Thank you Winston Knolls Home and Garden Club

“If you have come to help me you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up within mine, then let us work together.” – Aboriginal Activists, Queensland, 1970s

A big THANK YOU to the Winston Knolls Home and Garden Club in Springfield, Virginia who sent gifts to be shared with children in my community. With so many poor children here and never enough to give, I collaborated with some other community members who were also giving out gifts in some of the poor neighborhoods of La Paz – many of the children have never had a new toy or a new item of clothing. They were so excited…and I hope I’ve captured that sentiment in these photos…

To four of our finest…Carlos, Mateo, Pat, and Keith

To four of our finest…Carlos, Mateo, Pat, and Keith

Peace.
It does not mean to be in a place where there is no noise, trouble, or hard work. It means to be in the midst of those things and still be calm in your heart.

I know that each of you will do good work wherever you are, be it in Honduras or some other part of this beautiful world we live in…but wherever you go I hope that peace finds you in all that you do.

From the mountains of Rio Negro, out in Catacamas, and all the way down to the dirty south, there are pieces of the four of you scattered all over Honduras…and its a different place without you guys.

Ojojona

The following weekend I visited Miriam’s site in Ojojona for the fair and to look at two potential sites for a project she is developing with the OMM - Oficina Municipal de la Mujer (Munipal Office for Women). This office, which promotes women’s issues on the local level, is creating a Casa Refugio (women’s shelter) to provide temporary housing for battered women, a space for job/leadership training events, and a small business for women in the community. Miriam is working on this project through the Peace Corps Partnership program, where the community provides 25% of the funds and the other 75% comes from donations that Miriam will solicit. In this case, the community portion will be an in-kind donation of land and other building materials.

Ojojona is a cute little colonial town about 30 minutes south of Tegucigalpa, which draws a lot of tourists on the weekends for its old colonial buildings and the earthenware pottery of the region. According to the Moon Handbooks Guide to Honduras, Ojojona was settled by the Spanish in 1579, and originally played a more important role than Tegucigalpa because of the mines in its nearby hillsides.

El Nispero...

I spent a few days early in December visiting my friend and fellow volunteer, Erin, to work on a project in her town of El Nispero, Santa Barbara. This small colonial village of a few thousand is set in the beautiful Santa Barbara Mountains and can be reached in about an hour by bus on a bumpy dirt road heading south out of the department capital. El Nispero is known for its traditional handicraft of rugs, bags, and small gifts made of reeds from the local Junco Palm, but due to NGO investment in the department capital, El Nispero has little other resources to generate income. Despite lack of local resources, Erin is working hard to bring a new kindergarten and soccer fields to the community, which at current has no space for children to play and an overcrowded kindergarten for the growing population. While Erin manages the organizational and funding of this project, engineers from Plan International are helping on site and drainage issues, and I am assisting her in the design of the new kindergarten.