Copan Ruinas

Well, my short stint as an independent traveler has just about come to an end. This morning I crossed the border of Guatemala and Honduras and was soon whisked to the recognizable, if not entirely familiar, cobblestone streets of Copan Ruinas. I spent a week here in this laid back little city a year ago prior to the same project I'm about to get started on again. Within an hour of being here, I bumped into the UVM contingent and am once again part of a group of travelers. And so, the next two nights will bring on the quick transition from itinerant, lone wanderer to major cog in the academic apparatus of Dan Baker's Honduras course.

The next two weeks will consist of field work amongst sugar cane workers in Western Honduras. We are instigating changes to the small scale production process to create a cleaner, more economically efficient way of producing sugar for small farmers. This will be the eighth year of the project, started by Dan Baker. He originally came down here through an NGO to see what could be done about the problem of rubber tire burning, which was at the time the primary fuel for the sugaring process. In the past years, Dan has worked with various organizations and classes to implement simple, appropriate technology changes to the sugaring process to make it more efficient. A new system has been developed that is efficient enough to allow sugar producers to use the waste product from the process as a fuel. This means no need for purchased fuel and no effects of unsafe tire burning.
Last year the project expanded to include several more farms and this year we are bringing down engineers to survey the setups so that we can make scale models with which to test oven and evaporator efficiency in VT.
It's going to be a whirlwind of field work and data collection for the final two weeks of my five months abroad. And before I know it I'll be back on a plane to the States.