Meeting with Sustainable Harvest

I've been developing a data system for an NGO called Sustainable Harvest for a few years now. As there was a meeting of country directors in Honduras this past week, and data was going to be one of the topics, I was invited to attend. La Habana de Yoro is a few hundred miles from Santiago Atitlán, or 48 hours of rigorous travel. Monday the 20th I rode with friends to Chimaltenango from which I took the chicken bus to Antigua. Antigua is pretty touristy, but fun to walk around. I went inside the market to where the comedores (eateries) are. No tourists at all there. Ate a nice guisado de res. Since I needed to get up early the next morning I decided to go to sleep early. There was ridiculously loud music and drunken screaming until after 1 am, so you can imagine I was not the happiest person in the world.

The bus was waiting for me outside the hotel room at 6 (I was the only passenger from Antigua to Guatemala City). I had to wake someone up to let me out, and the uneventful ride began. What was supposed to be 45 minutes took 2 hours -- the traffic in the capital is that bad. Changed buses and arrived in San Pedro Sula at 5:30 pm. I had hoped to do some planning on my numeracy project, but I mostly slept and looked out the window. There I was met by Lily of the local SHI office, who helped me find a place and get oriented for the last piece of the journey.

At 5:15 am Wednesday I left the hotel (had to wake up the night clerk) and took a cab to La Terminal. I didn't follow Lily's instructions, but rather asked people that seemed to be directing travelers. I boarded a big former schoolbus, and sat for a few minutes before the heat and humidity forced me to wait outside. The bus went north for a while, which I didn't like since Yoro is south. Then we started heading south along a highway but stopping every few hundred meters to let people off or on. I thought I'd made a horrible decision -- that it was going to be like this the whole time -- but after a half hour or so of that, we started moving along pretty well, and gaining elevation, so it was not at all unpleasant. I called Lily and she was sure I was en route to the wrong part of Honduras. She wanted to talk to the bus conductor, who was about 11. He assured her we were indeed going to La Habana de Yoro.

I had been instructed to get off at the sign for La Habana. The bus stopped there at my request, but it looked like the middle of nowhere and there was nobody waiting to meet me. "Do you want to get off at the regular stop for La Habana, a few hundred meters ahead?" the driver asked. Then we saw an American-looking guy come out of a house right by the sign, and I knew I was in the right place. That was Justin, the Program Director. A mere 3 hours of travel was nothing!



We discussed issues all morning (being interrupted several times by LOUD hammering), breaking for lunch at noon (fried tilapia, locally grown) and then heading off to visit a biodiesel factory in the late afternoon, and going to the district capital Yoro for dinner. We slept dorm-style at the office: 5 of us in a room. That would have been okay except that my pillow was about nine feet high, and I had trouble getting comfortable.