Month in Review
Time for an overdue blog entry.
Highlights of the past month:
- Rapid progression of work at the women’s cooperative
- Crazy Halloween Party in Copan
- Confianza building with coworkers
- Working retreat to Puerto Cortes
- And much more…
The problem with not writing a blog entry for a couple weeks is that when you finally sit down to write it there’s just too much stuff. You don’t want to leave anything out, but you can’t possible say everything. In sum, it’s overwhelming. Days turn to weeks, and before you know it, you haven’t updated your blog in a month (or if you’re a certain cousin, who shall remain nameless, Tim, two months!). The above doesn’t begin to describe it, but it’s a start. The last month has been productive on so many fronts, but to draw back the readership, I’ll put up a fun post, focused on our trip to Puerto Cortes last weekend.
As a member of the Hermandad family, I was invited to participate in our end of year evaluation. This was the first year they had left San Marcos, and it was decided that Puerto Cortes would be the destination. Puerto Cortes is in the upper left corner of Honduras, very close to the Guatemalan border. It has nice long beaches, unpleasantly strewn with trash.
The point of the weekend was to evaluate what we had done in 2006 and make plans for 2007. In my charge as Voluntario del Cuerpo de Paz I presented what we had done. I presented on two projects: the workshops on capitalizing rural banking groups and my work with the women’s coop. My PowerPoint skills wowed them and the closing slide with me posing in front of the Honduran flag didn’t hurt. It was well received.
However, one of the points of my presentation was to show them how we can better organize the information we have. We run so many programs, with so many people that often times nobody has the full picture in front of them. I showed them a few tricks I had used to organize the capital raising plans we had developed with the rural banks as well as some of the sales and production registers we had created at the women’s coop. As a result of this now I have a ton of work because everyone wants to do the same with their own project. The trick will be making them learn how to do it themselves, not just doing it for them.
In the night we went swimming, hung out, and played pool. This was a huge confianza builder between us, as everyone switched to calling me in the informal tu form and joked and kidded around. I also got one of the highest compliments yet, from an older guy named Claudio, who told me that he appreciated my work here a lot and was impressed by my work ethic. I liked this a lot.
Saturday afternoon we put aside the work and went to play on the beach in Omoa. There are some terrific pics from this, which I’ll post shortly. We went out on one of those banana boats, two Hondurans fell off in the ocean (surprisingly wearing life preservers), and a good time was enjoyed by all. I also gave them some good water cooler material by going on a long walk on the beach with the cute girl from accounting.
We returned to San Marcos on Sunday, a bit tired, but refreshed. This week I’m working more with the ladies at the CICAL, finishing up a web page I started long ago, and celebrating my birthday this weekend. This is actually a serious production, as I have a number of different groups of friends that don’t easily mix. Friday we’re doing the Gringo only birthday, Saturday I’m doing my own private birthday celebration by sitting in an internet café to watch text updates of the USC-CAL game that will decide the Pac 10 championship, Sunday I’m going out with my neighbors to the farm, and Monday the English language class people are throwing me a party. Next week is Thanksgiving and we’re all going to Santa Rosa to have a Thanksgiving dinner together, but it just won’t be the same as in the U.S. Hope all is well, and I’ll try to update more frequently. Take care.
