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Also in Copan, I got this chill of the environment being inherently familiar to me. I recognized it because of my mother, she is from Kingston, Jamaica and I felt what she has conveyed to me about where she is from through Honduras, but the speaking part was a big missing piece. I will tell you, the days picked up, the next day was faster than the previous one. Also Monroe's departure from the trip gave it an interesting feel. (I have more to write)

Vanish Grover's Honduras Journal Entry

Tegucigalpa

Today, two images really struck me. The first was when I was outside of Dan's apartment. I looked up and saw the top of a power line. What should be (and in the states actually is) a tidy set of connections was here a messy, tangled, dangerous knot of wires. I was told by Dan that poorly planned connection like this repeatedly caused power outages due to the overload. This wasn't rare in Honduras. For me, it summed up the magnitude of the lack of planning that plagues many parts of the country.

The second image I saw was at a basketball court. A few of the taller guys on the trip and I (the only one shorter than six feet tall) went to go play basketball with some of the local basketball players. We started playing at dawn, and the sun shortly went down. That is when we realized that there was only one street lamp (on the corner of the block) to light the entire court. Poor planning, I thought again. Then the light went out during a basketball game. I figured that everyone would go home and wait for a government official to fix it, when Dan told me that this was a light that the basketball players paid for. One of them (called "the doctor" because he was a pharmacist) collected money from everyone in order to support the electrical bill for this one street lamp that they needed to play basketball twice a week. I saw that the Hondurans didn't leave or get upset. They simply waited for ten minutes until the light flickered back on, and resumed playing. I think I saw the resilience and patience of the residents of Tegucigalpa.

I'm not sure whether or not these glimpses into Honduran life helped me learn anything, but I now believe that we have much more work to do, and that there are people that would truly benefit from what we do in the future.