May 3rd, 2007 I finally became an official Peace Corps Volunteer. Up until that day I was considered an aspirante, still in training and not yet worthy of being referred to as a volunteer. For the first time since I have been in Honduras I blow dried my hair, painted my fingernails, wore a nice dress and put on a pair of high heels. All of the volunteers (well actually we were still aspirantes) piled into a big yellow school bus and drove down to Tegucigalpa. First we went to the Peace Corps office and had a session about finances and then we went to the US Embassy for the swearing in ceremony. We sang the Honduran and the US national anthem (which didn’t sound that great). Our training manager, the US ambassador, the Peace Corps country director and fellow volunteers all spoke words of encouragement and praise. Then we ate lunch and headed of to the ambassador’s residence where we spent the rest of the afternoon playing tennis and basketball, swimming in the pool and relaxing. Then we returned to Santa Lucia for one last night with our host families. In previous years Peace Corps has paid for volunteers to stay in hotel rooms in Tegucigalpa, but past groups have been too rowdy, so they stopped doing that.
On the left is Helmuth Casto, the Peace Corps Honduras Director of Health Projects. On the right is Jorge Reyes, the Honduras Health Project Manager. 
US ambassador to Honduras.
Hondu 10 (the name of my training group). There are 50 of us from all over the US working in Health, Business and Water & Sanitation.
The US ambassador´s pool.
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