Can Someone Just Fill Me in Please?
After a month at my site, I'm slowly getting some idea of what I dove into, what my role here is. I've come into the middle of the movie. I have to keep asking people what’s happened, and they just kind of want me to hush so they can focus on what's going on. I get filled in on bits and pieces, but the story gets jumbled, and I generally feel like I'm just pestering them.

This is what I've figured out: I'm in charge of a small but jolly crew of park rangers, I’m supposed to support a group of women flower-growers, collaborate on a project with honey-water-disposal (nothing to do with honey, it’s coffee waste) in the buffer zone, and try and bring an organic compost project back from the dead, among other things. It's not horribly glamorous, but it's busy and interesting.

Maize Again?
I was lucky enough to be able to participate in the event of the year in my municipality: the annual Festival del Maiz. It could have been a parade in any small town in the US. There were marching bands complete with tasseled caps and baton-twirlers, dancing horses and imitation N'Sync backup dancers. The floats were adorned with maize products and frowning girls perched atop wearing costumes their mothers spent half the year stitching, and towers of cotton candy. I wrestled with people for a good view, stuffed myself full of corn-based treats, and complained about the heat, just like a good spectator.

The nighttime entertainment was a well-known Punta band. If you haven't seen Punta, it's a sexy dance that was designed to make norteamericanos look ridiculous. It involves shaking your hips faster than humanly possible, balancing on your heels and then doing aerobic moves. I made the mistake of going to the event with two married couples, who left me to watch the dancers bounce around the stage like Gumbys on steroids while the town drunks used their never-failing radars to hunt me down and ask me to dance. Which I did. They would say things like "Isn’t it too bad that Punta is illegal in the US?" and then pull their shirts up to their chests and stick their fingers in their belly-buttons. I escaped and found one of my host brothers and his wife outside (he'd just spent an hour explaining to me how he wasn't going to the dance so as to avoid his friend, the mayor, who always pressures him to drink) having a beer with the mayor. All in all it was a fun night, and I learned a lot.

Storm
In a nearby town, an entire neighborhood and all their farms oozed down the mountainside and dammed up the river. There are at least 400 people left homeless. Honduras is in the tail end of a tropical storm, which, according to the locals here, has caused more damage than Hurricane Mitch, which devastated Honduras 10 years ago. Luckily people in the region are being very supportive. In my municipality there was little damage, but a lot of complaining about the rain!

Still not in Kansas
As I grabbed for a grapefruit that zinged through the air over my head in the Ambassador’s private pool in Honduras, I realized once again with a certain twist of my stomach that my life was not going to be normal again for another two years. The ambassador lends his mansion every year so that the newly sworn-in Peace Corps Volunteers may run amok (including playing monkey-in-the-middle with fruit in his pool) together for the last time before they are scattered about the country. One of the volunteers broke his nose playing volleyball in the ambassador’s beach volleyball court, but at least he’ll have a good story to tell about it.

My site is a cute little pueblo in the mountains near a beautiful cloud-forest covered national reserve. The community turns out to be far, far flung from the pictures I had in my head of grandmothers in hand-woven shawls slapping out tortillas by candlelight, wizened farmers, tired but content with their life’s work, keeping their families just afloat over the threat of hunger. Nada que ver- nothing to do with it. Rather the little town has electricity, running water, abundant cars and trucks, a handful of university degrees, a wealth of knowledge on large-scale farming, people who eat cornflakes for breakfast, and a pool. Yes, a pool. They fill its hospital-blue cement basin with water from the river on Easter and charge tourists to use it. My host brothers can talk over my head about cooperative administration and accounting. It’s an intimidating change from my village in Tanzania where having graduated high school set you apart from the rest of the world. Yesterday I helped a women’s cooperative plant lettuce and cauliflower in soil imported from Canada. The finished products will end up in El Salvador and Nicaragua in none other than that gaudy pillar of western commercialism: Burger King.

What am I going to be doing here? I’m working with an NGO that co-manages the reserve to better the farming practices in and around the park. But in short, so far I have absolutely no idea of what I will actually be doing. I’ll keep you posted.