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.