Pobre Gallina

Our friends Glenda and Giovanni came over for dinner this weekend, like they have many times before. We usually cook Honduran food, with them as head chefs and us running around as the sous chefs. Its fun! BUT, this past time Glenda got a glint in her eye and wanted to do something a little different. She proposed bringing over a live chicken, killing and cleaning it and then making sopa de gallina (not to be confused with sopa de pollo).

This is something a city girl like me has never seen before, so it was quite the experience! We documented the event with photos, so here they are -

(Caution - vegetarians and animal lovers beware!)

Here is the gallina that Glenda brought over in a Maggi bag (Maggi makes those little bouillon cubes that are chicken or beef flavored, which is kind of ironic).

"Please don't eat me!"

Next you've got us holding the chicken, which Glenda made us do before killing it. Shortly after it pooped on our floor.

Then Glenda did the actually killing. Everyone was too "chicken" to do the killing themselves (including her husband Giovanni). Glenda is a pretty tough lady!

To kill it, you've got to swing it around by the neck til you break it.

Next, we had to use hot water to pluck off the feathers as fast as you can. This bucket is also a laundry bucket I use, so with the blood and feathers, it was sort of freaky.

To get the rest of the feathers off, we lit some newspapers on fire and held it over the fire. In this picture the chicken almost looks fake!

(Notice the bloody cutting board and machete in the background. Nice!)

The cleaning and cutting:

And finally, the meal. Javi convinced them to make fried chicken, with mashed potatoes, gravy and corn (made by us) instead of soup. Well, we also made a broth soup with the chicken bones.

Man, this chicken was REALLY tough and neither of us could hardly find a bite of meat on the whole thing. But it was a skinny little chicken, not like those fat, caged chickens that end up at our supermarkets. We left a lot of "meat" on there after a good effort at eating it (I mostly got tendens and super super tough meat) but Giovanni and Glenda ate that stuff down to the bone. Later, someone at work told me you are supposed to leave it for a day so it gets softer, but I don't think there was hardly any meat to even get soft.

All and all it was pretty fun (minus the actual meal) and definitely one of those new experiences for us!

Felicidades Gringa!

So my birthday was just a few days ago and the nice people at work got me a cake:

That's right, it says "Congratulations Gringa." Funny!!!!

My birthday was pretty low key, just a few presents, a few phone calls and a nice dinner at home.

We found out some great news the other day. We wrote a post back in April about a grant we were writing for the microempresa (small business) program we set up with the Escuela Taller. Well, we were actually awarded that grant! Its from the World Bank and for $50,000 - a huge sum for the program, the school or the whole Foundation we work for! There were 5 grants in the WHOLE world of this type being handed out to business incubation programs in the first 2 years of operation - and we are one of them! The money is a "capacity building grant" meaning its a chunk of change meant to improve the program. The catch is that only $5,000 of it can be spent on "stuff" (which is still a good amount) but the rest - $45,000 - has to be spent on trainings, manuals, promotions, etc....not tangible things....and it all has to be spent in a year. Anyway, we are excited about it and so is the Escuela Taller. Peace Corps normally works directly with people and the philosophy is not to hand out money, but help people help themselves. I think that was true in this case as well, as we just helped the director of the Foundation write it, with many of her ideas in the proposal.

On another subject, we are planning on going to Nicaragua in a few weeks to venture out of Honduras for the first real foray. There should be some good photos and stories from that!!!

Thats all we got for now......

We finally ventured out......

A gathering of all the business volunteers in Honduras finally got us out of our house and away for a few days. We had been a bit paranoid about leaving the house alone after the break in, but eventually things will call you away and you just have to do it! We travelled to the other side of Honduras, to a town called Gracias.

Each project (remember, there are 6 – business, health, water and sanitation, protected areas management, youth development and municipal development) meets each year to talk about what we’re doing and share ideas. Here is a picture of us with the business group:

And this is only 1 of 6 groups! (There are a lot of peace corps volunteers in Honduras –it’s the 2nd largest post in the world.)

After that we decided to attend the “Noche de Fumadores” (Smokers’ Night) in a nearby town, Santa Rosa de Copan. (It’s a festival celebrating the town’s cigar making heritage.) We weren’t the only gringos who decided to go; only about 50 other peace corps volunteers went so we took up a long table at the event:

Getting crazy with Marcus:

Despues….we had to do one more “fun” thing before heading home – hiking Celaque, the tallest mountain in Honduras. At about ~9,000 ft it wouldn’t turn heads back home but that is sort of tall for a Central American mountain. Anyway, it took about two days so we had to backpack in. It was cold and wet up there near the top (its cloud forest up there) but it was well worth the swollen knees and sore calves (and the bit of pica pica that I got into again). The view from the top was amazing.

“TEAM SUMMIT!” (Heading out on the trail with friends Annie and Luke). That is Celaque in the background:

Cloud forest:

At the top of Honduras:

The view from the top:



And when we made it home, everything was fine. Apparently the barbed wire, reinforced door frame, Conor spending the night a few times AND hiding everything of value before leaving worked!