“Once there was a way to get back homeward…”

Honduras.  Muggings.  Gropings.  Scamming.  Duck Poo.  Honduras is a beautiful beautiful place…if you are nowhere near any tourists because when you are things get rough.  After a couple weeks with the biodiesel crew, we split off and headed for Honduras after another invigorating night at Lake Atitlan.  My 3rd visit and god willing not my last.  We spent A LOT of time on buses which the ducks did not enjoy but we put them in the showers of the rooms we occupied along our way (even when communal) and man does it smell after we do that.  They seem to like showers though.  I usually try to clean it up well but on a couple of occasions we´ve had to split quick and the clean up job is less than adequate. 

We went to Tela, a city on the Carribean Coast.  Ugly beach.  Ugly town.  LOTS of mosquitos.  I really wish we hadn´t wasted a moment there.  Amit and Meg got mugged on the beach.  I hope his parents don´t read this…  Our negative experiences in Honduras have been fully redeemed by our current local.  We met back up with the biodiesel crew 3 days ago on a finca in Sula Santa Barbara which is just a couple ours east of the Guatemalan border.  We are having a biodiesel conference here starting tomorrow and people are coming from all over to partake.  We are staying with an NGO called Sustainable Harvest and this particular site is a farm in the mountains which is absolutely gorgeous.  The weather is warm but beautiful.  The people who work here are amongst the kindest I´ve ever met and the food is delicious.  The place is completely full of the most adorable children I´ve ever seen.  It is such a calm and peaceful place to live and work.  We haul up all the water we need from the spring which has really got me thinking even more so than before about water usage.  You really start to reconsider the need for a 15 minutes shower when you know what it feels like to haul 7 gallons of water up the side of a mountain.  It is amazing how little we need and how much we use.  I really wish we´d come here sooner.  Our ducks LOVE it here and all the people here love them too.  This sounds almost unfathomable but if it turns out that we can´t get them on the plane then we may leave them here.  It would be the safest thing to do but I´m still not ready to commit to it.  It seems like an omen that the last name of the cook´s family is Hernandez.

BIRTHDAY!  Wednesday was my 21st birthday and I certainly didn´t expect to spend it climbing around ancient Mayan ruins or eating a pink marshmallow frosted cake given to me by a Honduran man I befriended only one day before with a lit cigarrette in it as a candle, but I did!  It was a wonderful day, thanks mostly to Amit who has truly been the most wonderful friend ever in every way and really made my birthday what it was.  He slept through the alarm at midnight to wake me up and then slept through the alarm that was supposed to wake us up to leave for the Copan ruins.  But he got me up at 630 and we missed the bus but hitched down the mountain and then took a couple buses to the ruins.  It was a beautiful ride and I was thrilled to get to ride a bus without having to worry about my pack.  We met up with Meg and our friend Tanner at the ruins who had split off a couple days before so that they could spend more time in Copan, a cute little town near the ruins.  We  were walking around the ruins thinking we´d never find them and I idly called out ¨tanner¨ just for the hell of it and sure enough he responded.  We snuck into some tunnels and got kicked off and Tanner dropped his nalgene bottle down the side of an ancient pyramid and we watched ton of huge red macaws take flight.  Not a bad day.  We headed back to Sula with some rum in tow, Botran of course, and then Jacobo, the guy who runs sustainable harvest got me a beautiful cake and some form of alcohol that comes in a plastic bottle.  I think it was supposed to be rum.  The night was pretty low key.  Amit gave me lots of wonderful presents including a bag of doritos and another present that he lost and should hopefully find sooner or later among other things =)  It was a beautiful day but I sure did miss seeing my friends and family.  Plans for Vegas will be made.

So I spent yesterday cleaning veggie oil out of a chicken bus to get ready for the conference and the morning searching for 2 liter plastic bottles for the conference attendees to make test batches of biodiesel in.  Not bad.  I´m covered in mosquito bites and have surrendered myself to DEET.  The conference ends the 18th and then off to Nicaragua or El Salvador to visit Evelyn.  I´m not sure I´m gonna be ready to come home.

 2…things are running…quickly

Andie