My town’s festival: sedated revelry?

Just this past week, San Luis Planes celebrated its annual feria patronal (patron saint’s festival). Last year only the Catholics celebrated it, carrying a small statue of Saint Louis around town, but this year, a secular committee formed and they planned a series of events that eventually made the Catholics decide not to participate, heh. And, before I knew it, my tranquil small-town Peace Corps life was shaken up by travelling sideshow-attraction people, gamblers and drinkers, horses, roosters, pigs, beauty queens, soccer and pool tournaments and a general atmosphere of revelry (albeit seemingly guilt-stricken and sedated). The following is a summarized list of what my small town did to celebrate its feria and of my interpretation of it all, as an integrated yet sarcastic foreigner. This is a very long post, so read what interests you and/or go to the bold sentences/photos to get the quick gist:

1. Traditional (and non-traditional) Honduran games/competitions

2. Typical “cultural stuff”

3. Carnival games

4. Atmosphere (ie. the ever-present peace-disturbing aspects of celebrations here)

1. Traditional (and non-traditional) Honduran competitions:

These traditional Honduran competitions were my favorite events of the feria. They felt, for the most part, quite genuine to Latin American/ Spanish-influenced culture, not so affected by America (which other events certainly were).

Carrera de cintas: the coolest event, hands-down. 10 participants from the local horsing circuit took turns racing their horses down a stretch of road towards a line that was hung between two posts. About six or seven small rings were clipped to the line. The riders tried to catch a ring with a metal “pencil” they were carrying as they galloped under the line. If they got a ring, they were presented a bandana and a kiss on the cheek by one of the bandana girls (all of which were definitely minors) and, at the end of the day, the rider with the most bandanas wins. It was exciting and looked very challenging and got by far the biggest attendance.

Palo ensebado: it reminded me of some traditional Basque competition in the Andes of Spain. A tree trunk of about 25-30 feet, with its bark scraped off, was rubbed down with animal fat and stuck into the ground. On the top was placed an orange flag. The first person to climb all the way to the top of the pole and retrieve the flag wins. Anyone and everyone in town can try. It was very Arthurian, you could say. Only men tried it, and had no problem stripping down to their skibbies and betting all-too intimate with the pole. It was very, very slick and it took a solid couple hours of relentless trying for someone to finally make it to the top. 

Gallo enterrado: poor, poor gallo. Translated, this event is the ‘buried rooster.’ A hole was dug in a corner of the plaza at night, secretly, and a live rooster was placed in it and buried up to its neck. Then participants were blindfolded, spun around, handed a stick, and given 2 minutes to stumble around and try to find where the rooster was buried, and smack its head off. The participant to successfully kill the innocent and scared-to-death rooster gets to keep it and make rooster stew, a favorite dish here on the mountain. Of course, with the entire crowd watching screaming and giving false instructions, it was kinda hard to hear the rooster’s crows, though it only took three participants before it was killed. For me, it seems like nothing more than plain old animal cruelty. But for everyone here, used to the culture surrounding cock fights, it was great entertainment.

Baby pig catch: perhaps another example of being not so nice to innocent animals was when the committee slathered up a baby pig with lard and let it loose to run away from a crowd that was trying to catch it. The person to successfully catch and hold onto the pig would get to keep it, not a bad freebie for around here, considering that a grown pig sells for upwards of L1000 (apx $50). Sadly, for the pig’s immediate sake, it was too scared to run, as the crowd had intended/expected, and it ended up getting dog-piled by about ten or so people, who decided the only fair way to split up the winnings was to do exactly that. So they cut it up into pieces and distributed the unfortunate pig among the 10 of them right there on the soccer field.

Sports: Naturally, there were no sports for women to participate in, though for my part, we gringos tried to change that. On the first Sunday of the event, there was a typical cuadrangular de futbol, a 4-team soccer tourney, in which teams from three neighboring towns challenged my town’s team. It drew a large crowd and was fun to watch. The winning team walked away with something like L1000 (apx $50) to split between the players. The next day, was a just-for-fun scrimmage between gordos and flacos (“fats vs skinnies”) ... older people who don’t usually play anymore and who perhaps aren’t as good as they once were in their youth. They tried to get me to play in the game, but since I didn’t fit appropriately into either weight category and since I wasn’t ready to totally embarrass myself along with the old guys, I just watched instead. We shamelessly laughed when somebody whiffed the ball or fell down. Of course, I secretly knew that would’ve been me had I played, heh.

There was also a billiards tournament, but since the pool halls in my town are pretty small, there was hardly a turnout. It is culturally inappropriate here for women to play pool or even enter a pool hall, so again, it was only men participating.

But finally, perhaps the most interesting sport for people in my town was Ultimate Frisbee. Alicia and I thought it would be a lot of fun to invite some of our friends/fellow PCVs up for the opening day of the feria to challenge my soccer team to an Ultimate tourney. We had to teach them how to play ahead of time, so as not to embarrass them too much. 14 gringos and gringas (we had just about even distribution) took to the field and shocked my town by throwing a plastic plate around. It was basically a gringo parade, but was a lot of fun. My town’s soccer team actually learned very quickly and, by the end, was playing almost as well as we were. We tried to convince local girls to play with their team, but to no avail. All in all, Team America still won, but only by a few points. (We were able to play thanks to the Aerobie that the fam sent.)

2. “Cultural stuff”:

Honduras as a country sometimes suffers from being a small place within very close proximity to America, the cultural giant just across the Gulf of Mexico. Meaning, that sometimes American culture penetrates Honduran “traditions” even without Hondurans realizing it. Because of it, I’m often skeptical when I hear somebody talk about doing a “traditional Honduran cultural event.” In the case of my feria, however, most of what was claimed to be authentic, wasn’t so bad.

La Mojiganga: Considering that my house is right on my town’s central plaza, I had a perfect place to view many of these events. The prime example would be that, out of the blue on Saturday, la Mojiganga came waltzing up and plopped itself right in front of my house. She was a paper and wire giant that reminded me of the parade-giants they march through the streets in Pamplona during San Fermines after the bull runs. In Trinidad, Santa Barbara here, a town about 20 miles north of my town, they set fire to Mojigangas to celebrate their feria. Anyway, our Mojiganga danced around the plaza and kids got up on stilts and danced with her. Other kids played around with wooden boxcars and wheelbarrows that were allegedly used by their grandparent’s and great-grandparent’s generations. The strange thing is that no one could really explain what the Mojiganga represented or how the tradition got started.

“Cultural Night”: one evening they built a stage on one end of the plaza and hosted a sort of talent show for school kids. I would hesitate to call it cultural, however. Most groups of performers were 10-12 year old girls dirty dancing to pop songs, to the approval of their teachers (who happily canceled classes that day so the kids could prepare their presentations) and the rest of the town and culture as a whole. Of the other performances were joke-telling, lip-synching to Mexican rock songs, and some sort of competition between to volunteers over who could stuff the most refried beans into the face of the other. For me, Cultural Night was a big miss.

Beauty Queens: around a dozen 14-15 year old girls competed over who was more popular, and sought money contributions to prove it. The girl who collected the most money in her decorated box won and became Queen of the Feria. Then there was a formal “crowning” ceremony followed by a dance in the new Centro Social. Also, the winning queen would preside over the carrera de cintas and would kiss the winning riders on the cheek after presenting them their bandanas. I know we have beauty competitions in the States, but this idea made me slightly uncomfortable because of the lackadaisical attitude towards minority laws here. Then, the same competition took place amongst 6-8 year old girls. But the families really got involved and dressing their little girls up in poofy dresses became a big deal, as well as inviting the perfect little bowtie-wearing date to accompany them too. Okay, but just when I thought things couldn’t get any more inappropriate, the feria culminated in the crowning of the rey feo (King of the Uglies). And, since my house is owned by the family of the committee’s president, my yard became the default location where the handful of rowdy 20-30 year old boys changed into cheap drag queens! This in my quiet, conservative and religious town! Anyway, you can imagine the type of things that went on during the crowning of the rey feo. The next morning I woke up to find my yard strewn with popped condom-balloons and torn panty hose.

Dances: a couple nights, the Centro Social hosted live bands from Santa Barbara. Lots of people went to the dances and let loose, dancing bachata and punta, as well as general sloppy dancing. It’s not often in the year that people in my town are out later than 9pm, but these dances didn’t shut down until after 2am. Cover charges were steep, at more than L100 (apx $5), but it seemed like people found it worthwhile. Some people get rather intoxicated to attend such dances, but I think that we find that in the States too. The important thing is that nobody got shot.

3. Carnival games:

The travelling-carnival-games people showed up in my town around the first of the month and set up their wooden and tin casitas (shacks) directly on the main road that goes through the central plaza, ie just in front of my house. Bus routes were diverted for the entire month.

Sadly, similar to the sporting events of the feria, these “carnival games” didn’t have anything to offer the women of my town. I put “carnival games” in quotes because as it turned out, what they were actually offering wasn’t quite all that was promised. What they actually were was a string of gambling tables—cards, dice and roulette. It is considered inappropriate for women to gamble here. So instead, I saw men spend hours and hours and hours losing their hard-earned money on the tables. Gambling can be a major problem in rural Honduras, and nobody seems to be doing anything about it. Worse yet, they let kids jump right in and play too, betting single Lempiras at a time. They’ll grow up to be good little gamblers themselves. Too bad nobody was there handing out cigarettes.

The only familiar carnival sideshow stuff they had were a bb gun shoot and a ring toss. Though I also didn’t see any girls or women try them out. They also installed a jukebox loaded with about five songs. Oh, and there was a mechanical swing that was hand-cranked! I only saw it used a few times, probably because it was so tiring to operate, heh.

4. Atmosphere (ie ever-present peace-disturbing aspects of celebrations here)

Let me stop myself for a second here. I’m realizing as I’m letting all this flow out here that I have gotten more and more sarcastic and negative about all this. I apologize. It may be coming off as immature and perhaps ethno-centric, these judgments of the feria. I don’t mean to be demeaning or offensive about things, I’m just trying to express my perspective accurately and honestly. I guess that when you live in a place that’s outside of your culture and norms, little differences can slip under your skin and add up over time and can end up really annoying you. I actually did enjoy parts of the feria and, at the very least, found it memorable. So hopefully you’re finding my ranting light-hearted as it’s meant to be, and not so obnoxious, heh. Let me continue with a little more ranting, then I’ll stop for at least a couple weeks.

To set the scene on the atmosphere that was created during this festival, I, along with my Frisbee-playing friends who were staying with me at the time, was waken up at 4am to an explosion in the plaza, literally. The feria committee relished the chance to wake up the entire town with firecrackers and deafening ranchera music, claiming that it was the “Alborada,” which is something cultural and traditional. They went on making unbearable noise for an entire hour. Luckily, this only happened two mornings during the feria instead of every morning, like promised. This would exemplify the nature of the general feria atmosphere for the rest of the week: loud and inappropriate noises all around.

Kids and adults (always the guys and never girls or women) would shoot off fireworks or light firecrackers no matter what time of day and no matter what was going on. During the crowning ceremonies, when people were giving speeches, during the horse races etc etc. It was like Christmas and New Year’s all over again, just two month’s worth dumped into a week.

Then there was the music. The carnival people’s jukebox had a very limited number of songs, but that didn’t stop people from poppin in their Lempiras and selecting those same songs over and over again. Then, just up the plaza from the jukebox speakers, another carnival table was blasting its own music in between rants by the dealer on a microphone calling out, “place your bets, place your bets, place your bets, place your bets, place your bets, place your bets, place your bets, place your bets.” So we usually had two songs going at once, and that’s if my neighbors didn’t have their own stereos on full blast. And don’t get me started on the MCs of the crownings and Cultural Nights, who didn’t know what to do with a microphone either.

Another ‘benefit’ of living right on the central plaza is that, with such an influx of people looking to gamble (or looking to stare at people gambling) comes and influx of boys and men needing to relieve themselves in public. I was woken up twice to the sound of flowing liquid right outside my house—twice! And there were countless times during the week when I stepped out of my house to be shocked by these fellows.

I will finish my novella of a blog post by talking about the generally strange behavior of people during celebrations here. And I’ve discussed this with other PCVs who have noticed this in their sites. But culture has it that people are at one of two extremes when it comes to celebrating ferias: Either they get uncontrollably drunk then violent and start fights and get into big trouble, or they are kind of sedated and super polite, not even applauding or dancing in public. I think that people get guilty if they are seen reacting to something that happens during a feria (perhaps because of strict religions here), or are just easily embarrassed and self-conscious. Or they’ve just never seen the point of showing their emotions in public. Mostly people seem to be content just standing around and staring at things that go on. This is quite different from celebrations in the US like Marti Gras in New Orleans or St. Patty’s Day in Boston or New Year’s in New York or basically any kind of concert or parade. Maybe it’s better?

Celebrating New Year's in Rural Honduras

¡Feliz Año Nuevo!
My New Year’s celebration went as follows:

1. Host family invites me to a late dinner at their house to begin at 9pm.
2. Arrive at 7ish to a houseful of children, old people and a few of us in between—dinner preparations are just beginning to be considered.
3. Host father invites me to a drink outside with friends = passing the bottle of Jim Bean then Jose Cuervo then vodka in a circle around the pickup truck telling crude stories. Do not worry, I partook hardly any. (Host father had started at 2pm)
4. Go inside after a few short minutes to escape the cold breeze and the escalating debauchery. Get a general lecture about how not enough people save their money in San Luis Planes from host grandmother—an appropriate conversation for any PCV… always on duty (actually, go granny… I begged her to give a talk at my coop!).
5. Firecrackers are going off like crazy. A few bottle rockets, a few volcanoes, a few sparklers, a few poppers, but mostly just the loud ones that go BANG.
6. Dinner is served on time at around 11:15. Three types of meat and lots of beans. Welcoming in the new year with farts all around.
7. Piñata smashing committed by those of us between the ages of 17 and 30, the real children of the group, as it turned out.
8. Midnight: burning of an effigy representing the old year (naturally, loaded with firecrackers), down on the plaza; explosions everywhere; host dad and cohorts firing pistol into air; hugs and kisses (when not jumping from the bangs); and did I mention the firecrackers?
9. Music so loud you could taste it: ranchero, techno and Lady Gaga.
10. Dancing. Yes, I danced to it all. And they had never seen such moves. Of course I would never ever even think about dancing with my 17 year old host sister. Never.

Anyway, it was a fun night and I’m very glad that I decided to stay in my community for the big day. I am also grateful I’ve got such a great host family. My host dad, by the way, showed back up at their house sometime around noon the next day with something of a headache I’m sure.

To be good and cheesy, I hope that everyone has a healthy and productive 2011.
Finally, below are a handful of my choices for top bug sightings in Honduras in the year 2010:

1. Stick Bug

2. Earring cocoons

3. Pincer bug

4. One of the many non-descript spiders

in my house

5. Brown butterfly on door

Coffee Picking on the Mountain in December

Saludos desde San Luis Planes! Happy holidays; I can’t believe Christmas’s upon us already. There are only three blog points this time. I decided I’d include some bold highlights in each part, to make it a bit easier to get through. Read what interests you, as always.

1. Coffee season: the flavorful details
2. Vacation highlights: Bad roads, Mayan ruins and Caribbean islands
3. Holidays: feliz Navidad y próspero año nuevo

1. Coffee season is in full swing. My entire town is involved somehow. If you’ve ever been curious about the process, here’s all you need to know:

Coffee is ripening on the plants and it needs to be picked, or “cut,” as they put it in Spanish. Who is out on the farms picking?: everybody and their mother— literally and sadly, next to childbirth, coffee picking is about the only thing that gets women out of the house in my rural, conservative town. Kids are out of school from November to February mainly so they can help their parents in the harvest. The town is basically dead quiet during the day because everyone is somewhere up in the hills picking.

It is a basic concept: pick as many red berries as possible, which are also known as “cherries,” as I’ve heard some people refer to them. But it’s tedious work. The typical worker gets paid around 25-35 lempiras, about $1.25-1.75, per bucket which may represent as many as 30 or 40 plants worth of berries. Adults usually pick around 5-8 buckets in a full day’s work (thus earning around $6-7).

The farm owners, who hire the pickers, “de-pulp” the berries using a type of motorized press, squeezing off the fruity red outer-layer. The beans , inside the red berry part, have a yellow/tan “husk” covered in a sticky liquid called “miel’ (honey). Most farmers, after they de-pulp, wash the beans to clean off the miel. Then they have to decide who to sell their beans to. In my town, the options are one rich family that owns their own company, one “middle-man” who has the reputation for ripping people off price-wise, and then there is the cooperative I work with.

My coop weighs the coffee that comes in and pays the farmer according to the price that day on the commodities market in New York. But, since the official commodity is dried coffee, and the farmers are selling wet coffee, the coop has to take off a discount for the humidity level of the beans. Usually we subtract 45-55% for humidity, depending on how much the farmers have dried their coffee before they bring it in. [The humidity-measuring device is actually pretty cool]

Once we’ve bought the coffee from the farmers, it’s got to pass through two stages of drying so that it reaches 10-12% humidity. More, and the beans would be at risk of going sour and/or rotting and less, and the beans would shrivel up and lose their flavor. Step one is solar: we spread out the beans on our outdoor patio and hope for a lot of sunlight. When it’s really sunny, it usually takes half a day to solar-dry the beans. Step two involves large spinning dryers that were donated to the coop by the USDA and imported from Brazil. Each one holds something like 30-40 bags (150lbs each) and takes approximately 30 hours. We have two dryers.

Grain elevators then shoot the dried coffee into the next room of our plant where the coffee is de-husked, i.e. where the bean loses that second, yellow protective layer. The de-husked coffee bean has a sort of dark green tint and looks more like a lentil than the typical roasted coffee one commonly thinks of.

Finally, the de-husked coffee is sorted by weight, then runs down a conveyor belt in front of which two lines of workers (predominantly women) sit and pick out the bad pieces for hours and hours. The sorted and selected de-husked coffee is bagged and sealed and stored and then awaits a truck to take it to the port for its long journey to Canada, where all of our coffee is exported.

The company that buys our coffee is Van Houtte, one of the bigger coffee name brands in Canada, and they roast, grind, and market it there and in the New England states—if you’re up for aimless browsing of the web, check out their special Single-Origin line and look for the San Luis Planes, Honduras brand. That’s us. Last year we exported 5500 “quintales,” which are 100 pound bags. That’s a lot of pounds of coffee to be moved, especially when you realize that the five factory workers move it all manually throughout every stage of the process. This year we expect to sell 1000 “quintales” more than last.

2. Vacation highlights: My mother and aunt and a friend of theirs came down to visit me for a week at the beginning of the month. And I’m pretty sure that our trip turned out to be most memorable for them.

Travelling in a 3rd world country isn’t necessarily an easy or smooth feat, to say the least. We had decided that renting a car would be the most comfortable… our goal was to avoid using the infamous bus system of Honduras, which is made up generally of 20-30 year old hand-me-down school buses from the US, which are mostly overcrowded with people and bags and sometimes animals, that run normally on inconvenient schedules. Sure there are a handful of “luxury” bus lines, but we opted for a little more freedom and comfort.

So, thank you Budget Rentals. We rented a shiny Toyota with “4 wheel drive” and headed for my site, where, sadly, it had been raining solidly for the past week. My town isn’t what you’d call “easy to get to” and the roads aren’t “in good condition” and the rain doesn’t “help things” and the tires on this shiny new rental car weren’t “appropriate.” Needless to say, we spun out on hill after hill until we just couldn’t go up any more. It was quite a dramatic attempt and, after everybody’s blood pressure began to increase relative to the incline of the road (ie steeply), we decided to scratch my town from the itinerary and turned around and left for Copan, the Mayan ruins.

The Mayan ruins were very interesting and possibly my favorite part of the trip. We hired a guide who was of Mayan descent and learned a lot about their history and culture. Copan was a city of about 20,000 that was in its peak as a cultural center from about 400-800AD. We got to see several stepped-pyramid temples and altars. There were also countless statues of kings and gods, a huge staircase of hieroglyphics, and a ball court. I asked our Mayan guide what he thought would happen in 2012 and he told us the whole end-of-the-world thing was all just a big misunderstanding. I’m relieved.

We spent the remainder of our trip on Roatan, one of the Bay Islands of Honduras. The boat ride out was quite choppy and one of the four of us, to remain unnamed, announced “uh oh” just before she got most vocally seasick into a handy pukebag. Our days on the island were spent swimming, eating and drinking beach drinks. It was rough. One morning, Aunt Julie and I went fishing just beyond the coral reef. Again, we’ll leave it nameless, but one of the two of us caught two and the other caught less than that.

Lesson learned: all in all is that interesting and memorable vacations can be had in Honduras, so anybody reading this, feel free to come down and visit, assuming I know you.

3. Happy holidays:

I’ll be spending Christmas and New Year’s in my site, with my host family and probably with various other families too. It’s nice to be back after having been travelling and I look forward to seeing how the holidays will be celebrated here. My guess is that celebrations will most likely involve bomb-sized, earth-shaking, glass-shattering firecrackers (see my October post for more ranting on firecrackers).

I send my best to friends and family back home.

Cold in Honduras? Actually, yes.

Aloe plant flowers, AKA alien growths.

Hello loved ones and friends and random people I dont know. I am posting a lot of words here to send out a broad update on my life as a volunteer in the Peace Corps. As Ive said here in this blog before, look at the list of contents first and then go on to read only what interests you- otherwise Id feel sort of guilty obliging you to scan the whole damn entry because you feel you have to. Youd get bored that way- or I would at least.

1. Cold in Honduras? Where am I?
2. My computer fixed: life has normalized again!
3. Firecrackers: who was the bastard who sold a truckoad of firecrackers to every kid in my town?
4. Business training (yes, Im actually doing some work too): to my coffee coop and personal finanze classes to families
5. Survey and Census results: any statisticians out there?
6. Ecotourism Committee and a chat on Global Warming: environment=good
7. My work in the school: (kids=good, when no firecrackers)
8. November, December plans: Panama and a visit from family

1. Cold in Honduras?
Who would have guessed? I certainly didnt expect to be cold in the tropics, but it's true. The last month it has been in the mid, and even low, 50s in my site. And it's grey and rainy. It's not going to snow, but having just gotten used to 8 months of 80 and 90 degree weather, the 50s have come as a big surprise. Plus, housing insullation isn't really a common thing here. But, it is actually a welcome change and it feels like fall back home. Give me cold over sweltering hot any time of the year, any latitude of the globe.

2. My computer is fixed
The Osteens step into action. Something broken? We know how to fix it. Something highly technical requiring many difficult steps to fix? Yeah, no problem. Father and son, handymen extraordinaire, save the day... okay, youre right, normally this statement would be highly sarcastic. This time, however, it's actually true. I must thank my father for sending me just what I needed to get my computer fixed and just in time. Best of all, for some amazing miracle or other, none of my memory was lost during the months my computer was experiencing the black screen of death. So, movies, pictures, and music have returned to my life, as well as word processing (hence the long blog entry this time around) and Excel and Powerpoint and Internet (on the sparse ocassions when I go somewhere that has WiFi) etc. And it feels good.

This is not the Peace Corps of the 60s. It is my humble opinion that people need computing abilities to be able to function productively in this century. Old people may disagree with me, but, you try living without a computer for a few months, all the while listening to various Honduran radio stations, and see how long you maintain your sanity. Okay, I didnt go insane without my computer, but I was close.

3. Firecrackers.
Some jerk came to my site and made a ton of money marketing firecrackers to every boy aged 5 to 15 in San Luis Planes. Yes, Im simply complaining right now, but these kids have gone crazy with blowing things up and my once peaceful site now perpetually sounds like a war zone. You'll just be sitting there, maybe with a spoonful of hot soup in your hand or maybe concentrating on translating a sentence for your writeup on the census you just finished, when BANG, BANG, BANG, there's a series of explosions just outside your house. Or maybe it's 6:30 in the morning. Or maybe it's 10:30 at night.

And, sure enough, when I asked one of the little buggerfaces why they were setting off so many firecrackers these days, he said it was because Christmas is getting closer. Obviously.

4. Business training (real work).
Yes, I am still chuggin along on my actual Peace Corps work too. My life's not all technological, climatic, firecracker drama. This past week, I finally imparted a full day's presentation to the members of my coffee coop to prepare them to revise their business plan. Not to brag too much about the experience, but I feel like it was a pretty big success. We shall see in November how our revision goes, but I have high hopes.

Also, Ive been working on a series of short classes to give to families in my town on all things personal finance. According to the results of the survey that I conducted, the average number of years studied amongst the people in my town is 4.3. This means that almost nobody knows what a budget is or how (or why) to save. And, for a town that is struggling with perpetual poverty, in a place whose economy (income) depends principally on a seasonal crop, I think that some basic financial know-how could be of some real use. Sure, I'm trying to make these sessions basic and practical, so that people will actually be able to get something out of them. The goal is to start in November and Ive got the support of the local Patronato, the town council, to help me get people convinced to show up.

5. Survey and Census results.
Ive now officially completed a survey and a census of San Luis Planes. In case you're interested, here are a few of the results of the survey. There are 1325 people living in my site and 309 separate families and 349 houses. Of the 309 families, 35 have 5 or more acres of farmland (apx 11%) meaning that they are the rich people in town.

There is pretty interesting data on ages, that is good news, I think (sorry about the crappy version of the chart):

Younger people study more and have less children. But there is still a lot of work to do, obviously.

100% of the population uses wood burning stoves which, at the base of a protected cloud forest, can be an environmental risk. Not to mention that some of these stoves aren't ventillated externally and thus all the smoke stays in the house causing a wide range of respiratory problems, especially for children. And the average number of children per family is 4.4. Some families, though, have as many as 11 children and some household have as many as 12 people living there.
41% of people burn their trash and another 41% simply throw it somewhere. 6% of families still don't have a latrine in their house and have to use "campo libre" (the open field... they go outside). In 51% of the households in San Luis Planes, the mother does not work outside of the house. 49% of the population has to travel outside of the town to buy food. Also, 49% has to travel outside of the town to buy medicine. 94% of the population depends on the buses. So that means that if something happens to the buses or to the roads, half of the population would have a hard time getting food and medicine.

6. Ecotourism Committee.

Notice the epiphyte growth, looking up inside the cloud forest.

The two other PC volunteers who live in my area, both volunteers working with the Protected Areas Management project (ie the environmental volunteers), formed a committee that promotes ecotourism in our three towns. By the time I arrived to site, it was already up and running and thus, I got to hop on board just after the hardest part had been tackled.

One of the offshoot pools by the trail in the park.

Ecotourism, of course, means that the people here have an opportunity to make money while protecting the national park. Win win. The committee is working on environmental education right now, giving a series of chats to each community on topics like local natural resources, environmentally-friendly waste management, and bird migration. Im working on the next session with a couple other members and we'll be talking about global warming and how it is likely to affect Central America and a few things that people here can do to help mitigate the problem. Of course, global warming has to be a myth made up by those crazed leftwing scientists because it's cold in Honduras right now. Heh.
In the future, the committee will be training guides and finding families that are willing to sell food and rent rooms to tourists. We'll also be working on marketing and transportation. The dream is to one day convert the committee into an NGO that strives to protect the forest while promoting ecotourism. Our community members seem, for the most part, energized and committed.

So come down and visit the cloud forest, see some tucans.

7. Work in the school.

The school year here will end in less than a month and doesn't start up again until the end of February. Almost all of the kids here help their families harvest coffee starting in November. So after the teachers' strike that lasted almost a month, I wasn't left with a whole lot of time to get things accomplished in the school this school year. Lots of my work there will start next school year.

My journalism group is down to two (perhaps three) weeks before we are done. They've done a good job so far and have been enthusiastic about getting to use the computers to type up their articles. Teaching them how to revise their articles has been the most challenging. Many of them didn't even know what "revise" meant. But, we've been working hard and I think we'll be proud of our final product. They'll be up for sale once they're printed. So while you're coming down to visit the cloud forest to help out our ecotourism committee, you can buy a local paper too.

This coming week, a Health volunteer from a town nearby will be coming in to help the two other volunteers here and me give an HIV/AIDS awareness chat to the 6th-9th graders of the school in my site. We all had practice giving such sessions during training, so it should be a piece of pastel. They are really well written sessions and I think the kids end up getting a lot out of them. We'll even be doing banana-condom demonstrations.

I think that after mulling it over for a long time, Ive decided to start giving English classes to the adults of the community at large. I tried starting English classes for the teachers of my school here, but it never worked out, they never showed up. So I was hesitant to try again with a new audience. And some PC volunteers are against the idea all together, claiming that teaching English only extends American imperialism or that we're only training people here to become illegal immigrants in the US. But personally, Im of the opinion that learning a language is good for the brain and, like it or not, learning English opens the doors for success here in Honduras. So there. I may also be starting English classes directly to the school kids next school year-- but we shall have to see about that because Im not really trying to become a school teacher (too many headaches for me).

Finally, now that our principal here finally consented to installing the 15 computers that were delivered last year, I have a shiny new computer lab to work with. I'll be starting computer classes to the teachers beginning next school year that they'll be passing on to the kids. Internet is the next step.

8. November and December Plans.

Im headed to Panama City, Panama the first week in November. Then at the end of the month, Im planning to visit friends in the Department of Olancho (which, as Hondurans love to brag, is bigger than the entire country of El Salvador) for Thanksgiving. Im excitidely expecting visitors for a week in early December. Then, some of my PC friends and I have been talking about renting an island in the Carribean for Christmas. Apparently it's quite an affordable thing to do these days. Rent and entire island. Who knew?

So that's all from me my Internet readers. Hope your eyes didn't fall out from having to read so much. I send my best from here.