a little update

Traveling Salesmen:
Here is a little something to think about. Traveling salesmen here are real traveling salesmen. Why? Because they sell on the buses, and thus are traveling while selling.

Puppies:
So, I was going to go get my dog today, and I went three weeks ago to talk to the woman who owns the dog and asked about getting the dog. Well, we show up and there was the puppy, so very, very cute but his owner wouldn’t sell him. They gave their other puppies away, but wouldn’t sell me this one that I had talked to them about. The husband told me they promised him to someone else. Needless to say that ruined my day.

In the aldeas:
I brought T with me for the first time to the aldeaas. We ended up doing a ton of walking, but I think she enjoyed her time there. We ate a ton of oranges and mandarins. They are in season (well, they have lots of types of oranges and one of them is now in season) so we pigged out on them. That also means that we didn’t quite have a lot of water with us, so we were drinking the liquids out of them.

Care packages:
Last week I got two care packages, on one day! It was like Christmas! The first one was from Aunt Maureen with candy and books, lot of them. The other was from Megg, and she gets major points for planning and execution of this care package. She must have planned this part long in advance. During Brittany’s baby shower, she handed out Halloween cards to everyone there and then sent them to me with other items. I have a bunch of cool Halloween trinkets. Toys are now on the top of the list for items in care packages.

T mowing down on cana, which is a stick of pure sugar.


Cat chillin out below a wood stove on a stack of corn cobs

People looking ata chlorinator, without chlorine. No big surprise there.

Beginning and end of coffee. This is ripe coffee beans in my hand and then small coffee plants almost ready to be planted in the background.

I had more internet access, so I figured I could put up more pics.

pictures

Odd new fruit!

The puppy that was not.

The barney pinata.

I know the best part about a blog is the pics, so here you go, enjoy

(I haven't figured out how to put writing before the pics)

short update (its been two days)

Traveling Salesmen:
Here is a little something to think about. Traveling salesmen here are real traveling salesmen. Why? Because they sell on the buses, and thus are traveling while selling.

Puppies:
So, I was going to go get my dog today, and I went three weeks ago to talk to the woman who owns the dog and asked about getting the dog. Well, we show up and there was the puppy, so very, very cute but his owner wouldn’t sell him. They gave their other puppies away, but wouldn’t sell me this one that I had talked to them about. The husband told me they promised him to someone else. Needless to say that ruined my day.

In the aldeas:
I brought T with me for the first time to the aldeaas. We ended up doing a ton of walking, but I think she enjoyed her time there. We ate a ton of oranges and mandarins. They are in season (well, they have lots of types of oranges and one of them is now in season) so we pigged out on them. That also means that we didn’t quite have a lot of water with us, so we were drinking the liquids out of them.

Take care until the next time,

Jill

updates

Ok, I am writing on Thursday October 15, 2009, which is the day after one of the greatest days in Honduran history. Last night, Honduras won the right to go to South Africa for the World Cup. In a very dramaful night, Honduras won against El Salvador, 1-0. The end of the game was still sad though, because Honduras could only go to South Africa if they won and the US won or tied Costa Rica. So, in the stadium people were sad, El Salvadorans were sad because they lost, and Hondurans were sad because they weren’t going to the World Cup. The US game had two minutes left and they were still down 2-1. Then the world changed for Hondurans, the United States tied their game up with literally seconds of extra time left. The news completely changed the feeling in the hearts of Hondurans. The stadium erupted in screams and tears. This is the first time in 28 years that they have qualified. This is like the Red Sox winning the World Series for the first time in decades. After a win there is the traditional caravan. Everyone piles into their cars (and pile is the right word, truck beds are stuffed with people) and they all drive around town celebrating.

This morning people are still celebrating, and there is a large crowd to welcome the team back to Honduras. Well, a few days ago we were the enemy, because the US beat Honduras, but because we tied it last night, we are friends again. There was a sign at a celebration last night that said God is Honduran because he allowed the US goal at minute 94. This morning on the news it is all about the win last night, but they do have a lot of revision of the last minute goal of the US too.

Food:

It’s been a while since I have written a food update. Now, I know I have talked a lot about mantequilla (sour cream and mayo mix). Now, I had accepted it as part of my life, but yesterday I had some really sour stuff which makes me rethink it.

On the subject of beans (very much a part of my life), you can tell microwaved beans from fresh. I went to a comedor (small restaurant) yesterday and got served microwaved beans. I mean it makes sense, so they make a giant batch of beans in the morning and then reheat them later, but it just doesn’t taste the same.

Pickiness. I was called out the other day for being a picky eater. All I could think was you don’t even know the half of it. Really, all she could say was that I didn’t like seafood, and that I used to not drink coffee. Well, for those of you who know me, there are a LOT more items on that list. Granted I have learned to eat things here that I would not have eaten in the states. Then I always have my siblings to point out you can be a pickier eater than I, although they too have improved on this.

Host family:

A little something on the host family was requested. I will say that we still have our awkward moments, but most of the awkwardness has gone, we have gotten used to each other. They were really cool with us having S’s birthday party here (see below). I now have a better understanding of our new housekeeper as well. At first it was weird, because I thought she was trying not to talk to me, and she just didn’t get anything I tried to say, so she would send her son (7 years old) to talk to me. Now, I think she just didn’t know what to do with a gringo. She started after Kiey left (the Japanese volunteer) and so didn’t have that experience of having a foreigner in the house. Now it is a lot better. We still don’t talk, but I think we understand each other better now.

Speaking of host families, I talked to both my old host families today. I was bored, and had bough a TON of minutes for my phone to make arrangements for the Guatemala trip, and had ended up not needing a lot, so I called and texted a lot of people. It was good talking to them. I haven’t talked to them a lot since being in site, so it was good to know that they still think of me and it was like being with them again. I really need to go visit.

Odd situation

So, yesterday I was leaving my house, and there was a woman walking down the street. Well, I smiled and said “good afternoon,” with the intention of continuing on my way. This did not work out like that though. She stopped, and started telling me that she is very poor and needed money for food and medicines. I didn’t know what to do. This could be true, or not. I was literally trapped by my door. So, once she started talking about not having food I lied and said I didn’t live there, that I was visiting a friend and that I couldn’t give away their food. Then she went straight back to money (and keep I in mind I am carrying a purse, and why would I have a purse without money right?). At one point she suggested I go get money out of the bank to give to her. That was my too much money, especially because this is after I had tried to leave and walk away but she stayed with me. I lied again, told her I didn’t have money and was late for a meeting, and wouldn’t be returning to that house the next day. I don’t know, part of it sounds weird, but as a white person here, a lot of people walk up to you to beg for food or money or for your water bottle (that has happened a lot).

Weekend fun-

two weekends ago, but I didn’t bring the most updated entry for the blog last time I went to the internet cafe:

This past weekend was S’s birthday. Friday, T and I went to the city nearby to do some shopping, for ourselves and for the party. We got a ride in which was very nice. The town has an import store with stuff from the US in there and I found face wash, so very, very nice to wash my face with it. I also got some other things, but you have to be careful there because you can spend your whole paycheck if you are not careful. Next we went searching for the party and got a Barney piñata. They didn’t have a huge selection, and what slipped out of my mouth was “everyone likes to hit Barney.” It ended up being a hit (pun intended). We then found the Honduran version of walmart, which we will hit up in the future.

After a few more errands we went back to town, where T and I bought the food for the birthday party, and the candy for the piñata. I found that they sell boneless skinless chicken breasts like in the states which will motivate me to cook more. At this point T and I are tired from working and then party planning for Saturday, and it was time to go to S’s house because her family was cooking a big dinner for her. Her family cooks so well, that it’s always a pleasure to be invited over.

Saturday comes and I got up extra early to have tennis practice before baseball. We walk all the way down there and the gym is occupied, so we sat around for a while and just talked. Later, when the other people showed up we tried to have practice on the basketball court. Problem being there was no fence, so they ran a lot to get the ball. A new person has joined our group and had one practice with the other people (I didn’t go because I had other plans) and I tried to be like “show me how you hit the ball,” meaning show me your stroke. He just didn’t get it. So, my friend Alex is used to this by now because every time I show them a new stroke they have to do swing without the ball for me to make sure they are using the right form. I had them playing tiny tennis for a while, then it was time for me to leave, so I gave them a drill they could do without me. I also told Alex to make sure this new guy (whose name is ridiculous to pronounce, he is getting a nickname from me) knew how to hit an imaginary ball and show me the correct for of how to hit the ball. Who knows if that happened.

So, I walk across the high school campus to the field where we have baseball, and get there at the same time S and T arrive and we are blown away that almost all the kids were there on time. One arrived late. That was amazing. Normally about half or a quarter of the kids don’t show up. We had a good practice; we finally started to teach the kids how to field the ball. All that time spent teaching them how to throw and once they get to playing, they start throwing all kinds of crazy. Finally after a long time (or maybe it just seemed like a long time) they started to get it. I think I will have to kids to it again next week to get a little better at it. We just kept saying if the ball does not get to the baseman, than the runner can just keep running, and that is how you can quickly lose a game. During practice our friends showed up for Sara’s birthday. I think they liked out practice. We ended practice with a card that all the kids had signed for Sara and singing happy birthday.

Well, here they have scheduled power outages. Say they have to fix a line or something, they announce that there wont be power on a given day, normally a Saturday. This just happened to be a no power day. We therefore had to try and figure out how we were going to eat lunch. We found restaurant with a fogon (wood stove), which is a Honduran woodstove that was serving tacos. We all went there and got tacos. Afterwards we walked around the market, getting some fruits and veggies and went to my house to relax and play games. That afternoon we had another surprise for Sara, which is the announcement we are getting a puppy! Technically the puppy will be mine, but T and S have promised to take some of the walking, feeding and dog-sitting responsibilities. It was great though, she screamed and was bouncing around at the news, and we passed around my camera which had a picture of the little guy.

For dinner we made some amazing chicken and veggie skewers. We marinated the chicken in teriyaki sauce overnight, and marinated the veggies a little bit too. We also had a nice fruit salad to go with it. I bought some star fruit and we had those in the fruit salad which turned out really well. We borrowed T’s host family’s grill to do all this, and the food was amazing.

After dinner we brought out the last surprise for Sara which was Barney. Let me tell you, doing the piñata a little tipsy was a lot of fun. That might just be the new thing to do in my region.

We finally left to go out for a bit. We went “bar hopping” which just meant going to the nice places in town and drinking a little, before we went to the club in town. Well, let me just say they must not have been checking IDs at the door because there were a lot of young kids there. I mean 15 and up. It was ridiculous. They were trying so hard to dance with us, but I don’t dance with little kids. We had some friends of Sara’s from the community there who are a little over 40, and the kids were dancing with them too. Yuck. Persistent little buggers they were. Now, we can say we have been there, but I will stick to the club in the next town because it is a LOT nicer and not full of high school kids.

So, we arrive to Sunday, and we had a welcome party for the new volunteer, L, in the next town over. Thanks to all the political situations we have gone through in the last few months, they have been put through a lot during training, and have finally been sworn in as volunteers. I know my group was just happy to finally leave training, they must be really, really happy to get out. She is really nice. A friend of ours in the town threw her a lunch with a bunch of good people to know. The party was a very nice event, a lot of talking, and getting to know each other.

Overall, it was a very nice weekend.

Fast forward to now (a few days later)

T and I have finally figured out how to live the Peace Corps life. We started cooking good food for ourselves and we had a movie night the other night. Not any movie night though, we had borrowed a projector because T is doing a presentation today, and we hooked a laptop up to it and had giant screen movie. Very legal, it was a private home showing. We finally took advantage of all the cheap fruits and veggies to make a salad and cooked chicken. I forgot how easy it is to cook.

pics

So, for a friend{s birthday we borrowed a grill and made cabobs. Well, taking advantage of the frill, T and I made hot dogs. This feast, is for two.
Ok, this is the type of latrine we are building in my site. The are pretty simple, but can be maintained to a very sanitary level.

a little over due

Hello folks, lately I have not been in a writing mood, hence the tiny blogs for such a long period of time. Hopefully I can change this.

Yesterday was a very productive day (for this month).
I got up at 8:30am and was up and running by 9am. This is like light speed compared to the week (or two) before this. I went to the plaza to buy a newspaper, came home and read it all, and did the sudoko puzzle. After a lunch break, I started working on a project for work, and did that for an hour and a half (it was hard work, I needed a break). I went to S’s house to use the internet there, and got a lot of things done online. I returned home and continued working on the program until it was time to leave for tennis. As it turns out, we couldn’t have tennis, so after a dinner break, I continued working until my energy ran out. Overall, very productive. Oh, I also went to the grocery store at one point, which is not working, but it is necessary and something I had been putting off for a few days.

Baseball:

Baseball continues to go well. Two weekends ago we gave the kids the gloves to take home for the first time because we didn’t have a practice last weekend, and that way they could practice on their own. This Saturday they did very well, you could tell most had practiced. Unfortunately, a few had gotten hit with the baseball and now were scared of the ball, which is a little hard to deal with as a coach. We did a running game, which I thought the kids would hate, because they don’t like to run, but they loved it! They did basically a giant relay race around the bases where everyone had to run through and we timed them. They did it once, and challenged them to do it 20 seconds faster and they did it 30 seconds faster.


Work:

I am finally working again. My counterpart has a huge grant from an agency and part of it was to construct latrines. We have been going to watch the construction and give people a little push into getting the latrines done. We just started to visit the sites with the people from the funding agency. It’s been interesting. Considering during my time not working I wasn’t speaking Spanish, I have been having a few problems trying to get sentences out of my mouth. Oh well.

Tennis:

Finally! We had tennis again. We have had nightly curfew for a while and therefore no tennis. I went with two people to play. Now, they told me on the walk down there that they played the night before and were bored just hitting around, they said “there was no one yelling or telling us what to do.” Well, I love to yell and be bossy, so that made me happy. Well, they wanted to run. I told them two laps around the gym and we ran three. Then after normal warm-ups, we went back over how to hit fore-hands and back-hands. Then I gave them the option of what they wanted to work on, and they said more forehands and backhands. I made them run. It was a good time. I was just standing there hitting them the balls and dodge the balls coming back. At one point I had them doing backhands and if I didn’t know their level, I would have sworn they were trying to see who could nail me with the ball. Later one of them left (realize that there were only two) to buy water (just outside there was a place to do this). That’s when I told them that if they wanted a break, they needed to tell me because I was just standing and not running. Well, they still wanted to run, so I put them in the middle of the court, and hit balls to the sides and they had to run after them. We only had four balls, so it’s not like Paula’s old Death game where you run until you can’t and then still go after two more.
Later I tried to teach them how to serve. Well, this didn’t go so well. I need to think about this more and then learn the VOCAB to do so. They were starting to get it when we left. It was good though to play and joke around, and then talk in Spanish a lot. You would be surprised how little Spanish you can speak and live here. Part of that is having 2 sitemates and we speak in English to each other.

Random:

So, I finally started drinking coffee. I don’t do it regularly, but I can get through a cup of coffee. Now, it has been the big joke in my office that I don’t drink coffee and just about every day I went into the office for the last 5 months, I was offered coffee. Well, the other day I shocked them by saying yes, I wanted coffee. It was a big moment; people were saying it was a miracle. Walther took a picture of the big event. Later that day though I was working with someone who apparently was not inside to see the miracle and he was joking with me about how I don’t drink coffee, and I was like, “I just had coffee in the office this morning!” But he didn’t believe me. Later that day, he started this coffee joke up again, but this time Walther was there to show him the proof. Now though I am expected to drink coffee ALL THE TIME. That just is not going to happen.


What else has been going on? Well, I didn{t bring the most updated version of my blog entry today, so I will post this and put the other stuff on lately. I have almost completely broken my internet addiction. I am working on a project now and have been getting some information from my boss through the internet, which is the only reason I have been on lately. As you can tell, I haven{t been that big into writing lately. This includes the journal I was so good at keeping for six months, which I haven{t written in for three weeks.

Ahh, what is going on? I am trying to plan my first real vacation here. Now, in the states I pretty much just went on vacation, taking care of the details as I went along. Not so here, I have to plan everything out, and international phone calls are expensive.

Political situation seems stable right now, even the newspapers aren{t writing much about it.

There is a big soccer game for Honduras coming up Saturday. It is against the US. If Honduras wins or ties then they progress to South Africa nad the world cup games. My coworkers and I have been joking about this for a while now.

I had an interesting morning. I had woken up early, but hadn{t actually gotten out of bed yet when I got a call from T. She brought the wrong passport and was leaving for Costa Rica that morning. The was calling me from the bus station in the next town over, and she had to convince them to let her on the bus (they check for valid passports beforehand so they have no trouble getting everyone through the borders) and that I could bring her other passport down to the main road and give it to her there. So, I got dressed really quickly, ran to her apartment, starting going through her stuff, I couldn’t find the thing, and I didn{t have minutes on my prepay phone, so I went next door and had to try to explain that I needed to call Theresa with their phone for a second and that I could give them money for it. I finally find the passport and hail a cab to the highway. It all worked out at the end, but I doubt she ended up sleeping for the ride which was her original plan{ its tough to sleep with that much adrenaline running through your system.


Ok, if you are wondering why I have odd symbols in here, Spanish keyboards are a little different. Now, this keyboard wont let me type some symbols including apostrophes. This also includes the at symbol which I need to log onto blogger and therefore I had to open up Word, find the symbol (stupid vista making things hard to find) and then copy and paste to add in the sign and get onto this blog.