Midwives and Site Visit

We finished FBT a week ago to come back to Santa Lucía for our final two weeks of training. It was really hard to leave Yarumela because I had gotten really close to my family and since we were the first group of volunteers there I think we really all got attached to each other. The bus came to pick us up in the morning and all the families were out on the corner waving and crying and I really hope I’ll be able to visit more than once in the two years I’ll be here. The end of FBT was really interesting as we learned about the Men´s health initiative, gave a men´s health charla to a technical school, and learned about obstetric emergencies. After learning about obstetric emergencies we went to a town about an hour away from La Paz to give a talk to local midwives and health volunteers who had come in from neighboring towns. Most of the midwives were elderly women no taller than my shoulder and were really fun to work with. We focused on hemorrhaging during pregnancy, delivery, and post-partum and taught them how to use bimanual compression to stop the bleeding until they can get the woman to a hospital. The Ministry of Health here in Honduras is really pushing institutional deliveries but for some of these women it just isn’t feasible because they live several hours away from the nearest hospital and can’t leave right when their contractions start because there would be no one else to take care of their children. Because of this, midwives are still widely used in the rural areas so it is really important to train them how to recognize obstetric emergencies so they know when to get the woman to a hospital. I really enjoyed the talk we gave and can’t wait to work with midwives when I get to my site.

And as for my site…

I´m going to Ocotepeque! Sites were announced last Monday, we met our counterparts on Tuesday, and left to go visit on Wednesday for a couple days. Ocotepeque is in the far west right next to the borders with El Salvador and Guatemala and I´m going to the city of Nueva Ocotepeque in the department of Ocotepeque. It’s the first stop in Honduras coming from both El Salvador and Guatemala which is going to make my work really interesting. I’ll be working with the Centro de Salud (health center) in Antigua Ocotepeque which is just outside of where I’ll be living mainly with maternal and child health. When I was visiting I went with the doctor and nurses of the clinic to vaccinate in one of the neighboring aldeas. We’re in the national vaccination month right now and since a lot of people don’t go to the clinics frequently if at all most health centers have to go out to the surrounding areas and take the vaccines with them to ensure that the children are vaccinated. It was really fun to go with them and a great way to start to get to know the area. When I go back in a week they will still be vaccinating so I’ll get to go with them a few days a week all around the municipality. My first week there we will also be going to El Poy which is the border crossing with El Salvador to give out HIV information. There is a lot of commerce going in and out of El Poy so we’ll be talking to a lot of truck drivers in addition to people just traveling between the two countries. Ocotepeque and the border crossing at El Poy is a big stop on the way to El Norte which gives us great access to migrants on their way up to educate them more about HIV and AIDS. Being in a border town is going to give me a lot of great opportunities to do a wide variety of work since I will do a lot with maternal and child health with the centro de salud and will also get to do HIV/AIDS work at the border and in town. I´m really looking forward to heading back in a week, integrating into my community and getting started with my work.

We have a lot going on this last week in Santa Lucía as well. We´re having a going away party for our families on Wednesday and then the swearing-in ceremony is on Friday. It’s going to be at the US embassy in Tegus and then we get to go celebrate afterwards at the ambassador´s house. I´ll be getting a new mailing address in a week and will post it as soon as I know since I won’t be going back to Tegus very often. For some reason the 11 hour bus ride isn’t much motivation for me to head back. It´s going to be a busy week before heading off to my site and I´ll have a lot to do once I get there which is a great way to start off my two years.

Baby Weighing

Last week we did a lot of Maternal/Child Health activities which was amazing. We started the week off with some nutrition, breastfeeding, hygiene, and then finished up with a trip to the mountains to weigh babies and give nutrition consultations. We drove up in our Peace Corps vehicles which are white land rovers that can seat 12 people pretty comfortably. The village was probably 10 to 15 miles away but took 45 minutes as we had to drive through a herd of cows and on some very rocky dirt roads. After waiting a while after arrival the mothers started arriving with their babies for us to weigh. We were divided up into groups and with two other trainees we weighed five babies. The babies, and children since any child in the village under 5 had to be weighed, were placed in a sack with holes in it for their legs and then hung from a scale like you would see at a grocery store to weigh produce. After weighing the kids we had to chart their weight and compare it to their weight from the past month to see if they had adequately increased in weight. Out of the five kids I weighed with my group only one had increased enough. We had consultations with the mothers of all the kids after the weighing about things they could do to help the growth of their children. Most of the kids were just getting beans, tortillas, and maybe some soup three times a day so we mostly just talked to them about trying to add some bananas and two snacks between the main meals. They don’t have access to a lot of variety so there weren’t a lot of large changes we could recommend but hopefully they will be able to make the small changes to have healthier children. We unfortunately won’t be back to the same community to see how the kids grow but this was definitely an activity I would like to do once I get to my site. It happens once a month and I would really like to be able to work with the monitors who weigh babies and give the consultations to help them improve the advice they are giving to the mothers.

As for my site, I will be finding out in two weeks where I will be spending my two years. I’m really looking forward to finding out and getting to know my new community. Although I’m excited to move on I’m also really going to miss my family and the community here in Yarumela where I’ve been for FBT. This is the first time my family’s hosted a volunteer as this is the first time the volunteers have been split up and some of them have been placed outside of the main city where we have our training. It’s hard to explain to people that although there are eight of us here right now not one of us will actually be staying for two years to work. I will definitely come back to visit and I think it will be nice to have ‘homes’ all over Honduras.

Pictures

Here are just a few of the pictures I´ve taken so far so people can see where I´ve been, what I´ve been up to, and who I´ve been living with. The first five are all pictures from my time during FBT here in Yarumela (and La Paz). Three of the pictures are of the carpets made of sawdust for Semana Santa in Comayagua. They are absolutely beautiful. People start working on the carpets at 12 or 1 in the morning and continue working up to the parade which starts at 10. It is incredible how much time people put into them when they just get trampled by the parade. Another picture is me with three of my host brothers and one of their sons when they took me and a couple other trainees to the ruins north of town in their yellow school bus. Yes, they actually have a yellow school bus from the states which they drive between La Paz and Comayagua five days per week as part of the public transportation system. The last picture of the batch is some of my fellow trainees in Comayagua.

The second set of pictures are all from before FBT. The first is of my host brother and sisters from Santa Lucía after we ran a race for which they had made prizes for everyone. Another of the pictures is of a lake and waterfall where I went swimming on my volunteer visit. The other three are also of my family in Santa Lucía, one after playing soccer and the other with my host parents and their parents as well.

We have two and a half weeks left of FBT and then it´s back to Santa Lucía for two weeks before heading back to our sites. FBT has been flying by and I can´t believe I´ll be in my site in just a month.

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.

Getting into Training

So far in training we’ve been doing a lot of interesting activities and I’ve been learning a lot. Every day we have a few hours of Spanish then either work with our projects or have CORE training where we have been talking about sustainable development and activities we can do when we first get to our communities to assess their needs. My Spanish class has been really interesting so far. I placed into the Advanced group and we’ve been spending this week on debates. I discussed the death penalty and it’s great practice for me because giving and defending my opinion is something that’s a little harder for me to do in Spanish. In my group we only have four days of class per week and the fifth day we use to do research for community projects we’re working on. My topic is women’s groups in Honduras and their history and I will be presenting my research to at least some if not all of the other volunteers next Friday.

The highlight of this week was going into Tegucigalpa on Monday. All of the Spanish classes went this week to go to the market and to practice navigating the Honduran transportation system on our own. We had to catch the bus from the town center and take it to our stop in Tegus, take taxis from there to the market, and then meet our teacher there. The bus ride was amazing. All the buses here are old yellow school buses from the US and seventies disco music was blasting the whole way to the city. It was also pretty packed with a lot of people standing in the aisles and hanging out the door. Once we got off the bus the taxis that were supposed to be there for us weren’t there so we hailed some other cabs and were able to bargain the price and save a little money. The market we went to was pretty small and we all had grocery lists from our host mothers of things to buy. We also had an assignment to find out the prices of a lot of products which was hard because it isn’t culturally acceptable to ask a price without at least an interest of buying whatever it is you’re asking about. Although I learned the hard way, I found it was a lot easier to get people to talk to me about prices if I explained first what I was doing and why I needed the price information. After the market we all got to go to the Peace Corps office in Tegus before heading back up to Santa Lucía. It was really fun to see a little of the city since it was the first time going since we got here.

This Sunday we’re leaving Santa Lucía for a few days to visit volunteers. Each trainee is going to a different site to visit a volunteer working in their same project area so I’m visiting a health volunteer working in the mountains towards the El Salvadorian border. I’m really looking forward to going. She works with an HIV/AIDS support group and does a lot of work with maternal/child health as well. I’ll be there until Wednesday when I come back to Santa Lucía. I think it will be a great opportunity to see what kind of work and project options are available as well as talk to a volunteer about her experience and what kind of advice she may have.

After getting back to Santa Lucía we only have a few days before we leave for field based training (FBT). All the groups leave for FBT the next Sunday and I’m heading off to La Paz with the rest of the health group. We’ll be there for six weeks getting more in-depth information about our projects and as part of my language class I will be doing a lot more community research and community-based projects. I’m really looking forward to these next few weeks because we have a lot of interesting activities planned.