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
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
Site Visit
My new address:
Kristyn Oldendorf
Rdo. Angel A. Soto
Honducor
Cucuyagua, Copán
Honduras, C.A.
Kristyn Oldendorf
Rdo. Angel A. Soto
Honducor
Cucuyagua, Copán
Honduras, C.A.
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 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
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
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.
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
my site!
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.
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.
Thursday, September 13, 2007
left- planting trees with high school studentsbelow-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
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!
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!
Sunday, September 2, 2007
HIV/AIDS charlas, strikes, tamales, and corn festivals
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!
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!
Monday, August 27, 2007
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
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.
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.
Thursday, August 9, 2007
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!
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!
Monday, August 6, 2007
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.
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.
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