chicken brains, el salvador and rambo

Hi everyone -

     Nice subject title right?  Wanted to keep every one's attention.  I'll get to explanations in a few lines I swear.  Right now I'm in Teguc, I just got back from a little trip and decided to wait for the next bus to my site and hope the jalon gods are with me today so I could print some stuff out and go buy a jar a of peanut butter (a whole jar in 3 weeks isn't ridiculous, right?)

     So the last time I wrote there were some things that I completely just left out.  Rambo, the other dog of my counterparts was ran over by a car., this happened in September when I was away for the conference in Olancho, I guess I'm over it now, but he was a cute dog.  Named Rambo after a futbol player, not after the movie character which is what I originally thought.  I suppose why I wanted to mention it before was because I found it very strange that he was hit by a car, when maybe only one passes every 3 or 4 hours, if even that.  Maybe that's why he got hit.  I'm still looking for a puppy but still haven't had any luck since Paluka's died.  The other house that I am trying to figure out a way lease has a nice fenced in yard, but the other doesn't.

    Meat in my community, and most of Honduras is a luxury.  Chicken is by far the cheapest, no one really ever eats beef or pork and if they do its very fatty and a  poor product.  So about once a week we have chicken at my house, Nolvia has about 30 chickens, she counted the other day, which in my opinion is 30 too many, but I'll get to that.  So with the 30 chickens and every so often they actually hatch their eggs, we continuously have more, so one a week is doing no damage to the population.  Its always boiled or fried chicken, but mostly boiled.  Some times we have it in soup and some times just with rice and beans.  When we have it with soup we usually will eat it for two days straight.  These chickens usually don't have a lot of meat on them to begin with, and to be perfectly honest I usually pick a little bit off and give the rest to the dog, but one day I was eating soup and could find almost no meant on the bone, while I was turning the bones over and over and picking out little pieces here and there it occurred to me what I was holding in my hand - the skull.  And I had been eating the brains!  I know Nolvia had been watching me eat and I'm sure its because she wanted to know what I was going to do with it, and then of course it could have been my paranoia, but all she said was, not a lot of meat on that one.  Whatever, I stopped eating it and gave the rest to the dog.  Life went on, but no, it didn't taste like chicken.

    Not much else has been going on in my site, I'm here right now in Teguc looking for some information to start teaching an english class and when I get back I'm going to start looking for some wild growing medicinal plants, because the nurse and I are going to practice making some remedies and then we're going to have a class kinda thingy to teach these remedies to all the health center guardians that live in each community.

    This weekend I went to visit another volunteer that has a rural tourism project going with some of my friends from my training class.  His town is outside of Marcala called Zancudo.  This town use to be part of El Salvador, but during the last war it was given to Honduras.  But the people there are a little confused, they travel freely from El Salvador to Honduras to buy groceries and what not, the area has also been declared dry by the president, I suppose because he is afraid a war will break out induced by alcohol consumption.  Bu there are plenty of people there that have horror stories about what happened to them, their family and friends during the wars.  One of the ladies that was cooking our food at the lodge lost a son by an American bomb that El Salvador dropped.  I asked the volunteer that lived there if there were many people with post traumatic stress or anything and he didn't really seem to notice anything, although he thought the people that were considered the "town drunks" had the most horrific experiences.  We went to a boarder town named Purkine (sp?) and it just seemed completely different over there, we could see the two active volcanoes as well.  Although most of the people in this region make a living my "chopping wood" the forests in this area didn't seem as deforested as near my site.  The weather was much colder, although right now in Tegus its kinda chilly so its possible that "winter" has spread across the whole country, but I doubt it.  The site is higher up in the mountains too, and seems more piney than my site. 

     The tourist place was really interesting, apparently there have been people asking around the area for a place to stay, the project is really only marketed at locals and I guess the occasional PCV, but right now there are 3 cabins with two double beds and private bathrooms and one cabin with bunk beds and a bathroom outside (to be used kind of like a hostel type room).  They were still putting the finishing touches on everything when we were there but they were quaint wooden structures, all made there because next to the land is a wood shop kind of place that makes wood furniture.  Also on the property is going to be the office of the NGO that is developing the project and a tourist office type place.  A little further up from there is going to be a restaurant for the people staying in the cabins (also made from wood). 

     There isn't much to see or do, but we went on a nature walk to Zancuda which round around a stream and through the forest for about 30 mins.  Once we got to Zancuda we checked out the town (this is the volunteer's site) and then sampled some of their corn products they were having for their corn festival.  It was typical corn products, atol - which is the juice that comes out of the corn after it is ground, tamales de alote which is just the ground corn (when its still moist) and wrapped in corn husks and steamed on a stove and corn on the cob 0of the different types of corn they grow.  Also later that night we ate the tamales de alote fried (in my site they like to add sugar after frying them).

     We did a lot of hanging out and were supposed to leave on Sunday but decided on the trip last minute.  So here I am and I'm getting ready to head back to my site, I have to catch a bus at 12.  More to come later.

 

PC Amor,

Bridget

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Bridget Kathleen French
954.650.5084