Mi casa es mi casa

So finally after 9 months of living with a host family (I really did enjoyed it) and searching for a place to live I found a house! It is plenty big for just me, I have a kitchen/living room, a bathroom, two bedrooms and a backyard, all this and I only pay $100 a month for rent, not too shabby. I took a trip with my host family to San Pedro to buy a fridge, electric stove, table, bed, fan, and dresser (it took 12 hours because of a car accident (not us though)). I’ve now been in my house for a little over two weeks and it is almost all set up the way I want it. It’s definitely a big switch having to do all my cooking and cleaning of an entire house by myself but it’s been a lot of fun, I’ve already used an entire roll of duct tape doing repairs, building makeshift shelves and whatnot. I have been surprisingly not lonely because whenever I walk by my old host family’s house, which is a lot because I only live ½ block away, they always invite me in for coffee or try to feed me because they don’t believe that a young man could possibly be able to cook for himself, it’s great having them be so welcoming and supportive of me.

Dia de San Valentine

I took a little trip to Tegus to spend Valentine’s Day with Katherine, it was a lot of fun, hanging out in Tegus for the weekend with her and the family, and I even got to go with her to the University where she is studying on Monday. It was a little difficult trying to plan Valentines activities for us in Tegus when I was in San Marcos and because I don’t know much about what to do in Tegus. We ended up having a nice/romantic dinner that I prepared for her, good pasta, chicken, French bread, and tres leche cake for dessert. Although it wasn’t over the top fancy it was really fun and in my opinion a success.

SPA Grant

One of the projects that I have been working on recently is what is called a SPA grant (small Project assistance) a program with the Peace Corps working with USAID (United States Agency for International Development). You are able to ask for funds up to $5,000 USD for a project in your community, the project needs to have a sustainable aspect, educational aspect, and be supported by the community too. We will be helping with the materials and construction as well as giving health talks on hygiene, water sanitation, diarrheic and parasitic diseases, as well as how to properly use and maintain a latrine. In San Marcos we have decided to write a SPA grant for a latrine project in 3 of the poorest villages, our goal, if approved is to build 80 latrines, 45 in Bella Vista, 20 in Panales, and 15 in Pimienta. We are just finishing up the grant and we will hopefully be submitting it today, I’m really excited about this project because it should make a lasting impact on the health of these villages. Keep this project in your thoughts and prayers and I’ll let you know when I know how it is going to progress.

Komo say deece?

Back in November I promised to help translate for a Medical Brigade from the States in Trinidad, Santa Barbara, back in November I was excited about it, but as the beginning of January rolled around my mood wasn’t quite the same, all I wanted to do was focus on stuff in San Marcos. Unfortunately for me I try to be true to my word, so at 7:00 on Saturday morning I found myself rolling out of bed and jumping on a 2 hour bus ride to meet a bunch of gringos from Louisiana. When I got there however, my attitude changed quickly, they were all really friendly and amazingly streamlined and organized with their equipment and personnel, they also fed us and put us up in a hotel…with hot water showers and air-conditioning! It turns out that they have been coming down to the same region for the past 12 years, what impressed me the most was the way that they have really worked with the locals working for change according to the needs and desires of the community. Along with me there were 3 other Peace Corps volunteers from the area, our job was to translate for the doctors and patients that came in, we were each paired up with a doctor and we acted as their mouth and ears. The first day we only worked a half day in the main city of Trinidad, it was mostly healthy people that came through, but it was a good warm-up for everyone. It was great timing for them to come down because me and another of the volunteers are from Seattle, and the Seahawks just happened to be playing the Saints in the first round of the playoffs, through a miraculous win the Louisianans were stunned, but remained in relatively good spirits, I tried not to rub it in too much. For the next three days we went out to the aldeas (small villages) and set up shop in schools or churches, we gave checkups, gave out medicine that the doctors prescribed, toothbrushes, and they had an eye clinic where they gave eye tests and gave out glasses. I was paired up with Dr. Melanie, she had been on this trip 5 times previously and she knew what she was doing, we were able to go very quickly through the patients because she knew what questions to ask with my translation and she knew what medicine they had and how much we could actually do for the patients, she was realistic with the treatment and also encouraged them to visit the local doctors for stuff that we couldn’t treat or needed continued attention. Together we probably saw over 250 patients in the 3 days with the whole group seeing about 700. I would say that it was a great time and time well spent, without translators they would have been in trouble and without their expertise and medicine many communities would be without attention. It was nice to see some American efficiency, see tangible results, speak English but still feel useful, I also took about 2 weeks’ worth of showers in 4 days.

Cumpleaños de Doña Dalila

January 3rd turned out to be the biggest of all the celebrations down here, bigger than Christmas, Día de Inocentes (like April fool’s day but on Dec 28th), New Year’s, or Kings Day. What would make January 3rd so important? My host grandma’s 65th birthday party of course. After everyone recovered from staying up to late on New Year’s, relaxed for a day, it was time to get back to the grindstone. Invitations were passed out, more family came down, the whole house had to be cleaned, re-cleaned and then decorated with balloons and streamers. Tables and chairs were rented, food prepared and even a marimba band was hired to play. All day we were preparing food, sandwiches, salads, drinks, and prepping the meat for the grill. At seven the party got started with the band starting to play, there were 4 guys with a combined age of probably 300 that were playing the big xylophone like instrument, by far my favorite part of the band. I got roped into grilling the meat with my host dad and uncles, tons of carne asada in great spices and amazingly chicken in a orange juice marinade. Because we had to cook the meat for so many people it took a long time, but we made sure to quality control test the meat frequently, chowing down on almost as much as we served to the rest of the party. After everyone had eaten plenty there was dancing and cake eating that lasted well into the early morning. It ended up being an unexpected but great way to finish up the holiday season,

El Año Nuevo

If there were a lot of fireworks for Christmas than you can probably guess what New Years is like. It is much more of family event than in the US, but just about everything here has more of a family aspect to it. There was lots more food and family all night, very similar to Christmas in fact. One tradition down here is that you make an effigy (I think that’s right) a big lifelike version of a person in clothes, stuffed with sawdust and fireworks that you burn at midnight in the streets. I think usually it is supposed to represent someone in your family that has passed away in the last year, but almost all houses do it. It’s pretty creepy because in the days leading up to New Year’s you will find people sitting along the street, or against a house, only to find out that they are fake, kind of like scarecrows.

La Navidad

So Christmas was a little different than usual this year, but it was still good, just a little hotter than normal. Usually for me Christmas is spent with family, having dinners, going to church, and then opening presents on the 25th in the morning, pretty chill and relaxing. This year I traveled to Yarumela to spend Christmas with my host family down there and my gf. At first it looked like it was going to be a pretty downer of a Christmas because my host grandma from Yarumela was in the hospital and it looked like we were going to have to spend Christmas in the Hospital with her, luckily she got better on the 23rd and was released meaning that it would be a “normal” Christmas. All of the 24th was spent readying the house for the massive amounts of family/guests that would be coming and making food, nacatamales are the most common Christmas time food down here. Down here Christmas is celebrate at midnight the night of the 24th/25th, fireworks are a big deal down here too so all day and especially right at midnight people light off fireworks in the streets…not the most relaxing way to celebrate Christmas, but it’s fun. I’m still not sure when/how Santa Clause visits because everyone is awake at midnight and nobody has chimneys. After the fireworks and lots of hugs and saying “feliz navidad” to everyone presents are exchanged, I got to sleep around 3:30. Christmas day is a low key day of eating and recovering from Christmas Eve, lots of food. The 26th we roasted a 25 pound pork roast, it took about 6 hours but it was worth every second. Hondurans are also big on making nativities, usually depicting the birth of Jesus and then also showing all of the major events in Honduras for the year, these scenes are amazingly elaborate and beautifully done (see the pictures).

Feliz Navidad y Año Nuevo

Hey everyone, it’s strange entering the holiday season knowing that I won’t be seeing you all or be having the normal end of the year traditions that I am so used to. I’ve never written holiday cards either, so this is another first for me, but I’m listening to Frank Sinatra, Mariah Carey, and Sufjan Stevens Christmas music and wrapping gifts so it’s beginning to look a little like Christmas. Many Peace Corps Volunteers say that Christmas is the hardest part of the Peace Corps, forget culture shock, work, strikes, political coups or Dengue fever, a Christmas alone can be the worst. Fortunately I am looking forward to all of the activities down here in Honduras and I have made many great relationships and have new families to spend the holidays with, it’ll be different.
Just a quick summary of the year of 2010 that is quickly ending: 10 months ago, in February, I took off from Seattle to serve my 27 months in the Peace Corps. I have been working with the health project down here whose main focus is on HIV/AIDS prevention/education and Maternal/infant survival. I am working and living in San Marcos, a small town in northwest Honduras and loving it. I work a lot in the villages around here, mostly with school kids and pregnant ladies…who saw that one coming? I also am playing the piano in the Catholic Church down here and playing soccer on a team. I also have a great Honduran girlfriend from Tegus named Katherine (pictured below). Next year should bring about more work, a youth project, infant nutrition project, a latrine project, and a new HIV/AIDS project, all of which I’m really excited about. For more info checkout my blog stuflu@blogspot.com.
It seems odd being almost Christmas and I’m sweating in my room with the fan on, even Seattle winters aren’t that mild. Around town you can see a couple of houses with lights up and a couple places with fake Christmas trees, definitely not the usual cheer I’m used to in the Northwest. Yesterday I did make our family Christmas classic teddy bear bread with my host family, they thought it was fun and a little weird…what else is new?
Hope all is well with you all, enjoy the holiday season, eat a candy cane for me and don’t complain about the cold weather too much.

Adios
-Stu

Adventures in Copan

Copan is one of the departments that borders my department of Santa Barbara; it is located to the South West of where I’m at, about an hour bus ride west from San Marcos. Although it is really close it is quite different (much cooler and wetter) and was relatively unknown to me. This last week we had a workshop for “Yo Tambien Merezco” in Santa Rosa de Copan, which, according to most volunteers, is there favorite/best city in Honduras. It isn’t a big city it has everything that you need, it is pretty, has stores, a market, nightlife, paved streets, and great food while still having Peace Corps budget prices. This workshop had the benefit of being in the city as opposed to previous ones that were in the outskirts, this meant that during breaks, lunch, and at night we could actually go out and do stuff instead of being confined to a conference center. The workshop was a great success, I feel like my counterpart, a 6th grade teacher, is really interested in implementing it in site, also people had a lot of fun and made good friendships. This was also the first time that I had met any of the new H-17 volunteers, all very interesting in their own ways. Other highlights of the workshop were great food, eating 10 pieces of cake in one day, buying a phone, discussing future projects with my boss/other volunteers and finding a random Christmas store with trees, lights, Santa Clauses and everything. The workshop was a quick Wednesday afternoon through Saturday morning trip.
Halloween is one of the biggest Peace Corps events of the year and it is always celebrated in Las Ruinas de Copan, a small town famous for their Mayan Ruins and a hotspot for tourists in Honduras. The thing about having Halloween be such a big deal is that for the rest of the year Volunteers are constantly planning and working on costumes. In the past 8 months I don’t know how many ideas I have gone through, but somehow John and I, by the time we were at the workshop still hadn’t really decided about what we wanted to be. We had almost given up and gone with a simple backup plan, Mormons, when all of a sudden we got the chance to spice it up a notch. For the last month we had joked around about being colegio (high school) girls. All students in Honduras wear uniforms so everyone knows what students look like, people had been talking about being high school students for Halloween, but we decided to kick it up a notch and play the gender card along with it. The problem was that asking to borrow a uniform (uniform top, high socks, and a pleated skirt) is a little bit awkward for male volunteers to do. Fortune shined it{s face upon us when, in Santa Rosa, while wandering around the market, we found a vendor that sold school uniforms. With the help of a female volunteer we managed to buy uniforms for $10, well worth it.
Saturday night in Las Ruinas was the night of the big party, a series of dance parties at bars around town. John and I shamelessly donned our uniforms and walked through the central park to the bar. We knew instantly that our costumes were a success, people stared, shocked initially and then started shouting out piropos (catcalls) and laughing hysterically…turns out two over six foot tall gringos in skirts aren’t the most common sights in Honduras. Throughout the night we got many sexually charged comments and even a few pinches and squeezes, fortunately neither of us cared or were worried, but I completely understand how uncomfortable actual girls would feel while wearing skirts…lots of funny stories that I’m not going to write down. It ended up being a very amusing and late night, one that won’t be forgotten by me or the local Hondurans for some time to come.

Barcelona

As I have repeatedly written in past blogs, soccer is king in Honduras, everybody has a favorite local team, Honduran national league team, and an international team, Barcelona is hands down the favorite international team in Honduras. Barcelona is arguably the best soccer team in the world right now especially after trouncing Real Madrid 5-0 last week; the same is true in San Marcos. How is it the same in San Marcos you ask? /Why are you writing a blog about this? There are a lot of different soccer leagues, Barcelona happens to be one the names of one of the teams in the 3rd division of 20-25 year old soccer players in San Marcos. Our region (San Marcos, San Francisco, Quimistan, La Flecha, Santa Rosa) has about ten teams, Barcelona is the best, it also happens to be one of the teams that my host dad runs, and also the team that I have recently begun playing with. So far we are first place in our division; we roll over most teams, last game winning 7-2 over a decent team. My first game came a few weeks ago, I didn’t play much, but in the time I did play I had a great time and it was real exciting. We were losing almost the whole game due to some sloppy plays, with 15 minutes left in the game we were down 3-2, that’s when I got into the game. We scored an equalizer but then we quickly let in another goal and it was looking bleak until one of our forwards scored again to make it 4-4, I was playing right mid and was involved in a couple plays, with about 5 minutes left in the game I was passed the ball for what would have been a simple give and go to an overlapping defender from our team, unfortunately a player on the other team had a different idea, frustrated by our comeback he slid tackled me from behind getting all leg an no ball, I went down hard but wasn’t hurt. I jumped up quickly to see what the ref was going to say, apparently I looked angry… the ref quickly gave the opposing player a red card, but my coach, wanting to protect me from doing anything rash rushed onto the field and began yelling at the ref, he got ejected too….oops. We ended up scoring from that free kick and winning the game 5-4. It’s funny, because we are in first place most of the fans were mad because of our comeback and generally root for the opposing teams so all the games have a lot of energy and passion. I’m getting to know the guys on the team better and it’s been a lot of fun, besides the frustrating paperwork problems being a foreigner. Today at 3 we play the second place team in the league in what should be another great game; I’ll let you know how it turns out.

Día Mundial De VIH/SIDA Manteniendo La Luz sobre VIH/SIDA y derechos humanos

World Aids Day is celebrated on the 1st of December around the globe, since HIV/AIDS is a large part of our work here in Honduras it would make sense for us to do something right? Kinda. As of the last week in November we hadn’t talked about World AIDS day at all in my health center or maternal clinic and I was OK with that, I figured I’d try to put something small together and give some talks in the health center, nothing too flashy. I’d been really busy with other projects and if nobody else was on board to do something I wasn’t going to take it personally. Just when I had gotten that all rationalized in my mind everything changed, of course. The head boss in our Maternal Clinic, the licenciada Francisca, with less than a week before the big day casually comes up to me and says, “so Stu, what do you think about doing a big World AIDS day celebration next Wednesday?”, I said that sounded good if other people were on board too, she promised me that they were…they weren’t really. I tried to gather some support from two of the health promoters, but because of some communication error they had yet to hear about the plans and were busy with other things. Monday rolled around, 2 days before the first and the the Lic. asked me how things were going and I said slowly. That’s when things kicked into gear. She ordered a meeting with all the health personnel and we got working, deciding that celebrating on Friday would be a better idea. All week we worked on stuff for the project, I’ll spare you the details, but we worked long hours but had fun doing it. We made torches and posters as well as decorating a truck for a march that we did around town with a drum band to get people attention. We also decorated the park gazebo with AIDS ribbons and posters and had pamphlets to pass out with info. The march ended up being a lot of fun, lots of people came out to watch us, this was followed up by educational activities in the park. All in all it was a success I’d say, there are definitely a few kinks that we will work out for World AIDS day 2011 but we learned lots and hopefully taught more.

Los Estados Unidos

So now that I’ve been back for about three weeks and gotten back into the thick of things back in Honduras I feel like I should probably talk about my time back home. For a little over a week I rushed around, didn’t get any rest, and was freezing cold…and it was great. There are a lot of Peace Corps Volunteers that don’t go home at all during their 27 month commitment, and then there is Peace Corps Honduras. Because we are so close to the US it isn’t uncommon at all for volunteers to head home for a family funeral, Thanksgiving or Christmas, if you live in Texas or Florida you can be home in 4 hours and $250, Seattle is the furthest contiguous US big city from Honduras. From leaving my house in San Marcos, the bus and taxi trip to the airport, a layover in Houston and touchdown in Seattle it took me about 14 hours to get home, not too shabby. The only problem was that it was 35 and raining when I got into Seattle, a little shock to my system. The main reason for my trip home was Rylan and Mali’s wedding, and for the first 4 days that was about all I did. I got in on Wednesday night, had a family dinner and quickly slept off my jetlag, Thursday was full or errands and then a rehearsal dinner. Friday was more things I had to get done in Seattle before a evening/sleepover with all the groomsmen, which was a lot of fun because most of my best friends also happened to be in the wedding party. Saturday morning rolled around which meant wedding pictures at UW and then getting ready for the wedding and reception. It was a really fun wedding, lots of friends that I hadn’t seen in 9 months and sweet Spearys(boat shoes) that the groomsmen got to wear. It was tough trying to balance my time between my really good friends that I wanted to spend lots of time with and talking to my other friends that I wanted to see and catch up with, talking about my work in the Peace Corps got a little tiresome at times, but it’s all good. Sunday was all family all the time with people showing up at the house at 10:30 and not saying goodbye to my last cousin till about 9:30 at night, but it was great to get to see everyone and get some quality conversations in. Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday were a blur of errands, friends and family, lots of great food that I hadn’t gotten to eat in too long everywhere too. By the time Thursday came around I was shocked that I had to pack up all my suitcases again and get ready to head back to Honduras, but I had one more activity planned. Knowing that the best flight for me to take to get into San Pedro Sula at a decent hour would be leaving at midnight I realized that I would get to indulge in one event that I had been dearly missing, UW football. UW happened to be playing a night game against UCLA at UW starting at 5. I got to go to the game, all bundled up of course, watch the dawgs manhandle the bruins and spend a little more time with my dad before heading to the airport and heading south. It really was a perfect way to end my whirlwind visit home. Although I dindn’t get to eat all the food I wanted, spend the holidays, or see everyone that I wanted it was still a great break from my work down here, a chance to get recharged for the work that is lined up. Thanks to everyone that made an effort to see me, I’ll be back for a bit in July if everything goes according to plans!

Frozen in Time at 90°F

Somehow I’ve managed to be in Honduras for 8 ½ months now, I really don’t know how that has happened or where the time is gone, I’m almost 1/3 of my way through my Peace Corps experience….crazy! Although I’ve done a lot of things, met a lot of people, and gone a lot of places it still completely blows my mind that the time has been passing so fast. I feel like i have somehow fallen into a bizarre time warp that I can’t really explain. I will now attempt to rationalize a few time bending phenomena’s that I have experienced here.
Work days: People here wake up early because they go to sleep so early, there really isn’t much to do in Honduras at night. For this reason the general work day, at least with the people I work with, starts around 7, lunch around 11:30, and generally finishes by 3, this has been tricky because I prefer to start around 9 and go till 5ish, the problem is finding people who will do work after lunch, most days I will be the last to leave the health center around 4:30, besides the janitor everyone else will have been checked out for about 2 hours earlier, they usually leave me the lock and tell me to lock up when I’m done. This leaves an extended afternoon that mysteriously disappears, mostly I play soccer or nap. The evenings manage to go even faster, I honestly still haven’t figured out where the hours between 6 and 9 go.
Workshops: I have gone to a number of workshops with the Peace Corps, all of them have been very good and beneficial for my relationships with counterparts and work, but they make short work of weeks too. Usually these workshops start on a Tuesday or Wednesday and go till Friday. The problem is that traveling to these gatherings takes up time, because volunteers are all over the country workshops are all over the country too, the closest one I’ve gone to was 3 hours away the farthest 9 hours…traveling kills days.
Traveling: Fortunately for me I don’t mind bus trips and I have gotten used to the inevitable delays that are associated with Central American travel. It seems like no matter where you go it will always take way more time than you expect to arrive and that you will arrive exhausted, it’s just a fact of traveling here, for that reason you usually kill two days on either ends of trips and feel it for much longer. Honduras also doesn’t have night transportation and even if they did I wouldn’t trust it farther than I can throw a bus. Traveling has to be done early in the day or you run the risk of waiting forever or getting stranded in a sketchy bus station (almost happened to me in San Pedro).
Seasons: I would have to say that the most mind blowing aspects of time here is the passing of weeks, months, and seasons. Although there is technically a dry season and a wet season, a cold season and a hot season, it is hardly noticeable and very hard to judge time because it is nothing like the “normal” seasons that we are accustomed to in the US. It is hard to picture seasons because here every day is more or less the same, you can’t see the flowers blooming, the leaves changing, the cold weather setting in, holiday decorations, summer vacation (Honduran schools go from January-November) ….nothing. Talking to people at home has been the only way to picture what season I’m in, hearing sports scores, or weather reports. Even though I know I’m going to be home in two weeks it’s hard to believe that it will really be November, leaves will have fallen, school years started, holidays coming and going.

Lets GO DAWGS!!!

So after getting to go to the UCLA game and then hearing about the Cal game a few days after it happened i knew that i had to do better with the Apple Cup. I was able to fortunatly call my parents during the 4th quarter and got to hear the last few minutes comentated by my parents. way too close but i'll take the win anyway, plus the Holiday Bowl on top of that! great stuff, hope we can do better this time around vs Nebraska

Juegos Traditionales

One of the many awesome things about San Marcos is that every year they host the Honduran Traditional Games Fair. This even happens in the end of April so I wasn’t here for this years fair, but I have been learning about it and doing some work with it. In an attempt to show off a little bit of the culture of Honduras various community members will, once a year, travel to demonstrate these games. In the past they have traveled as far as South Korea, most years just to the US. This year a group of 6 people from San Marcos are going to go to New Jersey and Washigton D.C. I was asked to help them out with the Visa application process because it is online in English and there are some confusing parts to it. I helped all of them get the right information together and thankfully everyone I helped, after their interview in Tegus was granted permission last week, they will be leaving on Sept 24, so it was some pretty close timing. This last Sunday I was also asked to help out with organizing the materials that they are going to be taking, it ended up being some work but mostly playing around. They are taking tops, parachutes, mini-soccer boards, marbles, and a couple other things that I don’t really know how to explain/play, but it is all really cool. I started to learn how to play with the tops, but it is harder than I expected, some of them are amazing with them, throwing them and catching them on their hands or doing other cool tricks. I borrowed one so that I can get some extra practice in so that I can be good when I go home. The day was finished off with going with some friends to see a “carrera de cintas” or a competition where guys rode horses as fast as they could and tried to spear little rings that were hanging from a rope above the road, it was very impressive and hard looking. All in all it was a great cultural day that I wont forget.

Feria en Yarumela

So after going to La Esperanza for the Family Health workshop some of decided it would be fun to head back to Yarumela, where we were for 2 months earlier, to check up on the families as well as go to the once a year fair. Danny and Lauren showed up on Friday, Tayrn and I came from the workshop on Saturday and John came up from Choluteca on Saturday as well. It was great getting to see my family again even though it had only been about a month since the last time I saw them. I got to go check out my families’ watermelon and guyaba farm; I got to slice bad watermelons out of the air with a machete…awesome. The fair was funny and weird because Yarumela is funny and weird, every day they had a parade/dance party in the street where guys in crazy masks and costumes dance to a live marching band, they stop on every corner for a song or two and grab people from the crowd to dance with/make fun of. Saturday night there was also the Yarumela princess coronation as well as a ‘torro de fuego’ a wooden frame of a bull that is loaded with fireworks and carried around in the middle of the park, it’s pretty much the worst idea ever but they love it here. Sunday was the motocross races and then a dance with one of Honduras’s most popular bands ‘Santa Fe’, I have never danced so much in my life, the dance was from 9-2:30 AM and we danced almost all of it, I was a sweaty exhausted mess by the end but it was worth it even though Monday my legs were sore. Saturday and Sunday nights I also got locked out of my house, I ended up sleeping an hour and a half outside both nights till people woke up...oops. It was a great weekend, getting to spend time with friends and family, dodging fireworks and dancing.

UW 32-USC 31

I didn’t find out the score of the game until Thursday when I checked my email and my grandpa told me the score. Good work dawgs, but let’s not have a repeat of last season though.

Family health Taller

So last week was filled with another trip to a Peace Corps workshop. It’s funny because the reality is that I have done a lot of traveling in my 7 months here in Honduras, more than many Hondurans have done in their lives, but I really go to the same places time and time again. This time it was back to La Esperanza, where we had the Men’s Health workshop, and then on to the happiest place on earth…Yarumela. I wasn’t super excited about going to the Family Health workshop, mostly because I wanted to spend some time at home, but I realized that this was a great opportunity for me to learn/review, but more so, a chance for my counterparts to learn and find ways to implement this topic in San Marcos, hopefully with my help/collaboration. I was able to take two counterparts from San Marcos, Nazareth, a health promoter that I have worked with a lot, and Cindy, a nurse that works in one of San Marcos’s smaller villages. It was great going with them because they are both young and I really enjoy spending time with them, they also are very motivated and passionate about their work so I feel like this information learned will really benefit everyone. La Esperanza was cold. Really cold. For the five days that we were there (Tuesday-Saturday) it rained and was cloudy all day, I think we saw the sun for about 15 minutes in total, it felt like November in Seattle….yuck. I knew that it would be chilly there so I brought a jacket and a sweatshirt, the only two warm weather articles of clothing I have down here, but my counterparts didn’t bring anything and they were miserable from the first moment we arrived so I loaned them my jacket and sweatshirt and jacket and I had to manage with long-sleeved shirts and a hat, the last day I gave up and brought a blanked to the conference room. All in all it was a good workshop, talking mostly about nutrition/malnutrition, diarrhea/hygiene, and home improvement techniques (gardens, better stoves, ect). It was a great review of information and a great way to get some ideas rolling with my counterparts and I’m excited to see where this leads.

Good work DAWGS

Although it is not really possible to watch or listen to the Husky Football games in San Marcos or pretty much Honduras in general it doesn’t mean that I’m not excited about the season. I was sad to see that we lost to BYU so last Saturday I took matters into my own hands. At game time I pulled out my Husky gear, two articles that I don’t get to wear very frequently here, sweats and a sweatshirt. Although it was too hot and I got some weird looks it got the job done, a UW victory.

Honduran Schools....blaaaah

One of the problems that Honduras has, this isn’t just me being judgmental, I’m pretty sure everyone in here can agree, is that the educational structure is flawed. Besides the normal understaffed, under budget, and too big of class sizes there lies a number of other problems. One of the things that frustrates me and the other volunteers is the teaching style that is far too common here, it’s like teaching to the test but worse, they teach straight out of a book and have the students copy and memorize, word for word answers, leaving no room for creative thinking, reasoning, or logical thinking. One of our goals when teaching in the schools is to get them participating and thinking, anything to break the monotony of the learning style that they are so used to, it’s not easy to do this because they don’t like participating because they aren’t used to it, but it is cool seeing them become more comfortable with it. The other major problem with the school systems is the ridiculous amount of political power that the teachers have in this country. They strike over any and everything and they can get away with it with no problem, during August they taught 2 days, the rest of the month they were on strike, although their cause was justified, not getting paid, the amount of damage that they inflicted on the students was tremendous. There are already a ridiculous amount of holidays here that they get the day off for, with this 3 ½ week strike it just added to the problem. This long of a strike isn’t unusual either, something to this magnitude happens almost every year, because of this many school teachers, because they have the money, send their kids to private schools so they don’t have to suffer from the teachers actions. The students do however learn during this last strike, and not in a good way, after the strike was over many areas had a student strike that lasted a couple of days where the students just didn’t show up in a show of solidarity…horrible. This is also really frustrating when a lot of our work involves schools and students, pretty much this is a big problem with no solution in site and I am just complaining…oh well, we do what we can.