Como se dice: Where's the wifi?

As previously mentioned, and now confirmed, internet usage is a lot harder to come by. It does exist in the town I'm in, but it is unbelievable slow. And it only works when the power's on... who knew? So in the last 5 days, we've been out of power 3 of them for at least some part of the day. Usually it's in the evenings, but the third time (the charm) it was out for a solid 24 hours. I consider this my wakeup call to real Peace Corps life. I haven't had a warm shower since I left staging in Atlanta, and that was at 4:00am, so it wasn't very well appreciated. We also ate dinner by candle-light, after my mom cooked on the woodfire stove. Environmentally-friendly or not, that things work come rain or shine, luz or no luz.

All that quick summary to say I found some internet, and I'm not even at a cafe. All of the aspirantes (trainees) are doing a "volunteer visit" which means I'm in Olancho right now (Eastside!). It's kind of like Texas: it's hot, dry, and everyone has guns. Which, depending on your definition of safety and security, could be very safe or very scary... or both. I'll be here until Wednesday getting a taste of real volunteer life. The first taste was a 2-hour bus ride to Teguz followed by a 4-hour bus ride with a shifting capacity of people, from 10 to 100. I'm convinced the U.S. has not taken full advantage of all the space available inside of your standard schoolbus. It's simply supply and demand. If people are demanding to get on the bus and are willing to pay the whopping $3.50 to travel halfway across the country, then the only limit on your profit is the supply of space on your bus. And trust me, profit is worth more than your "personal space." I know I haven't even mentioned much about my new home in Yuscaran, but I'll get to that next time. Let's just say, I moved up in the world and now have running water at my house, but it's still cold. Also, my mom owns a small business baking sugar cookies. I help out with the product testing to ensure consistent quality. I do this about 3 times a day, always over coffee (with more sugar!).

So what's the gameplan? Well, we're headed out bright and early tomorrow to a surrounding village that has no water. Why did they decide to live where they can't get access to water? There can only be one answer to that question: coffee. So we're headed up with some Water/Sanitation volunteers to see what we can do about getting some water systems installed and help out with income-generating projects for the community. We should knock that out by lunch, and then we'll see what happens.

Other than that, not sure what you guys have been reading/hearing in the news about Honduas, but there's some people in the streets of Tegucigalpa unhappy about the lack of money in their bank accounts. Merely the tip of the iceberg, but just one of the indicators of the amount of work to be done here. And also an idea of how complex and integrated the development issues are.

Thanks for reading, and I'll try to keep some semi-regular updates coming your way.


Ritmo de Cambio: Mucho. Lento.