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.

PICS TOO!!!!!!!

My first turranchula (sp)!

Latrine building!

Center for reconnect

Forest in Celaque.

Outlook from the mountain

View from the foreigners hotel in Gracias

This is the mountain I climbed, behind the clouds.

MORE INTERNET ACCESS!!!!!!!!!

Whoa, it has been a long time since I have written. The blog below is the first one, so read that first. The internet just hasn’t been working in town, I am not sure why, but it just isn’t working.

Interesting things:

Scabies wasn’t actually scabies, it was something else and is almost completely gone.

I went out to lunch the other day with my host mom, host sister, and the Japanese Volunteer in the house. It was a good bye lunch for him, because he has finished his two years and has left. It was good though because he actually talked. This is not normal. We lived in the same house for a little over four months and I knew nothing about him and had heard him talk like two times for three words each time. My host mom was great too, she walks in and is like “I want a margarita!” I hadn’t seen her ask for a drink before.

Other things:

Mel Zelaya is back in Honduras. As of now there has been no issues with this, but we are again unable to travel through Teguc.

In a few weeks the aspirantes will become volunteers. We are getting two in the department. One is a youth development volunteer and the other is in municipal development.

Things are progressing fine, I no longer have embarrassment to speak in Spanish, and as long as people don’t speak too mumbled I can understand them. Please no cracks on the hypocrisy of that statement.

I have finally started a few of my own projects for work. With the situation still a little volatile, I don’t want to travel in case they reinstate the curfew so I haven’t been traveling.

INTERNET ACCESS!!!!!!!!!

Ok, so to start where I left off:

I got back from the celebrations, and then began to plan for my upcoming technical four day training. This is done every year and called reconnect. Monday I basically sat around and packed, and relaxed. Tuesday I got up early and caught the bus to Teguc. This ended up being more stressful than need be because to get a ride up to the reconnect site, and thus arrive on time, I had to get to the office by a certain time, and it was doubtful for a while. I did make it, and then got to chill for the ride, and even scored some Burger King out of it! I like Burger King.

Seeing everyone for the first time since training was cool. Some people have changed quite a bit (sickness can cause weight loss), and I don’t know, it was just a time to relax. The first afternoon was filled with a field trip to visit this awesome sustainable agriculture farm. They have collection systems to drink the rain water (tested clean by Univ. of Vermont) and also have larger rainwater collection tanks for other uses in the farm. They have composting latrines, ceramic filters, compressed dirt buildings, organic crops, a biodigestor to trap methane gas which they use in their kitchen, and are a leader in encouraging diversifying crops and preventing erosion in fields. They also have coffee wine there, which one person bought a bottle and all of us tried it. The guy called us drunks because we immediately opened the bottle and finished it that afternoon. But, one bottle and 15 people doesn’t last long, so one afternoon is sufficient to down it.

That night was just filled with hanging out. During training several groups had formed, but we just hung out as one groups, which was nice. It didn’t get out of control, which out boss was worried about. Oh, the first night it was just the Health group and Wat/San (my group) who arrived in Feb.

The first morning we went out to build a latrine. Now, normally this should take two or more days, but we built what we could in the time frame to get an idea of the process. This was super helpful because I have a large latrine project coming up at work. I was pretty tired from moving rocks and sand around, but when we came back the H12-ers were at the training site. These are the people who arrived a year before me. Afternoon was filled with a lot of processing and how is everyone, any concerns, how is everyone holding up with the political situation, etc. I got bored quickly with that. The second night was definitely more energized than the first, a lot of people, a lot of drinking. It is a PC event after all. Nothing too out of hand happened.

Next morning people were in various stages of hurting. Some people got sick, some hung over, and some just tired from staying up later. More meetings, more talking, not much more.

Third night was a party. We had a dj, but most people were just content to sit around and talk. It was a themed party, 70’s style. The costumes ranged from party-poopers who didn’t do anything, to some really crazy outfits. My camera doesn’t work at night, so eventually I will get some pics from someone else to show how great my home-made costume was. I am so proud.

Next morning everyone had to get packed and out pretty early. Everyone travels by bus here, so the travel time home ranged from 15 minutes to 10 hours. I went to Gracias, Lempira to visit the site of friends. We stopped at a really cool place for a while, and this town has a HUGE market. Our market is tiny but theirs is huge with just a ton of fresh fruits and vegetables. I am jealous of that. The area I went to is also the traditional home of the Lenca people, so there is a lot of pottery there as well. I was carrying around an already stuffed bag, so I will have to go back later and buy some.

Finally we made it into their town. We ended up going to the hot springs that night. I was amazed, I could walk around there in my bathing suit without comments; in my town I can’t even wear capris without hearing piropos. They are so nice, they have made the place a nice family atmosphere and have created these giant pools for the natural hot spring water. We got to talking with these girls from a tourism school who are going around and studying Gracias, and that was cool to hear their views on Honduras and tourism and ecotourism as well.

Saturday was the big day. We decided to hike up the highest mountain in Honduras in one day. Normally people do this in 2. We ended up starting a little late. Then we walked very slowly to start (I had serious allergy problems and felt like the pressure in my head was twice what it needed to be). We hiked for a very long time, and at 2:15pm made it to the top. We headed back down at 2:48pm. Pretty soon after the clouds rolled in, and it started to get dark faster than normal due to cloud cover and the tree canopy cover as well. At this point let me assure you that we are alright, just with valuable lessons learned. We are hiking as fast as we can, trying to only stop when absolutely necessary, and it just keeps getting darker. Once we climbed down the seriously steep section we were running whenever possible to make up time. Then we got flashlights out, but only had 2 for the 3 of us. Eventually it started to rain. We were doing good thanks to Bert’s amazing sense of where the trail was, but then we got to a tricky spot, and were like, did we cross this raging river? Was it a raging river earlier, or did the rain make it this way? Eventually we back-tracked the 20m until we found the trail, and then found where we were supposed to go. There was still a small stream crossing that I ended up just walking through it instead of trying to jump on slick rocks, and thus got soaked because it was deeper than I thought.

We had called a mototaxi driver to come and get us at a certain time when we had cell phone signal, but we seriously misjudged the distance we had left before the visitor’s center. So, by time we finally got there it was past pitch dark and the guy wasn’t there. It turns out he went (still amazing because no other driver would even attempt it, especially at that hour) but his kids were in the mototaxi and were crying because they were scared, so he left again. Well, we walked as fast as we could on the dirt road, and eventually got signal to call him and he headed back up to get us. This is why you need to make friends with the taxi drivers! He had to drop his kids off with friends because they were refusing to go back up. We did give him a lot of extra money for doing this for us.

The next day he saw us hobbling around town in all our pain. He even gave Kalin and I a short FREE ride because he saw us wincing while walking down a street.

So, lessons learned: always have emergency items with you, you can’t use I’m in Honduras and don’t have them in my traveling bag excuse, always stick with your turn around time, it doesn’t matter how close to the top you are, and love your taxi drivers. Except for some aching muscles and joints, everyone was fine afterwards.

It took me 12 hours to get home. In the States I could drive from Allentown, PA to my house in 8 hours, but not in Honduras, things just travel slowly here.

Well, then I got home, and had these crazy things on my legs, and other places. I go to the doctor, and she says I have scabies. For those of you who don’t know what this is, I have little mites crawling around through my skin. Apparently they are supposed to itch more, but it’s not too bad. Therefore, I have spent an enormous amount of time the last few days ironing everything. The heat is what kills these little pests (they can live in your clothes for a few days), and since we don’t have a dryer (unheard of in Honduras), I have been ironing everything. This includes my mattress, underwear, and later today the straps on my backpack. It’s a good time.

A few days later I went to visit my friend’s site for her birthday. It was a good time, and a few volunteers from other areas came by.

weekend fun

Friday night:

Friday afternoon S’s friends arrived. They are in the same group, have baseball teams so came to help with the practice and later go to the Corn Festival with us. We hung out for a while and made pizza from scratch. Delicious! I am thinking of making this for my host family some day.

Saturday:

Once a day of relaxation; is now a very busy day with a crazy morning. This week it did turn out to be a little less hectic than normal. I got up and ready for tennis and then called for a ride and to get to the gym with all the baseball equipment and to get the gym opened, but our contact was out of town, so I got to wait for baseball to start. We ended up jumping in the back of a pick-up to get to the school and arrived just in time. We had a good practice, we wanted to have a game, but the kids just aren’t ready, I don’t trust them to pitch or catch well enough to play. They gave us a few ideas and I was able to relax a bit and take some pics while Sara (S’s friend) took charge of our throwing group for a bit.

After practice, we ate, showered and left. Well, important pit stop, the best coffee in town. We are known for our coffee which is saying something. The woman even showed us how they roast it, what it looks like before and after and invited us to come back and see the process one day.

In town we went to see the Japanese volunteers in the area perform. Really, there was a bunch of acts, and we got there in time to see them. Maybe next year we will do something to represent the USA. Maybe not.

So, afterwards we went to track down bull-riding. This is clear across town and there is a ton of people there and we walked through what looks like a flea-market set-up but its new stuff. Getting through there was fun. We eventually find where the action takes place, but needed 15 minutes to find where to buy tickets. We get in, and it starts 2 hours late (we arrived an hour and a half late, so it actually worked out) and it’s a lot different than what you see in the States.

Dinner followed at a few stands. I got a few different plates, and loved eating the street food and enjoying the atmosphere. Still later that night was dancing. Everyone was impressed that this town pulled off an event like this. It was huge, with several blocks fenced in and a stage at the end of every block. Some had live bands, others had DJs. The mood was great, I was expecting a lot of drunks and a lot of aggressive people, but it was all really relaxed. I am so glad that I went.