Sarah's Honduran Adventures

My 25th Birthday

2009-11-07T11:07:00.000-08:00

I’ve now had two birthdays in Honduras. The Halloween tradition for volunteers here is to go to the Copan Ruins, which is a cute town by Mayan ruins, to celebrate together. I went for the day before my birthday to see friends who I hadn’t seen in a while and to spend some time in a town where I can feel like I’m living a life of luxury (meaning running water, hot showers even though it was too humid to take them, and a couple restaurant options).

After spending some time with friends I took off before the actual Halloween festivities to attend a graduation ceremony. School here is divided into kindergarten, 6 years of elementary school, and colegio, which encompasses both junior high and high school. There is a graduation ceremony after kindergarten, elementary school, and high school. Graduation from sixth grade, the ceremony I attended, is a big deal since some students cannot afford to go to colegio or are needed to help the family.

After some speeches (fortunately not too many) the students are called up one by one to receive their diplomas. To receive the diploma, they walk up with their families and padrinos. Padrinos, godparents, are usually family members and are chosen especially for this occasion. I was asked by the mother of a family who is like my host family here, to be the madrina, godmother, for her daughter, Daritza. The ceremony was going to be in December but since the school year ended early, it landed on my birthday.

I have posted two pictures: one of Daritza and I with her diploma and the other of the family, one of the kindest and committed families I know here. It was a really big honor to be asked and it meant a lot to Daritza and her family. It was a great way to spend my birthday.

Getting Back to Work...Again

2009-10-22T14:44:00.000-07:00

The last couple weeks have been pretty crazy. (Ex?)President Zelaya snuck back into the country at the end of September and has been holed up in the Brazilian Embassy since. As a result the entire country was placed on a 24hr per day curfew that lasted three days. It was awful. No one left their houses and some of my neighbors who actually did leave to go to the emergency clinic were stopped by the police and only let go after explaining their health situation. The airports and borders were closed for a couple days but I was finally able to leave for my vacation after my flight being cancelled three times.

I had a great couple days in DC before getting sick and ended up having to stay two extra weeks until I got better. While I was there five constitutional human rights were suspended in Honduras until after the November elections and when I got back to Honduras last week I found out that the rest of the school year had been cancelled as well. School was supposed to end at the end of November and after already missing two or three months of class due to strikes, students started vacation last Friday. Micheletti decided that every student across the entire nation would pass every class, whether or not they had been passing throughout the year.

This leaves a couple projects on hold until school starts again in February but I’m planning more events with my girls group so they aren’t as bored during vacation. We’re also going to have some more meetings at the health center, which will be coming just in time since we have several pregnant girls, 14 and 15, in our pregnant women’s group. Every time I try to get some new projects going, the political situation escalates so I’m just hopeful that after the elections everything will calm down and we can get back to our normal lives.

Brushing Teeth

2009-08-20T18:50:00.000-07:00

Here finally is the video that I took a couple weeks ago in Polcho. All the kids are outside the classroom so they don't drool all over the floor and you can also see Cinthia, the nurse I work with, the mountains, the classroom, and teacher. Enjoy!!

A Day in the Life of the Gringita

2009-07-31T10:26:00.000-07:00

Trying to get my life back together I am finally going each week to Polcho, the aldea where I am doing the hygiene project with the Colgate grant. I absolutely love going and the 30 minute walk each way is beautiful…or so I thought until I got a different view of it today. I went again with Cinthia, one of the nurses at the health center and a good friend, and we were chatting the entire way about different ideas for activities and charlas for these kids during the rest of the school year. When we got there they were really excited to see us and it was obvious they have learned how to correctly brush their teeth since they now volunteer to demonstrate in front of the class and are not afraid of shouting out the next steps during the demonstrations. They’re getting a lot better at actually brushing as well as evidenced by the significant decrease in toothpaste and drool on the ground and on their clothes. I took a great video but have been having problems posting it, so hopefully it will be up soon.

After they finished brushing, showing me their pearly

whites, and playing a game, Cinthia and I finally headed out to go back to Antigua. The kids really like to walk partway with us (and we like it too even though it turns into a battle of wills when it comes to how far they can go) and it took forever to get them to turn around to head back to school. We tried everything until Cinthia saw some cows coming and hollered back to warn them and they finally took off running for the school. That may be something we have to try again. Anyway, as we were passing the man who was walking with the cows warned us that the path was not in a good state. We thanked him but continued on since we didn’t want to head back to the original path because we were going to take a shortcut.

About 50 feet later, we saw exactly why he was warning us. The entire path had turned into grey mud that was mixed with cow poop and who knows what else. We kept going and started to step on the rocks so we wouldn’t slip. I was following Cinthia a little too closely so decided to step on a different rock than she had. I have no idea what exactly what it was I saw, but it definitely wasn’t a rock. My foot immediately fell a foot down into the goop and as I tried to hurry out, I tripped, my other foot and almost entire leg sank down into more mud, and my right shoe came off, stuck in the mud in the first place I stepped, still a foot down. Having at least one free leg I reached dry land only to crash into a thorn bush. Picking out the thorns and laughing, I tried to tell Cinthia that my shoe had fallen off, but she could barely even tell since my foot was now black, the same color of the shoe. When she finally saw that I had lost it and saw where it was, she went back in the mud in her starch white nurses uniform to dig it out.

Covered in mud while she only had a little on her, we slowly made it to another village on the way where her aunt gave me some water to clean myself off as all the school children were watching, mesmerized. I don’t think they’ve seen many gringas walk into the school with mud and cow poop up to their knees as well as on their hands and arms. After taking the long way back since after all that we completely missed the shortcut, we finally got back to Antigua to make a work plan for the rest of the school year but ended up putting it off until Thursday. I had to get home to take a bucket bath.

Keeping Busy

2009-07-20T08:13:00.000-07:00

It hasn't been easy to keep myself busy when the country is pretty much at a standstill and no teachers are working, so I finally did something this weekend that has been on my list for a long time...I learned how to make flour tortillas! Most people here eat corn tortillas and although I can make those I really wanted to learn how to make flour tortillas from a family that has a baleada stand in the park and makes the best flour tortillas I've ever had. I went to their house on Saturday and helped them prepare the masa (dough) from 40 pounds of flour that they were going to make into tortillas to sell at their stand that evening. They thought teaching me was fun and took lots of pictures, some of which I have posted above. I'm going to keep practicing and hopefully will still be making tortillas when I get home.

Trying to Get Life Back to Normal

2009-07-13T08:30:00.000-07:00

Okay, so my life doesn’t quite fit the standard for normal, but whatever it was a month ago, I want it back. I spent a lot of time away from Ocotepeque in June starting with a women’s health workshop where the manual I have been working on with other Peace Corps Volunteers was finally debuted, which was followed by a wonderful vacation at home. I was really excited to be coming back to Honduras with loads of motivation and plans that I had been waiting to implement in order to be done with the women’s health workshop, but then we have nothing less than a golpe de estado to once again throw things off. I suppose this is part of the experience living in a developing country and although this is an extreme case I think there is always going to be something interrupting life and productivity.

Rather than getting right to work I barely even left the house my first week back because no one was sure if things were going to turn violent or stay peaceful. I have finally been able to go to the health center a few times to follow up on some consultations I had scheduled (somehow no matter how many times I tried to explain the difference between being a psychology major and being a psychologist it never came across so I just gave in), but most of my other projects are on hold. The teachers are on strike until Zelaya comes back so I can’t continue with the tutoring with the girls from my youth group or the hygiene project that I had started just before vacation in Polcho. It’s also going to be hard to start a women’s health group because people right now aren’t really in the mood to go to meetings or to talk about anything else, which is understandable and is exactly what Peace Corps Volunteers are going through too.

The first week and a half of this was pretty agonizing just waiting to see what was going to happen. I didn’t really think or talk about anything else so now I’m trying to find distractions even if they can’t be work related. I’ve been doing the work I can while researching grad schools and trying to study French so I can distance myself from everything that’s been happening. Maybe it’s not the most productive in terms of my work goals here in Honduras, but I’m hoping that when things get back to normal I will have avoided driving myself crazy and be ready to get back to work.

Oh Honduras

2009-06-30T10:04:00.000-07:00

I believe most of the world is aware by now, but for those of you who don't know, there was a military coup here in Honduras on Sunday. I just wanted to let everyone know that I'm safe and to tell a little bit about what's going on here. I'm not sure how it appears to everyone on the outside or how the international press is describing things, but where I am, things are actually just like normal. I believe the only protesting is going on in Tegucigalpa, which conveniently is 12 hours away (although it didn't feel as convenient when I had to go for my medical checkup). People outside of Honduras know more about what's going on than a lot of people here do, but I think everyone is just waiting to see how this plays out. Peace Corps has us on standfast, which means we aren't allowed to travel anywhere, and has told us to have passports ready and our bags packed just in case we have to be evacuated. So far I haven't heard that this is going to happen but it's been a waiting game for the last couple days. Not very fun.

This is the news for now and I hope everyone is doing well and not too hot now that it's almost July.

Risk Taking and Adventure Seeking

2009-06-01T20:27:00.000-07:00

I have never thought of myself as a risk taker. I’ve always been cautious when it comes to making decisions, especially those where there has been potential for me to get hurt (in any way). I started thinking about this more the other day on the bus with a friend of mine who is another Peace Corps volunteer. She is similar to me but we started talking because we both had recently been described as risk takers and didn’t understand why. We were in complete agreement that neither of us were big on taking risks as we were passing through the outskirts, the most poverty-stricken area, of Tegucigalpa.

Perhaps it was just a result of looking out the window with the eye of an outsider as a result of the conversation and thinking of home, but it occurred to me that living in Honduras is a risk that not a lot of people would take. Leaving a place where it is comfortable and you know what to expect is not easy. That got me thinking that maybe I am a risk taker in the sense that a lot of the things I do in my life do not follow a ‘normal’ path and have very uncertain outcomes.

I like to think of it as seeking adventure in my life since I have no desire at the moment to do it any differently. Is this good or bad? I don’t think the answer would be the same for everyone, but for me, I think it’s good. There is no where else in the world I would rather be right now and I am constantly thinking about all the cool places I could live in and travel to next. Living and working here has made me think a lot about what I want to do with my life and although it could change, I know that whatever I do, it will take me all over the world in search of the next adventure.

Colgate Grant

2009-05-21T12:28:00.000-07:00

I got a Colgate grant! I decided to start a hygiene program in Polcho, which is the poorest aldea of Antigua, and will be teaching the schoolchildren how to brush their teeth and how to keep themselves clean. I think a couple of the children might come from families that can afford to buy toothbrushes, but I’ll be getting a toothbrush for each child as well as toothpaste so they can brush their teeth each day after they eat at school. I’ll be walking once a week to the school to teach them how to brush their teeth correctly and will talk about other hygiene topics as well.

I’m really excited to be working in this community. The school is the only cinder-block building in the community and the rest of the houses are all made of mud and have either partially tiled roofs or just a sheet of tin to block out the rain. There is just one teacher for 18 kids from kindergarten to fifth grade and only a couple of the kids will be able to afford to continue with school after they graduation from sixth grade. Talking about hygiene might be a little difficult, but I’ll be going to the school over a period of six months and will hopefully be able to see a little improvement after that amount of time. I’m taking off for Tegucigalpa next week for our yearly checkups and will be picking up the materials there. I’m really looking forward to starting this projects and will post more once I start!

Work, More Work, and a Little Fun

2009-04-22T14:25:00.000-07:00

Life here in Ocotepeque is definitely picking up. Like I wrote in my last blog entry, I’m finally starting to figure things out. They say that the first year of your Peace Corps service you hardly get anything done and that all of your work gets done the second year. Just starting my second year in Honduras I can already see that this is going to be true. It takes a really long time to get people to trust you and to want to work with you but now that that is finally starting to happen, I’m starting to get some great results. One of the things that I’m really excited about right now is our pregnant women’s club I’m running with Julissa, one of the nurses, at the health center. She’s really excited about it and we work well together, which has made our meetings lately very well received. The meetings are once a month and are really fun. We talked about breast feeding and infant nutrition at the April meeting and will be throwing them a mother’s day party in May (along with giving them an educational component if I get my way). I’m so excited with how things are going and am also writing up all the lesson plans we have for the meetings so the nurses will have a rotating curriculum to continue the meetings after I leave.

I still see the girls in my Yo Merezco youth group fairly often. We have tutoring at my house once or twice a week in addition to continuing our monthly meetings. Next month we’ll be talking about study skills and test-taking strategies so they can do better in school. I’m also going to the house of one of the girls who failed the year tomorrow because her parents don’t let her leave the house and I’m going to try to get her permission to come to my house for school work and to the May meeting…we’ll see how it goes.

Honduras right now is in the national vaccination campaign, which is where the doctors and nurses go to each village covered by the health center to make sure all of the kids have received their vaccinations. I went this morning with two of the nurses to two different communities, La Comunidad and Los Estanquillos. The walk was beautiful on the way up to La Comunidad and we could see the entire valley. The rainy season hasn’t started yet so it’s extremely dry, but still beautiful. We gave a lot of the kids vitamin A because people generally don’t get enough in their diets here and caught other kids up on their vaccinations. Although I mostly went for fun and to talk to the people in the communities since I don’t vaccinate, I did give some kids vitamin A, which you can see in the first picture I’ve posted. In the second are Nolvia and Julissa, the two nurses I went with, checking to see if the kids who stopped by were in need of any vaccinations.

Although I don’t have much free time when I’m here in Ocotepeque, last month I was finally able to get out to one of the Bay Islands for vacation. I went with some friends to Utila and it was absolutely amazing. We went snorkeling with Whale sharks (they don’t eat people) and dolphins and I also tried scuba diving for the first time! Scuba diving was really fun and I would like to get my license at some point while I’m here. I’m trying to get to know Honduras while I’m here as well as work a lot in my town which means there isn’t as much free time as I was expecting before coming to Peace Corps, but this is exactly how I want it to be.

Reflections on a little over a year in Honduras

2009-03-13T15:46:00.000-07:00

Some days I can’t believe I’ve been here this long. It’s going by so quickly and I know I haven’t been in site quite a year yet, but I’m getting there. I’m just finally starting to figure out how my time is best used here (I think) and coming up with some projects of my own that I want to start rather just doing the textbook Peace Corps programs so I know this next year is going to go by even faster!

At the same time, however, it does seem like a long time since I was in California. When I think of all the bucket baths I’ve taken, all the power outages I’ve been through, all the catcalls and kisses blown to me from men on the street, all the frustration I’ve felt feeling like I’m not doing enough, and all the projects I’ve tried or completed not going quite how I envisioned, it could seem like ages. I’m used to the bucket baths by now, and can even shower sometimes, have plenty of candles and my headlamp for the power outages, am getting really good at ignoring all the men on the street (even if it’s someone I know and they want to talk to me), and am coming to terms with the work I’m doing, so I chose to look at the bright side and think about all the things I’ve enjoyed and how quickly time flies when you’re having fun.

I’ve realized that the thing that I enjoy most here is working with my youth group that I started for the sex ed curriculum. We finished that back in December, had a wonderful closing ceremony that my parents got to be there for and decided to keep meeting once a month. In between those meetings I started having some of the girls over to my house and exercising with others, but there isn’t as much time for that now since they’ve started school again. The school year ends in November or October if the administration decides to cut the school year short, and start again in February. To keep working with them, I have decided to start a tutoring/study hour program where they have a few designated afternoons per month where they can come to my apartment to have a quiet place to study or to get homework help. I started this in reaction to the devastating that four of the ten girls in my group failed seventh grade. Four. Of the six who passed, one was already repeating and two others failed their final exams, only passing on a second try. I see so many improvements that could be made in the education system here, but since I am not in the position to make them, I will put a lot of effort into these girls with the goal of every single one of them passing this year.

I also want to put more effort into the youth group we have in Antigua. I helped out a lot with their meetings last year but want to become even more involved this year. The students come to the health center once a month for a health-related talk, but I would like to do some other activities with them as well. I want to do a world map project with them where we paint a world map on a wall somewhere in Antigua, but that will probably have to wait until the rainy season is over. I also want to take them along with my Yo Merezco girls to a leadership camp at the Copan Ruins once they’re done with school. I would run the camp with another volunteer, who would also bring her girls as well. This is just an idea at the moment and won’t happen for a while, but stay tuned. I really want to make it work.

I think one of the hardest things lately has been dealing with the feeling that I’m not doing enough. When I first came to Honduras I said that I knew that the changes I would hope to make would be small and would touch a few people rather than my entire town, but it’s a lot different to accept that now that I’m here. I knew that’s what I was supposed to say, but I didn’t know what it was like until I actually got here. I realize that I’m serving as a mentor for the girls I’m working with and that I’m supporting my friends in town just by being here and talking to them, but I think part of me is still looking for that big project that is going to make the huge difference I’ve been wanting to make. How am I supposed to know where the line is between setting high goals and being realistic?

I’ve just been taking it one day at a time and using time in my day to talk to my neighbors, the girls in my youth group, and my friends. I have plenty of time during my day and really enjoy choosing my own projects and my own path through these two years in Honduras. Looking out the window this afternoon at the beautiful valley that encompasses parts of Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala, I realized that life couldn’t be any better. I’ll get through the bad days, the frustrations with work, the endless catcalls, and I’ll be doing it all with a smile.

P.S. The picture is from Christmas Eve with some friends up on the mountain overlooking my town at sunset.

Obama´s Inauguration

2009-02-21T14:22:00.000-08:00

After witnessing the reaction to Obama’s election back in November, I decided along with two other volunteers that we needed to make the trip to Washington D.C. for the January 20th inauguration. We bought our plane tickets together after many frustrations with the slow internet connection, just four days after the election. As we got closer and closer to our departure date I could not believe that I was actually going to be in the US again after almost a year of living in Honduras, and that I was going to be there for the inauguration. Before I left I even had several friends tell me they were going to look for me on TV and to tell Obama that Honduras loves him.

I finally got to the airport in San Pedro Sula after a five hour bus ride and 45 min taxi ride only to discover that the system was down to check in bags. My friend Anna and I nervously checked our bags full of nice, warm winter clothes hoping they would still get there with handwritten baggage tags while Matt carried his bag on with some of our more necessary items just in case. Our boarding passes were handwritten slips of paper as well that would supposedly take us all the way through our layover in Miami to Washington. After not too much waiting we all finally got on the plane at Gate 4 (of 5) of the most used of two airports in Honduras.

The flight to Miami was just a few hours long and we couldn’t get over how much leg room we had. There was no luggage on our laps, no sweaty people standing over us until we hunch lower in our seats, and no people throwing up all around us, where were we? We also got reprimanded by the flight attendant for not recycling out cans after the beverages were passed out, but how were we supposed to remember that planes miles high recycle when there aren’t even any trash cans in any of our towns?

Our layover at the Miami airport was the first time in this trip we realized that we probably needed to work on our social skills before spending too much more time in public in the US. We stared at all the gringos there, were in awe at all the restaurants and food options, and talked loudly about other people forgetting they could understand what we were saying. Classy. We also had huge problems going back through security after customs and then again boarding our plane because no airport personnel knew what to do with our handwritten boarding passes. Each time we had to show them to someone new, we were asked where we were coming from as they called friends over to stare at our strange documents.

Finally arriving in DC, we were welcomed by freezing cold and by Anna’s parents. They dropped Matt and I off at Matt’s cousin’s apartment where we stayed for the next few days and planned to meet up the next day. We ate some amazing food and even went out dancing after dark. I think I saw more people out after sunset than I have the entire time I’ve been in Honduras.

Our first whole day in DC, the day before the inauguration, Matt and I walked around DC with some of his friends from college and meet up with Anna in the afternoon. While we were on our way to meet Anna, we were stopped by a couple who asked us to take their picture. The woman, who was one of the representatives of Kentucky, asked us if we were going to pick up our tickets to the inauguration and when we told her we didn’t have any, she told us to try the representative from Puerto Rico since none of his constituents were able to come. We got really excited with the prospect of possibly getting tickets so went in the building to give it a shot. When we got to the Puerto Rico office we found out that they had given all their tickets away an hour ago but decided to keep trying. We tried many other offices, and after one of the staff members in the office of my representative told us rather rudely that it would be a complete waste of time and wasn’t worth the effort to look, we still kept searching. On the way to a representative from Minnesota we passed by the office of the Northern Marina Islands delegate and decided to give it a try. I went in alone to be less overwhelming and had my Peace Corps Honduras shirt on. I told the people who were in there all about our experience with the election in Honduras and our decision to make the trip up when one of the women went to a back office and came out with three tickets for us. We got their last three!! We were so excited that we made a scene in the office and I think they were really glad they gave us the tickets due to our reaction.

I have never seen so many people in one place as I did on the morning of the inauguration. People were flooding the streets, Capitol Mall, and the subway. After a bit of difficulty navigating through the masses of people we finally made it to the silver gate where we had to enter to watch the inauguration. It was not very well organized and a lot of people with tickets didn’t get in. That being said, it was extremely peaceful and if something like that happened somewhere else there easily could have been an outbreak of violence. We made it in with the last group to enter and got to stand with a good view of the Capitol right at the first jumbotron. The atmosphere was so amazing and people were laughing, crying, hugging, and praying everywhere. Obama’s speech was amazing and I’m so glad I got to be there.

With mixed feelings to be leaving the states, I got on the plane back to Miami and then to San Pedro Sula completely exhausted. Those four days in DC felt like an entire month was crammed into them. I was so overwhelmed with everything so easily available to people, how fast everything and everyone moved, and just life in general. It wore me out so much that I slept 36 of my first 72 hours back in Honduras. I wasn’t quite sure how I would feel getting back to Honduras since I didn’t even get to see my family even though I was in the same country, but as soon as I stepped off the plane in San Pedro, I knew. I was home.

A Not-So-Typical Saturday Afternoon

2009-01-12T07:14:00.000-08:00

I went on another run today, probably only the third one since my last blog entry about running, but this one was vastly different. I have now finished the sex ed curriculum with my girls group and have continued meeting with them doing various other activities. On Wednesday after an intense Scrabble game, Jessy invited me to go running with her on Saturday. She had told me before that she went sometimes with her sister and I was excited to go with her. We decided to meet up at 3:30 in the afternoon at her house and would then go meet Leily, another one of the girls in the group, on the way so she could run with us as well.

After finally finding Jessy’s house, I picked her up and we took off walking to the Ocotepeque health center to meet Leily. We only waited there for a little while before deciding to start walking on our way to Antigua since Leily lived further away from town than the health center and meet up with her a few minutes later. Leily had brought along her sister Suri to run with us, who she also brought to the party we had at the end of the Yo Merezco course, and had come in flip flops. We set off, alternating running with walking, at the most beautiful time of the day. By then it was about 4 and the sun was starting to get lower to the mountains in Guatemala. It was also a lot cooler than it had been earlier in the day, which was a really nice change. We ended up running and walking a little past the turnoff to Antigua where I go to the health center, which is probably 2.5 miles out of Ocotepeque. We turned around and ran past a man bringing his horse from the day. With a closer look, I realized that I knew him because he had been to the health center with a machete wound on his arm. After saying hello we kept on past the pastures and creeks until we got to El Soldado. El Soldado, the soldier, is a monument up on a hill to the Honduran Armed Forces that fought in the Hundred Days war against El Salvador in 1969. Other places in the country seem to think it was more of a skirmish than an actual war, but either way, Ocotepeque was actually captured by El Salvador. At that time there were a lot of El Salvador immigrants in Honduras supposedly taking jobs from Hondurans and because of this attitude there was also a lot of mistreatment of these El Salvadorian immigrants. Combined with a border dispute (that perhaps is still going on since the map I have of Ocotepeque is missing the border in some places), all that was needed to put the two countries over the edge was a soccer game. After the game between Honduras and El Salvador violence broke out and led to this Hundred Days War, also known as the Soccer War.

Going back to the run from my historical distraction, there is a field by the monument where people often exercise. We went up there, ran some stairs, did some abs, and sat for a while to take in the view. The sun was starting to set and we could see the houses of several villages up in the mountains. It was beautiful. We finally got moving again because a bolo (a drunk man) starting hanging around us with a huge wooden pole. After we got off the field and were approaching the road again, Jessy looked back and saw the bolo running at us with the huge pole. She took off screaming and laughing at the same time, as did Leily and Suri, so I went with them and when we looked back again he was heading the other direction, towards El Salvador. Bolos, because of their being so drunk and most of the time incoherent, are actually pretty harmless but it was pretty humorous to see him stumbling after us. After we finally stopped laughing we looked back again and saw that he had stopped and was trying to do some kind of martial arts movements with the pole against the cars and trucks going by on the highway. I don’t think it was bound to turn out very well so we got moving on our way back to Ocotepeque.

After an uneventful walk the rest of the way, we dropped Leily and Suri off at their turnoff to go home and decided to meet again on Tuesday. Jessy and I then walked back to her house where I had a few glasses of water before heading home. We probably went about five miles and although most of it was walking, I think that was one of the best and most satisfying runs that I’ve ever had in my life.

Christmas in Ocotepeque

2008-12-27T17:34:00.000-08:00

After saying goodbye to my parents on Dec 22, I traveled all the way back down to Ocotepeque to start getting ready for Christmas. My sitemate and I had decided a long time ago that we wanted to host Christmas for our Peace Corps friends in Oco and each were able to convince a few members of our respective training groups that it would be worth it to make the trip all the way to our town in the furthest reaches of Honduras. I had just a short time to mourn the departure of my parents, whom I will at least get to see again in June, before the cleaning, baking, and planning started for the Christmas in Oco extravaganza. Three other volunteers in my health group made the trip and stayed with me.

On Christmas Eve, when the last few of the other PCVs got here, we went to the market to get the last few items we needed to cook. After bringing them back to the apartment we packed all our stuff up for a delicious Christmas Eve dinner, and headed across town to my sitemate's house. She lives on the way to our final destination for the evening, a radio tower on a hill above town. We stopped by to say hello to everyone staying there, then continued on our way to meet them at the tower. From my sitemate's house it's only through a few pastures, across two creeks, and up the rock studded hill avoiding the cows for a 20 min walk to arrive. We plopped down on some rocks setting down a blanket upon which we could lay out all our food. We had compiled many different kinds of cheeses (Honduran and not quite the same quality of those at home), meats, treats, and other appetizer dishes to share for the evening. We had the entire evening to eat, chat, and look at the beautiful view of the city down below us. As it got darker we could even see the fireworks that, little did we know then, would just increase in size, danger, loudness, and intensity throughout the night. After staying up there for a few hours we headed back down the hill, headlamps on, back to my apartment.

Although we stayed up quite a while longer talking and sharing Christmas and family stories with one another, we hadn't intended on staying up late. Ocotepeque, apparently, had no regards for our plans because the fireworks and firecrackers just kept getting louder and louder. The kids on my street were throwing firecrackers all over just outside my bedroom window and the youngest one was probably three. As it approaches midnight, just getting louder and louder, we all get out of bed and decide to head up to the roof to watch. I already live on the second story, a high rise for my town, so you get quite the view from the roof. When we got up there, it looked and sounded like my town was under attack. There were firecrackers going off everywhere and fireworks exploding VERY low to the ground. The loudest firecrackers were blowing up part of the street around the corner from me in front of the police station. You may be asking how anyone can be blowing up the street in front of the police station, but the culprits won't get in trouble since it was the police themselves, in uniform and all. There were some fireball looking fireworks flying through the air looking like they were coming right at us, but overall we made it through the night unscathed, not taking eardrums into account.

Christmas Day was wonderful. It was extraordinarily quiet in the morning, an aftermath of the firecrackers I believe, so we all slept in and relaxed most of the day. We watched a Christmas movie, ate Christmas cookies and peppermint goodies, and cooked for dinner. We had our Christmas dinner up on my roof and I invited my neighbor who is in her practicum to be a doctor and was just getting back after working since 7am Christmas Eve, so she came as well. It was great to have a more tranquila night after the night before and it was a wonderful Christmas away from home and family.

I hope everyone had the happiest of holidays and has a wonderful new year!

Pictures!!!

2008-12-10T07:28:00.000-08:00

So we finally have a few more pictures up of some of the work I´ve been doing in my site! The first four are with my Yo Merezco group that I run at the library in town. The first picture is of the girls putting the steps to conduct a breast self-exam in order, in the second they are listening to some HIV information on a day where several of them were watching younger siblings and had to bring them to the meeting, the third is of Jessy participating in an HIV transmission activity, and the fourth is Gabby participating in the same activity. Below those four are two pictures of some of the work I´ve been doing at the El Salvador border with my counterpart, the doctor from the health center. The first is of the two of us talking to two bus service workers about HIV and the second is of us talking to two truckers about HIV as well. There will hopefully be more to come sometime soon!!

2008-12-09T19:21:00.001-08:00

2008-12-09T19:19:00.000-08:00

Six Month Reflection

2008-11-20T12:43:00.000-08:00

I´ve been in site now for over six months and decided that it was time for some reflection upon my work as well as an update of what all I´ve been up to. I can´t believe I´ve been here this long already and realizing that I´m over a quarter through my service has made me reflect somewhat on what I´ve done so far in site and what I hope to accomplish while I´m here.

My favorite project here so far is my Yo Merezco group. I absolutely love working with these girls and I even love preparing for the meetings. Now that school is out participation is definitely dwindling, which is somewhat discouraging. When school was in I would just go and remind the girls the morning of a meeting and more would show up. I even ran into one mother last week who told me that her husband found out their daughter was coming and doesn´t want her leaving the house. She was one of the girls who came all the time in the beginning and now doesn´t come at all. Another one of the girls who used to come to every meeting also isn´t allowed to come now that school is out. On the other hand, however, there are two girls who started coming late and now come to every meeting. One of them comes each week, and last week twice, all the way from a small village that is 45 minutes outside of Ocotepeque and her older sister has to go with her since it´s far for a 13 year old to be traveling by herself. Although it´s frustrating for me, I suppose that what they´re getting out of the group is worth it and it´s better than not coming to any meetings at all.

I´m still working on improving the monthly meetings at the health center with the pregnant women and adolescents. It´s difficult, just like any type of behavior change, to get the nurses to change the ways they prepare for the meetings. They still look to me to organize it sometimes but I think are at least getting used to the idea that I´m not going to do all the work. Maybe that means that within a year and a half I can get them to be more prepared and enthusiastic going into the meetings. We´ll see.

The manual that I´m working on for the Women´s Health team with three other PCVs is coming along and we´ll have a rough draft completed in January. I´m looking forward to starting the women´s group because through this project I´ve discovered that just writing programs without being part of the implementation is not as interesting to me. I want to start the women´s group in Antigua with the doctor at the health center because the women there don´t have as many opportunities or access to education as the women do in Ocotepeque. In January my friend Anna and I will be locking ourselves up in my apartment for several days to do all the editing before we submit it to the Peace Corps staff to get reviewed before printing. Then we´ll hopefully be on our way…

Personally, I guess I don´t really remember what I expected, but it probably wasn´t how things have turned out. I´m realizing how hard it is to make change actually happen and am trying to keep positive and to stick with the idea that small change is better than a large and drastic change, but it´s frustrating to see how long it actually takes. There are so many problems here and so many things that could be improved that it can be overwhelming to even think where to start. I´m also trying to come up with some good work activities to do in my communities, which will keep me focused because I think the rest of my time here is going to go by really quickly. Despite the frustrations, I´m really happy here, and there´s no where else I would rather be at this time in my life. I still love hearing from people at home so please send me updates when you get a chance. You can send me a letter at the address on the left or an email to sarahcwest@gmail.com.

Running in Honduras

2008-10-16T10:00:00.000-07:00

As my alarm clock rudely cuts into the middle of my dream, I force my eyes open, notice that it’s still dark, and wonder why my alarm has gone off. Oh yeah, I was planning on running today. I wrestle myself out of bed to look out the window and see the faint hope of daylight through the clouds low to the valley. My running clothes on, I’m finally ready to head out the door. It’s 5:25. I head out the dirt streets avoiding the rocks and make it to the main road. The international highway. Whenever I run, I run on the side of the road going to the El Salvador border and leave my apartment early enough to avoid the human and vehicular traffic leaving or entering Honduras. I head out of town and see two women walking on the other side of the road. A surprising number of people, considering all the times before leaving that I was warned people didn’t exercise here, usually walk or run between 5:00 and 6:30 going south on the only road that heads out of town. There aren’t quite as many people out today I notice, probably because of the rain last night and the overcast weather this morning. I cross the bridge that goes over the tiny creek and see a big herd of cows taking over the road and the grass on the right. I cross the street to run around them knowing that their bodies are not made for running but for some reason still having the irrational fear that one will try to make a break for it and charge me. As I run past, the man herding the cows with nothing more than a stick shouts, “¡Buenos días,” and I wave in return. I look to the mountains on the east side of the valley to see the wisps of clouds weaving through the rocky crevasses and am reminded just how much I love it here. I pass a group of men in their black rain boots carrying machetes, ready to start their day of work in the campo. Harmless, but I pick up the pace. I finally get to the curve in the road where I have decided to turn around today since I am just starting to run again and can see the lights of El Salvador in the distance. I will get there another day. I ran a few times during FBT but upon coming to site I wanted to get the feel for my community before starting to run because in many places it is inappropriate and possibly dangerous for a woman to run by herself. I turn around to start home and can see the whole town of Ocotepeque on the valley floor. I try to find my apartment, one of my very lofty goals on my runs, but have no luck. One of these days I’m going to have to stop and really look for it instead of just glancing for it every now and then. I run past a horse grazing on the side of the road that I didn’t notice on my way out as a truck passes by, coming from the border, which officially opens at six to let trucks through. I approach the herd of cows and the man, with a huge grin on his face, this time says, “¡Adios!” “Adios,” I reply. As it gets to be lighter the clouds settle a little lower in the valley and it begins to sprinkle, a result of the tropical storm somewhere in the Caribbean. I’m almost home. I think about everything I have to do today and the bucket bath I will take before starting. Hopefully the power will still be on so I can heat up the water. I enter town, turn down one of the first side streets to zigzag my way back to my apartment and think to myself, “What will I have for breakfast? Beans and tortillas?” After a run just like any other, I realize how much my standards for normal have changed.

Finally!

2008-10-13T09:58:00.000-07:00

So with some help from my mom at home, I finally have some pictures up! The first picture below is of my apartment and the second is a view out one of the windows in my bedroom. My apartment is on the second floor so I have great views of the mountains out of both of the windows and an even better view from the roof (where I sometimes like to eat dinner). The third picture was taken when Heather and Marisa came to visit and is of Heather and I on top of the bell tower of the church in Antigua Ocotepeque, where I work. The last picture in that set of four is of Cinthia and I at the health center. Cinthia is one of the nurses who works there and I really like to spend time with her. She lives in a small village of Antigua so I don´t get to see her as much as I would like, but she´s a really driven, awesome girl. The two pictures below are of Heather and I then of Marisa and I when they came to visit. It was awesome having them here to show them around and I can´t wait until my parents come in just two months!

2008-10-12T18:22:00.000-07:00

2008-10-12T15:26:00.000-07:00

I Finally Have Water!

2008-09-24T09:17:00.000-07:00

Well, I should clarify and say that I can finally control some of the water access in my apartment. For the last two months I’ve had water in my apartment every two days for just a half a day and rather than being able to just turn on the tap when I wanted water, none of the taps worked so one of them I had shut off and the other, the one in the bathroom, just shot out water every time the water came on. For the entire time. The kitchen also flooded every other day from a combination of the broken sink and all the rain and since my shower doesn’t work I’m still bathing out of a bucket. I know the flooding is a huge waste of water and kept trying to get the landlord to fix it, but things move at their own pace here and it was just finally fixed yesterday. The landlord came in, new faucet in hand, with the announcement that he was going to replace the faucet in the bathroom so it would actually work. After playing around with it for a while he announced that it didn’t fit and was going to keep trying, but the next time I turned around, he was gone and there was a huge gaping hole in my sink. No faucet. I began to worry about how much my bathroom would flood now that there wasn’t even a faucet to control the flow when finally, a few hours later, he came back with a shiny new faucet that is now in my sink and works like a charm. So far, with only day with water behind me, everything works. The water that comes out is brown with chunks of dirt and other debris and since that’s what I’m bathing with it may have been an extremely long time since I’ve actually been clean, but at least I can sometimes get water out of my sink by request, so I can’t complain. By the way, just so you can get a good mental image of my beautiful bathroom, it’s hot pink. That was somehow a result of Heather and Marisa visiting although I’m not quite sure how it happened. I get asked about “La Disco” by some of my friends when I see them on the street and they wonder why there is no disco ball in my baño.

Along with my apartment, my work is finally coming along as well. I’ve started the girls group here in Ocotepeque and meet with 10 seventh graders once a week. So far I really like working with them and they’re all really good kids. I’m looking forward to getting to know them a lot better and to be able to serve as a role model or older sister to them (although at only 23 I’m only a year or two younger than some of their mothers). Kids here, but girls especially, have so few opportunities I just can’t imagine what they would think if they saw all the opportunities for extracurricular activities I had growing up. Even though this course only lasts through mid-December, I’m hoping to continue meeting with them once a month throughout my service and to be a resource for them anytime they want to talk.

As per someone’s request for more photos and less text and with some stateside help, some pictures will be coming soon. Much sooner than when promised the last time.

Yo Merezco, Women´s Health, and Visitors

2008-08-11T13:27:00.000-07:00

I write this overdue entry sitting in my apartment soaking wet after walking/running home on the dirt and cobblestone streets in the pouring rain after this afternoon finally taking my first real, non-bucket shower with water that wasn’t brown in several days. I’ve eaten countless numbers of baleadas (flour tortillas filled with beans) in the past week alone, my kitchen floor flooded yesterday and my bathroom flooded today for unknown reasons (even though I’m on the second floor), yet I couldn’t be happier. I moved into my own apartment a little over a week ago and I’m finally going to be starting some of my own projects.

I’m working right now on getting a group of 12 year olds together that will be comprised of just 10-15 girls. We will hopefully start meeting in September and will be discussing abstinence, self-esteem, HIV and other STIs, good decision-making, communication, anatomy, puberty, and pregnancy in adolescents. The focus of the group is on HIV/AIDS prevention through abstinence and I’m really excited about it. I never thought I would be working on abstinence education here because I think the general feeling, at home at least, is that it is not effective but this program is completely different. I think that few people would argue that 12 years old is an appropriate age to be sexually active, especially after seeing how many 12 year olds and other adolescents here are getting pregnant, and this program gives these girls the tools they will need to make their own decisions and hopefully delay the initiation of sexual activity. So many girls and women here have low self-esteem and if a boy or a man says they will give their love in return for sex (although not so directly), they will usually give in. This program, called Yo Merezco, or I deserve, focuses on allowing the girls to see their self-worth and understand the risks of getting an STI or becoming pregnant at such a young age. It will also empower them just by giving them an activity to do outside of the home and classroom.

The other big project I’m involved with right now is the Women’s Health initiative. I’m on a team with three other PCVs and right now we’re working on writing a training manual as well as planning a workshop for midwives on obstetric emergencies, focusing on hemorrhage. The workshop is coming up in a little over a week and people will be coming from all over the country to attend. Each PCV will be bringing a counterpart from a health center and a midwife. I’m looking forward to the workshop and since I’m a newer member to the team I will only be facilitating a small part but I’m still excited to be on the other side and to learn more about putting on a workshop on the scale.

The Women’s Health initiative is fairly young, so we have a lot of work ahead of us. There are many initiatives within Peace Corps that have developed manuals with training programs to be used both by Hondurans and other volunteers, and we’re going to be developing a guide to be used with any women’s group. The guide will be used to facilitate a women’s group for roughly 15 weeks with a weekly meeting and will be about general health including fun activities for them to be doing outside of the home. Each of us are writing chapters since we’re working on just the first draft of the manual and I’ll be writing the sections for mental health and self-esteem which includes knowing your self-worth and values, how to hold on to these when confronted with pressure or stress and how to deal with stress, as well as domestic violence and alcohol or drug abuse by either the woman or her husband. In addition to these chapters we will also be covering gender, reproductive health, HIV and STIs, and communication. This is going to be a long process to get the manual written and to finally get a group started in our communities but I am definitely looking forward to working on a project that I know will be here after I have completed my service.

The other excitement here in Ocotepeque is that my first visitors are coming on Friday! Heather and Marisa are coming and I can’t believe that people from home are actually going to be seeing what my life is like as a Peace Corps volunteer. I think it will be really interesting for them to see where I live, meet my friends here, and see what kind of work I’m doing. I’m hoping one or both of them will write a blog entry after the visit to give the perspective of a newcomer into my life and since I haven’t even asked either of them yet I will admit this is a shameless attempt to get them to write.

I also love to hear what everyone is doing at home and appreciate the comments, emails, and letters I get. Please keep them coming!

What a Psychology Degree Means in Honduras

2008-07-16T15:35:00.000-07:00

Since I arrived in Ocotepeque people have wanted to know what I studied and after telling them I studied psychology, have proceeded to become quite excited about meeting a psychologist. Now you may be wondering how you missed me going to grad school and getting a master’s or a doctorate, but to this there is a simple answer: you didn’t. In no city or town at home would I be considered qualified to counsel or work in any psychology-related profession but no matter how many times I explain this to people here they continue to ask me to help with whatever problem they or someone they know may have.

It started the first week in site with each of the people I work with coming to me with some personal problem and has now progressed to the outlying communities. I was taken aback when my coworkers started coming to me because we had just met yet they were opening up and sharing some of their deepest insecurities with me. Another health worker is convinced that I am continually analyzing him and the rest of the staff and always wants to know what I have decided about each of them*. Needless to say, I think it enabled us to have much more ‘confianza’ from the start, which has made for great relationships both in and outside of the health center.

The rumor that a psychologist has come to the health center in Antigua Ocotepeque has also now arrived in the aldeas. Several weeks ago when I was visiting a friend another member in her community asked if I would come back to see her mother who has been depressed lately, which I now find myself doing this Saturday. In another aldea over the weekend, as soon as people realized that I was the other Peace Corps Volunteer in town, they knew that I was the gringita Sarita, the psychologist at the health center and immediately a woman asked me if she could bring her daughter into the clinic to see me.

Although not prepared for this part of the job description, I am doing what I can. Real psychologists are uncommon and extremely expensive, so aside from me these people have no hope of ever getting help with their mental health. I figure once I talk to people I will have a better idea of what can be done to improve their situations at home to alleviate whatever problems they may be having. As a result of talking to a fourteen year old girl this week I am going to be heading up to her aldea hopefully sometime soon to give a charla on reproductive health, adolescence, and self-esteem. The woman who I am going to see this Saturday just seems really lonely so I’m hoping that it will help her to just have someone to talk to. Hopefully this psychologist title won’t get out of hand and in the meantime I’m just enjoying meeting and talking to new people to try and help them be happier in their everyday lives.

*I think an extra note would be quite appropriate here. As I am learning to pick my battles, I decided to just let these comments go rather than explain to him that it is human tendency to make snap judgments of people and situations right away, not just something done by ‘psychologists.’ If we did not make quick judgments daily we would continually be hampered by decision-making. This is the same mechanism we use to assess the safety of a situation. Rather than consciously thinking about each aspect of a scene to decide whether it is safe or not, which would take way too long if we needed to get out quickly, we make a snap judgment which usually comes across as an uncomfortable feeling that tells us to leave. This judgment is made from cues we pick up, consciously or unconsciously, the moment we enter into a new situation. Sidetrack aside, judging is something everyone does, even though there are many who like to say they do not, and is necessary to make it through life.