Week 6 – Semana Seis

November 6th, 2007 by Sophie Hermann

Another week has passed… not a lot of progress out on site, in part due to weather and just the general slowness of some of the tasks. However it’s definately taking shape and it’s still great fun (as long as it’s not raining and warmer than 5 degrees).
We started the week adding extra adobe to the outhouse toilets, which have had about 8 courses of blocks so far, and we added another full course and the corners, just in time before it started raining. The next day we worked beneath the roof in the covered cafe area, putting up timber planks which we carried from up the hill about 500m away several times. A lot of sliding in mud, washing the mud off the planks, and more sliding as we tried to nail the planks in place. Wednesday, one of the few fine days, we ended up working in what will be the kitchen area, mixing plaster for the walls and using various techniques to try to get it to stick to the wall, including the more vigorous Throw and Slap technique used by the Irish, to the more gentle Palm Up and Slide method which seemed to prove less frustrating. Either way it was slow, but I enjoyed it, there’s something about having mud all over your hands, massaging a mud wall (it’s amazing what we do for kicks in rural Honduras).
The afternoons were spent at a classroom at the daycare centre, painting. A teacher had approached us earlier asking if we were able to do it, and thanks to Maureen’s fundraising efforts earlier (a volunteer from England who was here a couple of weeks ago), there was still money left in the pot to buy paints (not huge room for creative input: Celeste Blue seems to be the standard institutional colour), rollers, brushes. We took one day with four of us to do the first coat of blue on the walls, and finished up the second day with the second coat. As yet still need to do the white ceiling. And depending how soon the kids want to use the room, we may or may not go creative on them and paint murals on the wall… we’ll see…
Wednesday evening us volunteers met up at one of the girls’ house for a Halloween party Honduran style. They made us pupusas, which they’d learnt to make from their Spanish teacher. They were delicious: they are like tortillas filled with cheese, topped with salads and sauces. Mmmm mmmmm. We had those, followed by roast vegies, then some sweet stuff… apples dunked in melted caramel and topped with biscuit and chocolate crumbs… I was in heaven!
Took a long weekend to mark my halfway point, left on Thursday morning with two other volunteers to Copan Ruinas, in the west of the country near Guatemala, famous for its ancient Maya ruins. We caught a couple of buses to get there in the late afternoon. What a lovely town Copan is, it has a great feel to it, based around a central square, with many restaurants, bars and cafes all within easy walking distance. We managed to see the ruins on Friday morning, and it was fantastic. We were the first ones in the park when it opened at 8am, so it almost felt like we were given a private tour! The ruins are a special place, serene and tranquil, and awe-inspiring, beautiful amongst the many trees in the area. The scale of the ruins, and their sense of proportion and setting from one another and in amongst flat open spaces, to higher more revered spaces… The hieroglyphics and symbols carved into the rocks were intricate and beautiful, and each represented different eras of rulers during the time of the Mayans.
We followed the visit up to a visit of the museum, which held original pieces of sculpture, until we were all ruined out, and headed for a feed back in town.
The Saturday unfortunately rained all day, we must have brought La Esperanza’s weather patterns with us, however there was a Japanese festival in the square which still managed to continue for most of the day. There is quite a presence of Japanese non profit organisations here, in partnership with the Japanese Embassy and the Hondurans, so some of the presentations were from Japanese volunteers. Dancing, musical pieces with drums and Japanese harps, Japanese food, it made for entertainment for most of the rainy day. Was good to be in another town though, and plenty of shops and cafes to wander into during the day.
Sunday we began our trip back early, at 7am, and got back into La Esperanza (for more rain!) at about 4pm… Great trip away, and re-energised for the next 6 weeks. Let’s hope the rain manages to stay away for a bit so we can continue plastering out at Chiligatoro! In the meantime we have our afternoons cut out for us with the painting of the classroom…