The countryside around Gracias is beautiful. The air is mild and clear, the occasional bus or car shares the road with an infrequent two wheeled cart pulled by draft animals, and they all bump along the road that climbs higher and higher as it travels to small towns sprinkled among the verdant hills. The rains have started, things are greening up. Farmers are turning their fields, some with teams of oxen pulling plows. Horses, some of them saddled and ready to go, stand outside some of the houses. Terraced hillsides rise, layered with banana trees, coffee, and a kind of sugar cane used as feed for cattle. Small houses of earth, metal, terracotta tile or corrugated metal roofs, brick, wood, most with white washed walls, some with satelite TV dishes, all with at least a small
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