During the subsequent academic year students prepare, in consultation faculty a longer, more formal report on their investigations including descriptive, comparative, and interpretive sections. Ten of these monographs have been the centerpieces of senior honors projects in Anthropology, and all nine members of the 1992 project used the data gathered for Honors work. The program of study encourages students to take an active role in their own education. Often initially reticent to take responsibility and make decisions, students are gradually led to recognize their own abilities and the contributions they can make to the scientific study of the past. These Honduransmany of whom could be regarded as peasants, and of various ages ranging from 18-72are employed by the project and work directly under student supervision.
Friendships also form with neighbors and merchants.
Thus, participants find themselves inexorably drawn into the social fabric of village life. Students have joined in the celebration of a birth and attended the funeral of a friend's relative. This direct participation in community life is supplemented by two seminar courses dealing with contemporary peasant communities in Latin America and the broader political and economic processes linking even the most remote hamlet to international events. Field trips to various parts of Honduras and Guatemala further enhance and deepen appreciation for the diversity of cultures, past and present, to be found in Central America. Friendships formed with Hondurans have also brought former students back to attend weddings and christenings.