mosquitera

It's 7:45 PM here and I'm exhausted.  I think the sun from yesterday in the finca wore me out (by the way a finca is a farm).  I started packing up some things today because on Sunday my project is heading to a different town for 4 weeks for FBT.  Actually all I did was take down my mosquitera.  The city we are going to, Catacamas, is much bigger and will hopefully have internet and phone though I haven't heard yet.  There will only be 17 of us there, everyone in PAM, the other projects will be in different cities.

This weekend my project took a fieldtrip to Campamento to visit a coffee research center.  While it was extremely interesting, many of the practices were not ideal for rural poor coffee farmers.  The entire complex was amazing though.  They used natural pesticides, hormones that the bugs are attracted to.  We learned how to make two kinds of these traps, one with manufactured products and another with an old liter bottle of coke or whatever.  They are both kind of labor intensive, the traps need to be cleaned and refilled every 2-3 months which could be a lot of work for a single farmer.  He would still need to buy the hormones too, which could be some money that they just don't have.  Either way it was interesting.  After we put the traps together we went down to the Tilapia ponds that are continuously receiving water from the irrigation.  They harvest the fish for food once they reach a pound or so, however only the largest fish were in these ponds, the others are moved from holding tank to pond as they grow.  So clearly they have some time and money invested in these little guys.

We also checked out some of the other integrated projects they have going on in their farm.  They use manure from bunnies and chickens mixed with coffee pulp to make a fertilizer, though it is a little more complicated.  The lectures were entirely in Spanish and very fast so it made it hard to understand at time, but we had our project trainer there to translate for us, which helped but I caught on to most of it.  I learned more than I ever wanted to know about coffee and I may never drink another cup in my life, but I will spare all of you the details because I don't want to ruin a good thing for the coffee lovers.

After we were done for the day we went into down for dinner and they were having a fair type thing.  There were rides and booths, also a stage for music that occasionally had an American rap song playing.  The booths were pretty interesting; they were selling everything from clothes to bootleg DVDs and CDs.  The rides were all powered manually, not something any of us were itching to try out.  Ohh yeah I forgot they also had a rodeo, but I didn't get to see any of it because I headed down to the other part of the fair.  We left before the things really got hopping though because most people wanted to head back to the dorm type things we were staying in.

We all hung out there until about 3:30 AM.  And then the next day we headed back to Santa Lucia.  Oh I forgot, on the way there we got a flat tire in the PC vehicle we were taking, so we all had to pile out on the side of a Honduran highway and change it.  It was defiantly a new experience.  Many of the roads here are considered 3 or 4 lanes, when clearly they are 2, so several large trucks and buses came rather close to the side of the road.  Sunday ended pretty tranquillo so not much else to report on the weekend.

This week has flown by, on Tuesday we had a guy come a talk to us about AIDS in Honduras, and he had a pretty unique story to tell.  He is a volunteer right now and once he got to his sight he found an artists there, who it turned out had AIDS, he told us the story of how he had to go to the hospital and the experience there and how he ended up dying and his experience at the funeral.  He showed us a lot of photographs he had taken of his work and it really was touching.  It kind of made the day rather somber, but it was a very touching story.  We're finishing up the week with some work at Loma Linda, another integrated farm.

Also I wanted to point out that Amanda was right, I was told before I left that I would be very saddened by the poor people of Honduras as well as the dogs.  I guess I was so ready to see it that when I came across the dogs I was ready and then settled in I wasn't ready to see the people.  But it is a harsh reality here that I think it going to be hard for all of us to come to terms with, I was lucky I got to see it so soon in country, others will be waiting until September to see the real Honduras.

Hopefully there will be a great place to access internet and use the phone in Catacamas, but if not don't worry if you don't hear from me.  Thanks for all your encouragement and emails.

 

PC Love,

Bridget

--
Bridget Kathleen French
954.650.5084