Help me pick the photos, win a calendar!

Hey folks, some of you may know that the RPCV Madison group puts out a great Peace Corps Calendar every year that features photos submitted by PCVs. They accept up to five photo submissions from each PCV for the calendar. I've gathered some of my best photos and would like you to tell me which five I should submit!

If one of my photos is accepted then I will receive 25 free calendars. Of those, I will give away up to 15 calendars with readers who voted on which pictures to submit! So please look through the following pictures, then add a comment saying which ones you like best (vote for up to five). To get an idea of the kind of photos that get published, you can peruse the winning photos for the 2008 and 2007 calendars.

Thanks for helping me out!

#1) Jairo Smiling:

#2) Oscarito Flying his Kite:

#3) Flips into the Ocean:

#4) Fisherman in the early AM:

#5) Boys Fishing (wide shot):

#6) Pech Family:

#7) Washing by Hand:

#8) Pech man in Doorway:

#9) Pech man on Chair:

#10) Making Casabe:

Lightning over the Bay of Trujillo

Lightning over the Bay of Trujillo
Originally uploaded by StormyPetrel

We've been getting very little rain for this time of year, and along with that we've had far fewer thunderstorms. But last night there was a pretty good one that offered a great lightning show after blowing north of Trujillo. My digital camera has frustratingly few manual controls, but I've managed to make the most of what it does have, I think, and these shots are the result.

Also, in other random news, the Democratic Party added expansion of Peace Corps to it's draft platform. This should not be construed as an endorsement of the party or as a political statement, it's just news I thought I'd share.

To be "fair and balanced," President Bush did pledge to double the Peace Corps in 2002, resulting in a jump in applications.

Twitter and Tigo

I recently started using Twitter, a micro-blogging tool. A cool feature is that you can write updates on your cell phone. Setting up your twitter account to accept updates from a USA cell phone is a breeze, but it wasn't quite as clear how to do it for a Tigo cellphone in Honduras.


So if any of you out there want to Twitter with your Tigo phone, here's how you do it:

1. Sign up for a Twitter account.
2. Go to this page.
3. Enter your phone number using the following format +504XXXXXXXX.
4. Send the confirmation text message to 00447624801423.
5. Check Twitter after a minute or so and your phone should be set up!

You can follow my Twitter updates here.

Thanks to @mangandini and his blog DesdeGuate for help setting this up.

Viviendo Positivamente

Viviendo Positivamente means Living Positively. It's the title of a manual for HIV+ Support Groups produced by Peace Corps volunteers, the 2nd edition of which was revised and updated by Mary and I over the last few months. We're pretty proud of the new edition, and feel that it can be a great tool for support group leaders all over Honduras and probably in other Spanish-speaking countries as well. If you're curious, you can download a copy of it here (approx. 1.5MB PDF).

It's also the title of an annual conference organized by Peace Corps for people living with HIV and AIDS (PLWHA) and community health workers who work with PLWHA. Mary wrote a great post about the third annual conference, which happened just a couple weeks ago, so I'll just point you there instead of rehashing it all here. But suffice it to say the conference went really well and we got great feedback from the participants. (The most common answer to our post conference evaluations was "invite me again next year!")