Baseball, Chicken Coops, and Schools

Well, since the big earthquake a little over two weeks ago, we have had several aftershocks including the latest one registering 5.4 last Monday. We still have not felt any of them, however, but other people have. Almost all of them happened in the middle of the night though so I guess that would explain most of it. We have not heard of any damage caused by the aftershocks.
Last week Kevin helped build two chicken coops as examples for the rest of the community to use to build their own in the future. A former Peace Corps volunteer came back with some of his family to participate in this project and it was a lot of fun and hopefully will last a long time to keep the chickens safe and more productive at laying eggs. During that time Shannon went to visit our friend Elizabeth in Minas de Oro. It is a small community located in the mountains, very different from Catacamas! It was much cooler up there and she had a great time. Elizabeth still lives with her host family so it was good Spanish practice. They basically have a Honduran mansion and it was a nice vacation! Shannon also went to Tegucigalpa for a rural baseball tournament sponsored by Peace Corps. Elizabeth’s team participated but lost in the first two rounds. The team from Tegucigalpa won but many thought it was not fair that they were invited since they are not rural and have many more resources and get to practice more. It was an interesting experience as baseball is not very big here. Hardly anyone came to watch, including the parents. The bus station was fuller than she had ever seen it before on her way back and she had to wait three and a half hours just for the bus to come then another four hours to Catacamas! Good thing she met a nice Honduran to pass the time with. While Shannon was gone, apparently the mosquitoes had nothing else to feed on and attacked Kevin’s feet something wicked. He’d never had bites that looked and itched like that before.
Today we went to talk to some community leaders about helping them get funding to build a new building for their school. We made a budget with a list of materials and costs plus a time line for getting the school built. We still need to check on prices of materials but we now have a rough estimate of what it will cost. The town is located a two hour walk from the end of the road and right now they have one room for all school kids, 60 total. They actually started building a new building last year when they ran into problems like someone leaving with a bunch of money and never returning to do the work and the project sort of fell apart from there and ended up basically washing away during the rains so now they must start all over again. We are hoping to help them secure some funds to finally get this thing built so the kids have some space to breathe while learning.