Ando sin Pisto

Wow how things have changed since I´ve come to Honduras. At home I never had a lot of cash on me, but the amount I used to carry around would be a fortune here. I also knew that I always had access to an ATM as well and could take out money anytime I needed. Here I am fortunate enough to have a bank in my site (as several volunteers do not) and I even discovered the other day that there is a person in one of the hardware shops in town who you can go to if you want to take out money as well. Last Friday I realized I should have gone to the bank because I only had 50 lempiras to get me through the weekend, which is roughly equivalent to $2.50, but as it isn´t open on the weekends I needed to wait until this week. By the time I got to the bank yesterday, with a grand total of 2 lempiras (ten cents), the system was down and no one could take out any money. I had gone to the bank with my sitemate who had slightly more money than I did, 40 lempiras, so not being able to take out any money we went to the agent in the hardware store. We didn´t have any more luck there as I couldn´t remember my pin number (because I have never used an ATM) and when my sitemate swiped her card it said it wasn´t a valid account. So now we are stuck with barely over two dollars between us until the system is fixed at the bank but at least people here understand the situation and will let me pay them back. Before coming here I never would have imagined myself walking around with so little money so we´ll see how long it lasts me...

Icy Hot and Expired Zythromax

At the health center in Antigua Ocotepeque we get shipments of medicine only four times every year. If we run out of anything before then, well, the people who have walked all the way to see the doctor are just out of luck. That’s how it was when I first got here but we just got a shipment of medicine a couple weeks ago. Before getting the shipment the doctor and nurses go through the pharmacy to see what they need and how much of it to request. They always have to request more than they actually need because they never get as much as they request. When the shipment came in we didn’t get a lot of the medicine we had requested and we also got a lot of medicine we hadn’t requested and didn’t need. In addition to the medicine on the list, our health center also received various donations from the US and while this seems like a great idea, it probably didn’t work out as well as was hoped. One of the extra items we got was Zythromax. It is a great antibiotic and we received cases and cases of it. Once we opened the boxes, however, we discovered that it expired in just one week. All of it. During that week we took it up to the aldeas to people who were sick and the doctor prescribed it to anyone who needed it and came into the clinic, but we barely made a dent in all that we had. It’s really unfortunate that it expired so quickly because it’s a drug we would never otherwise have access to.

We also got several boxes of Icy Hot patches. While they also have the potential to be helpful, the patches we received have no way of being attached to the skin because they are meant to be placed in leg, arm, or back braces so they can be applied to the area in pain at the same time that the area is being supported by the brace. Not only do we not have access to any braces, but the instructions to use and apply the patch are in English. I was able to explain how to use it, but health centers where no one speaks English may not be explaining correctly. You have to make sure you put a certain side against the skin and unless you read English, you would have no way of knowing.
We have a lot of people coming into the health center right now because word has gotten around that we got in a new shipment of medicine, but we’ll see how long it lasts and how health care continues in the next couple of months until we get the next one.

Border Work and the Rainy Season

I’ve been in site for a month now and am starting to really get to know Ocotepeque. I’m meeting more people as well and rarely leave the house without running into someone I know. The rainy season has started and, aside from making laundry difficult, so far I love the rain. It has taken away the heat and has also made the mountains and entire valley very green, but it doesn’t seem like June because it’s warm and rainy while I’m sure it’s blazing hot at home.

About a week ago I went to visit my friend from the health center in her aldea, which is a small town of about 250 people 20 minutes outside of the town where I work. I met several of her aunts, uncles, and cousins, as well as her grandparents and had a great time. On my way home I had to cross a bridge that went over a small gorge and a river. I have no idea how old it was, but it was made of pieces of wood tied together (not very securely) with wire and there were several holes and gaps in the bridge. There was a wire handrail that was also extremely wobbly and did not help much to balance as I was crossing. After already having crossed it once, and not much braver for it, as we were getting ready to cross to head back to the highway it started pouring! When it rains here you have hardly any warning until the sky just opens up and lets loose. So not only did I have to cross the bridge again, but I had to cross when it was slippery and as I was getting drenched. Cynthia was walking me back and we were laughing the entire way trying not to slip between the pieces of wood. Going home in the rain, across the bridge, just completed my afternoon.

My work has been really interesting so far. I go into the health center every morning so I can become more familiar with the doctor, nurses, and the people from the surrounding communities. I haven’t started any of my own projects yet because I’m waiting until I understand the needs of the community better, so I have just been participating in the activities the health center already has planned. I have gone a couple times to El Poy, which is where customs is to pass between El Salvador and Honduras, to talk about HIV to the people passing through. There are a lot of trucks that pass though on the way to San Salvador or San Pedro Sula and these drivers are a high-risk population for HIV since they spend so much time away from home. Each time we went we were able to talk to a lot of men about HIV and the methods of transmission. Many of them are really interested in learning more because it’s spoken about so much but there are a lot of people who don’t know the difference between HIV and AIDS or that it can be passed from mother to child during pregnancy, birth, or breastfeeding. We are also trying to encourage people to get tested and other times the health center has gone they have taken rapid tests and tested people while they were waiting for their papers, but right now we are short on tests and need to save them for pregnant women. It is extremely important that pregnant women get tested because they can take anti-retroviral drugs to prevent transmission of the virus to their child during pregnancy. They can also have a C-section and learn about alternatives to breast-feeding in order to have a healthy child. While we were at El Poy we distributed condoms, showed people how to use them correctly, and educated them about the nature and transmission of HIV. It was a little intimidating at first, just walking up to groups of men and asking them what they know about HIV, but I really enjoyed the activity. I even got to board a couple tourist buses that were passing through to talk to all the passengers about HIV. These activities have been really fun and have given me more of an idea of the health situation in my site and the surrounding areas. I’m starting to think of some projects I can do during my two years here and it’s exciting to actually be able to begin to implement them soon.

I have been having trouble uploading pictures here, but hopefully some will be coming soon!

First Days in Site

I’ve been in site for a week now and so far, so good. I got here last weekend after our swearing-in ceremony at the US embassy. The swearing-in ceremony was a nice event and it was great to see everyone dressed up for the first, and probably last, time. The training director spoke as well as one of our fellow trainees and we got to hear from a representative of the Ambassador as well. After having lunch at the embassy we went to the Ambassador’s house way up in the hills above Tegucigalpa. We had access to the pool, tennis courts, basketball courts, and volleyball courts, but I didn’t get out of the pool the whole time since who knows when I will even see a pool again. It was a really fun afternoon and great to spend it all together.

After making the long trip yet again I made it to my site and started at the health clinic on Monday. They were just finishing the vaccination campaign so I got to go with a couple nurses to an aldea about 45 minutes away from the clinic by car. I will probably be working in the aldea during my two years here so it was nice to meet the health volunteers in the community as well as some of the community members. I really like the people at the clinic and am looking forward to working with them. I spent a lot of the rest of the week getting familiar with community and meeting people at other organizations that I could work with. It looks like I’m going to have some interesting work to do especially once I get a little more familiar with how everything works here in the health system. Last week I did get the opportunity to go to a vaccination event in El Salvador and that’s one of the neat things about being by two international borders, that I may actually have some work-related events that are in either El Salvador or Guatemala. It was an event to promote the MMR vaccine for adolescents from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala, and all adolescents that individual organizations brought to the event or were from the area got vaccinated for free. There were speakers as well who addressed vaccination and other health concerns shared by the three countries. It was a well put together event and fun for me to go to since I’m still learning about the health issues faced here and the steps currently in place to address these issues.

It’s going to take some time to adjust to the life of a volunteer after being in training for almost three months. During training our schedules were packed from 7:30 to 5. Here I pretty much decide my own schedule and once I start projects I will work on them outside of my time at the clinic, but for now I have a lot of free time. I’ve been taking advantage of my free time to try and meet people in the community and on Sunday I actually spend a lot of the day with the woman who works in the house I’m staying in. She has Sundays off so we walked around for a while, went to the park, and went to lunch. It was really fun to talk with her outside of the house because we could actually talk more since she didn’t have work to do. It’s been fun meeting people here and although a lot of these introductory conversations are a bit repetitive in time I will hopefully have a few closer friends. I’m pleased with my site and am really looking forward to getting more involved with my work.

New Address

I´m finally here in my site and I´m really excited about meeting more people and getting to know the area better. I´m going to write a more detailed update soon about our swearing in ceremony and first few days in site but I wanted to post my new address as it will be for the next two years:

Sarah West

Barrio San José

Recomendado al Correo de Ocotepeque

Honduras

América Central

I hope everyone is doing well and please keep me updated!

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.