Week Ten Picture and Events

After eight weeks this is the finished house.

No, not a bird or plane, its Tab sporting the rain gear of choice in Honduras...a tablecloth!

Tab and Pete all dirty from a hard day of work, and yes, these clothes will be worn again, and again, and again.

Tab´s biggest fan, little Samuel.

The volunteers hard at work, playing with the kids.

The start of an adobe style brick house that we were working on. The bricks were taken down from an old house and are being used to make the new one.

Dave roasting marshmallows at last weekend´s beach bonfire.

Your favourite volunteers!

Hi eveyone,
Things here are good! This week we finally finished the house we´ve been working on. We sort of took it upon ourselves to set an end date since it was starting to drag on and since the family had started to repair their old house now that the new one is done. Of course on our last day we had to carry huge planks of wood on our shoulders for about a kilometer uphill. Christino told us that we needed wood to make the door but we carried so much wood that Tab was prompted to ask ¨This is for the door AND...¨ she kept stressing the AND part but we couldn´t figure out what else they were planning to do with the cut wood. Again a mystery that could be solved with improved spanish. Leaving the family was actually really hard. We thanked eachother a bunch of times and they told us that they were sad we were leaving and that they enjoyed getting to know us etc.

On Thursday we were driven to a new project by Save the Children, however there were already three volunteers working there, including 53 year old twins from England who are awesome! I asked the one woman if she´d ever done anything like this before and she said ¨Oh no, well my other sister and I did backpack around the world when I was 50!!!!¨ Anyway, at this project there wasn´t really enough work for the three that were already there so we ended up picking up trash from the family´s yard and then working in their califlower field pulling weeds. The weeding was actually pretty satisfying and it was cool to see their crops. Also at this project we were treated to some sort of aweful refreshment whose main ingredients seemed to be milk, maize and sugar. I could hardly drink this corn-shake and had to down it like a series of shots so as not to be rude. YUCK!

Today we moved projects again and took over for some volunteers who were away travelling. Although the day consisted of a lot of sitting around, playing with children and trying to convince them that we weren´t hiding bon-bons in our backpacks, we did help out making mud mortar for adobe style bricks to be laid on. Again it was cool to see a different house and a different style of building. The best part about today was that the littlest boy at the house kept calling out ¨Tabitha¨ all day! He seems to be the only Honduran who can say her name properly and he sort of skipped about all day calling her, it was really really cute!

Anyway after being shuffled around a bit this week we´re hoping to get a more permanent project next week where there aren´t too many volunteers and where there is lots of work to be done. Due to the fact that ¨Tabitha¨doesn´t translate well in spanish we were planning to give Tab a new name for the next project. I voted for Consuela or something crazily spanish but Tab insisted that her new alias be Maria, however after little Samuel did so well with her name today we might decide to keep to our normal identities.

This weekend we´re heading off to Comayagua which is only a couple hours away from La Esperanza. Its sort of an old colonial town that used to be the capitol city. We´re planning to just poke around the city and like every other weekend away, eat and drink what we like and enjoy some english TV curtesy to our hotel room. Talk to you soon!!!