A Day in the Life of the Gringita

Trying to get my life back together I am finally going each week to Polcho, the aldea where I am doing the hygiene project with the Colgate grant.  I absolutely love going and the 30 minute walk each way is beautiful…or so I thought until I got a different view of it today.   I went again with Cinthia, one of the nurses at the health center and a good friend, and we were chatting the entire way about different ideas for activities and charlas for these kids during the rest of the school year.  When we got there they were really excited to see us and it was obvious they have learned how to correctly brush their teeth since they now volunteer to demonstrate in front of the class and are not afraid of shouting out the next steps during the demonstrations.  They’re getting a lot better at actually brushing as well as evidenced by the significant decrease in toothpaste and drool on the ground and on their clothes.  I took a great video but have been having problems posting it, so hopefully it will be up soon.

 After they finished brushing, showing me their pearly 

whites, and playing a game, Cinthia and I finally headed out to go back to Antigua.  The kids really like to walk partway with us (and we like it too even though it turns into a battle of wills when it comes to how far they can go) and it took forever to get them to turn around to head back to school.  We tried everything until Cinthia saw some cows coming and hollered back to warn them and they finally took off running for the school.  That may be something we have to try again.  Anyway, as we were passing the man who was walking with the cows warned us that the path was not in a good state.  We thanked him but continued on since we didn’t want to head back to the original path because we were going to take a shortcut. 

 

About 50 feet later, we saw exactly why he was warning us.  The entire path had turned into grey mud that was mixed with cow poop and who knows what else.  We kept going and started to step on the rocks so we wouldn’t slip.  I was following Cinthia a little too closely so decided to step on a different rock than she had.  I have no idea what exactly what it was I saw, but it definitely wasn’t a rock.  My foot immediately fell a foot down into the goop and as I tried to hurry out, I tripped, my other foot and almost entire leg sank down into more mud, and my right shoe came off, stuck in the mud in the first place I stepped, still a foot down.  Having at least one free leg I reached dry land only to crash into a thorn bush.  Picking out the thorns and laughing, I tried to tell Cinthia that my shoe had fallen off, but she could barely even tell since my foot was now black, the same color of the shoe.  When she finally saw that I had lost it and saw where it was, she went back in the mud in her starch white nurses uniform to dig it out. 

 

Covered in mud while she only had a little on her, we slowly made it to another village on the way where her aunt gave me some water to clean myself off as all the school children were watching, mesmerized.  I don’t think they’ve seen many gringas walk into the school with mud and cow poop up to their knees as well as on their hands and arms.  After taking the long way back since after all that we completely missed the shortcut, we finally got back to Antigua to make a work plan for the rest of the school year but ended up putting it off until Thursday.  I had to get home to take a bucket bath.

Keeping Busy

It hasn't been easy to keep myself busy when the country is pretty much at a standstill and no teachers are working, so I finally did something this weekend that has been on my list for a long time...I learned how to make flour tortillas!  Most people here eat corn tortillas and although I can make those I really wanted to learn how to make flour tortillas from a family that has a baleada stand in the park and makes the best flour tortillas I've ever had.  I went to their house on Saturday and helped them prepare the masa (dough) from 40 pounds of flour that they were going to make into tortillas to sell at their stand that evening.  They thought teaching me was fun and took lots of pictures, some of which I have posted above.  I'm going to keep practicing and hopefully will still be making tortillas when I get home.

Trying to Get Life Back to Normal

Okay, so my life doesn’t quite fit the standard for normal, but whatever it was a month ago, I want it back.  I spent a lot of time away from Ocotepeque in June starting with a women’s health workshop where the manual I have been working on with other Peace Corps Volunteers was finally debuted, which was followed by a wonderful vacation at home.  I was really excited to be coming back to Honduras with loads of motivation and plans that I had been waiting to implement in order to be done with the women’s health workshop, but then we have nothing less than a golpe de estado to once again throw things off.  I suppose this is part of the experience living in a developing country and although this is an extreme case I think there is always going to be something interrupting life and productivity.

 

Rather than getting right to work I barely even left the house my first week back because no one was sure if things were going to turn violent or stay peaceful.  I have finally been able to go to the health center a few times to follow up on some consultations I had scheduled (somehow no matter how many times I tried to explain the difference between being a psychology major and being a psychologist it never came across so I just gave in), but most of my other projects are on hold.  The teachers are on strike until Zelaya comes back so I can’t continue with the tutoring with the girls from my youth group or the hygiene project that I had started just before vacation in Polcho.  It’s also going to be hard to start a women’s health group because people right now aren’t really in the mood to go to meetings or to talk about anything else, which is understandable and is exactly what Peace Corps Volunteers are going through too.

 

The first week and a half of this was pretty agonizing just waiting to see what was going to happen.  I didn’t really think or talk about anything else so now I’m trying to find distractions even if they can’t be work related.  I’ve been doing the work I can while researching grad schools and trying to study French so I can distance myself from everything that’s been happening.  Maybe it’s not the most productive in terms of my work goals here in Honduras, but I’m hoping that when things get back to normal I will have avoided driving myself crazy and be ready to get back to work.