving the following Monday!! The premise of the trip was to visit two other Escuela Talleres financed by the Spanish development program. One is in Antigua, Guatemala, the other in Gracias, Lempira (western Honduras). In between the two, we stopped in Copan to see the famous Mayan ruins there. We had a fabulous time and enjoyed rollin around on a chartered bus with 50 Hondurans for five fast and furious days. Of course, our luck, the camera memory card went on the fritz after all the pictures we took in Antigua, but we will be back to get more!!! It was beautiful, even if it there were more gringos there than I have seen in all of Honduras in the last 6 months!

The best part of the trip is how much better we got to know the kids and the staff at the school. Relationship building with Hondurans is half the battle to getting work done here. We also learned a very important lesson about Honduran culture....waiting is doing. This Javi-coined phrase very accurately describes the amount of waiting we did with these guys on the trip. Any time we were going to do anything, or go anywhere, there was a lot of waiting involved, small group or large. But waiting was not an inconvenience, like waiting in line at the post office or the like, it was more of an activity which involved lots of talking and joking as we waited. This is a good cultural lesson for us fast paced, ultra-convenient demanding American types.

So, the first two pictures are the ruins at Copan, the last 4 pictures in Gracias with the staff and students from the Escuela Taller.

I promise we will get better about posting about life here in Honduras. (Some might be interested----) I already have some topics in mind......step by step pila laundry washing, a whole segment on PIROPOS (cat calls), the market, WORK, etc..... Hang in there with us!