Hi Folks,

Sorry for the long delay on updates; It's been a full week.

WE GOT A BUS!! (You can see it at the north end of the Urbana High School parking lot over the weekend.) It's big -- 71 passenger capacity. It runs really smoothly, just needs a little work because it pulls to the right a bit. Adrienne, Maya, Jane and Ben are excitedly plotting ways to transform the interior for the trip down. We're really excited about the prospect of driving it to Honduras.

We've been getting nice donations of stuff we need. Royden Freeland of International Crystal Manufacturing in Oklahoma gave us the crystals we need to retune the transmitters to their new frequency. Many thanks Mr Freeland and to Dan Druszkowski of Andrew Corp. in Joliet who facilitated the donation of the high quality Andrew coaxial cable to connect the transmitter to the tower, another essential part of the system.

We had a bit of a scare when initial measurements of the Utopia site in La Esperanza indicated that there wasn't room for the tower for which we have a license. After some scrambling via email, our cooperante in La Esperanza, Timo of COMPPA (Comunicadores Populares Para la Autonomia), remeasured the space, and we found that we could squeeeeeze the tower in with some fudging, and it should work fine. So, now we're back on track looking for sources of miles of copper wire (literally), and sorting out who will take responsibility for what in the tower erection. Wow, email has made it so much easier to plan these projects!

Yesterday, Maya Bauer came out to the Kalyx Center to test equipment and clean it and Robin Shealy did great work streamlining the software for scanning manuals, converting the images to text and translating that to Spanish. This greatly speeds up the process of providing Spanish documentation for the transmitters and other essential equipment. THANK YOU!!

Due to complications getting the bus, the confusion about the tower site, and the quite complicated process of getting the CDL driver's licenses necessary to drive the bus to the border, we're reluctantly pushing the departure date back a bit, so there will be a Summer Solstice celebration at the Kalyx Center on Thursday night, June 21. (Yeah, I know it's crazy to add that on to all of this.)

AND, we have some more opportunities for people with any skill level to help out. We'll be working at the Kalyx Center on Tuesday this week, and on Thursday up until the Solstice Celebration. Then, the big push to pack up everything and load it into the bus on Saturday and Sunday, June 23 and 24. We'll need lots of help with that, so if you've got some time, we'd love to have you! Call me at 762-9561 or 649-9085 for directions, to get info about carpooling, and to let us know how many we can count on. THANK YOU!!

Thanks for all of the wonderful solidarity in this. We appreciate your participation in this effort!!

Peace, Bill