Fellow volunteers, the Constant Transition.

Well, Alicia, the PCV just down the road from me, just finished her two year service and left our neck of the woods among a series of goodbye parties, endless farewells and last-minute work tasks to return to the last few days of summer in the beautful West Coast. Alicia and I have collaborated a lot on various projects over our more than a year of shared time on the mountain: the ecotourism committee, her library in her town, and environmental education and training.

She also dragged me up into the cloud forest for many a challenging hike as I (often clumsily) supported her scientific survey of the amphibians and reptiles of the mountain she was doing to complete her masters' thesis. (I'll have it be known that I found one frog).

Initially, before even making it to site, I had thought that I didnt want to be placed nearby another volunteer for fear that it would impede my community integration. And I guess that I didnt get placed in a site with another volunteer, considering she lived in the next town over. But our proximity was actually a good thing. It was nice to have an ally so close by, someone to talk work with, who knew the same people and the same issues, someone to eat American food with (even though she is a vegetarian) and to culturally escape with. It was, in fact, because of Alicia that my town filled out the paperwork successfully to get a volunteer. In essence, I ended up in San Luis Planes because of Alicia. She became a good friend and a big support, and we will all miss her.

Since Karen, our third amigo (amiga, I guess it would be), left us back in January, I was going to be the lone remaining volunteer when Alicia departed. But lucky, Alicia's community received another volunteer a couple months ago, Ben, who had to be moved away from the site he'd been living in for the past nine months because of worsening security issues. Ben is a sociable and fun person who has already become friends with just about everyone in his town. He seems to be dedicated to carrying on the work that Alicia left behind and may have time left to get another project done too. He will be a good ally.

So now that Alicia's entire training group (labeled arbitrarily H-15) left the country at various times during the past month and a half, my training group (H-16) became the oldest and wisest in PC-Honduras (heh, yeah right)... the seniors, so to speak, considering there are four training groups in country at one time.

We lost a lot of friends and good volunteers, reminding us of our own ticking clock. 27 months is a long time but it is also so ephemeral. My last eight-nine months here in a way seem hard-earned yet too few. Thus is the way of the Peace Corps, I suppose.