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Published: March 30th 2007
We’ve had a crazy couple of months since we got to Copan in January. Andy came down with Arielle and I for two weeks, then went back to Toronto to finish up his work. He was there working for a couple of months, but is back home again.
While he was here in January we spent time getting our house set up again and went to the beach for a few days. We stayed in some Garifuna villages(they are the Afro-Caribe population who live along the coast) and camped on the beach for 2$ a night!
I found a great house for us to move to, which we did in February. The house is in the same neighborhood, but much nicer and quieter. There’s also a great yard with GRASS ( like gold here)and two backyard patios for Andy to work on. The house we lived in before drove me crazy, as there is a carpentry shop right across the street and the hardest worker in Honduras works there with at least 3 saws going at once, from 7 am to 10pm. It’s like having a chainsaw going right beside you all day-RELAXING!
Arielle has been busy
doing her homework as well as playing with her friends. She got together with some of our friends and planned me a great birthday party for my 32nd birthday on Jan. 29th-she even baked me a chocolate cake all on her own! She’s joined the new, first all-girl soccer team in our town, as her friend invited her to join with her. She has practice everyday for a couple of hours, so she’s getting lots of exercise and meeting friends.
I’ve been meeting with the different organizations that I’ll be helping. The clinic and the health program with the doctor is still going strong, and has continued funding thanks to all of you who supported the fundraiser that we had at the Horseshoe, as well as the fabulous multi-media event that Lisa Ferguson hosted in February, bringing in over 6,000$ towards the health program. Thank you so much to all of you who have taken these projects to heart and have shown such generosity!
The money will go towards the clinic and towards purchasing a new all-terrain vehicle that the doctor, nurses, volunteers and I can get up into the mountains in to run a mobile
health clinic. We were actually just offered full funding for the mobile health clinic, after I wrote a full proposal with cost projections, etc, so now we have full funding for this year, except for meds, and partial funding for the next four years. I’ll be in charge of the program, and the funding came through for a salary for me, so life should be a bit easier now.
The school supply program is also going strong-we helped hand out school supplies to some of the villages last week. Paramedics for Children hands out over 1,300 packages to kids in the villages 4 times a year.
Rodger had a builder here for a couple of weeks, a guy who is going to raise funds and build the new orphanage/daycare/ community education centre for Paramedics for Children. It’ll be done in the next year and a ½ and Rodger wants me to be the administrator. The building is supposed to start in the next few weeks!
The centre is being built by the river on some beautiful land where the kids will have lots of room to play, near the Maya Chorti village, La Pintada, where
I’ve been helping. There are a bunch of projects that I’m working on there. I spent a week in February trying to get the Jr. high kids from La Pintada into school. The one-room school in the village only goes to the 6th grade, and because of financial constraints most kids don’t ever go further. The peace corps couple I helped last year raised funds for the kids to go to school this year.
It’s free to go to school for jr. and sr. high for the indigenous kids, but there are all sorts of other costs involved. I spent over 700$ US for 8 kids to get outfitted for school. They had to get a health check-up and report, pay for school registration, pay for all their books, get new uniforms for school and PE, new shoes(they only had sandals, and the schools have a rule that they have to have black dress shoes), school bags and supplies. The kids all come from families of 7 or more kids and their parents would never have been able to afford all these things. They’re really excited about being able to continue their education-this is the first time that
more than 2 kids have gone to jr. high at a time from their village! I’ll be trying to raise money this year to keep sending these kids next year, as well as send the new gr. 7 kids next year. Let me know if you’re interested in contributing!
I was teaching English to the kids from the village last year, so I’ll be continuing the classes, teaching gr. 1-6 together once a week and then teaching the jr. high kids separately. I’ll be teaching them English with the goal of them being guides for the tourism project in their village. They will also be learning their native language, Chorti, for part of this time, taught to them by a local teacher. We are updating the website that was designed for this last year, and the peace corps guy who is updating the site is going to give them computer classes and teach them how to update the site themselves! Now we just have to get some computers…!
The kids will keep a percentage of the money from the tours and deposit it in the bank towards the education fund for future years. These kids work
super hard-most of them work picking tomatoes for less than 2$ a day, work that they do all week, and then attend jr. high on the weekends. We hope to offer the classes at the centre when it’s built, as well as a whole range of art, woodworking, music, computer and language classes. If their tours take off, then they won’t have to work in the fields anymore, and can really concentrate on their studies. Andy has been able to give work to one of the kids all week, so he’s helping Andy with his woodworking. I hope that Andy will have enough work later to continue to hire and train this kid-his name is Dionisio, he’s 14 and super bright.
The infrastructure for the projects in the village already exists, thanks to some NGOs that have started projects there. I’m working with the NGOs to promote the projects and bring the tourists up to the village. There’s a great restaurant and two women’s craft co-ops, one with weaving and the other with corn-husk dolls. I’m working with two archaeologists who work in our town; they’re writing information on two Mayan archeological sites near La Pintada and they’ll
be teaching the Jr. high kids about these sites so that the kids can include the sites on their tour. The kids have also decided to include a tour of some amazing waterfalls near their village, so there will be lots of options for tourists. Right now tourists visit the town with guides on horseback, but there are no organized tours once they’re in the village, and they just wander around.
The idea behind the tours is to give the people in the village ownership of these projects, and most importantly to ensure that all the money from the tours is going to them. I’ve rented a store in town at a great central location, and will be selling fair trade craft items from the villages. The point is to give exposure to these projects and to give brochures and info on the tours. I’ll arrange tours from my store and accompany the tourists to translate for the kids until they have the hang of it and their English is better.
Andy can also sell his woodworking at the store, and I’ll be selling my own items (like jewelry, clothes and photo cards) as well as
other items from local artisans. Hopefully this will take off and we can support ourselves through this, and it will be a great way for Andy to display his woodwork. Right now he’s building all the furniture, shelving, the sign, etc for the store…should be beautiful! I’ve also been asked to teach a French class to some of the guides from the ruins, and some other people want me to teach them English privately, so those will help with the bills as well.
Last week Arielle and I helped a group that has a great agricultural project here in town, a model project for the Maya Chorti villages. Malnutrition is a huge problem in the villages, with most families just eating tortillas and salt all year round.
With this project, people are shown how to terrace garden on the steep hills and they can grow a variety of products for their own consumption and hopefully to sell later on. They have the people put in over 300 small trees as a living hedge-row to stop erosion, then introduce other crops inside. They then build bamboo pens off the ground for goats, and each family is given 3
pregnant goats. The goats are used for milk and later some for meat. They later pass on some of the babies to other families. The leaves from the hedgerows are feed for the goats, and because the goats are off the ground, they never eat the crops in the field as goats often do, and their excrement is parasite-free and can be used directly as fertilizer.
Once the trees are a certain height they have to prune them, and the wood is used for fire wood. This is key because deforestation is a huge problem here. Once all this is in place, the families are given a better wood-burning stove with a chimney-this is revolutionary here! No one has a chimney in their adobe huts, resulting in many cases of lung diseases and eye infections. Last week we helped the groups that were putting in the stoves and conducted simple hygiene talks for the families at the same time.
Besides all this, Arielle and I have spent some lazy afternoons by the pool, taking yoga classes together at our friend’s yoga centre and playing long games of Balderdash with friends in their backyard. Our town is booming
with tourists right now, so there’s always something going on. A few weekends ago National Geographic was here filming a whole show on Copan and did a whole segment on Oscar and Leah playing music and doing a yoga class at their retreat centre. That night some version of Temptation Island was filming a couple who won a weekend away at our favorite local bar. All this while the power went out for most of the day!
We’re settling into our new house with our new kitten named Libby, her mom was killed a few weeks ago with rat poison. We also got another friend for Libby, a kitten from a friend and named her Lula ( a combination of the name of my store, Libelula, it means dragonfly). I went to the Mexican border to renew my visa last week, spent some time buying things for my store from small Mayan villages, and also bought a super cute golden retriever puppy in Guatemala City. There was an ad in the paper and I went to meet the family, saw all the puppies and picked the one that kept coming to me. As many of you know, our
puppy died last year, so Ari and Andy were happy to have me bring home a new friend. He rode all the way home for 6 hours on 4 chicken buses, I snuck him across the border in my bag and then hitchhiked the rest of the way home Sunday.
Now I’m back home and we have a ton of work to do, as next week is Semana Santa and we have to get the store ready for the big tourist influx. A big volunteer team from Microsoft will be visiting Paramedics for Children next week to see about funding needs and to volunteer their time, so we’ll be shooting some promotional video and taking them up to the mountains.
Have a look at the pictures I’m attaching…maybe they’ll sell you on visiting us muy pronto!
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Erin Hurley
non-member comment
a la copaneca
You are all amazing! Keep up the good work and give all of Copán my love.