This is me and my Gracias host family during last night’s party.

Alright alright, last morning in Gracias, I’m gearing up for a PC party in Santa Rosa de Copan tonight. I’m not much in the mood this last week has really taken it out of me. Everyone in our group seems a little wiped out. I guess it is the norm to lose a few trainees during field based training but we’ve managed to make it through lots of hard work, hard chairs in our Spanish classes, more than a handfull of cases of amoebas, and one bout with Dengue fever (Get ‘er done Colleen). Last night we had a party to celebrate with our host families, it was a lot of fun. There were a ton of kids so we circled a bunch of chairs and had them play musical chairs to good ol American tunes. The kids were very into it and ran (not walked or danced) around in circles for a good portion of the evening. We also served them some quasi American food. We did the best we could with the food we could gather in Gracias (Imagine trying to put together a Thanksgiving dinner and only being able to shop at the circle K). But everyone had a good time and the families did a good job of pretending to enjoy the food. It was kind of nice to see the tables turned a bit. We’ve been struggling (some of the time) with some different foods here for about two months now. Last week I came home to sopa de mondongo (tripe soup) for lunch the other day. If you closed your eyes and imagined the cow intestines were actually some sort of exotic shellfish it was actually really good.
Yesterday, before the festivities, we had to put together some chicken coops in El Cile again. It was a good experience and nice to get out and hammer nails and put stuff together. We didn’t really have plans or anything and none of us had ever built a chicken coop before but it turned out well (except for running out of metal for the roof). I’m still learning a ton but there’s no way that I’m going to be able to remember a tenth of this stuff. Well folks, I’m about to hit the road. More next week to be sure. Keep on truckin or whatever…Joe