dirty south, can ya really feel me?

My trip south was good. I got to see what a YD volunteer can do. The volunteer I visited, Karla, teaches teachers to instruct English, gives HIV/AIDS charlas, feeds orphans on Saturdays, and runs youth groups. San Lorenzo is HOT. Hot like I want to walk around in a bathing suit all day hot. But it was nice. Especially because I got to meet other volunteers. I met Karla´s roommate, Caroline, who is a water/sanitation volunteer and Aida, who is a health volunteer. Aida was visiting for the weekend and lives an hour away.
The best part? Aida lives on an island and invited me to visit her Saturday afternoon! So I went to the island, Isla del Tigre, on the Gulf of Fonseca. To get there you take a 15 minute ride in a speedboat--very cool. The island is small. It is about 26 km around. The town, Amapala, is a colonial town. It used to be a port town until the 70s when a corrupt mayor sold the indursty to San Lorenzo-so Amapala lost it´s top business overnight. The warehouses/factories are still there, but they´re abandoned. Aida took me on a tour of the town-she knows everyone-and then we went to a restaurant that had a deck right on the gulf. Naturally, their specialty was seafood-so I had fresh fish with banana strips and salad. It was soooo good. The island was really beautiful-in the center there is a huge hill, which once was an active volcano but is now covered in trees. From the island you can clearly see the volcanoes of El Salvador, which back in the day erupted and created the black sand that now covers Amapla´s beaches.
The rest of the weekend I was in San Lorenzo and I met a PCV who served in Fiji 35 years ago! He opened up a restaurant with his wife in Honduras. It was really nice-full of hammocks and a deck along the Gulf. It was nice to be away, but it´s nice to be back too.