T-minus

The almost-finished library, left of the the almost-finished school.

Up hill

Top to bottom: Leidi, Kenia, Wilmer, Berto. These guys took me on a kid tour around Brisas. Their (new) houses, the kindergarten ("kinder," in the front room of one of the new houses), the trail where they like to play, an orange wheelbarrow. The last stop was the library.

From Copan. A little boy walking after the day's rain. Up hill.

Up hill. Probably best describes this round in Honduras. Four months in and we still don't have a building. The books (in empty corn sacks) and some of the furniture is stuffed in a back room in Cecilia's house. The rest of the furniture is in the carpenter's workshop. Some of the books got wet. Only a few of the women really get how to run the library. The teacher never comes to the school in Brisas. A lot of the bean crop has been ruined by the rain.

Whenever I ask Jose Manuel how the project is going, he always says the same thing. "Subimos." Translated, it means "we're progressing" or "we're moving forward." Literally, it means "to rise" or "to go up." And that's what this whole thing has been about. Slowy, I suppose, we are rising up. There are books. There will be a building. It will stop raining.

The rest comes after.

Deep river blues

Let it rain/ let it pour/ let it rain a whole lot more/ 'cause I've got them deep river blues.

Outside of Cecilia's house in Brisas. Chickens huddling over the fire pit, under the rusted tin overhang, out of the rain. Whenever it rains, they all get together and watch from the same spot.

Luisa watching the rain through the kitchen window. The people all get together and watch, too. We huddle inside the house. After the rain, someone usually takes the broom and sweeps all the water off of the porch.

Radio cure

Listen while you work. A radio hanging on the wall is a village staple. Battery-operated, scratchy reception.

In Brisas, we usually listen to Radio America or Honduras Radio Nacional. "H - R- N! La voz informativa del pueblo!" Mostly news. Sometimes soccer or the same woman singing (church music and old love songs). Commercials for coffee and cell phone service. The kids know all of the words.

Despacito

Lots of progress with training. Not a lot with the building. Still working on the foundation. (It's been raining for days, nonstop. Tropical Storm Matthew).

Cutting wood (with machetes) to make corner guides.

Laying the level line around the building's perimeter.

Josafina (front), Kenia and Leidi playing in the library's footprint.

Home?

Buffalo, but not Cleveland?

The globe in the library in Copan.

Field trip

To the public library in Copan. Everyone's first time visiting a library, of any sort. The idea was for the women to see how a library looks, how it works.

Talking with a librarian. He explained how books are organized, a little about the Dewey decimal system. Here, he's explaining what a dictionary is.

The library in Copan is run by a Finnish NGO. They're having a meeting in Copan of all of their librarians in October. To talk about how things are going, share ideas. And they invited us. Dona Santos exchanged numbers with one of the librarians. Hopefully they'll stay in touch, and someone from Brisas will go.

The library has story hour twice a week. Once in Spanish, once in Chorti. The Chorti story hour is more about telling stories, not reading them. Dona Cecilia liked that idea. She can't read. One of the librarians told her that a library was a place for sharing stories from memory, not just from books.

So, a pretty successful trip. Ideas, advice, connections. To celebrate, we bought books. A dictionary and two atlases to grow our tiny reference section.