A friend of mine Randy went over and spent some time with a Honduran guy he knows over the Holidays. Randy is from Nebraska and used to many outdoor adventures but you can tell from this quick email he sent his friends and family there is still a lot to experience in this world.
Here is the note I sent to my family about the Mainland trip --
I went to the Mainland of Honduras for about 11 days and worked on a cattle farm installing fences. It was tough work as we had to cut the trees down by hand split all the large ones four times all with no power tools! Then carry each one out of the mountains by hand (each weighing 50 to 160# and take them down to the fields. The men I worked with made $3 a day in wages (yes $3.00 a day not per hour!!!) and they do this six days a week. It was an eye opener!
The trip started with Max, Jill, Louise and I. We went to Teguc and brought in the new year on top of the roof of a house that Marco's owns. Marco's is the project Foreman and head of security at Lawson Rock. We stayed three night in Valley De Angelas, it is a cool very old village, real artsy, art shops everywhere. We took one day and drove to the pacific ocean on the other side of Honduras , we went out to an island that Honduras , El Salvador and Nicaragua all share. You can stand on the Island and see all three country's at one time, it was very interesting. One day we drove up in the mountains to La Tigra National Park. An old mining town that a company in New York City owned in the 1800's.The highlight of our excursion was when we got permission to go visit and old Indian tribe (similar to the Mayans). Wow was that something, they live in these little shacks with the ducks, chickens and other animals all inside with them. They are very dirty people with layers of filth on all of them (babies to adults). We asked why they did not take baths in the river that flowed by their village and we were informed that this was their soul and if they washed at all it was washing there soul away. They are allowed to walk in the rain but can not scrub their body's in anyway. They make these hand made baskets that they collect coffee beans in. It takes a day to go up in the mountains and get the material and then another day to make each basket.
Then the girls left and I went on with Marco's for 7 more days. We stayed in his uncles small house (8 of us!). We had to go to the river and collect water in buckets and used this to bathe, cook and flush the toilet. Great people. I was the only english speaking person in the village of Orica and by the second day the word was out and there would be kids lined up on the fence to see this white gringo coming out of the house each morning. We went deer hunting one day, they use dogs to track the deer. We got one deer and there the size of a large dog. They used every piece of that deer. They boiled the head for soup, the intestines for tripe soup, the hoofs for gun oil and cut the hide up into strips and fed it to the dogs. The meat was the best deer meat I ever had. Did not taste like our deer at all. It was not wild tasting. Once all the workers found out that I was willing to work hard with them and I did not feel like I was better than them they gave me their respect and we all became good friends by weeks end. I learned different kinds of old beliefs by the villagers ex: They believe the human eye has power and can actually make an animal sick or die if you stare at it long enough. They believe that if an adult looks at a child and does not touch the child with their hand then you can make that child sick, they call this eye's. If the child becomes sick from "eye's" then you must rub a raw un-cracked egg on the child's chest to remove it. Then they crack the egg in a dish and you can see the eyes in the egg, then you take the cracked egg to the river and let it take it away from the village. They also use a root from a plant to rub on a child to remove a sickness.
I found out it is possible to live and have friends in a community where you don't speak the same language. This was a trip I will never forget.
Here is a picture I took a couple of days ago near French Harbor at the site of the new mall being built. Its a pretty large project and is moving right along. The layout is more an outdoor mall than a traditional indoor mall of the states. It consists of a large center building with an L Shaped building around it and parking etc between the two. 
