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!