Pictures...as promised

 

Some sweet butterflies in La Tigra

 

Part of the garden at my homestay families house. That´s our little bathroom in the back.

 The view from our porch. Nice green hillsides. That´s a papaya plant in the foreground, but it´s a male, so no fruit from him.

 My homestay sister. When she´s not running around like crazy, she picks flowers for me.

 San Juancito. The enterance to La Tigra is through this town and up that misty hillside. It doesn´t look that steep here, but it´s just an illusion.

 Everyone in my project, Protected Areas Management, was stoked to see this sign. We just learned about the Zona Nucleo, which is the no impact zone above 1800 m. Everything above 1800 m in Honduras is declared cloud forest and under some sort of protection. Of course, there were still some houses up here and the forest was only about 30 years old. This area is the watershed for Teguz and the surrounding towns, so now it´s under stronger protection.

 Hillside houses up the valley from San Juancito. Yup, that´s a maize field above and below the house. There are some banana trees right above the house which appear to function as a barrier to erosion (keeping the house on the hillside and not in the valley bottom)

 A farmer planting maize. This is just a little down the valley from that last picture. Pretty tough work.

 We had a pretty major storm yesterday. The walls at the training center have holes in them so water can move from one level down to the next without breaking down the wall. 

Okay, that´s a brief summary of life in Honduras. I´m heading out tomorrow for a town four hours north of here. I´m going to be staying with a PAM volunteer for a few days to see what PC life is like first hand. I think she does quite a bit of environmental ed work with her community. I´ve been trying to think about all the possibilities for PAM work here in Honduras. Most people in my project end up in the aldeas (small villages) working on environemntal ed, latrine construction, improved stoves, hillside farming, erosion control, forest management, women´s groups, etc. Everything pretty much depends on the community you get placed in and what they want to accomplish. A few PAM volunteers have the opportunity to work on larger scale NGO networking and park managment, but those placements are pretty rare and sound extremely challenging. Right now I´m just trying to focus on my Spanish, which seriously needs some help. I feel like I´m getting worse, which is impossible, right? It´s tough cuz we go from Spanish at our homes to English in training. It´s hard to keep making the switch back and forth, but I´d better get used to it becuase that won´t be changing any time soon. 

Highlight of the week: Us PAMers built a small garden the other day. I found some black rasberries right next to our plot too! And I learned that we can buy horses at our sight! Burros are a bit cheaper, but pretty slow at carrying me up mountains.

Hasta luego!