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.

Finished

6 women, 12 purses. Everybody finished one practice purse with hands.

Now we're working on second purses, with different designs.

Four of the women gave me their finished purses. Para recordar. To remember. Really nice of them, but I felt a little weird. The idea was to sell them and make a little money.

Morning commute

From my almost-daily hike into Brisas.

I usually take a taxi from Copan to Las Sepulturas, part of the Mayan ruins. Then, someone from Brisas meets me and we hike in together. Forty minutes, depending on the mud. Sometimes we walk in from Copan. An hour and ten minutes. Better to take the taxi. L20 - $1.

Jose Manuel's machete in the trail.

Don Genaro near part of Las Sepulturas. Pretty cool, walking through the ruins every day. Las Sepulturas are seperate from the main site. Not many visitors. Quiet, impressive. Lately, they've been flooded because of all the rain. A temporary lake. Here's where the machete comes in. To avoid the water, we head off the trail and into the woods. Yesterday, Genaro hacked a new path for us through ropey vines and around ceiba trees.

Owl babies

Las Lechucitas. Martin Waddell.

Reading with kids in a somewhat-dark house in Brisas. From left, Berto, Kenia, Santos, Jeny.

Mother, daughter

Cecilia, left, with her daughter Catalina.

Cata, working on las tarjetas familiares. Each family in Brisas gets a notecard. Last name on top, then names of family members who can take out books. The cards will stay in the library. When someone comes to check out a book, the book's card from the card catalog will get paper-clipped to the family card. Then, into the "out" box.

Independence day, con't

Scenes from the parade.

Front line. Escuela Mayatan, the bilingual school in Copan.

Students all in white. The drill team.

The history section. Different Honduran historical figures on posters, framed in blue. Lots of moms looking for kids, running up to them with bottles of water and cameras, telling them to drink and smile.

Bringing up the rear. The marching band from another private school. Pine needles on the ground. (Honduras' national tree is the pine). The parade route smelled like a forest.

Independence day

El 15 de septiembre. Feliz dia de independencia.

Statue of Francisco Morazan, Honduras' big national hero, in the park in Copan. Decorated with wreaths for today.

The central park, full of people and Honduran flags. Lots of vendors cooking tortillas, selling snow cones. Cakes under netting to protect from flies. Water and juice and horchata in plastic bags in coolers. Peeled oranges and sliced cucumbers for sale with salt on the side, the Honduran way.

Push cart

From Copan.

The ice cream man. An old wooden cart, bicycle wheels, umbrella. A dying cow bell. The cart has two coolers, ice and ice cream. An old-fashioned hand grinder to make ice shavings for snow cones. Reused two liter bottles full of fruit-flavored syrups. Fresa, naranja, uva.

The snow cones get topped off with thick milk and honey. Also a spoon and a straw, neither of which are very helpful. The only way to eat one of these is fast, before it melts or the bees pick up on it.

Burger queen

Gender equity, fast food style. The Burger Queen restaurant, parque central, Copan.

Hands

Making a pattern. Cata traces her daughter's hand to use in a purse design.

Yellow hand, in progress.

Progress

In Copan, staying with the local peace corps volunteer. Hiking into Brisas almost every day and working with the women. Cecilia, Cata, Luisa, Soyla, Marina. Exhausting, but good. The library itself still isn't much to see, but I've been focusing on a different kind of work. The women have been working with the books, learning how to wrap them and prepare them for the library. Soon we'll be starting in on the Dewey decimal system and the card catalog.

Wrapping books. We worked outside. Lots of chickens and skinny dogs running around. One chick got stuck on a piece of contact paper. Below, Oneida, Luisa's daughter.

Weaving. The women in Brisas already know how to weave pretty well. Purses out of yarn on small hand looms. They use plastic combs to push the rows of yarn together. We worked on making different kinds of designs. I showed them how to make hands. From left, Cecilia, Marina, Luisa.

Making flowers out of fabric to decorate the finished purses.

Lady, Jose Manuel's daughter, with a library book. Eric Carle. El canguro tiene mama?