We were greeted at the Catholic church by the "Junta"- the Community Development Board of Los Planes. They took us on a short walk to a school/tutoring project they had recently managed to put into place. I immediately began to feel that I was in another culture, even though we were still in Honduras. The faces of the people have strong indigenous traits. Most of the women wear very bright colored dresses and skirts and some head scarves.
On the walk up to the school, all of the women (except for me) walked about 50 ft behind the men. The accent is slightly different and I've noticed they had a distinct way of talking both while they breathed air in and breathed out. As the fog and darkness crept in around us, we heard many of the members share about their experiences of working for the community. With the help of World Vision, the Comm Dev Board has worked to do a diagnosis of the community and to also make a development plan for the community. They now have a kinder, school and this special high school. They also have helped many families better their homes (replacing grass and wood huts with brick walls and solid ceilings). They have put a few economic development tools into place as well. It was very inspiring to hear the vision they had for their community and for the next generation.
With some members of the Board
After this short meeting, we walked down to a home where we had dinner with a couple of the staff of World Vision and some from the board. It had started to rain, so the walk down the trail and accross the cow field was a bit of an adventure. We dined in the glow of candlelight and flames from the wood stove (ie: a wood burning stove in the corner of the kitchen used for cooking). We drank a sweet coffee and a kind of sweet atol (sort of like thick corn pudding) and ate beans, fat little tortillas, quajada cheese, fried eggs and potatoes. We walked back to the house where we would be staying and settled our bags. A few men from the Board came to continue talking with Guillermo and to show him the diagnonsis and plan they had made. It seemed sooo late! Besides being tired, my mind was playing tricks on me because it got very dark around 6:30. There is no electricity in Los Planes, so the pace of life is different. Around 9 pm, we went to bed. Did I mention it was cold? I was wearing a fleece I usually use in Colorado in the fall and winter. There was so much fog, it was hard to see across from the house to the bathroom. We snuggled into our single-size bed, which was fine because we were freezing. The rain on the clay-tile roof was a nice sound to go to sleep to.
The shower experience
In the morning, we woke up and then we woke up some more when we took a cold shower outside under the sprinkling rain. It wasn't as bad as you think, and it was kind of funny because the shower was obviously not made for people of our height! We walked back to the same house for breakfast, which was chicken and vegetable soup and milk with cinnamon. Our food experience here is not one you find many places in the world. Almost everything is grown locally: vegetables from the garden, corn from the field for tortillas and atol, beans, chickens, milk and cheese from local cows,. We took a few pictures with the women from the board who were with us that morning and who made our meals. They took us on a walking tour of the community where we met individual families. Later in the morning we came back to La Esperanza and met more World Vision staff from the region and ate lunch. Tomorrow we are heading up to Yamaranguila where we will also stay with a family... more adventures to come!
1 comment:
What a world we live in. One night you sleep in a place without electricity and the next I read about it on the internet.
MOM
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