My mother took this leaving Harbor Springs for the airport. Ever-proud mom.
The hostel guy for my first night abroad.
Making a brief pit stop on our way from the airport at the gas station - time to dump some well water onto the running engine (located under the passenger seat of the car; it's from Indonesia. Of course.)
My room for one night in San Pedro Sula
This water bottle is turning out to be glorious. It filters out parasites and bacteria so I can drink local water if need be. And so far I have been drinking a LOT of water so this is fantastic. Me and this water bottle have already bonded and it's only day 1!
San Pedro Sula - the view from the second floor balcony.
Driving from San Pedro Sula to Copan Ruinas
The living area of "Iguana Azul". To the left is the "library" as advertised... I think I have more books than this in my parents' basement, but it's a library nontheless. I'll take it.
Iguana Azul
One of the Habitat houses in Otuta, a village near Copan Ruinas
Otuta
Laundry...
Latinos live on one side of the river, Maya Chorti live on the other side. In the rainy season, the river gets to high that the kids can't cross it to get to school. So now Mary and Billy Collins have building a second school on the other side of the river so kids can go to school all year... on both sides of the river.
One of the houses in the village of Otuta
I looked so hard for Chinches (triatoma bugs, my Chagas vectors) but found none. According to the locals here, they rarely find them except when tearing down walls. Ut oh...
Firewood near the houses... no bueno!
Maya Ruins (I had to get a photo of this tourist... classic)
Isra, the photographer from Habitat For Humanity International. We checked out the ruins together after a morning in the villages. I was sure glad to have the company... in English!
Ruinas....
...and more Ruinas....
Yoshi and I got on the bus for Santa Rosa... and I kept saying in bad Spanish how similar it was to my elementary school days. Turns out it was made in Grand Rapids MI! (click on the photo to read it bigger). This bus look familiar, anyone?
Japan International Cooperation Agency -- kind of like the USAID of Japan. They are huge in the Chagas world down here, and they work right alongside the National Program of Chagas people in the Capitol. I got to ride in the fancy trucks!
My new Japanese (pronounced "hap-pon-ais-se" in Spanish) friends. We communicate in bad Spanish. All sorts of fun.
Our hotel, where the conference was with all the Chagas people from western Honduras. Fancy stuff! No English though, anywhere...
The guy with the mike is my senior collaborator, Dr. Zuinga. King of Chagas in Honduras, essentially.
The two Japanese guys who actually speak English! Ken, the guy on the left, is my main advisor here. He's helping me totally revamp my study since there don't seem to be any bugs of interest in my communities.
Santa Rosa
A random stop in a Clinic. I'm still not sure why. Basically, I blindly followed these guys (and a physician from here in Copan who actually is fluent in Spanish) around Honduras for the past two days during our travel to the conference, and I still have no clue what's been going on.....
La Entrada, a town where we stopped to change buses. I call this the "baby's about to fall off the bath" statue. No entiendo.
The twisty mountain roads are filled with old American semi-trucks. They are everywhere! And definitely not designed for 1.5 lane roads of crazy slopes. Crazy, crazy.
Not sure exactly what was happening here. Perhaps the horse was tied to the bike? But which one will he take back to the villages?
More trucks in places they shouldn't be. There were 3 more behind this one, for the record. (Although we were on a 10 year old charter bus that probably shouldn't be mountain trail riding either). Such adventure, traveling through Honduras mountains!
This happened a few blocks from my hostel. Someone must have fotgotten to put out the construction cones last night... whoops.
Pasture behind my hostel
(Looking west) From the hotel next to my hostel
Copan Ruinas, my new hilly "hometown"
Pink chicken! They are everywhere, and I've never seen anything like them before in my life. Have I been missing out, or is this unusual??
This picture doesn't describe half of it. Sunsets here are one of a kind.
Copan Ruinas
This is how I plan to help keep track of the houses where I am collecting data. I made the back of my field-book into a dry erase board with some packing tape. I'm pretty pleased with it so far! "El Limon" village, Habitat house #6
Far left: kitchen/stove Middle: old bathroom Right: chicken coop
Habitat for Humanity comes in all shapes and sizes, I am learning.
Estufa (stove)
New habitat house with beautiful concrete walls and floors, but the extra wall for the outside kitchen still remains, and chinche bugs can still live in these cracks
The daughter of the "Health Promoter" woman who was my guide today... and one of her sons. People have kids so young here, and so many!
One of the Health Promoter's granddaughters. After the family saw me come with my camera, they quickly changed her into this pretty dress. So I had to take a photo. She was pretty cute...
Horses, randomly everywhere. I don't know how they keep them where they are supposed to be but somehow it all seems to work itself out.
Outside the school in El Limon.
My new desktop background... and facebook profile picture.
Dina Luz, the Health Promoter, and one of her grandsons Eduardo.
The most amazing thing is that these two little girls did not move one finger the entire time I was in there house. I'm not sure they even blinked. I have a bunch of pictures of them, and every one is identical! They just stared and stared with their wide brown eyes. Sadly, this family isn't getting a habitat house. And they have Chinche bugs in their walls, too. So sad. I wish so badly that I would help more!
In case you can't tell, his shirt says "I love boobies". And I'm pretty sure that no one in this entire town has any idea what it means. For real.
La Escuala!
They may have lethal parasitic bugs in their walls, but wow, what a view.
Babies sleep in hammocks here. It looks weird at first, but makes perfect sense, actually. They can't fall out, and they seem to sleep well enough.
This woman was so, so nice. I really liked her, and wished I could tell her that we could build a habitat house for her and her family! She told me to take lots and lots of pictures, in case Habitat ever decides to build more homes here. You never know. I hate getting people's hopes up though.
One of the nicer beds. Made from wood and rope, with blankets. The old woman and her husband sleep here.
Water is tricky to come by when you live on top of the mountain. You carry it in these buckets, up all the trails...
They are told "don't put your firewood near the house" for fear of Chagas disease. Kind of tricky when your house is made of sticks!! The three little pigs come to mind.
Ya, que bueno.
I had some help with my data collection - from a feathered friend
Lots of people seem to be telling these guys about Chagas bugs! This was on the door of one of the houses where I went today
"Mirsa" was the 12-year-old who guided me to Habitat houses this morning in the community of "Boca del Monte". Oddly enough she was more fascinated by my dry erase marker more than my electronic measurer or my handheld GPS.
New house, old house. A lado.
Close-toed shoes. Normally I am strongly against them, but here it makes a lot of sense, especially when I travel via motorcycle.
Cows in the road; no problema. We just honk and motor-cycle right on through them...
This is the look I get from every baby or toddler. I am told that the only other white girls who have come to these villages give out vaccines, which therefore makes me a terrifying being. So, I pass out balloons to try and convince them that I'm not here to stab anyone with needles.
Buying off the small children with balloons
New "Habitat for Humanity" houses have the adobe walls covered in concrete (preventing the bugs from living easily in the walls)
Soooo beautiful!
Today I got done about 30 minutes before Hector, my transportation, so I hung out with the local 5 year olds and wowed them with my mad cootie-catcher making skills. Amazing how that trick works with the richest of the Harbor Springs trust fund babies, and the poorest of the indigenous tribes in the mountains of Honduras! Totally the highlight of my day, although it had nothing to do with parasites.
Homes here are insanely clean; this room houses a family of 6!
Adobe bricks. I am learning more than I ever thought I could know about house construction in the tropics.
Me and my motorcycle! (minus Hector, the driver of the motorcycle)
The woman on the left lead me to 12 houses, up and down insanely steep trails through the jungle in her flip-flops, on a 90 degrees day... and she is 8 months pregnant, with TWINS!! Man, I felt like a wimp being all tired out and needing water. She was super nice though.
Plan de Perico, a village in the Municipalidad de Cabanas, Honduras.
Everyone hangs out in the streets in the evenings here; the kids play and the adults chat. It's sort of like the US suburbs in the 1960's...
Apparently, the start of the "rainy season" means board up your shutters every afternoon by 5pm before the storm. I learned that one the hard way...
The view from behind my hostel. I have started a routine of sitting on the grass up here and watching the storm come in every evening.
