Where to begin, these last two weeks has been huge. You are now speaking with a real Peace Corps Volunteer, an aspirante no longer. Last week I visited the site (Cruz Alta, La Campa, Lempira) where I’ll be living for the next two years it incredibly beautiful and looks a little like northern New Mexico, lots of pine trees and mountains all around. I met a few of my neighbors and will meet a bunch more soon. Right now I’m in Santa Rosa de Copan, just hanging out and taking a giant breath before making the big hike back to my site. I only got to spend a couple of nights in Cruz Alta last week but I’ll soon get a chance to know it intimately. While I was there I was able to hang out with the volunteer serving there now (John, he’s leaving sometime in October) and the original volunteer of the site, Pete. Both of them were very cool and made big impacts in the site. Pete’s wife, Elyse, was also there, she spent about a year and a half living with Pete at the site. She did a lot of good things in Cruz Alta as well. I met some women from a bread group she helped out in and they were very happy to see her again. One woman gave us some killer banana bread that Elyse had shown her how to make. The last night in site the three of them decided to have a special dinner. Pete had arranged to pick up a rabbit (canejo) and we were going to make stir fried rabbit with vegetables. The only problem was that the rabbit was still breathing and nobody quite new what to do with it. The guy who sold it to us recommended hanging it by the neck and assured us that it would be dead in a couple of minutes or so. None of us thought that hanging for a couple of minutes was a very humane way to go so I took care of it myself and earned the nickname windmill for awhile (I’m trying to avoid details). After the site visit I headed back to Siguatepeque for a couple of days of more training and on Thursday night we headed to Tegucigalpa for some more training and a reception at the US embassy. After that we headed back to a hotel and smoked some of Honduras’s finest cigars. All the guys in our group had been growing beards and had planned on shaving them except for the mustache for our swearing in party. It was really funny, some of us looked like sex offenders and the rest looked like crooked politicians. After shaving we headed down to a casino and I managed to blow through all of my “emergency” money like it was on fire or something, good thing we were paid the next day because I didn’t have two pennies to rub together after that. Needless to say we were all pretty tired and a few of us were a little hung over for our swearing in on Friday morning. Tomorrow I’ll head to Gracias and either catch a bus or a jalon (hitchhike) to La Campa and then walk for an hour or so up a big hill to my site. I have most of my stuff with me and it weighs a ton, this hike is going to kill me. I don’t have power in my site so I’ll be out of communication for awhile, I am planning on getting a cell phone and I’ve heard that there is at least weak service in Cruz Alta, well folks all for now I’m a little tired and I’m sure none of this makes any sense. I’ll be sure to straighten it out later and give some more details about the goings on down here. Love to all, Joe.