Finally, photos have arrived! It may have taken me an hour to upload them but I think they're worth it. Check them out and ask any questions if you have them on the message board!

I thought I'd run through my average day and make a couple of observations about Honduran life and culture. I did make a trip this weekend with the other volunteers, the pictures from which you can now see, but I'll save writing that up for another day when I'm not quite so beat! (the work today involved a lot of digging and mixing and not much else...)

We start early from the homestay - up at 5.45, breakfast at 6, gone by 6.30. This would normally bother me and leave me monster-like for the rest of the day but we sleep at about nine at night and we're all fully adjusted to this fixed sleep pattern making it pretty painless. I then walk with Joe, my fellow homestay volunteer into La Esperanza - it's a good 2 miles but in the morning light it would be hard to find a more perfect scene. The mist rolls gently off the mountains, the air is crisp and clear as the sun is hardly up and the trees are satisfyingly green - a real tropical paradise.

We arrive at seven at the central plaza by a football pitch to be taken to the site bya pick-up truck. We all bail in and enjoy the wind whipping our faces for half an hour as we climb even further into the mountains, away from Esperanza. Usually the jounrey is peaceful but occasionally we get tailed by an impatient local bus who insists on passing around a blind corner, typical of Honduran driving! Marcos, the man whose house we are building, greets us with some of his ten children - he is essentially a subsistance farmer who grows potatoes, bananas, coffee and keeps chickens and some cows. He is clearly very grateful to have our help which makes all the volunteers eager to work! Firstly, the lodo or cement must be mixed. This is done by manually working in three types of earth: tierra negra, tierra amarilla and arena all of which are extracted from different parts of the ground. The arena is very valuable since it's only found a mile away and has to be dragged back by hand - luckily we have enough to cover the building project since other groups brought enough to the site in past weeks. Mixing is hard work as it is all done with hoes and the amount of lodo needed for a day of brick-laying is huge. Initially they combine easily and bigger chunks can be worked out but then water is added and it becomes a sticky, heavy mush that is very difficult to mix quickly.

After the lodo has been thoroughly worked to Marcos' satisfaction it is smothered on the outer walls and the sand-baked blocks are lifted into place. This again sounds easier than it is! The blocks were all made in the dry season but are heavy to lift over the head (about 15 kgs) and as the building grows taller they become increasingly difficult to control. After Marcos has levelled all of the blocks on one wall we fill the gaps with lodo, smooth them out and repeat for the next wall. This is all that is needed at the moment (other than digging out the tierra negra and amarilla) but after one more layer we will begin to add bricks to the centre to create the shape for the roof. This should be done by the end of the week which leaves me with four weeks to see plastering and roofing, tasks I will no doubt write about later!

The work is hard, but satisfying and the mood is jokey, as you will see from the pictures! Marcos' children come out and look interestedly on or help if they are old enough and if we are very lucky, his wife cooks us some of their potatoes - the freshest I've ever had and very welcome after a hard morning's graft. We leave at midday to catch another truck back to Esperanza, avoiding the worst of the heat. We arrive in Esperanza tired and eager for lunch which can be bought for a maximum of 3 pounds at one of several restaurants and cafes. The services in general are pretty impressive - internet is very cheap (explaining my long posts!), there is a laundry service, bars, a park, a market and many smaller shops where snacks can be bought for the working day.

Prices are shockingly low here - I'm hardly halfway through the money I changed a week ago (only $200) and most of that went on necessary transport. The exchange rate is about 40 lepiras to the pound: a bag of water (cheaper than bottles) costs 3, a canned drink about 10 on average, meals 50-150, a long bus ride back to Tegucigalpa 110, a hotel room for two 400. Weekends are also by far the most expensive things and a diving corse on Rotan would be my biggest expense at $250. Still, this is the best value in the world and I won't begrudge the Honduran economy a little extra.

There are interesting quirks about the town - at ever bank are armed guards and the police carry weapons more suited to the military than a local force. All banks also have an airlock door system - to open the inner you must close the outer, sometimes having put your bag in a locker to prevent carrying in weapons. Clearly there have been problems in the past and property protection is important to the Hondurans. More unnervingly for me is the constant presence of American culture: coke and pepsi adverts plaster all the big walls, little boys are fixated on Spiderman and Batman, our neighbour feeds her 18 month old baby with Nestle powdered milk and the television is almost totally dubbed US shows. The presence of mobile phones everywhere within so much poverty is only one of the many paradoxes. It is sad that materialism that is not essential has spread so much faster than a desire for more practical things.

I talked briefly about the INFA centre in my last post - I usually head there at two after lunch to entertain the kids as best we can. Often though we have to stop them from hitting each other - many have no conception of right or wrong and just giggle while punching their friends. They lack many skills - previous volunteers have taught them to wash their hands, eat with a knife and fork and sit at a table for meal times without becoming totally unruly. But structure, other than the three meals they get a day is impossible to enforce - a story would be out of the question since they have no real routine. But things are better since they don't resort to the dreaded TV fo six hours. The sad thing is that the permenant staff at the centre don't seem to take an interest in teaching the children any skills that will maketheir lives easier in the future, leaving it up to volunteers to make the most out of a bad situation. And we will do - we plan on continuing the work of other volunteers and painting a plain room where the wash basins are and playing with the kids as much as possible. Real, long-term change though will have to come from above.

After the centre I walk home and then either read or rest before dinner, then we crash out or head out to meet the other volunteers and have a few drinks at one of the bars - a really relaxed way to unwind at the end of the day, however difficult the journey back with Joe is in the dark! I'm still having a lot of fun - the honeymoon has worn off a little but now I think I see thinks clearer and am no worse off for that. Expect more later this week when I'll try to squeeze in some info about food as well as stories from the weekend trip.