things are going well.  Allison left, so now it is just Larry, Joel and I.  It is good to get some good quality time with Larry before he leaves to get married in June.  Yesterday we planted tomatos peppers and onions.  and today i cleared a slope on our demo farm to plant beans.  things are becoming more day to day now.  the sun is hot hot, as it is dry season now.  often after work at two i take a small nap on the concrete floor.  the heat really saps the energy out of you, at least a gringo like me. 

Jay, one of our employees and I, finished another terrace today.  we have done four so far in a yard across the road from ours.  it is funny;  working landscape construction in massachusetts, i built stone retaining walls, like terraces for luxury.  they are indeed beautiful.  down here i am doing the exact same work, but it is purly for function.  This is what love about edenic development, overcoming the dicotomy of function vs. aesthetic.  i find that in sustainable land development, what is functional is beautiful, and what is beautiful is funtional.  that is how i imagine the garden of eden.  it is beautiful but also abundant and life giving, serving a primary function of providing food.  it is stange to so far segrate much of the functions present in our world from our overall experience.  when this unity isn´t taken into consideration is where our present global problems arise, pollution, desertification, erosion, leading to hunger, illness, violence and poverty.  when we can appriciate and lovingly accomplish every step of our agriculture and industry, in harmony with the environment and society, we will really step forward to a more sustainable culture, and a prettier planet.  at least this back yard with nice terraces is prettier and more fruitful now.  one backyard at a time i suppose.

you on facebook may have read my update about how i was wondering when the lump on my arm would stop oozing.  well, it did.  after my friend squeezed a bot fly larvae out of it!  yuck!  it was the grossest thing i have ever seen on my body.  there i was sqeezing the puss out one night, and then all of a sudden there was a little white pointy thing poking out of the hole.  i sqeezed harder and a little more came out, but i couldn´t get any more out with one hand so i went to my friend Mac down the road.  dependable Mac, slowly sqeezed and pulled till an almost inch long larvae came out of my arm.  as it came out puss squirted on Mac´s face.  yuck!  but man am i happy to have that out of my arm!

 last weekend Mac and I went on an awesome camping trip up above a huge waterfall, deep into the virgin forests up in the mountains.  it was breathtaking, waterfall after waterfall.  we came to an increadable view of where our river, the Cangrjal, empties out into the carribean by La Ceiba about 10 kilometers away.  we could see all this from a full days hike up from the road into the jungle.  we saw three snakes, and a howler monkey.  As we were bushwhacking up a steep hill to ascend a waterfall Mac almost grabbed the most poisonous snake in the americas, the Fer deLance.  It was perfectly camouflauged in the leaves.  i never would have seen it.  it really freaked me out.  but we went on, and no snake bites.  yey.  we made it back safe two nights later with a lot of amazing photos, (Mac is a photographer), a better friendship and really sore calf muscles. 

I am now in Costa Rica for the renewal of my visa; it is valid for only 3 months.  I have taken this opportunity to visit a friend of mine from middle school in Wheaton IL, Caitlin O’Connell.  Having not seen each other for 10 years, we reconnected on facebook, and now are hanging out at this very moment in Costa Rica.  It is funny how things work out but it has been a delightful time so far, following monkey and catching up on the last 10 years of our lives.  Caitlin is researching capuchin monkeys through a UCLA research project in Bagaces, in south western Costa Rica.  Yesterday I went into the field with her to follow a group of monkeys that they have been observing for 17 years.  we headed out at 4:30 in the morning and didn’t get home to 7 at night!  they observe them from dawn to dusk every day.  It was pretty amazing, the monkeys have been habituated, which means they they are not afraid of us humans that follow them around.  they went from tree to tree, playing, coming down to the creek for water, eating fruit, napping at midday, and doing things the primates like to do.  the morning was slow and relaxing, but in the afternoon, a storm hit and started pouring down rain.  then the monkey became more active going from treetop to treetop rather quickly and it was tough to follow them at points.  but alas, come dusk, they settled down in a tree, and we headed home in the dark.  The researchers have a whole language or code to document their behavior, and they take extensive and precise data.  the drawback is that monkeys is such a huge part of their life, its hard to get them to talk about anything else.  But I was able to get a few reminiscent stories out of Caitlin from a time when we were in a very primat-ive stage of life– middle school.  Its nice to know that i wasn’t such a dork after all.

I am in Tegucigalpa for a couple nights visiting with a friend Gustavo, who I met through Larry. Last night, I went with Gustavo to drop off some bananas to a friend of his, and he turned out to be my old p.e. teacher Ben Benitez, from elementary school at Acadamia Los Pinares. He remembered me well and my whole family. He said he used to pick me up when i used to be small. It was crazy, then he pulled out an old year book and sure enough there i was in several picture (more than i’ve ever been in in any school in the states). I also saw pictures of many of my old friends which he still presently knows, notably Juan, who wasn’t really my friend, but he was the fastest other kid in my class, and we would often have foot races during recess. It was kinda a show down between the gringos and the hondurans and the races were always close, but id like to think i won more often. Since this coincidental encounter, i have felt strangely content in this loud, sprawling, polluted two-thirds world city.

my two weeks with Rob was amazing. It was awesome to have such a good friend come visit of so long. it seemed that he was learning a lot, seeing a lot of strange stuff, especially how so many aspects of american culture are so strange when viewed through a different lens. Our trip culminated in a visit to the Copan Ruins, an ancient Mayan city that was long ago deserted. It was really inspiring and beautiful. we had a fully functioning tour guide who was also schizophrenic, and whenever he wasn’t in our immediate presence he was talking to himself very intensely. he said that he worked for the us air force in the 70s and that they (the US military) “have custody”of him which means they use some special technology to send messages straight to his brain via some sort of sonar energy. poor guy. but he still gave a great tour. After the tour rob and i really embraced doing sketches in liu of taking photos. we both came out with some good drawings. it was good to sketch, and i wondered to myself why i didn’t more often, after all i did major in art in college. i miss rob but i hope he comes back soon and brings friends.

tomorrow i go to Managua, Nicaragua, and then to Liberia, Costa Rica and then to Balgeces to visit and a friend from middle school that i reconnected with on facebook, who is studying monkeys and to renew my tourist visa, as they only last 3 months. so three months down 5 more to go.