Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
Touch the Hem of His Garment
December means I have already been in Honduras for six months. The idea of six months before seemed like so much time. I mean, that's half a year. More than a semester of college. Too many days. However, it flew by like nothing. Maybe time goes by faster in spanish? That must be it. Luckily, despite missing home and the fam I was able to celebrate Thanksgiving in true American fashion: surrounded by gringo friends and eating the tgiving staples. As much as I am starting to feel a part of my community, there really is no sense of community like us volunteers.
As far as work goes, another month brought a few accomplishments. Since all rural communities, well all communities for that matter, dont have a public water system like us in the states and instead receive all their water from the nearest mountain spring source, all towns are required to have a junta de agua, or water board, to oversee the water. My board wants to convert the old water tank and system to be used as an irrigation system to its beneficiaries. This would help out a lot during the dry season (which is quickly approaching!) when Honduras hardly gets any rain. We are only in the beginning stages of this however hopefully we can get that accomplished and I can piggyback some improved agricultural practices lessons. My environmental club is going strong, with us meeting every wednesday and thursday still. In Gracias, I am writing protocols and developing plans to monitor four focal species in the park: ocelots, quetzals, salamandra, and an endemic tree species. Hopefully these can provide baseline data for future researchers to come and develop these projects more as well as inspire Hondurans to develop monitoring plans for other species. My work with MAPANCE could be a full time job, however since Gracias is not my site (Catulaca!) I have to fairly share my time between the two places. Its an ever growing guilt trip I put myself through but I always remind myself part of my job is to leave and work in another town so I shouldnt feel guilty about leaving my community.
Besides working, I spend most of my free time fighting the frigid cold (its gotta be high 40s here), playing lots of dominoes (courtesy of Dona Judy), and still drinking lots of coffee. I plan to spend Christmas with my host family but I may try and have a very gringo new years to mix it up. Ive earned some English, right? And of course, I am so excited to have my dad come visit in the new year. In true campesino fashion I am going to take him around my town and country and, you guessed it, drink lots of coffee.
As far as work goes, another month brought a few accomplishments. Since all rural communities, well all communities for that matter, dont have a public water system like us in the states and instead receive all their water from the nearest mountain spring source, all towns are required to have a junta de agua, or water board, to oversee the water. My board wants to convert the old water tank and system to be used as an irrigation system to its beneficiaries. This would help out a lot during the dry season (which is quickly approaching!) when Honduras hardly gets any rain. We are only in the beginning stages of this however hopefully we can get that accomplished and I can piggyback some improved agricultural practices lessons. My environmental club is going strong, with us meeting every wednesday and thursday still. In Gracias, I am writing protocols and developing plans to monitor four focal species in the park: ocelots, quetzals, salamandra, and an endemic tree species. Hopefully these can provide baseline data for future researchers to come and develop these projects more as well as inspire Hondurans to develop monitoring plans for other species. My work with MAPANCE could be a full time job, however since Gracias is not my site (Catulaca!) I have to fairly share my time between the two places. Its an ever growing guilt trip I put myself through but I always remind myself part of my job is to leave and work in another town so I shouldnt feel guilty about leaving my community.
Besides working, I spend most of my free time fighting the frigid cold (its gotta be high 40s here), playing lots of dominoes (courtesy of Dona Judy), and still drinking lots of coffee. I plan to spend Christmas with my host family but I may try and have a very gringo new years to mix it up. Ive earned some English, right? And of course, I am so excited to have my dad come visit in the new year. In true campesino fashion I am going to take him around my town and country and, you guessed it, drink lots of coffee.
Saturday, November 6, 2010
Old Fascinations We Crave
In exactly five days I will be reaching the 2 month mark, the encroaching benchmark where we are supposed to make the switch from "getting to know your community" to "working with your community." It's terrifying. Now, I can't simply walk around aka work on my tan and drink coffee and peoples' homes. It is official, now comes the telling legacy of our PC years. But how does one really start? When you hear about such amazing projects going on, you do start to feel inferior about your own service. One volunteer is planning a country-wide girl's leadership and selfconfidence camp. Another volunteer is developing a city wide trash service, something that exists in very few Honduran towns (usually they simply throw their trash in the streets or burn it since trash dumps don't exist).
What do I have to show? I've developed a knack for creating business casual outfits that don't match at all. I'm no longer afraid of my family's large bull (featured below). A handfull of kids know my name. But often times when I reflect those are the only things I think I have accomplished. And now I am expected to be a real real person. Not just a real person. I have a responsibility to my community, to my project directors, to the kind taxpayers of the USA who give me my monthly allowance (thank you!), and to myself. And it couldn't come at a harder time. By the end of this month, the entire country of Honduras will dedicate 14 hrs of everyday to the coffee harvest. Whether they own coffee fincas of their own or are coffee cutters on other fincas, virtually every community vacates during the day. And frankly, it's tough to do community projects without community members. Also, they still speak spanish here, dontcha know. Ugh can't I just be fluent already?
But when I take a step back, and stop being so hypercritical, I guess I have accomplished some things already and am ready to dive into projects of my own. In a week and a half, I will start my environmental club with the youth of the community. In my opinion the easiest group to convince of the importance of preserving our environment, the youth are so excited to get extra time to hang out with the local gringo and do some hands on activities, something that is difficult to incorporate into their current school cirriculum. I have been helping some families with their family's gardens and have attracted interest from the community to start lessons on organic fertilizers and pesticides and nutrition. And I could potentially address the community's basic need of healthy water by installing letrines in those homes that do not have a bathroom or it is in bad condition.
Just keep your head above water, Justino. And it's all just starting. Soon, I will have the freedom to visit my fellow PCVs at my own discretion and gain ideas and inspiration from them. Once projects get off the ground in my community, I will gain limitless confidence with my new friends and hopefully lead to much more integration and work. Just keep busy is our mottos to sanity. In the trying time of the first initial months, sometimes I just need to tell myself you are doing your job right. well. be proud. Who knows where a certain conversation, certain day, or certain cup of coffee will take you. And hey, if all else fails, I can always go play soccer with some kids. I know I can't play, they know I can't play, yet somehow no one really cares because we both know I have the time in the world (at least the next two years of the world).
What do I have to show? I've developed a knack for creating business casual outfits that don't match at all. I'm no longer afraid of my family's large bull (featured below). A handfull of kids know my name. But often times when I reflect those are the only things I think I have accomplished. And now I am expected to be a real real person. Not just a real person. I have a responsibility to my community, to my project directors, to the kind taxpayers of the USA who give me my monthly allowance (thank you!), and to myself. And it couldn't come at a harder time. By the end of this month, the entire country of Honduras will dedicate 14 hrs of everyday to the coffee harvest. Whether they own coffee fincas of their own or are coffee cutters on other fincas, virtually every community vacates during the day. And frankly, it's tough to do community projects without community members. Also, they still speak spanish here, dontcha know. Ugh can't I just be fluent already?
But when I take a step back, and stop being so hypercritical, I guess I have accomplished some things already and am ready to dive into projects of my own. In a week and a half, I will start my environmental club with the youth of the community. In my opinion the easiest group to convince of the importance of preserving our environment, the youth are so excited to get extra time to hang out with the local gringo and do some hands on activities, something that is difficult to incorporate into their current school cirriculum. I have been helping some families with their family's gardens and have attracted interest from the community to start lessons on organic fertilizers and pesticides and nutrition. And I could potentially address the community's basic need of healthy water by installing letrines in those homes that do not have a bathroom or it is in bad condition.
Just keep your head above water, Justino. And it's all just starting. Soon, I will have the freedom to visit my fellow PCVs at my own discretion and gain ideas and inspiration from them. Once projects get off the ground in my community, I will gain limitless confidence with my new friends and hopefully lead to much more integration and work. Just keep busy is our mottos to sanity. In the trying time of the first initial months, sometimes I just need to tell myself you are doing your job right. well. be proud. Who knows where a certain conversation, certain day, or certain cup of coffee will take you. And hey, if all else fails, I can always go play soccer with some kids. I know I can't play, they know I can't play, yet somehow no one really cares because we both know I have the time in the world (at least the next two years of the world).
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Friday, October 1, 2010
No Style
Tomorrow marks the three week anniversary of arriving in my site, Catulaca, Lempira. No it doesn´t seem like that long but in total I have almost been here in Honduras for four months. It is crazy to think how fast the time has already gone and after talking with other volunteers to think how fast my time will go over the next 23 months. Things have slowed up quite a bit since getting in site. No longer do I have 18 other gringos to talk (in english) with, a consistent 730-5 schedule, patient teachers willing to listen to my horrible spanish, and random classes about composting and animal monitoring. Now, I sit on my porch roughly 5 hours a day, enter random peoples houses and try and make conversation with them about planting beans or their children, and play crazy eights a ridiculous amount of times with my dad. Though I am nothing but optimistic. I live in a beautiful community (yes I know I still havent put up pictures), have a great potential for projects, and slowly my spanish is developing from painfully slow to just slow. But what is my community like? What have I been doing? Thanks for asking:
1. Catulaca began as a Spanish colonial town established in 1868. Since the first inhabitants were European and not indigenous Lenca, many people call the residents "The Gringos of Catulaca." A vast majority of the people have blue eyes, very fair skin, and could easily be mistaken for fellow gringos if it wasn´t for their obviously campesino spanish. Basically, I fit right in (sort of).
2. Only in Peace Corps do you prefer to hang out with people seven years or more younger than you because there is less pressure to speak great spanish. Even though I should be talking with the established leaders of the community, sometimes I just want to draw beanie babies with my five year old neighbor or play cards with my host brother. At least I have learned about 20 different names for card suites.
3. I am slowly growing accustomed to campesino life. My family has already let me spend a day doblando corn (folding over the stalks so the corn can dry), deshojando (stripping the corn leaves to prepare for planting beans), branding cattle, and castrating bulls. Granted, I only held the bowl while cutting the huevos of the bull, but I did eat them the next day for breakfast. And thus my Honduran accent was born.
4. I have never eaten so many corn products at once. corn corn corn corn corn corn corn corn corn corn corn corn corn corn. corn.
5. Have already survived a 104 degree fever in Honduras. Also found out it is impossible to find an available doctor on weekends. Also, Hondurans think any sickness can be cured with a stomach massage and some laxatives.
6. There are two cockroaches in my bathroom that are always sitting in the upper corner of my bathroom. Instead of freaking out and retrieving the closer shoe like any normal person would do I instead named them the Flinstones. One night there were four cockroaches. Yes, it was a yabadabadoo-time day.
7. It is COLDDDD here. As you may know, it is currently the winter here, which I thought only meant that it rained a lot (which it certainly does). But no. I am freezing, and my family says it is only going to get colder. So your previous misconception that Central America is nothing but beaches and banana trees, you are wrong.
8. Everyone loves to show off the few English words they know to you. Yes, it is very cute and endearing when it is your community or family saying "hey" to you as you walk past. However, when you ask the bus driver how much the trip costs and instead of simply saying "diez" they instead count it out to you on your fingers, it gets extremely frustrating. I get it, Im 2m and obviously am not from here. But when I step out from the home of a small Honduran aldea and get on a bus to go to the next closest town, they could at least assume I know my numbers in spanish.
9. There are quite a few volunteers near me and it was great this past week to meet them all. There are five volunteers right in Gracias where I work in the office as well as another Protected Areas Management volunteer the other direction from my town. You know I am going to aprovechar these opportunities to collaborate on projects.
10. Miss you all but am so happy with what I am doing with my life right now and look forward to you all taking an adventure of your own. I have mapped out about five different potential vacation routes for when people come and although Honduras is small, it has it all. Mayan ruins, beaches, mountains, cattle, what more could you ask for?
1. Catulaca began as a Spanish colonial town established in 1868. Since the first inhabitants were European and not indigenous Lenca, many people call the residents "The Gringos of Catulaca." A vast majority of the people have blue eyes, very fair skin, and could easily be mistaken for fellow gringos if it wasn´t for their obviously campesino spanish. Basically, I fit right in (sort of).
2. Only in Peace Corps do you prefer to hang out with people seven years or more younger than you because there is less pressure to speak great spanish. Even though I should be talking with the established leaders of the community, sometimes I just want to draw beanie babies with my five year old neighbor or play cards with my host brother. At least I have learned about 20 different names for card suites.
3. I am slowly growing accustomed to campesino life. My family has already let me spend a day doblando corn (folding over the stalks so the corn can dry), deshojando (stripping the corn leaves to prepare for planting beans), branding cattle, and castrating bulls. Granted, I only held the bowl while cutting the huevos of the bull, but I did eat them the next day for breakfast. And thus my Honduran accent was born.
4. I have never eaten so many corn products at once. corn corn corn corn corn corn corn corn corn corn corn corn corn corn. corn.
5. Have already survived a 104 degree fever in Honduras. Also found out it is impossible to find an available doctor on weekends. Also, Hondurans think any sickness can be cured with a stomach massage and some laxatives.
6. There are two cockroaches in my bathroom that are always sitting in the upper corner of my bathroom. Instead of freaking out and retrieving the closer shoe like any normal person would do I instead named them the Flinstones. One night there were four cockroaches. Yes, it was a yabadabadoo-time day.
7. It is COLDDDD here. As you may know, it is currently the winter here, which I thought only meant that it rained a lot (which it certainly does). But no. I am freezing, and my family says it is only going to get colder. So your previous misconception that Central America is nothing but beaches and banana trees, you are wrong.
8. Everyone loves to show off the few English words they know to you. Yes, it is very cute and endearing when it is your community or family saying "hey" to you as you walk past. However, when you ask the bus driver how much the trip costs and instead of simply saying "diez" they instead count it out to you on your fingers, it gets extremely frustrating. I get it, Im 2m and obviously am not from here. But when I step out from the home of a small Honduran aldea and get on a bus to go to the next closest town, they could at least assume I know my numbers in spanish.
9. There are quite a few volunteers near me and it was great this past week to meet them all. There are five volunteers right in Gracias where I work in the office as well as another Protected Areas Management volunteer the other direction from my town. You know I am going to aprovechar these opportunities to collaborate on projects.
10. Miss you all but am so happy with what I am doing with my life right now and look forward to you all taking an adventure of your own. I have mapped out about five different potential vacation routes for when people come and although Honduras is small, it has it all. Mayan ruins, beaches, mountains, cattle, what more could you ask for?
Monday, September 20, 2010
Clap Your Hands
Well hello the seven of you following my blog! At the request of my mom and those possibly wondering what the heck I will be busying myself with for the next two years I´m gonna lay it down for you all. Right now I am living outside of Gracias, Lempira in the west of the country (which does still eat tortillas contrary to what my other host family said). However, I am only going to be working 50% of the time in my community, which is unusual for the typical volunteer. In my community, they are interested in diversifying their diet. In short, Im (hopefully) going to teach them about family gardens (huertos) in the most sustainable way possible as well as potentially help develop an irrigation project they have started with nearby water/sanitation volunteers. But as many volunteers find their projects they are initially given are never realized and usually find themselves doing something else. For right now, I am simply being an awkward andy walking from house to house with my host mom making conversation with my stunted spanish about their lives in short. Hopefully I´ll impress them enough that they want to come to my future meetings. Hopefully.
The other 50% of the time I am working with an org called MAPANCE, Mancomunidad de Municipios de Parque Nacional Celaque. An org than came from the environmental management branch of the municipality, MAPANCE manages the Celaque National Park (cue wikipedia!) which boasts Honduras highest peak actually. With my supposed monitoring expertise, I am going to help MAPANCE collect data within the park about what sorts of flora and fauna exist since this data does not exist. This data, along with much more already accumulated and that still needs to be accumulated, will be assimilated into an application to be a UNESCO world heritage site. Different areas in the world can apply for this certification if they have exceptional biodiversity, programs to protect the biodiversity, and some sort of unique cultural aspect. If an area is internationally recognized as a UNESCO site it greatly boosts tourism potential and I imagine they get a pretty groovy stamp on their literature or something. Im not quite sure if this qualifies as latin bling bling. But MAPANCE hopes to become one of these sites and hopefully myself and the other PCVs around Celaque can help them achieve it.
Yes mom, I will put up pictures soon. Hopefully more than the three I already put up. I was gonna do it today but se me olvido mi camara. puchica. Also I decided the wittiest way for me to blog is through lists. You have been warned.
The other 50% of the time I am working with an org called MAPANCE, Mancomunidad de Municipios de Parque Nacional Celaque. An org than came from the environmental management branch of the municipality, MAPANCE manages the Celaque National Park (cue wikipedia!) which boasts Honduras highest peak actually. With my supposed monitoring expertise, I am going to help MAPANCE collect data within the park about what sorts of flora and fauna exist since this data does not exist. This data, along with much more already accumulated and that still needs to be accumulated, will be assimilated into an application to be a UNESCO world heritage site. Different areas in the world can apply for this certification if they have exceptional biodiversity, programs to protect the biodiversity, and some sort of unique cultural aspect. If an area is internationally recognized as a UNESCO site it greatly boosts tourism potential and I imagine they get a pretty groovy stamp on their literature or something. Im not quite sure if this qualifies as latin bling bling. But MAPANCE hopes to become one of these sites and hopefully myself and the other PCVs around Celaque can help them achieve it.
Yes mom, I will put up pictures soon. Hopefully more than the three I already put up. I was gonna do it today but se me olvido mi camara. puchica. Also I decided the wittiest way for me to blog is through lists. You have been warned.
Saturday, August 14, 2010
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