Another month is coming to a close, and I move one step closer to ending my Peace Corps service. I am officially a junior in the high school world of Peace Corps, and as such, I have started thinking of post-PC life. It isn’t that I am trying to hurry up and finish my Peace Corps service, but I quite like using my reflective time to think about what I would like my next step to be. Graduate school is definitely in the plans, which of course means that the GRE is going to need to happen before I leave. Applying to graduate school will probably take place as soon as I get back to the States in Sept, which would then leave Oct through Aug open. What do I do with this time? Do I want to travel within the US or internationally? I have people I would like to see around the country and the world. Do I get a job? If so, where? Stubbs? The Capitol? Anywhere that will hire me for a couple of months? All of these questions are fun to ponder. And, I wonder when in my life will I ever have the opportunity to really do what I would like to do. How many times do you get to actively choose the next eleven months of your life? Once grad school begins, I go back to being a student, with the next two years clearly marked out for me. Hmm…it is all kind of fun to think about…but back to the present…

Honduras continues on as it has for the past year. It has begun to rain every evening and most afternoons as well. It will soon be at the point when sunny hours are outnumbered by rainy ones. And while I like the rain, life in the South comes to a standstill. When it rains, meetings are cancelled, the roads become impassable, supervisory visits are put on hold, and the whole region hunkers down till the sun comes out again. As a volunteer it means that September (half rain, half sun) is moderately busy, October (lots of rain every day) is a month for going through your DVD collection and the most pathetic monthly report imaginable, November (no rain, beautiful weather) is back to being really busy, December (the month of Christmas) is all about community integration and another pathetic monthly report, January (Christmas recovery) is moderately busy with the new year, February (starting to get hot) is very busy, March (officially hot) is busy, April (Semana Santa and HOT) would be an ok work month except that a full week is lost to Semana Santa, May (HOT!!) is a month for sitting in front of a fan/ forget about work, June (maybe a couple of days of rain, the temperature drops three degrees on those days) decent work month if you plan everything for the morning, July (rains occasionally, days are the warm side of hot) good work month, August (some rain, warm) REALLY BUSY, etc. At this point in my calendar, I will be going back to Texas. At least I won’t have to worry about not being used to the temperature.

Right now, as we near the end of the year, I am concentrating on finishing up on-going projects and trying to plan for November. I have some supervisory things to do with my education program for adults, a day-care center to get up and running, a couple of information sessions/workshops with women, and I am sure other things that will become apparent as I get closer to those days. October will be a month dedicated to working out (in my house) and studying for the GRE.

I suppose some of your, probably very few, are wondering what has been happening with the bats…Well, I broke down, talked to my landlady, and she sent some one over. He climbed up on the roof, removed a couple of sheets of lamina, and four hours later had managed to remove almost all of the bats in my house. The final count is as follows: six killed (sprayed with bug spray to confuse them first and then a swift smack on their little heads…before the bleeding hearts start getting upset, let me clarify something. We left the roof totally open for a solid two hours BEFORE we started killing the mice with wings. We banged around trying to get them to fly away for a very long time, but they wouldn’t budge…I don’t like to kill things, but I was also tired of being terrorized by them), one that flew down into the house (I carefully scooped him up and released him outside, one fell into the house (he was confused with bug spray, fell, and I swept him outside), and one that by the grace of God flew away on his own volition. Total count that morning: nine. Unfortunately, they are “bandidos” according to my landlady and several were trapped inside the house in other parts that we couldn’t get to. That night, two came out and I with the steely reserve of a professional bat-remover scooped them up and took them outside. If you count the bat that I had to remove from the house in the early morning hours before the albanil came over to remove the roof, I had a DOZEN bats in my house. A DOZEN BATS!!!

So where are we now…well I feel better about the whole thing. Because I can still hear bats along the outer walls, I decided to employ another volunteer’s suggestion and light a fire in my house. Using cinder blocks as a base so that I would not scorch the floor, I piled up finished and abandoned crossword puzzles (thanks Mom), a cardboard box that had been used to ship me something (thanks Grandbetty), and essentially set a fire in my living room. I heard some squeaking, but nothing flew down into the house. I can only hope that they flew out. As the fire died down, it dawned on me how badly it all could have gone. Sure I had had a bowl of water for “fire control,” and I carefully added crossword puzzles only when the fire died down, but at one point I was precariously close to setting my wooden futon (too heavy and big to remove from the living room) on fire. The important thing to take away from this is that I didn’t do any lasting damage, and I feel better for having done it. Currently, I am employing a different bat-removal method. You see, there are still bats. And while I am fairly confident they are outside, I still hear them frequently, and I worry that they will get back in. I am sure that they do not like fire, but essentially roasting marshmallows in my living room is too risky to undertake with any frequency. Instead I have removed the mop head from my mop, and when the little guys are particularly chatty, I slip a piece of paper through the mop head grip and light the paper on fire. Essentially, what I create is a torch on a very long pole. This, I carefully lift toward their known spots and move around trying to create maximum smoke and minimal smoke damage. As the paper starts to burn down, I lower the mop stick toward a little bowl with water and extinguish the burning paper. I sweep the ashes up and take comfort in the knowledge that the little guys are now to afraid to enter the house at least for a little while. I don’ t think I will sleep totally comfortably until I go a full month without a bat inside the house, but at least I am making progress.

Well this has turned into an entry longer than I would have liked, so I am going to go now…take care ya’ll.

Carmen

My August can be summed up best I think by referring back to perhaps my only (ok one of two favorite western movies), The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. And while it maybe really isn’t fair to call certain events that have transpired this month as ugly, Hollywood hasn’t made a movie called The Good, the Bad, and the Things that Make you go Hmm…Suffice it to say that the third category is really just composed of events that have occurred and which I wish not to repeat. First The Good: I have had a ton of work this month, actually more than I really would have preferred and certainly more than I expected. The work that has been going on is very specific to my project (municipal development) and has involved going to my aldeas (surrounding towns) and asking people in these communities what projects they would like to see. It has been great! I get to work with people, eat free lunch or dinner (which has been REALLY good), encourage political participation, and ensure that the meeting is held as democratically as possible (the only unfortunate part of these meetings is I have been getting into “discussions” with the alcaldia’s facilitator about the need for the community to prioritize their projects as a group not any single person and certainly not someone from outside the community). But yes, work is good! Also this month, I worked with a medical brigade from Taiwan. The group was by far the largest and most organized brigade I have worked with. The first day, I worked in the laboratory explaining urine tests, blood tests, etc., The second day, I worked with the dentist and watched maybe 50+ teeth be pulled, a process which I would prefer to never have happen in my mouth. And for the last two days, worked in general medicine and saw 80% of the people walk in with just an occasional headache (to which I replied, well here is extra-strength Tylenol equivalent and take it only when necessary and sorry, but headaches are part of life). 20% of the time, however, we saw real patients with real needs and provided a service that they would have never been able to receive otherwise (two particularly heartwrenching cases were one kid that maybe had Lymphoma and a 14 year old girl that was pregnant). The week of translating and hanging out with doctors from Taiwan culminated in a dinner at the Taiwanese Ambassador’s house in Tegucigalpa. The house was beautiful, the food awesome, and the whole thing ended a really incredible and very surreal week. Also, quickly, I have started really studying for the GRE, and while I was convinced that Honduras had greatly eroded my math and English vocabulary ability, my scores really aren’t that far from where I would ultimately like them to be. And now for The Bad: Honduras is solidly in the rainy season, and the water coming out of my pila looks like very watered-down chocolate milk (I know people use the chocolate milk phrase all the time to describe any brown liquid, but I am literally talking about the color that super-cheap, generic, hot cocoa has when prepared as the instructions intend.) The issue that has arisen with the “water” is that it tends to cause an increase in cases of diarrhea in Peace Corps volunteers, and I am a Peace Corps volunteer. If this were a prompt on the LSAT, you would answer (C) P also causes R. I guess I should start using filtered water to brush my teeth with for now on. Also in the Bad category, some of my favorite Peace Corps volunteers have started leaving. My closest Muni-D neighbor took off in the middle of this month, and the rest of what I would consider to be really good friends are flying out of the country on my birthday(!). They haven’t all left yet, but I am already starting to miss them. The upside to this is that they get to enjoy being back in the US (kind of like “they’ve gone on to a better place”). New volunteers will soon arrive to, if not replace these beloved members of the Southern crew, contribute their personalities to the mix. I look forward to meeting them, especially my sitemate. The Ugly (or experiences I would be glad to never have to go through again…ever): I have bats in my house. I don’t know if I have written about it very much previously, but please understand that we are talking about roughly a half dozen bats on any given day. I know this number is fairly accurate, because when it is hot I have seen four bats climb down from the roof area and heard several more hidden somewhere else. This week has been particularly bad: Monday morning I woke up to one in my room, Tuesday ditto, Wednesday yet again, and Thursday watched a movie with the four from the roof in the afternoon. Friday night and early Saturday morning really pushed me over the edge though. For all during the beginning part of the week, I calmly went to the kitchen got a plastic bowl and plate, trapped the little creatures, and took them outside (don’t want to be too cruel considering they eat a fair number of mosquitoes and things I am also not very fond of). But oh how Friday night- Saturday morning were different. One flew through one living room wall to the other that evening, which is not exactly cause for concern. Then in the middle of the night/ early morning one flew around my room while I kind of slept. You see it is hard to sleep with the periodic sound of thud-flap flap flap-thud-flap flap flap-thud as this one little creature tried desperately to either get out of my room or find a special spot to roost (I still don’t know which). I was going to let it hang out, mainly because I had no desire to trap a bat at what could not possibly have been later than 2AM. So I let him fly and tire himself out, then another came down. And I realized that the first was hanging out on my mosquito netting literally two feet directly above my face, while the second did the maddening smack into one wall, fly into another, combo. The second eventually went back up into the roof, but now I was awake, sort of, not enough to deal with the issue directly of having a bat above my head, but enough to think about dealing with the issue. Instead I chose to just move myself and my pillow out from below the bat should he poop, and went back to bed. A short time later, I realized that the bat had started crawling down one side of the mosquito netting, apparently not content to just hang out until I had the energy to scoop him into a plastic bowl. And because he was slowly getting closer to my body on the bed, I used a pillow and swatted at him from inside the netting (the idea to convince him to go hang out somewhere else). He would fly away, then fly back to the netting, then start his descent, then I would hit him with a pillow, and we continued this combo until I was thoroughly irritated. The last time he did it, he came super-fast behind my head and honest-to-God piddled on me a little. I got up, turned on the light, grabbed the plastic bowl from the kitchen and a broom from my gimnasio and was prepared to deal with him. Except that in the 10 seconds it took me to gather my things, he disappeared. So I watched for a second looking for motion, listening for movement, and when heard and saw none decided to watch a little morning news. I was content and relaxed and all of a sudden out of the middle of nowhere, a little, warm, brown thing fell from the roof and landed in the crook of my curled up legs. I, of course, panicked. I hopped up to get my bat gear, and once again he completely disappeared. I still have no idea if he is inside my room, and it has been 11 hours. So yeah, this little entry pretty much sums up my month of August. Some good, some not so good, and a fruit bat from hell. I hope everyone is doing well. As a point of reference time wise, today I discovered that Houston and New Orleans are about to be hit by a good-size hurricane, Gustav in a couple of days. I hope everyone emerges from the storm unscathed, and that New Orleans is spared any major damage (though right now it doesn’t look good for the Big Easy). Take care, love you all! Carmen

My how fast the month of July has passed. My trip back to the States was much needed and was a welcome break in the monotony of daily volunteer life. I would like to thank all of my family and friends for being very accommodating to my desires and my absurdly long list of things that I wanted to do and places I wanted to go. I got ALMOST everything done that I had planned to do and saw ALMOST everyone. A special thanks goes out to my parents for not only providing me with a car, the occasional shopping trip, and money to boot, but also were understanding when I left their company for time with friends. They didn’t even make me feel guilty about it. I would also like to specially thank my Aunt Stacy for the first class bus trip back to my site. After a full night of traveling with thankfully no delays and only one minor crisis that turned out to not be a crisis after all, the air-conditioned bus with movies was a god-send. It is also something that I would have deemed too expensive and would not have done had she not forced me to accept the $20 (yes, the super lujo, first-class bus is $20 or L.500, and yes, I am that cheap.)

I am refusing to write about my trip to the States, because most of you were around for all of the really notable activities and except for my friend’s car being towed with her house keys inside and my keys inside her house and thus being locked out until 530AM, nothing bad happened. And even then, that whole experience was an adventure and not wholly unfortunate either. Hell, I got to see what the inside of an EMT station looks like and check out the inside of an ambulance, which has a plethora of items used to open airways. Who knew, certainly not me.

My arrival back to Honduras was fairly easy. All of my planes and buses were on time, and I splurged the $6 to take a cab from Choluteca to Yusguare so that I wouldn’t have to walk 1/3mile through town with all of my stuff. When I got to my house, I noticed that my yard had been cleaned and all of the grass/weed-like plants off to one side cut (I would say mowed, but we all know the work was literally chopped with a machete.) When I entered my house, it was clean — like organized, the bed made, even the few dirty clothes I had left were washed. It was incredible. Apparently, when you ask a very nice family to occasionally sweep the floors and put water in the water filter, the other stuff comes included. I went over to their house the next day to drop off their gifts, to see how they were doing, and politely offer them payment for services, which I had not asked for but were fully appreciated. Their responses to the gifts was everything I had hoped (gratitude and excitement) and nothing that I had been dreading (“y?...”). As for leaving my house in mint condition “pues, somos amigas.” As a side note, Mom, the little girl LOVES the drawing books that we bought her. According to her mother, she won’t put them down and guards the pages like a dog with a bone.

As for the yardwork, well apparently my landlady missed me. And while she was thinking of me one day, decided to send the lone deaf guy in my town over to fix my yard so that I would come home to something nice. I mention that he is the lone deaf guy, not only to show that my community does not shun those that are not just like them (such as David, the well-known and respected, openly homosexual man that lives right next to the mayor’s office). But also because I did not know he was deaf when I went over to introduce myself the other day, while he was working in front of my house. It was a classic moment of gradually louder shouts of “Buenos” from my front porch, then of walking over to see if he was just really shy (some of the people from the campo hear you just fine, they just don’t say anything to gringos), and then finally in exasperation on my part, waving my hand in front of him. This finally got his attention, at which point he let out all manner of sounds and motions, none of which I understood except for the food one and left me totally chagrinned and in the middle of a conversation that I could not end nor politely escape. Finally, I slowly started backing up, nodding my head up and down with a smile, saying gracias just in case he can read lips, and eventually retreated back into my house. As it turns out later, my landlady’s husband has a whole system of sign language-esque motions for communicating, which he showed me and apparently works for hiring this guy to do all sorts of manual labor jobs. I wouldn’t have been able to understand the motions had my life depended on it, especially the one that means “show up before sunrise” but then again, I didn’t grow up in the community with this guy. For all I know these could be the same signs this guy has used all of his life. He certainly manages to get by just fine. For L.300 and free breakfast and lunch at my landlady’s house, he cleaned the yard and all of the residual construction materials.

So yes, my house is organized, my yard is cleaned, and my community has just begun their annual feria. I would write more about it, but this is already a pretty long post, and feria is still underway. When I have pictures and some good stories, I will be sure to write again. As for now, I am off to sweep my floor, wash my morning dishes, and maybe eat a homemade tamale (did I mention my neighbor sells me cheap tamales and cheese every so often. She yells at me from her yard and then brings them by. Talk about service). I hope everyone is doing well, know that the entire community of Yusguare asked about all of ya’ll’s healths and sends their saludos. Ok…adios…

Dear peoples,

As you may know, I shall be taking my first and very likely only trip home in the next couple of days. Yes, I am returning to the land of delicious beer, BBQ, and gyms to help me sweat out all of the guilt I will have consumed. I can't wait! I have packed my bags, told my neighbors to watch my house, filled my water filter, and said goodbye to my sweet little pueblo in Southern Honduras. I am coming back; this is certainly not a permanent return, but why dwell on the negative. In reality, I am a little mixed. What do I do if I don't want to come back? I can't very well leave all of my community projects and friends on hold, because I don't want to leave the lap of luxury. It wouldn't be fair to them, and it wouldn't really do me any favors either. So I shall return to Honduras, even if it means I have to board the plane kicking and screaming (or more likely kind of irritable and a little blue). But while I am in the States, I plan on enjoying myself to the fullest (even if it means making peace with the enevitable five pounds from Amy's ice cream and beer). I am going to go on runs (without worrying about being attacked) and maybe I will hang out at the gym a little or go for a swim in a pool...it all sounds so nice. In between the physical activities, I shall be indulging in all of the really good things the States have to offer. I miss the variety and if variety necessitates consumerism, then thank God I have a VISA. I really need to over indulge. I need so much of the good that the States has to offer that it gives me a tummy ache. As soon as I think I need a rest, I need someone to push me out the door and too the mall. Ah yes...I need to go home with a USA culture-amoeba. Bring on the tap water!

When it rains, it pours…That old adage couldn’t be more right with regard to the rainy season in Southern Honduras. It rained on and off yesterday, and then last night with 36 hours till Hurricane Season officially begins, the South was (or more correctly is currently being) hit by the first tropical depression of the season. Alma began rolling through last night with a torrential downpour, and she still hasn’t let up. The sky shows no sign of hope either; no end in site. According to the national disaster commission, COPECO, the South specifically mi querrida Choluteca, is under yellow alert for the next 12 hours and they are on standby for evacuation should the storm decide to stick around for longer than expected. Fortunately, I really like the rain, and the deafening roar it makes as it hits my lamina roof. The storm has actually served as a really nice wake up call to the fact that not all hurricanes hit the North Coast first. El Famoso Hurricane Mitch, which hit in 1998 destroyed most of the North Coast and much of the interior, but the South was relatively ok. Felix and Dean last year both hit the North Coast and nothing at all happened to Choluteca or Valle. It is understandable how one might get a little complacent as we move into Hurricane season. Not today…Alma we got your message.

I’m not one to complain, but it seems just a bit unfair. In the Dry Season, we fry down here in the South with a kind of heat the locals can only describe as “insoportable.” The kind of heat that renders you useless to do anything more than sit in front of a fan and pray that the sun sets sooner rather than later. And now that “Invierno” has arrived with the rain it is on the brink of flooding already. Ok…I exaggerate a little bit. it is pouring and thus really inadvisable to go outside. If it continues to rain into tonight, THEN we will be on the brink of being washed away.

It is times like these that I relish the fact that once long, long ago, I taught a couple of English classes to a bunch of kids. In the Honduran culture this makes me a “Profe,” and Profes are blessed with the special ability to essentially send any child they happen to see on any errand. I have taken advantage of this special power only twice, once to have the kids buy some more minutes for my cell phone (I rewarded them with pieces of chocolate), and again when I sent a child to pay for the tomatoes and onions I had “bought” earlier that morning. Relatively minor things. The owner of my house is a very well respected Profe, and she literally calls over the closest neighbor child to go do her bidding. Errands for the Prof are usually to run all over town looking for chicken, tomatoes, onions, cheese, tortillas, Pepsi, and maybe deliver a message as well. As I am not a Super Profe, I can not ask such an enormous favor…not yet anyway. I need to buy some corn tortillas for the migas I am making for tomorrow’s San Lo Sabado (normally it is held on Sunday and is called Gringo Domingo, but we had to change the day and Gringo Sabado doesn’t sound good). If I see another child walking by soon, I think I will ask him to pick me up some tortillas. I don’t need very many, and the tortilla woman is really close.

(In Tyra's voice) "This is your best shot"

Wiping out after taking my "best shot"...the only thing "fierce" at the beach were the waves

The best pair of Mardis Gras beads I have ever caught..ok...the only beads I have ever caught

Eating watermelon at the beach...yum!

Ahh…Life is good…a glass of white wine in hand, Brazilian music on the laptop, and I am waiting on company to arrive…ahh… sounds pretty nice doesn’t it. In truth it kind of is. Though the wine came out of a box (I have no bottle opener) and is being served in a strange tan plastic cup, it is still pretty tasty and makes Honduras feel just a tad more acceptable. My friends, which should be en route from Choluteca are really just a couple of guys that could not make it back to their sites (poor things are actually in the Peace Corps…I guarantee you they don’t have white wine and Brazilian music). As I have two extra beds and an extra bed room and am close to Choluteca with one sort of late bus, I am the most obvious place for them to stay. I was gone last week due to a conference for Project Citizen. The concept is good, though it tends to have mixed success in a Honduran classroom. The teachers that are good, and there are a few, will be able to introduce this project into their lesson plans and be able to cover several often lacking and yet totally necessary subjects. The other teachers will probably read straight from the manual, their students will get nothing out of the project, and eventually they will drop the whole idea in favor of an early lunch hour. I have a couple of fundamental problems with the project. One of which is that the project starts by asking the students to list problems in their communities. I personally feel as though most Hondurans have so convinced themselves that they are too poor and too corrupt and will never be able to rid their country of these issues and thus have completely given up. The last thing I want to do is take a kid that is idealistic by comparison and ask him to start listing problems in his community. I understand that at the end they present solutions, but I know and they know that these solutions will never be implemented…I don’t know, it seems kind of cruel to jade them so soon. Right now, my main concern with regard to this project is finding a teacher good enough and motivated enough to work with me. * * * So…the first part of this blog entry was written what is now over a week ago. I have since been to a second meeting/conference thing (this time over Peace Corps policy and my new role as an emergency-zone coordinator). The meeting was moderately interesting, and I got to meet some new volunteers. Perhaps the best thing I learned at the conference was a new game to be played on a ping pong table. Essentially, you get a group of four people, and they form two little lines, one on one side of the table and the other on the other side. Each person as they come up to the table hits the ping pong ball to the player on the other side and then quickly runs around to volley the ball back over to another recently arrived person. At any given time, two sometimes three people are in transit to assume their new positions, and a person is at each end of the table ready to return the volley. It was really, really fun and a pretty nice little work out. After the meeting, which was held in Siguatepeque, a group of us decided to take some much needed mental health days and headed up to the North Coast, specifically La Ceiba. Mental health days are kind of like Peace Corps weekends, because technically volunteers have to work all 30/31 days of the month. I had never been to La Ceiba, and I would never have been able to do the trip in the allowed amount of time if I hadn’t already been north of Tegus. The trip up in bus was nice, though unremarkable (just like you always hope your bus trips will be). That day we hung out and got to know Ceiba a little bit, and then that night we went to a really swanky club that patted down men for weapons as they walked in. Ok…in truth the club is a standard club by States standards, but considering the condition of most clubs in Honduras, this two levels plus karaoke room and wrap around porch meant it had actual ambiance. The music was good, and we danced like mad-men. The next morning, early because most of us wake up at 6AM on a regular basis, a group of us headed out to an awesome beach about 5km from town. We brought lots of water, and fruit, and because everyone was in Ceiba for the carnival were almost completely alone. After devouring God-knows how much watermelon and mango we decided to play a game called “Your Best Shot” based on America’s Next Top Model. Goofing off in front of the camera had an extra twist with the strong waves that would crash on you unannounced and drag you across the beach a little. As we were walking back to the main road in order to wait for a bus, a guy in a pickup truck gave us a jalon, then stopped and bought us iced tea and casaba chips (super crunchy baked chip like things only made on the North Coast) and then dropped us off right were we needed to go in Ceiba. It couldn’t have been a better jalon. We went back to the house, showered, and went out to the parade that evening. Later that night we went back out for a bit for the street carnival but I was so exhausted and the street so packed it was a little hard to enjoy. The next morning, Sunday, I got up early and made the 10 or so hour back down South. I actually could only make it as far as San Lorenzo before night fall, so I stayed with a friend there and made it back into my site this morning. Fortunately all of the plans that I had for today, the whole reason I left San Lo early this morning, fell apart and let me spend the day, guilt-free, cleaning my house and unpacking. Tomorrow will be busy, but at least now my house is not a disaster and I am caught up on sleep. Before I sign off from this absurdly long entry, I just thought that I would mention that the rainy season has officially begun. It rained HARD on my friend and me as we were walking around yesterday evening, and then it rained again today. The whole southern part of Honduras has in a matter of a week turned completely green and really beautiful, and these crazy frogs that sound like little laser guns going “pieu, pieu” have begun to come out. The rain has also cooled off the late-afternoon/evening time and today for the first time in three months, I turned my fan off because I didn’t need it. Also, I called my father to gloat this past Tuesday because it was the first day in eight months that Texas was going to be hotter than my part of Honduras…lets hope it stays that way for a while.

Peace Corps has many obvious goals: make a country less poor (aka. “Develop” it), teach Americans about other cultures (aka. Let volunteers actually learn more about their own culture by watching someone else reinterpret it for them. Akin to the King in Hamlet watching the players reenact the assassination of his brother, Hamlet’s father), teach others about American culture (aka. Explain that Americans do not solely eat things that come out of cans and that we regularly marry for more than three years).

What none of the materials one receives from Peace Corps explains is that every volunteer also has personal Peace Corps goals. These secondary, or informal, PC goals are often borne out of boredom and tend towards the ridiculous. Some of my favorite secondary goals are or have been to recreate/diagram notable moments in Peace Corps using only construction paper (my personal favorite was the picture of the volunteer and her friend hanging out at a nice hotel in Tegus, included in the picture is a tiny cutout of a bottle of unidentifiable liquor and tiny cutouts of clothes strewn around the room), to build a fruit dryer out of a cardboard box and some screen, to perfect the art of making yogurt, to train a cat (to do what, I don’t know but I always wonder…how on Earth do you train a CAT!), to learn how to eat ANYTHING with just tortillas, and many, many more…

Well…the other day I was bored, hot, and it dawned on me something I haven’t done in a while and that would make the perfect Peace Corps goal…Having previously attempted to train for a marathon, a feat that required the men to not rape me and the rabid dogs not bite me, I set my sites a little more towards the attainable. I decided to relearn how to do a handstand. I did plenty of these as a child, my mother can attest I used to do them in our living room in Austin for fun with Jessica Bungum. How hard could it possibly be, Madonna does them all the time, right? HA! Wrong! First of all, the last time I did a handstand, I had no boobs and was thus way better at finding a nice center of gravity. This is obviously not my current state. Secondly, I was significantly shorter the last time I attempted. Now, the force required to launch my legs above my head is a feeling not unlike throwing yourself as fast as possible, face first towards toward the floor with the vague notion that your hand will hit before you smash your nose. Thirdly, as I didn’t remember stretching before doing a handstand as a child, I didn’t stretch this time.

After a few pathetic attempts and the notion that maybe I could just will myself into a handstand like all those kids at the Olympics do, I finally attained the first step in handstanded-ness. Legs suspended for a fraction of a second above my head, I considered it a minor success. So yesterday morning, again, bored and hot, I decided what better time than then to work on my Peace Corps goal. Having gone for a run, I was feeling pretty good and limber and went in for the launch. As my first leg went perpendicular to the floor, I felt the hamstring in the second do the tell-tale yank-pain combo oft associated will straining a muscle. The other leg quickly came down, I righted myself, and stopped the foolishness to inspect the damage. Knee was good, hip was fine, pressure on the leg was ok, and walking was reduced to a hobble. Oh…not good….the injury has left me a little lame yesterday and today and made me reconsider my secondary goal. Should I continue with such a silly activity if it may result in injury? My mind still isn’t made up. When I can go for a run again, maybe I will think about it. Right now I am still reeling from having done something so dumb.

I really should have known better. If Madonna can do it, no mortal should attempt.

I am not currently in the best of shape both mentally and physically. I currently have a bit of a head and chest cold and as such stayed inside all-day reading. Normally hanging out with myself is pretty pleasant, but I can really only take so much of my own internal ramblings. To complicate or really to compound the problem, the electricity has gone out, and here I sit in the dark with not really enough candlelight to read by. Oh woe is me to be a Peace Corps volunteer! I really shouldn’t complain; I know there are many more people out there that never have electricity. Other Peace Corps volunteers in fact may read this and scoff, calling me all manner of names. And it is true! I have become softer during my Peace Corps time than I ever was back in the States. Whatever happened to the girl that worked in the restaurant with a migraine headache? Alas she has been replaced with a girl that doesn’t go to work because of the sniffles. Hondurans aren’t exactly motivators either. A small cough in the alcaldia or around my English class usually yields the same responses of “You know if you don’t feel well, this can wait” and “if you have gripe you should take tomorrow off as well.” It is nice how they care about my well-being, but they don’t do it with just me. On any given day, there are three or four people out of the office because they are “sick.” Given that roughly ten people work in the alcaldia, this loss is labor is fairly significant. So yeah, I have a cold and I am a bit lazy and I am bored with myself.

Current situation aside, the days and months have been passing by fairly quickly. I have no idea what happened to March, and already, we are solidly into April. In the States I would attribute the passing of time to my perceived level of busy. I think quite the opposite is happening here. I think the days are flying by because in retrospect they all sort of meld together. I don’t really remember the month of March, because nothing really big happened in March. This is not to say that I am not working. I am. But, projects here are ongoing and require an absurd number of meetings and following-ups, none of which is particularly noteworthy.

Two things that are worth mentioning is: one, I have started building a chicken coop with nothing more than the trees in my yard, a machete, some rusty nails, a hammer, and two nine year old neighbors that have decided to help; and two, I yelled at some kids that have been cat-calling me every single night for the past several months. Yesterday, I caught the kids in my yard getting water from my pila. I was, at the time, taking a nap and over heard “la Gringa, aqui” as well as other wispers. I woke up from my nap, and looked outside and saw them sneaking around my yard. I was furious! I got up, threw open the door, and started yelling at them about how I was going to call the cops next time and how irrespectful it was of them to enter someone’s property without asking, and so on and so forth. Two of the guys, the two I have the most problems with on a daily basis, just kind of laughed. And then, out of nowhere, my landlady and her husband come flying down the street in their truck almost hitting one of the kids. The two punks take off running as soon as they see who it is, and the third sort of stands around lost, like he can’t believe what is happening. My landlady gets out of the truck and starts yelling at the third kid that hung around about how she will personally call the police and go to each and every one of their houses to speak to their parents about harassing me if any of this behavior continues. She gets the kids names, talks to my neighbors, and then takes off. I couldn’t have timed it better if I’d tried. This all took place on Sunday, and so far it has been one 24-hour period with no piropos, maybe it really worked.

Hi friends and family. Here are a few more pictures. The first is of some, but certainly not all of the kids I play soccer with and taught a few words of English to.

This is further confirmation of my dominance during the Super Bowl. Notice there are two stars around my name. Those stars meant limited, but still very satisfying money for me. It is hard to call it betting, when the total amount is under a US dollar, but had it been a piece of chocolate, I would still feel just as proud.

This is the beautiful city of Tela...ok so the town itself isn't particularly pretty, but the area around it is very nice.

This is a picture of the beach in the South...it can be pretty...in that it is the lesser of the two coasts in Honduras, and still, way better than the beaches in Texas. Also, the beer is cheap, and the fried fish is really good.

I don't get to enjoy the beach all that often, but everytime I go it feels like a mini-vacation. Don't I looked relaxed?

Here I am at the Christmas party for the alcaldia (municipal government). First of all a couple of disclaimers before I get into trouble: 1) there were a lot of women there and everyone had a beer or two, 2) that is a normal sized beer bottle, but because of the angle looks abnormally large, and 3) we had a safe, DD to take us all back home at the end of the night. I just want to make that clear, before Peace Corps and family back home get all upset. It was a totally safe environment, I drank a beer in a socially acceptable situation, and I looked particuarly nice that night. So there.

This is beautiful Tela. The beach at sunset was pretty classic "Beach at Sunset" photo-op

As I sit here typing a group of about six ten-year-olds are playing a very loud game of soccer right in front of my house. Also, my neighbor’s chickens and lone rooster haven’t stopped crowing and clucking since about 3AM, and it is now 330PM. I should really be impressed at how incredibly strong and resilient the birds’ vocal cords are, but after about 12 hours of listening to them (mainly because they are particularly fond of hanging out in my yard), I am about ready for them to be made into tamales.

February has gone by fairly fast, and each day is significantly warmer than the preceding. The winds have begun to die down as well, and this worries me greatly. March and April, the two hottest months of the year are quickly approaching. On the other hand, mango season is about to begin. Of my five, yes five, mango trees in my yard, one of them has begun to drop ripe mangos. The current rate is one a day or rather one every night, and then in the morning, I pick it up before the ants find it. It is a game; a game that I am currently winning. I have been devouring books at a rate of about two a week, but the new Cormack McCarthy novel, The Road, may slow me down considerably. Not because it isn’t good, it is. But because, the pace of the book and plot is like a hike with my Uncle Dave, slow but never ending.

I won a little bit of money this month, my father should be proud. First I guessed correctly three out of four times at the combined scores at the end of each quarter during the Super Bowl. That week, my project group and last year’s project group got together during reconnect. We played Texas Hold’em two nights, and I tied one night (split pot with one other person) and won the next (mine all mine). It was just incredible luck. I honestly have never had that kind of luck before. Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on who you are, the buy-ins for the Super Bowl and the poker games were small (10 and 20 lempira or roughly $.50 and $1). The week after reconnect, a friend of mine came into town, and we checked out the lovely Copan Ruinas and the beach in Tela. While both places were very nice, I think the ruins are a one time only kind of thing. Tela, however, I would go back to in a heartbeat. The town is just kind of cool, and there are some places around the area that I would love to go and check out.

While I was gone, work carried on without me. I went to the alcaldia yesterday to see what all is going on and if there has been any progress on any of my projects. No. But after a slew of meetings with several people and my counterpart, we have things moving again. I start my English classes with Educatodos on Thursday and need to set up a meeting with the director of the school in my town to talk about some projects with the school.

Today, I was the perfect combination of Honduran wife meets Single-American-Female (hyphenated and capitalized because we are a distinct group of people, not a mere sub-culture). I washed clothes and sheets, mopped the floor, made a pot of beans and stack of tortillas, filled my pila with water, and burned trash. All in all, it was a very busy morning. In a very American way though, I did most of that simultaneously (multi-tasking is unheard of in Honduras), went for a run this morning, and enjoyed the power outage this afternoon by reading aforementioned book. Saving the world it is not, but saying good morning to every group of neighborhood school kids does go a long way towards community integration. Also, one of my personal Peace Corps goals is to thoroughly enjoy the absurd amount of downtime I have as a volunteer.

Now that my visit from the States is over, the only thing I have to really look forward to is my visit TO the States. I am trying not to obsess, four months is still quite a ways from now, but I have started to put together a list of things that I want to bring with me, take back, and places to eat when there.

Things to take with me: Anything that hasn’t been worn yet or will not be worn again, gifts for family, and a selection of Honduran treats for friends in the States to try (if possible Honduran moonshine).

Things to bring back: teas, spices, good coffee, peanut butter, tank tops, new high heels, my converse tennis shoes, pictures, and more music.

Places/things to eat and drink: Assortment of beers at Pint Night and Gingerman, Ribs from Stubbs and/or Salt Lick, Amy’s ice cream, Thom Ka soup from Madam Mams (in restaurant only), All-you-can-eat crab claws from Trulucks (last time my friend and I ate the equivalent of a dozen crabs, I think we can do better next time), LOTS of wine and margaritas and lemon drop shots and several other fancy and impossible things to find or make in Honduras, dinner at Star Lite (Austin), dinner at The Starlight (Terlingua), Tex-mex from any place that only speaks Spanish and Guerros and Tivo’s Place, breakfast tacos from my little hole-in-the-wall place on either Airport or Exposition, breakfast at Kirby Lane and Magnolias, anything from the East Side Café, and a Dairy Queen blizzard. Am I missing anything?

Dear readers, things are looking up.

I think January has been the best month thus far in Peace Corps. I finally have my new house, I have gone to the beach twice (a pretty nice beach, though it is no Caribbean), my census and 100% attendance projects are coming along, I am slowly but surely returning to my pre-Peace Corps weight, I have only flooded my house twice (I forgot I was filling up my pila with water and didn’t notice till it made it to the living room, both times), I am winning the war on the ants in my house, and the mouse/bat thing that is living in a little gap between the wall and the roof no longer gives me the creeps.

January has been the month of public health side projects. I occasionally run on the soccer field and talk about exercise and somehow that motivated other women in the community to organize a little running/jogging/exercise group. It is nice because they keep me motivated and in turn I help them out with other exercises and try to keep them interested in health. Most of these women understand that physical fitness is necessary, but then they will talk about how they used to be when they were “thin and healthy” and you discover that they did that by simply not eating breakfast or dinner. I try then to talk about ways to cut calories and talk about nutrition. Many of them have no idea how to cook spinach or prepare vegetables in ways that are tasty and healthy. So we run and swap recipes and talk about life and it feels pretty therapeutic.

This month I also helped out as a translator for a medical brigade, specifically for the ob/gyn PA. A medical brigade is a group of doctors, usually from the States and this time from Montana, that come down with basic medications and set up free clinics in some of the poorest communities of Honduras. They weren’t working in my municipality, but the other volunteer working with them needed a few more translators, so I pitched in. The whole experience was pretty fascinating. I discovered a couple of things about myself. 1) I made the right choice going for a Liberal Arts degree, and 2) I have no problem eating a little bag of GORP and observing/translating a pap smear. I suppose I should clarify a little. The PA that needed my help translating does pap smears and mammograms for women in the campo. The nearby laboratory runs all of the tests on the smears, and then the local community nurses walk around explaining the results. I was present for the first step. Paula, the PA, needed someone that would take medical histories, explain what a mammogram is and how they should do at-home exams, and then would explain the gynecological exam and ask if they had any complaints or problems. If we found evidence of any sort of infection, which quite often we did, she would give the patients antibiotics or creams, and it was my duty to explain the dosage and such. Again, it was really fascinating, and I have no desire to go into medicine.

February should be a good month as well. I have a meeting with all of the other Municipal Development volunteers in Honduras, where we will do God-knows-what for a week. And the next week, a friend of mine from the States is coming down for a visit. I am a little concerned, because he has never traveled in Latin America, and Honduras is a little bit like jumping into the deep end for your first swim. On the other hand, we are going to go check out the ruins at Copan and the North Coast; both areas have the nicest transportation and less Honduras-y. I feel a little bit as though he is being cheated of the “true” Honduras experience, but then again a first trip to Latin America can be so overwhelming on its own, let alone the whole chicken busses and cold-water showers. Fingers crossed, we don’t get robbed. THAT would suck.

I hope things are going well in the States!

Carmen

Fun things that you can do in Honduras:

1) A LOT of fried fish with heads (or rather every time you eat fried fish, it comes with head and all.)

2) Drink way too much rum the night BEFORE New Years Eve, thereby ruining any chance of a hang-over on New Year’s Day.

3) Come back home to find the electricity is out, and your counterpart has brought back three ice chests full of fish from the coast, which are quickly thawing and filling the kitchen floor with fish-water.

4) Pack all of your belongings by candle-light (romantic-sounding, but is really more of a challenge) because the electricity still hasn’t come back.

5) Move into new house in less than 30 mins (personal record)

6) Wake up to a deafening loud crack coming from the metal roof, panic for a second, then realize it was just a mango falling on it from a near-by tree.

7) Buy a new fridge, bed, television for $450, and then make the rest of your furnishings with 36 cinderblocks, one sheet of plywood (cut into pieces), and one slab of beautiful cedar.

8) Discover you can survive for 2 days on water, chocolate soy milk powder, and generic cornflakes. Also, coffee.

9) Listen to last year’s NPR’s All Songs Considered and hear one of the commentators mention a friend/ex-coworker’s band as his number one record of the year.

10) Sit on a plank of wood in your very first house without roommates and miss home just a little (then realize that while I am sitting here comfortably in my t-shirt and jeans with the windows open and light breeze blowing in, my friends and family back home are literally freezing…)

Carmen

Well, Christmas in the States has come and gone, but here in Honduras Christmas is still in full swing. You see, here, they celebrate Christmas from midnight on the 24th through Jan 6. I personally find this extended Christmas season to be just a bit too long, but no one else seems to mind. Then again, Hondurans don’t have that frantic last week before Christmas thing that we do in the States, so maybe they just aren’t burnt out on the whole idea by the 26th. At any rate, I don’t know how I am going to sustain sufficient Christmas-cheer beyond New Years.

Speaking of Christmas, I took advantage of the holiday season to go up to a very pretty and COOL (!) Valle de Angeles for a little work/play combo. I left my site on the 23rd, visited with my host family in Santa Lucia, and then went to Valle that evening. The morning of the 24th was a nice slow-paced hang out around the house with my friends and a little work, and then that afternoon, the three of us went over to their counterpart’s house for traditional nacatamales (blow Mexican tamales out of the water) and later a pretty standard turkey dinner.

On the 25th , we opened presents in the morning and ate hot cranberry-orange granola and milk (very tasty). Later that evening, their Santa Lucia host family came by and we made chicken and rice, green bean casserole, and ate traditional torrejas (imagine thick cut French bread, which is then soaked in egg and cinnamon and cooked in boiling syrup. Yeah.. delicious). On the 26th, I needed to head back home. So that morning, I stood on a crowded bus back to Tegus, then stood in the terminal for an hour because it was packed with people and all the buses heading out were super full. To top it all off, when I finally got on a bus, I had to sit in the very back (essentially on top of an engine) of the bus on a little cushion with my knees up to my chin, because it wasn’t technically a seat and I had to share that space with four other people. So yeah, my trip back home was a bit tiring but at least I made it back without any incident.

Depending on when you are reading this, I may or may not be in my new house by now. I am supposed to move in on the 3rd of January. Originally I was going to move in on the 30th of December, but my landlady has taken a liking to me and is in the process of building me a bathroom inside the house. For those of you in the States, you may have taken for granted having a bathroom inside your house. During the day, going to the bathroom/pila area outside is no big deal, but at night any trip outside is kind of scary. Not that I am concerned that the boogy-man is going to get me (though he might, you never know), but also because it is dark and animals tend to like to come out at night (giant toads, skunks, dogs, etc). Also, while not a huge threat but defiantly a concern, when I go out into my backyard to use the bathroom, I have to leave my back door open. Any time you leave you house open, you are more at risk for theft. So yeah, my awesome landlady and her husband have decided to go ahead and build me a bathroom inside the house, it only means that I can’t move in until the 3rd.

Well I have to get to a meeting. Love everyone a ton!

Carmen

Well the holiday season is officially in full swing. In Honduras, Christmas stuff has been up since about mid-late October (it’s what happens when you don’t have Halloween or Thanksgiving to lead the run-up to Christmas). The difference now is Christmas movies have started appearing on the TV. The other day, for example, I watched the Nutcracker, while I drank my morning coffee. I haven’t figured out what all I am going to do to celebrate Christmas. Peace Corps recommends I stay in my site and celebrate Christmas with my community. That would be a good plan, except I am not Christmas-close with anyone and by all accounts Christmas in Honduras is essentially eat tamales with the family and then go to a dance. There isn’t anything particularly special about tamales or even the dance that my town will have. On the other hand, when will I ever have the opportunity to spend another Christmas without all of the hustle and bustle normally associated with this season? I personally like the whole Christmas ordeal, but then again, I might find that Christmas Eve and Christmas can still be special without all of the trimmings.

On a more recent note…This past weekend I celebrated Thanksgiving with some of the other volunteers. I made my very first turkey, stuffing from scratch, and my mother’s giblet gravy. The whole Thanksgiving thing was a bit strange, good, but strange. First of all, we celebrated it on Saturday, which was fine but it meant that the day of Thanksgiving passed with little notice. Saturday day was fairly close to “normal” Thanksgiving. I started the turkey in the morning, and began cooking, later some friends came over and we finished up the rest of the food. Just about everyone brought at least one dish, so we had all of the standard food, including a couple of things I had never had before (stewed apples and a dessert squash thing). The turkey turned out quite good, not dry but certainly not under-done. I was particularly surprised it came out as well as it did, because I had no real idea what I was doing. I received lots of compliments on all of my food, though everyone’s dishes were really good. After gorging ourselves, we sat around talking, digesting. If we were back in the States, we probably would have watched football and gone out shopping (maybe a movie), as we live in Honduras, we went to a karaoke bar.

Hondurans love their karaoke, and their song choices tend toward the overly sappy, romantic songs from the 1980s. It also seems to bother no one if the same song is sung 4 or 5 times within the same hour (I know because I counted). So while the locals belted out “he can’t love you like I love you” and “just don’t wake me when you come back from her house” style songs, we, the other volunteers and myself, sang a Bryan Adams song, “Gangster’s Paradise”, and “Like a Prayer” by Madonna. “During Like a Prayer,” a very drunk guy from a nearby table decided to come over and sing with us. It was a classic karaoke moment. So yeah…that was Thanksgiving. Work continues on, and every day I get a little bit closer to moving out of my counterpart’s house and raising my chickens

The my counterpart's famous three year old about to get a bath. She can be really sweet one day and then a bit of a terror the next. A sweet old man gave my mayor/counterpart a live chicken as a thank you present. We ate it for lunch.Glenda, my counterpart's empleada, plucking doomed chicken. she looks so happy, I on the otherhand was a little horrified.

One of my current projects is to walk around collecting census information with the two people that work in the community development office. These are two sisters that lived in one of the houses we were surveying. I thought they were pretty cute.

Also, should any of you deal beloved readers decide to send me something via regular mail, my address isCarmen GaddisAlcaldia Municipal de Santa Ana de YusguareFrente del parque, Barrio CentroSanta Ana de Yusguare, CholutecaHonduras, Central America

Dear friends, family, and Peace Corps blog readers,

Today was perfect, like a beautiful, bright blue, 76 degrees kind of day. The kind of day that in Texas would mean that fall would be coming in soon; the kind of day that catches you by surprise in late September or October; the kind of day that says summer in thankfully over and finally we can return outside wearing sleeves and maybe pants. In Honduras, this kind of day is a total fluke. I cannot and should not expect it to linger; I cannot and should not expect it to continue to cool off. In fact, if you listened to the people in my community it is down right cold and the cooling temps and light breeze have been blamed for every thing that has gone wrong today from the cable not working this morning to the ubiquitous “gripe” (literally flu, but they use it to refer to any kind of illness) which has apparently afflicted everyone today.

So yes, it was finally a beautiful day. I personally spent the majority of it in one my near by towns, known as aldeas, working with a very organized women’s group. I also sat outside a lot today (sure I was waiting for busses, but if I closed my eyes I could maybe be in a park in Austin). This week has been a particularly productive week. On Monday, I worked with census information for one of our other aldeas (we have 9 in total) and practiced working with AutoCAD. Yesterday, I began working with our tax collection and land office trying to help them use the program for plotting their land sections. I also discovered that they are currently making a few mistakes, which is costing them accuracy and clarity on their maps. For example, as I was looking at an image of a piece of property I noticed that one side was labeled 40m and another side was labeled as 24. Both lines were exactly the same length in the drawing. Also, for whatever reason, they decided to simply add the lengths of two sides if the angle where they met was large and therefore didn’t look unlike a semi-curved line. When I asked them about it, they said that they took the two side measurements originally but that decided to simply add the sides together because, they didn’t see any reason not to. Soo…we talked and worked on basic AutoCAD stuff and hopefully the quality of survey maps will improve after this week. Today, I gave a money management 101 class with 40 women. Aside from the fact that I was only really expecting 20 women and I forgot my pencils at home, the whole talk went really well. We did a really basic spending assessment, where we looked first at all the money the family made each month and then looked at how much money the family spent each month. Just about every single person discovered they were spending more money that they actually made each month. I was really shocked, and they seemed fairly surprised as well. Then we talked about ways of cutting back on spending (shopping smarter and not spending little bits of money often). Little things like cutting back on the amount of chips and soda you buy saves a ton of money and calories.

Other things related to work…English classes, trying to get together an organization that helps smaller communities to understand their legal rights (a bit like fighting for vigilante-ism, which I am generally opposed to. The problem in these communities is the police don’t often respond to reports of violence or robberies. This organization provides other ways of handling these cases without going through the local police officials.), a municipality-wide survey, and I have recently started working to start a weekend market.

As far as my social life…I well…I have very little social life. I met the other volunteers and had a really great weekend with them, doing things like speaking English and drinking Honduran bloody marys. The unfortunate part was that the weekend eventually ended, and I returned back to my site…We are supposed to be getting together for Thanksgiving so that will be another date to look forward to, in the mean time though I am trying to focus on work.

When I am not working or watching just about anything I can find in English on the TV, I wander around looking at chickens trying to decide which of the different breeds/styles I would like to eventually raise (it is kind of like picking out a puppy, but with more emphasis on aesthetics and less on personality). I am also making my own yogurt when I get really bored. Before I sign off, I would just like to clarify something. I am not currently living in the little blue house because it is still being worked on, I will move in there in late Dec-early Jan. When I do finally move in, I will take pictures of what it looks like with my sparse furniture and few belongings.

Well…my time is up…I hope everyone is doing really well…Love you all

Carmen

This post is essentially just going to be used for pictures. Things are going alright here. It has been raining a ton, like non-stop for several days which has meant cancelled meetings, damp clothes, and mold. My wonderful grandmother sent me a box of truly random things she found in her house a couple of weeks ago (ask her, even she admits it was a strange little collection). HOWEVER, the random bits I received have really come in handy. Included in the box was an almost totally used spool of kitchen yarn (slightly dirty). Well, it has proven to be super useful. It is currently providing my clothes line, and when I moved to my site, it helped me to seal the large plastic dog food bag, which held all of my belongings. Also…included in this box was sugar-free Russell-Stovers Chocolates, individually wrapped. They are delicious, and should anyone decide to send me another package I would recommend including a few.

Trying to stay dry

This is the giant toad I found in my room one morning. I have since seen several other animals as well.

This is me on our graduation day. Look it says Peace Corps!

My cute little blue house, which I will be renting come January!

Me and some of my girlfriends as we got ready to go to the embassy for our swearing in.

Sometimes it rains inside the bar...

Me in El Paraiso, my training site for 6 weeksMy new site, from the second floor of the municipality building. It is actually quite cute.My friend Bronwin (known as Betty in her site because they can´t pronounce her real name) wearing the bowtie my wonderful grandmother sent. I let Bronwin-Betty keep it because she seemed way more excited about it than I was.My incredibly sweet and amazing Santa Lucia host family. Note the delicious birthday cake.Carmen

I am appalled by my apparent lack of transition in my blogs. I apologize to all of those who read this. Thinking in Spanish all day and typing in English is hard, especially when you have someone trying to talk to you at the same time. But…well…sorry..

I finally had my meeting though it was not on Monday like I had hoped. The result of all of my planning stuff is MORE PLANNING! I will be in more meetings with more people this next week than I had ever intentioned to be. I have a whole series of meetings with women’s organizations this coming week and the week after. On the days I am not meeting with them, I will be in meetings with Emergency Response Committees and trying to help them get an advanced alert system working. On days when I am not in meetings, I will be wandering around these same areas with a survey and asking people, most likely the same ones I just met, to fill out my forms. I guess this is what you would call Community Introduction.

In other news, I fixed my computer but my Ipod has decided to act up. The three year old continues to terrorize me, but she’s only three and I am way bigger. If push comes to shove, I will eventually prevail. I need to put a lock on my door, well really, first I need to be able to close my door all of the way, THEN I will put a lock on it.

The other volunteers in my area emailed me this past week. I will be having Thanksgiving up in a cooler area (THANK GOD!!), and we are doing some sort of Welcome New Volunteer thing near by on the 27th of this month. I am very excited to meet the other volunteers.

I finally made a decision and went for the little blue house. The other house apparently has a colony of bats that like the live in the kitchen, and no real outside area. Oddly enough, the deal breaker for me was not the bats in the kitchen, but the lack of yard. When it came down to it, I really wanted to be able to have chickens and a garden.

Well that is about all from Honduras. I´ll keep posting with new developments as they happen.

Besos from the South

Carmen

I just wanted to add- uploading pictures takes a VERY long time. When I find faster internet I will try to make it happen.

I live in the South, affectionately referred to as the ‘Dirty Dirty.’ It is hot, there are mosquitoes, and the locals keep joking about how much hotter it can still get. I have already bought a fan, because it is for sure a necessity. My town is actually quite pleasant, which is to say that it has lots of trees and vegetation. Mangos are particularly prevalent: thank god I like mangos.

I actually went looking at a house which I might rent at the end of my two months with a host family. The tree had a lime-lemon tree in the backyard as well as several other native fruits, mamones and nances. Nances are these horrid yellow berry-like things with a pungent scent and almost fermented flavor. The locals eat them like crazy, but they are overwhelmingly abhorred by the volunteer population. The house I went and looked at today was robin’s egg blue, and was quite cute and small. The area is safe (well, my whole town is considered quite safe) and the house has bars on all of the windows. The rental houses here have NOTHING inside. They are literally shells of houses. There is no table or countertop or oven/fridge/appliance of any sort. The most difficult part is that there is no sink. There is no sink, because there is no water that goes to the house house. Nearby is the pila and shower area, then a little bit further away is the toilet. I would be kind of irritated at not having a sink, but now I know how it works. You buy a table, get a jug of water that you use for cooking and a basin. When you need water, you get it out of the jug, and when you are done with your dishes you put them into the basin. It is awkward but it isn’t terribly hard. Just about everyone here has to do it that way. I will probably build/ find some stones in order to make a little path from the house to the pila and the toilet. I wish they weren’t two totally separate buildings, but there is nothing that I can do about it. I have one other housing option, which has no backyard and the neighbors play really loud music at all hours. On the other hand, this other house has an inside bathroom and is closer to where I will be working. I need to check it out this week and make my final decision. One problem with the blue casita is that it won’t be ready until January. I like my host family, but I am really ready to live on my own.

I have a meeting on Monday to discuss possible projects with the municipality peoples. Hopefully something worthwhile will come out of it all. I think my community would like me to help them to get a Reicken Library, but this is a long-term project and requires a lot of community support. I will certainly do what I can. I would also really like to help organize some sort of women’s group for wives with spouses in the States. I think they could really benefit from a little financial help/advice and some sort of support group. A lot of these women have children and are essentially single-mothers. I need to talk with the women in the Women’s Office to see what she thinks, but it is something that I think would be a really good first project.

Yesterday was a day of some good good moments and a couple really bad bads. Por ejemplo, yesterday I was walking with a friend of mine and happened upon the cute blue house which after a little investigating as to who owned it and its status led to me seeing it today; I also went to another good Municipality Corporation meeting and finally got to contribute something and got good positive feedback, and finally I met a young woman that lives across the street from my current house that is my same age and was friends with the previous volunteer and seemed genuinely interested in getting to be friends. Now for the bad, I discovered I accidentally erased the program for my sound card last week and now my computer doesn’t think it can make sounds, I had a terrible headache for hours last night, UT most likely lost their game to Kansas(!), and 300 Lempiras the equivalent of $17 has gone missing in my room (my fault for just putting it on the table). While I realize $17 is not a lot of money, you must keep in mind that is about 3 days wages for me. I am not at all going to suspect anyone in my house, because it was my fault for just putting it on the table and because it could just have easily gotten lost as been stolen. The only thing that gnaws at me is the fact that the three year old I live with does things she knows she shouldn’t be doing just to get a rise out of you and she is always walking into my room and touching my stuff. Do I think she stole the money? No. Do I think she took or purposely hid the money? Maybe. Just to illustrate some of the little mischievous things she does, yesterday she helped another little girl dig up the dead parrot with a shovel. This morning she was scrunching up the pages in my journal and putting the book in her mouth. When I took it away from her and told her not to put books in her mouth, she looked at me defiantly, picked up my day planner and started licking it. I kicked her out of my room. I was not amused. My counterpart/owner of the house I am in seems to think this kind of thing is cute. I think it is irritating. Also this morning, a HUGE toad was in my room. I don’t know how he got in, and took me forever to get him out. Ah…peace corps…

Dear faithful readers (ie. My family)

I know many of you have been wondering when I was going to post another entry. It has been a while. Sorry. But you see I received my new site, and subsequently went to visit. So now, when you wonder where in Honduras I am living all you need to do is look up the town Santa Ana de Yusguare, Choluteca, which is about 15km to the east of Choluteca, Choluteca. I find it funny that Choluteca is often dubbed (by Hondurans mind you) Cholutexas. Funnier still, that my area looks like a greener version of Big Bend or a more mountainous version of the hill country. Peace Corps has in effect sent me back home. I am working and living with the mayor (mother of three girls with a husband in the States), her cousin, and the empleada. It is a house full of loud, gregarious females, which is fun right now but I don’t know how long I can handle all of the estrogen. My site is really interesting because many of the men have gone to the States, and so the majority of the positions within the mayor’s office and the main social actors are women. This is not to say that the town is completely devoid of men, certainly not, but it is noticeably dominated by females.

So yeah…my new site is good. I am currently back in Santa Lucía and finishing up with the rest of training. On Friday, I will head back down to the “Dirty, dirty” (the term we have coined to refer to Southern Honduras). It is by the way perpetually in the 90s and the temperature varies from slightly less hot to slightly more hot than whatever average feels like. Right now we are in the cool season, I can´t even fathom what the warm season is going to be like (probably like Texas Summer). I hope everything in the States is going well and I will be sure to keep you guys posted on any new developments.

PS

The municipality building is a really nice two story structure with arches patios. It is also housing about 40 chickens in the backyard that just sort of wander around and occasionally jump the 8ft wall into the neighbor´s yard.

While my pictures upload, I thought I would write a new blog post. My birthday went quite well considering I am in Honduras and my host family had ditched me earlier in the week to go to Tegus. The hurricane ended up not really affecting anything, fortunantly. As it was, my parents woke me up at 530 (about the time I get up anyway) and then the empleada´s son stood outside my door yelling "Carmen, feliz cumpleaños." It was cute, not creepy, only because he is five years old. I ate corn flakes, went to Spanish class, recieved a cute card and a little birthday message on the white board. We just happened to have a field trip planned for that day, so we walked to the park, where a friend of mine gave me a chocolate covered banana (very tasty). We visited a cigar factory, which was interesting and huge. Then we went to the house of a woman, who makes coffee wine. The drink was interesting, not really my type of drink, but not terrible. She then pulled out a really delicious chocolate-coffee cake and everyone sang and we ate cake. Very sweet. I didn´t expect to literally have a full day of celebration stuff, but as it turned out. My friends really came through to make it a really pleasant birthday. One of the girls made me brownies, and so at the end of the day, we headed out to our local watering hole, ate brownies and drank a beer. Because my host family wasn´t in town, a couple invited me over to their host family´s house for dinner. So yeah, that was my birthday. Pretty relaxed, and yet, really fun. My host family has finally returned from Tegus. They came back in late Friday night, after I had eatten cereal for dinner because we were out of food in the house. I don´t think they had anticipated being gone as long as they had, or they hadn´t left enough money for food with the empleada. Or I don´t know. What I do know, is that I will be returning back to my awesome host family in Santa Lucía in nine days. Between today and that day, I have to learn how to make a Honduran dish (my host mother has decided to have me make some sort of corn drink which requires an absurd amount of work, and which she can´t help me with because her hand is broken); I am going on an overnight camping trip, where we will make smores (the only catch is the only marshmallows we have found are tropical flavored which doesn´t sound like would go well with chocolate, we did however find graham crackers); I have to present my Self-Directed Project to the head of my program (would have been really impressive, except that the Hurricane, registration for class, and illness ended up sabotaging our entire final week of project stuff.) ; And last but certainly not least, I will find out where I am to spend the next two years of my life. We get our site announcements on the 17th. I am very excited to be moving onto the next stage of Honduras Peace Corps. Training has been an experience, both really good and bad. I am sure it has been just an inkling as to what volunteer life with be like. Ok...before I go, a quick note as to what the pictures are. The first one is a picture of Jorge, my project manager and one of my favorite people in the world, with a friend named Brian. Brian and I gave a two-day research workshop in a small town as part of our SDP. The next one is Brian and I not finishing our SDP project because the girl that runs the computer lab in our little town needed to register for two classes (she of course failed to mention this to us as we were setting up the six internet classes over three days with 70 people). The next picture is of two friends Rachel and Drew. Drew and his wife Alice, not pictured, invited me over to their house for dinner on my birthday. We were actually sitting inside a gazeebo thing, but it was raining so hard we had to put on rain gear inside. The two smaller pictures are of some cute kids that followed us around one Saturday (they are doing the standard Honduran smile, where they won´t actually look at the camera or smile when you ask them to take a picture). The last picture is Jorge driving through road construction. Unlike in the States, there is no flagger or follow me car. You just drive into the work zone and watch out for the other vehicles. I hope this doesn´t take forever to load, but at least here are some new pictures. Carmen

I am so far not terribly affected by the hurricane. Please don´t worry. We haven´t been evacuated...yet...We all kind of wanted to be evacuated (how awesome would a free trip to Panama be!) BUT, if we get evacuated that means really bad things for the country are in store, so maybe in the long run it is better that we aren´t evacuated...but still...Felix is looking like it is just going to dump a bunch of rain on us, but really that isn´t too terrible. Tomorrow, I am going to be giving my first class on Auto CAD to a woman in the municipality (wish me luck!). I have figured out a few keys to the program, here´s hoping I can explain this thing in Spanish. One of the girls in our group just came down with the Dengue, which has me worried because it means that Dengue is here for sure (I had convinced myself that it wasn´t actually in my city, apparently it is) I guess now I have to be extra vigilent about repellent...ugh...anyway, I just wanted to put out a quick message saying not to worry, I haven´t been washed away just yet.

Carmen

Things have been going along like normal. I gave anHIV/AIDS charla last friday to a group of 20 high schoolers, two days before I gave a self esteem charla to expectant mothers in the health center and before that I gave a two-day, 4 hour in total charla to high schoolers in a town called Alauca about how to begin researching. We, my partner and I, asked them how many of them had ever used a computer and out of 16 people, 5 raised their hands. So...internet classes next week will be a crash course in computer navigation and basic searching. I am actually only going to help set up that tutorial session, because I was volunteered to help the urban planning/tax woman digitalize her hand-drawn land survey images and put them in AutoCAD. My father should start laughing, if he´s reading this. Because I have never used AutoCAD, and as he knows and I now well know is it is not the easiest program to try and teach yourself. The help is shamefully lacking, nothing says what it actually does, and I have no book to help me along. Sigh...I actually made a little bit of progress last weekend, and am going to work on it for a while tomorrow to see if I can really figure out the rest of what I need to know. I went to a corn festival last weekend, which was fun but I didn´t actually eat any corn (a group of us hung out under the shade and caught up with each other for a couple of hours). I turn 22 in a couple of days, and it is becomming very apparent just how separated I am from my original life in the States. I am not unhappy (well sometimes yes, but currently I am just fine) I am just really far from what I know and love. Once I live in my own house and have some control over my life, I will be happy. Right now I am adjusting to having no say over what I do, what I eat, who I live with, where I will be working, everything is done for me whether I like it or not.

Instructions for drinking water from a bag:

1. pay two Lemps or about ten cents for a half liter of cold water

2. use hand to wipe away invisible bacteria and things on one corner of bag

3. bite into the now ¨clean¨ corner and spit little plastic bit into purse.

4. squeeze the bag or suck on the corner

5. be very careful when setting down, best to just drink it all in one quick shot.

Should anyone come to visit me, now you know!

Love you all!