Updates from a village in the middle of nowhere.

Hi everyone. This is basically plagiarized from an email to my parents, but I was too lazy to write something new.

We are at the new school, in the mountains. (coincidentally, it is about the same elevation as the last one on the lake). Anyway, it is in a tiny little town. I don´t even think its a town, but a community. The town was set up when a bunch of ex-coffee farmers (they joined a union and were subsequently fired and blacklisted) started a new community. Needless to say it is dirt poor. Every day at 5:30, trucks come through town honking their horns and the men get in to take trips to the cities to hopefully get day labor. They return every evening around 7, with 40 Quetzales (about $5), if they are lucky. Most weeks, I guess the men can expect to actually find work 3 or 4 days. Coffee farming, as it turns out, isn´t much better. If a family picks 100 pounds of coffee beans, they get a whopping 3 bucks or so from the coffee dealers. Such is life.

Every meal, I go to eat at a local family´s home. The grandma is the only one I really ever see- grampa and the dads are off before I get there for breakfast and come home after I´ve already had dinner. The woman is nice, but doesn´t say much. They have a dirt floor and there are constantly chickens running around. I usually eat rice and beans and tortillas, and everything is suprisingly palatable. Laura´s family is more lively, and the kids totally adore her. In fact, the whole town is kind of fascinated with the gringos. There are absolutely no tourists for miles and miles, so we are the only outsiders to come to an area where everyone knows everyone. Today, my breakfast was a little more exciting because while we were eating, one of my family´s dogs got hit by a car. Don´t worry, he is OK. In fact, he is in better shape than their other dog, who has one ear.

We have classes for 4 hours a day, and all 8 or so students live in the school (not coincidentally, 3 of them went to UW-Madison). There really isn´t much to do except read and do homework and talk, and it is totally lovely. Right now, Laura, another student, and I just took a 20 minute ride in the back of a pick-up truck (in spanish ``picup``) to the nearby metropolis of Colomba (population, of, say, 1,000), which is the nearest town with computers. We came yesterday, but the town was out of electricity, so we didn´t get to use the internet.

It all sounds much more rustic than it is. We are having a lovely time. Tomorrow I have a phone interview with a school in Honduras.