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

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

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!

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.

view from my house
futbol field
laguna

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!

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.

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!

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!

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!