These are pictures from Monica's despedida. Monica had the job I now have in Casa Suyapa for the past year and a half. For her despedida we took all the kids to Tegucigalpa and went to an arcade, pizza hut and a huge soccer field to play a game of soccer.

These are pictures from the Olimpiadas, which happened last weekend. Everybody on the ranch is on a different team, I think there were 17 teams in total. Each team has a musical group and a wonder of the world. My team was Guns and Roses and the Pyramids. Friday night each team does a ten minute dance to their music and Saturday there were different competitions, like tug of war, in the mud!

This is a bunch of the volunteers out to eat in Tegucigalpa.

Hey friends and family,

this will be my blog for my time in Honduras, I'll try to update it semi-regularly, but it might just end up being a collection of pictures. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words. For now I will copy a little from some of the emails I have written my mom to give a picture of my time here so far. This was all written around two weeks ago:

We arrived Thursday (August 2nd) at around 3:30 in the afternoon, but we were so exhausted that we slept through dinner. Then we woke up and hung out with some of the other volunteers and then went back to sleep for the night. Friday we did a lot of exploring, but orientation won't officially begin until Monday. Friday one more new volunteer arrived and five more arrived on Saturday. There was already one girl, Cate, here when we got here. She arrived two weeks earlier because the girl whose job she is taking had to leave earlier. The volunteers are all really cool, a mix of Americans and Europeans, but a little more Americans. Except that all of the people arriving now are American girls, except one girl from Belgium.

Casa Personal, where the volunteers, live is really nice. It's rectangular shapped, with rooms all around the edges and then the inside is open, with a garden and hammocks and stuff. Right now we are living in a room with some bunk beds, but in a week we will get our own rooms with bathrooms and everything. Each volunteer has a different job, like working at the school or the clinic. Then besides their day work, each volunteers has a "Hogar". The hogars are the homes that the kids live in, there are a bunch of boys hogars and a bunch of girls ones. Mine will probably be Casa Suyapa, the baby house, since I will work there anyway. But since more of the volunteers don't actually work in the homes during the day, their hogars are seperate from their day jobs. Each volunteer has a hogar and they eat dinner there and help the kids with homework, etc. They also spend time in their hogars on the weekends. Last night me and Soraya has dinner in Daniel's hogar (he is from Austria, but leaving in a week). And then today we hung out in Cate's hogar. She is the one who has been here two weeks, she's really nice.

Casa Personal, where I will be living for the next year.