Gerald's Peace Corps 12 - The End

These last two photos are of Mayan ruins at Copan.  That's me on the ball court on the second photo.  Besides work I was able to travel to different parts of Honduras and on vacation visited Guatemala several times.  That concludes this blog.  I have more photos and more stories but that's probably more than sufficient to give you a taste of Peace Corps Volunteer service.  I still look back on those two years as probably the most meaningful time in my life.  I would recommend it highly to anyone.

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The San Juancito area was mountainous and the apple trees were mostly planted on steep slopes.  I helped demonstrate some soil conservation practices.... Small semi-circular terraces for each tree.  And I showed how to prune and shape young apple trees so as to get more production from each tree.  Walking up the mountain to visit farms was hard work....so the Peace Corps bought me the mule in the second photo.  One night I gave a talk in the Rosario school up above and when it was over it was so dark I literally could not see my hand in front of my face.  I got on the mule and he took me down the steep road and we arrived in town safely in about an hour.  He was a lifesaver that night.....but most of the time he was a pain in the butt. 😁  I finished up my year in San Juancito by getting a grant to pay for a 4 day field trip to visit successful apple farms in Guatemala.  Ten of us went and the trip went very well and for 7 of the farmers it was their first opportunity to travel to another country.

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Above are members of the cooperative meeting in the school.  San Juancito had both electricity and running water.....in fact in the early 1900's the Rosario Mining Company built a small hydroelectric plant powered by the stream coming down the mountain and San Juancito was the first town in Central America to have electricity.  It went out of operation in years past.  I loved living in San Juanito....it was much cooler and there weren't many scorpions 😊....although my house did have several bats that lived in it.

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I changed locations after the first year and my supervisor placed me in the small pueblo of San Juancito.....which was near Tegucigalpa.  It had an interesting history in that it was where miners had lived while the Rosario Mine was being mined for gold and silver.  The mine was higher up the mountain and the pueblo was below.  The mine shut down in the 1950's and San Juancito nearly dried up after the miners left.  A few stayed on to grow coffee and in the early '80's a few farmers planted apple trees and then a cooperative was started.  I was sent to work with the cooperative and help them improve their Apple production.

From the photo you can see the cloudy area above the town.  That's where the mine was and 10 months out of the year it's a cloud forest with lush vegetation.   In the dry season the cloud disappears.  The Honduran government turned the area into a national park named La Tigra.  It's cool and moist in the forest.  I once saw a quetzal bird near the edge of the forest.  There are beautiful streams which Tegucigalpa uses as a water source.

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I went into Tegucigalpa every so often to shop and visit the Peace Corps office.  It was a long bus ride in the old recycled school buses......perfect for the short Hondurans......but torture for a guy 6'2".  It was a 6 hour slow ride over rutted roads with the bus frequently breaking down or getting a flat.  I passed the hours reading paperbacks that I picked up from the Peace Corps office.  Sometimes the trip in was because of official business or visiting the Peace Corps nurse to help with frequent stomach ailments.  In Tegucigalpa I could get a cheeseburger or pizza and see a movie....so the 6 hour torture was always worth it.  The bottom photo is of the market.

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The first photo shows the almost completed ditch for capturing runoff.  Even though the climate was arid there were occasional intense storms.  The second photo is of a guy from Switzerland holding Padre Antonio's pet spider monkey.  It was usually tethered to that tree.  One day it got loose and was wreaking havoc inside the hospital and I had to catch it.  I finally got it out of the rafters after receiving several bites.  Padre Antonio was able to get frequent young people to stay a month or more to volunteer in the hospital.  The bottom photo is of a project of another Peace Corps Volunteer who lived in town.  She worked with a women's group way out in the campo.  I rode a mule and she rode a horse to get there.  These women are standing in front of a chicken coop.....a small grant helped to pay for the fencing....so that the chickens could be controlled....and eggs could be more easily found.

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I was assigned to work with a Franciscan priest from Belgium.....Padre Antonio....that's him in the brown robe in the second photo.  He started a natural healing hospital....the first photo.  The second photo is him with many of the patients.  He had developed a farm to provide food for the patients and irrigated his garden with a diesel powered pump.....getting water from the river.  I was focusing on conservation so we developed a demonstration to capture more water from the infrequent thunderstorms.  We constructed contour ditches to capture the rainfall runoff to allow the water to soak into the soil.  That's me in the bottom photo on the right.