Today I did the service visit to Villa nueva youth center, in Honduras. On our way there we were asked to give a donation to the youth center to cover the cost of paint because we were going to be painting a fence. When we arrived at the youth center, there was no paint! The people who were in charge had to go and buy all of the paint so we basically just stood around doing nothing for quite a while. Some people interacted with the youth, but some of the youth seemed a bit intimidated by a big bus of 40 Americans coming to the youth center, and most of us didn’t speak Spanish, so that made it very difficult to interact with the youth because they don’t know English and I don’t know Spanish so if I were to carry on a conversation it would be something to the extent of “Hi, how are you?” and that’s about it.
They finally arrived with the paint and we learned that we weren’t actually painting a fence. We ended up painting the cement brick wall that goes all the way around the building. We only did 1 long side and ½ of the short sides because there was enough paint. They added turpentine to the paint so that the paint would stretch farther. We started painting and then as soon as we started paint was getting EVERYWHERE!! I got paint all over me. I don’t think there was any part of me that didn’t get painted including my backpack.
We managed to finish painting by about 11:30. This surprised us all because we had planned on it taking all day. After we were done painting, we tried to get the paint off of ourselves using turpentine, but this wasn’t terribly effective. Consequently we all continued to get paint everywhere and all over everything. We then waited for people to deliver lunch to us. It was these tortilla things with beans, rice, chicken, and avocado. This dish had a special name but I kind of forgot it. Either way it was delicious.
Since we were all done long before we were planning on leaving, we ended up leaving to go back to the ship around 1300. We stopped at this market thing in San Pedro Sula on our way back to the ship. There were about 4 of us on that trip who had all gone on the FDP with me the day before. We were all terrified that it was going to be the same place we had gone the day before on our other FDP. It wasn’t so as soon as we saw it we were all relieved. Inside people were selling all sorts of Honduras souvenirs. Most of what people were selling was similar, so you could look around until you found the best deal on what ever you were trying to find.
We then were getting pretty thirsty and there was one stand that was selling Pepsi. We heard that the Pepsi was 18 lempira or about 1 dollar. When the woman pulled the Pepsi out of the fridge we realized that it was 1 dollar for 1.5 liters! This is a lot cheaper than when we are at home, where you pay over 1 dollar for a 20 oz bottle.
After 45 minutes in the marketplace, it was time to go back to the ship. We managed to get back to the ship around 1500, we didn’t do anything too exciting that night once we got back. I hung out with some friends, but that was about it.
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