Kelly and Ben in Honduras

Mar/April 2007 new

The photo to the left is of the other Copan Peace Corps volunteers Jamie and Quincy at dinner with us one night.   However, now we are the only Volunteers in Copan, both Quincy and Jamie have recently left.   Quincy has taken a job with USAID in Tegucigalpa (capital of Honduras) and will be there for the next year, and Jamie is headed back to the US to work in New York.  We were all good friends and it will be different without them.  We are not sure if Peace Corps is going to place more volunteers in Copan with us or not but we could be on our own for the duration of our service here.    

The surrounding photos are of the large coffee plantation Finca el Cisne where we stayed overnight.  This is something that we try to do with people that visit us because it gives a pretty good glimpse of what life is like in the Honduran countryside and where all the coffee that we drink comes from.  Plus it is enjoyable for us to go out there because we are good friends with Carlos whose family owns the farm and it is fun for us to ride his horses.  The morning there is spent on horseback getting a tour of the plantation and the land.  Then you go back to his house for a big lunch and siesta (see photo to right).  His mother prepares the lunch which is pretty traditional and all the ingredients come from the farm—and she is a very good cook.  In the afternoon you go on a tour of the coffee and cardamom portion of the plantation and see how the two are grown and processed.      

For the Mayor of Copan’s birthday we got invited with the rest of the people that work for the municipality to go up to his country house for the surprise party.  The mayor and his family are very wealthy and have a house in the town of Copan and then a second one in the country.  From the sounds of it the Mayor uses the second house maybe one day or two days a year.  The main food at the party was seafood soup which is pretty much every Honduran’s favorite meal.  The mayor obviously did not know about the party because he showed up about 2 hours after everyone else had. 

The landlord of the house where we live, Freddie,  happened to come to the party as well.  He is the guy seated between us in the photo to the right.  He and his wife live out in the villages and we had not really met him before, but his kids live next door to us in town with the grandmother and we know them really well.  There are no schools beyond primary school so if a family in the villages wants their kids to have an education beyond 6th grade they have to continue school in the town of Copan.  Unfortunately the town is not easily accessible for the vast majority of the villages so most kids end school at 6th grade.  But if you have family in the town you can send your kids to live with their uncles or grandparents and go to school.  In the case of Freddy his wife Nelly’s mother lives in town next door to us.  So the kids live with the grandmother so that they can get an education.   

These next pictures are from Buffy’s visit.  Although it was short we still managed to fit quite a bit in and I think she got a decent feel of our life in Copan.  We of course did the standard Ruins tour and visit to the bird park but then also went horseback riding outside of town along the river.  At the bird park we didn’t really didn’t spend much time with the birds we just hung out by the river and swam.  Its one of the best ways to escape the heat and relax.  We are pretty good friends with the owners, so they don’t mind us just hanging around.

And no...we did not plan on dressing like twins.

For semana santa (holy week) when everyone has a week vacation we decided to go camping for a couple days in Celaque– the national park with the hightest peak in Honduras– 9,200 feet.  Quincy hadn’t been so decided to join us.  It was absolutely beautiful but pretty challenging.  The first day we hiked to pico gallo (rooster point) which started off in normal pine forests (up to the right), followed by Doctor Suez looking cloud forest near the peak (to right with Quincy), then tropical forest on the way back down (bottom right).  On our way, we encountered the snake to the left in the middle of the path.  We were all a little scared to just walk around it so Quincy decided to shoo it off with a stick.  She figured it was safe enough– I mean its not like snakes can jump right.  It eventually slithered away and we continued on.  Coincidently the biologist who has the butterfly park here in town was on the same path giving a bird watching tour.  When we ran into him we showed him the picture of this snake.  His first response was ….whoa…..that looks like a jumping viper….in other words a snake that jumps and is also lethal!  He later determined that it was actually just a normal viper, so it couldn’t jump but still very poisonous. That first day was pretty long and tiring as Ben shows in the picture to the left. 

The next day we woke up and Quincy decided she wasn’t going to be able to make it to the top because of a killer blister on her foot.  She ended up hiking down and Ben and I did the hike on our own.  It was definitely pretty steep and not an easy hike at all, but it was definitely worth it.  The upper cloud forest was spectacular. 

About 10km from the farm house is a guest house where we stay overnight (photo to the left).  Although there is a solar panel which generates electricity for the lights we have not been there while the battery was charged and have had to use candles, which is probably better anyway.  You eat your meals outside under the thatched structure in the photo to the right.  One of the women from the village prepares dinner that night and breakfast the next day which are both typical Honduran food.  It is a very quiet and relaxing place to stay overnight, plus there are natural hot springs nearby to soak away some of the pains that may be developing from a day on the back of a horse. 

The pictures to the right and left are from the “consurso de barrio mas limpio,”  or contest of the cleanest neighborhood (it sounds better in Spanish).  This is a project I am working on with the Municipality of Copan and the other Peace Corps volunteer Quincy.  She works with the urban planning office and works a lot with trash management.  My interest with the project is the environmental aspect with the trash problem in Honduras.  Copan is pretty advanced in that there is actually a big truck that picks up garbage on a regular basis.  It passes by our house, for example, every Saturday and Tuesday.  Despite this basic service, some barrios don’t have good enough roads for the truck to access, there’re limited garbage cans, and the people are accustomed to littering.  This last one is probably the biggest problem.  Part of the problem is that plastic is fairly new here.   Not that long ago all the trash was organic or materials that degrade quickly.  For drinks, everyone had glass bottles that were always returned to the distributor where they were cleaned and reused.  This is still the case in a lot of stores and restaurants.  Now all of a sudden kids are eating a bag of chips instead of fruit and throwing empty bags in the street instead of a mango seed for example.

Aside from the health and environmental impacts of trash everywhere, it is also a big problem for tourism, which I think drove the Municipality to start a clean campaign.  The contest between neighborhoods is one of the activities in the campaign.  The pictures are from the first official tour of the judges through the barrios.  The local news came along to film everything including interviews with the leaders and other neighbors in the barrio.  All the trash up to the right is actually taken from our street– I don’t think we are going to win..

We returned from out camping trip on the Wednesday before Easter.  The trip back was no easy task.  3 separate buses on the busiest travel day of the Honduran year, during the hottest time of the year, after an exhausting 3 day backpacking trip.  We were both relieved to get back home.

The photos to the  right are of Semana Santa or Holy Week around Copan.  The  alfombras are colorful sawdust depictions of religious scenes or messages that different churches create.  Many tourists travel to the cities around Central America that are known for having the best alfombras.  This year Copan hired a couple of alfombra experts from Guatemala to help out and teach some of the people here how to create better ones.  The one shown to the right stretched for an entire block and people. 

The photo to the upper right is the catholic church in town in the processional between the 12 stations of the cross.  The church sets up the stations around the city and the people move from one to the next on Good Friday.

To the right is a picture of our neighbors- Valentina’s aunt fani and great grandma Dona Luisa.  Dona Luisa is a sweet old lady that still runs the household including the little shop.  Its quite amazing how much she works at her age.

The photos below are of Quincy's going away/birthday party.  After more that three years in Copan she finished up her Peace Corps service with a variety of going away events, all of which were fun.  She will definitely be missed.  She was a good friend of both of us and will be missed by everyone in town.  Quincy will not be going too far however.  She accepted a one year job with USAID and will be living in the capital Teguz starting in August.  Although Teguz is not right around the corner she will be back in Copan to visit from time to time, and we will have an excuse to visit her in Teguz.