Day 14 - what they don´t tell you at INTOPS

Saturday morning, 4.45am. Hannah and Nic wake up, eager to help the army men milk the army cows at 5am as promised yesterday. We actually spent the hour waiting and wondering where, in fact, they had got to, and watched the sunrise instead over the already hot Honduran morning. They did finally turn up at quarter to 6 but it was too late - 6am was exercise time! We ran around the football field getting very muddy and doing stretches before breakfast, of more refried beans! Our workshop was due to start at 8am, and, at 7.55am we were delivered more bad news that unfortunately no more leaders would be joining us. It was decided to still go ahead with todays workshop, training the existing leaders until 4pm and go home early. After some very last minute changes to the programme, to condense it still into a one day workshop, we lugged our resources bag up to the football pitch and ran our programme to 16 leaders in total, with 10 new leaders who hadn´t been to a GOLD session before.
Our workshop was not without battles, mainly of the bovine variety, where we were joined by the herd of cows at the beginning. Ducks and geese came in for a gander too, wondering what we were up to, and we powered on through the noise of the soldiers mowing and strimming the football pitch most of the way through the day.
After lunch, the new leaders made their promise to become members of the Guias de Honduras, and we were very lucky to be able to see their ceremony. We came back to our room for water to discover another giant iguana in our room, who was clearly confused why there were 5 girls in the army quarters. Forget tarantulas, we had our own pet iguana! Afterwards, we had an hour to deliver as many of our activities about condoms as we could, before the leaders had to leave. We quickly packed away our bags, VERY sweaty and a bit bemused, but otherwise pleased to at least done a days workshop.
We arrived in our hotel just in time for the pouring rain, in which we adopted the non-conventional method of cooling off by dancing in the rain and laying in the car park, exhausted from the most bizarre set of events over the past couple of days.