Second Week in Honduras!!!

I said it. SO after this first month away from home I can know how I feel. I DO miss home. I do miss family and friends, but if I were home I would also miss here. Entonces I am where I need and want to be. I have already completed 1 and a half weeks of my 5 week internship and it's flying by. We work with an organization called Proyecto Aldea Global (Project Global Village). This organization offers a wide variety of services to the community. Services offered include HIV preventative measures, family plannning, microcrediting, nature preservation, domestic violence prevention and more. We work in the health section collecting and organizing data from the community. Work varies for us in the office. Sometimes we just sit and put numbers into excel ferom the community. These numbers usually incude how many females are pregnant, if they have a plan of delivery, and how many months they are along with more data. On other days we actually get to go out in the community for various reasons. Sometimes we organize bags for children and adults. These bags include shampoo, soap, toothbrushes, and other hygenical things. Sometimes when i get bored at work I just get my boogie on in the office YOUUU knowwwwwww (pictured above)! Then after work I usually go out on the motorcycle to practice or go to a barbershop to hang out and learn a thing or two. The people here are super nice. They just taught me how to ride a motorcycle and they even let me ride their own. I asked if they were nervous, but they didn't seem to be at all. I also asked the friends I made at the barber shop if they could teach me some things. They insisted right away that I come back to learn. i was super excited. Life in Honduras just seems really chill and super laid back. When work is over at 4 and people see us leaving they ask me why I'm leaving so early. TIME in Honduras means so much and so little at the same time. it's so much different than the United States. We also made some friends with a few of our coworkers at work. They are super cool and very helpful. They help me with whatever I need and its a beautiful thing. They are taking English classes at a local school and Andrew and I are learning Spanish so it really works out well. This last weekend Andrew and I wanted to go do something, but we didn't really know what to do. So we asked them to come along with us to go do something and they agreed. They said they were going to miss English class, but we told them that we would teach them all they needed to know : ) So everything turned out GREAT! We ended up going to a smaller city named Otorro and we really had fun. The sun was blazing and we went swimming in a river, I got my suntan on, and we even hit up the local pool. We also hit up our other co workers house to eat some spaghetti and of course some cow tongue. YES cow tongue. No we really didnt eat it, but we could have. Maybe one day... Anyways yea life has been good, a little stressful at times, but we manage. We also ran into this one guy, as we normally do a lot of people. I blame it mostly on Andrew for being the tallest and whitest guy in Honduras, but he cannot help it. Everybody looks at him like he's a giant, and he is in Honduras, but was more in Guatemala. Anyways yea so when we're together we definitely get stares. I can only imagine how he feels hahaha. But yea so this one guy came up to us adn he looked pretty hood if you can imagine. He had some scars on his face and a rough sounding voice and look. He asked us if he could come with us and I said sure come on. So were walking and hes speaking to us in some decent English and he's saying that he's from New York and that he just killed a guy in this city near here called San Pedro Sula. he goes on to describe how he stabbed him three times in the back and is now in this city trying to get away from all of that. He said he's in a gang in New York and i told him that I was in New York last January. He was then trying to ask us where we lived, and that's when I drew him away. He soon asked for money and was telling Andrew not to mess with Brown blood. I began to tell the guy that Andrew is one of our friends and that he was okay. The guy soon took the money that I gave him and asked what he was going to buy with only two lempiras (equivalent to 10 cents). And I simply explained to him that he can buy whatever he wants but thats all I got. There are some pretty interesting people here in Honduras. Don't go thinking that it's all scary here though because honestly it doesn't feel any scarier than Tacoma or Spokane haha. It's honestly a really beautiful little town. Siguatepeque has some great people. We got into this conversation the other day with our friend Mario about life in Honduras. He explained to us how corrupt it is in Honduras and how he doesn't see opportunity as an easy thing here. He explained how the police can just pull you over and make you give them money or they will just write you a ticket. Negotiating deals here is very common. He later explained how there are no scholarships for him and the ones that he has applied for are for the upper class because they can pay the college more or the people more in the future. But he felt that he might as well try. It's very sad to me because this guy is super smart, lives in a smaller town, and has limited options. In my opinion he is smarter than me, yea it doesn't really take too much for me to admit that but I can tell by the things he does and the way he acts. He explained also how his father passed away a few years ago working in the United States just to send money to his family. It's very unfortunate that this had to happen because I see so much potential in this guy as well as a lot of our friends here. We also went with our family to this lake this last weekend which was super nice by the way. It really was a relaxing weekend. We also played some basletball and this court is pretty decent considering how little basketball is down here. I am grateful for what we got. Awwwww so many stories, but too little time. This next weekend we plan on going to Copan, these ancient ruins a ways away from here. We are leaving in the morning so wish us luck!