FBT and Semana Santa

I’m now in Yarumela, La Paz for our health field based training (FBT). There’s no internet access here so I haven’t written in a long time because I have to wait until an afternoon I can stay in La Paz after our training to use the internet. We’ve been here for two weeks now and I really like it here. Half of the health group is staying in La Paz which is the bigger city where we have our training and I’m with the other half in a tiny aldea outside of La Paz called Yarumela. We go in Peace Corps vehicles every morning to La Paz for training, come home for lunch, and then head back again. Training is going well so far and it’s been nice to get involved in more health-related information. Starting this week with HIV/AIDS we’ll be covering a different theme each week. Living in Yarumela is a very different experience than being in Santa Lucia, but I’ve really enjoying getting to know a different community. Yarumela is smaller and this is the first year in a long time that they’ve had volunteers living here so everyone in town knows who we are and knew who we were the first day we got here. My family is great although very different from the one I stayed with in Santa Lucia. News also spreads really quickly especially since several of the host families are related so there is no keeping secrets here. My host parents have five sons ages 30, 36, 23, 19, and 17. The two oldest live in town with their families although one of them, Ariel, is over here with his family every day. I love it when they come to visit because they have a one year old who learned to walk in the two weeks I’ve been here and another son who is also fun to play with. His wife is my age and is really fun to talk to. She even taught me how to make tortillas by hand! The next two sons attend universities outside of La Paz and were home last week for Semana Santa. The son who studies in Tegus, Edwin, comes home every weekend so I still get to see him a fair amount. The youngest, Alexander, goes to the colegio (high school) in town. There are people in and out of the house all the time which means there is always something going on.

All of the eight trainees who are staying in Yarumela live within one and a half blocks from each other. One of the other trainees, Katie, lives next door with the sister of my host mom and another, Anna, lives behind me with another one of my host mom’s sisters. This means we get to do a lot of things together and have integrated pretty well into the community already. Several nights of the week we get together with a ton of neighborhood kids to play soccer in the street. The streets aren’t paved and the other night when we played for an hour we only had to stop twice to let a car go by. There is also a river nearby where we’ve gone to swim a couple times. Living here is definitely a lot more similar to how I imagined Peace Corps to be and I would love to be in a village like this one.

Last week was Semana Santa, Holy Week, so we only had half a week of training. A lot of people travel during this week and no one works so that people can really take advantage of the holiday. On Wednesday my class organized a Cultural Day to present some of the culture from the US and Honduran culture as well. Each class had a typical US activity planned, such as Easter egg dyeing, the seventh inning stretch, the electric slide, and singing, to show our Honduran families who came to the event as well. We had all helped our families prepare typical Honduran food as well so we got to try a little bit of everything for lunch. It was a fun event and I think the families really enjoyed themselves.

I also did a lot of activities with my family last week. My host brothers took me and a couple other trainees to the ruins just north of town on Thursday afternoon which were fun to look around. Compared to other ruins around Central America they aren’t very large or spectacular, but I really enjoyed the trip and from the top of the ruins there was an amazing view of the whole valley. Then on Friday there is a tradition in almost every town and city to recreate the stages of the cross so all the trainees in Yarumela got up early and went with three of my host brothers to Comayagua to see the procession. They have a yellow school bus from the US and since the buses didn’t work on Thursday or Friday they had offered to take us all. Comayagua has an amazing tradition where they make carpets on the streets for the procession and there are dozens of carpets made of brightly colored sawdust. People start work on the carpets the night before the procession and some of them only finished right when the procession was approaching. They were so intricate and beautiful and it was amazing to see the work people put into them when they were just going to be walked over less than an hour after completion. The procession was beautiful as well and was amazingly detailed in the recreation of all the stages of the cross. The carpets in Comayagua are supposed to be the best in Honduras and some of the best in Central America and I’m so glad I got to go see them so early on in my time in Honduras.