We're having a rather strange leap in technology here in Cruz Alta. As you may know I've been living without electricity during my Peace Corps service, something I truly enjoy. I love waking up to quiet. Everywhere else I've slept in this country you wake up to radios and televisions blasting horrible, horrible sounds starting at an ungodly hour (just a saying, I don't believe any hour of the day to be ungodly). So, right before I left to go visit my future in-laws a new cell phone tower went up on the other side of La Campa (my municipality) and it provided some parts of Cruz Alta with cell service. I still have a bit of a hike to where I can send messages and make calls but the Peace Corps is much happier with a new way of getting a hold of me. The old way involved sending a note on a bus and then making some unfortunate soul make the hour hike uphill to my site. We never had a successful trial of our communication system so having cell phone service seemed like a good thing. A couple of days after I returned from the states one of the national cell phone companies set up shop for a one day promotion in La Campa. The cheapest phone they sold cost around 500 Lempiras (about 27 dollars or 10 days of work in my community). They do have plans here but they are expensive and are only offered in the larger cities, everyone I know uses pre pay phones that require you to buy phone cards to "recharge" the phone with minutes. The phone cards range anywhere from two dollars to about 15, the two dollar card expires after 3 days, the 15 after 25 days, and if you don't keep your phone charged with minutes your account will expire and you have to pay to reactivate it (another 8 bucks). The day after the promotion, my town was literally crawling with cell phone users. Most people went for the cheaper 500 lempira model but I saw a few with flip phones costing four or five times as much (40 or 50 days of work for your average campesino). The mayor of La Campa is walking around bragging about how he is bringing better communication and technology and bettering people’s lives. Cell phones just don't make sense here (I don't believe they really make sense anywhere. Are we so important that we need to be accessible every second of the day?). But here I have students that can't afford to buy their textbooks turning around and buying a damn cellphone that costs 5 times as much as any book. I can't imagine people having the money to keep their phones charged with cards. I think that Cruz Alta will soon be full of shiny new, beeping paper weights. The funniest thing is that we don't even have the electricity to charge them, so every couple of days you have to make the walk down to La Campa and plug your phone in at the house of an understanding cousin our uncle. People work hard here and most are just scraping by. Now people will work harder to keep a status symbol charged and ready to call friends and family that live a minute's walk away.

The other day Don Luis asked me if I would help with the electricity project. Everyone has been talking about electricity since I got here (cuando viene la luz). I said I would help and showed up the next morning. I worked with a crew of Cruz Altans to move the power poles into place and then set them in their holes. The poles were all 40 to 45 feet long, pressure-treated pine and weighed a ton. They aren't using the existing road system for the power line so we carried, drug, and rolled (using a cart made of an axle and two truck tires) along single track, pack animal trails. It was rough work, some of the trails went up steep slopes and there were only 12 or so of us pushing, pulling and struggling up the hills to get to the pre dug holes. Once at the hole, we would lift one end and slide down Y-shaped metal poles to support the post. We'd lift a little, slide the poles, lift a little, slide the poles, until we could get two, longer poles with harpoon like spikes in the end stuck into the end of the post. The longer poles were used for more leverage and slowly eased the posts down into their holes. The power poles weighed so much, and we seemed shorthanded at times but we got it done. At the end of the day I had an hour walk back up the hill to my house. We finished late and I ended up making half the hike in the starlight. I was pretty worked by the time I arrived at my little house and barely had the strength to throw some pancakes together before hitting the sack. For the next couple of days I was sore in muscles I didn't even know I had. The electricity project is something I can get behind. I don't think it is exactly necessary and prefer my life without it, but it will improve people's lives here. The biggest improvement I can see will be in education. I teach my middle school classes at night and we rely on an unreliable solar battery charger and a smoky kerosene lantern. I like it that way but it would be much more efficient and effective with proper light. I'd like to work on getting a computer here to start teaching the kids typing and basic computer skills. My friend Ellen is working on a typing manual in Spanish. Nobody can type here, the most educated engineers will be giving a fairly technical power point presentation and hunting and pecking the entire time. There seems to be a little bit of leapfrogging here, skip the typing get to the pretty visuals, skip the community phone and get right to the blue tooth.

One nice forward step was the addition of a community bus. Every day a decommissioned US school bus leaves Cruz Alta at 7 am and heads to Gracias, it makes the return trip at 2 pm. I can sometimes get to Gracias quicker hiking and hitch hiking but there is something to be said for reliable transportation, even if it is slow, crowded, and occasionally full of livestock. I can now get a cappuccino and a doughnut in Gracias and let the bus take care of all my travel worries. I'm going to have to find some other way to get some exercise or I'm not going to fit into my wedding suit 4 months from now. Four months four months, that is insane and wonderful. Oh how time flies. Peace-Joe

the axle we used to transport the poles

Pushing and pulling a post down a single track, pack animal trail.

Our crew setting one of the power poles

Shannon, Connie, and Jamie enjoying another fine morning at the Santa Rosa house

Eric and Neil warming up for our big run, a rough morning after Halloween

Me hydrating and getting ready for the big run after Halloween night

My friend Connie and I at the medical brigade

Man oh man, this has to be the longest gap between blogs yet. Sorry to my faithful readers, if I even have any of those. Pretty interesting couple of months on this end. In December I traveled to Indiana to finally meet my fiancé’s family. I was expecting some sort of a mix between that movie Meet the Parents and the scene in Dumb and Dumber when Lloyd is day dreaming about meeting Mary Swanson’s friends and family and lights his own flatulence causing an enormous fireball, immediately earning the love and respect of everyone. I guess it went something like that. Seriously, Em’s friends and family were fantastic; I didn’t feel at all nervous or uncomfortable. It was great seeing where she grew up and meeting the people she grew up with. I did catch some strange virus while I was there (or brought it with me, who can really tell?) and was pretty sick for a couple of days. One morning I woke up and I couldn’t stop burping, and worse my burps tasted terrible, like rotten cheerios (I don’t know how else to describe it). I’m sure they smelled even worse. My stomach got really distended and it looked like I was smuggling a basketball under my shirt, or that I was pregnant. It was then that I decided I needed to go to the doctor. The nice part about the whole ordeal is that I was placed on medical hold and “forced” to extend my trip until everything cleared up.

Once I got back to Honduras I headed up to my site to clear my head a bit for a few days then bused it out to my friend Connie’s site of San Marcos de Ocotepeque for a medical brigade. It was a ton of fun, I worked as a translator for a nurse in triage. It was a very rewarding and interesting experience. My friend Kathryn and I were the only translators working in triage so we got to see everything, including some very interesting cases. A common complaint was having “squirrels” running through their bodies; another good one was worms in the brain. Kathryn even had a woman come in that was complaining of not being able to have an orgasm and was wondering if it was her or her husband’s fault. I don’t know how she kept a straight face but she did. Aside from the interesting descriptions of complaints the work was very rewarding. I really liked helping kids. Children came in with lice, scabies, bot fly larvae (a parasite that grows into a pretty good sized worm in your skin, I had one in Belize a couple of years back), skin ulcers, and were generally malnourished from poor diets and stomach parasites. The doctors were able to do a great deal to ease their pain and get them the medication and treatment they needed. It was nice to see parents smiling and walking away with bags full of vitamins and parasite meds. This is the kind of stuff I joined the Peace Corps to do.

After the brigade I had a 3 day long project reconnect with the volunteers from my project. It involved another half day spent on cramped buses and ten hour days in the classroom sharing experiences and learning new extension techniques. It was kind of a bummer after such a good experience at the brigade but it was good to see some people I hadn’t seen in awhile. After that I headed to Santa Rosa to spend some time watching cable television and reading at our Peace Corps house. I was looking for a chance to decompress before having to go to Cruz Alta and be a “responsible” volunteer again. No such luck, my friend Ellen sent a message that my ninth graders were having their graduation and I needed to get back for it. So I hopped another bus, hung the thumb out in Gracias and caught a ride to La Campa where I met up with Ellen, and made the hour hike back up to Cruz Alta with a half an hour to spare before the graduation. The graduation was fantastic and I was really glad I made it. Nobody thought I would and everyone was surprised to see me. I gave a short speech at the beginning and watched as each of my students received their diplomas and gave a short talk in return. My best friend here, Elias, said some really nice things about how this whole thing wouldn’t have happened without me and it really choked me up. He is a great friend and is extremely appreciative, something that is occasionally hard to find here. His son, Javier, also just got back from visiting a neurologist in San Pedro Sula (the second largest trip). Javier had a very high fever awhile back and had actually gone into seizures a couple of times. Elias was worried that he might not make it. My parents’ sent some money down so that Elias could take him to a pediatric neurologist. Everything turned out fine with his examination, they gave him some medicine and he should be completely normal in a week or so. Good news all around. Hope everyone is having a good winter and that at least a few of you are making some turns. Peace---Joe

yours truly translating for nurse Bridgette. "I got squirrels real bad"

Doctor Greg exracting a Bot fly on a child's scalp

the line of people waiting to get into Triage on the last day of the brigade

My students and I at their ninth grade graduation

A little Hammock time at my neighbor Ellen's