Hello again, happy November, I can’t believe it is already November. This marks my eighteenth month in Honduras. It is absolutely insane how fast time passes. This was a fairly productive week for me. Our classes went well and we’re starting to meet to discuss the reconstruction of one of our classrooms. It is in pretty bad shape and we’re working on redoing the walls, floors, ceiling, doors, and tables and chairs. The nice thing about it is that it’s a pretty straightforward project. Rebuild the school and the kids will benefit from more space and nicer surroundings. Many projects aren’t so transparent, you have to worry about skewing community economics and whether or not a project benefits a community as a whole or focuses on a small group. Any project within education seems to be fairly straightforward. This week Cruz Alta also came out with its first “magazine.” Twelve local kids got together with a NGO and worked on gathering community history, bios, and photos and put together a small booklet documenting life in Cruz Alta. I didn’t even know they were doing it but last Saturday they invited me to a small festival celebrating the release of the magazine. It was really nice, they brought me up on stage and had one of my students thank me for my work here and present me with a copy of the magazine. I actually got a little choked up; this thing came out of nowhere and caught me off guard. A very nice surprise.

On a more social note, we celebrated Halloween last weekend in Copan Ruinas (a famous Maya archaeological site). There are over 220 Peace Corps volunteers currently serving in Honduras and over half of them were in Copan last weekend. That is a huge amount of gringos. And everyone dressed up, it was insane. There were hordes of people, decked out in some very strange costumes, running the streets of a fairly conservative little Honduran town. Yours truly went as Britney Spears, so I had to walk around in a too short skirt in front of whistling Honduran men. It was pretty funny. It was a good thing I had plenty of friends, who looked equally ridiculous, with me. It was a lot of fun and the context was insane. Ok that is about it for me this week, hope everyone is happy, healthy and all right. See everyone soon.--Joe

Can you spot the gringo? this is me at our magazine reception.

the ugliest Britney Spears with husband K-fed and baby