August 31, 2007

Hey Folks

Lots of good comments on the last blog, I will be sure to blog every time I have a near death experience or destroy something. Sorry for the long delay in posting another blog. I will try and post some pictures in this blog as well if the computer will cooperate today. Not much new going on here. Last week was the national corn festival here in Danlí (Festinama 2007 it was called). It is sort of like the state fair of Honduras with lots of vendors selling all sorts of things made mostly from corn. Corn is a big deal here, they grow mostly white corn which is similar to the dent corn we have at home but lighter in color with a very similar looking plant an ear size. Most everyone in the campo here grows at least some corn, mostly on a subsistence basis, meaning they grow enough to eat throughout the year or more often enough to sell at a low price at harvest and then buy back enough to eat during the year at a higher price (storage is a problem). Most corn in the diet is eaten in the form of corn tortillas made by hand every morning. Corn grows quite well here and is a thing of pride among the Hondurans. I need to look it up to make certain, but I am pretty sure that Honduras can’t grow enough corn to feed itself and has to import in order to feed the population. That is a pretty telling statistic I think since the majority of the population subsists on corn, rice and beans.

Anyhow the corn festival was pretty fun some other volunteers came into town to enjoy the food and beer and we walked around town enjoying the festival. Below are some pics from Saturday the main day of the festival.


Annie enjoying some corn products - elote is the grilled field corn you see below and montuca (sp?) is what she´s eating in the pic above. It´s a tamale like thing filled with pork or chicken, bits of potato, and a few other veggies like peas then wrapped in corn husks and boiled. They´re much drier than the Mexican tamales we´re used to.

Food stands set up around a plaza...it got a bit smoking with all the fires. In the big pots they´re boiling the Honduran tamales (just cooked corn mass) and montucas.


It´s a GYR

Feels like the county fair!

Streets of Danli before Festinama 2007 kicked off its carnival

The following pics are from the parade Sunday morning, the final day of the week-long festival. The first pick is a float with the ¨corn queen¨.




Right now Annie is in La Esperanza at a HIV-AIDS conference and I am at home. I went with a PAM (Protected Areas Management) volunteer to his site earlier this week to meet with his community about helping them with the initial survey they need to do to bring electricity to the community. Hopefully we will be able to do the preliminary study of the community for free (it costs about $1500-3000 to hire someone to do it, way out of reach of this community) or at least for minimal costs in transportation and some equipment. After the initial study is done the community can then look for someone to pay to put the electricity lines in (Church group from the states, NGO, or some other donor). And maybe in 4 or 5 years have T.V. and refrigeration.

OK until later

Que le vaya bien

Luke

August 14, 2007

Nah hombre.

Well I am now 26 and Annie and I have been married for 2 years… big weekend. It was supposed to be big weekend at least. We had planned on going to Tegus and working a little at the office (we can print for free in the PC office) and then spending the night in a hotel and maybe going to a movie or something. But in an attempt to contract every water-borne sickness Honduras has to offer I was sidelined with amoebas in my digestive system on Friday. That makes the count 3 digestive illnesses in the 3 months we’ve been in site. The amoebas weren’t nearly as bad as the last bacterial infection accept for a 45 minute period on Friday morning when I thought Annie was going to come home to find me passed out on the bathroom floor from the stomach cramps. I called the PCMO (Peace Corps Medical Officer) and she told me to go to the pharmacy down the street and buy 6 expensive neon green pills which seemed to clean the problem up pretty quick, as well as make my pee glow in the dark. Quite impressive.

Anyhow so we stayed home for the weekend. It wasn’t so bad. On Saturday I felt quite a bit better so I went to the store and bought a shovel, some chicken wire, and 10 lbs. of fertilizer (12-24-12) for about 9 American dollars. I started the project of tilling up our yard in an attempt to plant a garden. It took quite a bit of work since when they built the house rather than clean up after constructing things, they just threw everything in the yard and then fenced it in with a cinder block wall. Mostly the job was digging up the old cinder blocks, bricks, electrical wire, ceiling tile, bathroom tile, rusty wires, boards, nails, pvc pipe, and a big slab of waste concrete, and sifting what soil remained through the chicken wire to get the rocks out. Saturday went well and I got about half of the section we are going to plant tilled up and Annie planted some herbs and a few flowers. Sunday afternoon we went back to work on the other half….and that’s when things started to go badly. Towards the end of the day it looked like it might rain so we started to hustle to at least get the whole section tilled up over the weekend so we could plant things later during the evenings as more of a leisure activity (there was definitely nothing “leisurely” about digging up the slab of waste concrete). Earlier in the day I had found the buried electrical line and been careful not to cut it while digging. I had not found the water line yet and assumed it must not run through this section of the yard. I had dug up numerous pieces of pvc and after being careful with them, none of them turned out to be anything but trash. I started to be in a hurry, it was getting dark and it looked like rain. So I sunk the shovel into the ground and hit another piece of pvc, I dug it up and realized that this one was connected for a ways under ground…it was our water line…maybe. There was no way of telling. Water only comes every 3 days, usually in the afternoon sometime for about 3 hours. I thought I will just run down to the ferretería (hardware store) and buy a section of ½ inch pipe….but then I realized it was Sunday and nothing in Danli is open on Sunday. And water was supposed to be coming anytime because it had come on Thursday so Sunday was three days later. We are almost completely out of water and it is supposed to come anytime now and I just potentially cut the water line in half. I just ignored the problem. I figured there was only about 10% chance that particular pvc pipe actually served any purpose.

So I went back to my rushed tilling of the yard before it rained. Not more than 3 shovels later I sink the shovel down hard trying to get a chunk of concrete out and BOOM! I had no idea what happened but the electric line connecting at our wall was on fire. Apparently in Honduras you don’t bury electric lines at a constant depth and 3 inches below the surface is totally OK. I should have certainly been more careful. The electric line I had found before and been so careful not to cut had been deeper and rather than running straight to the house at a nice depth for some reason it took a bend and wasn’t buried as deep, and I hit it with the shovel and cut the electricity.

Now I was concerned. I was trying to decide if what had just happened was really as dangerous as I think it might have been (the line was 110V and 60A, rubber soled shoes, dry shovel handle, Annie knows CPR….moderately dangerous). But now we don’t have electricity, and who knows how to find an electrician in Honduras, I sure don’t. It keeps getting worse…within 5 minutes of cutting the electricity, the water starts coming, spurting out of the ground about 6 feet high from where I cut what is now glaringly obvious was our water line. So now we don’t have electricity, and we aren’t going to have a pila full of water for the next 3 days. So now I’m thinking I’ve got to solve the water problem and then it starts raining, hard.

It was a disaster, and Annie wanted to kill me. In a matter of a few minutes I had managed to cut both our water and our electricity. The yard was filling with water and the pila wasn’t. Luckily I have seen in my travels what Hondurans calls a “union universal” which is a bike tire tube wrapped tightly connecting 2 pipes. So I took out my leatherman and took off my bike tire (PC gave me a bike, which is worth way more now that it is helping hold together our water line), took out the tube, cut it in half, and made a universal connection. So we at least got a pila full of turbid water.

We also now have electricity again. I still don’t know how to find an electrician in Honduras, but a neighbor who fixes refrigerators is just as good. He managed to fix it without ever turning the electricity off anywhere….amazing, and horridly dangerous.

So we now have a place to plant some flowers and veggies….Wahoo

Luke

August 12, 2007

HALF A YEAR!

Hurrah! We’ve been in Honduras a half a year! Has it gone quickly? Well…both Luke and I agree the weeks go quick but the months go really slow.

This blog centers around our home but it’s sort of random so I apologize if it’s difficult to follow!

We got a package from home with my spices so now we can cook just about everything! We’re lucky to be in Danlí because you can find pretty much any ingredient or food item that you want (within reason). In Danlí you can’t find good cheeses (nothing gourmet and no mozzarella, feta, cheddar, colby, etc.); other dairy products like cottage cheese, sour cream, buttermilk; or whole grains: bread, rice, flour, etc. We’re planning a trip to Tegus to celebrate our anniversary and birthdays soon so we hope to pick up some of those coveted food items we can’t find here. We’re starting to feel like our house is a home…especially now that we have a couch to sit on in the living room. I took some updated pics of our house so send us an email if you want to see them!

Luke has been working feverishly in the yard lately trying to get it ready to plant a garden. My mom and grandma and Luke’s mom have sent us seeds so we’re excited to get our garden going! The soil in our front yard is pretty decent but Luke has to dig up the grass that is growing in it and then sift out the roots and rocks. We bought some fertilizer and have been using that in the rows where we plant. We have a compost pile that we started as soon as we moved in (a little over a month ago) but it’s not quite ready to use as fertilizer. Maybe for the next planting. Yesterday we got a few rows of things planted: flowers that grow to 4 ½ feet tall in front of the oh-so-pretty cinder block wall that surrounds our house, basil, chives, and radishes. We hope to plant more flowers, sweet corn, green beans and cucumbers today. Luke found a good manual in the PC office about when to plant things in Honduras which has been a help since the weather is a bit different here than what we’re used to in the States! It’s rainy season now and cooler than during dry season but still not quite cool enough to plant things like spinach. We’ll have to wait until Octoberish to do the cooler weather veggies. We’re going to try and plant a row of lettuce to see if it grows or if it still gets too hot during the day.

I’ve been trying to keep track of what fruits are in season when since we got here. Right now passion fruit is definitely in season. Our neighbors have a big tree that hangs over into our yard above our shed. For the past few weeks we’ll hear a loud bang when a fruit falls of the tree, hits the shed, the rolls off the roof. In the morning through afternoon, you can smell the sweet scent of maracuyá (passion fruit) in our yard. It’s a weird fruit…not something you can eat easily…but it makes an excellent juice. Other fruits right now that are in season are nance (a small yellow fruit that I think is disgusting), something called marmones (I believe) and a fruit that has a red spiny shell (sort of looks like a big strawberry) that you crack open and eat what’s inside (I have no idea what it’s called). Tamarindo (tamarind in English) has been in season for what seems like quite awhile. It grows in brown, fuzzy pod-like things and inside the pod are seeds with fruit surrounding them. This also makes an excellent juice – one of Luke and I’s favorite. Luckily there is a juice place only a few blocks from our house that sells fresh squeezed juice for only 8 Lempira – 40 American cents.

Remember the good old days when soda/pop was sold in glass bottles? Well here in Honduras you can still buy soda in glass bottles and the good thing about the bottles is that they are recycled unlike the plastic ones. Anyway Luke and I both love Coca-Cola Light (tastes very similar to Coke Zero in the States) so we decided to ask the owner of the pulpería (small family-owned store that sells beverages, junk-food, sometimes fruit and veggies, etc. that you’ll find on every street) if she could order us a case of Coca Light in bottles from the Coke guy next time he came. She did and we got our case of Coca Light in bottles. When we’re finished with the case, we just have to take the empty bottles back and get a new case. Each soda (about 12 oz) costs about 28 American cents.

August 7, 2007

Our new pet

Several weeks ago, we were walking home from the grocery store and Luke found a turtle in the middle of the road near our house. We could tell that at one point it had been someone’s pet because it’s shell had been painted. Luke got really excited and picked the turtle up, justifying that it was going to get run over if we didn’t take it home. Luke named him Umberto which is a Honduran name that we think is sort of funny so it seemed to suit the turtle. Umberto is about 8 inches in diameter and still scared of us a bit. He didn’t eat anything that we gave him for 2 weeks…we tried everything from cucumber and carrot peels to cabbage, rice & beans, etc. but Umberto wouldn’t eat any of it! On morning I was eating a mínimo (small banana) and decided I’d find Umberto and see if he liked bananas. I put him next to the bits of banana and he stuck his head out and ate right in front of me! Before he wouldn’t ever stick his head out if we were in sight but that morning he was so hungry he didn’t even care. So now all we feed him is about ½ a mínimo a day. I’m sure there has to be other things he’ll eat but we haven’t figured out what those are yet. Umberto gets up pretty early in the day and wonders the yard. I usually find him by the compost pile in the morning. He’s a pretty easy pet to have but doesn´t make a very good watch dog.
Umberto hanging out in the yard

August 1, 2007

More pics of hike

Organic coffee
Luke and I in front of waterfall we saw at the end of hike
Look closely - there is a monkey sitting on a tree branch in the top middle of the pic.