two weeks at one go, i hope you are ready

Ok, folks, lets see what I can think up for you all this week. I received messages from a couple of people this week that they have been following the blog and are excited about my adventures, so in their honor, I will try to see how much I can write about the last few days.

Monday-
Monday felt like a bad day because I didn’t have a lot of free time over the weekend.
That afternoon, we discussed the progress of the La Palma water system design. It turns out we will be delivering a report that says their idea, really has very little chance of working. There is a lot that has gone into this decision, and if you really are interested in the details, let me know and I will pass them on in an email.

So, that question a while back about who won the superbowl, wasn’t rhetorical. So, if someone did post a comment with the answer, sorry, I didn’t see it, but if no one has, can you please let me know? Thanks.

Monday’s tutoring session went really well. I’m not sure how much I have described the tutoring system here, so I’ll describe it now. Twice a week I get tutoring sessions in Spanish. Like the classes, they are 100% in Spanish, because most of the Spanish teachers don’t know English, and if they do, they are trained not to speak it ever in front of us (or so it seems). This is actually a very good thing. Complete immersion into Spanish. In the beginning it was hard because you are trying to talk with no grammatical knowledge and only a very few words. Now, it is not quite so hard, although I still need to exponentially improve my Spanish vocabulary.

The difference between classes and tutoring sessions are: tutoring sessions are one on one, there is no blackboard therefore there is no new grammatical learning (or very little), and it is more like an hour long conversation. You can ask to go over a specific thing, or review a specific tense, and they will steer the conversation into areas that need those tenses. I have felt that a lot of people don’t have the attention span for an hour long conversation with a beginner, so it’s a great help to have these times. The way the language program here works is they “grade” you on how well you speak Spanish. It does not matter how much you know, but how much can actually escape your mouth. So, right now I still have troubles pronouncing a lot of words, and getting complex sentences out without stopping to think, so even though I can write fairly well, that doesn’t count. And if you think about this, it makes sense because we need to TALK to counterparts and to family members, so that is how they judge everything. The interviews really are just interviews, you are sitting there with a tape recorder having a conversation in Spanish. I like it though, and the system has taught me a lot of Spanish in two months, so I have nothing to complain about.

So, the tutoring session Monday went well. I was trying to explain in Spanish about a book I had read, Under the Banner of Heaven, which is about the fundamentalist Mormon church. Seriously, they must have picked the world’s most patient people to be Peace Corps language teachers, because some of those topics were a little fun to try and explain. And, the best part about the tutorial was that as I was leaving, my parents drove by the park and I got a jalon (ride)! I am so sick of walking my hill. At those random times when I am not sweating (Monday evening was actually kind of cool), I didn’t want to start sweating buckets because of the hill. I was very happy to see my family!

Tuesday

So, a lot of things happened Tuesday. We started leaving the subjunctive. Also, I found out that two more people are no longer part of the Peace Corps. They have different stories, and we are sad to not see them in classes. So, we are down 4 people from the original 49.

In the afternoon, we went to a local village to look at the water system and talk to the people who run the system for a little bit. It was a good time. So, just to note, after about one week here, my host Mom told me that a baseball hat was not good enough for the sun, and suggested I use an umbrella as a parasol. Well, I felt a little dumb the first few days, and occasionally I still do, but a parasol is so much better. But, everyone once in a while I get comments on how ladylike I look walking around in the woods with my little umbrella. All comments are said in good fun, and those of you who know me know that I will trade fashion in for comfort any day, so a bright blue umbrella makes a gringa stand out more than normal, but I don’t care because I have portable shade.

Side note: Shout out to Julia, who had a birthday recently! I tried to call you but never got through. I was thinking about you though!

Tuesday night we had a lot of fun. See, Monday was an instructor’s birthday, and Wednesday was an aspirante’s birthday, so we had a joint party Tuesday night, but made it kind of a surprise party. Trying to detain the trainee for a little bit was a whole lot of work. Someone called her and said she couldn’t leave on time, so we waited for here for a few minutes. She started walking like she was running from a fire so I made up a lie that I had twisted my ankle and needed to walk a little slower. That barely slowed her. Then people were trying to stop to light cigarettes just to waste time. I should note that someone called her and told her to bring her laptop to play the movie, so knowing we were late, she wanted to make up time by walking quickly.

The fun part was that we wanted to the two people to walk in at the same time. So, another person tries to detain her by asking her all sorts of pointless questions (at this time she is getting aggravated that she is really late) and the teacher finally arrives. We couldn’t get them to go in together but it wasn’t too off. To set the scene, you walk in this kind of garage door kind of entrance, and there is a large building in the back on the far side of a really small field. So, all the lights were off, and as she opened the door they flicked on all the lights and yelled “Surprise!” She really appreciated the surprise and somehow we had managed to get everyone coordinated without letting the secret out.

We had brownies and soda. There is an abundance of soda here, I have never drank this much soda in my life. Not that I am complaining, because I definitely accept a whole lot of soda without a battle. We watched Anchorman after a few technical difficulties.

Wednesday:

Well, after the party, I went back to my house and the back door was locked, but the shower is back there, so I was just thinking I’d shower in the morning and it would be fine. I was wrong. I could not sleep, I could not cool down because I was covered with a few hundred layers of sweat and dust, and was kind of on a sugar high. About midnight I fell asleep and woke up at 1:30am. I was productive though, I was reading technical handouts and doing exercised is my Spanish grammar book. Then I go and spill a bag of water on my bed to make the situation a little worse. A little after 3:30am I finally get back to sleep so my alarm could go off at 5:30am. Good times. I was fighting all morning to stay awake.

In class, we had a good time. It was definitely very lively.

I also had my tech interview. Now, tech interviews aren’t like language interviews where you have to pass them. Its just a few minutes to talk with the PTS and APCD (hey this is a government organization, there are a ton of acronyms), about what you want to do, what kind of site you want. I think I was pretty clear that I want a larger site with a site mate. We find out in a week and a half where we are going.

Carlos was very mean though in the afternoon, he said that half of us have already been assigned to sites, but we can’t find out until later. The other half they are still discussing. Oh, I was told that in the teachers’ round table discussion yesterday that everyone is very happy with how my Spanish is coming along and my enthusiasm for class. I like to hear these types of things, so this news made me happy.

In the afternoon, I skipped out on the second day of hiking and looking at another water system to stay in town and help a friend give a charla to the people who work for the environmental organization in town about ArcGIS. So, I am not sure how much I helped. At one point a woman asked me why she needed to click on something, and the only thing that entered my mind was “Because I told you so,” but that wasn’t acceptable to say, so I don’t remember what I said, but she did it anyway. I got a little bit of experience with training adults in Spanish and got refamiliarized with ArcGIS.

Sorry for those of you whose conversations with me got cut out while I was online. I had been kicked off twice in a row and decided it wasn’t worth the aggravation, I can use an internet café later.

At night we went over to the friend’s house for her birthday. It wasn’t too long after dinner so I was still stuffed to the gills, and her host mom comes out with plates of arroz con pollo. I felt really bad but I had to decline. I forced myself to eat cake though so that it wasn’t a double whammy of declining.

Thursday

The morning started off really well, I had fried tortillas con queso with chismol on top. Muy ricisimo (very very very delicious)! I wasn’t a big fan of breakfast foods in the states, so the fact that I get food like that for breakfast makes me very happy.

Instead of having a normal day, we had a charla on HIV/AIDS. The peace corps has a policy to work on HIV/AIDS in any of the countries it is in that has a problem with it. Well, Honduras has the highest prevalence of it in Central America, so all volunteers get trained on HIV/AIDS. The training we got is what is called a training of trainers. This means that they are training us to be trainers. So, today we got the charla, and tomorrow we go into the high school to give the charla to the students there. It should be interesting. All through the training I just kept thinking, these volunteers are so good at Spanish, I really hope that I am that good one day. So, during the charla there were a lot of activities, some just plain fun, some with strong messages. So, tomorrow should be good. More details to follow.

But, about the charla practicing. So, the first few things were to get the participants involved, in this case it was us, but tomorrow it will be the high school kids. The first one is “I wash…” You go around in a circle and say your name and favorite fruit. The second time, you say “The first thing I do in the morning when I get up is wash my (fruit).” Well, the thing is, there are a lot of slang names for parts of the body which are fruit names, so it gets people laughing and involved and introduces the fact that there are a lot of slang names for parts of the body. So, the next thing is you have them list slang names for a lot of body parts and other themes. One was “menstruation.” So, there are things listed like nature’s monthly gift, the curse, etc. But one stuck out “shark week!” I loved it, so that’s now the name I use. Everyone laughed at this one, the men thought it was a little more appropriate than the women, but everyone laughed. A few were more fun than others.

At night I got my brother to practice Spanish tongue-twisters with me. I thought I was doing fairly well until my host sister came along and smoked us. She is very good at them.

So, let me just tell you how much fun it is to write in Spanish on an English program. I had to type up a resume in Spanish, and it is all red underlined, and I had to go through several times to stop auto-corrections.

Friday

So, the big charla went a lot better than I thought it was going to. It was a four hour event. I messed up quite a bit with my Spanish, but still managed to keep it understandable, and I had to read a bit of technical words surrounding HIV/AIDS. (Whoa, it took me four times to get it right in English, the first time I typed it all in Spanish). Sindrome de inmuno-deficiencia adquirida (AIDS) is a handful to say. The game I lead went really well, I think it is because I decided to do an example instead of trying to explain what was going on.

There were some rough parts, but as a group we got through it.

Later we had a processing time. We were told by the volunteer that was there to guide us that we did a good job, and that our Spanish was coming along fine. I liked getting the evaluations by the Spanish teachers this time because there was a spot for what you did well as well as what you did wrong, and they didn’t write down every mistake that we made. They also said we did a good job and that we made mistakes, but that mistakes are to be expected and that everyone could understand us, which is the most important part.

Also in the afternoon, we had a man with HIV come to talk to us about HIV in Honduras. There are a lot of stigmas associated with people living with HIV/AIDS here. Although it is illegal, a lot of places make you get an HIV test before they will hire you. If people know you have HIV, they won’t talk to you or touch you in anyway. So, a lot of people keep their HIV a secret, or don’t get tested because nothing good can happen for them for getting the test. There is the number of reported cases in Honduras, and then a projected number which accounts for the people who don’t get tested.

I learned a lot about HIV in the last two days. I consider myself an educated person, but I didn’t know a lot of the things that were presented today.

Ahh, I just saw my first scorpion! I think I am going to shower tonight in my boots! Just kidding, but stepping on the floor is not on my priority list right now. The scorpion by the way is in the crack between my wall and the ceiling. Still, I didn’t really need to see it.

So, what was I going to say before the scorpion came along? Oh, the betting pool. We have put together a list of potential sites that we might be moving to. This list has been patched together by current volunteers and occasional hints that are passed down (although who knows if the hints are right because the staff likes to drive us nuts like that). So, each person gives 10 Lempiras and writes their list of who is going to go where. Each person that guesses who is going to go where, and the person with the most right answers wins and gets all the money. It will be interesting to see how many sites are right.


Saturday

Normally Saturday means weekend, it means happiness, it means a chance to enjoy yourself doing something fun. Not this Saturday. We spent all day Saturday in the immigration office in Teguc. It stunk. The people there were very nice to open specially for us, but only one of the computers for preparing the residency cards was working so the process took twice as long as normal. We left Pespire at 6:30am, the bus had a very hard time with the uphills, so it took us over an hour and a half to get to the business group (we were supposed to be in Teguc at the time we picked them up). We get there and the health group is already there so it was nice to see them again. Annie was very intelligent and brought her cards and cribbage board. We played, then a little while later had a 4 person game going. Good times. I now miss cribbage again.

Around 12pm, it became evident that we were not going to be done any time soon, so we all went to lunch at restaurants. A lot of people went to pizza hut. Then, back to the immigration office. It was funny though, as I was getting my fingerprints taken, the guy asked me if were staying in Teguc, and when I told him Pespire, his reaction was priceless. I them made some joke about the heat and he laughed. We were all happy that it was only 80F in Teguc, it never drops below 90F here, even at night.

We finally managed to get out of the office around 4:30pm, or a little later. Then a few people wanted to go to a supermarket, so we went there. The gringos definitely swarmed around the alcohol section. So, its kind of bad to buy a lot of alcohol at your town because the thinking around alcohol here is different, there is no recreational drinking, or there is only a little of it. Most of the time the only people who drink are the drunks, so you have to be careful not to buy a lot, so this was a chance for people to buy some without looking bad in their community. We have been told that volunteers will leave their site to go out and drink occasionally because their reputation is completely reversed (from good to bad) with only one beer. Therefore, although it sounds bad to say the gringos swarmed around the alcohol, it’s actually kind of a sign of respect towards our towns.

We got back to Pespire after nightfall. I missed the mango festival party because I was so tired. I must have been really exhausted because I fell asleep when it was still 96F in my room.

Sunday:

I was really good Sunday, I did all my homework and even a little extra. The day was really relaxed, and hot. Most days it seems like the sun is the problem, but it was overcast all day or at least most of the day, so you couldn’t blame it on the sun. I have a dress that I brought which is very thin, and I was still sweating just sitting around. Every time I got up I could feel the back of the dress was wet from sweat.

Monday:

So, I will apologize here for the long lapse in time between entries. It is now Monday and I don’t see a time to put this online in the near future. It’s like this, on Mondays and Tuesdays, I usually have tutorials after classes, so there isn’t time before dinner to go to the internet café. Wednesday I will probably have a friend cut my hair, which may seem like a less important activity from your point of view, but you are not in the crazy heat. So, hopefully Thursday I will remember to bring my flash drive and money to go to the internet café.

What did we do today? Well, we have a meeting every Monday morning to review the events of the week. This is because it was getting really confusing for a while there, and the facilitators agreed to our request for a group meeting every Monday. We learned we will be doing the sanitation charlas in a school in the aldeas (small small small towns in the mountains- remember this word, it will come up often). The problem is we have to change our plans, or at least I do; speaking of which, I need to do that before I go to bed tonight. Try describing hand-washing in extreme detail, then try doing it in another language. We don’t have a new charla for this week, we only have to talk to the people in the afternoon about prevention of dengue and other related illnesses.

So, in the afternoon, we started to build pilas (I’ve mentioned these before, imagine large concrete water storage tank). Playing with concrete is hard. There is a lot of bending over and shoveling, and that is after we pawned off the sifting of gravel to the local kids. We now have the base done, it feels like we did more than that, but nope. Tomorrow we start with the sides. Hopefully this lasts longer than our stove which cracked in the first week.

I had a pretty cool tutoring session today. I had it with my first Spanish teacher here, who I have not talked to a lot since I stopped having classes with here. So, we worked on the subjunctive for a while, although we have only just started when to use the subjunctive so we didn’t do it for too long. Eventually she told me that for the interview I need to master the preterite and imperfect, so although I am trying to practice other tenses, I need to keep going with them too. So, she had we tell a story in the past, and she never corrected the tense, so either I nailed it, or she was just letting me talk. But, at the end she said I have done a good job learning the language and I enjoyed it. My goal is to make advanced low in the last interview, but the jump from intermediate high to advanced low is a little hard to jump.

Wednesday

So, for two days in the afternoon we have been working on these pilas. It is hard work in the sun. There is no autumn here, a time where it cools down between summer and winter, so we are still full steam ahead summer down here. Last night it finally went below 90F!

Today my group gave a small charla on hand-washing and teeth-brushing in a school in a poor community. It went fairly well. There were only 7 students (poor and small community) in the 4th grade. There were four of us and two teachers observing us, so it was a little interesting almost outnumbering the students today.

I spent a good deal of time today in the pila. We had to apply the concrete mixture into the insides, so I climbed (was picked up and put) in the pila. Problem: It is already hot, and I was inside a concrete container. No air movement whatsoever. It was definitely hot in there. Every time I would stand up, I would think how nice it was outside since there was a little breeze. Needless to say I was soaked in sweat. Later, our volunteer supervisor climbed in there to finish some work and he was in there for over an hour. Good times.

Thursday:

The good news was since we stayed so late yesterday, we were able to leave early today. Afterwards I went to try and use the internet to post this, but couldn’t get online because there was no electricity in most of Pespire. Hence, this is a superlong blog and it has been a very long time between posts.

Since I couldn’t get to use the internet, I went over to some friends’ house and Kalin cut my hair. It feels a lot better now that it is shorter. It was really funny, her host sister has an 8 month old baby, so spending time with babies is always fun, but his Mom gave him a sip of Gatorade and his face was pricesless. This baby rarely cries, so he is cool, and I’m a little jealous that they get to play with a baby every day.

Friday:

Vacation day! Carlos being the incredibly smart man that he is, planned in a vacation day, and kept it a surprise up until Monday. So, we all had to bust buns to finish the pilas Thursday, but it worked out because we got to go to the river! Not the river in town, but the river further downstream that is cool and deep and has large rocks to jump off of. I won’t lie the first reaction when we got to the hacienda was “where is the river?” because we had to walk through the cow pastures to get there. We had a great time though. It felt so good to finally be cool and to swim. It was a total day of relaxation. It was also a day of sunburns for some people (I managed to squeak by with the faintest of burns).

Saturday

It rained, it actually rained! Winter is coming! So, in about a month to month and a half I will be complaining about the rain. But with the rain came a little cooler weather. I was in the garage which is a long corridor with doors on both ends. The ends were both open which normally creates a little bit of a wind tunnel, and it was so nice and cool out. I read almost an entire book while sitting in a hammock. Speaking of books, once I get to my site, and decide whether I am going to live with a family or look for an apartment, I will be asking for books, so save any good ones that you read for me. Wait until I give the word to send them though. I am going to follow the lead of many of my PC companions and make a list of all the books I have read in Honduras. A lot of people say they read a lot while in the peace corps. I read a lot normally, as Kelsey can attest to since I always gave her a ton of books when I visited her.

Saturday night was pretty fun. Both my sisters from Tegus were down. With Saydi comes her novio Juan Carlos. Anyway, to start the story: Jorgito had asked me if I wanted to play cards, so he was teaching me a few Honduran games. Then after dinner we were playing at the table and Juan Carlos comes in and starts asking if I know the game UNO. Well, I brought uno with me, so I got them out. Then starts the games. Luckily he knew how to play so he could explain the rules (although I have the rules in Spanish so could have read, but that’s no fun), and it was very interesting at first trying to explain to five people how to play UNO. It was a lot of fun. I don’t remember the games being as long though, in one game I really think I shuffled the used cards four or five times because we needed more. Later, some neighbors came over and we played some more.

Sunday

Two cool days in a row! Talk about one happy Jill!

I slept in really late this morning because it was cool enough in my room to do so. I just couldn’t see getting up when I could lay around for two extra hours and not be sweating, you just have to take advantage of these situations as they come.

I played some more cards in morning, did some more letter writing, studied some Spanish and just had a rather tranquilo day.

What else is fun though to add. No interesting food adventures lately. I have almost become completely adapted to Honduran food, withstanding their spaghetti, they use some kind of oil while cooking which makes it rather interesting.

I saw my first scorpion here the other day. He was in the small gap between the wall and the tin roof. That was fun, I was just happy he was far away.

We played more UNO later that afternoon. After my sisters left to return to Teguc, the family returned to its normal tranquilo state.

This week our plans are to give small charlas to water boards and the local plumbers who take care of the water systems. Everything this week is in Spanish, the tech sessions are all in Spanish because we need to get used to discussing everything in Spanish. The advancados and other more advanced people in Spanish are having their final language interviews this week, and those of us who struggle a little more are having ours next week. Not that it matters too much though because there is only one real Spanish class between now and then. The last week is filled with what we call CORE classes, which are a mixture of things like safety and security, general development, and anything else we need to know about that doesn’t include language or tech classes.

Although I am excited to see my family in Las Cañadas again, I am a little sad to be leaving this one. They have been very good to me. I feel very at home here. I am leaving on my brother’s birthday (no cake for me), and the day before mother’s day. That reminds me:

Happy Mother’s Day Mom!

Ok, so i just found out my site. I am happy because it sounds like it has a lot of work, and a bunch of amenities in the town, the only thing is that it is far from everyone in my group now. I will have two site mates though and two more 20 minutes away by bus.