Dear Brownies,
I hope you are all well. I am thinking about you all today and hoping you are all happy and healthy and enjoying the beautiful Scottish weather!
I’m emailing you from a little town in Honduras, where I live. Honduras is a country just below The United States of America, but it is very different from the USA. Everyone in Honduras speaks Spanish and the country is very poor. People who live here aren’t lucky enough to be able to afford everything that we can afford in Scotland, like eating nice meals in restaurants, going on nice holidays, or even toys to play with and a TV to watch. But that doesn’t mean that they can’t still have fun playing outside together and finding other ways to be happy. If you walk just 20 minutes out of the village, you can stumble across beautiful views of the mountains like this:
There are two sides of Honduras, both of which I’ve been lucky enough to visit during my time here! The right hand side is on the coast, beside the Caribbean sea. This side is very hot all the time and has lots of beautiful beaches and islands where you can go to scuba dive or surf. I went scuba diving here for Christmas Day and New Years and saw lots of cool fish, octopus and even a shark.
The other side of Honduras has a lot of mountains and can be a bit colder sometimes. This is where I live! Tomalá is the name of my village and it is really high up a huge mountain, which means it can be hard to get to, and even though it’s sunny during the daytime, it gets freezing at night. It’s really small- only 1000 people live here. That’s less people than in Craigmount High School! This is Tomalá:
The big building you see is the church, and I live right beside it with a host family. I have a mum, four brothers, and a dog called Cheese pin. We eat all our meals together and when I first arrived here, I thought their meals were really strange!
For breakfast every morning we have a cup of coffee and a piece of bread. Coffee is really important in Honduras because we grow and sell lots of it. For lunch we have rice, chicken and tortillas almost every day. Another weird thing about here; they eat lots of meals with their hands and don’t use any cutlery! For dinner we have different things. Sometimes we have scrambled eggs and refried beans and sometimes we have soup. But whatever we have, we always eat it with tortillas! Here is a typical Honduran meal with eggs, refried beans, mayonnaise and tortillas of course! 
My job here is working as a teacher at the primary school and the high school to teach the children English. I love it! Classes start at 8am every morning, and before the children can go to their classroom, they have to sing the Honduran National Anthem altogether. Can you imagine singing O’ Flower of Scotland every morning before school?!
The children have the same subjects as you when they are in primary school, except school isn’t as strict here. Pupils like to play about and chat when the teacher is talking and that’s just normal in Honduras! It just means that if they fall behind in school work, they have to stay in the same primary and repeat it over and over again until they pass their tests. So listening to the teacher is a good idea, especially if you want to get a good job when you’re older. Often, kids who stay in school for a long time repeating the same school year, can’t get into university so they have to work on the coffee plantations when they are older, or on the farms in the boiling hot. It doesn’t look very fun!
We have a uniform, but some children can’t afford to wash it properly, so their skirts and blouses have holes in them or are really dirty. The teachers don’t mind though, because they understand. Here are some of my students playing outside during break time:
We don’t have a Brownies group here in Tomalá where I live. After school and on the weekends, all the children like to play outside(football is their favourite sport to play and the girls play it too), go to church, and also help their mums and dads. Helping your family is a very important thing in Honduras. This is because life can be hard here sometimes. For example, we don’t have washing machines to wash our clothes, or dishwashers to wash the dishes. We use a ‘pila’ for this. This is what it looks like: 
Sometimes, the electricity and gas go off, meaning we can’t put any lights on or use the oven to cook food. And everyday, the water goes off at 1pm until the next morning, so we can’t flush the toilet or use the shower. And when we do shower, it’s with freezing cold water! Here is a picture of our luxurious bathroom:
So, the mums, the dads and the kids all work together to cook, to clean and to make everything feel a little bit easier! I know a lot of children in Scotland don’t like to help around the house, but as I’ve learned from the Hondurans; mum and dad work very hard, and sometimes they just need a little helping hand.
All this hard work might seem a bit boring, but all the children here in Tomalá are very happy and they love their lives here. They have their friends and family around them, and they make the most of what they’ve got. 
Adios from Honduras, and espero que todo vaya bien!
Sending all my love,
Lucy.
lucytakeshonduras 