The Wahoo Journals

Thanks for reading

2008-12-15T19:06:00.004-06:00

Welp, as I am sure some of you have already heard. We’re not in Honduras anymore. We have returned stateside for good (well at least for the foreseeable future). We enjoyed our time in Honduras and we were a little sad to leave, but glad to be home in our own culture with the weather we are accustomed to. I feel like I should have something profound to share with all of you, or some sort of wisdom to impart after our time in Honduras, but I don’t. And I can’t think of anything I have broken or destroyed recently to talk about or any terrible illnesses to describe. The only thing that seems appropriate is to thank all of those people that have been thinking about us, praying for us, listening to our stories, supporting us in our adventures and reading our blog.

So.

Family, friends, brothers, sisters, kinfolk, neighbors, amigos, associates, acquaintances, colleagues, contemporaries, backers, benefactors, contributors, patrons, advocates, sponsors, supporters, accomplices, collaborators, cronies, countrymen, comrades, compatriots, companions, compañeros, confidants, cohorts, allies, sympathizers, well-wishers, and brothers in arms…… Thank you.

We are home. WAHOO!

Papaya anyone?

2008-11-19T23:20:00.004-06:00

So over a year ago when we moved into our house that we now rent, we planted several papaya trees. And about 14 months later, here they are, well over 10 feet tall and producing a riduculous amount of 5-10 pound fruits. I don't know how many of you have tried fresh papaya but it's well...stinky. Luckily I figured out that blending it with milk, ice, ripe bananas, and a little sugar makes it tolerable. I know lots of people like it (all the Hondurans I know do) but the texture combined with the smell makes it a difficult fruit to swallow, even though it apprently is really good for you. We planted the trees simply because someone told us they grow fast and they do. There is more than 25 papayas growing on this one:

Another tree with less papayas:

One of the first ones to ripen, cut in half:

Projects

2008-10-20T10:01:00.006-06:00

I think I blogged about the PEPFAR grant I got awhile ago (PEPFAR = President´s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief). The first part of the project has been working with a group of 14 girls in their early teens from two neighboring communities about an hour from Danli. I take a bus that leaves Danli at 11:20 and arrives around 12:20. It´s dirt roads most of the way and since it´s been raining so much lately, it´s pretty slow going (and bumpy!). We started classes in September and have been meeting once a week for 2 hours. The manual we´re using is the manual I helped write and edit. The class has really been enjoyable for me and for the girls. We´ve talked so far about good communication, self-esteem, abstinence, and anatomy. There are still about 8 chapters left to cover. The goal is to finish the class by mid-December. Here are some pics of the girls:

Working on drawing a self portrait for a self-esteem activity

One of the girls doing an activity

We did ¨trust falls¨one afternoon

They really got into it and started passing the girls down the line

The second part of the project is training 24 9th graders at the middle school in the same community in HIV prevention. The goal is to train them so they can train the younger grades. Last week we did 4 hours of training and then on Friday we divided them up into 4 groups and they each received their training manual. They had to go through the manual and decide who was going to do what activity and then fill out an ¨Action Plan¨. When they finished with that, they got the necessary materials to be able to complete the HIV training themsleves (bascially the same one we had given them). They were very excited to get their materials and got to work right away. Tomorrow they have an exam that they have to pass with 90% or above to be able to participate in the training of the 8th, 7th, 6th, and 5th graders next week. Hopefully they do well!

Working on doing a transmision activity

Busy cutting & coloring

Weekly market trip (minus the cat)

2008-10-07T13:30:00.003-06:00

After I went to the market last week, I decided to take a picture of what I bought. Tito, our cat, decided to get in the picture as well. There are three grapefruits in the back - citrus fruit is in season now and very delicious. Luke loves popcorn so when I remember, I'll pick up a couple bags (front right) when I go to the market. Corn harvest began in August and continues...in the back left you see small corns called "jilotes" here. In the US, we usually only see them canned. We really like them in soups and stirfry. I can't remember exactly how much I paid for everything but below the pic is a pretty accurate estimate (remember L19 = $1):

Grapefruit = L3 each

Jilote = L15

Red onion = L 15

2 lbs tomato = L 14

Head broccoli = L12

Carrots = L10

Popcorn = L10 per bag

Flour tortillas = L 10

Cucumber = L 3

Zucchini/squash = L5

La Niña de la Independencia

2008-09-16T16:26:00.001-06:00

Oh the places you will go….. or more accurately end up!

So today was “El Día de la Independencia” here, or independence day. There wasn’t a lot going on except for a large parade in Danli. We could have spent the day inside our house avoiding the heat (a popular alternative with me on some days), but Annie was asked to come to a celebration in a small town nearby where she gives classes. And I was expected to come along which I didn’t mind because I have not spent a lot of time in this particular community and it was a chance to see where she disappears to weekly.

I have stopped asking a lot of questions about where I am going or what I am getting into lately. It´s not that I don’t want to know beforehand, but that the things I get into are equally ridiculous whether I have prepared myself for them or not. I naively assumed this was just any old independence celebration….kids playing loud drums, drunk people, small explosives, and maybe some guys on horses…these are things I don’t mind and sometimes enjoy, excepting drunk guys who have been recently deported from the states….so much cross-eyed anger!!

It was not to be. We had been invited to celebrate the independence of Honduras at a jardin de niños (a pre-kinder educational center) in order to help celebrate the crowning of the village of Linaca’s 3 year old princess of independence. Seriously?! Being a 6’4” gringo in Central America makes a guy stand out enough without attending the crowning of child princesses. If you think preschool chairs are small at home just imagine how small the chair I sat in today was. At one point Annie looked at me and said “don’t cross your legs like that, you look funny” to which I had no reply except to change my position behind my “desk” to an equally awkward and ridiculous pose, to which Annie replied “oh.”

It gets better...we weren’t just guests, we were the honored guests. We were to sit (sit is the wrong word, crouch is more accurate) at the “mesa principal” (the head table). Not only did I look and feel ridiculous but I had to do it from the most prominent spot in the small concrete school building. At this point I noticed that I was the only male in the room who wasn’t breastfeeding - this was not a celebration attended by males over the age of 2.

Now I was officially stuck for the duration. Sitting at the mesa principal the only thing I could hope for was a quick ceremony, not a likely thing I have found. Soon something occurred to me...we were going to have to give “palabras” (words). At every event in Honduras with a “mesa principal” from the crowning of child princesses to the signing of important legislation everyone at the “mesa principal” has to give their speech. And these are not short speeches; they are customarily to go on and on about whatever it is that the people at the mesa principal want to talk about – usually a lot of flowery vocabulary, thanking so-and-so and doing lots of name/organization dropping. What was I to do? There are only 3 topics with which I have sufficiently developed Spanish vocabulary to talk at any length whatsoever. These topics are in order of competence:

1.) Water resources engineering
2.) How cold it gets in the States during the winter
3.) Toyota pickups, 1984 – 1992 models

I had no idea what to do, but Annie being the sympathetic wife that she is (sympathetic and also sensitive to being embarrassed by her gigantic sweaty husband who changes every conversation to one of three topics) saved the day and let her “palabras” go long and used the “we” form a lot and pointed to me as if to say “he isn’t smart enough to say anything, but we’re together…..you ladies understand…isn’t he ridiculous looking in that chair.”

But, anyhow ask me about it when we get home, and if you’re ever in the village of Linaca in southeast Honduras walk around and look in the houses to see if you can see a picture of me on someone’s wall pinning a sash and crowning a 3-year-old princess.

Conquering Celaque!

2008-09-03T21:08:00.008-06:00

A recent 2-night trip to climb the highest point in Honduras at a little under 9,500 feet reminded why I love backpacking. The mountain, called Celaque (meaning "box of water" in the local Lencan language), is in a very dense, lush cloud forest just outside the city of Gracias in western Honduras. The mountain gets around 2,000-4000 mm of annual precipitation so we prepared accordingly with plenty of ziplocks to store dry clothes and water-proof tarps. Neither Luke nor I had gone camping/backpacking since living in Colorado so we really enjoyed it. The only thing missing was our dog Moose!!

Setting off with our friends Sara & Javi, with Celaque in the background covered in clouds

One of the many stream/river crossings

This is on our first leg of the hike (4 1/2 hours to first camp)

Our tents set up on first night (check out the awesome A-frame design with the tarp - nice work Luke & Javi!). It rained on and off the 1st night and all through the 2nd night but luckily we all managed to stay fairly dry.

This pic gives you an idea of the dense forest...trees covered with moss, vines, and ferns in the misty clouds. This pic was taken from our the second camp, about 2 hours from camp 1 and an hour and a half from the summit.

We made it! This is in the afternoon of day 2, it's a steep climb to the top from camp 2. It was chilly up there!

Looking out over the mountains and communities below from the top of Celaque.

A nice view from the top

Campo-style living

2008-08-26T20:34:00.005-06:00

So lately I've had a good share of "campo" and "aldea" time. "Campo" means anything not in a city and "aldea" is any small community. You'll find thousands of these tiny aldeas - some as few as a dozen families - scattered around the countryside and mountains of Honduras.

Last week I spent two days in a row in a community about a half hour from Danli. I am starting a class there with young girls that focuses on good decision-making skills with regards to life planning (avoid teen pregnancy, HIV/AIDS and STI prevention, thinking about what to look for in a mate, etc.). (You can read more about the course called "Yo Merezco" in my Aug 8 blog). Anyway, last week over the course of two days the young Honduran woman who's helping me with the class and I visited 16 different houses to drop off formal invitations for the girls we chose to be in the class (determined by their teachers to be "at risk"). It was really fun to show up at people's houses with no warning or phonecall ahead of time and see how Hondurans treat unexpected guests. Because this community is in a valley, there is a lot going on agriculturally...lots of corn (see pic below), beans, tomatoes, and green peppers as well as lots of cows. Therefore everyone has a fence surrounding their house. I followed Nohemy's lead and walked right into the fenced area. As we approach the house, we would wait for someone to "saludarnos" - greet us - and for them to say "pasen adelante" - "come on in." They would then, without fail, produce two plastic chairs for us to sit on. Everyone has an outdoor porch and each time this is where we would sit to discuss the class that we plan to start and ask the mother's permission for their daughter's participation. We would stay about 5-10 minutes, thank them and then take off for the next house. Many times we were offered food to eat. During the course of the two days, I was offered and ate the following things at various houses:

- Tamales (like Mexican tamales but without any filling or sauce)

- LOTS of sugary coffee

- A hard boiled egg with tortillas

- Boiled jilote (the field corn before it is mature - tiny cobs that they boil with a few of the inner husks left on -

you eat the whole thing)

- Rosquillas (corn and cheese biscuit type things)

- Horchata (a drink made from ground rice)

- Boiled pastaste (a vegetable sort of like a potato)

- Chicken and rice

- Red beans

- Sweet bread

- Coca-Cola

As you can see, I definitely did not starve during my visits! Because the teachers chose the girls and we visited girls from two different schools, the houses really were scattered all over the valley so we did lots of walking. I enjoyed it very much and realize how living in a big city in Honduras really is very different than living in the "campo."

This pic was taken not on my last trip but the trip before to Linaca so the corn is much bigger now!

Yesterday and today I spent time in another small community (where the well is being drilled currently - they still haven't found water yet). I stayed overnight and gave a 4-hour workshop (2 hours yesterday and 2 today) on HIV/AIDS prevention to the women of the community with the help of my PCV sitemate, Ann Marie, who also came. It went very well and was very fun to stay overnight in the community. They don't have electricity and because it gets dark around 6:30, everyone is usually in bed by 8. We ate our beans, tortillas and fresh cuajada (a soft cheese - made that very day) by candlelight in the kitchen for dinner. They have to haul all their water from a creek or lagoon so there is no "shower" to speak of. Most people bathe (half-clothed) in the creek. I bathed after it got dark with a bucket of water under a tree near the house. I ate LOTS of corn products because right now is harvest time. I had tamales twice, elote (boiled field corn), and corn tortillas twice in less than 24 hours. We also had delicious fresh red beans from the recent harvest and chicken for lunch today that I saw running around in the morning! The woman (she's 28 too) I stayed with butchered it about 8:30 this morning and after plucking the feathers, put it in a pot on her "fogon" (brick/adobe stove that uses small sticks and pieces of wood to keep lit) to boil. She then later cut up the chicken into pieces and fried them in some oil in a saucepan. I think that was the freshest chicken I've ever eaten! The workshop went very well and we had a great time hanging out in the "campo".

Cost of living in Honduras

2008-08-18T14:52:00.003-06:00

I can’t remember if we’ve ever done a blog on the cost of living in Honduras (thanks to fellow PCV Mary for the idea!). According to PC, volunteers are given a wage that allows them to live near to the level of the majority of people in their community. So PCVs monthly “salaries” (not including rent) in Honduras vary from 4,200 lempiras ($221) to 6,100 lempiras ($321). This all depends on the size of your site and location (north coasters get more…they get to live on the beach and get paid more – arrg!). PC pays our rent separately. They have a “ball-park” figure for the cost of rent in each site and it is up to the volunteer to find a place to live within that amount. For example, here in Danlí, the maximum PC will pay for rent per month per person is 2,500 lempiras ($131.93). Luckily, if you’re married you get double for rent!

Here are some examples of prices in Danlí (18.95 lemprias = $1)

Water bill: $3.69 per month
Bus ride to Tegucigalpa (capital, 1 ½ hours from Danlí): $3.38
Bus ride from Tegucigalpa to north coast beaches (about 7 hours from Tegus): $10.77
Baleada (flour tortilla with beans, cheese, eggs, sometimes avocado): $0.37 - 0.79
1 lb of red beans: $0.79
1 lb of rice: $0.58
Corn tortillas: 10 for $.18
Eggs: $0.11 per egg
1 liter of milk: $1.21
1 large plastic container of purified water (5 gallons): $1.58
1 lb. roma-sized tomatoes: $0.53
1 whole medium-sized frozen chicken: $3.96
1 lb lean hamburger: $1.27
1 lb hard “Honduran” cheese: $1.32
1 lb of chicken breast (with bone): $1.42
A meal at a typical “comedor” here in Danlí: $1.85
(Typical breakfast and dinner meal: meat (usually beef), beans, fried sweet plantains,
scrambled eggs, avocado, tortillas. Typical lunch meal: meat, rice, cabbage salad, cooked vegetables, tortillas) A glass of fresh juice: $0.42
Oranges: $0.11 per orange
Mango (during season): $0.16 per mango
Pineapple: $0.79-$1.32 per pineapple
Avocado (during season): $0.26 for a large one (twice the size of a Hass)
A small bag (from lady on street) of sliced green mango, ciruela, mamones,
nance, or other fruits in season: $0.26
A small cup of coffee: $.32
A “latte” from the Honduran chain “Espresso Americano”: $1.16 (beat that Starbucks!)
A 3 lb bag of “Gati” (cat food): $1.16
A ½ liter bag of water: $0.12
½ liter of Coke: $0.58
Local beer: $0.69 per bottle
Postage for a letter to the US: $1.32
Call home (to the States): $0.11 per minute
1 hour of internet use: $0.53

If we stay in Danlí for a month without leaving, we can definitely get through the month easily on our $263.85 allowance (that doesn’t include rent). If we leave to visit friends, go to Tegus for errands, etc. we can barely scrap by. With gas prices so high, bus and taxi prices are high! Just in the last few months we’ve seen our bus fare to Tegus go up by nearly 18.5% an. taxis in town now charge 25% more.

Recently in the news around the world, including here in Honduras, there has been talk of the rising cost of food. In Honduras the “canasta básica” (basic basket of food) has gone up considerably since last year. One local paper reported a 34% increase since 2007. The media continuously alludes to what could be a steep increase in the cases of malnutrition here in Honduras in the next few years if prices continue to climb.

(Anything else you want to know the cost of? Leave a comment & ask!)

Trip home, work here, etc.

2008-08-08T11:18:00.009-06:00

So here’s the promised blog with pictures. The last three months have been busy – involving lots of traveling and even quite a bit of work (thus the lack of blogging). Anyway, here’s what’s been going on…

In late June, we made it back to the States for my brother Chad’s wedding. It was a great time to go home (for the wedding plus 4th of July). The weather was great and we got to spend lots of time with family and friends. Here are some highlights of the trip:

Chad and his wife Sarah

With my brothers Chad & Josh

Luke & I on his parent´s farm

We had lots of great time with our nieces! Anica above and Aila and Lila below

The Gingerichs (and Huddles!)

Upon returning to Honduras, I immediately got back to work on a new manual that the PC Honduras Health project has been working on for 2 years. I joined the team this year and have been in charge of editing and revising the manual. The course is called “Yo Merezco…” which means “I deserve…”.

The cover of the manual

It’s a class designed for young girls, ages 10-15, and deals with topics like self-esteem, good decision making, what to look for in a spouse, domestic violence, reproductive health, sex ed and HIV prevention. The focus throughout is on sexual abstinence (delaying the first sexual encounter). PC Honduras received money from President Bush’s PEPFAR (President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) to design and implement this course. So we worked on finished up the manual to get it published in time for the national workshop that we had (July 23-26). We invited about 20 PCVs and their Honduran counterparts. We spent Wednesday afternoon and all day Thursday talking about the manual, how it’s to be used, and teaching several of the chapters in small groups so that people could get a feel for it.

The tables set up for the workshop

Doing an activity with the participants

Me teaching the chapter on anatomy to the participants

On Friday, the participants (who had been split into groups) went to a school where they were to teach a chapter of the manual to a group of girls (like a practicum). Unfortunately, there was a teacher’s strike that day (and the day before as well) so there were very few girls there but we made do by calling parents and telling them to send their girls to school and by just having smaller groups than we originally planned. By Friday afternoon the workshop was over.

4 of us 5 leaders making phonecalls to parents

Doing a trust-fall activity with the girls during the practicum

Doing a peer pressure activity with my group

All in all, everything went well and we (the team of 5 of us in charge of the manual and the workshop) were just glad it was over! The next phase of the project is for PCVs around the country to implement the course in their communities. I am starting a class in a small town outside of Danlí that starts the first week of September. A young woman in the community who is very active and enjoys volunteers work (a rare concept for most Honduras) will be helping me with the course. Another phase of the project is to develop a similar course except for boys.

Soon after that was over, I came back to Danlí and started helping with the group from the Episcopalian church (same group I helped and blogged about recently). They drilled another well in a community near Danlí (same community where I will do the Yo Merezco course). While that was going on, I helped with health and hygiene classes for the members of the community (mostly women show up but this time we did have one gentlemen and several young men). We did 6 days of classes with the participants from 10 am – 4 pm (with an hour and a half lunch). The graduation ceremony was just this past Wednesday.

During class with the community

A group picture of the participants

Here’s a little update on the community we worked in last time and didn’t find water (read my blog from June 10 to get a better idea of how desperate this community is for clean water): Luckily the group (they call themselves the Water Ministry) recognized the need this community has for clean water and have made them a priority. After they finished up the well earlier this week in the community where we were doing the health and hygiene classes, they went back to San Lorenzo and started drilling again. They had problems getting permission from the land owner on the first go round to drill where they wanted to and ended up drilling in a less than desired spot only to not find water. This time, they were able to get permission to drill where they originally wanted to. I hope to hear some good news next week that they found water. Here’s a pic of a young woman from this community hauling water from a nasty lagoon which is where all the water for consumption and domestic use is gathered.

The months of August-October will be busy for us! Luke has recently been busy with several projects and starting soon, will have 11 communities that need surveys and designs done. We are lucky to start feeling like we have some meaningful work (it only took a little over a year of living in Danlí to find some!). The school year ends in November and after that (at least through January) things will slow down a little. Come February, we only have 2 months left of service. Time is starting to fly and I’m feeling like there’s a lot to be done before we’re finished here. As most of you know, our service thus far (18 months) has definitely had it’s ups and downs (generally more downs than ups) but we’re looking forward to our last 8 months and hoping we can leave Honduras feeling good about the work and service we were able to do.

We´re blogging again! Check out Luke´s recent blog below...

Randomness

2008-08-07T15:15:00.000-06:00

Welp…. sorry for not blogging recently, to all those who have faithfully been checking the blog in hopes of something, I apologize. I have tried in earnest to get myself in to some sort of exciting, dangerous or hilarious situation, but to no avail. Life is normal (or it has developed the sense or normalcy) and normal seems hardly blog worthy. I can think of nothing to write about, but in place of writing I will make lists.

Things that have recently happened…

1.) I paid a guy 250 Lempiras to pull out and chop up our giant “zucchini” plant that managed to take over our entire yard and produce only 2 small tasteless gourds. It took him almost a day and a half.

2.) Our “canícula” recently ended, canícula is the word for the month long period during the wet season when it doesn’t rain. Good riddance canícula.

3.) Annie and I did a topographic survey last Monday for a community called “El Ojo de Agua” or “The Eye of Water”. They have a well and need me to tell them how to get the water to the houses.

4.) We found (more accurately rescued) another turtle, this one is painted red with a white stripe down his back. We found him on the road outside of the liberal party headquarters in town (red and white are their colors). He/she and Umberto are currently chasing each other around in our compound either mating or fighting, or both.

5.) Band practice has started again! So we will be serenaded until the Sept. 15th Independence Day celebration with daily 4-hour marching band practices by all of the nearby high schools.

6.) The neighbor kid got a saxophone (help us!).

7.) Avocados are now in season……Hallelujah!!

8.) Food is getting more expensive. This has taken a toll on most everyone we know since the majority of people’s income here is spent on food.

9.) Our oven (stove part still works) broke…this is a disaster!! Annie lost her main source of entertainment and I lost my only source of baked goods.

10.) Hondu 9 is leaving for home; this makes our Hondu 10 group the next in line to take off.

11.) The papaya tree we planted 12 months ago is giving fruit (papaya tastes awful by the way).

Things I did yesterday, in no particular order:

Read

Worked on the distribution system design for “The Eye of Water”

Went for a walk because it was the first nice cool day in a long, long time

Priced large plastic barrels at the large plastic barrel store. No really, it is actually called “Large Plastic Barrels Corner Kick” (translated from Spanish)

Talked on the phone to 2 people about potential projects next week

Purchased 50 Lempiras of prepaid cell phone minutes

Called a missionary to find out where on earth the church is that I agreed to meet some people at tomorrow

Made two grilled cheese sandwiches

Fed our cat

Watched the turtles fight

Went for a run

Got whiffs of our terrible smelling compost pile while working on the computer

Made sketch of small methane digester to put compost in

Played Spider Solitaire on computer

Wrote cover letter to send to a company in the States

Washed dishes

Annie´s got a blog with pictures that she´ll post soon so stay tuned...

Blogging is hard

2008-08-05T17:48:00.002-06:00

Hello everyone and those who diligently check our blog waiting to see something...anything...new. I´ve got an update in progress with pictures and everything so just hang in there a few more days. We appreciate everyone who continues to keep in touch with us and with what we´re doing here in Honduras! We promise to be better bloggers!

Josh was here!!

2008-06-17T16:11:00.007-06:00

As some of you know, Josh, my little brother (well, not so “little” anymore, he just finished his first year at Iowa State on the civil engineering tract) visited Luke and I in Honduras for a week and a half in May. We had a WONDERFUL time with him!

We spent the first few days after Josh’s arrival in Danlí where we went on a hike and bike ride, walked around the city and hung out at our house.

A view of Danli from the mountain we climbed

Luke chatting with our friend Rene's brother

We wanted to do something “work-like” while Josh was here so a few days after Josh got here we caught a bus to Tegus where we met up with another volunteer from our department and caught a bus to Guaimaca (northeast of Tegus about and hour and a half). From there we caught a jalón (a ride) to the small town in the mountains called San Marcos. Getting the “jalón” was an interesting experience! For whatever reason that day, the Danlí bus station was super crowded and we couldn’t get on a bus right away like we normally do. That caused us to miss the 11 o’clock bus in Tegus that we needed to be on to catch the one and only per day 1 o’clock bus in Guaimaca to San Marcos. We waited on a dusty road on the edge of town heading to San Marcos for around 4 hours before a truck headed that direction with room in the paila (truck bed) picked us up. There ended up being 7 adults in the back of the truck (including us 4 gringos), 4 children, a large sack of corn, a tire, several boxes, and our surveying equipment. It was an hour and a half ride on a dirt road through pine forests until we arrived in San Marcos. By then our limbs were asleep and we were thirsty and dusty but happy to have made it. In San Marcos, there is a Protected Areas Management volunteer (pretty much the only PCVs that live without electricity in small rural towns). It was fun for Josh (and for us) to spend a few nights there without electricity.

The next day we did a survey with some of the townsfolk. They have a stream that runs through town and even during dry season there is plenty of water so they want to do a small hydroelectric project and use the water to bring electricity to the school and possibly to the town. The survey needed done to see if this would even be possible and to estimate costs. I had never surveyed with Luke before so it was fun to see how that works and since Josh did lots of surveying last summer, I think he also enjoyed it. We stayed in San Marcos two nights and had fun. In the evenings we cooked with the volunteer’s little gas stove and sat in the hammock on the porch. After the long day of surveying, we went to a little swimming hole near the volunteer’s house and cooled off.

From San Marcos, we headed back to Danlí for just long enough to do a little laundry and repack. We were hoping to get back to Danlí around 1 pm but we’re in Honduras so things never go as planned. There was a national strike going on that day and all major entrances/exists into Tegus were going to be blocked at least until noon. So instead of catching a bus in Guaimaca at 9, we had to wait until about 12:30 before one was available. It was a long day of waiting for and being on public transportation.

The next morning, I gave my sex ed class at the school for street kids and Josh came with.

After that, we had lunch and got on a bus (again) to go to Comayagua, a city between Tegus and San Pedro Sula in the north. We stayed that night with our married PC friends and left early the next morning for Tela, a beach town on the north coast. That afternoon, the boys immediately went down to the beach to swim while I walked around town. The next day we got up early and got a ride to a small town on the beach about 1/2 hour west of Tela (all one way sand roads to get there). It´s the last little Garífuna village on a sandy road before a lagoon.

Baleadas - fresh flour tortillas filled with beans, grated dry cheese, avocado slices and a cream that tastes a little like sour cream. Baleadas are traditionally eaten for breakfast or dinner.

(A little background on the Garífuna…the Garífuna are what the Spanish called “Black Caribs.” For the first two centuries following Columbus, the island of San Vicente was inhabited by an indigenous group from the coast of South America. During this time, black slaves who were either shipwrecked or who had escaped from plantations on nearby islands also came to inhabit the island. These two cultures intermixed and developed a new language. In 1797, the Garífuna were kicked off of San Vicente by the British who had taken control of the island fourteen years earlier. They were moved to the Honduran island of Roatán in the Caribbean and eventually moved on to the mainland and started building their villages as far north as Belize and as far east and south as the Nicaraguan Mosquito Coast.)

Most Garífuna live in traditional huts with dried palm branches for a roof. We hung out on the beach in this small Garífuna village (that has miles of deserted undeveloped sandy beaches in both directions) and arranged to eat lunch at a Garífuna woman´s house. She served us fried fish (you get the whole fish on your plate, typical Honduran style), tajadas (fried plantains - not the sweet kind but the kind that taste like french fries), rice mixed with beans, and cabbage salad. It was yummy. We ended up getting a ride back into Tela with this guy in his truck.

We spent the next day on the beach in front of the nice resort we stayed at when my mom and grandparents were visiting. We rented beach chairs and a little tent for shade and spent the whole day swimming in the ocean, reading, and eating coconut that a young Garífuna boy sold us.

The next day we arranged a tour with one of the guide companies to go kayaking in Wildlife reserve along the coast called Punta Izopo. We spent several hours kayaking in the river and exploring the swamp and mangrove trees. We saw some interesting birds and got a good arm workout. The guide then took us to Triunfo de la Cruz, a little Garífuna village just east of Tela. We stopped and ate the typical Garífuna meal at a restaurant right on the beach and spent several hours swimming in the ocean and relaxing in hammocks. That afternoon we took a bus to San Pedro Sula (about an hour and a half from Tela) so that Josh could get up early and catch his 7:45 am flight the next day. Josh left saying he wanted to come back again and visit and we hope he will!

Brigades, mission trips, and the like

2008-06-10T15:03:00.007-06:00

Prior to last week, I did not have a favorable view of “mission” trips – be it medical brigades or otherwise (often I include Peace Corps in this view). I have seen large groups of gringos come to Honduras for a week or so in groups of 20-35 to do all sorts of things. (“Gringos,” just in case anyone is confused about that, is the general term Mexicans and Central American’s (I think South American’s too??) give to people from the North America.) Anyway, many of the brigades are medical and do little more than hand out Tylenol and vitamins. Sometimes these basic medical brigades will find a case that needs special referral – someone with diabetes or a hernia the size of a football (this happened to the doc I was translating for last September) – and that is when these type of brigades seem to provide a service the Hondurans are lacking in – complete coverage and adequate referrals. Of course, whether or not the patient will get the special paper to get referred and paid for depends on if the brigade has bothered to team up with a Honduran doctor to provide these referrals. The cases that need referred, however, are few and far between the handing out of vitamins and Tylenol.

There are other brigades that come to do work – such as a build a school or church. When my family was visiting, we ran into a gringo brigade that was building a school. Let me say first that the funding to build schools and infrastructure of any kind is needed here (I wish the government was doing it’s part and taking care of it’s own business, but it’s not). However, there is always someone capable on the ground to manage that funding and if that is not possible, two people coming from the States can do that. I get frustrated when I see 30 gringos who paid at least $500 each for their plane ticket and are paying at least $20-50 per night per person for hotel, and who knows how much for meals that come to build a school. There are so many Honduran men that are out of work and that could be paid minimum wage ($5 per day) to build a school with several people (instead of 30) overseeing it. The dollars would stretch so much further…enough to buy books and materials for the children possibly even enough to buy a few computers.

These trips usually consist of people who don’t speak Spanish, who have zero cultural knowledge and who tend to freak out about eating anything that isn’t packaged (I’m generalizing here but that’s usually the majority). It becomes difficult as a Peace Corps Volunteer translating for these brigades to not only translate the language but to also translate the cultural tid bits and serve as general guides. My friend who is a health PCV in the west, wrote an interesting blog about her experience in dealing with these brigades. You can read it at: http://allisonodonnell.blogspot.com/2008/04/wheelchairs-from-washington.html

I apologize for offending anyone here. I don’t mean to criticize your personal experience on a mission/brigade/volunteer trip and what that meant to you. Essentially Luke and I are on a 27-month “volunteer” trip of sorts and believe me, I have enough to criticize Peace Corps about. I do understand that mission/brigade/volunteer trips can be very beneficial to a person – especially a young person – to see life outside the US, to see poverty, etc.

Last was the first time I worked with a group from the States that I felt really good about and felt like their work here is needed and Honduras is better off because of them. A group of Texans from different Episcopalian churches have been coming to the state of El Paraiso in Honduras every three months for 5 years now. The church owns a well drilling rig that a Honduran guy is in charge of and uses when the team isn’t in Honduras. Every three months, they drill a well in a community that is desperately in need of water. For example, the community we worked in last week is not far from Danlí but has no electricity and is hauling all their water (in buckets the women and children carry on their heads) from a nasty lagoon below the community. The water is pretty contaminated and not everyone is chlorinating or boiling their water before drinking it. Lots of people have skin problems from just bathing in the contaminated water. The community has a tiny one room school from kindergarten through the sixth grade with one teacher for FORTY-TWO kids.

They have one American guy that works as their logistical coordinator and comes to Honduras often to “get the kinks out” before the team arrives. The Episcopalian church also has several middle-aged women volunteers living in Danlí to help coordinate and do follow-up.

So when a group comes down (usually about 10-15 people, the guys generally work on drilling the well with some men from that community and a health educator from the States comes and does 6 days (10 am to 4 pm) of hygiene and health training for the women of the community. She has been coming down pretty much every 3 months for the last three years. She doesn’t speak much Spanish but that doesn’t stop her from trying to communicate. After the first few communities in which she gave the health and hygiene classes (and someone translated), she realized that it would be beneficial to train several women in each community to be volunteer health promoters. So she started by asking a few women after the training in a community if they were interested in becoming volunteer health promoters in their communities. Those women would then get special recognition at the graduation ceremony. They take an oath to volunteer in their community to assure that everyone continues to practice good hygiene and they get a book with lots of good teaching pictures and materials. Now two of these Honduran volunteer health promoters (who are from one of the first communities that the health educator from the States started doing the trainings in) go to every community where they drill and run most of the training session with the women in the community themselves. I helped translate between the two Honduran women leaders and the health educator and then between the health educator and the women of the community when she would do some of the training. It was a very rewarding week to see what some time and commitment can accomplish. The two Honduran women are very outgoing and wonderful educators and the health educator from the States has a lot to do with that.

Unfortunately, in like 6 days of work (including various breakdowns of the machine), they drilled to about 44 meters and didn’t find water which was so sad because this community was very united and really really need water. The team was scheduled to leave on Saturday and apparently they will meet when they get back to the States and decide whether to drill again in this community in a different spot. A Honduran guy is in charge of the drill rig that the Episcopalian church owns and they do allow him to drill when they’re not here so we’re hoping they’ll ok it and let him drill again in this community.

Where the team spent a week drilling (and fixing broken parts)
The town church where we held our meetings with the women

A group shot of the women holding up their hygiene puppets (see pic below as well) and jugs that they used to design a hand-washing device (useful because it doesn´t use much water)

A puppet one of the women made to teach hygiene to their children

One of the seasoned health promoters (in middle) doing a skit to teach about nutrition
The women laughing, enjoying the skit

Kids from the community hanging out after a long day watching us pack up
On the last day there was a graduation and the women did a few skits on what they learned. In the pic below the mosquitos (dressed in black on the left) keep attacking the woman sleeping (on ground on the right) because she hasn´t cleaned up the standing water around her home

Regalar

2008-06-06T15:42:00.004-06:00

An interesting phenomenon exists here in Honduras and that is the act of “gifting”. “Regalar” means literally “to gift or to give a gift” and is used widely…you can “gift” anything from food to children. Yes, even children. I will explain that in a bit. The trick with using the verb “to gift” is that it should be used in the command form. For example, “Regáleme comida” would be “gift me some food”. One of the best “regálame”s I’ve ever heard is when some girl during a medical brigade asked me to gift her my shirt (the one I was wearing!). “Regálame”s get thrown around a lot when the gringos come to do medical or water brigades. I am, for this reason, against just randomly handing things out to people. The kids start pushing and shoving, the adults get antsy and meanwhile all you can hear is kids screaming “Gift me that! Gift me this!”.

“Regálame”s can be used in much more common, less obnoxious ways. For example, at the beginning of my service I learned from my Honduran counterpart that when you are working in a community or passing through a community and you know someone there, you can always, at a moment’s notice, ask them to gift you rice and beans or coffee and some sweet bread. This is not rude or weird but actually a compliment because it means you enjoy eating their food. Also, if you are working in a community it is unusual to leave the community empty handed. “Regalos” that are common are: bananas, plantains (see pic below of bananas (mínimos) and plantains that we got gifted a week ago. They should start ripening soon!) coffee, any other fruits or veggies that are in season, frijoles (beans), and eggs. I even saw one of the Hondurans that was working in the community with us last week take home a chicken in a box that someone ¨regalar¨ed.

This week we were working in a community about half an hour from Danlí on a dirt road where the Episcopalian church is drilling a well. Part of the agreement that was made with the community was to feed the Hondurans that were working on the well (the Americans brought their lunches made by the cafeteria at the hotel they’re staying at). Luke, of course, prefers the Honduran rice and beans to a white bread bologna sandwich that the rest of the gringos were eating and asked the women to “regálale” lunch. They did and were more than happy to feed a gringo the food they cooked! The next day they brought him lunch again. Well, the word apparently got around the community that my husband likes the Honduran food and one of the woman leaders in the community (not the same one that had been cooking for the guys) apologized to me for not asking me over to her house for lunch with the other Honduran women that were working because she just assumed I didn’t eat Honduran food like the other gringos.

Now...the gifting of children…the family that owns the pulpería on the corner of our street has a “regalo” in the form of a young boy. When they were introducing us to their family members, they said the names of their children and then pointed to Daniel and said, “He was a gift”. This is nothing strange or out of the ordinary. I heard children called “gifts” many times now. It is common for aunts & uncles and grandparents to raise their relative’s children here…be it for economic or health reasons. I suppose there are worse things to be called than a “gift”!

I know...it´s time to blog but what about?

2008-05-26T14:31:00.003-06:00

Ok readers...now´s your time to let us know what you want to hear about (we are having the ¨I´ve been in Honduras over a year and it´s starting to feel way too normal to blog about¨ blues). Be it culture, PC related questions, Honduras in general, our daily life, how we get around the country, where we buy things, etc. I don´t know what you all want to hear about so comment on this blog your ideas and we´ll get some new blogs out soon!

Tito el gatito

2008-05-08T16:01:00.003-06:00

Our cat - Tito

The buzz on seasonal, local eating

2008-04-28T11:42:00.004-06:00

I remember hearing my grandma or grandpa tell me about how at Christmas time they would get an orange in their stocking and how big a deal this was given the lack of fruit (other than canned) during the Midwest winters. Oranges, like many other seasonal fruits and vegetables, used to be just that, seasonal. So what has happened? Why is it that nowadays it doesn’t matter if it is winter or summer, one can always find a ripe tomato or a melon at a grocery store? We are fortunate (or maybe unfortunate??) to live in a free market economy where an abundant food supply at low cost is consistently made available to us. We Americans love variety – especially when it comes to food – but maybe it is time for a shift back to the “oranges in the stocking” era.

(Side note – This blog was inspired by a book I just read by Michael Pollan, “The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A natural history of four meals”). In Pollan’s book, he tells a story about a farmer who sells his eggs (from chickens that are free range and eat grubs left behind from cow pies found in the grass from cows that are pastured) to local restaurants. Eggs will vary from season to season if a chicken is not fed solely on chicken feed and does not live in a cooped up container. Some seasons produce better yolks and others better whites. When the farmer first began selling eggs to chefs, he found himself apologizing to one of the restaurant owners for their pallid hue in the winter months. The chef told him not to worry because during cooking school in Switzerland he’d been taught recipes that specifically called for April eggs, August eggs, and December eggs. Until I read this book, I had no idea that eggs from a chicken could vary from season to season. (Or, better stated, that eggs from a chicken should vary from season to season).

Our global food market allows us to eat whatever we want year round. And I’m not just talking about fruits and vegetables. According to Pollan, pastured animals can be harvested only after they’ve had several months on rapidly growing grass. Feeding animals corn in CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations) has accustomed us to a year-round supply of fresh meats. People used to eat most of their beef and pork in late fall or winter, when the animals were fat and eat chicken in the summer. Nowadays, we can eat corn fattened beef year round.

Ok, so what does it matter? What/who does it really hurt if I buy asparagus in the winter and can find ripe tomatoes year-round? First, buying locally and eating seasonally provides a sense of security that comes from knowing that your community, or country, can feed itself. Other reasons to eat locally include preserving the beauty of agricultural landscape (come on, how “pretty” are those giant CAFOs??); the satisfaction of buying food from a farmer you know rather than the supermarket; the fact that local food doesn’t have to travel miles and miles to arrive to your plate; and because by buying locally and eating seasonally, you decide not to participate in the industrial food chain powered by fossil fuel. (One fifth of America’s petroleum consumption goes to producing and transporting our food.) By eating locally, you also make a decision to not take part in America’s big food industry – the advertising, the lobbyists, the profits made from “supersizing” our meals, etc. Plus if you start eating locally, you will make a conscience change to eat better (you won’t find any processed food or frozen meals at your local farmer’s market)!

Eating locally, as Pollan points out, doesn’t necessarily mean it will be organic or even sustainable because there’s nothing to stop a local farmer from using chemicals or abusing animals except the good word (accountability) of his customers. I would think, however, that being accountable to your community members is a much better deterrent for being honest on your growing practices than not having a clue in whose mouth the food you grow and produce will end up.

Ok, so I may sound a little “preachy” and I apologize for that. I’ve got a long way to go until I can follow my own advice but this is the direction I am moving in. Living in Honduras has forced Luke and I to eat seasonally more so than we did when we were living in the States. Last year, I started making a list of what fruits and vegetables were in season when and this year it has been fun to anxiously wait each season. Having less available also makes our meal choices easier. Many volunteers have expressed fright at returning to the States after a two-year term with the PC and being utterly overwhelmed by the options that a US supermarket has to offer.

One of our goals upon returning to the States is to make a better effort at eating locally and seasonally. Among these goals is to grow and produce as much of our own food as possible. It doesn’t get any more “local” than that! Gardening in and of itself is so rewarding and it reduces your waste by turning your throw-away scraps into compost. I used to help my mom can and freeze vegetables and fruit during the summer months when fresh produce is plentiful and this is something I’m hoping to start when I get back. See below for pics of our garden in here in Honduras.

Our front yard garden as of Sunday, April 27

Our variety of lettuces and leafy greens that we planted during rainy season (October - January)

FOR MORE INFO:

Interesting websites I’ve found from magazine articles and books:
http://www.eatwild.com/
www.ams.usda.gov/farmersmarkets
http://www.localharvest.org/

For an interesting article on our carbon footprint and what we can do see:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/magazine/20wwln-lede-t.html?ex=1209528000&en=62fa7bceddf15978&ei=5070&emc=eta1

Scenes from Honduras

2008-04-19T17:00:00.006-06:00

Hello everyone! Not a whole lot of updates in the way of work or life but I wanted to get a blog up anyhow so I decided to post some good pics from Honduras that we’ve accumulated thus far. I tried not to repeat any others that we have already blogged!

Lake Yojoa in west/central part of Honduras, surrounded by two national parks

Pineapple field

waterfall near lake Yojoa

woman in Copan Ruinas balancing goods on her head

Macaw birds

Tegucigalpa, from the roof of the hotel PC puts us up in for medical reasons

A milkman in Santa Rosa de Copan

Street in Danli

Lots of different fruits!

Sunset in Danli

Sunset in Santa Lucia

Hydrangea in the Santa Lucia park

church in Comayagua

Drying a fresh harvest of coffee beans

Foot bridge to an aldea near Danli

Cows resting near a home

Countryside near Danli

The Honduran license plate that says ¨take care of the forests¨

orange tree (yes, they´re green but very orange inside!)

First a turtle, then some ducks, now a kitten

2008-04-15T18:30:00.004-06:00

Some people have already heard that we had to give the ducks away. It was sort of sad to see them go but they wouldn´t stop eating my garden and escaping the PCS. We gave them to our friend who owns property in the mountains just outside Danli. He took Gladys and Melvin to his dad´s house up there and according to him, they´re happily wandering around up there.

So now we have a...kitten. On Sunday afternoon I was washing clothes at the pila when I heard very loud meowing. I went to the porton and opened it and sitting literally right outside our porton was a tiny little kitten who was extremely frightened. I yelled for Luke to come outside and we quickly made the decision to let it in our ¨compound¨ because it was over a 100 degrees outside and the poor thing was all by itself and can´t be more than 4-5 weeks old. Luke asked around on our street to see, just in case, if anyone had lost a kitten and no one had. The story Don Juan (the neighbor who sits outside his house all day and evening selling chips and candy) told us was that a ¨loca¨ (crazy woman) was walking down our street, throwing a kitten in the air. Not sure if I completely believe that or not but in any case, the kitten needed rescuing. Don Juan proceeded to tell Luke how lucky the kitten was to have been meowing outside our house!

After Luke gave me a quick lecture about how I couldn´t get too attached to the kitten because he didn´t want to bring a cat back to the States when we finish our PC service, he constructed a little house for it out of an old box from a package my mom had sent last year and put in off the ground a little bit and under a plastic chair so it can´t get wet when it rains.

The kitten is not allowed inside (we both agreed on that) and is doing well. I am taking it to the vet tomorrow to see what, if any, shots it needs and of course, de-wormer. I haven´t taken a picture yet but will be sure to do that soon and post it.

Any ideas for names for the kitten? We´ve toyed with: Shakina Francis (the name of a beauty salon near our house - what a name!), Francis, and Herbert. We´re not feeling very creative so any suggestions are welcome!

English classes

2008-04-07T12:03:00.001-06:00

A few months ago, I started an English class two nights a week for an hour here in Danli. This is something that I was reluctant to do at the beginning of my service. Yes, it’s true, I do have a Masters in English but because teaching English was my job before I came to Honduras, I decided that I wanted to learn different skills while here. I also hesitated to teach English for other reasons. One of them has to do with the misconception of language learning that I find to be very common here. For whatever reason, many Hondurans believe that learning English is 1) much easier than learning Spanish and 2) only takes a few months to learn if you have a good teacher. Language learning as a life-time endeavor is not something commonly believed and I felt that starting an English class would only result in dashing dreams of becoming fluent after a few months (if only!!). Another hesitation has to do with the goal many people have behind learning English. Many people who want to learn English do so because they want to go to the US to work. So I decided that I would only teach English to Hondurans who appeared that they would use whatever they learned to improve their skill sets for their jobs or studies here in Honduras.

The lady who owns the internet café that Luke and I frequent asked me before Christmas if I would be willing to teach English to the two girls that work there. I told her I’d think about it then decided I would. I had remembered several nurses at the hospital where my counterpart works mentioning if I ever started an English class to let them know. So I called them up and then through word of mouth, we ended up with a class of about 14. A Cuban volunteer doctor is part of the class, as well as a friend of Luke and I’s, a young boy who is now in private school and feels behind in his English class since he went to public elementary school, two nieces of the internet café owner, a few friends of the nurses from the hospital that are in the class, and a few others.

All in all it’s been a good experience. I do the planning for the classes but Luke comes and helps out. Hondurans are used to route-type memorization in learning situations so we try and make the classes dynamic and fun by using games, dialogs, roll-playing, etc. The students seem to have a good time. We started the class in mid-February and as of yet, don’t know when the class will end. That’ll either be when Luke and I get tired of teaching or when the class number starts dwindling but for now, we’re enjoying it.

Teaching at the internet cafe last week

Semana Santa in Danli

2008-03-24T10:57:00.004-06:00

We have successfully made it through our second Semana Santa (Holy week) here in Honduras! Semana Santa is a week-long holiday celebrating the death and resurrection of Jesus. Pretty much every business, both private and government, closes down for the week. Some typical Honduran activities for the week include: traveling to visit family, going to the beach, river, or pool to go swimming, going on a picnic, and participating in the religious processions It’s sort of the official start of summer so any sort of water-related activity is in order. All the stores in Danli a week before Semana Santa started selling blow up pools, inner tubes, balls, etc. Luke and I had planned to do a hiking trip but decided instead to spend the week relaxing and hanging out in Danlí. We spent the week gardening, bike riding, watching movies, going on walks, and cooking. (Not that much different from a normal week I suppose!). On Thursday and Friday there were processions by the Catholic church and since our house is so close to the city center, we could watch them from our front door (see pics below).

Thursday am procession:

Kids in the window are Andrea & Daniel. They live on our street.

Carrying a statue of Jesus on the cross

Friday am activities: preparing an ¨alfombra¨(carpet) made of sawdust for the procession later that night.
Processions Friday evening that went right by our house:

Duck farming in Danli

2008-03-15T10:40:00.001-06:00

Hey everyone, here is an article I recently wrote for our Peace Corps Honduras volunteer newsletter…

For those of you that caught my last article (in the newsletter) about gardening in Danlí this one is not nearly as good or funny. At no point have I almost died while duck farming, so feel free to skip ahead to the COS surveys. But I have made sure that my Tami Flu is close by. If anyone in this country is going to get bird flu I assume it would be the gringos living in close quarters with 2 ducks.

Along with our garden, the ducks are our attempt at molding the “Peace Corps Experience” to more of what we thought it would be. Everyone remembers what they thought they were getting into before we rendezvoused in Washington DC. The way we tried to explain what we were going to be doing to friends and family. Going off to live a simpler life with people who still value things like agriculture and cultural traditions. I remember explaining to relatives that we would most likely be living in a rural community with no running water. I was after all joining the Peace Corps under the program of Water and Sanitation and Peace Corps only sends volunteers to communities that ask for help.

We could see it all so clear, helping the people understand the need for clean water, organizing and motivating and the whole nine yards. Culminating at around 18 months in site, finally designing the simple hydraulics on paper that would bring the clean water! Meanwhile throughout the whole process we would be enjoying our time sharing a life’s worth of knowledge. I could draw on my years of dairy farming experience to improve nutrition and introduce economic opportunity, Annie could help start gardens and introduce new recipes in cooking classes. At one point when we were younger Annie’s family had 20,000 laying hens and my family was raising 5,000 turkeys so certainly a small chicken coop project would have found its way into our schedule. I had already envisioned myself raising thanksgiving turkeys to distribute to the community as a cultural exchange...... all of this spaced comfortably throughout hammock time in our adobe house.

But that was before DC.

That was before “safety and security” trainings, before cell phones and saldo, before NGOs and SANAA and “development work”. That was before sites of 75,000 people and a 2-hour daily commute (worse than most big cities in the States mind you), before regional hospitals, and houses with 9 foot walls and razor wire. That was all before.

That was all before I bought 2 ducks.

The ducks have what I call a Pato Confinement System (PCS) in our back yard. This is mostly scraps of stuff that was in our yard when we moved in and starting cleaning the place up. The ducks are named Gladys and Melvin after our host parents in Santa Lucia. They constantly escape the PCS and eat our garden, even after 224 lempiras of chicken wire we can’t keep them from getting into the compost pile or eating our snap peas down to the ground. Melvin has one leg tied to a post inside the PCS to keep him from escaping and both their wings are clipped, but no matter. They still escape.
Their eating the garden makes Annie crazy. The garden is more hers then mine. I help out and do most the tilling of the soil, but she dictates what vegetables and flowers get planted and where. I offer to make the ducks go away but she won’t let me. They wake me up in the mornings well before I feel like getting out of bed (more accurately getting off the colchon). Melvin used to escape and then Gladys couldn’t find him so she would chirp and chirp and chirp. It’s worse than a rooster. Nowadays Melvin is tied up by one leg so he can’t get out but he taught Gladys to escape, and she escapes in silence. Now Annie wakes me up and tells me MY ducks are eating HER flowers. So I have to get up and chase Gladys back into the PCS. We put up with them for some reason.

Gladys and Melvin came to Danlí from Mata de Plátano. Mata de Plátano is the site of one of El Paraíso’s resident PAM volunteers. I went there to help survey a spot for a new basketball court. Mata de Plátano is one of maybe 2 or 3 Peace Corps sites in Honduras without electricity. It is more of what I had imagined pre-DC. Gladys and Melvin were just fuzzy little creatures, living with the pulpería lady, eating pataste and shitting on the floor. For some reason she asked me if I wanted a pair of ducks. I initially said no. How would I get them home? Would we eat them? Where would I put them? Who would feed them when we were gone? Later that day I went back to the pulpería and told the lady I’d take the ducks. ‘What the hell’ I figured; it would be nice to have some livestock.

I put Gladys and Melvin in a box that afternoon and the next day I caught the one and only bus out of Mata de Plátano at 6 a.m. As with most days and projects, things hadn’t gone that well on this trip. People didn’t show up to help us work. The municipality was late with the materials they had promised. I was headed back to a big city that wasn’t friendly and work I didn’t really feel like doing.

But then about 6:10 something happened. Someone on the bus spoke to me…. Some campesino dude with his rubber boots and machete asked me, “What’s in the box?” And I understood him. I knew exactly what he said. Here I was, so damn far out in the middle of nowhere, and I could understand what this old man was saying to me. He wanted to know what I had in this box. So of course I smiled big and told him I had a box of ducks.

A box of ducks.

And at that moment the bus driver cranked the reggaeton music so loud you could no longer hear anything anyone said inside the old school bus. The sun was shining through the pine trees as the bus bounced and jolted and stopped and backed up and steamed and lurched and roared and skidded down the mountain. We passed a house with a whole family outside standing under a big sign on the porch that read “Vivir en Paz”, and I smiled. After an hour and a half the reggaeton was still blaring and the bus stopped to put more water in the radiator and all the men got off the bus to take a piss off the side of the mountain. I got back on the bus and set my box of ducks on my lap again and everything was good.

I had forgotten all about “safety and security”, NGOs, SANAA, and “development work”. All the bad was gone for that 3-hour bus ride down the mountain. It didn’t matter at that point that my time here won’t count towards professional engineering certification in the States. It didn’t matter that whatever it is that I do here is nothing like what I imagined or signed up for. What mattered was that I was crammed onto a school bus riding down the side of a mountain listening to incredibly loud reggaeton music looking out the window with a huge smile on my face holding a box of ducks…… This is what I signed up for.

So I still count down the months, I still get angry at NGOs and SANAA, but I am still here in Danlí enjoying my duck farming.

A little bit of nature and a lot of poison ivy!

2008-02-26T13:34:00.004-06:00

Last weekend Sara & Javi, married business volunteers in Comayagua, came to Danli for a visit. We arranged a quick trip to the protected area not far from Danli with Luke’s friend René on Saturday. It was a beautiful day to get out of the city and enjoy nature (plus there was a scheduled power outage from 8 am to 4). We got to learn a little about washing coffee beans, sat under some tall trees and watched howler monkeys including a little baby one, got some poison ivy (sorry Sara & Javi who really got it bad), picked limes from René’s orchid, and saw a small waterfall. We had been to René’s property before but it was fun this time to take other people and share it with them. Below are some pics from the day.

A beautiful transparent butterfly!

Close-up of a purple orchid

Another orchid

Resting by the waterfall

Sara & Javi after a PB & J for lunch

Rene, Luke, & Javi learning how to wash the coffee beans

Inside of old house on Rene´s property built sometime in the late 1800s by a Spanish family. House was inhabited during coffee season to wash, dry, and roast beans. Still in decent condition.

Side notes to comments on last blog

2008-02-22T12:39:00.002-06:00

I am happy to see we’ve gotten some good comments on the latest development blogs! I have a few other side notes to add after reading the comments.

If it is indeed true that aid cannot reach the hands of those who most need it and is only augmenting the corruption of the government to which it is given, why continue this less than efficient circle? Not only are we wasting donor and government dollars by handing them over to corrupt governments and agencies, we may also be contributing to what William Easterly calls the “aid curse” – where high aid revenues going to the national government benefit political insiders, often corrupt insiders, who will vigorously oppose democracy that would lead to more equal distribution of aid (“The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s efforts to aid the rest have done so much ill and so little good” (2006)). Steve Knack of the World Bank has found that higher aid worsens bureaucratic quality and leads to violation of the law with more impunity and to more corruption. Hmmm...can aid really contribute to making government worse in the recipient country? It seems so ridiculous to even imagine because the nature of aid is to assist countries in need not make them worse off, right??

I do agree with the people who commented on the previous blog that whether aid reaches the hands of the poor has a lot to do (and maybe everything to do) with whether the government receiving the aid is corrupt or not. But I do believe that some of the fault does lie with the donors. Why perpetuate the cycle? Would it not be possible to bypass bureaucracy and take aid away from bad government to try to get it into the hands of the poor? Easterly makes a good point, “…if aid is apolitical on the receiving end, so it should be one the giving end. Can’t Western voters demand that their aid agencies direct their dollars to where they will reach the most poor, and not to ugly autocratic friends of the donors?” Many will argue that aid should go through even bad governments to promote their political development and democracy. But if aid’s true goal is to reach the poor, why not make this as easy as possible?

Second in series

2008-02-14T14:50:00.001-06:00

So as promised here is the second blog (follow-up to the one called “Sustainable Development”) on the history of foreign influence in Honduras. Some of you may already be familiar with this information while others may not. Either way, it can help us to understand better the situation that Honduras finds itself in today. To write this blog, I referenced several books including: “Inside Honduras: The essential guide to its politics, economy, society and environment” by Kent Norsworthy with Tom Barry (1994), “Honduras and Beyond: A Memory of Inequality” by T.Y. Okosun (2006) and “Don’t Be Afraid, Gringo: A Honduran woman speaks from the heart” translated and edited by Medea Benjamin (1987).

Here is a short account of US foreign policy in Honduras. In 1954, Honduras gave permission for its territory to be used as a training ground for the CIA-supported, rightwing military force that overthrew the reformist government in Guatemala. In that same year, Washington singed a bilateral assistance pact with the Honduran military that assured the close US-Honduran military cooperation of the 1980s. According to Norsworthy, “it was also during the Honduran banana strike of 1954 that US labor representatives associated with the State Department began infiltrating the Honduran labor movement and exerting a conservative, anticommunist influence that has long obstructed the advance of a unified, progressive popular movement in Honduras”.

In the 1980s, Honduras became the center for US policy in the region. Between 1980 and 1990, the number of NGOs operating in Honduras tripled. The majority of these organizations were US private and church organizations. According to Kent Norsworthy, the rapid rise in nongovernmental organizations was due largely because of the country’s strategic role in U.S. foreign policy in the 1980s. (If you are asking yourself, what was the U.S. up to during the 1980s in Central America, I recommend reading “The Death of Ben Linder” by Joan Kruckewitt or “Don’t Be Afraid, Gringo: A Honduran woman speaks from the heart” by Medea Benjamin).

What was this foreign policy? Well, in the 1980s, the Sandinistas were in power in Nicaragua and in El Salvador the growing strength of the National Liberation Front threatened to oust the US-backed Salvadoran government. Honduras quickly became the key for the United State’s geopolitical interests and both countries soon reached an agreement – in exchange for an increase in US military and economic aid, Honduras would join the US in its effort to topple the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. To give you an idea what kind of “effort” this was, the US spent well over a billion dollars in economic and military aid in Honduras between 1979 and 1989. According to Medea Benjamin, the influx of US dollars created a gold-rush atmosphere which aggravated the endemic corruption and infighting within the Honduras military. So while the military chiefs and politicians were getting rich off US aid, the majority of Hondurans were getting poorer. Although democratic elections were held in 1981 (from pressure by the US), the military maintained a firm grip on reins of power and rather than reducing the power of the military, allowed them to act with greater impunity because they were now covered by the facade of a civilian government. Payment on foreign aid debt gradually began to take up more and more of the government budget (read “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man” by John Perkins (2004) to learn about how the US has, for over half a century (and still today??), loaned out money to countries in need with the goal of pushing them into a hole of debt so deep that they are forever indebted to the US, thereby making them “pay” their debt other ways, namely in whatever happens to be of US interest at the time). So anyways, in order to pay back their debt, Honduras reduced it’s already inadequate health budget from $130 million to $97 million between 1986 and 87. Unemployment shot up to 41 percent and there was an alarming rise in human rights abuses. Despite a five-fold increase in US economic assistance between 1981 and 1990, per capita income for the population actually declined. Kent Norsworthy sums up the effects of foreign policy in Honduras nicely:

“Democracy, development, and stability have been the oft-repeated US goals in Honduras. But after more than a decade of aid and intervention, these goals still seem distant. In fact, rather than moving Honduras forward, US policies and programs in Honduras appear to have sown the seeds of economic and political instability. This failure can be attributed in part to the contradictory and misdirected character of US economic and military assistance. But it also has to do with the fact that from the beginning Washington’s interest in Honduras has been mainly a product of US foreign-polity concerns in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala.”

While I am a little afraid to ask it, Honduras’ history does beget the question: Am I as a United States Peace Corps volunteer here in Honduras today to help fix years of misguided and misdirected aid that has resulted in a Honduras worse off today than before US influence?

Comments, criticisms, other sides to the story and perspectives are welcome!

PS: Please remember that what we post on our blog does not represent the opinions of any other organization or people, just us!

Book review

2008-02-12T10:06:00.000-06:00

So some of you may have been wondering about our list of books off to the right of the blog that keeps growing…and growing. With no tv (that’s not completely true as we do have a computer and PCVs love to share dvds and tv series), there is plenty of time to get lost in a good read. So here is a list of the books we’ve read thus far with a little “blurp” about them to help any potential book lovers find some new reads. We had a rating system with a ¨thumbs up¨ icon but when I copied and pasted the blog from a Word doc onto the blogger page, it turned the thumbs up into ¨C¨. So three ¨C¨s means you should read the book if you get your hands on it, two means it was a decent read and one means…well, you know, it was a little less exciting. Enjoy!

PS: If anyone has any books they’ve read that they think we might enjoy, please feel free to comment on this blog with your suggestions or send us an email!

Books read by Luke during time with Peace Corps (* = Annie read it too)

*The Color of Water by James McBride CCC (Good non-fiction read about a kid from a mixed-race family growing up in the 50s)

The Known World by Edward P. Jones C (Confusing, only read it because I was stuck in an aldea for 3 days, this is the one I had when I was stuck in the room with the rats!!!!)

Indian Givers: How the Indians of the Americas Transformed the World by Jack Weatherford CC (If you like native American history)

Waiting for the Snow: The Peace Corps papers of a charter volunteer by Thomas Searlon (a return PCV) CC (things were better “back in the day”)

*The Beet Fields by Gary Paulsen CC (Gary Paulsen books taught me to read)

Tracker by Gary Paulsen CC (see above)

*Don’t Be Afraid Gringo: A Honduran Woman Speaks from the Heart edited by Medea Benjamin CCC (3 thumbs up if you’re looking for a good book that delves into Honduran culture, history, and economics. A bit outdated now but many things remain unchanged)

*The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini CC (you can just see the movie now)

Huck Finn by Mark Twain CC (classic, that is worth a read or re-read)

Peace not Apartheid by Jimmy Carter CC (explains a lot)

A Whale for the Killing by Farley Mowat CC (I like Mowat’s writing. People of the Deer, a book of his I read before PC, gets 3 thumbs up)

Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond CCC (You should get 3 credit hours for reading this)

Ma and Pa Hart Join the Peace Corps by June Hart (RPCV) CC (a quick good read. Makes you want to go to Brazil)

Walking the Big Wild: From Yellowstone to the Yukon on the Grizzly Bear´s Trail by Karsten Heuer CC (Any one want to walk to Alaska?)

The Last Cowboys at the End of the World: History of the Gauchos of Patagonia by Nick Reding CC (Good non-fiction, can’t believe they used to send PCV’s to Chile, I feel I would have fit in better there)

The Red Badge of Courage and ¨The Veteran¨ by Stephen Crane CC (classic quick read about the civil war)

*Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins CCC (People should read this if you’ve ever wondered what US interests in foreign countries really are about)

*The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho CCC (quick read and is worth it (I read the English translation))

Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold (a re-read) CCC (One of my favorites)

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West by Dee Brown CCC (Very well put together history of the Plains Indians)

The Firecracker Boys by Dan O´Neill CC (I can’t believe they almost blew up Alaska!!! Seriously they were going to blow the whole thing up)

Caribbean by James A. Michener CC (Not my favorite Michener, but a good read)

Into Thin Air: A personal account of the Mt. Everest Disaster by John Krakauer CCC (Quick and very entertaining)

The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America by Bill Bryson CC (If you like Bryson, he is a little tough on rural America at first though)

Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing CCC (Wow! penguins can’t taste that good)

Milagro Beanfield War by John Nichols CC (Makes a person want to move to New Mexico)

Collapse: How societies choose to fail or succeed by Jared Diamond CC (we’re screwed)

Books read by Annie during time with Peace Corps (* = Luke read it too)

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie CC

Sea Glass by Anita Shreve CC (a good fiction read)

Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown C (too much hype)

A Bend in the Road by Nicholas Sparks CC (a sad but good fiction read)

Nine Hills to Nambonkaha: Two years in the heart of an African village by Sarah Erdman (a return PCV) CC

The Girls Guide to Hunting and Fishing by Melissa Bank CC (good fiction read)

Eleven Minutes by Paulo Coelho CC (good fiction read about a rural Brazilian girl who ends up in Europe and ends up working as a prostitute. Coelho writes really well)

*White Man´s Grave by Richard Dooling CC (a fictional PCV get’s “lost” in Africa’s bush and his best friend goes looking for him)

The No. 1 Ladies´ Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith CC

Cipotes by Ramon Amaya Amador CCC (a great book by a Honduran author (in Spanish))

The House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III C

*Eat, Pray, Love: One woman´s search for everything across Italy, India, and Indonesia by Elizabeth Gilbert CCC (the author writes about life after her divorce and how she went searching
for answers to what life is about and who she is)

Irresistible Revolution: Living as an ordinary radical by Shane Claiborne CCC (the author stirs up questions about the direction of today’s church and world and discusses how to live out an authentic Christian faith).

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris CCC (the author writes about growing up. The book is a compilation of funny stories of childhood. He is a regular contributor to Public Radio International’s “This American Life”.)

The Red Tent by Anita Diamant CCC (a “historical” fiction about Jacob and his family from the book of Genesis, written in first person by Dinah, the only daughter of Jacob)

The Memory Keeper’s Daughter by Kim Edwards CC (a decent fiction read)

Where have all the minimos gone??

2008-01-29T15:43:00.000-06:00

Since we returned from the States, it has been difficult to find mínimos here in Danlí. (Mínimos are bananas that grow wild in the mountains here. See pic below of ones that aren´t ripe yet. They are sweeter and smaller than the imported bananas we get in the States). Anyway, this was very disconcerting because generally mínimos are one of the few fruits that can be found year round in abundance at the market and pulperías (small family-run stores you’ll find on every block). So last week I asked a Honduran that I’d worked with several times on Agua Pura (Pure Water) projects why there are no mínimos. The explanation I got was interesting and I believe worth sharing with you all.

At the beginning of December, coffee picking season started. The harvest lasts through February, sometimes into March. Everyone in a coffee-picking community is expected to help pick and many people from outside the community go to help pick and make a few lempiras. So the explanation I got was that the coffee pickers are being fed/eating all the mínimos in the mountains and there are none left to be delivered to Danlí. I’m also assuming that the guy who usually drives down the mountain with a truck full of mínimos to sell at the market in Danlí is either picking coffee or managing his coffee pickers. Anyway, I got the explanation I needed (for awhile I was worried that perhaps there was a mínimo shortage or that some disease had plagued the mínimo trees) and will have to settle on eating the export bananas I find at the grocery store until March.

Sustainable development work?

2008-01-23T14:57:00.000-06:00

Luke and I have been thinking a lot lately about “development work” and “sustainability.” Living and working here in Honduras as a PCV makes it nearly impossible not to ponder the meaning of these terms and how they translate into the work that we as volunteers as well as government and non-government organizations do here in Honduras and other “developing” countries.

For starters, what exactly is “development”? According to materials given to us as new PCVs, development in its broadest sense is any process that promotes the dignity of a people and their capacity to improve their own lives. Ok, so what exactly constitutes the “improving” of one’s life? One could say that for example, access to health care and a giant flat screen tv are both “improvements” to one’s life. Of course, we scoff at that idea because we all know that while a big screen tv may “improve” your tv-watching capability, it’s not actually going to make you a happier person (really?! yes, really). However, having access to pre- and postnatal care will actually improve not only your health but your life and the way you think about it. Besides health care, there are many other obstacles to improving ones life such as climate, geography, economics, politics, and social conditions.

So that’s “development” now what is “sustainability”? “Sustainable” development is defined as work that a community is able to continue on its own without outside support. People learn to build on their own strengths to take charge of their lives, and to address their expressed needs. A development project should be culturally sustainable (does the concept fit within and build on local beliefs and traditions), politically sustainable (when the NGO or PCV leaves, will the project continue within the socio-political context?), economically sustainable (will there be sufficient local resources or the capacity to generate them when the supportive outsiders leave?), managerially sustainable (will there be local management capacity to carry on the work when the supportive outsiders leave?), and environmentally sustainable (as the project grows, will the environment be able to sustain the use of resources?).

Ahh! With all these things to think about and absolutely zero funding (expect for the occasional grant) life as a PCV is sometimes overwhelmingly frustrating.

Wouldn’t be easier just to “drop in” to build a few houses, maybe even a church or a school and then head back to our own lives??? Um, the answer to that is YES, it would be easier. That’s called charity and it has its place but it also has limits when it comes to behavior change and long term social and economic improvement. (I’ve seen too much equipment and too many projects that were the “drop in” type and once the “supportive outsiders” left, their projects were stagnated and began to gather dust immediately because they were nowhere near sustainable to begin with).

So, without necessarily giving people “things,” we (PCVs as well as other organizations) have to work within a human capacity building framework – where the focus is on the development of people and their skills. We have to avoid paternalism (giving to people or doing it for them) and motivate the people to improve their own lives. The first part of this process is figuring out what the actual needs are of any group of people or individuals. We may think, for example, that a community needs improved stoves because we (as the development worker) can’t enter a house without the smoke burning our eyes. However, this particular community may not perceive this as need and might put clean water, a school, or a health center higher on their needs analysis. Throughout all of this, it is helpful to look at development as a process, not a project. While the process may contain many “projects” real change is SLOW to come. Patience and perseverance are key qualities as well as being able to deal with not seeing any real concrete results of your work.

Another question that often comes up in the big scheme of things is why is Honduras the way it is? Why are there so many development workers and volunteers here? What would happen if every development organization, church group, and volunteer decided to pull out of Honduras? Would the government, who has been able to depend for years on outside aid and support to bring their people clean water and other basic necessities, finally realize that they have responsibilities to their country? Would they also realize that perhaps foreign organizations don’t know what’s best for Honduras? Possibly. Or would culprits such as lack of jobs, hunger and poor nutrition, emigration (1 in 7 Hondurans is currently living in the US), poor education, poor health care, lack of potable water, corruption, violence, years of exploitation by foreign countries, lack of capital, and an inept government continue to be barriers that prevent change?*

Well we definitely don’t have the answers to the questions I’ve raised here but we sure do spend lots of time thinking about them. This purpose of this blog is not to criticize Honduras or Hondurans, simply to let our readers join in on the conversations that we as PCVs have. My idea is to have another part to this blog about foreign influence and the beginning of outside organizations in Honduras (to help us understand why Honduras is the way it is today). There may be a third part on resource distribution and globalization. Stay tuned…

*Thanks Javi & Sara for brainstorming that list in one of your blogs.

A new year

2008-01-16T13:35:00.000-06:00

It’s been awhile since we blogged (I realize that phrase has opened quite of few of our latest blogs) so I apologize to people who check the blog often and are disappointed to see nothing new!
We went to the US for vacation over Christmas and New Years and had a wonderful time. It was great to see family, friends, and eat lots of good food! Luke and I both thought that after being out of the country for nearly a year, it would be strange to return. We anticipated some “reverse” culture shock but were happy to find out that it wasn’t too shocking. We did notice lots of things (some good, some bad) that before were easily overlooked such as: hot water from all faucets (bathroom, kitchen, bathtub, shower, washing machine, dishwasher), water fountains in public places, road signs and drivers obeying them, grocery stores full of choices, BIG houses and cars, no catcalls (yeah!) and on and on.

Things we enjoyed most while home: spending time with family and friends and meeting a new niece, inhaling deep breaths of cold winter air, sledding (at one point we had four people and a dog on a not very big toboggan), food, drink, football games on TV, hot showers, a bed to sleep in (yes, we’re still sleeping on mattresses on the floor), snow, driving a car, good dairy products, hunting, laying in front of the fireplace (on carpet!)… I’m sure there is much more to that list but those things stuck out to us.

Work has been slow since we got back because both our counterparts on our vacation until February. We’ve had a few other things to organize and take care of work-wise to give us something to do every few days but mostly we’ve been catching up on reading, gardening, and hanging out.

Anyway, hope all our readers spent a nice holiday season with family and/or friends. Happy 2008!

Blog

2007-12-11T14:29:00.000-06:00

Hey all, Feliz Navidad.
I haven’t blogged in awhile and I think that is directly related to the amount of exciting things going on. Its been a little slow lately, but that is ok I think things are going to speed up with the new year and maybe life will be a little more exciting then.

I also haven’t blogged anything work related lately so this is a little work update before the holidays, hopefully all of the office-bound readers will check before heading home.

Anyhow, like I said things have been a little slow. My counterpart organization just finished up a round of water projects that I had very little to do with since I got to Honduras pretty late in the project but they are starting a new round of projects in new communities in January (hopefully January, but I’m afraid that means February). If things go well, I can manage to be an integral part of those projects.

Last week in an attempt to prepare for the new projects I gave a surveying class to the 3 technicians from the JAM (my counterpart agency). All of the new water projects will be gravity-fed systems with a conduction line and tank followed by a distribution network. Someone is going to need to survey all of these in order to properly design flow rates and such, so I decided to try and train the technicians so that I wouldn’t have to do all of the surveys. I like surveying and I wouldn’t mind doing them all myself, but that would also be a little risky since I am a PC volunteer and can get sent home for such ridiculous things as riding a motorcycle or not taking a god-awful amount of malaria medication. If I can train someone else to do it then there is less of a problem for the organization when I get a medivac for getting hit by a car (very probable in Danlí) or contract bird flu (I bought 2 ducks last time I went to the campo). So I wrote up a little manual and had a 3-day training in surveying with a theodolite. I invited two other PCV wat/san volunteers to help. The classes were about 7 hours long with class time and field work each day. My Spanish hits a really big wall at hour 3 so having the extra help was really a good thing. The class went surprisingly well and I will follow up with more field training after the New Year. I will most likely go with each technician on their first survey and make sure everything is going well. After I can see that they are capable of doing an accurate survey, I will make up some diplomas so that in the future they could potentially find work surveying for other organizations. If this works I will feel pretty good about it. Check out the pics below:

Preparing the night before in casa

In the field, notice the world war II era theodolite in front

Two of the technicians

THANKSGIVING!

2007-11-27T13:22:00.000-06:00

Ahh, one of few truly American holidays. We celebrated it with “gusto” in Honduras last Friday and continued celebrating throughout the weekend. Luke and I offered to host the Paradise (the state we live in is called Paradise) Thanksgiving at our house on Friday. Almost everyone from our department/state made it and a friend of Luke and I’s from a town south of Tegus. We had 9 people total for the main meal on Friday and everyone brought something to share. We had: a 20 lb turkey, mashed potatoes and real gravy from the pan drippings, green bean casserole (I actually had to deep fry onions for the French’s onions), stuffed squash, candied yams, salad (with greens from our garden!), homemade rolls (thanks for the recipe grandma Bauer – they were a hit!), creamed corn, chili con queso soup with fried tortillas (apparently a Texas tradition), cranberry sauce, homemade pumpkin and apple pie (thanks grandma for the crust recipe) and vanilla ice cream. We were definitely in the “turkey coma” starting Friday afternoon until the leftovers finally got eaten Saturday evening! Saturday morning people came back over for my famous homemade Monkey bread and hung out for lunch. A few Paraiso volunteers that had gone to another Tgiving celebration were passing back through Danlí on their way home and stopped by for a beer but ended up staying overnight Saturday and helping us finish up leftovers. People kept stopping in and out, which made it feel like a real Thanksgiving. The last of the guests left yesterday (Sunday) afternoon.

Mass chaos in the kitchen while we got all the food ready!

The pretty pies!

Yummy!

Sitting down to eat

Breaking out the leftovers and board games
Luke overdid it! (see bottom of pic where he´s laying down)

Saturday am: Everyone came back for breakfast

Sat. night: Tara and & I break out the leftovers once again!

Stuffing ourselves for the last time Sat. night

In memory...

2007-11-12T13:26:00.000-06:00

Moose (Moosey)

December 20, 2004 - November 7, 2007

You were loved by many! We´ll miss you!

5 am wake-up calls by hail marys?????

2007-10-26T08:19:00.000-06:00

Ok, it happened again and now it’s happened enough that it’s blog worthy. Truthfully, the first time it happened it was blog worthy because it was odd that it happened once…now that it’s happened around 10 times, it’s just plain outrageous!

Here in Danlí (in our neighborhood) there are several things that could wake you up before you’re ready to get up:

1. Fighting dogs
2. Loud roosters
3. Honking taxis
4. A neighbor playing really bad 80s music
5. Cohetes (loud “boom” firecrackers)
6. Someone driving a truck around with a speaker or two in the bed doing some sort of advertisement (this has happened both really early in the morning at 4:30 am and really late at night around midnight)

Fortunately, of the six things listed above, Luke and I are now able to sleep through numbers 1-5 quite consistently. However, about three weeks ago we had to add a number 7 to the list. Before I explain to you what number 7 is, I have to explain something about churches here in Honduras and more specifically, in Danlí.

I think Luke mentioned in another blog that Hondurans are evangelical, Mormon, or catholic. Churches here seem to have the attitude that louder is better and almost all church services (evangelical anyway) employ the use of speakers, microphones, and a synthesizer (you can imagine how this sounds). For some reason, the catholic church here in town must have felt that they were getting “out-sung” by their fellow evangelicals and decided to purchase a few speakers and start parading around at 5 am singing, praying and doing “hail-Mary’s” with a loudspeaker. This is also usually accompanied with or prefaced by ringing church bells. We have told recent visitors about number 7 when they stay here and they laugh and think it’s funny but the next morning once they’ve been woken up by it are angry and amazed that this actually takes place.

It’s 5:30 am right now on a Friday morning and I was, once again, woken up by a hail-Mary this morning. Luke opened the portón one time to get a look at what exactly was going on and described it as something you’d see in a parade…a guy driving a truck super slow with a speaker followed by a guy with a microphone and then a bunch of people following the truck singing along. You’d think they’d hit different areas of Danlí to assure that everyone hears their good news but unfortunately they pass back and forth on our street at least 4 times a week now anywhere between 4:45 and 5:45 am. I’m looking forward to our upcoming trip to get out of Danlí for a week! :)

Aguacates!

2007-10-22T14:47:00.000-06:00

We´ve found avocados of every size and shape here (who knew that the Mexican avocado wasn´t the only kind??). Below is a pic of me at the dinner table with toasted flour tortillas and avocado (I also love to eat them plain with salt). The really tiny avocado only had about two spoonfuls in each half and the big one was too big to eat at once.

I´m also including a pic of Luke sucking ¨chupando¨an orange. The oranges here (surprise!) are actually yellowish green and absolutely delicious. They have a thick shell so I buy them from a lady who uses this metal thing to peel the rind. You then cut the orange in half and suck out the pulp and juice. (Take note of the hanging shelves in the background that Luke built for our books!)

Smells like pumpkin spice...

2007-10-15T10:30:00.000-06:00

Hello from Honduras! Fall is in full swing at home…rustling leaves, afternoon football games, Starbucks Pumpkin Spice lattés (ok that’s sort of a joke but I do miss the occasional lateé)…it’s funny how what Luke and I talk about often has to do with what we’d be doing at home during a particular season of the year. Luckily here the weather has been very “fall-like” (for Honduras). Since last Sunday, there has been a low front hovering over southern Honduras bringing us cool and rainy days (lower 70s) and even cooler nights. Luke and I both love it. After seeing the hot sun every day during dry season and then usually for part of the day during the rainy season (late June-December) it’s nice to have a string of cool days where the sun doesn’t even peak through! We sat outside the other night and had to put on sweaters!

Our good friends Dory and Jarod sent us a package a few weeks ago that contained several delicious beers from the New Belgium Brewery in Fort Collins (where we were living before moving to Honduras). And since we have been reminiscing about fall weather we thought we’d blog about what sipping those beers reminded us of….

- Car camping along the Poudre river
- Sitting outside our garage on summer weekend nights with the dog and grilling
- Hanging with Sally and Jason in Denver (Luke’s sister & brother-in-law)
- CSU Rams football games (we usually lost but oh well!)
- The New Belgium brewery tour (ok, we only when on the actual “tour” once but frequented the place after work and when visitors came for the free samples)
- Hanging out with our friends Dory and Jarod
- Going out to eat downtown Fort Collins
- Picnicking up on the Horsetooth Reservoir
- $1 New Belgium drafts on Tuesday nights or during Colorado Avalanche hockey games at a divey (but very delicious) Italian restaurant on Prospect
- Friday nights at home just Luke and I and Moose listening to music and cooking something tasty

We definitely miss Fort Collins and our friends and family (and of course, our dog Moose). The homesickness (thank goodness) isn’t a constant feeling …more of sometimes surprisingly powerful wave that comes on a bad day, after looking at a picture, hearing from family or being reminded of something from home.

(See below for another blog I posted today on our work update)

Work & Leisure

2007-10-15T10:28:00.000-06:00

Several of you got the following paragraphs in an email (these are updated) but for those who didn’t, here is an update on what we’ve been up to work-wise.

Luke is currently working on putting together a class on how to survey for the “técnicos” at his counterpart organization. Técnicos are basically guys with construction experience but no real education. The técnicos at his counterpart organization are in charge of overseeing the water systems that the communities put in (construction supervision), hygiene, health, watershed management, and environmental education, preliminary surveys, etc. However, their surveying skills could use some improvement. He feels that this would definitely be sustainable and something he will enjoy doing.

Luke has also started teaching math several hours a week to 3rd-6th graders at the school for street kids (the one I blogged about). The school year ends in a month and they’re only on page 15 of their math books (in other words, they’re WAY far behind). This can be attributed to the kids having some learning difficulties but mainly because the teachers don’t do much to push the kids or “teach” them in my opinion. Even though the school year ends and the teachers stop coming, these kids still show up at the school everyday Nov-February (months of vacation) so he’s hoping he can work with them through those months and catch them up for next year.
Starting in January or February, Luke’s counterpart organization will be starting new water system projects in 7-10 communities that are very isolated (like the one in my blog about the trip to the campo). We’re planning to commit 3-5 days every month staying overnight in these communities. Luke would work with the guys in the community and oversee the construction of the water system (also do surveying and the water system designing) and I would work with the nurse from the local health center (if there is one) or with community volunteers on health education. We’re looking forward to this. Luke’s counterpart organization gives us money to cover the transportation, lodging and food for us while we’re working in these communities so we don’t have to worry about that.

I’m currently finishing up working with the 210 5th graders (6 classes) that I started working with in June. We finished up all the sex ed charlas last week (they went way better than expected) and started HIV/AIDS prevention this week. I gave them a preliminary test just to get an idea of what 5th graders in Honduras know about HIV/AIDS and it was really surprising…many still think it can be transferred through mosquitoes and saliva, some think there is a cure, that you can’t get it after having sex just one, etc. I’m going to give them the same test again after 3 hours of charlas. Before the school year ends, I need to make my decisions about who I’m going to ask (5 from each class) to be in my youth groups that I’m going to form starting next school year (in April). The focus of the youth groups will be leadership and community service.

I recently applied for and received a small community grant to work with the People Living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA) support group here in Danlí. There are about 30 people who come regularly to meet once a month. We’re going to do two sessions, covering topics like reproductive health in PLWHA, sexual health, dealing with stress and depression, and adherence to medication. One of the workshops is this month and another one is in November.

Other than work, Luke and I spend a lot of time reading, cooking, and watching movies on our computer (thank goodness for DVD rippers!). Our garden didn’t work out so well the first time (lack of good soil) so we’ve been busy lately organizing the re-plant (getting fertilizer, weeding, etc.). Of all the flowers I planted, only 3 zinnias came up but they sure are pretty! It’s been cool lately so we’re going to try and plant lettuce and spinach. We ate a lot of leafy greens in the States and here the only lettuce you can find is iceberg and occasionally some weird tasting spinach at the market. We have a trip planned to the west at the beginning of November to visit some friends of ours (a married couple) in Santa Rosa de Copan. For Thanksgiving (it makes me sad to think about spending this holiday here in Honduras) the volunteers in our state are getting together for meal. It’s hard to believe that when we get back from the States in January we’ll be just a month shy of having been in Honduras for a whole year. I wouldn’t say the time is going fast necessarily, but it definitely is moving along.

Side note to last blog

2007-10-04T08:55:00.000-06:00

An addition to my latest blog (see below)…I realized that I should explain better what “community” in the mountains of Honduras means. Normally, when we think of a small town or a community we think of a cluster of houses more or less close to each other. Here a “community” (aldea) usually consists of houses scattered along a road or trail. Rarely are two houses right next to each other. In the community we visited last week, there are about 40 houses included in the community but if you drive along the dirt road that hugs the mountainside, you might actually only see 10 of those houses. Most are either up or down from the road, hidden among the trees or coffee plants (about 8 feet when they’re mature). This definitely makes doing house-to-house visits more difficult and more of a workout!

Trip to the campo

2007-09-28T15:04:00.001-06:00

This week Luke and I headed out to an aldea to work and came back with lots to write about. Luke’s assigned counterpart organization (JAM – Juntas de Agua Municipal) picked us up on Tuesday morning at 6:30 to drive us the 2 ½ hours to an aldea called El Recuerdo de la Esperanza. It was a long drive on dirt roads but luckily we were in a double-cabin Toyota pick-up so we weren’t too uncomfortable (and luckily I had remembered to take my motion sickness medicine before leaving). We went to the community with several objectives. The first was to take a look at the water tank the community has been building and check their progress of burying water pipes to get water to each house. This water project (funded by COSUDE – The Swiss Cooperation Orginization through the JAM) was supposed to be finished no later than September 30 but the community still has not completed everything (COSUDE provides all the funding for the project; the community provides all the labor, the JAM provides the technical assistance). We went to “check-up” on them and encourage them to get the project finished. The second objective of the visit was to do house-to-house visits with a community volunteer, going over basic hygiene and health issues. Part of the water project involved installing latrines for every house so I was also to go over maintenance of the latrine and make sure everyone in the family, kids included, are using it. This community is very poor and very isolated. To give you an idea of just how poor…before the water project began, only 2 of 41 houses had latrines (this means that people were just going to the bathroom somewhere outside, literally "didn´t have a pot to pis in"). Because the community is so isolated, their diet consists of mainly tortillas, beans, rice, and eggs and lacks fruits and veggies. Most of the kids are shoeless and were dirty from head to toe. A good number of them have the puffy bellies from parasites, malnutrition, or a combination of both. And, of course, there is no electricity.

We got to El Recuerdo at about 9 am on Tuesday morning after a bumpy ride and after crossing several rivers (without bridges) and many streams. We set off to hike up the mountain to visit the site of the water source and where the tank and filter are being built. The water source for the community (once the tank and system are finished) comes from several natural springs in the mountainside. The community sits in a valley with mountains on both sides. The one side of the valley is covered with vegetation and trees (the side with the water source). The other side of the community has been cleared and the farmers burn what remains in order to plant corn and beans. The side that has been slashed and burned has ZERO water sources and looks dry and dusty. (Wonder why??)

Standing on vegetated side, looking at the slashed-and-burned side.

After visiting the water tank site and filter to see how the job is coming along, we had lunch and then headed to the house where Luke and I would be staying the night. The house we stayed at was relatively nice compared to most houses in the community. There were three rooms – a kitchen and 2 bedrooms (each with 3 beds in them). Near the house that was perched on a hillside were the latrine and shower (see pic below).

The front side to this outdoor shower was open. It looked down the hill that was covered in coffee plants. No running water so we used a bucket of water and a paila (paila is a plastic container/bowl that is used here to shower, to wash dishes, hands, etc.). It was a cold, breezy shower!

Luke worked until 5 pm with some guys from the community, laying water pipe in front of the house we were staying at.

Luke working with the guys from the community

We ate dinner at 6 pm (avocado, rice, beans, and tortillas). Soon after, everyone in the house went to bed! Even though is was only 7 pm Luke and I decided to follow their lead and go to bed. It got dark around 6 pm and since there’s no electricity, by 7 pm it feels more like 10. We got out of bed the next morning around 5:15 and had the feeling that we’d missed breakfast. I asked the señora of the house (Doña Olga) what time she had gotten up at and she said 3:45! I suppose if you go to bed at 7, 3:45 doesn’t seem so early??? We had breakfast (eggs, beans, tortillas) then Luke set off for the tank to help out and I stayed around until Doña Olga (one of the community volunteers) was ready to go house to house with me. We were able to visit 13 houses in a little over 3 hours. Doña Olga did the introductions and then from there let me do the talking. At this time of day, the only people home are the wives and children. At each house I did the following things: looked over the latrine to make sure it was clean and asked to make sure everyone was using it, asked them how they were purifying their water (either by boiling it, using chlorine, or setting the water in the sun), asked about the family’s health, and if there were kids around, I gave a mini-charla on hand-washing and had all the kids wash their hands with me. I think I washed my hands with around 30 kids in all!

Clean hands! This pic was taken after I showed the kids how to wash their hands and explained to them when they should wash them.

Several things I noticed:
1) No one is purifying their water. The water system, once working, will bring treated water (with chlorine) to every house. However, currently their water is coming from a hose stuck in the mountain and they are not treating the water at all before consuming it.
2) A lot of kids were dirty and shoeless, running around outside with bare feet, stepping in chicken, pig, and/or dog poop then tracking it inside.
3) Almost every household has chickens and they are free to roam wherever and inevitably end up inside the house (see pic below of chickens roaming the front of the house where we stayed at).
4) Many women do NOT have chimneys on their wood stoves in the kitchen. In several of the houses I had to stand outside the kitchen to talk to the women because my eyes immediately started burning and I couldn´t help but cough because of all the smoke. The women are used to breathing that in on a daily basis and don’t realize it’s a health risk, especially for babies and young children. (See pic below of an example of VERY nice kitchen in a newer house in the community).
5) The kids are not in school! Apparently several months ago the teacher’s contract ran out (why the government would sign a contract that ends 4 months before the school year is over makes no sense to me!). According to many, the teacher was great and even organized a women’s group in the community. You can’t blame her for not wanting to stay if the government wasn’t going to pay her. It was sad to see all these young kids at home when I was doing the visits that should’ve been in school.

Chickens! They are very annoying and constantly try to get in the house. I took this pic right after the grandmother tossed some corn kernels on the ground for them. If this is what they call “free-range” chickens than I want mine from the cage! :)

A nice kitchen! Notice that this stove has a chimney.

Someone came to get us on Wednesday afternoon and we made it back to Danlí by about 6:30 pm. It was a good trip and we hope to get back to the community soon to help them finish up their water project and do some health-related education. Unfortunately, Luke and I both woke in the middle of the night the night we got back with some digestive issues. I suppose this is to be expected even though we were chlorinating our water. Luckily the problems didn’t last but more than a day.

Luke and I both enjoy visiting and staying over in the campo. Living in Danlí it’s easy to forget just how isolated and poor some of the communities in Honduras are. Plus, the people are very friendly and every time we go we always end up with stories to tell!

Portón

2007-09-24T08:51:00.000-06:00

Hey everyone! Wow…. sorry about the lack of blogs, we are still in Honduras (amazingly enough). We have been in and out of Danlí lately and not had a lot going on work wise (this is driving me crazy). It is Monday morning at 7:30 while I am writing this. I have to go to find some guys to ask them a question about a design I am working on for a water system today and then go to a meeting at the mayor’s office. I am not exactly sure what the meeting is about but I got invited so I am going, and taking Annie with me so that I have a chance of understanding everything that goes on. My Spanish is getting slowly better and I can now understand all of the major themes in most conversations but I occasionally miss important details or fail to explain myself very well so when I can, I take Annie with me and then after the meeting we have to have a debriefing to make sure I got all the information.

So for lack of anything better to blog about Annie suggested I blog something about life here in Honduras. We live in a pretty big city so we were only allowed to live in certain neighborhoods in town. These neighborhoods in Danlí are very typical of most Central American neighborhoods in that they are surrounded by a wall or a iron fence topped with razor wire, barbed wire, broken glass bottles, or an electric fence. We have an electric fence on top of a concrete block wall. The electric fence is actually kind of annoying, it uses electricity for one and it makes our house stand out too much…like I should hang a sign outside that says “DO NOT FEED THE GRINGOS”. Our house is odd in that we are the only family living behind our wall. Most places have at least two families (always siblings or parents + an assortment of other random relatives) living behind the wall. We also have a big green “portón” or door that opens to the outside. The portón is big enough to pull a car through and is the only entrance to our little compound.

Our big green portón

The portón has caused some funny scenarios. First, it is the only way into our compound (a huge design flaw). When we were first looking to rent this house we committed to rent it even though we hadn’t seen behind the wall yet because at that point you couldn’t get inside the portón. Some one had run into the portón with their car and it was mangled to a point that it wouldn’t open, so no one had entered our little compound for over a year, there was no way in and the electric fence was still on. Side note - no one had actually ever lived in this house before, it was built 2 years ago with “remesas” which is the name for checks sent down from the States and the lady never came back to Honduras. This is quite common…a lot of communities have large American-looking houses with no one living in them or that are unfinished. People send money from the states to build a big house and then they either get deported and the remesas run out or they get citizenship and never come back to the house they had built. Back to the portón stories…people have to knock on the big green door or ring the doorbell if they want to find us which means we don’t have to let them in. We can instead just yell over the top (¡¿Quién?! = “Who is it?!”) to see who it is first. For example, when the Jehovah’s witnesses come you can just pretend that you don’t speak Spanish. Just yesterday the Mormons came over (they send ladies here) and I opened the door and I could tell they wanted to come in but I just didn’t open the door far enough and they were stymied (I was nice though, the Mormon church is right next door so I didn’t want to be rude and pretend to not know Spanish, best not to piss off the neighbors, plus it was a good opportunity to practice a little Spanish). An early morning portón visit (we woke up at 7 am on a Saturday morning to the doorbell) was the nice pulpería owner from down the street. (A pulpería is a little store run out of your house that sells mainly junk food, some basic staples, soda and beer). Anyway, she wanted our 5 empty beer bottles back because the bottle guy was coming to pick up empties later that morning. Nothing like being woken up on an early Saturday morning and having to look around for empty beer bottles while the neighborhood pulpería owner waits outside your portón. Another early morning portón story…a few Sundays ago I was away and some guys stopped by really early in the morning (6:30) looking for me. They were going on a hike in a protected area that Annie and I had hiked with them several months ago and wondered if I wanted to go with them again. Annie answered to portón in her pjs and found a truckload of middle-aged guys looking for me.

We desperately need one of those peepholes!

Youth camp

2007-09-05T12:13:00.001-06:00

A few notes before I get into the blog...hurricane Felix dumped some light rain on us starting last night around 10 pm and ending sometime early this morning. No flooding, no wind. Sounds like it lost power when it got into mainland. We didn´t even lose power! Also, be sure to check out Luke´s blog below on the corn festival. I added a few more pics to it today as well.

I am finally going to blog about the youth camp for young leaders that I participated in a month ago….

The health PCV about 20 minutes south of Danlí got a grant to work with at-risk youth so we spent a weekend with around 32 youth between the ages of 15-20ish at the beginning of August. This health PCV works with a youth organization in her community that had already identified young leaders and many of them have been to talleres (like a capacitation/training) on HIV/AIDS, Sex Ed, etc. We trained (and re-trained) the young leaders on HIV/AIDS prevention, gang involvement, drugs, and abuse over the weekend and did lots of camp-like activities like a bonfire, scavenger hunt, team-building activities, etc. They rented a building that is used for these types of things about an hour from Danli near Nicaraguan border. We all slept at the building on colchones (4 PCVs, 3 other youth leaders, and the 32 youth) and got about 4 hours of quiet sleep. Here are a few pics from the camp:

Four of us PCVs helping out

The week following the camp the youth leaders willwork with the kids at a school for street kids here in Danlí (the “at-risk” youth) on these topics. A youth PC volunteer works at this school on a daily basis. The leaders were divided up into four groups, each assigned with a different topic to work with the kids on. I was assigned to help lead the HIV/AIDS project. My group came to Danlí the Wednesday after the camp and we worked with the kids from this school for several hours on HIV/AIDS prevention. I helped the young leaders design the presentation and activities but just sat back while they led it. We gave the presentation to the 10-15 year-olds at the street school. They had never received a formal HIV/AIDS charla before so it was interesting to see what beliefs they had about HIV/AIDS (one thought, for example, that there was a cure). I felt, and so did the leaders, that the kids learned a lot. And the leaders had a great time doing it! Some of them mentioned wanting to come back and volunteer at the school.

A little info on the school….
The school got started about 5 years ago when the director went around town looking for the places where the street kids hang out. “Street kids” is sort of misleading because most of them do have somewhere to sleep at night, even if it is in a one room shack with tarps for walls. When they’re not in school, they spend their time hanging out on the street and beg. Many of the kids have been sexually abused and/or raped by other family members or older street kids. The PC youth volunteer in Danlí has been volunteering at this school for almost two years now (her COS (Close of Service) is in December). The project has definitely had its share of problems. A major one being that because the government doesn’t fund the school, they have to depend on the local government and donations. The local government only gives the schools 10,000 L per month ($529) and that is supposed to pay the salary of 3 people, buy supplies, and maintain the school. Definitely not enough. The other major problem besides money is that the teachers who get assigned to the school (only 2 teachers for abouat 30 kids between the ages of 5 and 15) often decide to quit soon after starting or just don’t show up a lot. I’ve complained and blogged about the educational system before so I won’ t do it again here but just to reiterate, there really is no system of accountability or monitoring so if a teacher decides not to come to work a few days a week or decides to put a movie on during school hours so she can use that time to plan, no one is there to fire them or even take some money from their paycheck for the days they’ve missed. These kids need stability and teachers who care which is a rare thing here. They have had a few good teachers move through but that is definitely not the norm. A few pics from our day at the school:

Hey Folks

2007-08-31T15:12:00.000-06:00

Lots of good comments on the last blog, I will be sure to blog every time I have a near death experience or destroy something. Sorry for the long delay in posting another blog. I will try and post some pictures in this blog as well if the computer will cooperate today. Not much new going on here. Last week was the national corn festival here in Danlí (Festinama 2007 it was called). It is sort of like the state fair of Honduras with lots of vendors selling all sorts of things made mostly from corn. Corn is a big deal here, they grow mostly white corn which is similar to the dent corn we have at home but lighter in color with a very similar looking plant an ear size. Most everyone in the campo here grows at least some corn, mostly on a subsistence basis, meaning they grow enough to eat throughout the year or more often enough to sell at a low price at harvest and then buy back enough to eat during the year at a higher price (storage is a problem). Most corn in the diet is eaten in the form of corn tortillas made by hand every morning. Corn grows quite well here and is a thing of pride among the Hondurans. I need to look it up to make certain, but I am pretty sure that Honduras can’t grow enough corn to feed itself and has to import in order to feed the population. That is a pretty telling statistic I think since the majority of the population subsists on corn, rice and beans.

Anyhow the corn festival was pretty fun some other volunteers came into town to enjoy the food and beer and we walked around town enjoying the festival. Below are some pics from Saturday the main day of the festival.

Annie enjoying some corn products - elote is the grilled field corn you see below and montuca (sp?) is what she´s eating in the pic above. It´s a tamale like thing filled with pork or chicken, bits of potato, and a few other veggies like peas then wrapped in corn husks and boiled. They´re much drier than the Mexican tamales we´re used to.

Food stands set up around a plaza...it got a bit smoking with all the fires. In the big pots they´re boiling the Honduran tamales (just cooked corn mass) and montucas.

It´s a GYR

Feels like the county fair!

Streets of Danli before Festinama 2007 kicked off its carnival

The following pics are from the parade Sunday morning, the final day of the week-long festival. The first pick is a float with the ¨corn queen¨.

Right now Annie is in La Esperanza at a HIV-AIDS conference and I am at home. I went with a PAM (Protected Areas Management) volunteer to his site earlier this week to meet with his community about helping them with the initial survey they need to do to bring electricity to the community. Hopefully we will be able to do the preliminary study of the community for free (it costs about $1500-3000 to hire someone to do it, way out of reach of this community) or at least for minimal costs in transportation and some equipment. After the initial study is done the community can then look for someone to pay to put the electricity lines in (Church group from the states, NGO, or some other donor). And maybe in 4 or 5 years have T.V. and refrigeration.

OK until later

Que le vaya bien

Luke

Nah hombre.

2007-08-14T08:48:00.000-06:00

Well I am now 26 and Annie and I have been married for 2 years… big weekend. It was supposed to be big weekend at least. We had planned on going to Tegus and working a little at the office (we can print for free in the PC office) and then spending the night in a hotel and maybe going to a movie or something. But in an attempt to contract every water-borne sickness Honduras has to offer I was sidelined with amoebas in my digestive system on Friday. That makes the count 3 digestive illnesses in the 3 months we’ve been in site. The amoebas weren’t nearly as bad as the last bacterial infection accept for a 45 minute period on Friday morning when I thought Annie was going to come home to find me passed out on the bathroom floor from the stomach cramps. I called the PCMO (Peace Corps Medical Officer) and she told me to go to the pharmacy down the street and buy 6 expensive neon green pills which seemed to clean the problem up pretty quick, as well as make my pee glow in the dark. Quite impressive.

Anyhow so we stayed home for the weekend. It wasn’t so bad. On Saturday I felt quite a bit better so I went to the store and bought a shovel, some chicken wire, and 10 lbs. of fertilizer (12-24-12) for about 9 American dollars. I started the project of tilling up our yard in an attempt to plant a garden. It took quite a bit of work since when they built the house rather than clean up after constructing things, they just threw everything in the yard and then fenced it in with a cinder block wall. Mostly the job was digging up the old cinder blocks, bricks, electrical wire, ceiling tile, bathroom tile, rusty wires, boards, nails, pvc pipe, and a big slab of waste concrete, and sifting what soil remained through the chicken wire to get the rocks out. Saturday went well and I got about half of the section we are going to plant tilled up and Annie planted some herbs and a few flowers. Sunday afternoon we went back to work on the other half….and that’s when things started to go badly. Towards the end of the day it looked like it might rain so we started to hustle to at least get the whole section tilled up over the weekend so we could plant things later during the evenings as more of a leisure activity (there was definitely nothing “leisurely” about digging up the slab of waste concrete). Earlier in the day I had found the buried electrical line and been careful not to cut it while digging. I had not found the water line yet and assumed it must not run through this section of the yard. I had dug up numerous pieces of pvc and after being careful with them, none of them turned out to be anything but trash. I started to be in a hurry, it was getting dark and it looked like rain. So I sunk the shovel into the ground and hit another piece of pvc, I dug it up and realized that this one was connected for a ways under ground…it was our water line…maybe. There was no way of telling. Water only comes every 3 days, usually in the afternoon sometime for about 3 hours. I thought I will just run down to the ferretería (hardware store) and buy a section of ½ inch pipe….but then I realized it was Sunday and nothing in Danli is open on Sunday. And water was supposed to be coming anytime because it had come on Thursday so Sunday was three days later. We are almost completely out of water and it is supposed to come anytime now and I just potentially cut the water line in half. I just ignored the problem. I figured there was only about 10% chance that particular pvc pipe actually served any purpose.

So I went back to my rushed tilling of the yard before it rained. Not more than 3 shovels later I sink the shovel down hard trying to get a chunk of concrete out and BOOM! I had no idea what happened but the electric line connecting at our wall was on fire. Apparently in Honduras you don’t bury electric lines at a constant depth and 3 inches below the surface is totally OK. I should have certainly been more careful. The electric line I had found before and been so careful not to cut had been deeper and rather than running straight to the house at a nice depth for some reason it took a bend and wasn’t buried as deep, and I hit it with the shovel and cut the electricity.

Now I was concerned. I was trying to decide if what had just happened was really as dangerous as I think it might have been (the line was 110V and 60A, rubber soled shoes, dry shovel handle, Annie knows CPR….moderately dangerous). But now we don’t have electricity, and who knows how to find an electrician in Honduras, I sure don’t. It keeps getting worse…within 5 minutes of cutting the electricity, the water starts coming, spurting out of the ground about 6 feet high from where I cut what is now glaringly obvious was our water line. So now we don’t have electricity, and we aren’t going to have a pila full of water for the next 3 days. So now I’m thinking I’ve got to solve the water problem and then it starts raining, hard.

It was a disaster, and Annie wanted to kill me. In a matter of a few minutes I had managed to cut both our water and our electricity. The yard was filling with water and the pila wasn’t. Luckily I have seen in my travels what Hondurans calls a “union universal” which is a bike tire tube wrapped tightly connecting 2 pipes. So I took out my leatherman and took off my bike tire (PC gave me a bike, which is worth way more now that it is helping hold together our water line), took out the tube, cut it in half, and made a universal connection. So we at least got a pila full of turbid water.

We also now have electricity again. I still don’t know how to find an electrician in Honduras, but a neighbor who fixes refrigerators is just as good. He managed to fix it without ever turning the electricity off anywhere….amazing, and horridly dangerous.

So we now have a place to plant some flowers and veggies….Wahoo

Luke

HALF A YEAR!

2007-08-12T11:40:00.000-06:00

Hurrah! We’ve been in Honduras a half a year! Has it gone quickly? Well…both Luke and I agree the weeks go quick but the months go really slow.

This blog centers around our home but it’s sort of random so I apologize if it’s difficult to follow!

We got a package from home with my spices so now we can cook just about everything! We’re lucky to be in Danlí because you can find pretty much any ingredient or food item that you want (within reason). In Danlí you can’t find good cheeses (nothing gourmet and no mozzarella, feta, cheddar, colby, etc.); other dairy products like cottage cheese, sour cream, buttermilk; or whole grains: bread, rice, flour, etc. We’re planning a trip to Tegus to celebrate our anniversary and birthdays soon so we hope to pick up some of those coveted food items we can’t find here. We’re starting to feel like our house is a home…especially now that we have a couch to sit on in the living room. I took some updated pics of our house so send us an email if you want to see them!

Luke has been working feverishly in the yard lately trying to get it ready to plant a garden. My mom and grandma and Luke’s mom have sent us seeds so we’re excited to get our garden going! The soil in our front yard is pretty decent but Luke has to dig up the grass that is growing in it and then sift out the roots and rocks. We bought some fertilizer and have been using that in the rows where we plant. We have a compost pile that we started as soon as we moved in (a little over a month ago) but it’s not quite ready to use as fertilizer. Maybe for the next planting. Yesterday we got a few rows of things planted: flowers that grow to 4 ½ feet tall in front of the oh-so-pretty cinder block wall that surrounds our house, basil, chives, and radishes. We hope to plant more flowers, sweet corn, green beans and cucumbers today. Luke found a good manual in the PC office about when to plant things in Honduras which has been a help since the weather is a bit different here than what we’re used to in the States! It’s rainy season now and cooler than during dry season but still not quite cool enough to plant things like spinach. We’ll have to wait until Octoberish to do the cooler weather veggies. We’re going to try and plant a row of lettuce to see if it grows or if it still gets too hot during the day.

I’ve been trying to keep track of what fruits are in season when since we got here. Right now passion fruit is definitely in season. Our neighbors have a big tree that hangs over into our yard above our shed. For the past few weeks we’ll hear a loud bang when a fruit falls of the tree, hits the shed, the rolls off the roof. In the morning through afternoon, you can smell the sweet scent of maracuyá (passion fruit) in our yard. It’s a weird fruit…not something you can eat easily…but it makes an excellent juice. Other fruits right now that are in season are nance (a small yellow fruit that I think is disgusting), something called marmones (I believe) and a fruit that has a red spiny shell (sort of looks like a big strawberry) that you crack open and eat what’s inside (I have no idea what it’s called). Tamarindo (tamarind in English) has been in season for what seems like quite awhile. It grows in brown, fuzzy pod-like things and inside the pod are seeds with fruit surrounding them. This also makes an excellent juice – one of Luke and I’s favorite. Luckily there is a juice place only a few blocks from our house that sells fresh squeezed juice for only 8 Lempira – 40 American cents.

Remember the good old days when soda/pop was sold in glass bottles? Well here in Honduras you can still buy soda in glass bottles and the good thing about the bottles is that they are recycled unlike the plastic ones. Anyway Luke and I both love Coca-Cola Light (tastes very similar to Coke Zero in the States) so we decided to ask the owner of the pulpería (small family-owned store that sells beverages, junk-food, sometimes fruit and veggies, etc. that you’ll find on every street) if she could order us a case of Coca Light in bottles from the Coke guy next time he came. She did and we got our case of Coca Light in bottles. When we’re finished with the case, we just have to take the empty bottles back and get a new case. Each soda (about 12 oz) costs about 28 American cents.

Our new pet

2007-08-07T12:40:00.000-06:00

Several weeks ago, we were walking home from the grocery store and Luke found a turtle in the middle of the road near our house. We could tell that at one point it had been someone’s pet because it’s shell had been painted. Luke got really excited and picked the turtle up, justifying that it was going to get run over if we didn’t take it home. Luke named him Umberto which is a Honduran name that we think is sort of funny so it seemed to suit the turtle. Umberto is about 8 inches in diameter and still scared of us a bit. He didn’t eat anything that we gave him for 2 weeks…we tried everything from cucumber and carrot peels to cabbage, rice & beans, etc. but Umberto wouldn’t eat any of it! On morning I was eating a mínimo (small banana) and decided I’d find Umberto and see if he liked bananas. I put him next to the bits of banana and he stuck his head out and ate right in front of me! Before he wouldn’t ever stick his head out if we were in sight but that morning he was so hungry he didn’t even care. So now all we feed him is about ½ a mínimo a day. I’m sure there has to be other things he’ll eat but we haven’t figured out what those are yet. Umberto gets up pretty early in the day and wonders the yard. I usually find him by the compost pile in the morning. He’s a pretty easy pet to have but doesn´t make a very good watch dog.

Umberto hanging out in the yard

More pics of hike

2007-08-01T15:35:00.000-06:00

Organic coffee

Luke and I in front of waterfall we saw at the end of hike
Look closely - there is a monkey sitting on a tree branch in the top middle of the pic.

Hike

2007-07-30T14:03:00.000-06:00

Hello everyone!

A week ago last Saturday we went on a really nice hike near Danlí. A family friend of our host family’s who was always over at there house when we were living there knew we liked to hike so he came over one and invited us on a hike Saturday morning. Luke was the one who answered the door so he didn’t get all the info like who all was going, where we were going, etc. but we decided to go anyway. Turned out to be pretty fun. Ended up being our host family’s friend (Carlan), four of his middle-aged guy friends, two ten-year-olds and a Japanese volunteer who is living with Carlan’s parents, and Luke and I. We drove for about 35 minutes on a dirt road out of Danlí and ended up hiking for about 4 hours through one of Carlan’s friend’s private property that is still really well forested. The guy who owns the property definitely had to be with us because we weren’t walking on any well worn trails. We walked through dense jungle, moving over and under logs, pushing vines and branches out of the way, etc. We didn’t make it to the top of the mountain we were headed to due to lack of time but we did get some good exercise and got to see wild monkeys! We started hearing their growl/howl soon into our hike but didn’t actually see any until we got pretty deep into the jungle. We saw them from below as they were high up in the trees but one of the guys had binoculars. They made some really cool sounds and were pretty big (about the size of a 10-year-old kid). We also saw a small waterfall and returned to Danlí in the afternoon around 2. Here are a few pics. I´ve got more from the hike but don´t have time today to wait for them to download but I´ll post them soon.

Getting ready to head out of town

A close-up pic of coffee beans. Coffee won´t be ready to pick until Nov/Dec.

On the hike we stopped by to look at a field of red beans.

A neat pic Luke took of the landscape.

Work update

2007-07-25T15:56:00.000-06:00

Hey everyone,
I feel like I have to apologize for not blogging enough every time I blog, but Annie seems to keep everyone up to date on most of the goings on. So sorry for not blogging and you’re welcome for marrying a blogger. It is also a challenge to blog because life really isn’t that exciting…..although Saturday we saw some 100 lb wild monkeys, which was exciting.

I have been spending 3-4 days working in El Paraíso per week and the other days either chasing other work around the area or working on the computer. I have a copy of EPAnet software and AutoCAD software and some different GIS softwares that I am trying to find the time and projects to work with so I can keep up-to-date with engineering softwares. Work in El Paraíso still consists of me following around the técnicos from project to project trying to get things built correctly. JAM currently has 7 projects that are scheduled to end in September and construction needs to be done by then (when the bank account quits giving Swiss money). I am still of minimal impact with this organization. The técnicos are very capable in my opinion (and they speak the native language). It has still been beneficial to me though as I have seen quite a few different projects, the subsequent problems, and have done a few surveys that have saved them some time. I have also had some worthwhile experiences. For example, just today I spent 5 hours hiking around the rainforest in the rain (imagine that), and I managed to fall down in the mud on 3 separate occasions. We were walking along the newly buried conduction line to check if some new air valves were installed correctly so the trail was nothing but saturated clay. My second fall was the best. We came to the top of a hill and the trail was pretty steep. There were 2 ways down, slide on your ass or try and sort of run/slide down and stay upright for the 40 yards of downhill. I tried the running method (genius) and my foot caught on a root at about the point of maximum velocity and it was a face first yard sale into the mud and water. The guy I was with thought it was hilarious how much earth I moved with my face/shoulder. I then took a shower and washed my clothes in an overflow from the water system along the way because I figured I might as well just be wet and not both wet and dirty. I promptly fell down a third time. On the way home I rode in the back of the truck.

Of interest, the project we were working on is right along the border with Nicaragua and in one of the areas where the heaviest fighting took place during the contra war in the late 80’s between the Nicaraguan Sandinistas and the American backed Contras. You can still see machine gun placements along the ridge, and the stories that the guys I am working with tell are not of a pleasant time, especially for the communities unfortunate enough to be in the area. If anyone wants to know more about what was going on at the time (politically, culturally and economically) read the biography “The Death of Ben Linder.” I can’t remember the author, but it is definitely worth reading and a book both Annie and I recommend.

Here are some pics I took on a visit to see a community building a tank last week:

Charlas with the 5th graders

2007-07-17T12:55:00.000-06:00

I thought I’d get some pics up and blog a little about the charlas I’ve been doing at two different elementary schools in Danlí. I’m doing a 3-month course with 5th graders (I’m working with 6 classes in all which is about 210 students), dealing with topics like good communication, self esteem, values, stereotypes, relationships, puberty (physical changes), pregnancy, HIV/AIDS prevention, and future goal setting/plans. So far it’s been difficult but lots of fun working with the kids. I think I mentioned in another blog how difficult it is to be heard because of how each “aula” (classroom) has windows open to the courtyard. I almost lose my voice after giving two charlas in a row! And when it rains...it´s impossible! The schools have tin roofs and when it´s raining, I have to quite early. I have some pics to post thanks to a Japanese volunteer (a nurse) who is doing a 2-year volunteer program similar to Peace Corps and is living in Danlí. She accompanied me to a charla the other day to see what I was doing with 5th graders and took a few pics.

The pic below shows me doing a self-esteem demonstration. The bottle represented one’s inner self-esteem. The volunteers against the board each took turns reading a slip of paper I gave them with either a positive comment (Annie, I like your shirt) or negative comment (Annie, your charlas are boring). With each positive comment, I filled the bottle up a bit with water and with each negative comment, I squirted the bottle at the students (I poked a hole in the bottle with a seam-ripper so every time I squeezed it, it shot out a stream of water). The students loved it! We then talked about how we can make sure our “self-esteem” bottle stays at an equilibrium and how it’s ok to feel sad or not content with yourself sometimes.

Here is a class of students intently listening to what I have to say! Notice the uniforms…every public school I’ve seen in Honduras requires their students to wear uniforms. Girls in skirts, boys in pants. For physical education, the girls wear skirts with shorts underneath and the boys wear shorts.

Here’s me monitoring a “dinámica” (fun participatory activity). The kids got into groups and had to write positive comments (we first practiced what a “positive comment” is) to their classmates, writing them on a piece of paper taped to their back. The students then got to look at their list to see if the qualities their peers see in them are qualities they knew they had. I stressed the importance of giving compliments and their homework was to intentionally give at least 5 positive comments before going to bed that night.

A big sincere thanks to family members who have contributed to this project! GRACIAS!

Work update and pics

2007-07-13T13:00:00.000-06:00

As some of you already know, we’re finally in our own place! It’s great to be on our own again (after 5 long months). We are living pretty simply with very little furniture (only 1 plastic table and 2 chairs and 2 thin foam mattresses for the floor that we sleep on) but we couldn’t be happier. Our next big purchase will be a couch, a few more plastic chairs, a bed, and maybe eventually, a tv. Send me an email if you want to see pics of the house.

I am sitting here on my plastic chair on a cool (low 70s) Thursday evening thinking of something to blog about so I thought I’d talk a bit about the sand filters that Agua Pura and Rotary International have been installing all over Honduras. I’ve tagged along three times now with employees from Agua Pura and an American environmental engineering student who is here doing a third-party evaluation of the filters. In the department of El Paraíso, around 9,000 filters have been installed. Each filter costs about $27 and is installed inside a family’s home. The family is responsible for coming up with 200 lemps (about $10) of the cost. Check out the pic below to have an idea about what it looks like.

Before I go any further, a little about how the filter works…the cement column contains several layers (starting from bottom) – gravel, smaller gravel, sand, and a layer of water on top of the sand. To keep the filter functioning, at least one 5-gallon jug of water has to be poured into the filter each day to every other day. Basically viruses in the water are attracted to the sand and parasites and larger bacteria get trapped in the sand. Other bacteria are killed off by the biological layer. So, by the time, the water comes out it’s drinkable.

Through the third-party evaluation, they have been finding out that many people are not using the filters correctly or at all. (Ahhh…the joys of development work!). The problem is that the 4 employees (all Honduran) of Auga Pura in Danlí cannot possibly oversee the proper use and maintenance of 9,000 filters. So what we would like to bring to the drawing table is training the already established community leaders in the monitoring of their community’s filter use and general hygiene and come up with some way of reporting back to Agua Pura so they can keep a better eye on things.

It’s so interesting to see all that goes into a project like this. This is the first NGO that I’m really getting to see a lot of the inner workings of. After the several trips we’ve been on to communities to either do water samples or present the idea of bringing filters into a community, the environmental engineering student (and now a public health student who’s also here for 6 weeks doing an internship) and I have to have coffee and debrief to process everything that is involved. Some of the issues that have come up are:

If a community already has a water system, do they really need household sand filters or are there other methods of water purification that would be more suitable?
If a community has a system and was previously treating their water at the tank with chlorine and have now stopped chlorinating because chlorine doesn’t work with the sand filters, what do the people do in the community who don’t have the sand filters?
Are the sand filters being provided because it’s really in the best interest of the community or because numbers are needed to report back to the administration so funding and jobs of the employees can be secured and foreign donors can feel good about themselves?
If filters are being installed to provide clean drinking water but not much is done in the way of education on general hygiene (washing hands, wearing shoes, keeping animals out of house, keeping trash covered, use of latrines, etc.) people will still get sick so how do you manage that (staff, funding, etc.)?

I’m neither for nor against the filters…just bringing up some of the questions that I imagine arise when working with any NGO or similar development agency.

Anyway, below are a few scenes from the campo on one of the visits I went on with Agua Pura. To check out Agua Pura´s explanation for why they´re working in Honduras click on: http://www.purewaterfortheworld.org/our-projects/why-honduras/

Bridge we had to cross to visit a home with a filter.

Corn sitting on someone´s kitchen floor ready to be milled to make tortillas.

The joys of living abroad

2007-07-04T16:21:00.000-06:00

Living in a foreign country has its advantages and disadvantages. There are things about Honduras that we love (fresh fruit and veggies, hospitable people, etc.) and there are things that are more difficult to grow accustomed to. Luke and I spent some time thinking about things that we are dealing with or have seen here in Honduras that to us seemed funny, strange, or just something that we’re not used to in the States and wanted to share it with you. Enjoy the list!

· Sweet-tasting ketchup
· Not flushing your toilet paper (systems can´t handle it)
· Cockroaches
· Feeling “chilly” when it’s 79 degrees
· No speed limits, stop signs, or any regard for what we would consider “safe” driving
· Restaurants that are closed during meal times
· Ropa Americana (American clothing) that has somehow made its way to Honduras. We’ve seen t-shirts that say things like: “Too sexy to study,” “Baby princess,” “My boyfriend’s out of town” “In God we Trust,” etc.
· Putting a plate of food to be eaten later in the microwave (somehow the microwave will keep anything fresh and safe for hours or even days)
· Water shortages
· Difficulty starting things on time
· A love for music from the eighties and early nineties (especially the sappy ballads)
· Excessive honking – could almost be considered it’s own form of communication
· Badly dubbed American movies in Spanish
· “Store dogs”: dogs, usually short legged long-haired ones, that belong to the owner of a store and hang out in and on the street nearby the store
· Stale baked goods
· “Piropos” from men (catcalls)
· Not covering food that’s in the fridge
· Men who walk around ringing a bell selling ice cream from a cooler on wheels
· Being woken up around 4 or 5 am by loud “bangs” that sound an awful lot like gunshots but are really firecrackers called “cohetes” that people use to celebrate birthdays, anniversaries, etc.
· Bolos – drunk old men who fall asleep in the sun on the sidewalk or are really chatty
· Buying then drinking purified water out of ½-liter plastic bags
· Drinking liquados, soda, and natural juice out of a plastic bag with a straw
· Lots of Tweety Bird posters, paraphernalia, car accessories, etc.
· Seeing commercials on tv for rewards for having more “remesas,” (money sent from family/friends who are living and working in the US). Banks here offer prizes – the more “remesas” you deposit into your bank account, the more chances you have to win a new fridge, car, or whatever it is they’re offering.
· Being asked over and over by everyone why we don’t have kids (we´re married so why wouldn’t we??)
· Seeing an entire family (mother, father, child) all riding on a one-person bicycle

Work update

2007-07-02T13:49:00.000-06:00

Hey everyone,
Things here are progressing, I am not sure if the progression of things will lead to any tangible results, but they are progressing…and that is a good thing.

We recently took a trip with an hombre from a NGO called Vecinos Mundiales (World Neighbors) that works here in Honduras. We made this contact earlier on a trip with another guy from Vecinos, I think we blogged about that trip already. Anyhow, it seemed to be a quite successful trip, and we have tentatively planned to stay around 5-7 days a month in the community we visited working on a number of things from beginning to start to think about the potential of a water system, and working with some agricultural producers to giving talks at the schools about self esteem and things of that nature. Vecinos seems excited to have Annie available to work in the health sector as they do not have a health worker in the zone right now, but are doing a lot of health education there.

We left on Monday at about 2:30 and after 3 river crossings on a dirt road big enough for one vehicle and 3 hours in a pickup (I was in the back covered by a tarp to keep dry while Annie was crammed into the single cab with 2 workers from Vecinos) we arrived at the community. It is pretty high up in the mountains, 1,300 meters, and was actually pretty chilly, although to us 75 F is chilly. We talked with some people and found a place to stay. Vecinos is building an office and once it is finished hopefully we can stay there when we are working in the community. Right now they’re using a part of a family’s house as their office where have several desks and a couple of cots to sleep on when they’re in town. We stayed at the house of the lady who makes food for the Vecinos employees while they’re there. The food is “típico” but excellent – rice, beans, cheese, tortillas, eggs, fried plantains, and of course sugared coffee.

The zone is dominated by coffee production and is pretty rough, steep, wet country. Deforestation is taking its toll, but fortunately hasn’t yet left the place an eroded desert. There are 2 small communities that don’t have potable water systems and I am going to attempt to find out how much interest there is in these 2 communities to build a system. I am looking forward to the opportunity to work there as the communities right now don’t have anyone working with them on the water system so I will get to start from almost the beginning and ‘si Dios quiere’ in 2 years some progress will be made towards a potable water system, and maybe they will even have a functioning system. The barriers at this point to the communities getting a functioning system seem almost endless, but you have to start somewhere.

The place we stayed was nice. The outdoor showers in the morning were a little chilly with no hot water (Annie says she could see her breathe while she was showering). When we go to the campo people are usually very hospitable and this time they even moved stuff around so we could have the “master” bedroom. Mostly because they thought I was too gigantic to fit on any of their smaller beds. It is very nice of them to go so far out of there way for us, but sometimes it just makes me feel like more of an intruder…I really can sleep wherever (please no rats if possible)…and I get the feeling that since we’re gringos they think we’re pretty soft. And in comparison we are pretty soft, but I would appreciate a chance to prove that I am not a total pansy ass and can sleep on the floor just fine.

I will try and post a blog sometime soon on all of the things that starting these waters project is going to entail…….once I figure out what that is.

So things are going well for us here, thanks to all who have kept in touch and kept us in your thoughts and prayers.

Hasta luego,
Luke

A couple of additions to the campo trip that Luke blogged about. On Monday night when we got there, the sun quickly set (the sun still sets here around 6 pm…Honduras didn’t do Daylight Savings Time) and the temperature quickly dropped. I was chilly the entire time we were in the campo except for during the day from 9 to 5. The first night it started to rain during dinner and kept raining hard all night. I was convinced that the whole mountain was going to slide away, taking us and the house with it. Luke told me not to worry but in the morning told me that he too worries about mudslides even though he knows it would takes days of hard rain to wet the earth deep enough to make a mountain slide away. Anyway, I woke up the next morning knowing I would have to take a cold shower outdoors while the rain continued to poor down. Sure is a good way to wake up! To give you an idea of how “cold” it is…I was wearing my jeans, boots with socks, a long sleeve shirt and my rain jacket and was wishing I had a sweatshirt and a stocking cap. It’s supposedly “winter” here now that the rains of started but even with the rains it hasn’t been exactly chilly in Danlí so the fresco of the mountains surprised me.

Luke and I both complained about the sugared coffee when we first got to Honduras but now we both enjoy it when we’re in the campo. It seems to fit with the “plato típico” and gives you a bit of something sweet that you otherwise wouldn’t get.

Quick update on the “house hunt:” WE FOUND A HOUSE! Some of you have heard our good news by email but to let everyone know, it’s official! We signed the contract today (Sunday) and paid the first month’s rent. It’s a really nice house only 2 houses down the street from where we live now. We’re happy with the neighborhood (only a few blocks from the main plaza and plenty of neighbors that will “watch our for us”) and even happier with the house. We’ll have a bit of a yard and an 8 foot wall that gives us complete privacy! Now the task of finding furniture and other household items. We have to buy everything from a fridge to a bed to kitchen utensils and a couch. Bit by bit. We may be sleeping on “colchones” (small mattresses you put on the floor) and sitting on plastic furniture for awhile. But I’m not complaining…we have a house! We hope to be moving into it at the end of this week. -Annie

2007-06-24T14:54:00.000-06:00

This past week went by fast. On Monday I practiced for my first charlas to give on Tuesday. Then Tuesday morning I went to the school and found that another group of young “gringos” from a church were doing some sort of program with the kids. I decided I didn’t want to have to give my charla after the kids were all wound up so I decided to go back on Wednesday. I went Wednesday and a Japanese volunteer who also works at the hospital (in nutrition) accompanied me just to see what type of work I’m doing. I gave the charla to a fifth and a sixth grade class of 36 and 40 students, respectively. The first charla was a basic introduction to the course. We went over all the different topics we’d be addressing throughout the series of 15 or so charlas, talked about good communication, did some fun activities (what they call “dinámicas”), and the students came up with rules for the course. Even with the large amount of students, it went really well although I’d almost lost my voice after giving the two charlas. It’s hard to understand how the kids can learn anything in the schools here due to the structure of the buildings. Because of the hot climate, most schools are built in a square or U shape with an open center courtyard. The classrooms have windows that face the courtyard as well on the opposite wall to let the air pass through. Sometimes there is glass in the courtyard windows but usually they just have the metal bars for security. So it is incredibly difficult to hear anything because something is always going on…some kids are on break, others are doing a loud activity in a classroom nearby, etc. You really do have to practically yell while you’re in your classroom so that all students can hear. This coming week I’m planning to do the same introduction charla at two other schools.

On Thursday and Friday we went to Zamorano, a private agricultural university between Danlí and Tegus for a meeting with some PC staff and all the volunteers from the department of El Paraíso. We stayed over night Thursday night, had breakfast, and then came back to Danlí on Friday late morning. It’s a neat university with a huge campus. Students come from all over Central and South America to study there.

On Monday-Tuesday we’re hoping to accompany two employees of Vecinos Mundiales (NGO) on a visit to a few communities they’re working in. The last excursion we went out with this NGO put us in contact with these fellow employees who are working in another aldea near Danlí. We’re going this time just to get to know the communities and see if there are any work possibilities.

A couple of food/drink tidbits...I’m now addicted to the unripe mangos that sort of taste like an unripe apple. You can buy them off the street from usually older ladies who peel the skin off the green mango then cut thin slices of the fruit. They sell a bag of the slices for 5 lemps (25 cents) and put salt (mixed with dry chilies spices) and hot sauce over the slices. It’s a salty/spicy treat! Luke definitely is not a fan but I love them…it fulfills my need for salty snacks. We found a great juice place near the centro. The owner has yummy pastries as well as lots of fresh juices called “frescos naturales”. She usually has about 7 different kinds to choose from. This morning (Sunday) Luke and I went on a walk and stopped there afterward. Luke got guayaba and I got maracujá (passion fruit). They are so good!

Hello

2007-06-20T15:55:00.000-06:00

¿Cómo les va? Things are going alright here.

I am not sure what to blog about…it seems like quite a bit has happened since the last time I blogged. One thing I had wanted to blog about was an addition to Annie’s blog about Honduras and the “slower pace of life” here. I wanted to write a little something to demonstrate that while things here are slow there are still plenty of people working very hard.

The first example of this I saw in a community JAM is working with, a couple hours drive from El Paraíso. I went with one of the técnicos to visit the caja toma (small damn) that the community had constructed in the mountains to check and make sure everything was done according to plan. We walked uphill for about 2 hours from the last passable road to get to the caja toma, and it was a well built concrete structure. About 3 yards of concrete went into the whole thing, all of the materials for which were carried along the same route we had taken to get there. It’s not an easy hike even when you’re just carrying water, let alone a 80 lb sack of cement. Anyhow, after we got back to the community about 8 guys were unloading bricks to build the water tank, and there was a guy there helping that everyone was joking with and having a good time. He was one of the roughest looking fellows I have ever seen, unloading bricks with no shoes on, he maybe had half his teeth, and on a good day weighed 115 lbs. He looked as if he had spent the majority of his life drunk, and probably had. My first thought was that someone grabbed him and told him they would give him a cigarette if he helped unload bricks. But after awhile one of the guys started telling me the story of how this guy who had maybe never owned a pair of shoes, lived in the community, was a pretty friendly guy, and was helping construct the system voluntarily (no one gets paid, all of the community members do their part to construct the entire system). And when they had started the caja toma, up on the mountain, this guy had grabbed the first bag of cement and walked uphill without stopping to rest the entire way to the construction site. It had taken me 2 hours to walk that far and I stopped to rest twice… this guy did it carrying nearly his weight in cement on his shoulders.

The next example came when Annie and I were talking with a group of guys in a community a ways north of Danlí about the possibility of working towards another system in their area. I was explaining that it would be possible to start the process, but I emphasized that the community needed to really be ready for a lot of work because they would have to provide all of the labor, and there would be plenty. They sort of chuckled and looked at each other and told me that when they had done the system for the first community they trenched and buried 30 kilometers of pipe a meter underground, by hand.

Going on 5 months of host family living…

2007-06-19T15:25:00.000-06:00

Our goal the last month and a half here in Danlí has been to find a house. I’ve been keeping a list of how many people we’ve asked, contacts we’ve made, and potential rentals we’ve heard about but so far nothing has worked out. We were about to get an apartment a week ago last Monday but the owner tried to raise the price on us last minute. We told him we’d talk to Peace Corps and get back to him. It’s been a week now and we’ve tried to call him several times to no avail. Apparently he doesn’t want to rent it at the price we’ve offered.

Renting in Honduras isn’t renting like in the States. There isn’t a section in the newspaper with rental listings and no websites to check. You basically have to walk around asking people if they know of a house in the area that is for rent and follow leads. We’ve gotten a lot of ¨so-and-so is a good person to ask¨or “in such-and-such neighborhood I heard there was a house for rent” then we go and either the house has been rented or there wasn’t a house to begin with. The other main difference in renting here is there really are no rental standards. Contracts are made and signed only occasionally. Getting information from the landlord about things like trash pick-up, electric and water bills, what happens if you need something fixed, etc. is difficult. You either take the place or you don’t. Why would you need to investigate everything thoroughly before moving in??

Anyway, if you can’t tell already, house hunting has been really frustrating (especially after the lastest miss last Saturday). The woman who runs the internet place we go to has been really nice to Luke and I and has been asking around trying to help us find a house. When we went last Friday night, she told us that she’d heard that a house in a nice barrio was for rent and gave us directions. Saturday morning we went to the neighborhood, asked around to find where the landlord lives and come to find out, the house had been rented the previous afternoon. The owner proceeded to tell us that it was too bad because the house is super pretty with a nice yard, etc. and a very reasonable price for a house (cheaper than the apartment we almost rented). Who knows, maybe something will come up and we’ll be happy we waited for it (at least that’s what I’m going to continue telling myself). Until then...host family living it is!

Weekly happenings

2007-06-17T13:36:00.000-06:00

On Wednesday I was at a meeting all day at the Casa de la Juventud (youth house) in Danlí. It’s basically a hangout out for youth that’s open 7 days a week. The purpose is to provide activities and learning opportunities to keep adolescents out of otherwise risky behavior. The house has been there for awhile but in the last few years, there hasn’t been much going on. The meeting was to motivate volunteers (foreign and nationals) to bring life back to the place.

On Thursday I accompanied Luke on a trip to an aldea about 1 ½ hours on a dirt road into the mountains from El Paraíso. We went with the other PC engineer (about to end her PC service but plans to stay on with the organization as an employee), the Catholic Relief Service’s engineer who is working with JAM, and a técnico. We went to look at an aldea that has a water system that needs improved due to damages caused by landslides. We were about a 20 minute hike (along a steep mountainside – see pic below) from the car looking at the mountain where the pipes have been damaged when some dark clouds appeared and it began to rain.

The trail alongside the mountain

A house tucked away in the mountains (view from the trail)

We thought we’d wait it out a bit. Neither Luke nor I had our jackets with us but I did have my tiny travel umbrella. The rain didn’t let up so we decided to hike it out of there but we were already soaked to the bone. We go to the truck, drove back down to the aldea, had some sweet break and coffee and started to head home. We didn’t get more than a few minutes from the aldea when we saw that the small stream that we’d crossed over on the way in had turned into a raging amount of water resembling more of a river. We got out of the truck to check out the situation. Luke put a stick at the edge of the water and within a few minutes the water had grown 20 centimeters past the stick. We knew it would be awhile before the water would start to go down and slow down so we decided we’d go back to the aldea and find somewhere to stay the night. Just as we were about to turn around to head back, a smaller truck came from the opposite direction, paused for only a few seconds at the crossing, and then drove through the raging water with two kids and an old woman in the cab. We all just laughed about how hard we’d analyzed the situation and then this guy, obviously from the area, didn’t even give it a moments notice. So we put the truck in 4-wheel drive and crossed the water (Luke is really sad he isn’t allowed to drive). We made it back to Danlí by about 4.

The ¨river¨ we crossed to make it home

Earlier last week we’d made a contact with Heifer International which I’m sure many of you have hear of. A fellow PC volunteer is working with them in the west and has been really impressed with their work. When we called the office in Tegus we were directed to Heifer’s counterpart NGO in the department of Paraíso which is Vecinos Mundiales (World Neighbors). We contacted them and made plans to meet with the employee who was passing through Danlí on Friday. On Friday morning we met up with him at a restaurant here in town and he gave us the lowdown on the several projects in the area. He invited to us to go with him to an aldea to check out where they’ve been working to see if we thought it might be somewhere we could work. The aldea is about one and a half hours from Danli, about an hour of which is on a dirt road that hugs the side of a mountain with really only enough room for one car to pass. The drive to this aldea was beautiful. The first 30 minutes or so of the drive is through an area that is practically uninhabited so there is very little deforestation. When we got to the aldea, we were served lunch and introduced to 6 men who are the leaders in the 12 small communities on that mountain. They had lots of questions for us about how we could help, what our experience was, etc. It’s hard to explain to them that the support we offer in through trainings and technical support but no financial support (although we can always help them look for it by presenting projects to NGOs, etc.). They’re looking for help with several things, the first one being with water systems. 4 of the 10 communities have functioning water systems, 2 communities have old ones that need replaced and 6 communities have no water system at all. They also have some agriculture projects going (apiculture and coffee) and according to them they need lots of health training in nutrition, basic hygiene, latrine use, and family planning. It was great to see a community where our services could be offered! The community leaders were going to do some investigating to see how interested the communities without water are in putting in a system. The community really has to be united in the fact that they want a system because the community members themselves will be the ones carrying the cement up to the source, digging to lay the tubs, etc. The leaders said they would give us a call when they knew more about where the communities stand but they were sure that they would be interested….we’ll see. A few downsides to working with this community…we’d be on our own (without a counterpart agency or NGO) because Vecinos Mundiales’ funding for these communities was cut recently cut off and because of transportation…2 buses leave in the morning from the mountain for Danlí and return in the afternoon. If we were going there to work, we’d have to take the afternoon bus from Danlí and spend the night, returning several days later in the morning (to have an entire day to do work). Seems to both of us it would’ve made more sense to send us to live and work in an area like this. Anyway, we’re hoping it works out to get something done in these communities. It would provide an opportunity for us to do some work together, to see some projects through from start to finish, and to get out of the city for days/weeks at a time to do the work.

On Saturday morning we went and saw the remains of an aqueduct system just outside of Danlí that was constructed in late 1700s by a Catholic priest that brought water from the top of a mountain outside of Danli to the city itself. The street our host family lives on is called the Calle del Canal (Canal Street) because the canal used to bring the water into the city along that street. See pics below.

This week I plan to start working with the schools. On Tuesday I’ll go to one school and on Wednesday another. On Thursday through Friday we have a retreat type thing with all the volunteers from the Department of Paraíso at the Central American Agricultural University (between Danlí and Tegus).

Slower pace of life

2007-06-14T18:27:00.000-06:00

I would say that most Hondurans enjoy (or I guess you could simply say “live”) a slower pace of life. Something that for Luke and I (while don’t get me wrong, we love our leisure time) is difficult for us to get used to. Our Monday – Fridays in the US were filled with projects, coffee, deadlines, schedules, meetings, lunch dates, errands, planning, did I mention coffee?, etc. There’s just enough time at the end of the day to eat dinner, chat a bit about your day, walk the dog, read a magazine or newspaper for a few minutes and catch John Stewart or The Colbert Report before calling it a night. (Ok, I’m not going to lie…that life I used to lead sounds extremely enticing to me right now although I complained about it when I was living it!). Living life takes longer here and it’s taking us a long time to feel like it’s “normal”.

We don’t have a car (even if we wanted one Peace Corps doesn’t permit it…or a motorcycle for that matter). This is definitely less of a problem here in Honduras that it would be in the States because Honduras has a pretty good public bus transportation system (by pretty good I mean you can get virtually anywhere you want in the country by bus(es), albeit a super long trip on an old yellow school bus imported from the US with standing room only). Here in Danlí we get around by walking or taking a taxi (which costs a set fee of 12 lemps per person – about 60 cents). On an average day in the States I would drive my car to numerous places…to my office, to the preschool where I taught then back to the office, to meet someone for lunch, to run errands (stop at the grocery store for a few things, get gas, grab a coffee, stop by a friend’s, pick up dinner, etc). All this adds up to a complete dependency on my car, sad as it may be. Here in Danlí, and most other mid-size cities in Honduras, there’s no such thing as one-stop shopping – no Super Target, Super Wal-Mart, or mall to be found. The benefit of this is lots of little smaller shops owned by locals. The disadvantage is having to walk around to multiple stores trying to find exactly what you’re looking for. For example, when I buy food to make dinner, first I go to the market to buy fruits and veggies. Then I go to the smaller grocery store to get more “specialty” items like a baguette, olive oil, or spices. Then because of the price difference, I’ll go to the cheaper grocery store to get staples like rice, beans, oil, etc. As far as buying things other than food, one has to shop around. I bought backpacks for Luke and I a few weeks ago for our trip to Amapala. Our big backpacks scream tourists so we wanted some smaller day packs. There are many, many stores in Danlí selling different types of bags and no one is selling them at a fixed price. So if you’re looking for a deal, you walk around and bargain with the vendors until you’re satisfied with the price. The point I’m making is that getting food for dinner or buying something like a backpack can seriously take a whole afternoon.

Many PC volunteers have difficulty returning to the Sates after 2 years here because it takes some time to readjust to the fast pace of life. Everyone in the US seems to be constantly on the move. Hondurans can easily spend an evening sitting on their front stoop or porch with family members and friends chatting and people-watching. No rush to be anywhere at a certain time because most things start at least half an hour late anyway. The concept of “wasting” time waiting for a meeting to start, for the bus, or for something to do simply doesn’t exist (or a least doesn’t exist as much as we’re used to). For me, it’s really hard to sit and wait for everything so I combat the boredom/annoyance by carrying a book with me. But I wonder if by doing so I’m missing something that the Hondurans enjoy…just the simplicity of living in the moment, not always waiting for what’s to come. I´ll work on that.

Footnote: I got the idea for this blog from a blog written by our friends Kate and Sean, another Hondu 10 married couple. (Thanks guys!)

How to cut a mango

2007-06-08T14:42:00.000-06:00

I realize this is a strange blog but several people have asked me how to cut a mango and the only way to explain it is with pics. I learned how to cut a mango like this from another volunteer who spent time in the Philippines. I´ve actually never seen a Honduran cut a mango like this so it´s not very ¨cultural¨ but oh well. Hondurans usually just peel them and suck the fruit off the seed or slice off chunks.

Position the mango so that you can cut two identical slices off of each side. (If you don´t cut it this way, you´ll run into the seed and won´t end up with two big chunks of the fruit.)

Slice off two chunks from both sides.
The section you have left in the middle contains the large flat seed.
Make criss-cross sections with a knife in the two sections of the mango that you cut off the sides.
Turn that piece inside out so the sections of mango pop out. Bite them off the skin and enjoy! To eat the middle part of the mango that contains the seed...peel of the skin and bite off what fruit remains.

Hello all

2007-06-03T17:32:00.002-06:00

Be sure to scroll down and read my latest blog on the Honduran educational system. Also, check out our book list (books we have read thus far while here) in the right column (last two things in that column).

Here goes the weekly update…

I spent a lot of time working on the course I’ll be implementing hopefully this week with 5th graders in a school in an aldea about 25 minutes from Danlí. Unfortunately I didn’t realize that not this week but the next is “student’s week” so there is no school for the whole week. I may wait to try and start after that.

I spent all day Thursday at a meeting with young Honduran volunteers and young Nicaraguan volunteers working in HIV/AIDS prevention. Country AIDS statistics were shared along with activities they use in their prevention presentations. It’s nice to see young people volunteering for their own countries but at the same time makes me wonder if a foreign volunteer is really needed here in Danlí?? I’ll find my place I’m sure but it’s still hard. I don’t think many people/organizations are working with 5th and 6th graders in HIV/AIDS prevention so my niche may be there.

On Friday I went to the office and hung out all morning and at 11 am we got a driver to take us out to an aldea to visit a Centro de Salud (health center) and drop off medicine. Because my counterpart works for the Honduran health department (public hospital), they have vehicles that they’re allowed to use. Someone always has to drive us around though. Anyway, we spent about an hour at the first aldea. My counterpart knows an older woman in the aldea who used to work as a midwife so we stopped there first to see if she was home and to tell (not ask) her to have lunch ready for us on our way back out of town.

Really, it’s the most interesting thing…you can show up in any aldea and someone will feed you. You don’t need to call ahead or ask if they have time or enough food. You just stop by and let them know you want to eat. Luke has experienced this in the aldeas he’s worked in too. If it’s not lunch or dinnertime when you stop by, they’ll for sure give you coffee and some “rosquillas” (hard corn cookies) or sweet bread.

Well the midwife wasn’t home so my counterpart told the neighbor girl that if Doña M came home, she was supposed to have cooked eggs ready for us when we passed back through. While one of the employees from the hospital went to the Centro de Salud, my counterpart, another employee and I walked to the house of Doña M’s brother and his wife. We sat on their porch and of course, they had to “regalar” us something (regalar literally means “to gift”). So we got loads of mínimos (small bananas), and sacks of beans, both things from their farm. We thanked them, ate a mínimo, and then took off for another aldea higher in the mountains. We had to walk about 10 minutes from where we parked the old 1980-something Toyota Land Cruiser to find a woman who is living with HIV/AIDS and is pregnant with her fourth child. Her husband wasn’t around (she told us he was out planting in the fields) and I’m not sure how often he really is. She’s got 3 little girls all under the age of 5 and is 8 months pregnant. I’m not sure how long she’s had HIV. We found her to tell her she needs to come to the hospital on Monday to start taking medicine to prevent the baby from getting HIV and to give all the little girls an HIV/AIDS test. The little girls were running around without shoes and pretty dirty and the woman herself didn’t look healthy but she seemed very kind. The house has a dirt floor and although it looked tidy, it was pretty open to the elements. A sad afternoon but we were happy we found the woman because more than likely, she wouldn’t have come in to start taking those meds.

On the way back out of town, we stopped at Doña M’s and sure enough, she had come home and there was hot rice and beans, tortillas, and cheese waiting for us. It was 2 pm by then so we were ravenous and I couldn’t have asked for a better meal.

Honduran educational system

2007-06-03T17:32:00.001-06:00

I’ve been meaning to blog about the educational system here in Honduras for quite some time so I’m finally getting to it. I had to do a little research on this topic for my Spanish class when we were still in Santa Lucia so that’s why I have some percentages and other data.

Apparently, Honduras’ educational system is the worst one in Central America. There are many problems including lack of resources and schools, lots of teacher strikes, poor teacher training and really no system of teacher accountability. By that I mean the teachers can do whatever they want in their classroom…they can chat with peers and drink coffee all day if they want and there is really no one who will tell them they can’t do that. I’m not saying all teachers in Honduras spend their days drinking coffee and chatting...of course, there are some very good teachers but there are some pretty bad ones too. A lot of teachers are teachers only because it was a good financial decision for them (steady pay, lots of time off, etc). According to one source, Honduras’ rate of illiteracy is 18.3% of the total population, 80% in the rural areas. Many Honduras never finish elementary school and much fewer finish high school.

Schools are divided up into a “ciclo básico” which consists of grades 1-6, a “ciclo común” which consists of 7-9 and then “bachillerato” which is like our high school but with a vocational focus and is from 2 to 3 years. People we’ve talked with have said somewhere around 65% graduate from the “ciclo báico” (through 6th grade) but official statistics are more around 85%. I’ve heard that teachers pass students onto the next grade even if they completely failed so their “numbers” don’t look bad. There will be kids in the 4th grade, for example, that still can’t read but keep getting passed to the next grade.

Schools in the aldeas (village) often times have even more issues to deal with. Teachers of these schools usually don’t live in the aldea and show up only Tuesday-Thursday to teach so they don’t have to travel during the weekend. Some schools only have one teacher for all the grades (think one-room school house back in the days in the US). Due to the remoteness of some of these schools, the teacher(s)/school receive basically no supervision.

Teacher strikes are problems for every school here. The government pays the salaries of teachers, defines their benefits, etc. so when the teachers aren’t getting what they need, they strike, often times for weeks or months at a time. In 2006, students were in school for only 140 days instead of the required 200. The other problem is that school only lasts for about 5 hours. You either go in the morning or afternoon. So it’s common to see kids running around at any hour of the day and impossible to tell if that kid goes to school or not. Very different from US schools where kids are in school from 8ish to 3 or 3:30 and where it’s odd to see any child over the age of 6 running around between those hours.

There has been a big surge in private education in the last several decades. However, there is a lot of disagreement over whether private education is actually better quality than public or not.

Teachers here, for the most part, do not use much creativity in their teaching methodologies. Students are taught by copying what is written on the board into a notebook. Not much work is done to develop creativity, self-esteem, team-work, critical thinking, etc.

Again, please remember that these observations are my own, made from talking with other volunteers that have worked in schools and from our training sessions. Needless to say, there’s a lot of work to be done!

Greetings

2007-05-29T13:42:00.000-06:00

Buen día a todos y todas,

I realize I haven’t written any significant blogs as of late, so I will try to make this one worthwhile. It is Monday evening and Annie and I just got back from a trip to see some volunteers in the south and then an unsuccessful trip to the Peace Corps office in Tegus for some business and to pick up packages (today was Memorial day I am told, and the office was not open).

Last week I made my first trip into the campo (countryside) far from the city. On Tuesday I met a guy with a pickup at the gas station in Danlí and he drove me to the aldea of Crique de Oro (gold creek) which is about a 2.5 hour drive from El Paraíso, 1.5 hours of which is in 4-wheel drive, 1 hour of that in low range. I went to this community to start surveying to see if it is feasible to install a potable water system. The organization I am currently working with, Juntas de Agua Municipal (Municipal Water Boards) has worked with a community downstream that is in the process of installing a potable water system for their community that is in danger of not functioning during the dry season do to a lack of water flow from the spring that acts as the main source. So my assignment was to find the potential water source for Crique de Oro, and determine if this source of water will provide sufficient flow to supply potable water to the community, and augment the flow to the lower community during the dry season, as well as travel house to house identifying how many people live in each house and where they are located relative to the potential location of the water tank.

The community is completely rural with most houses sitting by themselves on the side of steep mountains among intermixed coffee and banana fields. There is no electricity or phone service, and no running water (although about 1/3 of the families have run hoses to their house from nearby streams and ponds, that bring water nearer to their house). I traveled around with anywhere from 2 to 6 men who were either members of the local water board or interested citizens and we visited each house. The second day we were able to visit almost 50 houses on horseback and in my case by mule (I literally got a blister on my ass from riding for over 11 hours; I hadn’t ridden in quite a while).

I would say the trip was mildly successful. I managed to measure the flow of the source one day and visit a number of houses as well, and on the second day acquire a mule and visit quite a few houses. It was a little frustrating as I was led to believe that the trip would be short and there was not a lot of work to be done, just sort of a quick and dirty data gathering mission, but I soon found out after arriving that there was well over a weeks worth of work to be done and when I was told all of the equipment I would need was in the truck that really meant that only one hand held GPS unit was in the truck, and the wrong unit at that. So I ended up staying for 2 nights and three days doing the best I could, and I am going back this Thursday with the hope of finishing up visiting each house, and Annie is going to come along to speed things up.

I stayed with a family in the community; they had a nice little place that was really clean and pleasant with a little stream running through, a new latrine, about 8 cows (the popular Jersey-Brahma cross), and a bunch of chickens that actually had a chicken coop. It was a good place to stay. When I got back from surveying the family was working away in the little adobe shed in the barnyard and I soon realized they were making me a bed and moving stuff around in the shed so I had a place to sleep. They showed me where I was to sleep and initially I was pretty damn pleased, it was clean and private and just what I was looking for (I had already realized that I was potentially going to be staying quite of few nights here over the next couple years if this project gets funded). The little shed was partitioned by a blanket hanging from the ceiling and I had wooden bed off of the ground and a foam mat to sleep on. It gets dark pretty quick without electricity so pretty soon the guy whose family I was staying with came out and handed me a 2x4, and asked if I needed to go anywhere during the night. I said no and was sort of confused until he said good, prop this 2x4 against the door so that the dog doesn’t come in and kill you during the night. And then it was explained to me how the guard dog gets left off it’s leash during the night so no one steals the family’s calves. This is the same 120 lb. dog that was in the yard tied to a 3-foot chain that had lunged against the chain foaming at the mouth every time I moved the slightest inch and acted like it wanted nothing more than to kill me. I said that I would not be going anywhere and thanked him for the 2x4. I went in to my shed and started reading a book with the candle they had given me, thinking that things were still going pretty well (although immediately after shutting the door I had to take a piss)……Then I heard the rats…I should have thought earlier that there might be rats because they store some feed concentrate in the shed…but I hadn’t...and here I was in a 8 ft x 14 ft adobe shed with rats, and I couldn’t even open the door. I didn’t sleep very well that night, not that the rats were actually doing anything but eating and fighting and having a grand old time. I have now confirmed that I have a full blown phobia of rats. I would have slept better with a bear on the other side of the room than with the rats.

I told Annie when I got back to Danlí that it was a combination of the best and worst experience I have had yet in Honduras. We’ll try and get some pictures this week when Annie goes with me.

Hasta luego,
Luke

Be sure to check out Annie´s blog and pics from the weekend below.

Hello from Annie

2007-05-29T13:31:00.000-06:00

My week wasn’t nearly as interesting as Luke’s but I’ll update everyone on it anyway. On Monday Luke and I went to the Environmental Health office of the Department of Paraíso (part of the hospital where my counterpart works) and asked what kind of projects they do, if they need any volunteer help with health topics or engineering work. The employees are really nice and seemed very open to us working with them…they even offered us a desk in their office. We made plans to go to a community the next week (tomorrow – Tuesday the 29th) that has no potable water and is having lots of health problems due to no clean water. We’ll see what comes out of this or even if we make it to the community tomorrow. There always seems to be things getting in the way of plans.

On Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday I went to my counterpart’s office in the morning where I usually sit at the desk they have for me there and look through my manuals. I’ve started putting together a class for 5th and 6th graders that includes topics like self-esteem, good communication, values, sex ed, HIV/AIDS prevention, etc. I have a lot of materials dealing with these topics so I’ve been taking the best of each topic and putting it together to develop a class (really it’s just something to keep me busy when I’m at the office).

On Wednesday, while Luke was working in the mountains, I went to El Paraíso to visit the other health volunteer in the area and talk to her about what type of work she’s doing. I also accompanied her to an aldea about 20 minutes from El Paraíso on a dirt road to give a charla to 6th graders. I still need to blog sometime about the educational system here…it’s definitely something that needs some major improvement. The kids do a lot of copying from the board and very little critical thinking, group work, problem-solving, etc. For example, while we were giving our charla, we asked them to read a story in groups about a teenage girl who got pregnant with her boyfriend that she thought was in love with her. We then asked them to discuss as a group 3 questions that we put on the board. After giving them these instructions, they immediately started to copy down the discussion questions we had put on the board. Meanwhile one person in the group read aloud (very quietly) the story. None of the group members were listening because they were so concerned with writing everything down. A few of them even asked us if they needed to copy the story itself in their notebooks. I kept saying, you don’t need to write ANYTHING for this activity, I just want you to understand the story and talk about it. That was a concept they couldn’t quite understand.

On Thursday afternoon, my counterpart picked me up (with a driver) in a State of Honduras vehicle from the hospital and we drove out to an aldea about 25 minutes from Danlí (towards Paraíso then off a dirt road to the east). We went to talk to the director of the school to asked if I could come and give my charlas to the 5th and 6th graders. They seemed happy to have me start coming. I’m probably going to start going there once or twice a week starting in a week. The problem is the transportation…there are only a few buses that go to and from the aldea. So, like everything in Honduras, one hour of work actually takes twice, three, even four times as long due to things like transportation, chit-chatting, starting late, people not showing up, etc. So if I get there, give the 1-hour charla, and get back to Danlí safe and sound, I can call it a good day’s work. After we finished talking to the teachers, we stopped at a midwife’s house in the aldea, talked to her for a bit, had coffee and sweet bread, and then headed back to Danlí.
Saturday morning we took off for Tegus then onto San Lorenzo then onto Coyolito where we then took a lancha (small boat) to the island of Amapala in the Pacific. We had a great time hanging out with other volunteers, lounging on the beach, swimming in the ocean and eating seafood. Sunday morning a group got up early to hike up to the volcano on the island but Luke and I didn’t bring boots and didn’t feel like getting up at 5:30. The next time we visit the island, we’ll definitely hike it. The top of the volcano is usually covered in clouds and is about a 3-hour hike to the top. It felt very tropical on the island – humid and hot. The beaches are definitely not Caribbean beaches with the white sand and blue water but still, a beach is a beach. We left the island around 2 on Sunday afternoon. Luke and I stayed with a volunteer in San Lorenzo on Sunday night. San Lorenzo is an interesting little town on the coast with mangroves all around. Lots of seafood restaurants and a heat that is almost suffocating. We had breakfast this morning with the two volunteers there then headed to Tegus then back to Danlí. Check out the pics of the weekend below.

On the ¨lancha¨on the way to Amapala (you can see the volcano and island in the background).

Hanging out at the house we rented on the beach.Sunset over the Pacific.

The beach we stayed at. Only a few abandoned shacks, a restuarant and our house.

Mango Festival in Yuscaran

2007-05-20T16:40:00.001-06:00

Yesterday (Saturday) Luke and I took a quick trip to Yuscaran (about halfway between Tegus and Danli then south about 10 miles) for their annual mango festival. We also met the lone PCV there and hung out with a few other PCVs that came for the festival too. We came back today (Sunday) but had a nice time getting out of our ¨room¨ in our host family´s house and hanging out with some fellow volunteers.

A pictue of Yuscaran from the ¨mirador¨(lookout). You can see the fires burning in the background. In this case, it was due to local farmers clearning the land and not a forest fire.

A big Ceiba tree at the lookout followed by Luke with other volunteers by the tree and me standing in front of it.

Cotton swab dilemma solved!

2007-05-18T14:02:00.000-06:00

After you´re done with this blog, check out the short one below it with pics of mangos.

I sent an email a few weeks back to family members while Luke and I were in Tegus (apparently it´s spelled with an ¨s¨instead of ¨c¨which it´s shortened from Tegucigalpa of which I was unaware until this week) because of his dengue/bacterial infection. Anyway, I mentioned that I had used a Honduran cotton swab (commonly referred to in English as ¨Q-tips¨ but that´s actually a brand and believe me, this was no ¨Q-tip¨) and when I pulled the swab from my right ear, I realized that the cotton was no longer on the end. In situations like this, as my husband will attest, I usually overreact completely and panic...and this is what I did when I couldn´t see the cotton in my ear or on the floor anywhere. My ear felt a little funny but nothing painful and it wasn´t affecting my hearing so I decided I would wait until Monday (this happened Friday night) when Luke had an appointment to see if a PC doc could look in my ear.

Monday rolls around, the PC doc looks in my ear and tells me she sees nothing! Yeah! I´m in the clear (so I thought). We came to Danli the next day and a week later (just this past Monday night) I was showering and water got into my ears. Usually not a big deal but my right ear didn´t clear up after shaking it a bit. I kind of freaked out (my usual reaction). I couldn´t hear a thing out of that ear and it felt really heavy and plugged. I slept on that side all night hoping it would clear up but in the morning there hadn´t been any change.

I knew I´d have to go to the Honduran docotor here in Danli (PC docs won´t see you until you´ve seen the doctor in your site or unless it´s an emergency). So I went, told him the situation and mentioned the mysterious disapperance of the cotton swab that the PC doctor didn´t see. He looked in my ear for awhile then walked over to his desk drawer where he rummaged around for a good few minutes. He found what he was looking for and walked back over to me with a 5-inch long metal utensil. He made me lie on my good ear and told me not to move. I was sure I was going to loose my hearing in that ear! I laid there a few seconds, it hurt a little bit, and then he showed me what he´d fished out of my ear. Yes, the end of the cotton swab, completely intact. I wanted to give the man a hug (more for not damaging my ear drum in the process than taking out the cotton but whatever).

Mystery solved. Lesson learned: Honduran cotton swabs are definitely NOT to be used for inner-ear cleaning.

Mangos!

2007-05-17T14:37:00.000-06:00

Oh, I love mangos! I bought a mango once in the States but I didn´t know how to cut it up (the seed is tricky) so I ended up butchering it and throwing it away because I´d made such a mess. Now I can´t get enough of them. The season ends towards the end of this month so I´m taking full advantage of the bounty. Yesterday I went to go buy mangos from this lady in town who I´ve gone to a couple times before and I asked her (after buying 6) if I could take a picture to show my friends and family back home all the mangos. She didn´t mind. I told her that a mango this size in the US would cost around 27 lempira ($1.50) and I had just bought 6 mangos for 20 lemps ($1)! She thought that was hilarious and as I was leaving, I could hear her turn to her friend and say, ¨Guess what a mango in the US costs?¨. Anyway, below is the picture of the mangos and the truck she sells them out of.

The ones I buy are the bigger ones towards the cab of the truck that are more green and red.

Luke´s update/new mailing address

2007-05-14T13:55:00.000-06:00

Hey folks. Thanks for checking the blog. I think Annie (scroll down to read her entry) updated most everyone on the goings on here. The big challenge now is looking for a place to live, there isn’t such a thing as a renters market here, but I think we will be able to find something as a few houses are empty around town.

We went to the post office here in town and opened a PO Box so from now on, you can send any mail to us (packages included) to the following address. To those of you who sent us pacakges that we still have not recieved, we´ve haven´t given up yet. None of the volunteers we´ve talked to have had problems receiving packages so we´re hoping we´re not the first. (We also put the mailing address in the bottom left hand corner on the blog so you can also scroll down to find it there.)

OUR NEW MAILING ADDRESS:

LUKE Y ANNIE GINGERICH
APARTADO POSTAL 69
DANLÍ, EL PARAÍSO, HONDURAS
AMÉRICA CENTRAL

The first week was pretty slow. Hopefully things will speed up and my Spanish will get better, the language is still a big challenge for me. As far as work goes there really isn’t a whole lot going on yet, and most likely won’t be for awhile. I went to the “strategic planning” meeting for one group of people I am going to work with. It was a 2-day meeting and I went for the first half a day, but couldn’t stay for the rest without going completely nuts. It was the slowest meeting I have ever been involved with. So I politely told them I was leaving and to call me when there was work to be done. It´s hard because I don´t speak the language well enough yet and the generally inefficiency of organizations in Honduras is difficult to get used to. I went to try and get some information from the Danlí office of the Honduran agency in charge of water and sanitation (SANAA), but I was unsuccessful in getting any good info so I will go back tomorrow. I got a name of an engineer to talk to at SANAA, so hopefully I can get passed the secretary this time.
Annie and I are also going to talk with the Salud Ambiental (Environmental Health) people in Danlí tomorrow who have suggested that they might have some work for me. And a volunteer I talked to who lives nearby works in a community with no water, so options are definitely opening up for work, poco a poco.

One of the biggest challenges as an engineer is going to be transportation. Most of the communities I am supposed to work with are quite a ways from Danlí in rural areas, and Peace Corps does not allow us to drive or ride on motorcycles (or drive a car or pickup), but everyone here rides motorcycles to these rural areas, a motorcycle just makes sense, a horse is too slow (and I don’t have anywhere to put one) and you would just ruin a car on the roads here. I can’t help but think my 4Runner would have been perfect for my current job, but I am sure it has found a good home in a scrap heap somewhere. The transportation is really kind of aggravating. It is like Peace Corps gives us training to help bring water to the rural poor of Honduras, but then makes it as hard as possible to actually do the job.

Vaya pues, I better get going, the championship of professional Honduran soccer is on the TV and I feel like I have a cross-cultural responsibility to watch it.

Hasta luego,
Luke

Update

2007-05-14T13:26:00.000-06:00

Well we’ve almost spent a week in our site. It’s feeling a little more like home each day. It’s been hot here lately and we’re looking forward to the rainy season when things cool off a bit and green up. The rainy season is supposed to begin sometime in June.

As some of you know, we actually didn’t get to site until last Wednesday (should’ve been the Friday before) but Luke was sick with dengue and a bacterial infection so we had to stay in Teguc close to the doctors.

We are living with another host family (the last one!). The family consists of the married couple (a retired vet and teacher), two maids (one for cleaning, the other for cooking), a teenage granddaughter, a non-family member who’s studying at the University and renting a room like Luke & I, and two Honduran doctors from Teguc who are during a year of work in Danlí (also renting rooms). There are family members and friends in and out of the house constantly. We pretty much hang out on the patio or in our room. We have a tv that sort of works and a private bathroom so its not so bad but we can’t wait until we finally get our own house….which leads me to another topic but first some pics of our host family´s home.

The patio where we like to sit and read (but constantly get bit up by mosquitos).

living room

When we got to Danlí we heard from the other three volunteers who are here right now about a furnished two-bedroom house that is really nice and that two volunteers rented last year. We went to look at it on Saturday and it’s definitely a really nice house and completely furnished with everything from beds to a blender. The only downside is that it’s not really centrally located, there’s not a lot of yard, and it’s in a complex with two other houses of the family (to get to this house you have to go in the same front entrance of the yard that they use to get to theirs). I think we’re looking for an extremely private home just because we’re so tired of living with families and having absolutely no privacy. Hopefully there will be some other options. We went to look at another house today that a volunteer had looked at when she was trying to find something but unfortunately it was already occupied.

Last week was definitely a “first week on the job” sort of week. I went to the hospital where my counterpart works on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday until about noon each day. My morning usually starts out with sitting at my desk for a few hours and reading manuals that PC gave us that I haven’t had time to read yet. On Thursday I went with my counterpart and a group of young people who do HIV/AIDS prevention work to Las Manos, a town on the border between Honduras and Nicaragua. There are a ton of semi truck drivers parked at the border, waiting for up to 2 days sometimes to get clearance to cross the border. Apparently in the evenings, it’s a hot spot for commercial sex workers so we went to hand out condoms and info on HIV/AIDS. On Friday I attended a meeting for people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA). It was very interesting because Hondurans were the ones giving the charla (presentation) and I’ve heard that most Hondurans don’t know how to give dynamic charlas and don’t do much to keep the audience interested. From what I saw, this seems to be the case. The topic itself was very interesting and informative (adherence to medication) but it was delivered in a lecture-type way.

Thursday night we meet up with a 3 other volunteers, one from Danlí and two from aldeas (small towns) around Danlí. It’s good to talk with other volunteers, especially asking them about their first few months in site and what they did. We hear about volunteers that have so much work they can’t do it all and it’s hard to imagine that right now when we’re at the point of making connections, figuring out the community, meeting people, etc. We both know it’s a long process to get work (thus the point of being here for 2 years) but it’s hard waiting it out. We’ve been napping and reading quite a bit. It’s so hard for me to sit still but I’m doing my best.

On Saturday afternoon we went with two other volunteers (the ones from Danlí) to a swimming pool about 20 minutes from Danlí. It’s in the country and has a restaurant and tilapia farm as well. We hung out and swam for several hours then came back to Danlí and had sopa de jaiba (crab soup) for dinner. Very tasty. They put an entire crab into your soup.

Today (Sunday) we strolled around for awhile, ate the traditional fried chicken Sunday lunch, and watched a movie on tv. Sundays are generally pretty slow days. There aren’t a lot of people on the streets and most stores are closed except for some restaurants and the bigger stores.

Not sure what this week has in store…ahhh…the life of a volunteer!

Dengue Fever

2007-05-04T13:03:00.000-06:00

Hey everyone. Thanks for checking the blog. We had some time today in the PC office in Teguc so there are 2 more new blogs below this one including pictures from swearing in and from Danli.
I officially have Dengue Fever which is a virus that is transmitted by mosquitos. I think I contracted it about 8 days ago before we left for Siguatepeque from Sabanagrande. I started feeling pretty shitty and tired in Siguatepeque, and while we were in Danli I was waking up in the middle of the night completely soaked in sweat, it pretty much felt like I had a high fever all the time and there was a lot of body aching and my eyeballs hurt really bad and I had a headache. I started feeling better Sunday and so i decided I was getting over whatever i had, but on Monday all of the symptoms came back and i felt terrible again. I got tested for dengue yesterday and that is what I have got so annie and i are staying in Teguc tonight as i had some more tests today and maybe more tommorow if things don't start to look like they are healing. I do feel substanitially better today than I have for the last week. I got a rash yesterday that is supposed to be a sign of the end to the fever.....wahoo. Somehow I also ended up with a bacterial infection in my intestines as well, so everything i have eaten since monday has just exited the system as fast as possible.

Ok i better get going.
make sure to scroll down and see the other 2 blogs from today.

It's official! We're volunteers!...and Luke has Dengue fever

2007-05-04T12:47:00.000-06:00

Yesterday we spent the day in Tegucigalpa for our swearing-in ceremony at the US Embassy. The PC country director and the US abassador spoke. Afterwards, we ate lunch there and then went to the ambassador's residence to swim/play tennis/play basketball. It was a fun day. We were supposed to go back to Danli today but Luke's sick (he's getting over dengue fever and also has a bacterial infection) so the PC docs want us to stay overnight so they can monitor him. Hopefully we'll be off to Danli tomorrow to move in with our host family and start work on Monday!

Below are some pics from the swearing-in ceremony. Be sure to scroll down and check out some pics from Danli that I just posted after you look at these.

Lunch after swearing-in at US Embassy

Luke and I are now officially PC volunteers!
Our entire Hondu 10 training group
The four married couples

Pics of Danli

2007-05-04T11:27:00.000-06:00

Here are a few pictures from Danli. Hope to take more soon.

The town hall

Colonial church in main plaza

Central parkChurch lit-up at night

Danlí it is

2007-04-28T17:38:00.000-06:00

So as many of you already know, our site for the next two years is Danlí in the department of El Paraíso (southeast Honduras). We got here on Thursday afternoon after a 4 hour ride from Siguatepeque. Luke´s counterpart luckily brought his truck (although tiny) and his counterpart, my counterpart, us two, all our luggage, a bunch of plastic crates, and some dude (who rode in the back the entire way) fit into the truck. The four of us were crammed into the cab and talked, or should I say listened, to Luke´s counterpart talk about the entire history of Honduras, the educational system, US influence in Honduras, HIV/AIDS, global warming, and the association that he works for. He is a very interesting guy with a good reputation for working with potable water projects, just happens to be a talker.

Anyway, we arrived in Danlí and got settled into our hotel. The city is big at about 75,000 but doesn´t feel that big. It´s relatively safe and surrounded by hills on 3 sides. We took some pictures today and will blog them hopefully sometime this week.

Yesterday (Friday) Luke traveled to the town of El Paraíso which is 30 kilometers from Danlí because the offices of the water board association (who he´s working for) is there. He said everyone in the office seems to be really friendly but wishes he could understand Spanish better than he does. Luke says that as far as he can tell at this point the group JAM (Juntas de Agua Municipal) is the association he will be working for. They provide technical support to the small water boards that are formed in the rural areas of the department of El Paraíso that need systems to deliver potable water. Luke will be functioning as the engineer for these communities as they orginize and try to find sources of funding to build or rehabiltate systems.

I spent the day walking around the hospital with my counterpart, meeting about 25 people and trying to write down all their names and a little note about their appearance so I could remember them. Sounds like I´ll be working a lot with groups of young people of high school age and kids in 4th and 5th grade on HIV/AIDS prevention. My counterpart seems to feel that the school kids in the city of Danlí already know enough about HIV/AIDS due to the fact that there are several universities and lots of organizations that are always sending people to the schools to give charlas (presentations) so she wants to focus the prevention education on the rural areas around Danlí. There is also an HIV/AIDS support group that is looking for ideas so I may get involved with that. They currently have a small green house project where they grow plants and then sell them.

We´re headed back to Santa Lucia tomorrow for 5 more days to finish up training and swear in as volunteers then next Friday we´ll be in Danlí to stay!

Honduran cultural tidbits

2007-04-22T15:58:00.000-06:00

It's been so hot here lately (supposed to get up to 110 degrees later this week) that for the past few weeks when I walk around town between 8 am and 5, I use my umbrella. Honduran women in La Paz do too so I don't look like the idiot gringa.

Did you know you could have a washing machine but no running water?

There are millions of geckos here and they make an extremely load clicking noise. For the first few weeks in my new house, I was convinced a bird was trapped between my ceiling and the roof but turns out I just have geckos crawling on my ceiling.

There are at least 7 types of mangos in Honduras and they're starting to get ripe now. They are delicious! It's really hard to eat a mango off the seed because it ends up stuck in your teeth. The best way to eat in (especially if it's a bigger one) is to slice it in half around the seed then make criss-cross cuts in that slice, turn it inside out, and the bite off each of the small squares. That probably makes no sense but believe me, it works much better than eating it off the seed.

I absolutely love fried plantains. They cook up really sweet and are a common food for dinner.

Hondurans have a ton of phrases that have "God" in them. The one I hear all the time is "Si Dios quiere" which literally means "If God wants/wills". They say it all the time! For example, my family ran out of water in the tank a few days ago (we still have water in the pila to take bucket showers with) and I asked my host mom when the water was coming and she said "lunes si Dios quiere" which means "on Monday if Good wants/wills".

Three goals of Peace Corps

2007-04-22T15:55:00.000-06:00

Luke & I have wanted to blog the three goals of PC for awhile but keep forgetting so I'm finally getting to it.

1. To help the people of interested countries in meeting their needs for trained men and women.
2. To help promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the peoples served.
3. To help promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of all Americans.

Since 1961, more than 178,000 Americans have served in the Peace Corps in 138 countries.

And more pics...

2007-04-19T19:16:00.000-06:00

For whatever reason, I haven´t really felt like blogging lately. Maybe it´s because I am getting a bit tired of training and don´t really have anything new to add but I felt like I should put something up so our family and friends continue to check the blog. We find out our site on Monday afternoon which will be very exciting. I am sure the day will go by extremely slow until they tell us.

So anyway, here are some more pics from Luke and I´s first cockfight experience. This took place about 3 weeks ago on a Sunday afternoon in La Paz. It was quite the spectacle and I was happy that we could only stay for a bit as Luke had to catch the bus back to his training site. I left out the bloody pics and the guy in the ring who puts the rooster´s head into his mouth to clean his air passages (if you can imagine a guy with rooster blood all around his mouth, you can imagine the picture). At the fight (under a thatched roof) were pretty much only men and it smelled of beer, cigarettes, sweat (it was really hot), and blood. Not exactly the most pleasant place to be on a Sunday afternoon but nonetheless an interesting cultural experience. Something I didn´t know they do is sew blades onto the rooster´s legs which helps them take down their opponent because they naturally fight with their legs anyway.

This pic is of the scale used to weigh the roosters.

Two roosters mid-fight.

Garden planting

2007-04-15T13:02:00.000-06:00

We´ve been posting lots of pictures lately which seems to help people get a better idea of the work we´re doing and get a mental picture of what it looks like here. Thanks to everyone who continues to read our blog and comment, we appreciate it! Knowing that people are keeping up with us will make it much easier when we come home because we won´t have to explain, starting from square zero, what we´ve been doing for the last two years! So thanks again. Be sure to scroll down and look at the last couple entries which included pictures as well.

On the same day that my health group built the stove, we planted a garden for a family among coffee plants and banana trees on the side of the mountain. It was such a beautiful spot! In the picture below we´ve already tilled the land (by hand) and are planting the seeds. I´m the dork with the sun hat on in the background.

The garden has been planted. We put sticks around the outside and the family said they would put up the wire fence to keep critters out.
After we finished the garden, the family invited us for coffee (from fresh coffee beans from their farm) and bananas. Below you see a bunch of bananas that were sitting by their house. They pick the bunches off the trees, hang them, and in about 8 days they will be ripe.

my FBT site

2007-04-14T13:03:00.000-06:00

hello everyone. I am going to attempt to post some pictures from my FBT site as Annie seems to be posting a lot of pictures and I am getting behind. I am currently in La Paz visiting Annie and I ran to the internet to check email while she works on a paper she is writing.

here goes with picture posting, i have tried this a few times from my site and the internet just can't handle pictures.

above is a picture of the iglesia, built in 1809.

This is the street I live on. The green garage door behind the lamp post on the left hand side of the street is my home.

The left door is the shitter and the right door is the shower. There is a toilet that you flush with a bucket. In the shower is a 35 gallon drum that I take my showers out of. Really a pretty comfortable and clean set up.

This picture may be hard to see. It is the "stream" that runs behind the house. The pvc pipe coming out of the wall is our sewer pipe. Not a very good set up, all of the raw sewage from the city finds its way to this waterway, our sewage just gets there really quickly, and the stream meanders its way through town for all to see and smell. here is a picture of the back yard. Its pretty nice and the yard is raised above the sewage which is a much nicer set up than many people in town. The building on the left is where the family butchers hogs and also makes nacatamales to sell.

So there is a little insight in to where I have been staying. In a week and half Annie and I will have a new site for the next 2 years.

How to build a mud/brick stove

2007-04-12T18:47:00.000-06:00

Last Wednesday we built a stove for a family in a mountain town about an hour from La Paz. The stoves we learned how to build are much more efficient in that they use less wood and burn much cleaner (smoke does not fill the house). You make a mixture of dirt and water for the mud and really all the other materials you need are clay bricks, 4 pieces of about 12-in rebar, the metal stove top, and the chimney.

Here I am getting started by putting a layer of mud on the cement table where the stove will be built.
We've added the first layer of bricks around the outside and are now starting to cover them with mud. Second layer of bricks is done. You can see the small hole in front (we used a big tin can cut in half) to put the small pieces of firewood in the stove.

The finised stove. The mud needs time to harden and once is has, the family will paint it white. The stove can be used immediately. (Soon after this picture was taken, the woman who lives in the house cleaned the area to the right of the stove.)

Random thoughts

2007-04-09T08:55:00.000-06:00

If you've read Luke's blog from yesterday below, you might think I got bit by a giant, mean dog. Truth is I was feeding a starving little puppy that weighed about 2 pounds and it got really excited and bit my finger. Don't worry, I've learned my lesson! Another lesson I learned over the past weekend is that the sun here is bien fuerte. Luke and I spent the day at the pool on Saturday at a nice hotel in Teguc. I waited for 10 minutes before putting sunscreen on my chest and legs hoping to get a little sun on them because that was the first time I had been in a swimsuit besides the day at the beach. Well, either the sunscreen didn't work well or the sun really is that strong because I am really burnt and regretting it. I guess I've been making some poor decisions lately! :)

There are several things I've been wanting to blog about recently but none of which deserves a single blog entry so I'm just going to blog about them all in this one.

I figured some of you might wonder how much daily things cost here. Right now $1 equals about 19 Honduran lempiras. A 20 oz. Diet Coke costs 11 lempiras (55 cents), a cup of coffee costs aobut 4 lemps (20 cents), one pound of Honduran coffee in the supermarket costs 28 lempiras ($2), and a 1/2 liter bag of drinking water (they sell drinking water in plastic bottles too but they're more expensive) costs 2 or 3 lemps (10 or 15 cents). Fruit is really cheap too. For example, last weekend when Luke visited I bought fruit at the market in La Paz (see picture from one of the previous entries). A pineapple, 3 cantaloupes, 4 bananas, and a bag of 7 mangos cost me 35 lemps ($1.85). A good snack here is a baleada which is just a big flour tortilla with beans, scrambled eggs, cheese and fresh avocado slices (if you want) folded in half and warmed up on the stove for a bit. A baleada costs between 5 lemps (just beans and cheese) to 8 lemps (26-42 cents). Beer is expensive here (relatively, I suppose). A single bottle of beer in a supermarket or liquor store costs about 18 lemps (95 cents). Depending on the town and the establishment, you can get a beer for 10 lemps (53 cents). There is what is known as the "gringo tax" where a bar/restaurant owner will charge more for the beer if a gringo (American) is buying it. Restaurants, especially in smaller towns, rarely have an actual menu for you to look at (you just ask what they have at that time). If they do have a menu, it's usually a list of what they can make and not of the prices so the gringo tax is easy to implement. Rum, unlike beer, is pretty cheap. A big bottle of Nicaraguan rum, Flor de Caña, costs about $5.

Fruits here are plentiful and cheap like I mentioned. I have tried many fruits that I never knew existed. Apparently pineapples here are extra sweet and because of this can't be exported because the sweet variety spoils too quickly. They're super good, that's for sure. Besides pineapple, you can find cantaloupe, watermelon, mango (at least 3 different varieties), oranges, grapes, strawberries (less common), regular bananas, small bananas called mínimos, papaya, and limes. Fruits you might have to google to figure out what they are are: guayaba, ciruela, nance, and tamarindo. It's hard to find pears and apples here and when you find them, they were imported from the US and not that great of quality.

Piropos....where do I start? They're so common I figured I have to blog about them. Piropos are basically cat-calls that women get here from men on the street and you get even more if you're a gringa. They are super annoying and can range from what would be considered a more polite piropo which is a kissing sound to them saying things to you like "i love you", "bye-bye", "my princess", "beautiful woman", etc. Many of these phrases can be said in English (thanks to American television) or in Spanish or in a combination of the two. The best reaction to the piropos is ignoring them but when someone is extra persistent or I've gotten 4+ in one single walk across town, I usually yell something at them. The men who give them are, for the most part, harmless and don't want to hurt you they just want to let you know that they think you are pretty. It totally grosses me out and I'll probably never get completely used to it but I can deal with it.

Social drinking is an interesting topic...In Honduras it doesn't really exist unless it's among the university educated and upper classes. The way Honduras see it, there are two types of people...bolos (drunks) and people who don't drink at all. Having a few beers with friends or after work is rare (unless it's among the well educated like I mentioned earlier). Women for the most part do not drink in public and never go to the cantinas or pool halls unless they're "working" there. Needless to say, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that my family here in La Paz can enjoy social drinking. The day I arrived to La Paz, my host mom handed me a glass of wine to welcome me. A few days later, my host mom celebrated her 56th birthday and when I came home from lunch, there were a bunch of people there celebrating and drinking a beer so she handed me one. (She asked me if I wanted another one after the first one but I had to say no because I had to go back to class an hour later!). When I came home for dinner another group of people were there celebrating so I shared another beer with them.

Ok, I think that's all the random thoughts for now. Be sure to read Luke's blog from yesterday below mine.

Estamos en Teguc....happy Easter

2007-04-08T11:22:00.000-06:00

Hello everyone. again apologies on the scarcity of blogs.... hope everyone enjoyed Holy Week. Annie and I have been in Teguc for the last 4 days. For those of you who havent' talked with our immediate families recently Annie was bitten by a dog on Tuesday and we have been staying in Teguc so she could get the required shots on Wednesday and saturday to prevent her from contracting Rabies. The bite was not bad at all, but it drew blood and therefore the options are monitor the dog for ten days or come to Teguc and get teh shots. Monitoring the dog didn't work because it was way up in the hills where she was bitten and the starving little thing was probably going to die within 10 days even if it didn't have rabies. So i came to Teguc on wednesday night to stay with her until Sunday when we can get rides back to our respective sites. It sounded like a fun trip except it is Semana Santa (Holy Week) here and nothing is open......really the only things open in the entire city are the american chain restaraunts like wendy's and pizza hut which aren't good in teh states and are no better in developing countries. Plus they put us up in a hotel with no windows. it was clean which was nice, but our room literally had no windows to the outside, it was a 10ft x 10ft concrete room with one flourescent light in the center of the room. luckily i liked my cellmate......... we did have an ok time though hanging out and we took a taxi downtown and saw the alfombras (on Good Friday people dowtown make giant murals out of colored sawdust in the streets, it is really pretty neat) and we went to one of the really expensive hotels yesterday to use their pool. I also got through an entire book i had wanted to read.

right now it is almost noon (mountain time, the whole country was supposed to turn the clocks ahead last week, but it got called off by the president at the last hour becasue they were worried the confusion would be too much.....certainly couldn't have been more confusing than calling off the time change 5 minutes before it takes place.... ) and we are in the Cuerpo de Paz office waiting for our rides back to training sites so we have some time to blog and check emails and such.

We swear in as volunteers in less than a month so that is something to look forward to and we get our site announcements in 3 weeks so we will know where exactly we are spending the next 2 years.

hasta luego,
luke

Weekend pics

2007-04-01T13:39:00.000-06:00

Here are some pictures from this last weekend. Yesterday I blogged with pictures from training so be sure to scroll down to see those as well.

Luke & I cooling off from the hot sun with a ¨paleta¨ on Saturday afternoon. We´re eating the fresh frozen fruit ones. They also have them in chocolate and pineapple. They cost about 15 US cents.

Luke and I eating the ¨plato típico¨on Sat. night in La Paz. The plato típico includes: beans, cheese, eggs or meat (Luke has a pork skewer on his plate, I have eggs), a fried plátano (plantain), tortillas and chismol (pico de gallo salsa). Very tasty and only costs about $1.85 per plate! We´re drinking Canada Dry with Flor de Caña Rum (only $5 for a big bottle of rum).

A cool old door to someone´s house in La Paz

The market in La Paz

2007-03-31T11:19:00.000-06:00

Catholic Church in La Paz Typical street in La Paz This is a picture of me about an hour up the mountain from La Paz in an aldea called Tepanguare. We went there on Friday to learn how the health centers in the aldeas work with mothers to make sure their children are not malnourished. Every month the mothers are supposed to show up to a meeting to have their babies weighed. If the kids drop below a certain weight, the nurse will go to the family's home for some counseling on nutrition and general hygiene. This is an example of the chart that the mother brings each time she comes to weigh her baby. You can see the blue line is between the two black lines so this baby has maintaned a healthy weight since birth.

Weighing a baby in TepanguareTrying to figure out how this whole weight monitoring thing works
A random picture of a gallo and a gallina in the aldea up the mountain

Instead of having Spanish classes, me and two others who are in the advanced class have to work in the community. Below is a picture of us giving a charla (presentation) Friday afternoon on general hygiene, cleanliness, and diarhea to a group of mothers at a kindergarten. The kids of these mothers have been recognized as at risk for malnutrition.

Field Based Training continues

2007-03-28T17:51:00.000-06:00

hello everyone, I apologize that the blog entries are getting more scarce. The days are pretty full and are going by faster than I expected. We have spent the last week working on a latrine project, and today i and 4 other volunteers built an improved stove for a lady in the campo. it has been good to spend the days outside, the improved stove is a good thing for people to have it reduces smoke in the house and burns more efficiently. some PAM (protected areas management) volunteers came to show us how to make them. we have also been putting two latrines in at a kindergarden nearby, and yes digging latrines sucks as bad as it sounds. especially in the dry clay soils here in the south. So now all the wat-san volunteers know how to build both the stoves and the latrines and when we are sent to our sites we will know how to start projects in these areas if we find a need for it in our communities. And if you ever wondered how long it takes 16 gringos to dig 2 latrines the answer is 4 days.......

what else...... the family stay is going well, my family turned a whole hog into chorizo (ground spiced pork) this afternoon, i miss the whole process, i come home for lunch and there is a carcass hanging in the back yard and when i get home it is cooked and in 5 pound bags. Spanish is progressing poco a poco (little by little) i am now at the point where i can get myself out of the stupid places i get into, but i still can{t hold an intelligent conversation........poco a poco.

oh and people don{t forget to email me lukeging....at....gmail.com (can{t find the at symbol on the computer, nor the apostrophe) i may not respomd due to time constraints but i like to here what is going on with folks at home.

Hasta Luego,
Luke

PS: Scroll down to read Annie´s entry on beliefs that many Hondurans have about pregnancy and babies.

Creencias

2007-03-28T17:50:00.000-06:00

I find this very interesting so hopefully some of you do as well...

Many Hondurans believe in a few (if not all) of the following ¨creencias¨ regarding health. I hate to make generalizations but I think that the more rural and and the less education you have, the more you believe in these things. However, there are exceptions I´m sure. As volunteers we have to walk the fine line between dismissing their creencias altogether and, on the other extreme, not doing anything to change the possibly dangerous ones.

One creencia I´ve heard is called the ¨mollera hundida¨ which translates to ¨sunken spot¨ on a baby´s head. When any baby is really dehydrated, the soft spot on the top of their head will sink a bit. Because the relationship between dehydration and the sunken spot often doesn´t get made, things are done to try and get the soft spot to go back. One is that they push on the palate (roof of mouth) of the baby to try and pop-out the soft spot. OR, and even worse, they turn the baby upside down and smack the baby´s feet while it´s dangling there (very dangerous due to the shaking).

Another very dangerous creencia is that when a baby is born and doesn´t respond right away, a hen´s beak is put into the baby´s anus. The hen begins to suffocate and starts to move around a lot which sometimes does get the baby to respond (thus the continuation of the belief). If the hen dies, then the spirit of the hen enters the baby and the baby will live. You can imagine the infections a baby could get in it´s first few minutes of life by doing this.

Others, less dangerous, have to do with babies as well. The first one is that the sex of the baby is not determined by the male´s sperm but rather the moon. The other one is that if a pregnant woman sees an eclipse, the baby will have some sort of problem. The last one I´ve heard is that if a baby is really uncomfortable and moving around a lot, they say there are hairs on their spine that need to come out. To get them to come out, they put the mother´s breast milk on the baby´s back and supposedly the hairs come out which you then pull.

I was trying to think about any creencias we have in the US in regards to being pregnant, children, etc. so if anyone thinks of any, please post them under the comments to this blog.

First week of Field-Based Training

2007-03-25T16:30:00.000-06:00

We had some interesting Tech sessions last week. One of those was going over a program called ¨In Charge of my Life¨ that volunteers can do with young people in their communities. It is basic education about HIV/AIDS, STIs, and safe sex with another component focused on leadership. Peace Corps has been using the program (developed by a married couple) for the last few years with lots of success.

On Wednesday afternoon, we had 3 commerical sex workers (the more politically correct name for prostitutes) come and talk to use about their work. A PCV (leaving soon), along with a Honduran woman with a degree in social work or something smiliar, worked with CSWs, educating them on keeping themselves healthy and HIV-free. He said it´s ridiculous to try and get them to change professions because they won´t make the same amount of money (or even close) doing anything else. They started a program where they train CSWs in HIV/AIDS, condom use, etc. and then the CSWs, as facilitators, go and teach what they learned among their circle of friends (other CSWs). We learned some interesting thing about CSWs in Honduras. The first of those things being that they are three types. Ones who work in nightclubs, ones who work in brothels and ones who work strictly with American men. For those of you who didn´t know, there is a US military base here in Honduras and they keep the ¨gringeras¨ well employed. ( Gringeras is the nickname for the CSWs that work with ¨gringos¨or Americans). They told us that American guys are the worst when it comes to agreeing to wear condoms. There is also a population of government contractors from a big firm (to reamin nameless but I´m sure you can figure it out) here in Honduras and according to the CSWs we spoke to, they are also really good clients. It was all very disturbing.

We spent all day Thursday doing a Men´s Health Workshop (material that was again recently developed by Peace Corps volunteers). Men´s Health is geared toward educating men on HIV/AIDS, STIs, and safe-sex practices. The volunteers who do a lot of work with Men´s Health frequently give ¨charlas¨ (informal presentations) in cantinas (bars), in the park, in prisions, on military bases, and with police and firemen. After Thursday´s training, they split us trainees up into 4 groups of 5 and we had to prepare a charla to give the following day (Friday morning) to Honduran men training to be policemen at an academy in La Paz. We arrived on Friday morning to the academy and the 4 groups split up and each had an audience of 25 young men between the ages of 18 and 23. Our charla included lots of dinamicas (like ice-breakers or games) and participation. A lot of them have never seen a condom and have never received any formal education on HIV/AIDS (proven evident by the fact that a lot of them belived mosquitos can give you HIV). I got some good pics so I´ll try and post a few of those soon. We even included an activity with bananas and condoms where they each got to practice putting one on. It was a great experience for us trainees and great practice in charla-giving.

Luke came to La Paz on Saturday around noon and we had a good time here. It definitely wasn´t enough time to spend together (only 24 hours) but luckily Field-Based Training is only for another month. It took him about 3 1/2 hours to get from La Paz back to his site.

La Paz

2007-03-21T10:45:00.000-06:00

A hello from La Paz. I arrived here safely on Sunday and met my new family. My host parents are older, the dad is 67 and the mom is 56. They have four boys and only the youngest (25) still lives at home. My host dad owns a Ferrertería which is like a general hardware store and my host mom is a retired elementary school teacher who now owns a Mini Super (like an all-purpose store) right next to their house. So she is in out and of the house all day. She can tell when someone is at the store because they’ll yell her name. This store, like most small stores, doesn’t have a door where people can come in and browse - just a window that she sells things through. If you ask you can go in and browse but for the most part people know what they want and just ask for it.

I have been eating well, smaller portions that at my last home but that’s a good thing! I had to ask for more coffee today at breakfast because one cup just wasn’t doing it. I also asked her if I could have a cup at lunch too. She is more than happy to accommodate me. She told me last night that they want to give me the best and be ¨my family away from home¨. My favorite thing so far is the fresh squeezed juice she gives me everyday at lunch. I told her I don’t like much sugar so it’s basically just pure juice. I had blackberry juice on Monday and cantaloupe juice yesterday. My room is really nice and big and I have cable tv which is a plus. I actually learn a lot from watching Spanish tv or English tv with Spanish subtitles. The bathroom I share with my host brother is so-so (lets just say I have to get used to critters in there like ants and cockroaches). In my bedroom, thank god, I haven’t seen any critters. My host dad calls the ants ¨animalitos¨ which translates as ¨small animals¨ so that gives you an idea how big they are!

It’s much hotter here in La Paz than it was in Santa Lucia. I am sleeping fine until about 6 am when the live-in-maid takes the covers off the bird cages and they all start singing/taking. They have several birds and one parrot that talks REALLY loudly in the morning. I guess I’ll have to get used to it!

Training is going fine so far. We have Spanish classes and tech training and that pretty much fills up our day. There are three of us in the health group in the advanced Spanish class so we only have formal class once per week and the other four days we are supposed to go out into the community and try and give presentations and work with the health sector to figure out how things work here. Yesterday Connor and I went to the local health center and talked with the director of the center and the director of all the health centers in the area and got some names of people. This morning we went to the Hogar Materno which is place where poor women come from places far away as they approach their due date. They don’t have any facilities in their communities so it is a place where they can be fed and sheltered until they give birth at the hospital here in La Paz. Very interesting. We scheduled a charla (presentation) in a few weeks that we’ll give to the mothers-to-be there on nutrition of her and the baby after birth and we’ll also talk about hygiene and sicknesses the baby can get (like respiratory infections). I’ll keep you all updated on all the different projects we’ll be working on. It’s hard because we have to go out into the community on our own, make the contacts, and basically figure out how to spend our time since we don’t have Spanish classes. I suppose it’s good practice though for when we’re have our own communities to work in.

Ok, sorry that got a little long! Hope everyone is doing well! Scroll down to see Luke´s recent entry from his site at Sabanagrande.

hola

2007-03-19T18:26:00.000-06:00

hey everyone,
sorry we have not updated teh blog in awhile. We are currently in field based training in two seperate spots and things are going pretty well....sorry if spelling and punctuation are pretty bad in this blog the computer i am using isn´t the best and i don´t want to go back and fix all the keystrokes the keyboard misses.
the host famliy thing is going better this time as i am accustomed to it now, the first day here was a little tough as there were about 30 people in the house on weekends (i got here sunday at noon), but weekdays it is just me and the host mom and an assortment of relatives whom i have not yet identified and don´t live in the house. the host dad apparently works far away ans statys there all week. the food is pretty good too as i am getting used to it and the family sells meat out of there house on weekends along with nacatamales which are some sort of gigantic tamale. I will take pictures of the housesome day when everyone is gone and post them. we surveyed some today and it was good we did a whole survey with an abney level, and i think it will turn out ok. there were 5 of us and two locals to help with cutting stakes. and it was mostly just a test run on making folks familiar with surveying here, there will be a volunteer stationed here that will finish the survey and hopefully build a water system for some pretty rural houses. it was nice to see an old lady who was really glad to see us surveying because right now her family has to haul water quite a ways to there home. I talked to annie on thew phone and she seems to have a pretty good setup with her new host family, i will let her blog about it when she gets time.

hasta luego,
Luke

Honduran beverages

2007-03-14T11:03:00.000-06:00

A very random blog I know! When you are done reading this, scroll down to see a pic of the beach from last weekend.

Coffee –

Luke and I have been drinking coffee with breakfast and dinner (and sometimes at the cafeteria at the training center too.) As of yet, neither Luke nor I have had any difficulty sleeping. I assume this is probably due to the new environment, speaking Spanish a lot (mentally exhausting) and the fact that we walk a good hour a day and break a sweat both there and back due to the hills. To make coffee our host mom puts water on the stove and just puts the coffee grinds right into the water. Just when it starts to boil, she dips out the coffee/water mixture with a cup and runs it through a filter (a cloth, cone-shaped one) into a thermos. They don’t buy the coffee in the bean form but I saw the package the ground beans came in and it is from a Honduran coffee farm. Its weird but it’s actually sort of difficult to find good coffee even in a country that produces a lot…they would rather export it all and make more money than risk selling in here in Lempiras. The Hondurans drink their coffee with a lot of sugar – more like a cup of sugar with a little coffee. We had to clear that up right away with our host family that we prefer it black! Some people drink it with milk but most just with sugar.

Water –

We don’t drink water from the tap. It’s not safe because it’s not treated like our city water that we’re used to is. So the only water we can drink is bottled water (they sell it in giant plastic jugs here). This gets sort of complicated because water that is consumed in any from must be treated whether it’s ice, etc. Sort of difficult when you’re living with a family and have no control over what you eat/drink and also difficult when you go out to eat because you can never really be sure. Boiling the tap water is ok as long as it’s for 5+ minutes or you can add 3 drops of chlorine per liter.

Licuados –

Licuados are extremely common here (you can find them just about anywhere from the street to a restaurant) and really delicious. Basically it is really cold milk (or partially frozen milk that comes in bags), sugar, fruit (papaya, watermelon, cantaloupe, strawberry, pineapple, or banana) and oatmeal or granola if you want all blended together in a blender until frothy. I usually get a banana and strawberry licuado but have had a cantaloupe one and really liked it to. I’m a fan!

Tea –

So they don’t really have a lot of store-bought options for tea which is probably due to the fact that they’re really good at making homemade tea. I haven’t quite learned how to yet but my host mom makes a really delicious cinnamon tea and says she makes a good pineapple tea with the left-over scraps after cutting up a pineapple.

The beach

2007-03-14T10:53:00.000-06:00

Luke and I on the beach last weekend on the northwest coast

2007-03-12T16:31:00.000-06:00

We made it safely to the northwest corner of Honduras over the weekend and back to Santa Lucia. It’s actually not that far away, just takes a long time to get there due to all the bus and taxi transfers. We left Cuyamel (the site of the current volunteers we visited) at 7 am and made it back to SL at 4 pm.

On Thursday we got to San Pedro Sula around 1ish and the volunteers met us there. They took Luke and I to get cell phones and something to eat. Luke also bought some swim trunks and a pair of flip flops (both things he forgot to bring). We then headed to Puerto Cortes (on the coast) then transferred to another bus to get to Cuyamel.

Cuyamel is a small town (about 7,000) about an hour walking distance south from the beach. The roads in their town are all sand roads and there isn’t much to do in their town so they usually go to Puerto Cortes or to San Pedro if they need lots of groceries or want to see a movie. They have a really nice house which made me excited to get our house someday (not until July will we move into our own house). They have 2 bedrooms, dining room, kitchen, livingroom, 1 bathroom, 2 patios and a nice yard (with a banana, papaya, and avocado tree!).

We ate Thursday night at their house and spent Friday during the day checking out what they do for work. I went with the female volunteer who works in health around town to the nutrition center, the maternal and child center, and the health center. Every volunteer gets what they call a counterpart who is generally an NGO (non-governmental organization). The counterpart is usually the one who requested a volunteer to begin with and who the volunteers “works for” during their service. I’ve heard that some people are lucky and get really good counterparts who they work closely with during their entire service and others who only see them occasionally. The health volunteer that I visited worked with a Spanish NGO from the Basque country although all but one of their employees are Honduran. Counterparts are good for orienting you to your site, helping you find work, giving you transportation (in most cases they have a vehicle), etc.

Friday night we went out for seafood in a Garífuna community on the coast about 15 minutes from Cuyamel. I don’t know a lot about the Garífunas except that they were Africans who were taken as salves and brought to/shipwrecked on a Caribbean island until the English kicked them out. They ended up settling on the north shore of Honduras in the late 1700s/early 1800s and there are still very large communities of Garífuna there. Anyway, Luke had shrimp soup (made with a coconut broth) and I had garlic shrimp – both very tasty.

Saturday we made it to the beach. The north west shores of Honduras are not very developed so a tourist looking for a Caribbean beach vacation might be disappointed. This is probably why most beach tourists to Honduras go to the Bay islands just north of Honduras to do snorkeling, diving, etc. Needless to say, it was great to get a day at the beach. The water was a nice temp and the sun was pretty hot. We didn’t take a lot of pics but we’ll hopefully get a few posted soon. Saturday evening we returned to Cuyamel, ate dinner and went to bed so we could get up at 6 am on Sunday to get traveling back to Santa Lucia.

One more week here in SL then the three tech groups split up and we all head to our respective Field-Based Training sites for 5 ½ weeks. During this training we have lots of tech training and more language training (the Peace Corps staff travels with us) and we do a lot of hands on training in the community. For each PC Honduras group, the Filed Based Training is in a different location so that the trainees can practice their skills where needed in the community. The health group is going to a bigger pueblo and Luke’s Wat/San group is going to a really small pueblo so on weekends, he’ll travel to my site and PC pays for us to stay in a hotel since our tech groups are split up. Shouldn’t be too bad. It will be nice to get some time away from our hosts families on the weekends.

Hola, as you could probably tell the above was written by Annie, but now this is Luke, i am at the cafe posting what annie wrote last night and maybe adding a little.

so the visit was good, long journey, but a good thing to do. so i visited a fuente (spring) that is being developed into a water source. It appeared to be a clean reliable source of water, a good thing for the community. everybody needs clean water.

The volunteer i visited was working with the community on some issues that need to be resolved. mostly he was going to try and convince the community that they needed to charge more than 4 lempiras (20 cents) per month for a connection to the water system ¨(the town gets to vote on the tarrif). They had previously had a water system that doesn´t work because noone was taking proper care of it and charging 4 lemps a month does not pay to fix a water system, but now there system is broken and someone (foreignors/aid agency/church group/envirnonmental group....someone) has payed to build them a completely new one, and the volunteer was pointing out that he is going to have a hell of a time convincing the town they need to pay a higher tax for there new water system, they only payed 4 lemps prior and now they have a new one.

anyhow, I am learning that development work is a lot more complicated than I anticipated....... I would blog more about it, but I am afraid I would want to retract some statements in the future, as my opinions of what we do are changing.

Hope all is well in the North.... todo esta bien aqui

Cheque Leque,
Luke

Cool and rainy here

2007-03-07T11:46:00.000-06:00

It’s blogging time again. Hope you all got a chance to read Luke’s most recent blog before this one – interesting stuff about the water sources for the town of Santa Lucia.

It’s been chilly here for the past few days. Highs in the mid-60s and rainy/foggy. I can’t seem to get warm. Luckily our showers are hot or else I think I’d be miserable. Apparently there was some flooding on the north coast but hopefully nothing that will impede our trip up there to visit the married couple PCVs on Thursday morning.

We had a good weekend, nothing too exciting. On Friday we met with other volunteers for a few beers and on Saturday we went to the town soccer game. It was a pretty intense game as the winners play in the final this coming Sunday which Luke and I are going to miss! And my host brother plays in it! Anyway, because it was so intense and because the one team had one off-sides penalty and one penalty for knocking down the goalie (both penalties occurred on points scored which were then taken away) several fights broke out which included some fans. We all got off our seats to watch the fight in the corner of the field and one PC trainee looked at another and said, “Hey, isn’t that your host dad fighting down there!?”. Sure enough, someone’s host dad was in the middle of the fighting. Ha. No injuries as far as I could tell.

Luckily this weekend we didn’t have to do our laundry. The lady that washes clothes for our host family washed Luke’s and I’s as well and we paid her 25 Lempiras which is a like $1.25. Totally worth it. Although may I remind you that our daily salary is 55 Lempiras each so we have to be careful about how we spend money and lately we’ve been spending it on buying bread from one of the PC trainee’s host mom who runs a bakery out of her house and makes delicious garlic, wheat, whole-grain, cheese, sweet cheese, carrot, cinnamon/raisin and banana breads. Twice a week, after training, Luke and I stop by her house and pick up piping hot fresh bread. Yum.

So I don’t understand it but apparently it’s summer here now even though Honduras is north of the Equator. They call their summer from January to May, then winter is from June to September when it’s rainy season and then from October to December it’s hurricane season which is apparently still winter.

We’ll be sure to blog soon after we get back from our trip to the coast and hope to have some good pictures to post. Take care everyone!

Hola

2007-03-06T16:59:00.000-06:00

Hola a todos -

Hello all, Annie has been doing more “blogging” as of late, so if something I say is redundant forgive me. Training is going well; the language training is good… I get really frustrated at times but that is a part of learning I guess. The tech training is going well, I have a small advantage over other people having studied water resource engineering, but I think having studied a shovel may be more advantageous in a lot of the work we will be doing here. We visited the water system here in SL las Thursday, very interesting, they have some nice springs that supply the necessary flow during the wet season and a good well that supplements in the dry season (which I am told has been trending towards 8 months out of the year as opposed to 4 months of dry season years before). Friday we built some “bomba-flexi” pumps, which are basically relatively cheap and easy to make water pumps made with a few feet of galvanized iron and pvc pipe with some check valves made from miscellaneous pvc connections and two marbles and bike tubes for gaskets. They are neat, but marginally useful, a person could maybe pump 1 to 2 gallons per minute from a cistern to a storage tank above a house with the one I built, more if they did a really good job making the pump (which could be a lot of pumping).
We are generally going to estimate 20 – 25 gallons of water usage per day for folks in Honduras for drinking, bathing, washing, I don’t think flushing is in that estimate (you don’t flush the latrine). For reference estimates in the states for water use in the house are around 160 gallons per day per person, more in drier places and twice as much if you water your lawn. Not to say it is bad to use more water it keeps us clean, well hydrated and healthy, and in places like Iowa it rains a lot so it isn’t as if we have to worry about it (as long as the treatment plant/septic is working an your not breaking thermometers in the sink).

Hasta luego,

Luke

Tostadas de pollo y guacamol

2007-03-03T13:37:00.000-06:00

Dinner on Thursday night at home

(Scroll down to read previous blog about events of the week)

Week 2

2007-03-02T16:10:00.000-06:00

Wow…this week went fast! We’ve been busy at training with Spanish classes (a total of 22 hours this week), more safety/security and health training, and technical training a few days this week. Friday morning my Salud (Health) group is going to a hospital in Teguc that specializes in maternal health so we get to visit the maternity ward and see a live birth (hopefully). If some of you are wondering why this blog is posted for Friday but I’m referring to Friday in the future, it’s because I’m currently writing this Thursday evening at home. (UPDATE - Í´m getting ready to publish this blog (Friday afternoon) so I´ve already been to the hospital this morning and I was able to see a live birth! The maternity ward is totally different here...the women who are just beginning labor are all together in one big room then as the progress they move to a different room, again with beds on both sides of the room (no privacy whatsoever) where they basically go through labor on their own, pushing included. Just before they´re about to actually give birth, they move the woman into another room. Luckily when our group of 5 went into the labor room, a women was just getting ready so we got to watch the whole thing).

I went to Teguc the first time on Wednesday with my Spanish class. It’s like any other large Latin American city – utter chaos. Between the cars, taxis, and buses (all honking uncontrollably), pollution, heat, uneven sidewalks, street vendors selling fruit, tortillas, watches, (basically you name it, they sell it), etc. it’s not the most pleasant experience you’ll have. We went to a market and bargained for some fruit and veggies, got to know where several bus stations are, and then saw the Peace Corps Honduras main office. Luke still hasn’t been to Teguc (I think they’re afraid to send intermediate level speakers to the “big city” still) but we’re going Friday evening after classes with our host dad to a market that is only open on Fridays and Saturdays and that sells fruit and veggies that come straight from the fields (very fresh).

Our host mom is going to be gone all weekend because she has a church retreat. She’s worried about what we’ll eat while she’s gone so her daughter-in-law is supposed to come over and cook meals for us. I probably could have managed but would rather have someone set the food down in front of me at this point….although twice this week I’ve came home early to help my host mom cook. I now actually have recipes for: tostadas de pollo o guacamol, las tortillas con quesillo, los pastelitos de papa, las baleadas, las enchiladas, los tacos, el anafre, las catrachas, and plátanos fritos. Obviously most of you have no idea what those things are but I can help you understand by telling you that the main ingredient in almost all of them is fried corn tortillas, beans, and a dry cheese they call queso seco. So far my favorite meal has been las tortillas con quesillo. You basically fry two corn tortillas, put some queso seco between the two fried tortillas, then top it off with what we know as pico de gallo salsa but what they call chismol – delicious. We’ve been eating lots of beans (which we both like), tortillas (both fried and regular), avocado, eggs, fresh fruit, and drinking LOTS of good coffee (we have it with breakfast and dinner). We made guacamole on Thursday night and along with onion, pepper, and salt, she added two hard boiled eggs to the mixture – strangely tasty. I think my host mom really likes when I cook with her as she’s eager to tell me how she does things and keeps telling Luke that he’s going to eat well when we’re living by ourselves because I’m learning quickly. One more thing about the food - they make burritos, enchiladas and tacos here but they are not like the Mexican or Tex-mex ones we know….I’ll explain those another day or if you’re lucky, one day I’ll cook for some of you! J

We found out today that not this weekend but the following, Luke and I are going to the northwest coast (about 5 ½ hours from here) to visit a married couple who are current volunteers (all trainees are doing a volunteer visit this weekend). The pueblo is practically on the beach and just a short drive from the Guatemala border. Although the bus ride will absolutely suck (I already explained how scary those rides are), we’re hoping it will be a nice little vacation and that the couple we’re visiting won’t mind taking us to the beach. We leave on Thursday morning and come back Sunday afternoon.

This weekend will be full of studying as Luke and I both have lots of homework from our Spanish classes. I plan to get up late Saturday morning, have breakfast, maybe meander into town just for the exercise, then come back and lie in the hammock and read all afternoon.

To all our friends and family - have a nice weekend! And thanks again to everyone who’s reading our blog and making comments – it keeps us writing!

Pics

2007-02-28T18:07:00.000-06:00

Luke sleeping in hammock at our house on Sat. afternoon

Watching the sun set from the lookout point in SL

Scroll down to see first blog from today!!

Also, I keep forgetting to mention that if you click on the pics that we upload, you should be able to look at them larger and be able to zoom, etc.

The next few months

2007-02-28T17:46:00.000-06:00

An update on what we will be doing and where we will be in the next few months:

In SL until March 17 (next weekend, from Thurs March 8-Sunday, March 11 Luke and I will be doing a volunteer visit which means we will be traveling to a town somewhere (they will tell us tomorrow) where a current volunteer is working).

From March 18-April 25, Luke and I will be living in separate pueblos working with our respective technical groups (Water/Sanitation and Health).

From April 26-28 we will actually visit our future work site.

From April 29-May 3 we will be back in SL/Teguc to wrap up training and swear in as volunteers.

Mailing address

2007-02-27T17:02:00.000-06:00

We found out that if you send anything to us via FedEx, UPS or DHS you need to ask us first for the name of the person to address it to because that person would need to be in the office that week in Teguc and they will have to sign for it (I also updated this info on the Mailing Address blog). The regular USPS address stays the same as originally posted. ¡Gracias!

Pics (see blog below pics for weekend events)

2007-02-26T17:35:00.000-06:00

Luke and I in the back of our family´s pickup truck on Saturday

when they were showing us the nearby mountain and views of Teguc

The patio in front of our host family´s home

Street in SL on the way to training