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.

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.