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.