the first week

wow, well, there has been a lot transpiring since i last wrote. i think all the students here, including myself, feel that we’ve been here for months, when it hasn’t even been a week. not in the way that it’s been a drag and time is passing slowly, but there has just been so much to take in and accept as our own. i am extremely happy though. each day holds many new things and we just take ‘em as they come. after such a slow-paced christmas break, though, i sometimes miss having time to relax. so here are some highlights from the past week:
-the first day of class: this was on friday. i have spanish from 8:30 – 11:30 and a development class from 12:30 – 2:30 each day. this month in development we are studying the history, people, and general context of honduras, which has been great. i am in the intermediate spanish class, and i’m keeping up really well. i can understand everything the teacher says in spanish, given that she choses pretty simple words most of the time.
-downtown scavenger hunt: on saturday morning we split into teams of three people and went on a scavenger hunt in downtown tegucigalpa. we had gone down there on thursday with the professors, but now we had to find our own way! it was fantastic. the hunt ended uptown at La Basilica de Suyapa, (the Virgin de Suyapa is the patron saint of honduras), where a festival was taking place to celebrate her. after we all met up there, some girls and i went to Tacos Tados, our new favorite place to eat, where i got a meal of two tostados for $1.25, including a bottle of coke. unreal. another example of how inexpensive food is here, i ate lunch today for about 75 cents (a wheat roll, some cheese, and a large banana), and the cheese was 70% of that. water can be bought in a sealed plastic bag (so fun!) for 5 cents. how am i going to go back to living in southern california?
-retreat: from sunday afternoon to monday afternoon, we went up to a national forest called La Tigra. it was up in the mountains just outside of tegucigalpa. it was so nice to get out of the noisy city and up to cool of the forest. we took turns telling our life stories to the group. i had been talking to and getting to know a lot of the students before, but now they took on a whole new clarity and dimension. when i met them all at the airport, they seemed really similar, but now i can see that they are all very different. this program does attract an interesting type of person though. for instance, no one is really obnoxious, which is a rarity, if you have ever been in any number of small groups. we think that this is because people who are interested in development and willing to live in honduras can’t be too self-centered or insensitive to other people. we’ll see though. we’ve only been together for a week. on monday morning we hiked up to a waterfall. the hike was beautiful, and the waterfall was cool, but some of us were not satisfied until we had climbed to the TOP of the waterfall. so four of us basically trailblazed up through the forest/jungle for about 40 minutes. it was pretty steep, sometimes vertical, and the waterfall was nowhere in sight (or sound) but the further we went the more we wanted to make sure this climb was worth it. finally we made our way to what we thought was the top, but which was actually about 50 feet above the top we had seen from the base. there was a beautiful little waterfall and pool of clear water, and below we could see the frothy head of the main falls. the way down the hill was faster and much more fun. when we could, we would grab tree vines and repel down the muddy slope, but otherwise we would support ourselves from small tree to small tree, letting gravity swing us down, hoping the next tree was the mossy kind, or bamboo, and not the kind with thorns on the trunk. it was the most exhilarating thing i’ve done in a long while.
mm, this is a lot. and not even the half of it all. more to come later, and hopefully i can get some pictures on here. much love,

jessica.