Quite possibly the only post for April...

Wow, what happened in the past 23 days?!  I know things have been super busy down here being in class from 7:30AM - 5:00PM every day, taking overnight trips to learn about tourism in Honduras and in two days: hearing a four hour HIV/AIDS charla, having four hours to prepare to give charla and then the next day having another four hours to give the charla to another group.  In the meantime, the first free month of time on my modem expired and on these pay as you go systems, it's not the easiest thing to get money on.  Besides that the version of Microsoft Office I had expired, which took my Word with it.  (I usually type my blogs out first and then copy and paste them to the Internet.)  So, as you can see there are bastante reasons that I haven't had time/been able to/felt like posting any blogs.  I'm going to try my best to tell you what you need to know and sum up the past 23 days at the same time.  ¡Suerte!

To start the month off we had some time off from classes for Holy Week/Easter.  Like most Latin countries it's a mostly Catholic country and there are processions and old school practices galore.  The thing here is making alfombras, basically rugs made from sawdust of different colors.  I didn't learn the history behind it, but it's quite involved and intricate work.  Myself and some others helped make a few on Good Friday.  Here's some pictures:

After Holy Week and some time off it was back to work.  That week was Business Plan week.  We shadowed a business Monday, did a little learning Tuesday, went back to check in with the business on Wednesday and then we had until Friday to turn in an 8+ page business plan with about a 15 min. presentation included.  These were individual projects.  My business was a restaurant but turned out to be the restaurant/pulperia because I had a hard time tracking down the restaurant owner.  Kinda typical I think.  We're seeing that most people don't take business ownership very seriously down here.  Our work is definitely cut out for us.

Post Business Plan week we got to take a more in depth look at tourism in Honduras.  It was definitely the best week thus far!  Naturally, with my background I'm interested in tourism and it's got huge potential to do major things for this Honduran economy.  To get the full experience of the tourism market we took an overnight trip and got to camp on the beach on the southwestern side of the country.  It was quite warm...ok straight up HOT, but besides that it was a great trip!  Here's some pix:
(I take that back.)  This is slower than dial-up and I just waited about half hour to have not a single picture upload.  Moving on...

After the tourism week we are up to date with this week.  This week we had some classes on micro-finances here in Honduras and also got the HIV/AIDS charla like I mentioned at the beginning.  We got the charla Wednesday from some current PC volunteers.  Wednesday afternoon we were broken into groups and had time to prepare to give the charla ourselves.  Thursday we gave the charla to a group of kids who may or may not have been interested.  It was an interesting experience to say the least.  HIV/AIDS is something I personally don't worry about and part of the reason I told my PC recruiter that I didn't want to go to Africa.  It's a huge problem I realize, but it's not my problem, nor area of expertise.  Luckily, as Business Advisers we don't have to give this charla later on down the road unless we want to, so I may not be dealing with this material again.

So, here and now I'm sure everyone would like some more "meat" to this, but I'm about ready to pass out I'm so tired.  It's nearly 2AM and the last time I was up this late may have been New Year's...  Thanks for reading and I'll try to do better from here on out, now that I know the drill of getting some money put on my modem.

Hasta la proxima vez...