Oh Honduras

I believe most of the world is aware by now, but for those of you who don't know, there was a military coup here in Honduras on Sunday. I just wanted to let everyone know that I'm safe and to tell a little bit about what's going on here. I'm not sure how it appears to everyone on the outside or how the international press is describing things, but where I am, things are actually just like normal. I believe the only protesting is going on in Tegucigalpa, which conveniently is 12 hours away (although it didn't feel as convenient when I had to go for my medical checkup). People outside of Honduras know more about what's going on than a lot of people here do, but I think everyone is just waiting to see how this plays out. Peace Corps has us on standfast, which means we aren't allowed to travel anywhere, and has told us to have passports ready and our bags packed just in case we have to be evacuated. So far I haven't heard that this is going to happen but it's been a waiting game for the last couple days. Not very fun.

This is the news for now and I hope everyone is doing well and not too hot now that it's almost July.

Risk Taking and Adventure Seeking

I have never thought of myself as a risk taker.  I’ve always been cautious when it comes to making decisions, especially those where there has been potential for me to get hurt (in any way).  I started thinking about this more the other day on the bus with a friend of mine who is another Peace Corps volunteer.  She is similar to me but we started talking because we both had recently been described as risk takers and didn’t understand why.  We were in complete agreement that neither of us were big on taking risks as we were passing through the outskirts, the most poverty-stricken area, of Tegucigalpa.

 

Perhaps it was just a result of looking out the window with the eye of an outsider as a result of the conversation and thinking of home, but it occurred to me that living in Honduras is a risk that not a lot of people would take.  Leaving a place where it is comfortable and you know what to expect is not easy.  That got me thinking that maybe I am a risk taker in the sense that a lot of the things I do in my life do not follow a ‘normal’ path and have very uncertain outcomes.

 

I like to think of it as seeking adventure in my life since I have no desire at the moment to do it any differently.  Is this good or bad?  I don’t think the answer would be the same for everyone, but for me, I think it’s good.  There is no where else in the world I would rather be right now and I am constantly thinking about all the cool places I could live in and travel to next.  Living and working here has made me think a lot about what I want to do with my life and although it could change, I know that whatever I do, it will take me all over the world in search of the next adventure.

Colgate Grant

I got a Colgate grant!  I decided to start a hygiene program in Polcho, which is the poorest aldea of Antigua, and will be teaching the schoolchildren how to brush their teeth and how to keep themselves clean.  I think a couple of the children might come from families that can afford to buy toothbrushes, but I’ll be getting a toothbrush for each child as well as toothpaste so they can brush their teeth each day after they eat at school.  I’ll be walking once a week to the school to teach them how to brush their teeth correctly and will talk about other hygiene topics as well.

I’m really excited to be working in this community.  The school is the only cinder-block building in the community and the rest of the houses are all made of mud and have either partially tiled roofs or just a sheet of tin to block out the rain.  There is just one teacher for 18 kids from kindergarten to fifth grade and only a couple of the kids will be able to afford to continue with school after they graduation from sixth grade.  Talking about hygiene might be a little difficult, but I’ll be going to the school over a period of six months and will hopefully be able to see a little improvement after that amount of time. I’m taking off for Tegucigalpa next week for our yearly checkups and will be picking up the materials there.  I’m really looking forward to starting this projects and will post more once I start! 

Work, More Work, and a Little Fun

Life here in Ocotepeque is definitely picking up.  Like I wrote in my last blog entry, I’m finally starting to figure things out.  They say that the first year of your Peace Corps service you hardly get anything done and that all of your work gets done the second year.  Just starting my second year in Honduras I can already see that this is going to be true.  It takes a really long time to get people to trust you and to want to work with you but now that that is finally starting to happen, I’m starting to get some great results.  One of the things that I’m really excited about right now is our pregnant women’s club I’m running with Julissa, one of the nurses, at the health center.  She’s really excited about it and we work well together, which has made our meetings lately very well received.  The meetings are once a month and are really fun.  We talked about breast feeding and infant nutrition at the April meeting and will be throwing them a mother’s day party in May (along with giving them an educational component if I get my way).  I’m so excited with how things are going and am also writing up all the lesson plans we have for the meetings so the nurses will have a rotating curriculum to continue the meetings after I leave.

 

I still see the girls in my Yo Merezco youth group fairly often.  We have tutoring at my house once or twice a week in addition to continuing our monthly meetings.  Next month we’ll be talking about study skills and test-taking strategies so they can do better in school.  I’m also going to the house of one of the girls who failed the year tomorrow because her parents don’t let her leave the house and I’m going to try to get her permission to come to my house for school work and to the May meeting…we’ll see how it goes.

 

Honduras right now is in the national vaccination campaign, which is where the doctors and nurses go to each village covered by the health center to make sure all of the kids have received their vaccinations.  I went this morning with two of the nurses to two different communities, La Comunidad and Los Estanquillos.  The walk was beautiful on the way up to La Comunidad and we could see the entire valley.  The rainy season hasn’t started yet so it’s extremely dry, but still beautiful.  We gave a lot of the kids vitamin A because people generally don’t get enough in their diets here and caught other kids up on their vaccinations.  Although I mostly went for fun and to talk to the people in the communities since I don’t vaccinate, I did give some kids vitamin A, which you can see in the first picture I’ve posted.  In the second are Nolvia and Julissa, the two nurses I went with, checking to see if the kids who stopped by were in need of any vaccinations.

 

Although I don’t have much free time when I’m here in Ocotepeque, last month I was finally able to get out to one of the Bay Islands for vacation.  I went with some friends to Utila and it was absolutely amazing.  We went snorkeling with Whale sharks (they don’t eat people) and dolphins and I also tried scuba diving for the first time!  Scuba diving was really fun and I would like to get my license at some point while I’m here.  I’m trying to get to know Honduras while I’m here as well as work a lot in my town which means there isn’t as much free time as I was expecting before coming to Peace Corps, but this is exactly how I want it to be. 

Reflections on a little over a year in Honduras

Some days I can’t believe I’ve been here this long.  It’s going by so quickly and I know I haven’t been in site quite a year yet, but I’m getting there.  I’m just finally starting to figure out how my time is best used here (I think) and coming up with some projects of my own that I want to start rather just doing the textbook Peace Corps programs so I know this next year is going to go by even faster! 

 

At the same time, however, it does seem like a long time since I was in California.  When I think of all the bucket baths I’ve taken, all the power outages I’ve been through, all the catcalls and kisses blown to me from men on the street, all the frustration I’ve felt feeling like I’m not doing enough, and all the projects I’ve tried or completed not going quite how I envisioned, it could seem like ages.  I’m used to the bucket baths by now, and can even shower sometimes, have plenty of candles and my headlamp for the power outages, am getting really good at ignoring all the men on the street (even if it’s someone I know and they want to talk to me), and am coming to terms with the work I’m doing, so I chose to look at the bright side and think about all the things I’ve enjoyed and how quickly time flies when you’re having fun.

 

I’ve realized that the thing that I enjoy most here is working with my youth group that I started for the sex ed curriculum.  We finished that back in December, had a wonderful closing ceremony that my parents got to be there for and decided to keep meeting once a month.  In between those meetings I started having some of the girls over to my house and exercising with others, but there isn’t as much time for that now since they’ve started school again.  The school year ends in November or October if the administration decides to cut the school year short, and start again in February.  To keep working with them, I have decided to start a tutoring/study hour program where they have a few designated afternoons per month where they can come to my apartment to have a quiet place to study or to get homework help.  I started this in reaction to the devastating that four of the ten girls in my group failed seventh grade.  Four.  Of the six who passed, one was already repeating and two others failed their final exams, only passing on a second try.  I see so many improvements that could be made in the education system here, but since I am not in the position to make them, I will put a lot of effort into these girls with the goal of every single one of them passing this year.

 

I also want to put more effort into the youth group we have in Antigua.  I helped out a lot with their meetings last year but want to become even more involved this year.  The students come to the health center once a month for a health-related talk, but I would like to do some other activities with them as well.  I want to do a world map project with them where we paint a world map on a wall somewhere in Antigua, but that will probably have to wait until the rainy season is over.  I also want to take them along with my Yo Merezco girls to a leadership camp at the Copan Ruins once they’re done with school.  I would run the camp with another volunteer, who would also bring her girls as well.  This is just an idea at the moment and won’t happen for a while, but stay tuned.  I really want to make it work.

 

I think one of the hardest things lately has been dealing with the feeling that I’m not doing enough.  When I first came to Honduras I said that I knew that the changes I would hope to make would be small and would touch a few people rather than my entire town, but it’s a lot different to accept that now that I’m here.  I knew that’s what I was supposed to say, but I didn’t know what it was like until I actually got here.  I realize that I’m serving as a mentor for the girls I’m working with and that I’m supporting my friends in town just by being here and talking to them, but I think part of me is still looking for that big project that is going to make the huge difference I’ve been wanting to make.  How am I supposed to know where the line is between setting high goals and being realistic?

 

I’ve just been taking it one day at a time and using time in my day to talk to my neighbors, the girls in my youth group, and my friends.  I have plenty of time during my day and really enjoy choosing my own projects and my own path through these two years in Honduras.  Looking out the window this afternoon at the beautiful valley that encompasses parts of Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala, I realized that life couldn’t be any better.  I’ll get through the bad days, the frustrations with work, the endless catcalls, and I’ll be doing it all with a smile.

P.S. The picture is from Christmas Eve with some friends up on the mountain overlooking my town at sunset.

Obama´s Inauguration

After witnessing the reaction to Obama’s election back in November, I decided along with two other volunteers that we needed to make the trip to Washington D.C. for the January 20th inauguration. We bought our plane tickets together after many frustrations with the slow internet connection, just four days after the election. As we got closer and closer to our departure date I could not believe that I was actually going to be in the US again after almost a year of living in Honduras, and that I was going to be there for the inauguration. Before I left I even had several friends tell me they were going to look for me on TV and to tell Obama that Honduras loves him.

I finally got to the airport in San Pedro Sula after a five hour bus ride and 45 min taxi ride only to discover that the system was down to check in bags. My friend Anna and I nervously checked our bags full of nice, warm winter clothes hoping they would still get there with handwritten baggage tags while Matt carried his bag on with some of our more necessary items just in case. Our boarding passes were handwritten slips of paper as well that would supposedly take us all the way through our layover in Miami to Washington. After not too much waiting we all finally got on the plane at Gate 4 (of 5) of the most used of two airports in Honduras.

The flight to Miami was just a few hours long and we couldn’t get over how much leg room we had. There was no luggage on our laps, no sweaty people standing over us until we hunch lower in our seats, and no people throwing up all around us, where were we? We also got reprimanded by the flight attendant for not recycling out cans after the beverages were passed out, but how were we supposed to remember that planes miles high recycle when there aren’t even any trash cans in any of our towns?

Our layover at the Miami airport was the first time in this trip we realized that we probably needed to work on our social skills before spending too much more time in public in the US. We stared at all the gringos there, were in awe at all the restaurants and food options, and talked loudly about other people forgetting they could understand what we were saying. Classy. We also had huge problems going back through security after customs and then again boarding our plane because no airport personnel knew what to do with our handwritten boarding passes. Each time we had to show them to someone new, we were asked where we were coming from as they called friends over to stare at our strange documents.

Finally arriving in DC, we were welcomed by freezing cold and by Anna’s parents. They dropped Matt and I off at Matt’s cousin’s apartment where we stayed for the next few days and planned to meet up the next day. We ate some amazing food and even went out dancing after dark. I think I saw more people out after sunset than I have the entire time I’ve been in Honduras.

Our first whole day in DC, the day before the inauguration, Matt and I walked around DC with some of his friends from college and meet up with Anna in the afternoon. While we were on our way to meet Anna, we were stopped by a couple who asked us to take their picture. The woman, who was one of the representatives of Kentucky, asked us if we were going to pick up our tickets to the inauguration and when we told her we didn’t have any, she told us to try the representative from Puerto Rico since none of his constituents were able to come. We got really excited with the prospect of possibly getting tickets so went in the building to give it a shot. When we got to the Puerto Rico office we found out that they had given all their tickets away an hour ago but decided to keep trying. We tried many other offices, and after one of the staff members in the office of my representative told us rather rudely that it would be a complete waste of time and wasn’t worth the effort to look, we still kept searching. On the way to a representative from Minnesota we passed by the office of the Northern Marina Islands delegate and decided to give it a try. I went in alone to be less overwhelming and had my Peace Corps Honduras shirt on. I told the people who were in there all about our experience with the election in Honduras and our decision to make the trip up when one of the women went to a back office and came out with three tickets for us. We got their last three!! We were so excited that we made a scene in the office and I think they were really glad they gave us the tickets due to our reaction.

I have never seen so many people in one place as I did on the morning of the inauguration. People were flooding the streets, Capitol Mall, and the subway. After a bit of difficulty navigating through the masses of people we finally made it to the silver gate where we had to enter to watch the inauguration. It was not very well organized and a lot of people with tickets didn’t get in. That being said, it was extremely peaceful and if something like that happened somewhere else there easily could have been an outbreak of violence. We made it in with the last group to enter and got to stand with a good view of the Capitol right at the first jumbotron. The atmosphere was so amazing and people were laughing, crying, hugging, and praying everywhere. Obama’s speech was amazing and I’m so glad I got to be there.

With mixed feelings to be leaving the states, I got on the plane back to Miami and then to San Pedro Sula completely exhausted. Those four days in DC felt like an entire month was crammed into them. I was so overwhelmed with everything so easily available to people, how fast everything and everyone moved, and just life in general. It wore me out so much that I slept 36 of my first 72 hours back in Honduras. I wasn’t quite sure how I would feel getting back to Honduras since I didn’t even get to see my family even though I was in the same country, but as soon as I stepped off the plane in San Pedro, I knew. I was home.

A Not-So-Typical Saturday Afternoon

I went on another run today, probably only the third one since my last blog entry about running, but this one was vastly different. I have now finished the sex ed curriculum with my girls group and have continued meeting with them doing various other activities. On Wednesday after an intense Scrabble game, Jessy invited me to go running with her on Saturday. She had told me before that she went sometimes with her sister and I was excited to go with her. We decided to meet up at 3:30 in the afternoon at her house and would then go meet Leily, another one of the girls in the group, on the way so she could run with us as well.

After finally finding Jessy’s house, I picked her up and we took off walking to the Ocotepeque health center to meet Leily. We only waited there for a little while before deciding to start walking on our way to Antigua since Leily lived further away from town than the health center and meet up with her a few minutes later. Leily had brought along her sister Suri to run with us, who she also brought to the party we had at the end of the Yo Merezco course, and had come in flip flops. We set off, alternating running with walking, at the most beautiful time of the day. By then it was about 4 and the sun was starting to get lower to the mountains in Guatemala. It was also a lot cooler than it had been earlier in the day, which was a really nice change. We ended up running and walking a little past the turnoff to Antigua where I go to the health center, which is probably 2.5 miles out of Ocotepeque. We turned around and ran past a man bringing his horse from the day. With a closer look, I realized that I knew him because he had been to the health center with a machete wound on his arm. After saying hello we kept on past the pastures and creeks until we got to El Soldado. El Soldado, the soldier, is a monument up on a hill to the Honduran Armed Forces that fought in the Hundred Days war against El Salvador in 1969. Other places in the country seem to think it was more of a skirmish than an actual war, but either way, Ocotepeque was actually captured by El Salvador. At that time there were a lot of El Salvador immigrants in Honduras supposedly taking jobs from Hondurans and because of this attitude there was also a lot of mistreatment of these El Salvadorian immigrants. Combined with a border dispute (that perhaps is still going on since the map I have of Ocotepeque is missing the border in some places), all that was needed to put the two countries over the edge was a soccer game. After the game between Honduras and El Salvador violence broke out and led to this Hundred Days War, also known as the Soccer War.

Going back to the run from my historical distraction, there is a field by the monument where people often exercise. We went up there, ran some stairs, did some abs, and sat for a while to take in the view. The sun was starting to set and we could see the houses of several villages up in the mountains. It was beautiful. We finally got moving again because a bolo (a drunk man) starting hanging around us with a huge wooden pole. After we got off the field and were approaching the road again, Jessy looked back and saw the bolo running at us with the huge pole. She took off screaming and laughing at the same time, as did Leily and Suri, so I went with them and when we looked back again he was heading the other direction, towards El Salvador. Bolos, because of their being so drunk and most of the time incoherent, are actually pretty harmless but it was pretty humorous to see him stumbling after us. After we finally stopped laughing we looked back again and saw that he had stopped and was trying to do some kind of martial arts movements with the pole against the cars and trucks going by on the highway. I don’t think it was bound to turn out very well so we got moving on our way back to Ocotepeque.

After an uneventful walk the rest of the way, we dropped Leily and Suri off at their turnoff to go home and decided to meet again on Tuesday. Jessy and I then walked back to her house where I had a few glasses of water before heading home. We probably went about five miles and although most of it was walking, I think that was one of the best and most satisfying runs that I’ve ever had in my life.