Kristyn's Adventures in the Peace Corps

Last Day in Honduras!

2009-09-25T09:35:00.000-06:00

Right now I'm sitting in the Peace Corps office in Tegucigalpa, the capital. The last few weeks have been pretty eventful. My second to last week I was busy trying to finish up with the grant proposal I'd been working on. I was pretty busy getting stuff done. The second to last Saturday in my site, I had a goodbye party with volunteers in the area. There were about 15 people and it was nice. I made chili and dirt dessert for everyone, and when the chili was cooking, I went to take a nap, and when I woke up it was completely gone! They had eaten every last drop of it. I was very dissapointed, but at least I still got some dirt dessert. The next day, six of us went up the mountain to the river and swam for a little while. We brought the puppy of one volunteer with, thinking he's be fun to play with, but he slept under a rock the whole time. It was a really nice weekend, but sad saying bye to people.

My last week in site was sort of hectic. I had to clean out my house, give stuff away to people, pack my bags, and say goodbyes. I left a lot of stuff for the volunteers replacing me. I haven't gotten to meet my replacements, but they are a married couple and I hear they're really nice. One is in the municipal development project (the same project I'm in) and the other is in the youth development project. I've been joking with people that I do so much work, they had to put two people to take my place. That's definately not true though.

I spent a lot of time my last week visiting people and it made me wish I had spent more time with certain people before. Saying goodbyes really made me realize how much people mean to me and how much I mean to them. It was tough. Sunday was my last day, and it was so hard. I was saying final goodbyes all day to people I've spent two years with but will likely never see again. It was depressing.

I got to the capital on Monday, since we had to spend the week here to do administrative and medical stuff before leaving. But while on the bus here, we got word that Mel Zelaya, the exiled president, had snuck back into the country and was in Tegucigalpa. We arrived at 3:30 to find out that the current government had called a nationwide 4:00 curfew. So we rushed to get food and get to the hotel. Then we find out that the curfew was extended the entire next day! So no one could go outside the entire day. So we just sat in the hotel. There were about 18 volunteers here, and we stayed in this little, rundown hotel that Peace Corps always puts us in. The first night the electricity was cut, but it came back the next day, so we pretty much watched TV all day. We got woken up at 6am that Tuesday to the sound of protesters on the streets, disobeying the curfew. There was a huge police force out there throwing tear gas at them. We went up on the roof of the hotel to watch the action.

Since we were stuck in the hotel and couldn't leave to get food, and everything was closed because of the curfew, Peace Corps called the US Embassy to help get us food. So they sent over two US soldiers with MREs for us to eat. They gave us a little demonstration on how to make the meals. You add water to this packet, and it automatically heats the food. There were lots of different options, including: Vegetable Penne Pata, Sloppy Joes, Chicken Breast, BBQ Veggie Burger, etc. They pretty much tasted like frozen dinners or something. And they came with little snacks.

On Wednesday, the curfew got liften from 10am-4pm, so we all went to the Peace Corps office to get stuff done. We were supposed to get lots of medical exams done, see the doctor, etc., but since we lost so much time, they gave us vouchers to get everything done in the US. At one point, there was a huge demonstration outside the Peace Corps office and no one was allowed to leave. On Thursday, there was no daytime curfew, so we were able to get all the administrative stuff done with Peace Corps, close our bank accounts, and all of that. We made it to the mall and the grocery store, and we were hoping to go out to dinner, but at 6:15, they called a 7:00 curfew, so we were stuck inside again.

Today we are just finishing up a few things at the office. I fly out tomorrow at noon. Going through political unrest is an interesting experience, and it makes me sad for Honduras. People here have enough problems without corrupt politicians trying to make power grabs and messing everything up. It's been a frustrating week but it does make it easier to leave. I'm looking forward to going home and not worrying about curfews or protestors or tear gas. See you all soon!

Hot Tamales!

2009-08-24T15:13:00.000-06:00

This past weekend was really good. On Sunday I hiked up the mountain to visit my host family and spent the day there. They cut down a bunch of corn in the morning and we made tamales. My host mom’s brother and his family, who I’m close to, came over to help. Making tamales is a long process. We husked all the corn, keeping some of the husks to cook the tamales in, then degrained the cobs, ground the corn to make meal, mixed it with some other ingredients, filled the husks with the corn mixtures, and put them in a pot to boil. There are many different types of tamales, some are cooked in banana leaves, some have meat and vegetables in them, some have beans in them, some have nothing, some are sweet, etc. Before coming here I had no idea there were so many types of tamales. I don’t like them that much. Depending on how ripe the corn is when you pick it, you can do different things with it. Some corn was put aside to make tortillas, other to make tamales, other to make elote a.k.a. corn on the cob, and the juiciest corn was used to make atole. Atole is kind of like pudding, or flan. To make it, you grind the corn really well to get all the juice out, which is kind of milky. This is mixed with milk, sugar, and cinnamon. It’s another dish I don’t really like. So, throughout the day, I ate corn in four different forms: elote, atole, tortillas, and tamales. It was nice day though, and I hadn’t seen my host family for two months, so it was good to visit with them.

Last month we finished the cultural talks with the 5th graders. To finish the session, we put the students into groups and had them research and present a topic. I talked to them about good research and good presentation techniques. Each group chose a country or region and a theme. Some examples of themes presented: Chinese festivals, Central American sports, European food, African wildlife, famous people of the US, US sports. Some of the groups I was pretty impressed by, and others not so much. The day after the presentations, the librarians and I organized a party for the students. We made “cultural food,” which included: spaghetti, nachos with salsa, hummus, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and oatmeal-raisin cookies, and scones. The party started at 4pm, so the two librarians and I spent all day preparing the food, which was a pain but kind of fun. The party went well, except that it rained for about half an hour and it was an outdoor party. But all the food went over really well, and after the rain stopped, I played a bunch of games with the kids.

Lately, I’ve been pretty busy working on a couple grant proposals. The municipal government of my town is in the process of building a garbage dump with good environmental standards, and they want to have an educational aspect to the program, so I’ve been working on writing a couple grants to focus on education and awareness. I helped the library that I work with to write a grant proposal to fund garbage management workshops with several community groups: civic leaders, youth leaders, small business owners, food service owners, and teachers. The idea is to train 100 community leaders in themes including: the importance of not littering; separating trash into organics, non-organics, and recyclables; utilizing the garbage service when it starts, etc. Instead of receiving a diploma for completing the workshop, each participant will receive a canvas bag, with an environmental slogan, to be used for shopping, instead of using plastic bags. Our municipality has actually been talking about making the pulperia (small store) owners charge for plastic bags in order to encourage people to bring their own bag when making purchases.

The other grant I’m working on is with another volunteer, in coordination with a local NGO (non-governmental organization), to do an environmental education campaign. This includes having television and radio announcements and programs, as well as billboards with environmental messages, specifically promoting good waste management practices. The budget also calls for promotional items (keychains, stickers, pens, canvas bags, etc.) with the campaign’s logo and an environmental slogan. If we can create a stigma against littering, less people will be likely to do it.

The other component of the campaign focuses on the local buses. With the grant money, signs with environmental messages (ej. “Don’t throw garbage out the window”) will be purchased and placed on the insides and outsides of buses. An agreement will be reached with the bus companies to implement a trash collection policy so that passengers will be able to deposit their trash in trash bags. Also, a professional will be hired by the project to give informational environmental talks on the buses and hand out the promotional items. The bus companies have been pretty responsive to the proposal of these activities. We’re submitting the proposal to the Coca-Cola Foundation and are looking for other funding sources. It’ll be really exciting to see billboards and bus signs with environmental messages, but I won’t actually be here to see it.

I only have one more month in my town, then I go to the Peace Corps office for a couple days to do closing medical exams and administrative stuff, and then I go home. It’s hard to believe I’m leaving so soon. I’m getting pretty sad about it, but it’s time to move on.

2 years in Honduras!

2009-07-13T16:09:00.000-06:00

Saturday, July 11th was my two-year mark of coming to Honduras. “Does it feel like it’s been two years?” people ask. Time here sometimes goes fast and sometimes goes slow. It does feel like two years, it feels like a long time. But, at the same time, I think back on something that happened, and it’s hard to believe it was almost two years ago that it happened. And, for me, it’s sometimes hard to take note of how the time passes, since there aren’t really seasons. And it’s been the first time since I was 5 that time hasn’t been marked by school breaks and summer vacations. That’s something everyone faces once they finish school, unless you become a teacher I suppose. But here everything moves slower than in the US, which is sort of double-sided.

How do I feel about leaving in 2 months? Well, I’ll save the real insights for when I’m actually leaving, but I would like to say that I’m so happy I’m here. For the past few weeks, I’ve been getting tired of being here and ready to go home, but overall, I am very happy to be here. There are always ups and downs. I believe you could ask any Peace Corps Volunteer in any country and they will tell you that there are extreme highs and lows. At times, I feel so content, at peace, happy with my life here, and I don’t want it to end. I love my town, the people, my work, my life. But at other times, I feel frustrated with everyone and everything and I just want out or to give up. Sometimes I’m just tired of it all. And of course, there are mediums in between the extremes. But the thing is, you can experience the range of these extremes within the space of a few hours, or even the same hour. You can go from the high to the low or the low to the high in the space of an hour. Happy to frustrated to angry to content. We have to deal with such a range of stresses here that we are often on edge. I’m going to be really sad to leave. When people talk about it, it makes me want to cry. But there are also a lot of things I’ll be happy to be over with. It’s going to be really, really hard to leave here, but I’m ready to go home.

Ok, those are my thoughts. Now as to what’s been happening for the last couple months. I can’t remember the last time I wrote or what I wrote about, so I’ll just start with my birthday. My birthday was June 10th, my second birthday in Honduras, and it was really nice. In the morning, as I was getting ready, the two librarians, who I’m friends with, came to my house bearing gifts. They gave me a tank top and underwear. Haha. They were nice though. Then I went to the kindergarten for Wednesday morning story hour, and all the kids sang to me and every single one gave me a hug and wished me happy birthday. In the afternoon, I went to the town down the road where there are two volunteers, and I met with them and a couple other nearby volunteers for lunch, so that was fun. We had a delicious chocolate cake and I got some presents! Then I went home and visited people all afternoon. In the evening, I went to my neighbors for my birthday dinner, which was good, and they gave me even more presents! All together, it was a very nice birthday. The following Saturday I went to my friend’s town a couple hours away and we had a combined birthday party. About 18 volunteers were there and a bunch of Honduran friends, so it was really fun.

In May and June I worked a lot with the schools. Every Wednesday I do culture talks with 5th grade. Each week we talk about a different continent and the way of life there. I use library materials and one or both of the librarians come with to do the talk with me. There are two 5th grades, so we have to do each talk twice. We’re usually there from 1-4. (The school systems a little different here. Grades 1-3 have class 7am-12:00pm while grades 4-6 have class 12:00-5:00). The talks have been going well. Hopefully I’ll be able to post some pictures soon.
In mid-June my Peace Corps group had our Close of Service Conference in the capital. It was 2 and a half days long and it was pretty helpful. We talked about searching for jobs, presenting our Peace Corps experience, readjusting to life in the US, administrative things about leaving, and some other things. Since it was the entire group I came to Honduras with, it was neat seeing everyone together again for the first time in almost two years, although we have lost many people who left due to medical or personal reasons. I saw people I haven’t really seen since we swore in as Volunteers. So that part was fun. I will have my end of service medical exams the week of September and will be flying home September 26.

The past few weeks have been a little crazy. As some of you have heard, there was a coup in Honduras. I’m not going to explain the whole thing, I shouldn’t get into politics, but any online news site will have articles about it. BBC News, CNN, and Washington Post have all had some good articles. If you have specific questions or want to know more about what’s happening, just email me or leave me a comment. The coup happened on Sunday, June 28th. Peace Corps kept in contact with us and we weren’t allowed to leave our sites for over a week. Now we’re allowed to travel, but only nearby. There’s been a national curfew in place since it happened. Although there have been lots of protests in the capital, and some violence, things have been pretty calm everywhere else. There have been some roadblocks and protests in other areas, but nothing too serious. So we’re really in no danger. But the day of the coup, and that whole week, everything was really uncertain and it was hard to get good information about what happened, what was happening, or what was going to happen. At first many of us thought we’d be evacuated out of Honduras, but since none of us have been in danger, that’s not going to happen.

A lot of work and projects were put on hold, and we weren’t allowed to travel, so it was a tough, anxious, boring couple of weeks. The teachers went on a nation-wide strike and schools were closed (which is a fairly common occurrence here) meaning that I haven’t had much work to do. Thankfully, classes are starting up again this week. Again, I could go into detail about what people are saying about the situation and what I think, and all of that, but this isn’t really the spot for that. It’s important for volunteers to stay neutral when talking to Hondurans, which is what I’ve been doing. It’s not really clear what’s going to happen, since negotiations last week fell through, but things are slowly returning to some normalcy.

Lately I’ve been busy applying to jobs. I’m mainly looking at non-profits in DC in the environmental field. I’m really worried because this obviously is not a good time to be looking for a job but I’m going to be persistent and I’ll settle for what I can get. I’ve applied to a lot, and plan on applying to many more. If anyone has any suggestions, leads, or knows of any openings, please let me know. Email me or leave me a comment. I can use all the help I can get!
I’ve written kind enough for now, I think. More to come soon, hopefully.

Earth Day

2009-04-24T11:18:00.002-06:00

I just want to write a quick entry about stuff I did on Earth Day. Wednesday mornings I take the kindergarteners to the library for story hour, so I did that and read them books about animals. We talked about why it's important to take care of the animals and the water and the Earth. Then the librarians had the kids color and cut out paper Earths and they hung them around their necks to take hope. And they learned an Earth Day song. It was really cute. Those kids are usually really well-behaved too.
In the afternoon the librarian and I went to the school to start our culture talks with the 5th graders. Every week we are going to cover a different continent. This first week was an introduction and we talked about why it's important to respect different cultures and people of different races. We played a country identification game, which they did ok on. It went well I think. And next week we are learning about Europe and Russia. I think I'm going to have to kids make little castles. In Honduras, they have an Environmental Day as well as an Earth Day, so I want to do more environmental activities for that.

i´m still here

2009-04-20T12:13:00.000-06:00

I haven’t updated in over a month! Shame on me. I’ll make this a long entry to make up for the lull. As I type this, I’m sitting in my house, in my plastic chair at my plastic table, eating vegetable bean soup and listening to the cicadas outside. I made the soup yesterday, and it’s good, but this is the third time I’ve eaten it since last night and I still have a lot left. Honduras has really taught me to love beans. I crave them when I don’t eat them for a while. Here red beans are more common, but in Costa Rica and I think in El Salvador, black beans are more popular. I like both.

A note on the cicadas: they are HUGE, they three inches long. And, unlike cicadas at home that are considerate enough to only come out every seven years, these guys come out every year and make tons of noise for like two months before they disappear again. Sometimes they sneak their way into my house at night and fly around banging into the ceiling. They’re so gross.

So, you’re probably wondering what I’ve been doing. Right after my last entry, I had to go to Tegucigalpa to the Peace Corps office to see the doctors and get some tests for the brucela, my raw dairy disease. Everything turned out ok. I’m now done with the antibiotics and I think I might have to get another test to make sure they worked. The weekend after that, I went to visit my host family who I hadn’t seen in a while. They are all doing well and were in the process of building a very large swimming pool when I was there. I hear that the pool is now complete, is very nice, and has many visitors. I’m not sure if they’re charging admission or what the deal is. I’ll probably go see them this week. They are so high in the mountains that it’s usually too cool up there for me to swim. Here in town it’s considerably hotter. It’s in the 80s all day and it hasn’t rained in weeks. The sun is so strong is sometimes gives me really bad headaches. One week, I had a headache for three days straight. I think it’s because, not only are we near the equator, but we’re at a high altitude, so the sun is really strong. The rain will start in about a month.

I’m doing monthly talks at the high school with the 7th graders. (Here, grade school is 1st-6th and then high school starts at 7th). This month, in honor of Earth Day, I’m giving a talk on global warming on the 28th. I can’t do it closer to Earth Day because the students are in exams all that week. Last month, two other volunteers came to help me, and we did a talk on HIV/AIDS, which went pretty well. The problem was that we did it with 57 students at once, and it was just too hard to keep order. But it’s such a long charla that I didn’t want to have to do it twice. For all the other talks I do, I’m going to split the kids into two sections. The day after the AIDS talk, I went to the kindergarten to do story hour and one of the teachers hadn’t come, so the other teacher was stuck with all 58 kindergarteners. That’s a lot of little kids, but I have to say they were better behaved than the 7th graders. This week the librarian and I are beginning the culture charlas with the 5th graders, so that will be fun.

The library has all kinds of problems right now. We have very little participation from the town, and no funding. They are trying to reconnect internet, with a different, cheaper provider, but there are issues with the foundation. We’ve tried to get funding to pay for internet from various local organizations and companies and from embassies, without any luck. So we’re still looking for possible counterparts to help keep the library running. Fundraisers don’t work very well because they are a lot of work, and we don’t have to manpower to run them, plus people in town don’t really have the money to support them. We’re also exploring strategies to get more local interest in the library. It’s all very frustrating.

On a more positive note, we just had Semana Santa, or Holy Week, where pretty much everyone has the week off to spend with their families, and go to the river or the beach to cool off. I went to La Ceiba, on the north coast to stay with a volunteer there. A bunch of people came and it was a lot of fun. We swan in the pool, went to the beach, went to the mall, saw a movie, had some good food. It’s nice having a common week off where everyone is celebrating at the same time.

Sunday I spent a lot of time doing laundry and cleaning my house, which was getting really dusty. It was kind of gross. The longer what bugs and I go without cleaning, the more I dread cleaning I’m going to find in the process. Luckily, I didn’t find anything gross today, just lots and lots of dust. Last night there was a very large spider on my bedroom wall, which made me realize I could no longer put off cleaning. So now my house is nicer and cleaner. I also spent some time today reading in my hammock. My hammock is not as nice as it once was because it’s gotten really stretched out and hangs low and isn’t very comfortable, so I’m debating whether I should buy a new one. I’m reading a book by Jane Goodall about chimpanzees. I was really surprised my some of their behavior, such as killing each other, cannibalizing infant chimps, and having war among chimp clans. It’s an interesting book. I haven’t been reading as much lately because I’ve had a lot of other stuff going on. And I’m getting back into computer chess and spider solitaire, so sometimes I play one of those instead of read. Also, planning English lessons and charlas is pretty time-consuming. Well, that’s all for now. I hope you enjoyed all my random news and thoughts.

new jeans!

2009-03-16T12:42:00.001-06:00

I’ve had really good weekends lately. On Saturday, I spent the day in Santa Rosa, the biggest town near us, with another volunteer. We went shopping and I got a new pair of jeans, which is pretty exciting. All my clothes are in a sad state so it’s really exciting getting something new.
On Sunday I took a trip with this man from my community who is the president of the library board and the market board and works in the mayor’s office. We went to a town about 45 minutes away to visit his brothers and sisters and we decided to call the volunteers who live in the towns we were in so they could come along with us. So four of us drove around with Don Carvagal to meet all his family. We went to seven houses in one day and of course at each house they’d give us something to drink. At the first house we had coffee, tamales, and birthday cake (at 9:30 am), at the following houses we had: Coke, another Coke (which I managed to decline), horchata (a local drink made from corn and cinnamon), a big lunch and green mango juice, banana soda (it’s kind of disgusting), and coffee. Of course we appreciate people being so hospitable, but it’s really rude to refuse anything, and it gets hard to drink so much sugar. And then I got home at 5:30 and it was my neighbor’s birthday so I had more birthday cake and Coke! It was a really interesting day. I got to play with a cute dog, hold a really cute baby, and meet a lot of good people. One thing I really love about Honduras is how hospitable, friendly, and open people can be. Often, even though you’re meeting someone for the first time, they act like they’re your best friend and invite you to do things and give you food and just be really nice and make you feel comfortable. I love that.
Last week was pretty busy. Our library just lost its internet and a lot of financial and logistic support that it had from the foundation, so we are writing proposals/solicitudes for funding and researching organizations we can solicit from. I’m doing a cultural project with the library for 5th grade in the school. Once a week the librarian and I are going to visit the school and do an hour session with the 5th graders about the cultures of the world. The first half hour will be a talk about a continent, including how people dress, eat, live; religions; wildlife; some history; etc. We’ll show pictures, maps, music, and videos. The second half an hour will be an activity, like face painting, drawing, doing a craft, etc. If anyone has any good ideas for this, please let me know. It’s an 8 week activity and the final week, the students have to present in groups about something specific of their assigned region, such as food, sports, native tribes, animals, or whatever they want.
Another activity I’m doing to promote the library is story hour with the kindergarten. It’s the cutest thing. My first day of it was last Wednesday and I had 40 little kids in the library. I was surprised by how well behaved they were, which I attribute to their amazing teacher; she is so patient with them, and they listen to her. I read them four or five little books and asked them questions and we did some little activities and they loved it and I loved it. There are two kinder classes so I’m going to rotate weeks with them.

I’ve also been visiting the high school. I gave them a long explanation of Project Citizen, which is an excellent 3 month activity about civic education for the students. They select a problem in the community, research it, research the current policies, and create their own public policy for the problem. They conduct interviews and use internet, newspapers, books, and generally learn how to research and develop critical thought. At the end, they present their findings to a committee. The director really liked the idea, but after I presented it to the teachers, they decided it would be too much work. It’s too bad, because I really would like to do it; but it’s not going to happen without support and participation from the teachers. So I’m going to visit the high schools in the two towns next to me to present it. On the plus side, I did schedule talks to do with the students, one a month.
I’d like to get the recycling going again, but prices have dropped from 2 lempiras a pound to 1 lempira a pound, which wont even cover transportation, so I’m not sure how it’d work. I’m going to develop a proposal with a local NGO (non-governmental organization) to look for funding for a garbage project. There’s so much I want to do, but everything takes so long and it’s very difficult to find someone really willing to work. But things are going well. Ever since I got back from the US, I’ve been so happy here. I don’t think I’ve had any bad days. That’s all for now. I’ll try to update soon.

back in honduras

2009-02-14T13:48:00.001-06:00

Hello all. I hope you all read the wonderful previous entry by my good friend Becky. Thanks Becky! So I left the US on Feb 6th, and managed to get back to my house the same day, despite my bus being held up for an hour in a huge line of cars due to an accident with a semi blocking the entire road. It was sooo nice to come back. And when I walked around on Saturday, everyone was so happy to see me and saying they had been worried and that they were missing me. Being in the US for so long was great; it was really nice enjoying hot showers and good food, but it also made me appreciate my relaxed life here. I love Peace Corps.
I´ve spent the last week catching up with everything. School started on Monday, so I´m planning some activities to do with the students.
My illness is no longer a mystery. My last test results just came back and apparently, I have brucella, which you get from eating unpasteurised milk products. Of course I didn´t know I was eating unpasteurised milk and I don´t know where I got it. It´s a pretty rare disease. But I should be ok, I just have to take antibiotics every day for 6 weeks.
So, that´s all for now. Happy Valentine´s Day!

Hello from Becky!

2009-02-05T14:45:00.004-06:00

Hi Everyone who reads this blog! This is Becky, Kristyn's friend from college.

(Kristyn and me, senior year of college!)

How are all of you doing?

I'm doing pretty well :) Kristyn wrote an entry for me today in my blog, so I thought that I would be nice and reciprocate. Kristyn hasn't written an entry in a long time, so I'll try to help her out and let you know what she's been up to.

First of all, Kristyn arrived in the US about three weeks ago. As some of you may know, she was sick with what she thought was Dengue. She was really tired and had chills...and all of this happened right before her big DC trip! She was disappointed, but excited to come visit anyway.

For most of her trip, Kristyn stayed with our friend Julia (her room mate from college). Julia just got a nice house in Arlington, VA. right outside of DC so Kristyn was excited to go see it. For the first few days of her trip, Kristyn was pretty busy. She went to some museums in DC, out to dinner with friends from college...she even got to visit with a family that had babysat for during junior and senior year of college. She stayed with that family a few nights too.

A few days after Kristyn arrived, her friend Brianna, who's also a Peace Corps volunteer came into town. Brianna had gotten her and Kristyn some tickets to great events going on. Saturday, January 18th Brianna got Kristyn and her tickets to a women's luncheon that Michelle Obama was supposed to go to. Unfortunately, Michelle didn't make it...though there was a cake/candles/singing for her! Later that night, Brianna scored FOUR tickets to an inaugural ball...which I was able to go to too! I even brought a friend's girlfriend with me as my date.

(Kristyn and I at the ball. Look at our cool VIP passes!)

Kristyn, Brianna, Jackie (my friend) and I went to the People's Inaugural Ball. It was at the Grand Hyatt in downtown Washington, DC-very nice. There was dancing, a live band, some hors d'oeuvres, drinks, a fashion show-a very fun evening! Later, we went and met up with a friend from school, and went out dancing! Even though Kristyn was sick, she stayed up pretty late that night...missing the metro, having to catch a cab back to the house she was staying at in Maryland.

The next few days of the 'inauguration' weekend were pretty fun. We all had brunch at Julia's house in Arlington, VA on Sunday and hung out for the rest of the day.

(Kristyn, Julia, me and Giuliana)

Kristyn slept a lot because she wasn't feeling well. On Monday, her grandma, Aunt (Karen) and Aunt's boyfriend came to pick Kristyn up. They took a day trip to Thomas Jefferson's house in Monticello, VA. It's a bit of a drive from DC (around 3 hours I think) but it was very beautiful there and they had a good time.

(Aunt Karen, Kristyn, Grandma at Monticello!)

Tuesday, the BIG inauguration day, Kristyn was very busy. For some reason, the people who were organizing the Peace Corps delegation in the inaugural parade took her name off of THE list and Kristyn thought she might not be able to walk in the parade! She and Brianna were very upset! Luckily, after making some phone calls, and meeting with a guy named Corey, Kristyn was put BACK on the list and allowed to march in the inaugural parade. She had to get up at 4:30 am, take a bus from where she was staying with her Aunt and Grandma, to the DC metro and then take the metro into the city. The metro was packed and because of the MILLIONS of people that came in for Obama, took a while. She waited outside for most of the day, but was finally able to march in the afternoon. How exciting!

(Kristyn and Brianna, waiting to march in the Peace Corps tent)

(The group gets ready to march!)

The rest of the week, Kristyn wasn't feeling very well. She was supposed to come visit ME in New York City where I live, but she wasn't able to make it. It was very sad. She had to go to a few Peace Corps doctors...and it took a long time. She got some blood work done, including a MALARIA test.

Once Monday rolled around, Kristyn was actually feeling a bit better. At this point, she was again staying with our friend Julia. Julia was happy to get to spend some time with Kristyn after not seeing her much over the past few years. She had another doctor's appointment, and the Dr. told her the Malaria tests, among other things, were negative. The doctor told her though that she couldn't go back to Honduras for another week at least because he wanted to monitor her and make sure she didn't have anything more serious.

Kristyn didn't know what to do. She hadn't told anyone in her town in Honduras that she would be gone this long, and she was missing the other Peace Corps volunteers. But she had all this extra time so...

she came to visit ME in New York City! I was so happy! From this past Friday, January 30th, through early Monday, February 2nd Kristyn was here! We did a lot of stuff while she was here. We went out Friday night, and Kristyn got to meet my room mates (I have two) and some of my other friends. Saturday we went to brunch (a very New York City thing to do) and then to a modern art gallery near where I live. Saturday night my friend had a Kansas Day party, so Kristyn came to that with me. Sunday, we went to a Chinese New Year parade in downtown Manhattan and then to the NYC transit museum in Brooklyn. We ended our day at my friend's apartment in Astoria, Queens (where I live too) and watched some of the superbowl. It was great having her here, especially after seeing her place in Honduras when I went to visit in June.

(Kristyn and I in an old subway car at the NYC transit museum. She loves to take pictures like this :) )

Monday morning Kristyn headed back to DC for another Doctor's appointment. The doctor wanted to run just a FEW more tests even though Kristyn seemed fine. The next day she had another Doctor's appointment and on Wednesday she found out that she could head back to Honduras on Friday morning. She's still not exactly sure what she had in the first place, but it was probably something like Dengue.

Kristyn was very happy!

In the meantime, the waiting between Doctor's appointments and extra down time wasn't all bad. Kristyn got to see 'Slumdog Millionaire', do a lot of shopping, eat some good 'American' food like Dairy Queen and Potbellys. And she got to spend time with her friends, which is never a bad thing.

All in all, Kristyn has had a great trip to the US but she's ready to go back! I was so happy to get to see her, since I miss her a lot! In college we talked every day, multiple times and hung out a lot. So, it's been hard not having her here to talk to. But, now I got to spend a little bit of time with Kristyn, and it won't be so hard when I dont' see her until September.

:)

That's all for me. Hope you're all having a good day and Kristyn says 'HI' to all of you!

xo
Becky

Happy Holidays

2009-01-09T07:25:00.002-06:00

I apologize for not updating in so long. I'm not much of a writer, unless it's for school, so I have to force myself to write every time I do a blog. And this past month with all the holidays, it's been even harder.

I’m going to start with Donkey Polo, which took place December 12-13. Donkey Polo, or Burro Polo, was started by a Municipal Development Peace Corps Volunteer 12 years ago in the town of Yuscaran, which is in the south-east, near the Nicaraguan border. Donkey Polo is basically what it sounds, a simplified game of polo played on donkeys instead of horses. It’s always volunteers versus the Hondurans of Yuscaran, and every single year the Hondurans have won. By a lot. This year we scored 2 and they scored at least 13. The game takes place during the Yuscaran town feria, so there are lots of food stands set up in the park, music, and a stage with events going on. Yuscaran is a beautiful town, and it’s near where we had our field based training for about 6 weeks, so I already had a good impression of that area of the country. I currently live on the complete opposite side of the country, but since Honduras is about the size of Tennessee, traveling across it is worth it for something as fun as Donkey Polo.

We played on a concrete soccer/basketball court, which was covered in donkey poop by the end. Because so many of us wanted to play, we broke it up into quarters and switched up each quarter. I played last, and my stupid donkey would not move, no matter how hard I hit it. And when it did decide to move, it would run in the opposite direction of where the action was! I was getting pretty frustrated with it. For most of my time in the game, I was smushed up against the fence because that’s where my donkey wanted to stand. On the plus side, I got some good pictures of myself on a donkey. On the down side, I don’t know when I’ll be able to post those pictures, because whenever I try, they don’t load. But overall, it was a really fun weekend. Donkey Polo was a once in a lifetime thing, only to be experienced in Honduras.

Now for the holidays. I’ve now spent my second Christmas and second New Year’s in Honduras. Christmas really isn’t the same here as in the US; it’s just not such a big deal here. There’s not much Christmas music, or decorations, or Christmas cookies, or exchanging of gifts. People usually get together with family and the woman make tamales and pan (a type of bread eaten with coffee). And at night lots of men get really drunk, someone told me there were 30 murders Christmas Eve night from drunk people having machete fights, or shooting each other. I don’t know if the number’s correct, but I’m sure there were a lot of drunken murders that night. It’s so sad that happens on such a holy night.

I spent Christmas at a fellow volunteer's site, in Nueva Ocotepeque, which is at the western most part of the country, near the borders of El Salvador and Guatemala. There were 5 of us there, volunteers from my group. On the 23rd, we went up to an aldea so that Brianna (the volunteer who lives there) could give out Christmas cards and cookies. On the 24^th, we made lots of good food and hiked up the side of a mountain behind the house, which has an amazing view of the town, and we had a picnic and watched the sunset. It was beautiful. . It’s tradition to stay up until midnight on the 24^th and set off fireworks, the same as the 31^st, but we went to bed around 10, which was probably safer. The 25^th, we made lots of good food again, and had a nice dinner and a secret santa gift exchange. The next day, we walked to this old cemetery and that night we went to karaoke (I didn't sing). So it was a really nice few days.

For New Year’s Eve, I went with another volunteer to his Honduran counterpart’s house, and there was a small party. There were tamales, honduran chop suey (they use ramen noodles, soy sauce, and lots of vegetables), and some other snacks. The night was really fun; there was music and lots of fireworks. Here it's tradition to have fireworks for Christmas and New Year's. And they make a man out of old rags and put clothes on him, kind of like a scarecrow, and they stuff him full of fireworks and set him off at midnight! Its supposed to represent the old year.

Not much happened over the Holiday weeks, since most people either had family visiting or were gone visiting family. I’ve been helping out in the library a lot, getting ready for the New Year. We took everything down, cleaned, and made new decorations.

The Sunday after New Year’s I began to feel really sick, kind of like I had the flu. My body was really achy and I kept getting the chills, but I was still up and functioning part of the day. By Wednesday I still wasn’t feeling well, and it suddenly occurred to me that I had the symptoms of dengue. Achy muscles, cramps, fever, chills, headache, pain behind eyes, tiredness, etc. Some of you might remember I was in the hospital my first week in Honduras, and dengue was a possibility. But I’m fairly positive that wasn’t dengue, it was just some kind of virus.This time it really is dengue. So Wednesday morning, I called the Peace Corps doctors but they just told me what I already knew, drink lots of fluids, take Panadol (local version of Tyenol), and rest. So that’s what I’ve been doing. Wednesday and Thursday were probably the worst days. It’s awful being sick. But people have really been taking care of me. On Thursday morning I texted the librarian that I thought I had dengue, which is why I hadn’t gone to the library the afternoon before and I didn’t think I’d go that day.

So on Thursday, Laura, the volunteer in the town next to me, came over to take care of me all day. We talked and she brought me food and made me tea. It was really nice of here. And a few people in town stopped by to see how I was. The man who works in the mayor’s office and is president of the library junta stopped by, the lady who works in the market gave me a Gatorade, and right after Laura left at 4, the two librarians (they are both about my age) stopped by and brought me crackers and juice. They stayed for about an hour. One of them told me stories of a heart condition she had when she was young and she had to get her lungs drained. She described what it was like to be in the children’s ward of the public hospital. They wouldn’t even let the parents in to be with their children. There were lots of little kids there with swollen heads, and bellies, with tubes sticking out of them, and they were all scared and alone. After listening to her stories, I felt much better. My dengue seemed like nothing next to the suffering of those kids. One of the things that makes me saddest in life is seeing really hurt or ill little kids. So anyway, it was really nice of them to come see me. After they left, I slept from 5:30-8:30, woke up, had some soup, read a little, and went back to bed at 10. This morning I’m feeling somewhat better, hopefully the fever doesn’t come back.So that's the start to my New Year. Hopefully this will fill my sickness quota for the rest of the year.

Thanksgiving and World AIDS Day

2008-12-08T10:00:00.000-06:00

I’m trying to think of everything’s that happened since I last wrote. Thanksgiving went well. We had about 20 people, mostly volunteers, but also a few Americans here teaching at bilingual schools or working with other organizations doing Peace Corps-type work. Everyone there I had met before, and several are some of my best friends here, so it was nice gathering.

We found frozen turkey in the back freezer of a little corner store, which was good because it was easier than killing a turkey, but had me a little worried because we didn’t know how long it had been in that freezer or whether it had been defrosted and refrozen several times. Despite my doubts, the turkey turned out excellent. We had excellent homemade stuffing as well as Stove Top Stuffing, homemade wheat bread and garlic rolls, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, green bean casserole, cranberry sauce, and some other dishes. There were many excellent desserts, including pumpkin pie, chocolate pecan pie, dirt dessert, peanut butter chocolate bars, a fruit salad, a jello mold, and more.

Our biggest setback of the day is that the water went out sometime Wednesday night and when I left Friday morning it still had not come back. So we spent all day Thursday without water, which made cleaning, cooking, washing plates, flushing the toilet, etc., a challenge. We took buckets and made trips to neighbors’ houses begging for water. No one in the neighborhood had water, but they all have pilas (like water tanks) whereas the house we were staying at doesn’t, so they were able to spare us some water. Despite all the setbacks, the day turned out really nice.

A couple days before Thanksgiving, my host parents and I had a meeting with a rural bank in one of the aldeas, which we helped form. They invited us for a celebration 1 year anniversary lunch. It was pretty neat to see that this group we helped form and train is going strong a year later. It’s a really great community with motivated people.

This past week we celebrated World AIDS Day, which is December 1st. I organized a small committee to plan events for the day, and we decided to have activities the whole week. Our committee included the Doctor from the health center, the librarian and her assistant, a local pastor, a representative from PDA (the local chapter of World Vision, a Christian aid organization), and representatives from the municipality. The doctor is a woman, and just started at our health center a few months ago, although she lives in our town. I really like her, she’s very motivated and friendly. I’d like to work more with her. Of all the activitys we planned for the week, about half actually happened.

On Monday, the 1st, we had an inauguration of the week, with the mayor, doctor, and pastor giving little speeches, and then, with the school band and some HIV/AIDS banners, we walked from the health center to the park. Our town’s TV channel came to film it all, and for the rest of the day I had people telling me they saw me on TV.

We were discussing having a health fair in the park on Tuesday, with the nurses doing HIV tests and handing out pamphlets, but that didn’t quite get organized. On Wednesday night I gave a talk to a group of 8 teenagers about HIV/AIDS. It’s a pre-prepared charla that Peace Corps gives us, and it has a lot of activities and games, rather than a lot of talking. Another volunteer came to help me out, and the Doctor came to participate and explain some of the more complicated medical parts. I was really worried no one would come, and it did take away to round up enough kids to participate, but in the end it went really well.

On Thursday we were supposed to have an AIDS patient come in to talk to a small group about his/her story and how it is living with AIDS, but the person in charge of the activity fell through, so that didn’t happen. I spent all of Thursday in the library, helping put together decorations for the float for the parade Friday. It was fun, I had never worked on a float before. I’ll try to post pictures of it. So we were in the library until 8pm on Thursday, cutting, gluing, etc. Friday morning we all meet at 7:30am to decorate the car. It was a really overcast day, but we decided to go ahead with it. As we were finishing up the car, it started raining steadily, so I went to talk to the doctor, and we all decided that we’d have to postpone the parade so that the rain wouldn’t ruin all the decorations. It was pretty disappointing after all the work we put into it, but now everyone has more time to improve their floats!
So it’s been a pretty busy week, with good days and bad days.

futbol and café

2008-11-21T13:47:00.003-06:00

Wednesday night was a big soccer game, Honduras vs. Mexico, playing in Honduras. As a fundraiser for the library youth group, we set up the projector in the community center and showed the game in there. They charged a little for entrance and sold popcorn and pop. It was fun watching the game on such a big screen. Honduras won, 1-0, so of course everyone was super excited. Thursday morning I went to pick coffee in the farm of one of the old men who sells in the market. Coffee picking is hard, dirty work that pays practically nothing. I just went for the experience and to spend time with people. I picked a decent amount, they said. It’s definitely not something I’d want to do on a regular basis. At least it wasn´t raining. It’s been pretty cold this week, but not too rainy.

Right now, I’m putting together a group to plan activities for World AIDS Day, which is December 1st. We decided to make it a week-long event and have things each day, from the 1st to the 6th, and end the week with a little parade, Sat the 6th. It should be good, but there’s a lot of work to do.

On Sunday I think I’m going to a wedding. It will be the 3rd wedding I’ve gone to in the past month. Weddings here are definitely different than in the US. It´s fun going to different weddings and birthday parties and seeing how people celebrate.

yay obama!

2008-11-08T10:13:00.002-06:00

It’s been a while since I last wrote, so let’s see. All the people who were evacuated have now returned to their houses, so that’s good. School lets out in about a week so I want to start a sport club and an environmental club to do with the kids during vacations. Coffee season is starting, the coffee berries are turning red and ready to pick. So during break, a lot of kids will be busy picking coffee. We had some super cold days last week, but the past 4 days or so have been really warm and sunny. It’s weird how the weather changes so drastically.

My friend from college, Ashlee, was here this past week visiting. She speaks Spanish well, so it was nice introducing her to all my friends in town. We spent time in my town and then for Halloween we went to a big party that volunteers have every year in the town of Copan Ruins, which is a touristy town near Mayan ruins. It was my first time there, and I really liked it. It’s clean, pretty, and has lots of good restaurants.

There was live music both nights and a costume party one night. There were some pretty good costumes. I was a nance tree. Nances are this little yellow fruit that is absolutely disgusting. It looks similar to a cherry, but it’s yellow and has a putrid smell, and gross taste and texture. They only grow in Honduras, as far as I know. Pretty much every volunteer hates them, and Hondurans are always trying to give us nances or nance juice. Once I was at a teacher’s house and she gave me nance juice, and I didn’t want to be rude, so I tried drinking it, but I couldn’t do it, it’s a gag reflex. So I thought a nance tree would be a scary costume. Anyway, the party was fun. We didn’t actually visit the ruins, because it’s kind of expensive to enter, but hopefully I’ll be able to go back before I leave.

Ashlee flew in and out of El Salvador, so we went to San Salvador the day before her flight. San Salvador is so nice; I was really surprised. It has nice malls and stores, and I think it’s just all around nicer than either of the big cities in Honduras. I definitely enjoyed going to the nice malls.

We were able to watch the elections on US channels, in English, so that was good. Watching Obama win just made me so extremely happy. And I’m reading Dreams from My Father right now, wish just makes me respect him even more. When he wrote that book, he didn’t have presidential aspirations, so it’s a very honest book. He’s had such an interesting life.

I saw Obama speak at Georgetown University in October 2006, my senior year. He was giving a talk about fossil fuel possibilities and I took the day off of my internship at the Sierra Club to go see him speak. I remember it was a beautiful fall day, and I walked to Georgetown from my apartment. He was such a good speaker and I thought then that some day this man could be President, and I’m seeing him speak right now. I didn’t think he’d be President so soon! Everyone here is really happy he won. People in El Salvador and in Honduras have been congratulating me on Obama winning and saying how happy they are about it. It’s such an exciting time to be an American. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so patriotic.

In other news, we think my duck, Paco, is actually a girl. So I´m thinking up a new name. Also, our town library now has a webpage up if you want to check it out. It´s in Spanish and it stills needs some work, but it´s something. There are some good pictures under the ‘Galeria de Imagenes’ tab. Here´s the link: http://www.bibliotecasanpedro.es.tl/
Go to it so we can get more hits!

natural disasters

2008-10-24T09:55:00.002-06:00

there´s been a lot going on here the past week. Last Friday there was a huge landslide up in one of the mountains, which wiped out an entire aldea (village). Luckily, they had some warning and everyone got out in time, but they lost everything in their homes. Then the dirt from the landslide fell into the river, creating a large, natural damn. So whenever this damn breaks, all the water behind it will come rushing down the river. About 5 aldeas down the river were evacuated. There are hundreds of evacuees staying in the school and in the munincipal meeting room of the town next to mine, and about 25 people staying here. So I´ve been going almost every day to play with the kids and keep them occupied. They are just waiting; they can´t go back to thier homes until the damn breaks. I have to say the local government, police, army, and NGOs have been very organized taking care of the evacuees and keeping everything in order. Also, throughout the country, there has been a lot of flooding, and, in certain parts, tremors. So people are being evacuated all over. It´s pretty crazy. The other volunteers near me and I are safe, and Peace Corps is well aware of the situation. In other news, I have a friend from the US coming on Tuesday, so I´m excited about that. It´s fun having visitors.

2008-10-15T09:11:00.002-06:00

I just want to write a quick update. I decided against having a cat; I just don't really like cats. So I gave him back to the people who gave him to me. My duck is doing well and getting big. He pretty much lives at my neighbors' but he's happy because he has a pond to swim in and geese to hang out with. My neighbors had a couple turkeys, but the male turkey just attacked and killed the female turkey! I told them he's too aggressive and dangerous. I don't want my duck in danger of a turkey attack. So we are going to kill and eat the aggressive turkey. He gets the death penalty for killing his wife. I think we're going to have him for Thanksgiving. Hondurans obviously don't celebrate Thanksgiving but they know what it is, so we'll have a little Thanksgiving dinner.

The map is finally finished! It took exactly one month to do. Next week we are going to celebrate. Me and the students will write our names on the wall and I'll make a cake. And I want to organize some geography activities. The map looks pretty good, although it's far from perfect. I'll post pictures of the whole process when I get a chance. The electricity has been going out a lot lately, so I haven't had much chance to use internet.

Right now I'm in the Peace Corps office in Tegucigalpa. My group is here for mid-term medical exams. We have to poop in a cup, get a physical, and go to the dentist. I traveled all day yesterday to get here, I have the medical stuff today, and I'll travel all day tommorrow to get back to my town. It's just so far.

kitty

2008-10-06T13:15:00.002-06:00

I had a really good weekend. On Friday during the day I hung out in the market. I didn’t paint the map border like I had planned because we ran out of paint thinner and the one hardware store in town didn’t have any. I didn’t feel like going to one of the neighboring towns to get some, so instead I just hung out and talked to people. We played soccer for a little while and I made paper airplanes with the kids. It was really relaxing, and sitting there making paper airplanes, I thought about what a great job I have. In the US, I’d never be able to be sitting around on a Friday afternoon making paper airplanes and get paid for it.
Around 4pm I left for my friend Kyler’s site, a volunteer about 35 minutes in bus from me. It was the feria in his town this weekend. It was bigger than our feria, but we had better rides. The ferris wheel in our feria was pretty big and it went super fast. At this feria, they had a little ferris wheel, and it was manual. There was no motor, just a man standing at the bottom, hand-pulling it. He was a very strong man.
On Saturday, there was bull-riding. We had bull-riding in our feria, but I didn’t go because it was raining. So Saturday was the first time I’d ever seen bull-riding, other than on TV. There were 9 bulls and a small ring, and the guys took turns riding. Kyler said he was going to ride one but I was kind of skeptical. He was all ready with his sombrero, belt, and cowboy shirt. During the event, he stood down by the riders and the bulls and I sat in the stands with another volunteer, Meghan, who came to watch. It was pretty scary to watch the riding, and a couple guys almost got stepped on by the bull, although no one did actually get hurt. So I was really thinking that Kyler would back out and decide not to ride. But then he was suiting up to go. The participants wore a helmet that looked like a baseball catcher’s helmet, but was a little different. And they wore a padded leather vest. I was kind of nervous when Kyler got on the bull, but he did well, stayed on for about 5 seconds, and he fell well and didn’t hurt anything. And then the announcer did a quick interview and congratulated him. It’s not everyday you see a gringo riding bulls in Honduras. It was all pretty exciting.
Sunday, I went with my neighbors to their niece’s 12th birthday party. The party was in a community in the mountains, so we all crowded into the back of a pickup truck to drive up there. It was a nice, small party. We ate tamales, talked, and had cake. I knew most of the people there, so it was nice to talk to people. There were some cute little kids there, too.
Sunday evening, walking home from the little store down the street, around 6:30, I saw a little animal in the street. It was kind of dark out and at first I thought it was a rat, but then realized it was a tiny kitten. So I chased it and grabbed it, so that a car wouldn’t hit it in the dark, and asked around to see who it belonged to. The twins across the street, two 8 year olds, said it belonged to them, their cat recently had 3 kittens, but that they were giving away the kittens and I could have it if I wanted it. I don’t really want a cat, but this kitten is just so little and cute. And it needs care, it’s dirty and skinny. I told them I wasn’t sure I wanted it, but could they loan it to me. So I brought it home, gave it a bath and some milk, and it’s sitting in my lap sleeping as I type this. I don’t really want a cat, but I do like this kitten. And my duck’s kind of left me, so I no longer have a pet.
Things have been going well lately. The map is almost done, we should finish by Tuesday I think. It´s looking great!

1 year in site!

2008-09-26T13:43:00.002-06:00

Saturday the 27th is my 1 year in site date. I’ve been a Peace Corps Volunteer for a year. I’m half-way done. That actually seems about right, I wouldn’t say the time is passing slow or fast, it just seems likes it’s been a year. This past year I’ve met many people, formed strong friendships, become a part of this community, and have learned a lot about Honduras and Hondurans. I’ve gained a much better understanding of the factors holding back Honduras and why. There are so many things I’ve learned and grown to understand this year. This experience is definitely preparing me to work in the field of international affairs. I’d really like to get my master’s in international environmental policy at some point after Peace Corps.
I came to my site with a lot of big ideas and plans. Now I’ve come to see that most of them aren’t really feasible, but that even if I can’t reach my big goals, my time here isn’t wasted. Although there is more I’d like to be achieving, I know my relationships and the lives I’m touching does count for a lot. I do complain about certain things here and how hard it can be, but I’m so happy I’m doing Peace Corps. There’s really no other experience like it. Even working in an NGO or government organization in a developing country wouldn’t be the same, because here I’m free to work in whatever I want to and whatever the community wants me to; I’m not tied down by a work plan, boss, or budget. This next year, I hope to get involved in more sustainable activities and get to know more people. I think the next year actually will go fast. There´s so much I want to do in work and travel, and planning for my post-Peace Corps life.
That´s all for now. I don´t think I´ll be celebrating Saturday, just working on the map, but I´ll be thinking about how my time here is half over.

independence day and map making

2008-09-18T13:54:00.000-06:00

There are a few exciting things going on right now. Last Wednesday, the 10th, was Día del Niño (Day of the Children/Kid’s Day). All the schools have a big party for the kids with food, games, and piñatas. The idea is that a lot of kids in really poor families don’t really get to celebrate their birthdays, and some kids don’t even know when their birthdays are, so Día del Niño is kind of like a big birthday party for all the kids. The morning of the 10th all the kids were so excited, it was really neat to see. I made cookies for the kids that live near me. Other countries, at least in Central America, also celebrate Día del Niño, but on different dates. I think there is a Kid’s Day in the US, but it’s not really celebrated because there every day is like kid’s day. There you don’t really see 8 year olds selling things on buses or 6 year olds filling potholes by hand or 11 year olds sifting through garbage dumps.

Also in this month is Independence Day, September 15th. Every town has a parade for Independence Day and the students and the bands march in the parade. For the past week the schools have been doing almost nothing except practicing marching. It’s a very big deal. I don’t think people really celebrate with parties and fireworks like in the US. Last year for Independence Day I was in training in El Paraiso, which is a bigger town in the eastern part of the country. They had a very nice, big parade.

The parade here was good, but not that big. It was neat because every kid in town was in it. First came some students carrying flags, then the mayor and other officials of the municipality, then the high school band, high school honors students, a car float with the queens of the feria, and the rest of the high school students. Then came the school group, first some kids holder a banner for the school, then the school band, then the honors students, then some girls dancing, then the rest of the students. They were all supposed to march the whole parade, but they didn’t really because they were tired. After the school came the kindergarten. They had two car floats with some of the kids sitting in them. It was really cute. And the rest of the kids walked. So that was the whole parade. They made a circle through the main part of town, it lasted about an hour. The rest of the day was pretty boring. Everything was closed and no one was doing anything.

September 16th is Teacher’s Day. The teachers deserve a rest after all the work they put into Día del Niño and Día de Independencia. So schools have only been in session a few days over the past 2 weeks.

My exciting project right now is a World Map project, which is the painting of a large world map in a public place, usually on a wall or on a playground or basketball court. This is a project designed by a Peace Corps Volunteer in 1988 in the Dominican Republic and has been done in many Peace Corps countries and in the US. I have a Peace Corps manual explaining the project. You draw a grid and then draw the map according to the grid. In the manual there are sheets for each section of the map so you can do the grid. After drawing the grid and the map, you paint all the countries and then label them. It’s a very time consuming project but it will be fun and educational.

Last week, I just decided I wanted to do this in the town market and I told the market group my idea. I went to the high school to get some students to volunteer to help. The wall in the market is made of concrete block, so I had to get some concrete and get someone to finish and smooth the section we were going to paint on. So I organized that in a day. Then I went to local hardware stores and got them to donate us paint. I’ve actually been really pleasantly surprised how much people are contributing to this project. On Saturday me and one of the men who works in the market started by putting sealer on the wall and painting it blue. We draw and paint the countries over the blue, it’s easier than painting blue around the countries. The section of wall is 2 meters by 5 meters but the map will be 2 meters by 4 meters, so it will have a little of a border on each side. On Sunday a few students came to help measure and start the grid. We didn’t get that much done because they came in the afternoon and it started raining. On Tuesday the same students came back and a nearby volunteer also came to help. We worked most of the day and got a lot done. We finished drawing the grid and finished drawing most of the bottom half of the map- South America, Africa, Australia, and Antarctica. It’s kind of fun working on, drawing all the countries, and it’s going to look soooo good when it’s finished.

I have also been busy working on a project proposal and budget for these workshops my host family wants to give to the group of women. They want to give baking and needlework workshops so the women can start producing and have sort of a microenterprise. We had a meeting with the group last Friday and the community is really excited about it and already planning the workshops. So I think it has potential to be a good project.

pics of Paco

2008-09-01T13:28:00.004-06:00

Paco el Pato

2008-09-01T13:23:00.001-06:00

I have a duck! I went to visit my host family a few weeks ago and told them I wanted a baby duck and they told me that my host mom’s sister had some. So I went to visit her and see the 5 ducklings. She said she could give me one but I’d have to wait until they were a little bigger and less delicate. So on Thursday I went to a meeting in an aldea with my host parents and slept over at their house, and then went to see the ducklings. They were big enough to take one, so I did. We think it’s a male because it’s one of the bigger ducklings, but we’re not positive. You can’t really tell until they’re more grown. But, assuming it’s a boy, I named him Paco. In Spanish, duck is pato (Pah-toe), so he’s Paco el pato. I really like having a duck, he’s so cute. He makes funny noises and shakes his little tail. One of my neighbors has 11 ducklings, so I think I’m going to get one from him too, so that I can have 2 and they can keep each other company.

Right now I´m keeping him in the house, but when he gets older I´ll have to make some kind of enclosure for him outside. A duck is a good pet because they are easy to take care of. I can leave it home alone, which I would feel bad doing with a dog or cat. When I leave Honduras, I won’t be as sad leaving a duck as I would with a dog or cat. Ducks aren’t loud and mean like geese or chickens. I’m really happy with my little duck.

The meeting on Thursday was in a community that we helped with forming and training a caja rural (rural bank). My host parents had the idea of forming a group of women in this community to train them in making something that they could sell. So people in the community formed a group of ten women, elected officers, and the group came to a meeting with us to discuss what they want to learn to make. They decided they wanted training in baking and in knitting and crochet. The idea is that they can sell these products and form a sort of micro-enterprise/ rural bank. We are writing a project proposal and budget to apply for funding for the training expenses. My big concern is that people will back out. Right now the women say they want to learn and produce, but I hope they don’t give up or lose interest. A few people in the group are young. There are two 13 year olds and a 15 year old. I think it’s a project with potential and it’s a good community to give the opportunity to since they are very motivated and organized. Hopefully we’ll have some success.

let there be light

2008-08-28T11:28:00.001-06:00

The week of the 11th I was in Tegucigalpa for training for a volunteer peer-support group. It was actually a pretty good session. We talked about different stressors of being a volunteer in Honduras and different ways to deal with them, and about good listening skills. The idea is, volunteers can call us if they are having problems and just have someone to talk to. We also made a bunch of cards to give volunteers who are in the hospital. It was nice getting back to my town after the trip. I always appreciate my town more after being away from it.

My electricity finally got reconnected, last Thursday, and I appreciate it a lot more now. The library, on the other hand, has been without electricity for about 3 days now. I´m posting this in an internet café. Hopefully the library doesn´t have to wait to get electricity connected as long as I had to wait.

I just hung some shelves in my house, which make such a big difference. I had the carpenter cut me 4 small planks of wood and I hung the 3 smaller ones with nails and rope and the bigger one with brackets. It took some work, since it’s really hard to nail into my concrete block walls, but I eventually got them all up and they look nice. I’m seriously considering getting some ducks. I know two people who have ducklings right now and offered me a couple. But I need some kind of enclosure with a roof for them, and some kind of water. And I’m a little worried about them pooping everywhere. But I think ducks would be a good pet because they don’t require too much care and I wouldn’t be sad to leave them behind like I would with a dog or cat. So the ducks are a possibility.

Last week I had a slightly frustrating but pretty normal situation. This is kind of a long story, feel free to skip it, it’s just a sample of what I go through on a normal basis. One of the woman who works in the market asked me to help set up an organized sport hour in the market, since there is a basketball court there (without hoops, but the kids just play soccer). I thought that was a good idea, since there aren’t any sports in our town. So I went to talk to the president of the market committee, who is also president of the library committee and works in the mayor’s office. I know him pretty well and we talk often, but he never seems to take me seriously, he just jokes around with me. I’ll call him Don C.

So I told him I wanted to organize an open sport hour in the market for whatever kids want to come and that I would supervise and organize games. After staring at me for a minute, he said we’d have to talk to the school principal, and I said no, this wouldn’t be anything to do with the school. The principal told me I couldn’t take the kids out of the school to do trips to the library, so if they can’t go to the library, they definitely can’t leave school to go play sports. Don C laughed and asked well who’s going to bring the kids to the market, and I said, well they’ll bring themselves, no one has to bring them. And then he said, well we should make it a competition between barrios (neighborhoods). I told him that would be nice, but much harder to organize, and if we were going to do that, I’d need help to organize it. And then he stared at me, and I asked, well, how are we going to organize it. He said we’d get the presidents of each patronato (neighborhood committee) to organize their kids. So I said fine but are we going to visit each of the presidents or are we going to have a meeting and have them all come. And he says ‘yes,’ so then I asked, well which? Are we visiting them or having a meeting? So he tells me that on Saturday we could go visit the man who works with all the patronatos. And I said ok, that’s fine, but organizing teams is going to take a couple weeks, meanwhile I’d like to just start an informal sport hour. And he tells me no, it will only take a week.

Well, Saturday comes and I call Don C to go visit the other man, and he tells me no, we’ll have a meeting with them all instead. So Monday I go to talk to Don C in the mayor’s office and ask him about the sport hour, and he’s acting like he doesn’t know what I’m talking about. The entire exchange has been so slow and complicated. It’s like every little thing that should just be easy and simple turns into some big complicated thing. I just wanted to make a couple signs saying we’re having an open sport hour, and see who shows up. I’m still just going to go ahead and do it and not wait on them to organize some competition between barrios, because that’s going to take a while, if it even happens.

On a more positive note, last Friday I did some baking with this same woman in the market. We made banana bread and carrot cake. She sold all of it Saturday morning; it was a big hit. This week, she’s going to make more bread and we’re going to make cookies. I really like hanging out in the market. The people are nice and it’s a pretty and calm place to sit.

Sunday morning, I went to a community up in the mountains to help with English classes. It’s a program called Educatodos for communities that don’t have schools. The classes receive books and CDs and community volunteers facilitate the classes. They have math, social studies, science, and English. But the facilitators don’t usually know any English, so it’s hard for them to teach it. So I’m helping out in a couple communities, going once a month to help with pronunciation of words and answering questions. I like going because these communities are really high up the mountain, and I probably wouldn’t have a chance to go to them otherwise. The teacher’s husband came to pick me up and take me on Sunday. We had class and then I ate lunch at this woman’s house whose sister is in the class. Then she gave me a pot of flowers and we walked around a little. The people there are so nice. Sunday afternoon, when I got back, I went to a meeting of the group of women in town who we helped form a community bank. The original idea was to get them to form a micro enterprise of bread, tortillas, etc., but now they don’t want to do that. It was a good meeting, they’re doing well as a group.

Tuesday I started a series of charlas (talks) with the 6th graders about business fundamentals. It’s a five-part charla, the first one was about savings and feasibility studies. This is a pre-made charla, by Junior Achievement and Peace Corps. They gave us a manual with all the steps; we just have to do it, so it’s pretty easy. The kids really liked the first two days. In the session on production, we make an assembly line to make paper airplanes. There are a lot of fun activities. The library has started giving computer classes, so I’m going to see if I can help out with that. I’d really like to teach typing, since no one knows how to type, and it’s definitely a useful skill.

So I have some good activities going on right now, but nothing major. A gecko just pooped on my head. That’s disgusting. They live in my rafters. Last night a grasshopper, about 4 inches long, fell from my ceiling right in front of me. It really scared me. One of my biggest challenges is bugs in my house. One day I’ll write a whole blog just about the bugs in my house.

I’m right in the middle of my time in Honduras. A year ago today, I was here. A year from today, I’ll be here. Hopefully I’ll get some visitors in the next year. (hint hint :) ) This is kind of a long post, but it makes up for all the time I haven’t posted.

back from US

2008-08-15T10:32:00.001-06:00

note: this is a delayed post because i haven't had a chance to post in a while

Aug 5, 2008

Well, my trip home was great. I’ve been back a little over a week now. While home, I was able to visit with almost everyone, although I did miss a few people I wanted to see. It was so nice talking to people; the hardest part about being away is that I miss everyone. I thought it would be really weird going back to the US after a year, but I got used to things really quickly. Mostly, I was impressed by how clean and things were. It was fun going places, seeing people, and eating. I ate a ton, I really think I gained at least 5 pounds in the one week I was home. I had to eat everything I’ve been missing. Going into stores was kind of overwhelming; there was just so much selection and everything is so big. I did a lot of shopping, since I was really in need of clothes. I also got some little presents for my friends here, which they enjoyed. My neighbors recently got a puppy. He’s sooo cute so he’s going to be partially my puppy, too. They said I could take him on walks and play with him whenever I want. So I got him some chewy toys and flea collars. The little boy next door named the puppy Dogny, or something like that, which doesn’t mean anything, isn’t Spanish or English, and no one knows how to pronounce it. So I just call him either puppy or perrito, but I’m going to start calling him Doogie; that’s better and it sounds similar to whatever his name is.

Anyway, I had a really good and busy time in the US, and it’s kind of tough being back. I’m happy to be back and everyone here missed me and they’ve all been asking how my trip was and how my family is. But still, now I miss everyone and everything at home more than before, because now it’s all fresh in my mind. And it’s not like when I first got here and I missed everything because then being here was new and exciting. Now I miss everything and it’s no longer as exciting being here, it’s just life. But it’s ok, I’ll get over it soon. The next year will probably go by really fast and I want to make the most of it.

I haven’t had electricity in my house since I’ve been back. The problem is that this house has never actually been connected to the power line; it was somehow connected to my neighbors’/landlady’s house. Because of this, I don’t have enough power to run my electro ducha, which is this small thing you connect to your shower, where the water comes out, and it heats the water. If this sounds dangerous, connecting an electric heater right where the water comes out, you’re right, it kind of is dangerous. In some showers, when you touch the water tap to turn the water on or off, you feel a slight shock. Not everyone has an electro ducha, but a lot of people do. It’s the only way to have a hot shower unless you heat water on the stove and have a bucket bath, which I do sometimes. So anyway, to fix the problem of not having a strong power supply, my landlady told me that while I was gone in the US, she’d get the electric company to come hook my house up to the power line. When I got back last week, my house had been disconnected from my neighbors’ house but not yet reconnected to the power line. The electric company said they would come in 2-3 days, which I didn’t believe for a second. It’s now been over a week, but supposedly they’re coming Friday. So we ran a super-long extension cord from my neighbors’ to my house, which I’ve been using, but I don’t want to plug too much in it. Also, last week, the power went out in the whole region for a day, and this week it went out for 2 days.

Throughout town, they have been digging ditches along side the road so that the rain and sewage water doesn’t ruin the dirt rocky roads, which have just been repaired. (Repairing these roads means that they dump a lot of rocky dirt on them and roll over it to pack it down, which actually makes a big difference) Now my house has a big ditch in front of it, which turns into a creek when it rains, so this guy made me a little bridge, which is really just a plank of wood. I really like it, I feel like I have a moat in front of my house. My house is really secure. I’m improving the inside, too. I’m having the carpenter cut me four planks that I’m going to put on the wall to make shelves and keep everything less cluttered.

I’m not sure if I already wrote about this, but I’m going to do a workshop with one of the woman in our town market to teach her to make cookies and bread and things like that to sell. She recently bought a large oven, so she can make all kinds of things in it. People here don’t really bake cakes or cookies or anything really; they don’t usually have electric ovens, and if they do, many don’t know how to use it. Some people have big wood-burning ovens outside. They’re kind of dome-shaped and made of concrete, I think, and they make different types of cookies and bread to eat with coffee, but they all taste pretty much the same, and are usually really dry and crumbly. I make banana bread and cookies a lot, to give to people, and they really like them. So it’ll be fun if this woman actually starts baking and selling.

That’s about all for now.

things i miss about the US

2008-07-14T10:19:00.003-06:00

I leave in a few days for the US! My first trip home in a year! In honor of my trip, I'm posting about things I miss from the US.

-Family and Friends (of course) I really miss people and I miss being among people who really know me and who have known me my whole life. I miss certain conversations and jokes and memories.

-DC I love Washington, DC. I really enjoyed living there. I like that you can walk around and that there's a good public transportation system. It's pretty, it's international, there's always a lot going on, there's free museums and monuments and lots of history. I miss living in DC.

-Food The food here isn't bad, I enjoy it, but I just really miss food from the US.
I miss good ice cream and good bread. There isn't really any good bread here. Like sourdough and wheat bread, etc. Also, I never liked hamburgers, but now I get cravings for a good hamburger, mainly just because there are no good hamburgers here. I miss barbeque. I miss skim milk and cereal. There's skim milk here, but it's not the same. And there's not as wide a variety of cereals, and the good cereals I can't afford. I really like cereal. Also, I miss salads, especially spinach salads. Big salads with lots of vegetables. There's a lot of food I miss, I can't really list it all. I plan on eating non stop while I'm home.

-Hot showers I've always really liked showers. Here, I have no hot water, and sometimes my water pressure is really bad, so the shower doesn't even really work. So if I want a warm shower, I have to heat water on the stove, dump it in a bucket, and take a bucket bath. It's just not the same as a real shower. I never feel really clean.

-Cleanliness- In general, I miss things being clean. Streets without garbage in them, houses that aren't bug infested, dishes washed with hot water in a dish washer, clothes washed with hot water in a washing machine, etc. Just the idea of cleanliness.

-Bathrooms- not that there aren't bathrooms here, but adding on the cleanliness theme, I miss clean bathrooms that are complete with toilet paper, water, soap, and towels. Also, there aren't really public bathrooms, and people are awkward about letting you use the bathroom in thier house. So finding a bathroom is always an issue. I miss being able to go into any fast food restaurant or Starbucks to use the bathroom, or being able to ask to use the bathroom in someone's house without it being weird.

-Internet- I miss having internet in my house. Having wireless internet and a working laptop seems so amazing right now. The idea of looking up any information at anytime, or of talking to someone online at any hour, is just incredible.

There's a lot more I miss, like museums, and safe clean cities, and good stores, and malls, and good places to run, and more, but I have to go now because my time is up on the computer and this little girl is standing next to me staring over my shoulder, because she wants to use the computer to play some game.

I can't wait to see everyone!!!!!!

more birthday parties!

2008-07-14T10:09:00.002-06:00

Yesterday my host cousin, Danielle, had a party for her 5th birthday. It was at thier house, in the aldea on the mountain. It was really fun. There were probably around 50 people, my host family, my host mom's siblings and their families. And some of the families of the inlaws of her siblings. There were tons of little kids. We had baked chicken, fresh from thier farm, vegetables, mashed potatoes, and rice. Then the kids beat up the piñata, which was fun, and then we had cake. The cake was really big, and it was a mix of chocolate, strawberry, and vanilla. My host mom's sister, who made the cake, knows I like chocolate, so she found me a piece that was all chocolate. I took lots of pictures for them, since they don't have a camera. Danielle had a pink party dress, it was really poofy. She mostly got clothes for presents, but I got her a mini magna doodle, which she loved. She didn't put it down for the rest of the day! In the evening, after most people left, we had some dancing. All my host mom's brothers wanted to dance with me, they wouldn't let me sit out at all. I was rotating between 5 different men. I thought it was really funny. At about 9, we finally left, one of my host mom's brothers drove me home. I left my house at 11am and got home at 9:30! It was a really fun day, thier family is so nice to me!

2008-07-07T15:40:00.002-06:00

Well, the feria's over, it was fun. I have a few new small projects going. I'm doing weekly trips to the public library with the school kids. Last week me and one teacher brought 60 1st graders to the library and I read them a few books whith children's rights themes, like right to education, to equality, to family and care, etc, and we talked about what rights are. It was fun and the kids really liked the books. On Wednesday, I´m going to bring the 3rd graders.
Also, a program called Educatodos, which does continuing education for communities that don't have middle schools or high schools, asked me to help them with English classes. So on Saturday I went up to one community in the mountains to answer thier English questions and practice pronouncing vocabulary with them. On Friday I'll be going to another community to help them. Sorry this entry's short, but I've got to go.

Birthdays and the Feria

2008-06-23T16:37:00.002-06:00

My host sister’s 15th birthday was on the 8th and my host parents had a big party for her. They spent over a month preparing. There were 5 big cakes, all different flavors, and one of the cakes was shaped liked a princess. My host mom and my host sister crocheted thier dresses. For the table centers, they hand-made flowers and in the middle of some of the flowers were barbies, which they crocheted little dresses for to match my host sister’s. It was a really nice party. They set up so much, I can´t even describe it all, but it was a very big deal. We ate chicken, pork, rice, tortillas, vegetables, cake, and lots of Coke.About 50 people came and it was fun seeing everyone all dressed up.

My birthday was the 10th and it was really nice. My friend Becky was here from the US so it was great that she could be here for my birtday. Some of my neighbors gave me gifts and I recieved some cards and packages and phone calls from the US. I had lunch at a friend´s restaurant with a few other volunteers who are in the area. It was a really good birthday. I can´t believe it´s been almost a year since I left for Honduras. Sometimes it feels like I’ve been here a long time, but it’s also been going pretty quickly. About 15 months more in Honduras.

Our town feria (fair) has been starting up for a while but this week is the final, big week. Saturday night there was an event for the Queen of the Feria, which was kind of like a beauty pagent with the high school girls. They elected one Madrina (godmother) of the Feria, a Madrina of Café, a Madrina of Ganaderia (cattle), a Madrina of Deportes (sports), and a few others I don’t remember. They also elected juinor madrinas, which are little girls, like between 5 and 8. Sunday was a parade with all the madrinas. The car float for the Madrina of Café was decorated with coffee plants and bags of coffee beans. I liked the float for ganaderia, it was pulling a cart with two baby cows in it. It was a fun parade. All the mothers who had daughters in the parade were excited and nervous and they all wanted me to take a hundred pictures of their daughters.

There are more booths set up now, selling more food, like pizza, french fries, tajadas, candy, and they set up a couple small rides, like a carasol and a tiny roller coaster. The whole fair is about two blocks long, on just one street, it doens’t have a whole fair grounds. This week, there are events planned every day. There will be dances, another parade, bull riding, an art exhibit, a cow show, and a horse race. And it’s good timing because all next week is school vacation, either for all the schools in the department or in the country, I’m not sure.

This morning the high school students I’ve been working with in the next town over sold the bottles they’ve collected. Since they have so many, I arranged for the buyer to go to them, so they don’t have to worry about transportation. They got almost 3,000 Lempiras which is like $150, which is about what most people here make in a month. We spent all morning classifying the bottles.
Although they’ve been having lots of success, I’m not having as much luck recycling in my town. Last week was really frustrating because, long story short, no one wanted to help with the project or offer support. So I’ve decided to drop the recycling project in my town and just focus on working with the high school kids in thier recycling project. It’s disapointing because I’ve been working really hard on this for a while, but it’s just not feasible here. So now I’m looking for new projects and to involve myself more with the munincipality. I have a bunch of small project ideas but I’d like to start something long-term. That’s about all that’s going on right now. We will be celebrating our town feria all week, it’s the most exciting time of the year for San Pedro!

Parades and Parties

2008-06-05T10:25:00.005-06:00

I´ve had an exciting couple weeks. The 23rd and 24th of May I went to La Ceiba, on the North Coast, for Carnaval, probably one of the biggest events in Central America. It´s similar to Mardi Gras, but Honduran style, and near the beach. My friend from my training group is a volunteer there, so those of us who went stayed at her apartment. On Saturday there was a really big parade with horses and fire trucks and lots of floats. On the floats there was music and dancing and people throwing bead necklaces. I thought it was really well put together, I really enjoyed it, even though I often don´t like parades. We stood in the central park to watch the parade. The park is beautiful with lots of big old trees, and there were tons of people selling food, jewelry, clothes, and other things. All along the streets people were selling things too.

Toward the end of the parade, we were walking along the sidewalk to meet some other friends, and walking down the sidewalk toward us was the president, Mel Zelaya, and he paused and shook our hands! I shook hands with the president of Honduras! I lived in DC for four years and never even saw the US president or anyone important.

Saturday night was a big street party. There were a bunch of band stands set up with music and dancing. It was a lot of fun. I really like La Ceiba as a city, it´s the third biggest city, but it´s not as dangerous, dirty and crowded as Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula. It was a really great cultural event to go to.

The following Wednesday, we had our regional safety and security meeting, so we got to meet all the new volunteers in the area. They all seem really nice. And we got to stay at a nice hotel in Santa Rosa.

Sunday was my towns feria inauguration, so they had a little parade. The people in the munincipal office told me I could ride a horse in the parade if I could find a horse. So I borrowed my neighbor´s horse Sunday morning and rode down to the park. The park was full of people waiting for the parade and the other people on horses were lined up and the school band was waiting, and they all thought it was really funny I was riding a horse. But, as we were waiting, the horse got really scared because of all the noise and motorcycles and other horses, and was beign really skittish and not doing what it was supposed to. So people were laughing and I decided there was no way I could ride that horse in a parade, it could be dangerous. I rode the horse back to my neighbors and walked back to the parade. I did have fun riding the horse, but I just couldn´t in the parade.

Proj Cit

2008-05-19T10:47:00.003-06:00

All last week I was at the Project Citizen workshop with the rest of my project group, outside of the capital. it took 9 hours to get there and 9 hours to get back, on the bus. The highlight of the trip was that I got a haircut from another volunteer. It´s pretty short, like a little above chin length, with lots of layers. I like it. I got back Saturday night.
Every town has a feria, like a town fair, which is the day of the patron saint of the town. We are San Pedro, so our saint is Saint Peter, who´s day is June 29th. So it's a month and a half away, but the feria has already started! In the central park, there are booths set up with food, and fussball tables, and people selling candy. When the feria really gets started, there will be a feris wheel and other rides. They also do bull riding and events like that. Some towns only have their feria for a few days or a couple weeks, it´s exciting we have a 2 month feria.
Wednesday I have to leave for another Peace Corps meeting about Safety and Security, which I´ll write about later. I have to go now because the library is closing.

2008-05-10T10:02:00.002-06:00

so on wednesday, we went to the special ed school and talked to the teachers. it was great. there are about 15 kids, of a variety of ages, and two teachers. they are in the process of building a new school since the building they are in is being loaned. this woman, the director, has a boy with down´s syndrome, and she almost single-handedly fought to get this school running. they are still lacking a lot. it was so nice to see the students and talk to the teachers. we are setting up a meeting with a lawyer to see what their educational rights are under the law.

i held the meeting to form the environmental committee, and only 4 participants came. so we went ahead and talked about the purpose of the meeting and showed a video on the future of the world in 2070, which was pretty powerful, and then we rescheduled the meeting for next sunday.

on monday, i have to leave for Tegucigalpa to go to a Peace Corps workshop for Project Citizen. i´m not that excited about it, because it´s such a long trip and i´ll be gone for a week. i don´t like leaving for long periods of time. but it´s a good project to do in the schools, and it´ll also be nice to see people I haven´t seen for a long time. That´s about all for now.

2008-05-06T10:53:00.002-06:00

I almost forgot, I went with the high school students a few weeks ago to sell thier bottles to recycle and they had about 1,500 pounds, and earned about $150, which will go toward building a water tank in the high school, since it has no water now. I´m worried though about when school is over, because I want this project to continue, not to end when they graduate.

exciting news

2008-05-06T10:33:00.003-06:00

Yesterday Rachel, a nearby volunteer, and I were in Corquin (one of the towns next to mine), giving recycling talks at the school. Then we went to the post office and were talking to the husband and wife who run it, who are a really nice, young couple. And the husband told us about a special education school for children with Down´s Syndrome and other disabilities, that´s in Corquin. This was really exciting to hear! It was an issue I had been thinking about for a while, wondering if I could get involved with special education, and I had no idea this school was there.

I´m not sure if it´s true, but he told us this is one of only two special ed school in the country, and to think it´s right here! The normal schools do not have special ed programs. So we are having a meeting tommorrow morning to see what kind of support we can give the school, in the form of funding, book donations, programming, things like that. Right now it´s being run mostly with money from the families. Also, another nearby volunteer in youth development actually worked as a special ed teacher in the US, so she´s going to come tommorrow to talk to the teachers and see what they are doing and what support she can give. I´m really happy we found out about this. I think we could get some funding, expand the school and publicize it so that more students can attend. I´ll let you all know how the meeting goes.

In recycling news, things are going well. I have given about 20 talks about recycling, talking to hundreds of students, in 4 schools and 2 high schools. Last Saturday I went with the high school students to pick up bottles in the streets. People were congratulating them on their trash collection. It´s a really good group, I like hanging out with them. On Thursday we are having a meeting here in my town to form an environmental committee.

On Saturday I held a training session for 5 patronatos in my town. Patronatos are kind of like town councils or neighborhood committees. There is one in each little neighborhood of the town. We talked about democracy, citizen participation, transparency, avoiding corruption, and how to prioritize community needs. It went very well, about 14 people came. There was lots of conversation and discussion, and people had some really good things to say about community participation in the government. Honduras has one of the highest corruption rates in the world, so citizen action is really important. The group decided to have a meeting with the mayor today, since they aren´t really happy about the way projects proposals have been handled lately.

Next week we have a Peace Corps workshop in Tegucigalpa for Project Citizen, a project to do in the schools. We are supposed to bring a teacher or community member but I can´t find anyone who is able and willing to leave for a week, so I might have to go alone. It´s a good project, I´ll explain it more later.

rain

2008-04-17T10:50:00.003-06:00

The weather has been really rainy for the past week, which is kind of unmotivating. I also haven’t been able to do laundry. Things are going pretty well, otherwise. My recycling plans have changed a little. We are going to sell at a different location than I was originally planning on, but it makes more sense this way. The high school students I’m working with have a huge pile of sacks filled with recyclebles which they are going to transport on Monday. We need to do some calculations, but the amount they will recieve from the sale should cover gas for transportation. In my town, the high school isn’t doing this project, so there is no group organizing things. So, rethinking things, and the selling situation, I decided we should really form a neighborhood committee to manage logistics, like storage and transportation and the funds. I talked to the mayor and the director of UMA, the environmental office, and they supported the idea and set a date to have a meeting to form an environmental committee.

My house is looking even better. A few volunteers in the area just finished thier service and left so I inheirited a fridge, a toaster oven, a blender, some chairs, and some shelves. I now actually have a kitchen. Every couple of days I’ll try cooking something. I’m trying to improve my cooking skills. Otherwise I eat easily prepared things or I eat next door. My neighbor feeds me often, they are really nice, they say I’m like family to them. I got so lucky with my house and my neighbors. I’m really happy with my house, it’s really important to have my own nice space to go to at the end of the day. The new group of volunteers will be getting to site in a couple weeks. The town next to me is getting a business volunteer. Hopefully he or she will be fun. And interested in recycling. I have a hammock now, which I spend way too much time in. It's just so comfortable. It's hung on my front porch, but I live on a really quiet street so hardly anyone passes by. Well, that's about all I feel like writing for now. My hammock is waiting for me.

2008-04-07T10:11:00.002-06:00

I just realized how long it's been since I posted. Ooops. This will be kind of short because I'm in the library writing it and I don't have much time. Last Monday we planted lots of tree seeds in the school in the aldea, in the mountains. It was fun, all the kids were helping and a bunch of parents came to help. We cleaned up the weeds, prepared the dirt, filled seed bags, and prepared a seed bed, prepared the seeds, and planted them. It took all morning. I want to do another tree nursery in some of the other schools in the mountains.
Saturday was the youth baseball regional tournament. A bunch of volunteers have youth baseball teams, and a few times I went to help out a volunteer near me with his team. These kids just started practicing in October or November, knowing nothing about baseball, and they've improved so much. The tournament had 3 teams, and they played on a soccer field, so there was no back stop or infield, or outfield fence. It was fun watching, and the team I had been helping won! Those kids were so excited. It was a good day.
Sunday I had to help my counterpart give a training session to representatives from 4 different rural banks. There were about 30 people. The training was about accounting and managing all the books they have. This other guy, who is actually an accounting teacher, is part of my counterpart's NGO, but he ended up not coming, so we were kind of unprepared. But it actually went really well. I ended up explaining most of it, and we did lots of example problems for finding balances and calculating interest rates. Some people were really confused at first, but by the end I think they all got it. The weather has been really warm and sunny, so that's nice.
That's about all for now.

semana santa

2008-03-28T09:13:00.000-06:00

I haven´t written in a while because last week was Semana Santa (Holy Week) so everything was closed all week. A lot of people take advantage of Semana Santa to travel and go to the beach, which makes it not a very good week to travel because the buses are really full and everywhere you go it´s really crowded. I stayed in my site and spent time with my neighbors and I spent a couple days with my host family. We sat outside in the cabañas, in hammocks, near the fish ponds, and my host mom made roasted chicken and grilled fish and beans and tortillas and salad. It was nice until it started pouring and it got really cold. We had 2 and a half cold rainy days and then it got really warm and sunny again. I also painted my bedroom a purple-blue color, which is really pretty. Easter wasn´t that excited. I thought there would be processions and things, and I guess there were in some towns, like Santa Rosa, but nothing much happened here. When I lived in Costa Rica, there was a long procession through town for Easter, and the kids and adults were all dressed up in pretty costumes and they had drums and it was really pretty. There’s no Easter Bunny in Honduras, no painting eggs or chocolate bunnies or jelly beans. I had a nice Easter, it was a beautiful day and I ate tilapia with my host family, but it didn’t feel like Easter.

The kids at the school in town have already collected a lot of plastic bottles to recycle. I went to the school this week and talked to all the afternoon classes about recycling. I don’t know if I’ve explained this before, but the medium to large size schools have two shifts of classes- in the morning grades 1-3 and in the afternoon grades 4-6. The smaller schools, which only have like 2 teachers, just have class all day. Some of those small schools only have one teacher for up to 50 or 60 students. So I’m going back a different day to speak to the morning classes. Also, in all the schools the students have uniforms, white button-up collared shirts, and navy blue slacks or skirts. The education style is different than in the US. Here, there is more focus on repetition and copying things down, and less focus on critical thinking or creativity. If, for example, the teacher shows an example drawing of a picture of a house and asks all the students to draw a house, they will copy the example. There’s a lack of thinking outside of the box. Most of the teachers have only high school degrees and many of them, especially the grade school teachers, are very young, just out of high school.

Right before Semana Santa, I went to the high school in Cucuyagua, one of the towns right next to mine, and I met a teacher who was very supportive of my recycling project. He is working with a group of about 50 students who are graduating this year but who need to do a project to graduate, so recycling is going to be their project. I met with a small group of them and we formed a plan with a timeline. This Saturday I’m going to give them a charla (a talk) about recycling and then they are going to give the charla to the other classes. In addition to the recycling, they are going to use organic waste to make a compost pit to make fertilizer. I’m really excited about this group. They seem like very hard working students. It makes up for the high school in my town. The director/principal said he doesn’t want to do the recycling project because there isn’t room in the school to store the recyclebles and he doesn’t want the students bringing in more garbage because there’s already too much garbage in the school. I was pretty mad and frustrated when I heard that. Maybe he has a point, but he’s not looking out for the future or the good of the community. So I told the Cucuyagua high school they have to do this project well to show up the high school here.

I’m also trying to work on things with the library. My town has a Reicken Library, which is a group of libraries spread throughout Honduras, funded by an American businessman who was a Peace Corps Volunteer, I think in Honduras, but I’m not sure. They are very nice libraries, small by US standards but very pretty and well designed. The Reicken Foundation has a very strict selection process and criteria for choosing communities to get libaries. The community has to form a committe to solicit the library. The community has to provide the land, labor, and afterward they have to take care of the maintanence of the library, and pay the librarian. The library in my town opened in October, right after I got to site. The library has a finance committe and a support committe, formed by community members, and they have to program all kinds of activities. A representative from Reicken visits every few weeks to see how the library is doing and they give capacitacions to the librarians and work with the committees. Each library has a few computers with free internet (which I love), but the committee has to come up with fund raising to support the free internet. I’d like to give classes on how to research on the internet. Reicken Libraries also have meeting rooms, complete with a projector, which are available to any group in the community by request. Kids use the library the most. I hardly ever see any adults in any of the Reicken Libraries, but the librarian is trying to change that. So I’m really lucky my town has one of these libraries. It’s a really nice place and a great opportunity for the community, especially with its programming.

Books I´ve Read

2008-03-11T08:57:00.001-06:00

I´m posting a list of books I have read. I havent been reading that much since I moved into my new house, but in Oct-Dec I was reading so much. Some of the books I brought with me, a few were sent to me, and most I borrowed from other volunteers.
Books I have read since coming to Honduras, in order of being read, with country of the setting in parantheses:

Pillars of the Earth (12th century England)
*True Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (all over the world)
Snow (Turkey)
*The Piano Tuner (Burma)
Mosquito Coast (Honduras)
News From Paraguay (Paraguay)
*The Bookseller of Kabul (Afghanistan)
An Open Heart (Dalai Lama philosophy/theology)
The Other Boleyn Girl (16th century England)
The Little Prince
*A Thousand Splendid Suns (Afghanistan)
Prep (United States)
American Gods (United States)
Memoirs of a Geisha (Japan)
The Boleyn Inheiratance (16th century England)
Dreaming in Cuban (Cuba)
Honor Lost (Jordan)
Zorro –in Spanish (early 1800s California and Spain)
The Reader (Germany)

* These books I would highly reccomend to anyone, and which were especially useful to me from a Peace Corps context. There are a few other books on the list which I really enjoyed but I would only reccomend to certain people, so ask me if you're looking for a good book. I´ve also read a lot of magazines, mostly Newsweek, The Economist, and National Geographic in Spanish.

2008-03-03T13:49:00.002-06:00

The recycling project is moving along. Last week I visited the school in the town next to me and talked to every afternoon class, which is 7, so about 250 kids. I also went to the aldea, where the school is I was visiting last school year, and I gave them the recycling talk, about 35 kids. It all went well and the kids are excited to start recycling. The director is getting cans this week so we can begin. So I´ve been pretty busy going to all the schools trying to organize things. On Friday I had the meeting with one of the patronatos (neighborhood committees) that got canceled last Sunday because no one showed up. Well, they didn´t show up again, just one guy. On the other hand, last Monday I had a meeting with a different patronato, which is mostly women, and everyone showed up, and on time, and we had a good, productive meeting. So it just depends. I´ve been trying to post pictures, but the internet is just so slow. Soon hopefully.

tiedye, tarantulas, and recycling

2008-02-23T09:36:00.002-06:00

On Thursday I was doing laundry (hand washing in the pila) and I accidentally got chlorine, which I was using to soak my socks, splattered on my blue tank top. I only have a few tank tops and I want to wear them everyday because it´s been hot, and then I ruined my favorite blue one, getting chlorine on it. So then I decided to turn it into a tiedye shirt, and I poured spots of chlorine all over the shirt. It turned out decent; I´m going to wear it alot. I´m becoming more of a hippy every day. Haha. Just kidding. Kind of. I do use a lot of Raid. That´s not very hippyish. I had an ant problem. There were tons of really tiny ants coming into my house, through the ceiling. There would be lines of tiny ants from the ceiling down to the floor. I don´t know what they were doing, because they weren´t getting into my food. They were really driving me crazy, so I bought Raid and that really works well. Also, when I got back from being gone for the Peace Corps meeting, there was a large tarantula in my house. It really scared me, it´s the biggest spider I´ve ever seen outside of like a zoo. So I caught it and put it outside. It was just too big to kill.

When I was living in the mountains, I found in my room at different times: a mouse, a toad, a slug, and lots of ants. Since I have been living in town, things I have found in my house: geckos (all the time, they live in my window frames), little frogs (they are in my shower sometimes at night, I think they crawl up the drain), a tarantula, cockroaches, and lots of ants. And lots of other types of little bugs, moths, mosquitos. But now I have Raid to protect me.

The last couple weeks have been really busy. I´ve been making myself busy, and it makes me so much happier than having nothing to do. It´s so much easier living in town. There´s always work to do if you look for it and get yourself involved.

The most exciting thing that I´m doing now is a recycling program. Garbage is such a problem here. Very few towns have garbage dumps. My town doesn´t have garbage pick up so people burn their garbage or throw it in a pile somewhere. There´s always lots of garbage in the streets. And there´s really no recycling. In some of the bigger cities there are people who buy metal cans or plastic bottles to resell, but not really around here. But now that is changing. A nearby volunteer has been working to start a small business that buys plastics, metals, glass, and paper, to resell in El Salvador and other places. They have been researching and organizing for months and just this past week they started to buy recyclebles.

So I am starting recycling collection in the kindergartens, schools, and high schools in my town and a couple of the neighboring towns. The idea is that the kids will bring the recycleble materials to school and every two weeks or every month we will sell it all to the company. To start off and motivate the students, we might do a contest to see which grade can collect the most, and they will win some kind of prize or party. This is going to be a really big project. I´m going to visit each classroom to explain why we are recycling, and the specifics of how, like that we have to seperate different materials, crush cans, take the tops of the plastic bottles, things like that. I think it´s important to go to each classroom to get the students excited and to make sure everyone knows the process, however, these are fairly large schools. I´ll be talking to a few thousand students in total. Once we get going in the schools, I´d like to start collecting in restaurants and stores. So far, I´ve been talking to the mayors, school directors, and some teachers. I think I will start visiting classrooms next week.

There are lots of details to work out. I need to make sure each school/classroom has a system to collect and seperate the recyclebles; get scales so we can weigh it all, since each school will need to keep track of what it´s collecting and how much money it should get, and a transportation method. I´m more excited about this than anything else I´ve been doing. We can get garbage off the streets, reuse recycleble materials, and the schools can make a little money off it. I´m so nervous something isn´t going to work.

I´ve also decided to start working with the patronatos, which are like neighborhood committees that meet each month to talk about what the neighborhood needs. My town has 5 barrios (small neighborhoods within the town) and each one is now forming a patronato, which is an initiative of the mayor. Some of them had inactive patronatos before, and some are forming new ones. So I heard they were being formed and went to the mayor´s office to say I could help to organize them and capacitate them, and the mayor gave me the names of the patronato presidents. Then I had to find the presidents to tell them I could meet with their group, so I walked around and asked where these people lived, found them, talked with them, and set dates for meetings.

As I talked to the patronato presidents, I realized I really didn´t know what I was doing. What did I want to talk to them about? How could I help them? I don´t know anything about patronatos and I have no experience with local government. But it doesn´t really matter. As a Peace Corps Volunteer, you don´t need to know much about things to start working on them. Peace Corps provides enough resources and materials that I can get all the information I need in whatever area I need it. And I really just need to know more than the people I´m capacitating, which usually isn´t that much, and then I learn as I go along. When I started with the community banks, I didn´t know anything, but now I have a much better understanding.

Anyway, I decided to do a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Oportunities), with the groups to begin to see how they are organized and where they lack. Then we´ll talk about the importance of citizen participation. It is very common for people to be apathetic and inactive in the community. So I went to the library and looked at some books about citizen rights, munincipal laws, and citizen participation. We´ll also talk about the function of a patronato and how they can write solicituds to the mayor´s office and things like that. From there, I´ll see what else they would like capacitaciones in. My first barrio meeting is Saturday evening, there´s another Sunday and another Monday, each in different barrios. It should be interesting. Before I left for Peace Corps, I thought a lot of my work would be with people to inform them of their rights as citizens and to increase participation, and now that´s what I´ll be doing, so that´s exciting.

So that´s mainly what I´ve been doing lately. I´m going to do other various projects and talks in the schools after I get the recycling started. Another exciting thing that is coming up is that the Energy Department is interested in the biodigestor project that my counterpart is thinking of doing and also in the improved stove project that my counterpart completed with the previous volunteer. So a few representatives from the Energy Dept., including the Vice-Minister of Energy, are coming here the first week of March to see the improved stoves and the biodigestor.
Also, I can make friendship bracelets now.

Reconnect

2008-02-11T11:39:00.000-06:00

Last week I went to the capital, Tegucigalpa, for Reconnect, a Peace Corps meeting. They are annual meetings by project group. In my project, Munincipal Development, there are 29 volunteers; 14 from my training group and 15 who have been here for over a year and are leaving in September. The workshop was at a nice hotel up in the mountains. It was pretty and they fed us a lot.

The first day was just the 14 from my group and we each presented 20-30 minutes about our sites and our work. It was interesting hearing what everyone is doing. Some people are really busy and others have hardly anything going on. Some sites are much harder than others. Projects that people are doing include: starting neighborhood committees, training community banks, updating the munincipal action plan, starting youth groups, helping conduct censuses, building improved stoves, giving micro finance classes, marketing traditional pottery, giving computer classes, and giving English classes. The next two days we heard presentations from the volunteers who had been here longer, and also from different organizations in Honduras that we can work with. It got boring sitting through so many presentations all day, but it was really nice seeing everyone and hanging out together.

When we got back to the capital, we went to the mall, which was a strange experience. I felt like I was in a different world. There was so much stuff, and lots of US stores. I didn`t really buy anything, though. After the mall we went for sushi. There are two sushi restaurants in Tegucigalpa. It was really good. I got a California roll for $3 and it was good quality. There were like 30 types of sushi on the menu.

I got back to my site, and I was really happy to be back. On Sunday we had a town meeting. The mayor and everyone came to explain what projects they are going to do this year. At least 200 people were there, and they served everyone a cup of Coke and a package of cookies. It`s practically mandatory to give out a snack at any sort of meeting. Anyway, some people weren`t too happy with what the funds will be used for, but it didnt make a difference in the end. The munincipality is receiving about $100,000 from the funds for the Reduction of Poverty Strategy, (ERP in Spanish) which was started by the UN Millenium Challenge Goals. These funds only go to Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC), which include Honduras. I learned about all of this in school, so it´s interesting to see it in action now. The funds go to each munincipality each year for development projects, and they are distributed locally so the community can decide what it needs, rather than the national government, or some foreign organization. However, there are still problems, because the funds can be politicized, misused, or stolen. So accountability and getting community involvement is really important.
School started today, so I´ll be busy this week going to the schools to give talks. It´s a great way to get to know people. That´s all for now.

Perrito

2008-02-01T14:45:00.000-06:00

For the past week, I’ve been watching my friends’ golden retreiver puppy. It’s been an interesting experience having a dog here. I walk all around town with him and everyone comments how pretty he is. Dogs here are mainly mutts and basically all of them are dirty and aggressive. Most people have dogs, but the dogs aren’t allowed in the house and they often just walk around on the street and bark at people. There are lots of dogs, but you can’t pet them because they will bite you. So it’s unusual to see a pretty, well-fed, clean, friendly dog. And I usually keep him on a leash, which is also never seen here. When the puppy gets close to people, they are often afraid, because they think he will bite, so then I have to say he doesn’t bite, he’s not mean, you can touch him, and then they pet him and comment how pretty he is. It’s weird to see people afraid of such a cute little puppy. After a week of walking him around, most people recognize him and the kids get really excited to see him. Hopefully I’ll be able to watch him again soon, since he has lots of friends now in my town. Having a puppy is definitely a good community integration tool. He’s helped me meet a lot more people in town. People think he’s my puppy so I always have to say I’m just watching him this week. They all want to know how much he cost and where I bought him. So then I say I don’t know, he’s not mine. I definitely wouldn’t want an expensive, full breed dog here. People think I have money because I’m walking around a well fed, pretty dog, and I would be afraid of someone stealing him. I liked having him for the week, but I couldn’t have my own pet here, it’s too much work.

Yesterday, I took a walk with my neighbors, the two sisters, to buy tiles or shingles for their roof, since the roof is leaking. Tiles here are an adobe material and are big. They are called tejas We ordered the tejas and I asked the woman how they are made, and she said why don’t you walk over to where they are made so you can see. So we walked down the street to where they make the tejas and the woman gave us kind of a tour. They make a mud mixture, and wake up at 2am to mold the tejas, because they have to do it when there is no sun, so they don’t dry out before they are supposed to, or something like that. The place has light bulbs hanging outside so they can see what they are doing at 2am. Once it gets light out, the tiles are left to dry under the sun, and after they dry for a day or a few days, they are baked on top of a huge oven. It was pretty interesting. I felt like we were on Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood, taking a field trip to a community business. One tile costs 3 Lempiras, which is about 15 cents, which is a lot when you think about how many tiles one house needs. It’s really hard work to make them, though. The family invited me to come one morning, early, and I could try making some tejas. It sounds exciting.

Today I had a meeting that the environmental office (UMA) of a nearby town invited me to. They want to start a micro bank for the farmers involved in the town farmers market. The woman in charge of UMA didn`t tell me I`d have to do anything, but when I got there, she asked me to explain to everyone what a micro bank is, what it does, and to form it. I had nothing with me and wasn`t expecting to do it. So I just stood up and explained it all off the top of my head. Then they elected the president and all the other board members. It`s a good project. They want to better organize the farmers market. It was an all day affair, but very interesting. I think I`ll definately be working more with this town`s UMA, the woman in charge is very motivated. She`s not really in charge of anyone, she is the whole office. So she has a lot of work managing water sources, avoiding forest fires, etc. She told me she would find me a pretty sombrero so we can work in the field together.

Next week I have to go to the capital for Reconnect, a Peace Corps workshop. All the volunteers from my project, Munincipal Development, will be there, and our project managers, around 30 people. We have to present what we’ve been working on since we got to site and then we have to listen to presentations about different things. I’ll be gone all week and when I get back I need to meet with the school principals since the new school year begins Feb 14.

Medical Brigade

2008-01-28T13:20:00.000-06:00

Last week I went to help translate for the medical brigade in Lempira, a neighboring department. The people in the brigade were really nice. There were 3 doctors, 2 nurses, 2 woman working in the farmacy, 2 women working with the kids, and 3 men doing construction projects. Most of them were from Arkansas and they had very strong accents. In addition to me, there were 6 other volunteers there to translate. So we had a really fun group and it was great spending time together and showing off our knowledge of Honduras to the people from Arkansas. Some of them had come many previous years, but for some it was their first time here.

We stayed at sort of a compound, a center for training groups and retreats. There were a bunch of buildings. We slept there and ate there and the patients came there to be seen. They fed us so much. We had breakfast, a snack, lunch, another snack, and dinner. And there was so much food and it was really good. I felt like I was on a cruise, with the amount I was eating.

The first day we had a little over 100 patients. There were less the next days, and in the afternoons, we didn`t really have anything to do. They were hoping for more people to come. The first two days I translated for the nurses, so I was just asking people what was wrong, for how long they had had the conditions, and asked them to step on the scale. It was pretty easy.

The 3rd day in the morning I translated for one of the doctors. That was very interesting. Our first patient was a pregnant woman, and we got to listen to the baby`s heartbeat! There was another woman with extremely high blood pressure. They would have rushed her to the hospital in the US, she was really on the verge of having a stroke. They couldn`t do much, though, just give her lots of medicine. There was an old woman who they thought probably had throat cancer, and told her to go to a specialist, but she probably won`t be able to. There was another woman who probably had schitsophrenia. It was an interesting week.

I also helped with the farmacy, explaining medicine dosages to people, and fitting people with eyeglasses. Mothers would come in with thier 3 children, and they would be getting all different medicines, and in many cases the mother would be illiterate. So then I would have to carefully explain which medicine was for what and when to take it. It made me nervous, because it would be hard for her to keep straight all the medicines.

In the mornings I went running with one of the other volunteers. It was a really pretty area. We would go on walks in the evenings. One afternoon me and one of the other volunteers went to help the old man fish in their tilapia ponds. That was fun. At the end of the week, the nurses prepared goodie bags for us, with vitamins, coloring books, and lots of other good stuff. They were a great group.

This week I am puppy sitting my friends` golden retriever puppy. He is so cute but a lot of work. I will post pictures soon.

2008-01-18T12:59:00.000-06:00

It`s really nice living in town. It`s more of what I pictured my Peace Corps experience to be. I like being able to walk around and talk to people and go to the mayor`s office when I feel like it and be able to go to nearby towns. This morning I had a meeting with the director of the Environmental Office of the munincipality next to mine, and the woman was really nice and they are doing a lot of interesting projects that I can help with. When school starts I`m going to start a big garbage education program. My neighbors are really nice and keep giving me things, like eggs, platanos, oranges, tortillas. The last few nights I`ve been playing soccer with the kids in the neighborhood. My landlady`s little boys have a Sega, but they only have the Sonic the Hedgehog game. And my other neighbor`s little boy has a PS2, but mostly just car games. Their fathers are in the US working and they sent the game systems here for the boys. Pretty much everyone in my town has either lived in the US, has a family member living in the US, and/or wants to go to the US to work (mostly illegaly). People have been asking my to teach English classes, but I think a lot of them just want it so they can go to the US, and I don`t want to endorse that. Itell them all it`s better to stay here and take advantage of the opportunities in their own country than to risk going to the US. Every day planes full of deported Hondurans land here. It`s a really hard situation.
Next week I am going to help with a medical brigade. Doctors from the US are coming and they need translators. There will be 6 doctors and 6 volunteers to translate. Meals and housing is provided for us. The brigade ends Thursday or Friday and then I`m going to my friend`s site to help with events for National Women`s Day. She works with a big coalition of women and they have lots of activities planned. So it will be an exciting week. Then I need to come back here and try to meet with the principals of all the nearby highschools.

pictures of my house

2008-01-17T10:43:00.000-06:00

my pila in the backyard where i wash clothes and dishes

my small bathroom, which i painted orange

the town park

the front of my house

the main room of my house, looking at the back door. that is the table i had built to use as a kitchen, with my electric stove on top. the red curtain is a traditional blanket with a dog pattern that i made into a curtain. and my pretty green walls. the other wall i am going to paint light brown sometime this week. i have been painting almost every night, it´s kind of addictive.

first week in my new house

2008-01-14T09:42:00.000-06:00

12 jan

I´ve had a good and eventful week. Monday and Tuesday I spent buying things for my house and setting things up, and I painted my bathroom orange. I´ve been getting to know my neighbors. On Tuesday I went to the library for story hour. About 12 little kids came to listen. The librarian is a great story teller, she read Curious George, or Jorge el Curioso. After the story, she showed the kids different species of monkeys on the computer and then they drew and colored monkeys. They were all really cute. I love the library, there are so many good books in Spanish, and I can use the computers for free.

On Wednesday I went to a nearby town for a meeting with an organization that is building a garbage dump and beginning an environmental education program. I´m really interested in doing a similar project in my area. I was with two other volunteers having lunch before the meeting and my project manager, Jorge, called me to say he was on his way to visit me for my site visit. We all get site visits in the first few months in site so they can see how we are doing and what we´re working on. Jorge apparently sent me an email, but I don´t check email every day, so I had no idea he was coming. So then I was kind of flustered, because I had a meeting, but I had to meet with him, too.
But Jorge said no problem, he could come to where I was and meet with me there Jorge did our training, so we were with him for 3 months. He´s a great person and I get along really well with him. He got there a little before 2, and the meeting was at 2, so he came with to the meeting. It was a very interesting and beneficial meeting. We talked about the landfill, garbage collection, recycling possibilities, and environmental education. After the meeting, I met with Jorge and talked about everything I had been doing and my experiences. Then he came back the next day, Thursday, to meet with my counterpart. Jorge had some good advice and he said that he thinks I will do great things in my site. He probably says that to everyone, but it was nice to hear. Also, he brought me a bike that another volunteer had left. So now I have a bike, and I´m going to try to ride it to the aldeas in the mountains. He also came to see my house and he said it´s very nice and it´s secure.

I really like my house. It has one main room, which is the kitchen livingroom, two bedrooms, and a bathroom. I painted my bathroom orange one night, like the color of a ripe orange, and yesterday I painted two walls of the main room kind of a forest green color. It´s really pretty. I´m going to paint a third wall a light brown and the other wall I might leave white, because it´s a really high wall. My bedroom I´m going to paint blue and purple. I bought some traditional type blankets, made in Guatemala, to use as curtains. I have my bed, a shelf set for clothes, a plastic table, and a plastic chair. The carpenter is building me a large, tall table for my kitchen, since there aren´t any counters. It´s almost done, he just has to put some shelves in the bottom. I bought a 2 burner elctric table-top stove on Thursday. I don´t have a fridge, but some volunteers are leaving in April, so I´m going to wait and get one of their fridges, because I don´t want to have to buy one. Before I bought the stove, I was toasting bread over a candle flame. It felt very Peace Corps. I have a nice little backyard with banana trees, coffee plants, a white poinsetta, and some other flowers. And I have my own new pila to wash clothes and dishes, and it´s tall, which is nice, since I´m tall. There´s no sink in the house, so I use the pila for everything.

In the next couple weeks I need to meet with the school principal and the highschool principal to plan some things, and I need to meet with the environmental offices of all the nearby towns to discuss the garbage situation. I don´t have much time before school starts. The week of the 20th, I will be in a small nearby town to help a medical brigade. Doctors from the US are coming for a few days and they need translators. I think it will be interesting to see them at work and to learn some medical terms in Spanish. And the first week of February I need to go to a Peace Corps meeting. Everyone from my project, Munincipal Development, is going to this meeting to share our work and listen to some talks. It will be nice to see people I haven´t seen and hear about what they are doing. So I have a lot to organize and not that much time.
I´m really happy living in town. I love being able to walk around and say hi to people and go to the park and the library and it´s much easy to work and organize things. It was a good experience living in the mountains, but harder to get anything done. I´m looking forward to the next couple months and the projects I think we can start.

New House!

2008-01-07T14:40:00.000-06:00

I moved into my new house on Sunday! It was pretty easy and fast to move, since the only furniture I have is a bed and a plastic chair. My host dad moved it all down with his truck. Sunday I spent unpacking, doing laundry, and getting to know my neighbors. My neighbors on my right are my landladies, they own my house. They are sisters, one is a nurse and one is a teacher, and the nurse has two little boys. The grandparents also live with them. They`re really nice. Today I have been going all over to buy stuff for the house. Like curtains, and paint. It`s so exciting having my own house! This afternoon and tommorrow I`m going to the library and to the mayor`s office to do some planning on how I can help them. Wednesday I have a meeting with a group that is building a landfill for some nearby towns. I`m really interested in seeing if it would be possible to build one for the munincipalities around here. Now that I`m living in town, I have a lot to do. Lots of people to meet and projects to start. This is the first time I`ve lived all alone, but it`s nice. I have a lot more independence. And it`s safe, my house is very secure, my neighbors are nearby, and it`s a safe neighborhood. I`m a few blocks from the central park where the mayor`s office is. It`s really pretty. I`ve taken some pictures, I just need to post them. My computer is still broken, so I`m trying to figure out where I can upload the pictures.

I`ve been in Honduras for almost 6 months now. I`ve experienced every month in a Central American country, because I was in Costa Rica January-June and in Honduras July-December.
I`m definately getting used to living here. I like it. That`s all for now.

Christmas

2007-12-28T10:24:00.000-06:00

People have been asking my about Christmas here and how it´s celebrated. It´s not as big of a deal as it is in the US. Some houses have lights and trees, but not everyone. There´s not much gift giving, mostly just for the kids. People make tamales and stay up until midnight on Christmas Eve and shoot off fireworks. It didn´t feel like Christmas at all. There was no Christmas music, or decorations, or snow, or presents. I had a nice Christmas, but it was sad not being home. I miss you all and Merry Christmas!

2007-12-20T09:34:00.000-06:00

13 dec

The past couple weeks have been pretty good. Although last week I had several meetings not work out. Last Wednesday, the 5^th, I had a community meeting to talk about a kindergarten and only two people showed up, so I said I would just start having classes and maybe more people would join later. So I had my first Kindergarten class last Friday. Last Thursday we had another meeting with the women who make bread, to form a community bank/ micro-enterprise, but not enough people came so we rescheduled it for the following Monday. The following Monday more people came and we were able to have the meeting. Last Saturday, I went to a meeting at the library in town that the director for the youth program was giving. It was really good. About 10 kids came and they seemed really excited about it. The director talked a lot about the importance of reading, which you don’t hear much of here. Nobody I know of reads just to read. The library will have drama groups, debates, and reading clubs.

I’ve had three days of kindergarten now and it’s fun. It’s more like preschool since the kids are 2-4. I have 3 or 4 kids and have class for 2 hours. We are learning colors, counting, coloring, and drawing. We played Candy Land one day. They are having a hard time remembering the colors, but they’ve definitely improved already. It’s really tiring though, I can’t imagine having a whole class of little kids and being with them all day every day. I have a whole new respect for teachers. Last class the older sister of one of the kids came with to help and she was really good with the kids, so I’m hoping her and another teenager nearby can continue the classes on their own. One day after class, I was walking around the aldea (village) and the streets were lined with chip bags, so I started picking them up. There is a project of making purses out of chip bags, which I didn´t learn how to do yet, but I figured I´d start collecting bags to do it. So I picked up a ton of bags, then went home and cut them and washed them. Some of them were pretty nasty, since they had been sitting on the road and were all dirty.

On Tuesday I went to help out a nearby volunteer who has a youth baseball team, with a practice. It was so much fun. These kids have never played baseball and since no one plays it here, it’s really a foreign sport to them, but they really play pretty well. Not that many kids are going to practice now, because they are out picking coffee, but they started out with a lot, and once school starts again, more will come again. So I’m hoping to help out a lot with that. It’s great to have the chance to play baseball. I’m happy I brought my mitt to Honduras.

My house is coming along. I can’t wait to move in.

19 dec Wed

Yesterday I walked to the village to give kindergarten class. I spent a couple hours on Monday cutting Christmas tree shapes out of cardboard so that the kids could decorate Christmas trees and then we will glue them to toilet paper roles so they stand up. I think it will be a fun project, but I don´t know when I´ll be able to do it, because the last two days haven´t worked out. Monday was a really foggy morning and the trees looked pretty in the mist. At one point, one of my host brothers was on the horse riding toward me, and he was wearing a gray sweatshirt with the hood up, and in the mist he looked like an elf from Lord of the Rings. So I walk all the way up there to the house where I do classes, when we don´t go to the school, and find out that the whole family is going to Santa Rosa. So I would be losing a third of my students, since I only have 3 students. So I said, ok, I guess I´ll come back tommorrow, and I turned around to walk all the way back to the house. I was ducking under one of the barb wire fences and I hit my head hard on the post. Then, as I was walking down one of the hills, I completely slipped, and skidded down the hill a little. I wasn´t hurt at all, but my pants got all muddy. So then I had to go home and hand wash my muddy pants in the cold, with freezing water. That I didn´t even mind so much. I´m lucky we have a washing machine and I seldom have to hand wash clothes. But what bothered me is that the family only has one pila, and they use it to wash clothes and to clean to just killed chickens. They currently have like 600 chickens, and pretty much everyday they are killing, plucking, cleaning, and packaging chicken. So when I wash clothes, I have to do it in the same place they wash dead chickens, and the ground is littered with chicken feathers, and it smells bad, and I wonder how clean my clothes are getting if they are getting covered in chicken germs. Anyway, it wasn´t a great day. In the afternoon we had two meetings with rural banks, and they were pretty boring and I was so cold.

Today I was going to go give classes so we could make Christmas trees, but it was really foggy and they told me it was better not to go.

Lately, I´ve been spending a lot of time visiting my hostgrandparents. They are really tiny and old. They live in the house next to us. My host grandma has a hard time hearing me or understanding me, so our conversations are kind of funny, because I´ll say something and she´ll reply with something completely different. She likes to feed me, and she makes really good tortillas. And my hostgrandpa is really interesting. So I really like visiting them.

On Saturday, they are coming over, with my host grandma´s two sisters, and I´m going to show them how to make Christmas cookies. We´re going to make the peanut butter cookies with the Hershey Kiss in the middle, sugar cookies with M&Ms, oatmeal raisin cookies, and lemon bars. I´m really excited. I need to buy cookie trays, measuring cups and measuring spoons because no one has any of that.

I started to make a purse out of the chip bags I collected. You cut strips out of the bags, and then kind of criss cross them together into strands, and then sew the strands together. I´ll have to take a picture. So I made all the strands, and now I need to find a big needle to sew them together. I´ve been really bored lately. Nothing is going on. Last week was really warm and sunny but all of this week has been cold and rainy. My couterpart host dad´s been out of the house all day working on coffee and chicken stuff, so we haven´t been going anywhere or working on anything. I have the kindergarten classes, but I can´t even always go if the weather´s too bad. I can´t wait until school starts again, and I can´t wait to live in town.

Moving out

2007-12-08T09:01:00.000-06:00

After a lot of thought, I´ve decided to move out of my homestay. When I first got here, I thought maybe I would stay here, but now I´d really rather live in my own house, and in town, for many reasons. I´ve been living with host families for nearly five months, and I miss the privacy and independence of living on my own. It´s true I have my own little house here, but it´s still connected to the family´s house, and I don´t have a kitchen. I miss deciding and preparing what I want to eat, and eating when I want to. It´s hard being on someone else´s schedule and eating what someone else feels like cooking. Also, I can hear everything from my room and they can hear everything I do. For example, one night, I had a cold, and I was up all during the night blowing my nose, and the next morning, they were all asking me how I felt, since they could here me up all night with a stuffy nose. I would like a little more privacy than that. And my room shares a wall with the house bathroom, so I can hear everytime someone uses the bathroom. I just would rather have my own independent house. Two years is a long time.

More importantly, I feel really isolated where we are, and really dependent on my host parents all the time. There are only 3 other houses here! How am I supposed to integrate into the community and work with the community if I´m not living in the community? It makes things really difficult and it´s really hard to get around. I´m also with my host family all the time, since they are also my counterparts. They are great counterparts, I couldn´t imagine better counterparts, but I´m here for the whole community, and I feel limited in what I can do with my current living situation. And I feel like it´s not a great idea to live with your counterpart. There´s a lack of a divide between home and work, and you become too dependent on that person. So I really need to move out of the house, and have my own house and more independence.

Also, I think I´ll be happier in town. This whole past year, while I was waiting for my Peace Corps assignment, when I found out it was Honduras, when I was in training, I always pictured myself living in a small town. I like where I´m living- everyday I can´t believe how beautiful it is- but I think I could be more effective as a volunteer in town. I´ll be able to walk around all over. I can work with all the schools, and the mayor´s office. There are three towns all right next to each other, so I can work with all three munincipalities. My project is Munincipal Development, which is working with the local government and community based organizations. We learned all about how the government functions in training, but I haven´t done much with the government because I haven´t been in town that much. Of course, I want to continue working alot in the aldeas, in the mountains. I really like the people and there are some great projects I want to work on here. But I think I can be more useful in town.

So I told my host dad two weeks ago that I decided to move out, even though I really like living with them, but that I´m used to living alone, and that´s just how we are, all volunteers have thier own houses. I was really nervous about telling him. I had been worrying about it for weeks, since I know he wants me to stay living with them, and they built me that whole little house, and I feel guilty about leaving after all they´ve done for me. But then I thought, if I was able to tell my own family that I was leaving for two years to live in another country, then I should be able to tell this family I met two months ago that I´m leaving their house to a house 40 minutes away. That gave me some resolve to tell him. He was disapointed, since they were expecting my to stay with them, but he said it was ok, he understood. He said it would be hard to find housing in town, though, which made me worried it would be months before I found an available house.

So last Saturday, Dec. 1, was World AIDS Day, and there was an educational fair in the town next to my town. The volunteer who lives there was helping to run it, so I went to help out. I was talking to one of the nurses who lives in San Pedro, my town, and I said I wanted to move there and did she know of any houses available. This was the first person I asked about housing, and she said yes, her sister had a house that no one was living in. They were renting it out to students but now it´s empty. It was so lucky that the first person I asked about houses had a house available! So later that day I went to see it. It´s a few blocks from the park and mayor´s office. It´s a nice house, and it´s in a quiet, pretty area of town. The house has two bedrooms, a bathroom, and a main room. It doesn´t have a pila (which is like a large sink that also stores lots of water, I keep meaning to take a picture of one to post) but they said they could build me one. The house doesn´t have tiled floors, just concrete, but that´s ok. It has a nice front porch. So tommorrow I´m going back to talk to the woman about improvements that need to be made and rent, and to sign a contract. I´m hoping to move in in January if everything´s ready. I think I´m going to buy a new camera next week, since mine won´t turn on anymore, and then I´ll take some pictures of the house.

Now that I´ve decided to move out, and that I´ve told my host family, I feel much better and more positive. I have something to look forward to, and I´ll be doing what I wanted to do from the begining. I did give it a shot here, and I´m going to live here through December, and maybe part of January, but to be happy here for two years, I want my own house and I don´t want to be so isolated. So I´m really looking forward to the oppurtunities I´ll have in town and the independence I´ll have with my own house!

pictures from the biodigestor

2007-12-05T14:10:00.000-06:00

me with a 1 day old baby calf.

inserting the bag that holds the biogas into its ditch

my host brother crawling through the bags in order to put one bag inside the other,

to double bag them

rolling out the plastic

my blue bedroom

2007-12-04T17:23:00.000-06:00

I haven´t been writing much lately because my computer is broken. I´m hoping to get it fixed, but I just don´t know if it will be possible. Anyway, things are going well. The weather has been pretty nice the last few weeks. It hasn´t been raining too much, and it´s been in the 70s during the day.

I decided recently that I like life here, in Honduras as a Peace Corps Volunteer, and that I could be really happy here for the next 2 years. There are many moments when I really miss people or places in the US, but I think the time will pass really quickly.

This month me and my counterpart organization helped form two rural community banks. They already had members but we explained the functions, the rules, and had them elect the officers. It was pretty interesting. We have to go back to give them training in accounting, transparency, savings, credit, and things like that. Yesterday we went to the town meeting at the mayor´s office, and the two banks were made official and given funding to begin. There was a great photo op of the mayor shaking hands with the bank president and handing him a thick stack of bills. Unfortuneately, my camera hardly turns on anymore, so I wasn´t able to get a picture.

Sunday was the 6^th grade graduation at the school I was giving charlas at. School ended a few weeks ago, but they just had the graduation. There were only 4 students graduating from 6^th grade, my host brother, and 3 girls. It was a nice ceremony with cake. I told the parents that I would like to give Kindergarten classes to the little kids in December and January. So I´m having a meeting tommorrow with all the parents in the community who are interested. I want to have class 1 or 2 days a week for a couple hours each day, and have someone from the community, maybe my host sister, helping me. And then in Februrary, she can continue giving classes in someone´s house, and can find another helper. That is, if the community wants to continue with it. I like working with kids, but I don´t want to be teaching kindergarten for the next two years, which isn´t even sustainable. But I think if I start it off, have someone helping, and show it can be done, people will like it and want to support it. That way they can have sort of a kindergarten without needing a building or teacher. It´s better than the kids sitting at home all day, anyway.

I´d really like to do a garbage project. In the aldeas, in the mountains, everyone burns thier garbage. I´m not sure what to do about that, because it would be really hard to start a functioning garbage dump out here. Everyone is so spread apart. But it´s something I´m going to look into. In town, where there is garbage collection, I want to start a program to encourage throwing away garbage, not dropping it in the street, and building garbage cans in the town parks. I really want to do a big program to educate people about reusing and recycling. There isn´t any kind of recycling program, but a volunteer near me is working in starting one, so I want to see what I can do. It would make me so happy to get a good garbage and recycling program going.

This Saturday, I´m going to a meeting at the new Reicken Library in town. They are funded by a man in the US, but the community has to provide the land, labor, and maintenance. Each library gets computers and some books to start out, and it´s up to the community to get more books. They are really nice libraries, with free internet, good books, a community meeting room, and lots of programs, for all the members of the community. These libraries are being built all over the country. Our library was finished about 2 months ago. I want to help coordinate reading groups, writing groups, drama groups, and an environmental club through the library. I´m really excited about it beacause I love libraries, and books. And this library has free internet!

I have lots of other ideas for projects. Hopefully they will work.

Nov 12

2007-11-24T13:17:00.000-06:00

this is an entry i typed weeks ago but never had a chance to post, so i`m posting it now.

12 november

I haven’t written in a while because I have had much positive to say, but now I have some interesting things to write about.
Last week the kittens were born, and there are 2 males and 1 female. They are so cute and tiny. I’ve never seen kittens right after they were born, they’re like mice. The boys are white with orangish-brown spots and the girl is grey and black striped. I’m going to name mine Mateo Miguel Fernando. They have to stay with their mother for a while still; they haven’t even opened their eyes yet.

More work-related, we finally had the biodigestor latrine workshop this weekend. A volunteer who has built a lot of them traveled here on Saturday to teach us how to do it, and another volunteer who lives near me came to see it. It was nice having them here and showing them where I live. The project is basically a large tunnel of thick plastic lining, of several meters length, to hold the waste, and the gases go up a pvc pipe to the stove. The waste goes into one end of the tunnel, the gas goes up through a tube in the top, and runs to the cook stove. The bacteria dies in the plastic lining, and the remaining waste liquid that comes out can be used to fertilize a garden or a fish pond. It’s pretty simple. To start the gases working, you have to pour in five buckets of a mixture of manure and water every day. It should start producing gas after a month, and produces about 6 hours of gas a day to cook from. The plastic we had was smaller than what they normally use, so ours will only produce about 3 hours a day of gas. It’s a free source of fuel for cooking, and saves a good deal of fire wood.

The next step is to get people interested in the project, write a proposal, and submit for funding. Peace Corps provides funds up to $6,000 to volunteers to do small projects like this, so I’m probably going to apply to that fund. It can take up to 6 months or more to get funding, so this is really something for next year.

The volunteer who came to do the workshop is a really interesting guy. He has already been here over two years, because he extended for a few months, and when he finishes his service at the end of the year, he will stay in Honduras to work with an NGO here. He got married to a Honduran in June, I think she is his counterpart’s daughter. When he got to Honduras, he didn’t know any Spanish, just a few words, and now he speaks like a Honduran. He even tells stories like a Honduran. He has tons of stories, I learned a lot.

Also, he got his Master’s in forest science, and he knows the name of every plant, tree, and fruit in English and Spanish. It’s really amazing. We walked all around the farm and he and my counterpart talked about plants. I’ve never heard so much about plants in my life. I could probably take a semester class in botany and not learn as much as I did from him in two days. The quantity of fruit varieties in just the area behind the house is overwhelming. There are little fruits that look just like tangerines, but they are lemons, and taste just as sour as any yellow lemon. And there are lemons and oranges that are bigger than grapefruits. And there is a huge tree of passion fruit, which grow really big. And a fruit that tastes like a squash, but it grows from a tree, and they hang down almost on vines. And most of the fruit falls to the ground and rots. That just begins the strange fruits growing here. On the property here, there are probably like 10 varieties of oranges growing. No bananas, because it’s not hot enough, but there are platanos (plantains), some of which can be eaten raw, and some which are harder and have to be cooked. There are 50 varieties of platanos in the country.

In other projects, we are supposed to give training to the rural micro banks, sometime this week, hopefully. Last week there was another meeting at the mayor’s office about the women’s bank but only 8 women showed up, and only 2 were the same from the week before. So I don’t know what’s going to happen with that. School is over, so I’m looking for some kind of youth group or something that I can work with and give charlas to. I also want to get some funding to get Christmas presents for really needy kids so we can have a Christmas party for them and hand out presents. That’s about all for now.

2007-11-21T12:32:00.000-06:00

Sorry I haven´t updated in a long time. I´ve had really limited internet access, and then when I do get a chance to use the internet, it`s either extremely slow, or it doesn`t accept my USB memory stick, so I can`t update. I have a couple blogs written, and some pictures, but this computer won`t take my memory stick. Hopefully this weekend I can really update. But things are going alright. For a while I was feeling really discouraged and negative, but now I`m feeling more positive about things. I don`t have much work going on. In the next 2 weeks we are going to do some training sessions for some rural banks. I want to start giving kindergarten classes a couple times a week, so I`m trying to organize that. That`s all for now, I`ll try to post my previous entries soon.

My Week

2007-11-03T09:46:00.000-06:00

On Monday I was going to go to the school to give a charla, but as I started to walk it started drizzling and then my host grandpa, a little old man, yelled up the hill at me to turn around, don´t go, you´ll get rained on. So I sighed and walked back down the hill. He gave me a ride in an ox cart, which was interesting. Oxen are kind of scary, they´re so big. Then I sat in their house for a few hours and drank coffee. It rained hard all day so it´s probably good I didn´t walk 40 minutes to the school in the rain. Monday afternoon I read magazines.

Tuesday morning it was raining really hard again. So I painted my bedroom a pretty blue color. It was the most exciting part of my week. It looks really nice. In the afternoon I went with my host family to deliver chicken and cheese to people and to visit some friends.

Wednesday morning we had a meeting at the mayor´s office with a group of woman who make and sell tortillas, bread, and cakes, to talk about forming a group of them. As a group, they could get loans and expand their enterprises. The mayor wants to start sort of a farmer´s market, which would be an outlet for these women to sell thier goods. Unfortuneately, only 5 of the 20 women invited came to the meeting. Of course, the mayor´s office only told them about it the day before, and the meeting was at 9am, which isn´t a good time for women, especially bakers, to leave the house. So we planned a second meeting for this coming Wednesday. Despite the lack of participants, the meeting still lasted 3 hours. Well , really 2 hours, the first hour was just waiting and talking, because people generally come an hour later for community type meetings, so the meetings start 1-2 hours after the set time. But it sounds like the women are interested in forming a group, so hopefully this Wednesday´s meeting will have some results. Wednesday afternoon I took a long walk in the mountains, because it was actually a sunny day, and it was so nice just being able to walk, and it´s a beautiful landscape.

On Thursday we went to Santa Rosa so I could go to the bank. Thursday evening we went to my host mom´s brother´s house for his birthday. Unfortuneately there was no cake. Last week i taught my host family how to make Rice Krispy Treats and they were really amazed at how easy they are to make, and they really liked them. It was one of my bigger successes so far, making Rice Krispy Treats. I would definately reccomend that to other volunteers.

Friday I finally made it to the school. I gave the little kids a talk on values and then we sang ´head, shoulders, knees, and toes´in English. They really liked that. And then Simon says, using the body parts we learned from the song. A few of the kids just didn´t get it though. It didn´t matter if I said Simon or not. Then I worked with the bigger kids, and we reviewed the English I taught them last week, then we sang ´head, shoulders, knees, and toes´ which they loved, we did it like 10 times, and we were going pretty fast by the end. We played Simon Says, and 3 of the kids I couldn´t fake out, so after a while, I called all 3 winners. It was a fun school day, but it was my last charla for the year because next week they have tests and then they are done. Next year I´m going to start charlas on the environment and also civic education.

So that was my week. I also got in contact with the volunteer about the latrines and he is coming next Saturday to do the workshop.

Pics!

2007-10-27T09:29:00.000-06:00

Coffee season is starting.

ripe coffee beans/grains are red

the little coffee procesor at the house

you pour the grains in the top and
the machine takes off the peel/pulp, leaving just the white bean

The white beans, depulped (without the peel)

The leftover pulp (peel)

This leftover pulp is a huge waste issue. It is very acidic, and can easily pollute the water, yet there is no good method for disposing of it, people just dump it wherever they can. And can you imagine the quantity leftover, since everyone is depulping large quantities of coffee for three months. We are hoping to work with the biodigestor latrine to use it to dispose of the pulp and use its gases to cook with.

I don´t know if I´ve talked about this latrine, it´s a project we´re starting next month, which uses the methane gases from human waste to cook with on a gas stove. So it´s avoiding deforestation, since no wood is needed to cook, and it´s a latrine.

Before electricity

2007-10-27T09:14:00.000-06:00

1 month down! (23 to go)
Today marks one month in site. It went pretty fast. I did a lot, although not that much work. But no one expects you to do much your first couple months, it´s more of a time to settle in and get to know people and your surroundings. I´ve had a few days where I felt really homesick or I felt like this is just really hard, but overall, I´m happy and positive.
The past 4 days have been really cold, well in the lower 60s/upper 50s probably, but it feels colder because there is no installation or heat, so it´s chilly inside, too. It´s warmer in town, during the day, but up on my mountain, it´s really cold. I´ve been sleeping in sweat pants, long sleeves, and socks, with 3 blankets. I don´t have a comforter, just some fleece blankets, so I just pile them on. And it´s going to get colder. Still, I´m really happy I won´t have to deal with a real winter, with freezing wind, and ice, and snow. This will be the first year of my life without snow.

Tuesday the electricity went out around 4:30 pm. It’s pretty dark out by 5:30 or 6, so we had to light candles and sit in the dark. Apparently a large region of the West was without power and they said there have been times when the power went out in the entire country. The power outage led to a really interesting conversation with my host parents.

I learned that they just got electricity in the community about four years ago. So then I asked what they used to do at night, since now they watch TV at night, but they didn’t have that a few years ago, to which they responded that they would talk, de-grain corn, and go to bed early. They didn’t have fridges, and they didn’t have iceboxes, since there’s no way to get ice, but there were some people with gas-powered fridges. Mainly they just didn’t have things that needed to be kept cold. If they killed a chicken, they would eat the whole chicken that day. Beef and pork they would dry in the sun or else smoke it above the stove in the kitchen to preserve the meat. Since there were no phones, the towns used telegraphs to communicate between themselves, Morse Code style. Then they told me that people in the community only began to get cars recently, everyone used to only travel by horse or walking really far, and they used oxen to transport. There are still many horses in use for transportation, but most people in my community have cars. My host mom said she was in 6th grade the first time she ever saw a car. And she’s only 34.

The conversation got more surprising. They explained how they didn’t have plastic cups or glasses so they used cups made of mud, or gourds, and they wrapped things in leaves since they didn’t have containers. My mouth dropped open when my host dad said that when he was in elementary school they didn’t have pens or pencils so they had to use feathers to write and they had to make their own ink. And he’s only 42. And I didn’t believe him when he told me that they didn’t have matches, so they had to start fires by rubbing rocks together. But he was serious. People carried flint around to start fires. And they didn’t even have candles, they had to make candles out of beeswax. I was really taken aback. Life used to be like that in the US, with horses and making candles, and feather pens, but it was like 100 years ago, not like 20 years ago. It’s amazing how much things have changed in the community in the last few years, since now everyone seems to have a TV and a fridge, and lots of other things.

Food y más

2007-10-20T09:37:00.000-06:00

I’m going to write a little about the food, because it’s different here than what I’ve been eating in other parts of the country, during training. The tortillas are much thicker, you can’t roll them, they’re more bread like then other tortillas, and they’re really good. We always eat them warmed off the stove, and I like them a little burnt.

There is a lot of dairy, since we have cows and the family sells cheese and butter. The butter is completely different than in the US. It’s white and liquidy and doesn’t taste like butter, but more like yogurt or sour cream. Some people call it crema. It’s good. They don’t really put it on anything, but just on the plate with the beans and everything, it’s good to dip the tortillas in. The cheese is white and I don’t know what kind of cheese to compare it to, it’s pretty different, but good. So for every meal, there’s some combination of cheese, or butter, or cuajada, which is like cheese, but spongy and more curd like. They drink the milk right out of the cow, they just boil it first. And then the kids drink it hot with sugar and Corn Flakes. I don’t really like the hot sugary milk, but I don’t really ever have cereal for breakfast. We have beans, tortillas, cheese, and butter, usually, sometimes eggs, and sometimes thin pieces of grilled chicken. And always coffee.

We have lots of fruit trees- oranges, lemons, guava, papaya, an apple tree, and other fruits I’ve never heard of before coming here. There’s trees with lemons the size of large grapefruits, it’s really strange. I love guavas.

We have chicken every other day or a little more, and it’s really fresh, like the milk and eggs and pretty much everything else. About once a week we have tilapia from our fish ponds. They cook the whole fish, either fried or grilled. That’s basically the only fried food we ever have. It’s really nice because in Santa Lucia I was eating fried tortillas about every day and I really didn’t like them.

We have a lot of vegetables- tomatoes, onions, white cabbage, lettuce, cucumber, potatoes, squash, carrots. About once a week or so we have soup with lots of vegetables in big pieces, with a big piece of chicken or beef. I’ve only had beef a few times since I got to site, and no pork, mainly just chicken and fish, which is perfect for me. We don’t eat that much rice, sometimes with lunch, but not always, which is fine with me. Every afternoon we have coffee with cookies or bread or crackers. So, that´s basically what I´ve been eating. I think I got pretty lucky with food here.

This past week included a meeting with the mayor and other municipality officials, a meeting about rural micro banks, a couple trips to nearby towns, construction of an improved stove, a meeting about building a high school in the community, and giving a talk in the school to 1st-3rd graders. The mayor was excited to have me and it sounds like there are some interesting things I could do with the mayor’s office. We’re going to be doing a lot of work and training sessions with rural banks (cajas rurales) which are formed by the community members to provide small loans within the community, like micro finance. It’s definitely something I’m interested in, so I’m excited to start that. Also, I finally got in touch about the volunteer about the latrine project, and he’s coming in November to give us the workshop, although I’m still waiting to hear when.

My community, Yaunera, is talking about building a high school since right now there’s not one nearby, so now people either stop school after the 6th grade, or they have to travel to other communities, or like my host family, go to town on Saturday morning. The people in the community have to pay for the land and construct the school and this organization, I’m not sure what it is, will provide the teacher and computers and other materials. It would be such a great opportunity for people. And, personally, I’d really like to have a high school in walking distance because there is a lot I could do with older students.

On Wednesday I went to the school to give the same self-esteem talk to the younger students 1st-3rd grade, It was much harder than working with the 4th-6th graders. Some of them were really slow to understand the games, so I had to explain many times, and even then, some didn’t get it. So I doubt how much they got out of my self-esteem talk. There were a few kids who really into it and seemed to be getting something out of it. The first graders can’t really read or write, so that made it more complicated. It was an interesting experience. I have a lot of respect for teachers, seeing what they deal with every day.

We’re talking about a lot of really good and interesting projects, I just hope we’re actually able to do them all.

Two weeks in site

2007-10-13T10:19:00.000-06:00

On Wednesday I gave my first charla as a volunteer. I walked to the school in the morning with Kristian and Kelvin, my two younger host brothers. I talked about self-esteem, but I kept it pretty short since it was my first talk and I wanted to know the kids better. I had three games, it was really more games than talking, so they really liked it, but I’m not sure how much they actually learned. They’re really cute kids, and they were well behaved. When I finished, they asked me to teach them the days of the week in English. So I taught them that, and then the numbers. They’re really excited to learn English. I told them to think about what they want to learn in English for my next charla.
When I finished with the students, I looked at the three computers the teachers said weren’t working. These computers have been sitting there for three months because no tried to connect them. That’s not really surprising though, stuff like this happens all the time. For the first computer I just connected the cords to the different parts and plugged the whole thing in and it worked. It doesn’t have Microsoft Works, though, which is a problem, I have to try to find the disc somewhere so I can install it. The second computer I got on, but it kept giving me strange error messages that I’ve never seen before. I’m not sure what to do with it, I’ll try it again next time. The third computer, I got working, no problem, and it has Microsoft Works and a really good Encyclopedia installed. So I’m going to start giving computer lessons to the kids. Some of them haven’t used a computer before, so I’ll have to figure out where to start.

On Thursday there was a community meeting at the school to talk about opening a high school. Right now there isn’t a high school, just two grade schools, which go up to 6th grade. So a lot of people just stop going to school after 6th grade, or others travel to the next closest high school. My host parents, my host brother, Kevin, who’s 13, and my host sister Karen, who’s 14, all take classes at the high school in town on Saturday mornings. They spend all week doing their homework and studying. It’s nice seeing them all work together. So it sounds like they’re going to get a high school for when the new school year starts in January. There’s another meeting next Thursday to talk about specifics. This school year ends in early November and school starts again sometime in January. So I think Nov and Dec will be tough months for me, because it’s coffee season, so everyone will be occupied with that, and I won’t even have the schools to work at. I’m hoping to do something with the mayor’s office during that time. Thursday night, three of my host mom’s brothers were over, and we netted some tilapia out of the fish ponds and grilled them. It was really nice sitting outside with everyone, and the fish was really good. I’ve always been afraid of eating a whole fish, but I’ve done it three times now. I don’t eat the tail or fins or head, but even eating around all the bones takes work.

On Tuesday last week, I went to Santa Rosa (our nearby big town) with my counterpart and some other people. They had to pick up some baby chicks, since they raise chickens, and get some other supplies for my room, and other things. I was walking around on my own , and I ran into some other volunteers whose sites are nearby. One of them was from my training class, but from a different project, and the others I hadn’t met before. It was really nice seeing them and getting to talk in English for a while, and compare sites. Current volunteers are a big help because they’ve experienced the beginning phase and know what we’re going through and that it will improve. The baby chicks are really cute. They set up a little incubator up on the little hill where I have to go to use my phone, so I can look at them when I make calls and check messages. I’ve been trying to get ahold of a volunteer to do a latrine workshop for us, but I can’t get ahold of him. We really wanted to do the workshop in October, so we could start the project in January.

Right now a bunch of trees are flowering white, and it’s really pretty. They don’t at all compare to DC in spring, but they’re nice. It’s been raining almost every night, soon the raining season will really get going and it will be rainy most of the time. Some of the coffee is starting to get mature, it’s a pretty red color. They’re have to start picking it soon.

Monday last week, we spent all day working on my room. We put in light switches, hot water, and did some plastering. It’s pretty much done now, we’re still missing a couple light switches and electric outlets, and a screen on one of the windows. My closet doors are beautiful, they’re a pretty wood color and each door has a full length mirror. My host family is also having a table built for me, which I definitely wasn’t expecting. I said I wanted a really big table to make charla papers on, since the paper is really big, and that I would go to a hardware store in town to see about getting wood to make a table, and the next thing I know, they tell me my table will be done on Sunday. They say it’s big and has a large drawer in the center. I’m overwhelmed by everything they’re doing. I´ll be so happy when I can finally unpack everything.

That`s all for now. I miss everyone a lot!

Pictures of my site

2007-10-13T09:45:00.000-06:00

Pictures from the 40 minute walk from the house to Yaunera, the aldea. This is what my host brothers walk every day to get to school. I was running it for a week before I found a better alternative. It`s all mud and really hilly. It is really beautiful, and goes through coffee fincas, and forests, and has overlooks of valleys.

pretty view from walk

part of the path

really muddy part of the path

view of valley- there`s a river at the bottom, which you can hear

the white spot on top of the hill is my house

self taken picture with pretty sky

baby sheep, born the day I got here

baby chickens, which I will be eating in a few months

pretty sky, building where some animals and equipment is kept

another self-taken shot with pretty sky

Pictures from Swear-In Ceremony- Sep. 27

2007-10-13T09:19:00.000-06:00

Munincipal Development Group

Enjoying lunch after the ceremony

Youth Development Group

Tegucigalpa from the bus

Me with Peace Corps flag!

Me with Alejandriana and Jorge, our project managers

Me with my friend Jordan

Our Munincipal Development group with our Spanish teachers

2007-10-09T11:03:00.000-06:00

October 5, 2007

I’ve been in my site a week now. I don’t have to much to report. I’ve been thinking a lot the past week, and I’ve made a lot of observations, but it’s difficult to put into words. The way of life is so different here in the campo, up in the mountains. This is the closest to culture shock I’ve experienced. Every day I’m surprised by something. It’s just so different from anything I’ve ever experienced. Sometimes it’s not just the way of life that surprises me, it’s the fact that I’m living this way of life, and I’ll be here living it for two years. I’m not just passing through. It’s not just that the houses are different, transportations is different, the food is different, but the way of doing things are different, and the way of thinking is different. It’s not that shocking, but there are things that make you think twice, or make you wonder. I also just feel really remote. It’s like a 35 minute drive to the closest paved road, I’m probably a 30 minute walk to the closest store of any kind, even a pulperia.

The best thing about living here is my host family/counterparts. They are so energetic and ideological about the development projects we’re going to do. And they’re just so happy I’m here, which is obvious by the little house they’re building me. They actually have an extra room in the house, and there would have been nothing wrong with them giving me that, but they took it upon themselves to build an extension onto their house for me; it’s really meaningful. They are willing to invest all that money, time, and effort to make me comfortable. It’s really incredible, and it says a lot about how invested they are in having a volunteer here. It makes me feel a deep sense of responsibility to work hard and really give a part of myself. I’m continually surprised at the work this must have taken and that they actually did this for me. The room is pretty much finished. They just have to connect hot water to the bathroom, install the electric outlets, and put doors on the closet. I’ve been sleeping in here the past few nights, and it’s really peaceful. There’s no furniture yet, except for the bed, but I like the feeling of sleeping in a new house, before all the furniture is in yet. It gets me excited about possibilities and new beginnings. The room even smells new, like construction. Eventually I’d like to paint the walls. Hopefully by the end of next week I’ll have some furniture. I’m so excited to have everything unpacked and set up finally.

This week we didn’t do too much. One day my host mom and I walked to the school where my two youngest host brothers go, it goes up to 6th grade. I think it’s about a 35-40 minute walk from here, mostly uphill and muddy, but with really beautiful views, and the boys have to walk it every day. It’s a two room school house with two teachers and around 30 students. When we arrived, the kids were at recess and a sheep was standing outside the gate of the schoolyard, looking in, just like Mary and her little lamb. Speaking of lambs, the day I got here last week, a little white lamb was born. It’s really cute. Anyway, at the school, the teachers said they’d like me to come 1-2 times a week to give charlas and to give computer lessons. So I’m happy I have some definite work. I think I’ll go on Wednesday to give a self-esteem charla, and my next charla after that will be on leadership. I really want to do an environmental education program. The problem is that the school year ends in early November, so I won’t have much time with them until school starts again in January. The other day I was playing with the cat and I said I wanted a kitten, and they told me the cat was going to have kittens soon, so that was surprising, not the answer I was expecting. I’m really excited about having little kittens. That’s all I really feel like writing for now, but I’ll probably have a lot more to say next time.

I'm a volunteer!

2007-09-28T14:32:00.000-06:00

Yesterday was our swear in ceremony at the US embassy. The Ambassador was there and the country director and all the training staff and we had the ceremony in the lawn of the embasssy. The press was there and there was an article about us in the paper today and we were on the news. Everyone gave speeches and it was really inspirational. It really felt like graduation again. After the ceremony we went to the ambassador's house. There was a pool, tennis courts, and sand volleyball. The house and lawn were huge, literally bigger than a lot of the sites we are going to. We played sand volleyball and it was a lot of fun. It was really sad saying goodbye to people because we won't be seeing each other. I've had to say so many goodbyes in the past few months. I am really excited that we're finally volunteers and I'll soon be starting projects and getting to know new people.

2007-09-25T16:25:00.000-06:00

my host family (the little girl in front is a niece, the others are part of the immediate family)

view from the house
view of the house

my room, still under construction
me with the previous volunteer and my counterparts

Site Visit

2007-09-25T16:21:00.000-06:00

Recommendation: PRINT THIS ENTRY, it’s pretty long, and you’ll have a better chance of reading it all if you print it, and it will be easier to read.

My new address:
Kristyn Oldendorf
Rdo. Angel A. Soto
Honducor
Cucuyagua, Copán
Honduras, C.A.

(This is the address of the local post office, and when I get letters or packages they will let me know and I can go pick them up. Make sure you use this address and not the previous addresses I gave you. Please feel free to send me stuff, just don’t send any really big boxes, and nothing perishable.)

This past weekend was our site visit, from Thur-Sun. Counterpart day was Wednesday, all the counterparts from our sites came to the training center to meet us, and the directors gave some speeches. It was interesting seeing all the different counterparts from all over. On Friday we traveled back to our sites with our counterparts. I took all my stuff with me, except enough clothes for this week.

My counterpart is also my host family. My host dad is Arnulfo and my host mom is Yesenia. They are really energetic and involved in the community. They have a small, new NGO, and it’s part of my assignment to help them organize and get things going. Also, my host mom/coutnerpart is president of the caja rural (rural micro bank). My host mom is also part of a group of 7 women who crochet shirts and bags and things, and make wedding dresses. They have four kids, aged 14-9, named Karin, Kevin, Kristian, and Kelvin, which is funny because my name just fits right in. The kids are beautiful and it’s nice having kids in the house. Also, they have a computer and the previous volunteer installed a game which is all the original Nintendo games, onto the computer. So all weekend the kids were playing original Super Mario Brothers, which was exciting.

The house is basically on top of a mountain; it’s about a 40 minute drive from San Pedro, the town, up to the house. It’s a beautiful drive up the mountain, and there are a few rivers, which are really pretty. The road is terrible, all muddy and rocky and full of holes and bumpy. I live in caserio, it’s called, because there’s our house and a couple other houses and that’s it, it’s so far out in the middle of nowhere. Also, it’s a farm. They grow coffee and have chicken coops, pigs, tilapia ponds, cows, turkeys, ducks, geese, sheep, and goats, all right outside the house. It’s crazy. It is nice that we get tons of fresh food from all the animals. The tortillas are really good, and my host mom makes good homemade pizza and cake.

I was also really surprised and happy to find out that they have running water all the time and it’s drinkable right out of the faucet, which is very unusual, but they get it right from the source, since they’re on top of the mountain and the water doesn’t have to make it down to the town. Also, they have a washing machine, which makes things so much easier. I knew they were building me a room, but I was shocked when I saw it. They built me my own little apartment, minus a kitchen. There’s a large front room, a bedroom, a good size bathroom, a closet, and a little patio area. It’s really amazing. They were still finishing it up when I was there but it will be done by the time I go back at the end of the week. I have a bed and little fridge from the previous volunteer but I’ll need to buy a desk and chair and whatever else I want. I’m paying about $150 a month for rent with all my meals included.

I only am required to stay with them 2 months, but they want me to stay longer and I’m considering it, but I’m worried about transportation because I’m so far up the mountain and my only way of getting around is to get rides from my host dad/counterpart. There’s a bus into town once a day at 6am, and it returns at 2pm. But if I’m working more with aldeas in the mountains, it would make more sense to live in the mountains. So I’ll have to wait and see how it goes. A big negative is that I don’t get cell phone service in the house. I can receive text messages, but I get them a couple hours after they’re sent. There’s a little hill outside next to the house where the water tank is, so I can go there to get reception and make calls. I might buy an antenna for my phone, which might help. When I stand outside the house and look around I literally can’t see anything except trees and mountains, there’s not one house in view. It’s really pretty, but it was kind of a shock. Usually people from the Municipal Development program are in municipalities, close to the mayor’s office. I can move to the municipality after my two months home stay, but I’m not sure if I will.

Also, I’m replacing a volunteer, and I was able to meet her, we spent all weekend together. She’s leaving this week though because she just got a job at the National Institute of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, MD. So that’s kind of funny because I just came from Bethesda, so it’s like we’re switching places. She’s from Maryland and went to UMD. It was really helpful hearing her experiences and suggestions, and she’s really nice. She gave me lots of tips. We’re really close to Guatemala and El Salvador, so it’s easy to travel to both, and she gave me some info on buses and hotels for when I travel. On Sunday we traveled together back to the capital, because she has to do administrative stuff this week with Peace Corps before she leaves on Friday for the US. She lived in the town of San Pedro her whole service, and she started out with a different counterpart before she found my current counterpart, so I will have a different experience. She had a cat while she was here, Tigre, and she decided to bring him back to the States with her, so it was an interesting trip back to Tegucigalpa, traveling with all her luggage and a cat. The cat was really good though, and very calm the whole day. We left San Pedro at 5am and got to Tegucigalpa at about 4:30 pm and I got back to Santa Lucia at 5:30pm. It was a long day. We did get to stop at Wendy’s for a quick lunch, which was exciting.

I had a good weekend. We spent most of Friday driving around to different aldeas and meeting people. Saturday evening we had a goodbye/welcome dinner and cake for the old volunteer and me, which was nice. It was really sad watching her say goodbye to everyone, it makes me think about how hard it is going to be to leave here after two years.

The big project my counterpart wants to start is a latrine project, so hopefully we can get that going in the next month. There are a lot of possible projects but I think it will take me a while to find my place. I’m also kind of worried because the coffee crop is from November through Jan or Feb and everyone’s going to be busy in the fields all the time, so it will be a challenge finding projects to do. I’m really excited to get going. The other people in my group had good visits. Almost everyone has some concerns about something, but everyone is still committed. Thursday is our swear in ceremony at the embassy and our reception at the Ambassador’s house and Friday we travel to our sites for good.

my site!

2007-09-18T10:49:00.000-06:00

My site is San Pedro de Copán! It’s in the west, near the Guatemalan border, near the town of Santa Rosa de Copán, which is a popular tourist site for the beautiful Mayan ruins that are there. You should really google pictures of the ruins of copan, honduras, you´ll get some beautiful pictures. I´m a few hours from the actual ruins, but it is really cool. There are some indigenous groups that still live in the area. I am so excited. My site description sounds amazing and it’s supposed to be absolutely beautiful there, and I’m near a national park. I was expecting to be extremely hot for the next two years, but my site is actually really cool, with an average tempearature of 60 degrees Fahrenheit, because of the high altitude, so I was surprised about that. I’m going to need to buy some more jeans. I have all kind of possible projects to work on. There is a volunteer there now, Nicole, and she wrote me a very long, very informational letter about the projects she’s worked on and about possible projects I can start, and about all the people I can work with. It’s really helpful. It turns out she’s leaving her service early to start a job in the States, so we won’t be overlapping at all. I’ll get to meet her Thursday when we go to visit our sites, but I think she’ll be gone be the time I get there for good. Hopefully I’ll get to inherit a lot of her stuff, which will make it much easier when I go to live in my own house. We swear in the 27th at the embassy and then we leave the 28th for our sites.

For the first two months I have to live in a homestay, which will be in an aldea (small town) of San Pedro, probably like 500 people or so, but I’m not sure. My conterpart is my homestay. After two months I can keep living there or I can move to San Pedro, and I can even take over Nicole’s house there. I’ll be about a 10 hour bus ride from the capital, Tegucigalpa, which is hard, but at least I’m near a popular area to visit, so hopefully other volunteers will be in the area visiting, and when people come visit me we can go there and go to my site. There is another volunteer about 20 minutes from me, and from our training class, there is another volunteer, Brianna, about 2 hours away, and Rachel, about 2 or 3 hours away, I think, and they’re both really great, so that’s exciting we’ll be close. Most of the others will be really far away from me.

Some of my possible projects are working with a group of women who crochet sweaters, shirts, skirts, dresses, and bags, and are looking to market their products. I’ll have the opportunity to work on fair trade initiatives with them, which is pretty exciting. There is also an interesting latrine project my counterpart is just starting, and an improved stove project in progress. My counterpart is an NGO (non government organization) that is working to develop the munincipality. Also, there are several active schools that I can work with. She listed a lot of other possible things I could look into. I basically have a lot of freedom to explore and work on what interests me and what I think I could be useful in. My site sounds pretty much perfect, hopefully I stay this excited when I go visit it. We meet our counterparts on Wednesday and then go back with them on Thursday to visit for the weekend. I’m soooo excited.
Most people are pretty happy about their sites. There were some surprises about people who thought they were going somewhere else. One girl is going to La Ceiba, which is a really touristy, fun city on the North Coast, on the beach. So that’s pretty exciting. Five people are going to the South, where it’s really hot. The others are near the El Salvador border, but southeast of my site.

We also had our goodbye party today, which went really well. We made American food, like deviled eggs, hotdogs in a blanket, potato skins, veggie trays, cheese and crackers, guacamole and salsa, stuffed jalepenos, ricekrispie treats, cookies, and blackcows (because there is no rootbeer for rootbeer floats). Everything was so good.
I’m really sad to leave here, because I really like the town and my family. I’ll miss Brayan a lot, he’s really sad I’m leaving. I told them I’d come visit, but it would take me days to get here from my site. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to come. I’ll miss everyone in my training class, too. It was really nice being all together here, and we got pretty close.
I can’t wait to go see my site, I couldn’t stop smiling while I was reading my site description and my letter, it sounds so amazing.

2007-09-13T17:48:00.000-06:00

left- planting trees with high school students
below-me in front of my house

left- the cemetary in town
below-me, Alice, and Dan

left- me during our field trip to the countryside in my friend´s hat. i´ve decided i need to buy a hat.

below- us fishing with our home made poles

left- brianna in a cool tshirt her friend sent her with the tiny fish she caught
below- a baby cow

2007-09-13T17:41:00.000-06:00

Last week, on Thursday, we had a field trip in Spanish class to a tobacco factory just outside of town. It was really big and we got a tour about the whole process. It was really interesting. We watched the whole process and learned a lot. The place smelled really strongly of cigars, though. I think my favorite part was seeing all the pretty wooden boxes they get sent out in. After the factory, we went to this woman’s house were she makes vino del café, or coffee wine. I didn’t understand what it was until we went and tasted it. It actually tastes like a mixture of coffee and wine, it’s a strange combination, I prefer the two separate, but it wasn’t bad. She explained the process of how she ferments the café, it really is a unique idea. This woman also makes wonderful cakes with coffee. We had some, and it was so moist and chocolately, with a taste of coffee. It was definitely some of the best cake I’ve ever had. It was a really fun day.

Monday we had cultural day, so we each made a typical dish with our families and then we all got together with the families and had a little party. We each had to explain in Spanish the recipe of what we made. All the volunteers had to come up with games to play, like we had pin the tail on the donkey, the hokey pokey, and pictionary. It was really nice. We had it in the evening, and the house we had it at has a big patio with lots of plants, and it reminded me of Lord of the Rings in Hobbiton, with the mossy trees and the lanterns. It was so peaceful. Some students performed some traditional dancing for us. We only have five more days here, and I’m really sad about it. I’m going to miss my buddy Brayan. I plan on coming back to visit, if possible. I really like my family here and the town.

We had our third technical interviews Monday with the project directors and they gave me some clues about my site. I’ll be in a small site, near a city, and after my two month home stay, I can move to the city if I want. My counterpart is working in developing the municipality, and his wife is working with a group of women who want to start micro enterprises, so I’ll have lots of project options. They told me that my counterpart called Sunday to check when to come pick me up and he´s really excited to have a volunteer, so that’s exciting. My counterpart will also be my homestay family, and they actually just built me a room, so they’re really getting ready to have me. I found out I’m replacing a volunteer, which makes me a little nervous because I won’t be blazing my own path, I’ll be following their projects and expectations the community already has. But it will make integration easier and it should give me more freedom to start and expand projects, hopefully there will be less setbacks. We will have three months overlapping, of working together, so I really hope we get along well. I meet my conterpart in less than a week. We find out our sites on Monday and we meet our counterparts on Wednesday. It’s so crazy. I’m getting nervous, Peace Corps is really about to begin. So far it’s been pretty easy going, just going to Spanish class and working together on little projects, but in a few weeks we’ll be all alone and responsible for integrating into our communities and starting our projects. I’m excited though.

Tuesday and Wednesday we had our rural tourism field trip to Los Llanos and it was a lot of fun. We slept in this big room which used to be a restaurant and the property was really big and there was an empty swimming pool and a fire pit. Tuesday we rode horses to a farm and learned about cows and pigs, and we went to a sugar cane farm and got to cut down the cane with a machete and then we ground it to make this sugar cane drink. Riding horses was really fun and it was exciting getting to use the machete. In the afternoon we made hand-made fishing poles out of sticks and fishing line and used screws as weights and we went fishing in this pond out in the countryside. A couple people caught fish but they were about the size of your little finger. It was really pretty and relaxing. When we got back, we played soccer in the empty swimming pool. Then we all sat around the empty pool and talked and it was really nice. Saturday night we had a campfire, which took a while to get started since all the wood was wet, and we roasted marshmallows. We couldn’t find normal ones, we could only find the colored tropical flavored kind, but they were still really good. We have a really fun group. I really hope I get stationed near some of them.

Wednesday we went to a different cow farm and a saw a fish project in Las Manos, on the Nicaraguan border. The farmer was a good speaker and explained things well and had good insights about the environment and the importance of agriculture. Jorge, our project director, gave us a speech about how people are malnourished from lack of knowledge or change of thought, and we have to show them how they can start fish projects and things like that. He’s so motivational. Then we went to a café finca and learned about the café harvest, which really begins in December. Then we picked some corn and roasted it, and it was excellent. That was pretty much it, I love field trips. We leave El Paraiso on Tuesday to go back to Santa Lucia, where we started off. I can’t believe we’re almost done with FBT!

HIV/AIDS charlas, strikes, tamales, and corn festivals

2007-09-02T12:20:00.000-06:00

We’ve been working on our field based projects for a couple weeks now, and they’re going well. I usually walk up at 5:10, go running, shower and eat, go to Spanish class, and then we have self-directed projects or tech sessions. For our Self-directed projects, we’re in groups and we have to work on our own in the community. My group of five is working in Jacaleapa, a nearby town. We’re working with the mayor’s office, the schools, and some community based organizations. We have certain objectives we’re supposed to achieve and we don’t have much time. In the mornings we have Spanish class and a couple afternoons a week we get driven to Jacaleapa in Peace Corps vehicles. The other afternoons we have training sessions here.

It’s frustrating trying to schedule things, because of this tight schedule and other setbacks. We’ve had a lot of setbacks. For one example, this past week Monday and Tuesday the teachers went on strike in the whole country so we couldn’t do any talks in the schools, which we need to do. The strikes are really frequent. The teachers just announce they’re going to strike certain days and then there are no classes. It’s such a shame because the students are suffering. They don’t get the greatest education as it is, and then when they lose all these days of class, they get more set back. Also, there was a road block Monday, so we couldn’t even get to Jacaleapa. There were three simultaneous strikes going on, one was a bus company, one was the teachers, and the other was Hondutel, the national government phone company. It seems like there’s always someone striking. Sometimes it gets violent. Last month there were incidents during the miners’ strike.

Anyway, we’ve done some interesting things in our project. Last week, on Wed, the 22nd, we went to a meeting with the mayor for a program called atención a jóvenes (attention to youths). The senior citizens in the town spend time with jóvenes a riesgo (youths at risk) once or twice a week. So we got to sit in the meeting with all the senior citizens and with about 12 or 14 teenagers. At first the mayor had us sit at the front of the meeting hall and then we had to introduce ourselves. It was an interesting meeting and I really like the program. In the afternoon we had Spanish class but it was an exciting day because we all had class together and the other classes taught how to make recipes. First, Brian and Susan taught how to make tamales. It was really fun. We had to shuck a lot of corn and then cut the corn off the cob and then we all went in the Peace Corps van to the molino (small hand-operated mill) to have the corn ground. Then we made the tamales. It was really fun. Next, Rachael, Dan, and Brianna Bailey made guacamole, which was delicious.

Last weekend we went to Danli for the corn festival on Saturday. We met up with people from another project, Protected Areas Management, who are doing Field Based Training in another town. It was really fun to see them. There actually wasn’t much corn at the festival. There was a mountain of clothes and shoes though. People were just lining the roads with there stalls of clothes and shoes, some of them were just piled up several feet high. It was an interesting site.

This past week was good. On Wednesday, the 29th, my Spanish class, which is me, Alice, and Carmen, went to the health center to give a self-esteem talk to a group of pregnant women. Our teacher came with to watch us and see how we did with our Spanish. It went really well. We talked about self-esteem in yourself and your own life, self-esteem in relationships, and teaching your children self-esteem. At the end one woman said we did a good job and another said it was really good to be reminded of these things and she was happy we came. That was my first charla (talk/lecture) and I was happy it went well.

On Thursday some current volunteers came to teach us how to do an HIV/AIDS charla. Although we’re not the Health program, HVI/AIDS education and prevention is a main goal of Peace Corps and it’s everyone’s responsibility to work toward this goal. The charla we did is a pre-planned charla and it’s mostly dínamicas (games/acitivities) so there’s not too much prep work to do with it except preparing the materials. So Thursday morning the volunteers did the charla with us and in the afternoon we got in groups of 3 or 4 and prepared to give it the next day.
Friday we went to one of the high schools and each group had a different class of 17-20 students ages 13-16 . It was about a 3.5 hour charla. Jordan, Brianna Bailey, and Susan were in my group. There were activities like: a race to find the HIV/AIDS vocab word that matched the definition, a true false game about AIDS, an activity with pictures in which the students have to say if the activity can transfer HIV or not, a game in which the students had to put in order the steps of using a condom, and then we had to demonstrate the steps, and have each student practice all the steps. Honduras has a high HIV/AIDS rate, the highest in Central America, I’m pretty sure, so these talks are really important.

It was definitely one of my favorite activities that I’ve done so far. I think the kids really enjoyed it and got something out of it. It was exhausting doing the charla, even though there were four of us giving it. But it was really loud in the room, because of outside noise, so we had to yell just to be heard, and even when someone else in my group was leading the activity, I was making sure the kids were paying attention or explaining it to kids who didn’t understand. It was also really hot, and by the time we were done I was so tired. That was the first time I’ve worked with a class or a big group of kids and I really enjoyed it. I’d definitely like to give the AIDS charla when I get to site, but I don’t think there’s any way I could do it alone, or even with the teacher, because it’s so tiring. I’d need another volunteer to do it with me. But it’s definitely a good activity to do.
Friday afternoon a women living with HIV came to talk to us and share her story. It was really emotional and really brought to life the problem. So it was a good day, but difficult.

Two more weeks until we find out our sites! I feel like half our conversations are about our sites and where they could be and what we want them to be like and if we’ll be close to each other. It’s hard not knowing, but it’d also be hard knowing. I have kind of mixed feelings about going to my sites. I’m ready to start working and I have lots of ideas of what projects I want to do, and I can’t wait to find out who I’ll be working with and what I’ll be doing. I’m so excited to go. But on the other hand, Field Based Training is really fun, and we have such a good group and we’re all friends, so it will be hard leaving everyone when we disperse all over the country. We’ll get opportunities for some of us to meet up, but it will be hard for all of us to get together again. We don’t actually leave for our sites until the 28th, so there’s still time. It will be so exciting to see our homes for the next two years.
So, that’s all for now, it’s been an eventful two weeks. ¡Hasta luego!

2007-08-27T17:50:00.000-06:00

Photos of El Paraíso

Trip to the café finca

Left- my buddy Brayan holding bananos

Below- my host dad with his café and banano plants

Bananos

Brayan and my host dad loading bananos onto the truck

Left- central park
Below- a street

Left- view from the finca of El Paraíso

2007-08-14T18:02:00.000-06:00

El Paraiso is great. I like that it’s a bigger town so there are lots of stores and restaurants and things to do. It has a really big plaza as well as a beautiful central park, so that’s really nice.

Today I was feeling a little down, for no real reason, I was just bored and kind of frustrated and tired of sitting in classes all day. So after training I took a walk around the town and as I was walking some kids were playing soccer in the street and the ball happened to come to me and I kicked it back and then we started to kick back and forth. Then all the kids wanted to know about me and how to say their names and various words in English. One little girl who is 6 talked to me for a long time. She was really cute and just very talkative. It really cheered me up to have all those kids so friendly and interested in me. I told them I would go back and play with them again. It was great timing to cheer me up.

My host family is awesome. I already wrote about them a little. My host mom’s friend, Maria Louise, is really funny and she kind of reminds me of Lois. She comes over every day to eat lunch with me and she’s really nice. My host dad is funny, too and he took me to the finca (coffee farm) on Saturday, which I’ll write more about in a minute. Also, there’s a little boy named Brian who is always at the house. He’s 11 and he’s from a poorer family and his parents aren’t really around. So he’s at our house all the time and my family feeds him and he helps out around the house and on the finca on the weekends. He’s my new best friend. He’s so nice and helpful and curious about the US. We talk alot. He´s really funny. Brian helps me with everything, mopping my room, doing my laundry, washing dishes. Yesterday he shined my shoes. I feel guilty that he does so much. He’s so energetic about it, he seriously won’t let me do anything myself.

The food is awesome here. I get fresh fruit and vegetables, fresh chicken from our chicken farm, bananas from our banana farm, and fresh honey, also from the farm. Also, my family sells paletas, which are like popsicles made of milk, sugar, vanilla, and whatever flavor they are, kind of like a fudgesicle. They’re so good. There are chocolate, strawberry, vanilla, and coconut. I’ve only tried strawberry so far. It’s basically frozen strawberry milk. My host mom is a really good cook. Hardly anything is fried, unlike the food in Santa Lucia. The tortillas are also so much better than the tortillas in Santa Lucia. I love pretty much all my meals here.

I had a really good and eventful weekend. Saturday morning I went running with Rachel, my running buddy, at 6. Then I showered and had breakfast. Around 10:30 my host dad, Brian and I left for the finca. A finca is basically a small farm but it looks more like a forest than a farm. There’s really no other word for finca. There are plants growing wild, but the crop is growing along side the other plants. I visited a couple of them in Costa Rica. My family’s finca is in the mountains, about a 20 minute drive from the house. It was really big. There are coffee plants growing all over, and banana trees. Coffee needs lots of shade, so people always plant banana trees to provide shade for the coffee. They grow several species of coffee, including Lempira, which only grows in Honduras. I ate bananas fresh off the tree. They also have several varieties of bananas, including purple ones, which are really good. Banana trees only produce fruit once, so to get the fruit down, they simply cut the tree to get to the fruit. It was pretty cool watching my host dad hack down trees with his machete. We walked all over the finca and then walked through someone else’s finca to visit some people who live on the mountain. They gave us coffee and cookies and we talked a while. It was so beautiful and peaceful being on the finca up in the mountains. It’s definitely one of my favorite experiences here so far. We were gone a little over 4 hours. Brian pointed out all the different types of fruit trees to me, and my host dad explained all about how coffee grows. I got to practice a lot of Spanish and I learned a lot.

Saturday night our families had a welcome dinner for us, which was really nice. We all got to meet each others families. Some high school students performed traditional dances for us and the food was really good. Afterwards, I went with three other trainees to a little café in the park where a guy plays the guitar and sings on weekends. He’s a tenor in the Honduran national symphony, so the music was beautiful.

Sunday I washed my clothes in the pila for the first time. I was lucky in Santa Lucia because my family had a washing machine, most people have pilas. I don’t really know how to describe a pila, I should take a picture of ours. Towns only get running water a few hours a day, so they keep all the water in a big cement container called a pila, and that’s where you do laundry, and where you cook and wash dishes when there’s no water. It has a wash board kind of thing to the side. I don’t know if that’s the best explanation, maybe you can google it. Anyway, it was hard work washing clothes by hand and it took me a while. Sunday afternoon I went to a cultural festival with my host family, including Brian, and my host mom’s friend, Marie Louise. There was traditional food and music. There weren’t that many people there, but it was nice. The guitar player from the café was there, so I talked to him for a while and got to see his adorable little kids.

Every morning we have Spanish class. There are two other people in my class, and they were both in my class before, in Santa Lucia. Our professors are also living with families here, so our class is in the house of the family our professor is living with. It’s a really pretty house with a big garden in the courtyard. We go home for lunch from 11:30-1.
In the afternoons we have technical training. Our first day here we made a map of the community, which was really fun. We’ve had talks about a couple different things. So of our 40 hours a week of training, we have 20 hours of language, and 20 of everything else.

On Thursday we’re going to begin our self-directed projects. We split into 3 groups, 1 of which will do work here, while the other two will go to nearby towns to work. I’m in a group with 4 others, and we’re going to Jacaleapa, which is about 20 mins away. We will have to give talks to students, including talks on civic participation, on leadership, and on HIV/AIDS, all in Spanish, of course. We will also do things with the mayor’s office and with community based organizations. I’m really excited about doing some actual work. This is sort of our practice run before we begin our work as volunteers. We don’t find out our sites for another month. I’d like a medium sized town, with other volunteers nearby, but not too close, and I’d like to work with juntas de agua, environmental clubs, civic education, and I don’t know what else.

El Paraiso

2007-08-09T17:55:00.000-06:00

We`re in FBT now, Field Based Training. It`s in El Paraiso, a town near the Nicaraguan border. I really like it here and I hope I get a similar site. It`s a good size, and not too terribly hot. Honduras is much hotter than I realized in some regions. I`m going to have trouble if I´m sent somewhere where it`s always 100. Anyway, today we made a map of the town, which was a lot of fun.
I love my host family here. They`ve never hosted anyone and they`re really excited about and all are super nice and friendly. I have a 22 year old host brother who goes to school in Teguc but is on vacations now. There are also two older children who don`t live at home. My family has a chicken farm, which my brother took me to see yesterday. I`ve never seen so many chickens in one place. They slaughter them and then sell the chicken out of the house. I´ve never had such good chicken though. And my host mom has this really nice friend who is always over and yesterday we went to her house and she has mango, avocado, and guava trees, so we got some fresh fruit. My host mom`s also a great cook, so I´m really happy about the food situation.
We`ll be having spanish classes in the mornings and will be doing community projects in the afternoons. There are only 14 of us here, so we`ll probably get pretty close in the next month and a half.
I`m so happy we get to do training in a big town and I got lucky with my host family. Hopefully it will continue to be good.
Also, keep sending me text messages! It`s free for you through the website and it`s free for me to recieve. I love to hear from people!

2007-08-06T20:36:00.000-06:00

First, if you tried to text me, I did get several texts, but no one signed thier name, so I´m not sure who they were from. So sign your names! :)
Also, my phone died on Sat and won´t turn back on so that´s what happened if you tried to call and it didnt work. But I´m getting a new phone tommorrow so then it should be good.

Wednesday we leave for Field Based Training so I´m pretty excited. I had a really good weekend visiting my volunteer. I got to meet a bunch of current volunteers and see a couple different places in Honduras, so it gave me a good perspective and a better sense of what to expect and what I want in my site. It was awesome seeing other parts of Honduras, the volunteers I met were great, and I had a lot of fun. I can´t wait to find out where I´ll be, it´s really nerveracking wondering where I´ll spend the next two years. Ok, I´ve got to go. More to come soon.

2007-07-30T17:14:00.000-06:00

view from my house
futbol field
laguna

2007-07-30T16:57:00.000-06:00

So it’s time for an update about Honduras and about training. Santa Lucia, where we are, is very hilly, has cobblestone streets, beautiful views of the mountains, a lagoon, and two soccer fields, I consider these the highlights. The lagoon isn’t very big, but it’s pretty cool, it’s actually a pretty green color, and there are ducks and swans in it, and on weekends people have little rowboats and paddle around it. Also on the weekends there are soccer games all day on both fields. Our first weekend here, I went to watch one of my brothers play on his team, which was fun. A lot of trainees play casually after class. I’ve played a few times and it’s fun, but I’m really bad. I also have run a few times. There’s a dirt path/street that goes up into the mountains, and isn’t very busy, so it’s good to run on. There’s another trainee who runs at a similar pace as me, so her and I run together, which is really nice. This path has breathtaking views of the town below and the mountains. The only bad part is that sometimes there are many barking dogs, and although they don’t seem like they’ll hurt us, it’s still alarming.
Usually I wake up around 6:15, get ready and eat breakfast and leave around 7:10. Some people live like half an hour from the center, but I’m pretty close, so I can get there in like ten minutes if I walk fast. Training starts at 7:30. Everyday is a little different, but we always have Spanish classes in the morning, lunch at 11:30, and sometimes more Spanish for an hour or two after lunch.
There are five people in my class. We do a lot of narration, do skits, take turns presenting a grammar topic, and present a news article, that kind of thing. It’s a little frustrating because over the past two years, I haven’t really had grammar, I’ve just taken classes taught in Spanish, and it’s hard sitting in a classroom for that many hours. I also feel like my Spanish should be better than it is, but my issue is really using correct grammar when I’m speaking. Costa Rica was the only time I really had to speak a lot of Spanish, and although I did fine, and had tons of conversations and could take care of things, people wouldn’t correct my grammar. And now I’m going off alone to my site to be a professional and it’s important that I really know the language to be as effective as possible. I’m sure I’ll improve a lot before I become a volunteer, but it’s a process.
After Spanish, we either have CORE, which is like safety and security or health, or we have Project Training, where we split into our respective projects (I’m Municipal Development) and we go over things respective to that. I think there are 15 people in Muni D. We talk about things like the structure and functions of the municipalities, the roles of different government officials, public services, transparency, social auditing, citizen participation, etc. For Security and health, we’ve had info sessions on diseases, how to prepare food and water, how to deal with unwanted attention, transportation safety, etc. Sometimes current volunteers come and talk to us about their experiences.
After training, I like to go run or play soccer, unless it’s raining really hard. After, I go home and shower, do homework, eat dinner. I’m usually asleep by 9:30 or 10. There just isn’t much to do at night.
The food isn’t too bad, although a lot of people are having serious issues with it. I was expecting mainly rice and beans, but I’ve only had rice a couple times, and I’ve had beans a few times, but not served with rice. Hondurans fry a lot of things, which does get hard to eat. I’ve had some good things and some not so good things, but nothing that I absolutely couldn’t eat. I get a lot of tortillas though, and I don’t like them that much. In Costa Rica I got really sick of rice, and here I’m getting really sick of tortillas. I eat like 6 a day sometimes. They’re corn tortillas, and are small and kind of dry. For breakfast I usually get Cornflakes, or sometimes toast, and fresh orange juice. I bring my lunch to school, and I get spaghetti, or some meat with tortillas, and sometimes and apple, watermelon, or papaya.
Some typical Honduran food:
Tacos- tortillas filled with meat, rolled tightly, and fried
Pupusas-tortillas fried, filled with pico de gallo, with cabbage and onion on top
Baleada- tortillas folded and filled with beans, cheese, and either eggs or chicken.
Tamales
Fried plantains
Anyway, it’s not bad.

My host family is good and we’re getting along well. The little girl is really cute. We color and draw together. She had two little rabbits in the house, but then one died, and she just told me that she can’t find the other one, so we’ll see what happens with that.
wednesday we went to Tegucigalpa to the market for Spanish class. My group had 7 people and we took a bus to Teguc and then a taxi to the market. We had to ask prices of things, buy some stuff, and find out bus schedules. It was a good experience. They keep warning us how dangerous the city is, but it doesn’t seem too bad. The market was neat. I bought a pineapple and some oranges for my host family. We then met up at the Peace Corps headquarters, and then they took us to Dunkin Donuts/Baskin Robbins, so that was really exciting. i wrote my reaction about the market visit for class.
on Thursday, we leave to do our volunteer visits. Each of us will go visit a current volunteer in our own program and see what they are working on and the life of a volunteer in the field. We come back that Saturday. i´m going to a town about four hours south of here where it is warmer. i´m really excited. In two weeks, on August 8, we leave for Field Based Training (FBT), where each program goes to a different site. Muni D is going to El Paraiso, which is a city a couple hours from here. It will be interesting to live in a different part of the country for a while. While there, we will still have Spanish but will also work more with people and the government. We don’t find out our permanent sites until Sep. 17, but we’re all wondering what the sites are, and thinking about where we’d like to be placed.
saturday was fun, some of us hiked around the mountains around here for about four hours and we saw some breathtaking views of the city and the mountains. after the hike about 12 of us played soccer for a couple hours, which was really fun.
So things are going well. On the down side, we’ve had four trainees decide to leave. It’s very unusual to have so many people leave, especially in the first two weeks. The last training group didn’t lose anybody. I think the reasons are more personal than having anything to do with the program or Honduras. It’s still hard seeing people go. I really can’t imagine leaving. I’m so happy with everything and I’m excited about the upcoming travels! I <3 Honduras!

Welcome to Honduras, help yourself to some Dengue!

2007-07-22T11:18:00.000-06:00

So after a week of being here, I get dengue. Well, it might have been dengue or it might have been some other virus, I don’t know yet for sure. The point is, I had to spend Wednesday night until Saturday morning in the hospital. Don’t worry it wasn’t very serious and I pretty much felt fine. Sorry for not letting anyone know I was in the hospital but I wasn’t allowed to make international calls from the hospital. And it wasn’t that serious. This was my first time staying in the hospital, 2 and a half days in Honduras. Luckily it was a nice hospital and I was well-taken care of.

So this is what happened. On Tuesday we got vaccinations for rabies and typhoid, and one of the side-effects of the typhoid vaccine can be a fever, so they gave us medicine to keep the fever down. I felt ok on Tuesday and went running with some other trainees, which was awesome. We ran up this dirt road that goes up into the mountains and has beautiful view. Tuesday night around 7:30 I was studying and watching tv in the living room and I got really cold so I went to my room to get a sweatshirt. The thermometer on my alarm clock read 72 degrees and I thought, I should not feel this cold. I had several layers on but I was still really cold and shivering so I went to bed, but I still felt cold, even under the blankets. But my host mom and I thought it was a bad reaction to the typhoid vaccine. Around 12 I woke up hot so I took off some layers and I felt fine.

Wednesday I woke up with a sore throat and during class I felt kind of sick, like I had a cold. I called the medical office and they said I probably just had a cold and a reaction to the vaccine and they would send me medicine. At lunch time I got really cold again. I hardly made it through the afternoon and when I got home at 5 I went right to bed and slept until 8, when I woke up to go eat. I was sitting and eating when I suddenly felt really faint and hot. I got up and went to the kitchen where my host mom was and I fainted and had a really hard time breathing. It was awful. So then they called the medical office, which then sent a driver to take me to the hospital.

I got to the hospital around 10pm. I still didn’t think anything was wrong with me. I thought I’d be there an hour and they’d send me home, but then the doctor said they had to do some tests and I’d be there 3 or 4 hours. I was upset about that but I just fell asleep. When the doctor he said it looked like I had dengue and they’d have to keep me over night. So then they moved me to my room. The driver who brought me left so then I was all alone. I had a bad fever and felt dizzy and sick. Thursday was hard because I felt really alone and I missed the US. I began to have some doubts, like this is just the first week and it’s so hard. My time here hasn’t even really started and I want to leave. But I knew it was just the circumstances. By the afternoon I began to feel better. Sometime on Thursday they said they’d have to keep me overnight. I didn’t have anything with me of course, but I talked to a Peace Corps doctor on the phone and told her things I wanted from my house so they driver brought them to me.

Friday morning the Peace Corps doctor visited me in the morning and told me it was probably dengue but it just wasn’t testing positive yet. But my doctor in the hospital came later and said it probably wasn’t dengue but that I might have to stay until Sunday because my white blood cell count was low and he didn’t want me to get more sick by being around people. Friday around 6 or 7 I had an unexpected but very exciting visit. Katie, a current volunteer who has been helping out with training activities, came in. I was so excited to see a familiar face! It was awesome having someone my age to speak English to after 2 days of not really talking to anyone. She kindly offered to get me whatever food I wanted and I had really been wanting a milkshake and some chocolate. Katie came back in 5 minutes with a strawberry shake, some candy, and some other snacks! She stayed about an hour probably, which was awesome. That visit definitely made my day.

Saturday morning I felt absolutely fine and I as beginning to get really frustrated about being there. The doctor came in around 10 or 10:30 and told me everything looked better and I could go. I was so relieved. Then the PC doctor called and said she sent the driver to pick me up. And now I’m back!

I don’t know how I would have managed another day there. I’ve never watched so much TV. I had 102 channels, in Spanish and English. I also read some and studied Spanish. I got through Thur and Fri ok, but I don’t know how I would have handled today, too. And it’s a good thing I can understand Spanish well, because no one spoke English and the doctor was going off about white blood cell counts in Spanish and I was all alone. I was fine, though and I never felt scared or anything, mostly just bored, and frustrated at times.

Now I have time to rest before going back to training on Monday. Good thing it’s the weekend, so I only missed two days of training. I don’t think I missed too much. One good thing about the hospital was that it made me really appreciate my house here and all the people here. If I could get through those days in the hospital not talking to anyone and not doing anything, I can get through any other periods of loneliness or boredom. I miss everyone and I love hearing from you all.

2007-07-14T13:31:00.000-06:00

Well, I’ve been in Honduras a few days now. So far, everything is going well. This is going to be very long, so just read what you want. We arrived Wed the 11^th in Tegucigalpa. It was so exciting getting off the plane. We walked down the steps onto the runway into the beautiful day and I looked around at all the mountains and clouds and I was so happy and excited to finally be in this new country which would be my home for the next 2 plus years. We were met by Peace Corps staff and we all got on a bus to the training center in Santa Lucia. It’s a mountain town, very pretty and hilly, and about 30 minutes from Tegucigalpa.

When we got here, we had a very brief orientation before our host families came to pick us up. My host family is nice. In the house, there is a mother, father, two sons, ages 20 and 17, and a daughter who is 26 and has a 4 year old daughter. The little girl is really cute, and I pretty much hang out with her the most. I haven’t talked too much with the family yet, mainly because I have a hard time thinking of things to talk about and because I’m just so tired by the time I get home.

We have training starting at 7:30 each morning and we go until 4:30. Friday we had Spanish classes, vaccinations, received information about our bank accounts, had placement interviews for the level of Spanish class, a session about safety and security, and a session on culture. Also the country director came to talk to us. So it was a pretty full day. We will find out Monday or Tuesday where we placed for Spanish classes. The classes will be about 4 hours a day I think, and there will only be about 3 people per class.

The other trainees are all levels of Spanish. There are a couple people who don’t really know any and a few who are fluent. The rest are somewhere in between. This morning we had team-building activities, which was really fun, then a whole lot of us went out to lunch, so I´m getting to know people better. There are 48 people in my training class. It’s a good mix of people and although I’m still getting to know them, I’m getting along well with everyone. There are 4 or 5 people from Illinois, a few people from the DC area, and one girl who graduated from AU in 2004. Some of the volunteers just graduated, some graduated a few years ago, and some are a little older, but I think everyone is in their 20s except for a couple people.

The training is really good. All of the directors and teachers are really excited about their jobs and make the training less tedious than it could be. They are sincerely happy we’re here and are doing everything they can to prepare us for service. There aren’t many jobs or organizations that will give you 11 weeks of intense training. They assure us that everyone’s Spanish will substantially improve by the end of training.

I am in the municipal development program with about 16 others. The other programs in our group are youth development and protected areas management. Most people are in youth development. In mid-August we split up by program and go to field-based training. I’m pretty excited about that. My program, Muni Dev, is going to a community south of here. We will be with a host family there and will stay for 5 weeks. Language classes will continue and training will be more hands on.

I like that they integrate all the things we have to learn. During all of training we have classes on safety and security, culture, language, approaches to development, and our specific programs, among other things. These things are taught together, for example we will do skits on safety in Spanish. When we return from field-based training, we will find out our site assignments and then we swear in as volunteers September 27 and leave for our sites the next day.

In training, we also talk a lot about Peace Corps policies. As trainees, and once we become volunteers at the end of training, we represent not only ourselves, but also Peace Corps and the US. Many of the people we will meet will not know anything of the US and its people beside what they may see on TV, so the image we portray is really important. We must dress professionally at all times, unless we’re just sitting in our homes. We must respect the culture and be very careful not to offend anyone or to have anything less than a good reputation. We are professional development workers and we have to portray that.

The approach to development is also very important. Whatever initiatives or programs we begin or work on must be sustainable- they must be able to continue once we are gone. Our goal is to improve human capacities. Some of the effects of our work might not be seen until after we leave, but if we do our work correctly, there will be notable effects. The goals of the Muni Dev Program are to help citizens increase knowledge of and participation in local gov and civil society and to help municipal governments improve capacity to deliver public services in a transparent manner.

That’s all for now. I’m in good spirits and am very excited about everything. There are moments when I stop and think, “am I really doing this,?” or I get sad about everyone I left. But these moments pass very quickly. This will be a challenge, there’s no doubt, but I like challenges and I want to extend myself and grow. I have no doubt that the rewards of my work, my experiences, and my relationships will outweigh the hard times.

peace corps eve!

2007-07-10T23:00:00.000-06:00

our flight to miami leaves in 6 hours! we have to have all our luggage ready to go in the lobby in 1.5 hours. that's right, we have to be ready to go at 2:30 am. it's going to be a loooong day.
staging has been great. i'm so happy it was in dc because i got to spend time with and say bye to my friends here while meeting all the trainees who i will be with for the next 27 months. it's a nice transition. plus, the hotel is on dupont circle, my favorite part of the city. i feel so lucky.
my training group is great. there are about 50 people and they all seem very nice and i'm sure i'll form very strong relationships with them. it's hard right now because there are just so many people and it's hard keeping track of everyone and their names. but there will be lots of time to get to know everyone.
tommorrow we land in honduras in the early afternoon and go to our host families. i'll probably just have to say 'hola, nice to meet you, i'm really tired, i need a nap.' i'm so curious about what my famiy will be like.
right now i feel excited more than anything. i don't think i've ever been so excited about anything in my life. that also has to do with the fact that this is the biggest decision i've ever made. i feel like Peace Corps is the absolute perfect fit for me. if i didn't do Peace Corps now, i would get a job in DC. so being in DC now and seeing the two side by side- PC and DC- i can for sure say that Peace Corps is what i want. although i would love to live and work in DC, i'm not ready to do that yet. i feel so lucky to have the opportunity to go to Honduras and benefit from all my time there will offer and i hope i can give back. there is honestly nothing i'd rather be doing now.

Five more days in the US!

2007-07-05T23:03:00.000-06:00

After years of contemplation, a year of planning, and almost a year of applying and waiting, I am finally leaving for Peace Corps! On Saturday I leave for DC and I'll get to spend time with my friends there and say goodbye to them and say goodbye again to my campus and apartment. I'm really happy I'm leaving out of DC. On Monday Peace Corps staging begins at a nice hotel in DC. We go over various orientation things Mon and Tues and then leave early Wed morning for Miami, and then on to Honduras. I'm very excited to meet the other volunteers.

I think I'm finally good on packing. I have everything I need, I got it all to fit in the bags, and the bags aren't overweight! The Peace Corps sent guidelines for packing, and my 2 checked bags have a combined weight limit of 80 pounds. So it's been difficult deciding what to bring.

For the training period, July 11- Sep. 27, we will be in Santa Lucia, which is in the mountains, so it's chilly. There are about 50 volunteers in my program, and we will have training together. We each live with a host family during this time, and have classes together during the day. The Spanish classes are broken into groups of about 3, and are pretty intense. There is also a field-based training during this time.

After training, we swear in as official volunteers, and all of us get spread out across the country. I think I will have some say in choosing my site, like how big of a town I want to be in, what part of the country, etc., but ultimately, the coordinators choose it for you. This also makes it difficult to pack, since some areas of Honduras are very hot all the time, while others are cooler. I will probably be the only volunteer in my community, but there's a chance someone else will be stationed with me. For the first 2 or 3 months of service, we're required to live with a host family to get settled in the community, but after that, we can decide where to live.

So, I have a few days left. It's been hard saying goodbye to so many people, but all the good thoughts and wishes mean a lot to me. I will stay in touch as much as a can. Christmas of 2008 I will come back to visit, if not sooner. Please email me with any questions. I'll miss you all!

Honduras, here I come!

2007-05-18T14:14:00.000-06:00

I recently found out my Peace Corps country assignment is Honduras!
I'm leaving July 11, less than two months from now. I'm so excited! At first I was really suprised by Honduras. Although I've been studying Latin America for the past four years, Honduras hardly ever comes up, so I can't wait to learn all about it. I'm also excited that I'm going back to Central America; it's such an amazing region. I loved my study abroad in Costa Rica.
Of course I'm nervous because I don't really know what to expect and it will be such a change. The experience will be so amazing. I'll be working in municipal development, working with local governments and communities. Yesterday I sent the in-country staff my aspiration statement and resume.

More updates to come!