I have decided to stop writing this blog, to let it rest in peace in the bowels of the Internet as a historical documentation of my experiences as a Peace Corps Business Development Volunteer in Honduras. Thank you for reading and commenting all these months. Please feel free to contact me in the future regarding these posts at: alex.osteen.pchn@gmail.com . If you are interested in getting involved with the Peace Corps, I say do it!

Also, in case you're a movie buff, check out my new blogging endeavor, my movie critiques:

http://thepicturegrande.blogspot.com/

After a four day Peace Corps conference at the Hotel Maya in Tegucigalpa, I successfully travelled back home. The million small differences between San Luis Planes and Highlands, NC are adding up to a relatively large shock, but luckily I'm unemployed and poor and don't have a lot of things to do other than work on my adjustment.

As for the BIG QUESTION: "What now?" Honestly, there is no concrete answer. The limbo that I'm in is definitely going to cause some stress, but I also have to believe that there is great opportunity to be had. So here are the possibilities (I daresay they are similar to those of lots of my fellow PC-Honduras volunteers):

1. Ideally I will get into a graduate school program in Environmental Policy and Economics/Business Administration in the fall.

2. Keep fundraising for my town's Health Center project.

3. Travel a little and visit friends/family.

4. Catch up on news, politics, movies etc.

5. Get a part-time job in the mean time.

I'm deciding what to do with this blog, whether to change its focus to my life as a young professional in the US or let it fade into being a relic of one person's go with the Peace Corps.

Thanks for the support everyone has shown me throughout this time of unexpected transition; it means a lot.

Here I am with my host family celebrating Christmas Eve.

Can you spot the gringo?Hoping that everyone had a wonderful Christmas and Hanukka. I was lucky enough to be invited to spend Christmas Eve with my host family, a silly and fun adventure in and of itself.

I dare say that now that we are approaching the arrival of a new year, it is an appropriate moment to reflect on one's life. So that's what this post is all about.

Someof my favorite magazine editions are Time’s “Year in Review.” I has been a positive experience, amidst the current dramatic turmoil of PC-Honduras, todo something similar and try to recap the past 22 months.

WorkRelatedBook your trip now!Classestaught: 8

Manualswritten: 3

Videosmade: 1

Volunteerevents hosted in my site: 2

Touristswho have visited my community: 300

Kilometers of new trail built: 5

Gain inprofit at my coffee co-op from 2010-2011: L2,000,000 ($100,000)

Cultural/Hondurasspecific 

Heading to my bathroom...1: spiderlarger than a tennis ball found in my house

1500-1600 : cups ofcoffee drunk

4 : bucketsof coffee picked

1: number of times Ihave been shocked by faulty electric installations

1/4 : bowlsof traditional tripe soup successfully/politely downed

PersonalTime

Booksread: 35... top five:

The Sun Also Rises (Ernest Hemingway)The SexLives of Cannibals (Maarten Troost)The Gone Away World (Nick Harkaway)AmericanGods (Neil Gaiman)The Sparrow (MaryDoria Russell)Movieswatched: 185 ... top five:

ScottPilgrim vs. the World (2010)Death Proof (2007)Sin Nombre (2009)The Good,the Bad and the Ugly (1966)The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)

Other

Quetzal. Numberof months without a computer: 7.5

Apxnumber of hours of television watched: 25



Newcountries visited: 2 (El Salvador, Panamá)

Hikesin the cloud forest: 15

Quetzalsseen: 4

Shotsof tequila taken / shots of tequila regretted: 5/5

Picturestaken: 2279

ThingsI will miss… MostPlato típico = Standard fareThe natural beauty of the SantaBarbara MountainAll things coffeeMy friends and work partners, fellowPCVsThe Honduran plato tipicoThe exercise I get on a daily basisThe quiet eveningsGetting piropo-ed (I don’t care if it was by 9th graders)Gallina = culprit 1 Least

The unease of travelling

Risks of being a gringo here in general

Milkproducts of Honduras

Gallinas (chickens) and cohetes (firecrackers)

Cohetes = culprit 2Riding busesin general

Having nocell phone coverage and being the last to hear about important news

The 60year old female mayor of Santa Barbara winking at me and squeezing my elbowduring meetings

ThingsI missed from the US… Most Dr. Pepper Dishwashers Trash management Being up to date on news and major events Driving Ubiquitous Internet Dave Letterman Being paid in dollars The comfort of public security Being within my native culture(Friends, family) Least

"I make America look good."The fast pace and pressure/stress connected with trying tobecome a successful adult in the United States

Facebook

Expensive consumer goods

Partisan politics

The economic crisis and not having a job

American television

Donald Trump

Will see everyone back home quite soon. Happy New Year's from San Luis Planes!

This is a tough blog post to write.

Two days ago all PCVs in Honduras received a bomb-shell emailfrom our Regional Director, our high-up boss in charge of all Peace Corpsprograms in Latin America and the Pacific island countries. He told us that thedecision was made to suspend Peace Corps Honduras and that all volunteers arebeing sent back to the US for at least30 days on “Administrative Hold” while the future of the program is deliberatedin Washington. That is bureaucratic code for “Honduras is being shut down.” It was a decision that we had feared might becoming for months now, but one that I had hoped wouldn’t actually happen.

It has been a rough year for volunteers in this country. SanPedro Sula, the second largest city in Honduras, is statistically one of the twoor three most dangerous cities in the world. Tegucigalpa, the capital ofHonduras, is not far behind. In essence, gang warfare and narco-trafficking inthe country are out of hand and very little is being done to effectively put astop to it. This has been a reality that all PCVs in the country have come tounderstand and was a major focus of our 3 months of training. For the most partwe are very careful about travelling in the country and generally try to keep alow profile. Even though it has been a precarious situation for a while now – consideringthat volunteers were still getting robbed at gunpoint and having their housesbroken in to etc – major crimes stillhad not been directed at PCVs. That is, until this year.

We PCVs here are definitely a family and we pride ourselveson the mutual support we give each other professionally and personally; we’re allin this together, kinda thing. So, when something like this happens to a fellowvolunteer, we all feel it, we all get shaken. But earlier this year, two femalevolunteers were raped within a month’s time. I can only imagine how somethingso ugly will change their lives forever and it makes me sick to think thatthere are people out there so messed up they’d do something like that, nomatter what country they’re from. Naturally, the US government is ultimatelyheld responsible and actions must be taken.

Combine this new reality in Honduras with major budget cuts toPeace Corps worldwide and you get the level of change that has hit our programhere this year. Policies were shifted, six projects were cut down to four,staff and volunteer numbers were reduced, more places became off-limits forPCVs and, amongst this whirlwind of changes, our Safety and Security Officer(SSO) resigned. I stopped by his office before he left to thank him for hishard work despite his tough job and he told me how much the events of this yearhad deeply affected him and, basically, that he couldn’t take another month ofhis job.

Reading all this as I write it makes it sound like a baddream that keeps getting worse. A few weeks after our SSO left, our Safety andSecurity staff aid personnel was also let go as part of the earlier-mentioned officecutbacks. Then, as our Country Director was in Panama for a conference, thelast straw finally broke the camel’s back: a female volunteer was shot in theleg in an armed robbery gone bad, as she travelled back to her site from SanPedro Sula. It was a classic case of “being in the wrong place at the wrongtime,” as an official in our office put it in his email, and it could havehappened to any of us. Thank goodness, she is alive and recovering, but thatdid it.

I’m not happy with all this, obviously. The last five monthsof my service, perhaps the most important part, have been robbed. My projects,which were counting on another combined nine months of PC volunteer support,are now having the rug pulled out from under them, putting their continuedwellbeing at risk. For example, my major Health Center project is put on hold,and the help my community was expecting won’t be coming now. How do you thinkan incident like this will affect our tourism project? Additionally, I have tosay goodbye to my friends and work partners here all of a sudden, just likethat, after almost two years of living here. Essentially, the criminals of thebig cities in Honduras are making the innocent rural communities lose out.

On a personal level too, we are being picked up and droppedinto a very different life, most suddenly. I do not know if I will be ready to goback to the United States, considering the rapid cultural change thatrepresents. It is safe to say that the majority of volunteers in my traininggroup, who still had another five months here, do not have jobs lined up yet,places to live, or money to support ourselves! We were counting on that crucialtime to get our futures straightened out.

When I told members of my co-op what was happening, thepresident of the board of directors wept as he apologized on behalf of hiscountry. They all felt awful that a volunteer had been hurt and furious that Hondurasis in such a bad place right now, that nothing is being done by theirgovernment to fix the situation. I told them that even though I feel very safeand comfortable here in San Luis Planes and that our work together was great,that I have no choice in the matter. I will always remember my time spent here positivelyand think of them warmly. Maybe I will be able to return some day.

Also, I just found out that this news made the NY Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/22/world/americas/peace-corps-cuts-back-in-honduras-guatemala-and-el-salvador.html?scp=1&sq=peace%20corps,%20central%20america&st=cse

Report:month 22

“Where is my Mind? Way out, in the water. Seeit swimmin’…”

-ThePixies

Icame to a shocking realization the other night, quite out of the blue. What dothe state of North Carolina and the Honduran department of Santa Barbara havein common? Well, there are at least two things that I can think of. They areboth places that:I, Alex Osteen, have lived in for longer than 1.583 years.Celebrate the human foot in strange,mutated-morphological ways. North Carolina proudly displays the sole of its troublinglyblue foot, stained with a viscous black substance and Santa Barbara’s famoussymbol is a foot with a rainbow feather growing out of it. Weird, right?

Doesthis mean that there’s something horribly messed up with my sub-conscience,that I have somehow ended up living a vast portion of my life in Bizarre Foot World?!I don’t think I’ve done it intentionally, but that would just prove it’s mysub-conscience at work. Indeed, this is precisely the kind of thing that I ponderat nights here in the GRAND OLE United States Peace Corps.

Ihope everyone has a happy holiday season 2011 and remember, celebrate yourfeet.

Thispast week the 9th grade class asked me to be the commencementspeaker at their graduation ceremony. Since my town’s school is a K-9, the 9thgraders have a graduation similar to seniors at a high school in the US. Forthe majority of these kids, 9th grade will be as far as theireducation goes, so it’s an equally important ceremony for them and theirfamilies.

Aswith many other events that I’ve experienced here in Honduras, this graduationceremony was, in many ways, quite similar to its US counterpart, but with a fewstandout details that made it quite distinct.

Samethings

decorations:balloons, flag, cutouts of diplomas and graduation caps etcspeeches:from the principal, the class’s teacher sponsor, class representative (and me)honorsgiven to the student with the highest gradeslotsof proud family members, lots of picturesdiplomaswere givenpartyafterwards

Differentthingsstarted1.5 hours late, naturallyitwas the first graduation in the new community center, in the middle of town, sobolos showed up outside to noisilyloiter for the entire ceremony (bolo isthe loving colloquial name given to the town drunks, who are important actorsin any town social event)theyhired a professional soccer announcer to be MC, so the ceremony progressed verydramatically, much like listening to a soccer gamealocal 20 year old was the sound guy and played the Titanic Celine Deyon song,80s American pop and Puerto Rican rap as the background music about fournotches too loud, throughout the entire event, during speeches and alleachstudent brought a padrino, or acommunity member who contributed to their education, whom they respect, whoescorted them to the stage to receive their diploma and who danced a waltz withthem at the end of the event (see Nicki/Nolan’s post)secretSanta amongst students and teachersthefinal toast in which the teachers filled the 15 year olds’ champagne flutes tothe brim with strong liquor then said congrats and bottom’s up!

Althoughsitting on stage at the mesa principalI felt much like an American puppet for the teachers, their token gringo thatthey can show off to the parents, I still strove to take the event seriously,be grateful and give a polite and warmly motivational speech. It was, afterall, the first time that I’ve had to wear a tie in almost two years now. But,in all seriousness, I was honored and thought that it was a very nice gestureof my friends and neighbors here in San Luis Planes.

The following is the grant proposal that I'm turning in to the Peace Corps on behalf of my town. We are going to be doing a PC Partnership grant of $40,000. You can donate to our project very soon by checking out our link on the PC website (peacecorps.gov), which has not been uploaded yet because the project is awaiting official approval in Washington:

Executive Summary

San Luis Planes on a cloudy day.The more than 4,000 villagers of San Luis Planes and neighboringtowns have identified the expansion of their health center as the area’s toppriority.

Health-related problems abound and, because of the highlylimited physical space in the current health center, they simply are notadequately being attended to in San Luis Planes. The nearest hospital is anexpensive emergency trip away (the equivalent of five-ten days’ wages for alocal laborer), preventing many impoverished families from visiting a doctor.

The goal of this project is to more than triple the size ofthe current health center’s physical space. By doing so, the center will addten new rooms, including an area dedicated to vaccinations, a maternity ward,an overnight room and a doctor’s office,thus providing crucial new health services. Ultimately, with an improvedbuilding, the town will be able to receive the placement of a full-time doctorfrom the Ministry of Health and will thus begin work on preventative health andeducation, the truly sustainable solutions to the area’s health problems.

Community leaders representing the town’s various keyorganizations have come together to form a committee to oversee this project. Theyunderstand the importance of improving their community’s health and arededicated to fighting for it. Additionally, the mayor of the city of Santa Barbara,the municipality of which San Luis Planes forms part, has promised to supportto the project. The two parties together will contribute a total of nearly 65%of the entire cost.

Health is a fundamental public good and a person can’t hopeto live a productive life without it, just as a town can’t hope to developwithout prioritizing the health of its citizens. Thus we hope that this projectwill directly contribute to the area’s economic advancement and well-being.

Background Information

A local girl helps her mother on the coffee farm.San Luis Planes is a village located within the municipallimits of Santa Barbara, the capital city of the department with the same name.The town rests on a plateau at around 1300 meters above sea level, within thebuffer zone of the Santa Barbara National Park. There are approximately 1325habitants and 290 households, putting the average number of people per house ataround 4.6. What’s more, the nearly 4000 people of the seven surroundingvillages also use the health center. People make a living primarily harvestingcoffee and other agricultural endeavors. The average household annual income isapproximately 25,000 lempiras (around $1315). San Luis Planes contains a K-9school with twelve teachers, a coffee cooperative, three churches, a communitycenter, a police sub-station, a soccer field, and said small health center. Thetown was connected to the national electric grid in 2008.

The town's soccer team and my left index finger.The greater area has felt the need for this project foryears, but hasn’t been able to obtain financial support until now. With thatgoal in mind, 25 community leaders from various key organizations in San LuisPlanes (churches, the town council, the school, the coffee cooperative etc)came together to form a committee to work on this project. They also have the support of the towncouncils of the surrounding villages as well as the mayor’s office of SantaBarbara.

Community Need

The Catholic Church during mass.In San Luis Planes, like in many places in rural Honduras,the population’s overall health is sorely lacking. Some of the most frequentsicknesses include respiratory problems; skin diseases; diarrhea, amoebas,intestinal parasites and other stomach problems caused by contaminated waterand food; high blood pressure, high cholesterol and general heart problems;diabetes; and injuries/emergencies related to non-mechanized manual labor.What’s more is that maternal care and sexual education is a growing necessity,considering the high birth and teen-pregnancy rate in the area and the effectthey have on family economics.

This second-hand American school bus represents the primary

mode of transportation for most people in my town.The nearest hospital is 36 kilometers away and an emergencytrip there can cost between 500-1000 lempiras, the equivalent of five to tenday’s wages. Because of this steep cost, many poor families simply do not havethe resources to visit a doctor when they get sick, much less for frequent checkups.To put it basically, the limited space and resources of the health center aresimply not meeting the needs of San Luis Planes and even less so for thegreater area. These problems will only become greater with time because of therapidly expanding population.

The members of the health center committee believe thatthese problems can begin to be resolved by obtaining a doctor. And in order forthe Ministry of Health to send a doctor to San Luis Planes, the health centermust be expanded according to a list of specific requirements, more thantripling the square footage of the building. The idea is that along with beingable to render more services, the health center’s doctor and newspace/equipment will be able to focus more on preventative health and education.More physical space also means a bigger medical storage room and thus theability to provide more medicine to the patients who need it. This woman, posing with three great grandchildren, represents the

elderly population of San Luis Planes.

Community Initiative and Direction

The committee thatwas formed elected its officers in its first meeting. An in-depth community analysis followed,using survey results, input from representatives from various community-wideorganizations and members’ own experiences and opinions. After the healthcenter came out as the top priority, the committee wrote a work plan and theproject proposal. The committee meets minimally once a week for two to threehours in the afternoon, but the officers often work much longer during the weekand donate time and transportation without a second thought. Only after all thiswork was finished did committee members approach the Peace Corps volunteer toask about ways to go about raising the funds required.

The Health Center's nurse likes to give shots.Several members of the committee have worked with PeaceCorps volunteers in the past on other large projects including eco-stoves,latrines and a new school. Additionally, almost every previous project thatbrought the current community buildings to San Luis Planes was implemented byat least one person on this committee.

The committee keeps the minutes during meetings, recordsagreements that are reached, stays in contact with the mayor and other towncouncils, and works closely with the Peace Corps volunteer who is helping them.When it comes time to buy materials and begin construction, the committee willtake charge of managing the inventory, overseeing the foreman’s work, keepingaccurate and transparent records of finances, and communicating progress to therest of the community and to the other donors.

Community Contribution

Tripling the size of this health center will be relatively expensiveat more than $40,000. However, between the people of San Luis Planes and theirelected officials in Santa Barbara, the community will be contributing nearly65% of total costs, approximately $26,000.

This is the crowded waiting room.The people of San Luis Planes will donate the equivalent ofnearly 900 work days in difficult manual labor supporting the foreman in theconstruction of the building. This includes not only helping to move andprepare materials, but also digging a large hole for a septic tank, levelingout the terrain for the new building and helping to install the plumbing, roofingand electricity. When put into dollar form, these 900 work days total out tonearly $7,000, which, for a town whose habitants’ average annual income is only$1,315, is substantial.

The municipality has promised to provide a few of the basicmaterials needed for construction, like rebar and steel roofing beams, a valueof approximately $10,500. They will also pay the foreman and engineer in chargeof the building’s architectural designs and construction, totaling more than$8,500.

The remaining 35%, $15,000, will come from this Peace CorpsPartnership Program, paying for the rest of the construction materials and thevalue of the contract to install the building’s ceiling.

Project Implementation

The project’s first phase, which is the phase thatcorresponds to this Peace Corps Partnership profile, will take seven months.After writing the profile comes fundraising. The community will be in charge ofpromoting the project locally and organizing the work that people willcontribute. The Peace Corps volunteer will be in charge of promoting theproject abroad. The committee plans to spend four months on this fundamentalstep.

The Health Center from the outside.While fundraising, the committee will also hold acommunity-wide meeting, passing on the details of their planning to the generalpublic. They will also choose a foreman and write up a contract. Once the fundsare raised the committee will purchase the materials and begin construction inFebruary. The construction is planned to last four months until May, when thefinished building will be inaugurated.

During the construction, committee members will take turnsmanaging the inventory and will continue meeting once a week to give progressreports. Once the construction is finished, the committee will evaluate theproject as a whole, and then enter into a second phase. The second phase willtake the committee into November 2012 in which time they will work on obtainingthe appropriate equipment and furniture and the placement of a full-timedoctor. After the year is up, the committee will switch members. The goal,however, is to maintain the committee indefinitely, giving support to theemployees of the health center.

Project Sustainability

Although a better building doesn’t automatically meandevelopment, this project has everything it needs to be sustainable.

The committee, holding up the blueprints of the

Health Center's expansion.In the first place, this committee is made up of people whohave lived here their entire lives, whose families have lived here forgenerations, and who are dedicated to seeing their town develop. Theirdedication to seeing this project through now and into the future isunquestionable because they have a real interest in seeing their area’s generalhealth improve. Another reason they will be the first to defend the well-beingof their health center because of the 900 work days they are going to put intoits renovation.

The members of this committee are also learning valuableskills when it comes to project design and management and community analysis.The knowledge of how to organize a project this big will be useful years intothe future as they start to tackle other issues confronting their community.This, in reality, is at the heart of sustainable development.

Finally, once the health center meets the Ministry ofHealth’s requirements, San Luis Planes will receive a doctor who will be ableto better attend the health needs of people here. But also the doctor will handleeducation and work on preventing health problems. Education is the key.

I live in a place that until three years ago did not have electricity. There is no cell phone coverage and no landlines. Until last November there were only two or three computers in my town. Then the school installed 15 computers as part of a government program of the former president, the one who was deposed by the coup back in 2009. (By the way, if you are doing the math, it took the school almost two years to get those computers out of the box and installed!) I am just now wrapping up computer classes to the teachers at my school, the majority of which had never touched a computer before. Ben, in El Dorado, and I have just started a new round of computer classes for the general public in our two towns.

And now, thanks to now Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Alicia, a few people in her town, and my coffee co-op, an Internet company a few miles away just constructed two antennas, one of which is strapped to the roof of my coffee co-op, to bring in a Wi-Fi signal to our two towns. Now the library in El Dorado and my co-op are connected to the wide world web.

In other words, this community has gone from no electricity, no light bulbs, no TVs, no fridges three years ago, to having Internet and YouTube, Facebook, email, Skype, Google, news, Wikipedia and viruses, porno and conspiracy theories galore. The good and the bad is all here now. How do you think this will affect the people in my town? My prediction is that their minds will be blown out of their eyes...

Good news is that I personally don't have to travel 2.5 hours to check emails any more. My life also will be turned around now, making my PC service turn a corner. This is the 21st century and it's here to stay!

Here is a list of smells that I have been exposed to on the bus from my town to the city of Santa Bárbara:

1. rotting cabbage

2. old man bean farts

3. fermenting coffee beans

4. baby

5. vomit

6. a bottle's worth of cologne on any male adolescent on board

7. the ubiquitous body odor

8. feet

9. manure

This past weekend, my environmental club and I --along with the help of two other PCVs and a Honduran artist/volunteer from Santa Barbara-- painted a mural at my school. It turned out to be a surprisingly fun project, though a lot of work. The theme was "conserving the environment" but from there, the kids had free reign. We worked the entire weekend and on Monday too and Im very proud of the final product. Lots of them drew a standard fare of birds and flowers and trees, but there was some critical commentary too: one kid drew a skeleton of a poached animal, another a fish with a chain around its neck. All in all, they worked hard and had a good time and are happy about how the mural turned out. The teachers also seemed pleased. In fact, the social studies teacher approached me afterwards about repainting the world map, a project left by the last PCVs in my site which has become quite worn away. There is some paint left over, so we shall see...

Well, Alicia, the PCV just down the road from me, just finished her two year service and left our neck of the woods among a series of goodbye parties, endless farewells and last-minute work tasks to return to the last few days of summer in the beautful West Coast. Alicia and I have collaborated a lot on various projects over our more than a year of shared time on the mountain: the ecotourism committee, her library in her town, and environmental education and training.

She also dragged me up into the cloud forest for many a challenging hike as I (often clumsily) supported her scientific survey of the amphibians and reptiles of the mountain she was doing to complete her masters' thesis. (I'll have it be known that I found one frog).

Initially, before even making it to site, I had thought that I didnt want to be placed nearby another volunteer for fear that it would impede my community integration. And I guess that I didnt get placed in a site with another volunteer, considering she lived in the next town over. But our proximity was actually a good thing. It was nice to have an ally so close by, someone to talk work with, who knew the same people and the same issues, someone to eat American food with (even though she is a vegetarian) and to culturally escape with. It was, in fact, because of Alicia that my town filled out the paperwork successfully to get a volunteer. In essence, I ended up in San Luis Planes because of Alicia. She became a good friend and a big support, and we will all miss her.

Since Karen, our third amigo (amiga, I guess it would be), left us back in January, I was going to be the lone remaining volunteer when Alicia departed. But lucky, Alicia's community received another volunteer a couple months ago, Ben, who had to be moved away from the site he'd been living in for the past nine months because of worsening security issues. Ben is a sociable and fun person who has already become friends with just about everyone in his town. He seems to be dedicated to carrying on the work that Alicia left behind and may have time left to get another project done too. He will be a good ally.

So now that Alicia's entire training group (labeled arbitrarily H-15) left the country at various times during the past month and a half, my training group (H-16) became the oldest and wisest in PC-Honduras (heh, yeah right)... the seniors, so to speak, considering there are four training groups in country at one time.

We lost a lot of friends and good volunteers, reminding us of our own ticking clock. 27 months is a long time but it is also so ephemeral. My last eight-nine months here in a way seem hard-earned yet too few. Thus is the way of the Peace Corps, I suppose.

One of the five after school clubs/classes that I lead during the week is my environmental club. There are 18 members aged 13-18 and we meet for a couple hours every Friday afternoon. A guy about my age in my town, Henry, volunteers to help me lead the sessions. And although Im certainly no expert in science/nature things, Ive found that other PCVs have been very enthusiastic to give advice and point me in the right direction. Not to mention my perennial friend Wikipedia. ;)

So Henry and I planned an 18 week calendar in which time we will be covering lots of big topics like local natural resources, organic agriculture, trash management and global warming. The idea is to give a brief lecture on the topic, no more than 30 minutes, just to explain the background info, then to go out and do an activity related to the topic.

For example, when we covered trash management, one week we had the kids bring in a week's worth of organic scraps from their kitchen and we made a compost pile in the school yard. We will use the compost, when it is ready in a couple months, when we plant our radishes during our discussion of organic agriculture.

The week following the compost pile, we were able to coordinate with the arrival of a group of 15 British high school students doing social work in Honduras to dig a mini-landfill for the school. It was tough work, digging the (3 meter deep!) hole, but now the school has an alternative to burning its trash.

We've also been on a bird-watching scavenger hunt, we've taken pictures of flowers and insects on a digital camera, we've planted flowers and other plants, and have made handicrafts out of recycling. Next week we are going on a hike in the cloud forest to look for birds and interesting trees. The week after we will be painting an environmental-themed mural at the school. Then the week after-- hopefully-- we will be planting trees in a deforested part of town.

It's been work that has kept me on my toes, considering how out of my element I've sometimes felt with this material, but the kids have been very enthusiastic and I believe it's important material. The hope is that these kids, who hold the future of the national park in their hands, will develop an awareness about how their actions affect their local environment and how that, in turn, affects their town.

PS- Ill try to put some pictures up soon, for those of you who are keeping score at home.

Always wear sunscreen.

My pale, be-freckeled Irish skin is not the appropriate match for work in the campo in the Tropics. I am, in this regard, 100% gringo. It is not to say that I never used sunscreen over the past 17 months, but I didnt use it enough, because during our mid-term medical checkups, the PC doctors agreed that I should go in and get two of the moles taken off my right arm. It was an easy and quick out-patient deal, and the biopsy came back benign. But it was a wakeup call. There is history of skin cancer in my family and it is not something to mess around with. I guess I realized that this isnt something to mess around with and that it is silly not to take the thirty seconds in the morning to put on sunscreen or a longsleeve shirt. Theres just too much at stake.

But actually, there is kind of a typical PC cross-culture story about the whole medical procedure. They sent me to a plastic surgeon in Tegucigalpa. And basically it was like walking onto an SNL skit: the surgeon had slicked back hair, he wore his designer button down shirt opened about five or six buttons, he had a gold chain around the neck, and spoke English with a smooth Latino accent. On the wall were a couple 'tasteful' paintings of naked women and, on his business card that he gave me, there is a pair of bare breasts. About the first thing he told me was that about 90% of his business is cosmetic surgery and that he does breast augmentation for the elite of Honduran women across the country. He was nice and did a professional job, but it was all just about too much to handle without laughing out loud. I was definitely the 'other' 10%.

Last Saturday, the most powerful electric storm that Ive perhaps ever experienced in my life struck my town. Though it only lasted for about two and a half hours in total, it was mightily intense and ultimately destructive. Lighting was striking all over the place and continually. The storm gods were angry. The night sky lit up more or less perpetually. And the wind toppled trees and made my (not-so-sealed) house rather breezy. But, one of the damned lightning bolts struck somewhere immensely close to my house in a booming explosion and blew out two lightbulbs (literally, as the shards of glass on my floor could attest) , made my cell phone charger start to smoke, and, worst of all, fried my laptop. In my defense, it was plugged into my surge protector. But it didnt matter. So, about six months after recooperating my laptop from a virus which shut it down for nearly four months, Im again sin portatil (without laptop). Life goes on without a computer, just much less efficiently. Luckily, it was under insurance (Im glad I went for the PC-endorsed property insurance after all) and I had all of my most important documents backed up on my harddrive back home and on my USB here. So the lesson to be learned is either 1) invest in a super heavy duty surge protector (in retrospect, mine was only about $20 from Target) or 2) unplug everything during any storm where there may be lighting.

PS- this is not the real picture of what happened to my laptop, rather an exaggeration

Just this past week, my town celebrated its annual feria patronal (patron saint’s festival). Last year only the Catholics celebrated it, carrying a small statue of Saint Louis around town, but this year, a secular committee formed and they planned a series of events that eventually made the Catholics decide not to participate, heh. And, before I knew it, my tranquil small-town Peace Corps life was shaken up by travelling sideshow-attraction people, gamblers and drinkers, horses, roosters, pigs, beauty queens, soccer and pool tournaments and a general atmosphere of revelry (albeit seemingly guilt-stricken and sedated). The following is a summarized list of what my small town did to celebrate its feria and of my interpretation of it all, as an integrated yet sarcastic foreigner. This is a very long post, so read what interests you and/or go to the bold sentences/photos to get the quick gist: 1. Traditional (and non-traditional) Honduran games/competitions 2. Typical “cultural stuff” 3. Carnival games 4. Atmosphere (ie. the ever-present peace-disturbing aspects of celebrations here) 1. Traditional (and non-traditional) Honduran competitions: These traditional Honduran competitions were my favorite events of the feria. They felt, for the most part, quite genuine to Latin American/ Spanish-influenced culture, not so affected by America (which other events certainly were). Carrera de cintas: the coolest event, hands-down. 10 participants from the local horsing circuit took turns racing their horses down a stretch of road towards a line that was hung between two posts. About six or seven small rings were clipped to the line. The riders tried to catch a ring with a metal “pencil” they were carrying as they galloped under the line. If they got a ring, they were presented a bandana and a kiss on the cheek by one of the bandana girls (all of which were definitely minors) and, at the end of the day, the rider with the most bandanas wins. It was exciting and looked very challenging and got by far the biggest attendance. Palo ensebado: it reminded me of some traditional Basque competition in the Andes of Spain. A tree trunk of about 25-30 feet, with its bark scraped off, was rubbed down with animal fat and stuck into the ground. On the top was placed an orange flag. The first person to climb all the way to the top of the pole and retrieve the flag wins. Anyone and everyone in town can try. It was very Arthurian, you could say. Only men tried it, and had no problem stripping down to their skibbies and betting all-too intimate with the pole. It was very, very slick and it took a solid couple hours of relentless trying for someone to finally make it to the top. Gallo enterrado: poor, poor gallo. Translated, this event is the ‘buried rooster.’ A hole was dug in a corner of the plaza at night, secretly, and a live rooster was placed in it and buried up to its neck. Then participants were blindfolded, spun around, handed a stick, and given 2 minutes to stumble around and try to find where the rooster was buried, and smack its head off. The participant to successfully kill the innocent and scared-to-death rooster gets to keep it and make rooster stew, a favorite dish here on the mountain. Of course, with the entire crowd watching screaming and giving false instructions, it was kinda hard to hear the rooster’s crows, though it only took three participants before it was killed. For me, it seems like nothing more than plain old animal cruelty. But for everyone here, used to the culture surrounding cock fights, it was great entertainment. Baby pig catch: perhaps another example of being not so nice to innocent animals was when the committee slathered up a baby pig with lard and let it loose to run away from a crowd that was trying to catch it. The person to successfully catch and hold onto the pig would get to keep it, not a bad freebie for around here, considering that a grown pig sells for upwards of L1000 (apx $50). Sadly, for the pig’s immediate sake, it was too scared to run, as the crowd had intended/expected, and it ended up getting dog-piled by about ten or so people, who decided the only fair way to split up the winnings was to do exactly that. So they cut it up into pieces and distributed the unfortunate pig among the 10 of them right there on the soccer field. Sports: Naturally, there were no sports for women to participate in, though for my part, we gringos tried to change that. On the first Sunday of the event, there was a typical cuadrangular de futbol, a 4-team soccer tourney, in which teams from three neighboring towns challenged my town’s team. It drew a large crowd and was fun to watch. The winning team walked away with something like L1000 (apx $50) to split between the players. The next day, was a just-for-fun scrimmage between gordos and flacos (“fats vs skinnies”) ... older people who don’t usually play anymore and who perhaps aren’t as good as they once were in their youth. They tried to get me to play in the game, but since I didn’t fit appropriately into either weight category and since I wasn’t ready to totally embarrass myself along with the old guys, I just watched instead. We shamelessly laughed when somebody whiffed the ball or fell down. Of course, I secretly knew that would’ve been me had I played, heh. There was also a billiards tournament, but since the pool halls in my town are pretty small, there was hardly a turnout. It is culturally inappropriate here for women to play pool or even enter a pool hall, so again, it was only men participating. But finally, perhaps the most interesting sport for people in my town was Ultimate Frisbee. Alicia and I thought it would be a lot of fun to invite some of our friends/fellow PCVs up for the opening day of the feria to challenge my soccer team to an Ultimate tourney. We had to teach them how to play ahead of time, so as not to embarrass them too much. 14 gringos and gringas (we had just about even distribution) took to the field and shocked my town by throwing a plastic plate around. It was basically a gringo parade, but was a lot of fun. My town’s soccer team actually learned very quickly and, by the end, was playing almost as well as we were. We tried to convince local girls to play with their team, but to no avail. All in all, Team America still won, but only by a few points. (We were able to play thanks to the Aerobie that the fam sent.) 2. “Cultural stuff”: Honduras as a country sometimes suffers from being a small place within very close proximity to America, the cultural giant just across the Gulf of Mexico. Meaning, that sometimes American culture penetrates Honduran “traditions” even without Hondurans realizing it. Because of it, I’m often skeptical when I hear somebody talk about doing a “traditional Honduran cultural event.” In the case of my feria, however, most of what was claimed to be authentic, wasn’t so bad. La Mojiganga: Considering that my house is right on my town’s central plaza, I had a perfect place to view many of these events. The prime example would be that, out of the blue on Saturday, la Mojiganga came waltzing up and plopped itself right in front of my house. She was a paper and wire giant that reminded me of the parade-giants they march through the streets in Pamplona during San Fermines after the bull runs. In Trinidad, Santa Barbara here, a town about 20 miles north of my town, they set fire to Mojigangas to celebrate their feria. Anyway, our Mojiganga danced around the plaza and kids got up on stilts and danced with her. Other kids played around with wooden boxcars and wheelbarrows that were allegedly used by their grandparent’s and great-grandparent’s generations. The strange thing is that no one could really explain what the Mojiganga represented or how the tradition got started. “Cultural Night”: one evening they built a stage on one end of the plaza and hosted a sort of talent show for school kids. I would hesitate to call it cultural, however. Most groups of performers were 10-12 year old girls dirty dancing to pop songs, to the approval of their teachers (who happily canceled classes that day so the kids could prepare their presentations) and the rest of the town and culture as a whole. Of the other performances were joke-telling, lip-synching to Mexican rock songs, and some sort of competition between to volunteers over who could stuff the most refried beans into the face of the other. For me, Cultural Night was a big miss. Beauty Queens: around a dozen 14-15 year old girls competed over who was more popular, and sought money contributions to prove it. The girl who collected the most money in her decorated box won and became Queen of the Feria. Then there was a formal “crowning” ceremony followed by a dance in the new Centro Social. Also, the winning queen would preside over the carrera de cintas and would kiss the winning riders on the cheek after presenting them their bandanas. I know we have beauty competitions in the States, but this idea made me slightly uncomfortable because of the lackadaisical attitude towards minority laws here. Then, the same competition took place amongst 6-8 year old girls. But the families really got involved and dressing their little girls up in poofy dresses became a big deal, as well as inviting the perfect little bowtie-wearing date to accompany them too. Okay, but just when I thought things couldn’t get any more inappropriate, the feria culminated in the crowning of the rey feo (King of the Uglies). And, since my house is owned by the family of the committee’s president, my yard became the default location where the handful of rowdy 20-30 year old boys changed into cheap drag queens! This in my quiet, conservative and religious town! Anyway, you can imagine the type of things that went on during the crowning of the rey feo. The next morning I woke up to find my yard strewn with popped condom-balloons and torn panty hose. Dances: a couple nights, the Centro Social hosted live bands from Santa Barbara. Lots of people went to the dances and let loose, dancing bachata and punta, as well as general sloppy dancing. It’s not often in the year that people in my town are out later than 9pm, but these dances didn’t shut down until after 2am. Cover charges were steep, at more than L100 (apx $5), but it seemed like people found it worthwhile. Some people get rather intoxicated to attend such dances, but I think that we find that in the States too. The important thing is that nobody got shot. 3. Carnival games: The travelling-carnival-games people showed up in my town around the first of the month and set up their wooden and tin casitas (shacks) directly on the main road that goes through the central plaza, ie just in front of my house. Bus routes were diverted for the entire month. Sadly, similar to the sporting events of the feria, these “carnival games” didn’t have anything to offer the women of my town. I put “carnival games” in quotes because as it turned out, what they were actually offering wasn’t quite all that was promised. What they actually were was a string of gambling tables—cards, dice and roulette. It is considered inappropriate for women to gamble here. So instead, I saw men spend hours and hours and hours losing their hard-earned money on the tables. Gambling can be a major problem in rural Honduras, and nobody seems to be doing anything about it. Worse yet, they let kids jump right in and play too, betting single Lempiras at a time. They’ll grow up to be good little gamblers themselves. Too bad nobody was there handing out cigarettes. The only familiar carnival sideshow stuff they had were a bb gun shoot and a ring toss. Though I also didn’t see any girls or women try them out. They also installed a jukebox loaded with about five songs. Oh, and there was a mechanical swing that was hand-cranked! I only saw it used a few times, probably because it was so tiring to operate, heh. 4. Atmosphere (ie ever-present peace-disturbing aspects of celebrations here) Let me stop myself for a second here. I’m realizing as I’m letting all this flow out here that I have gotten more and more sarcastic and negative about all this. I apologize. It may be coming off as immature and perhaps ethno-centric, these judgments of the feria. I don’t mean to be demeaning or offensive about things, I’m just trying to express my perspective accurately and honestly. I guess that when you live in a place that’s outside of your culture and norms, little differences can slip under your skin and add up over time and can end up really annoying you. I actually did enjoy parts of the feria and, at the very least, found it memorable. So hopefully you’re finding my ranting light-hearted as it’s meant to be, and not so obnoxious, heh. Let me continue with a little more ranting, then I’ll stop for at least a couple weeks. To set the scene on the atmosphere that was created during this festival, I, along with my Frisbee-playing friends who were staying with me at the time, was waken up at 4am to an explosion in the plaza, literally. The feria committee relished the chance to wake up the entire town with firecrackers and deafening ranchera music, claiming that it was the “Alborada,” which is something cultural and traditional. They went on making unbearable noise for an entire hour. Luckily, this only happened two mornings during the feria instead of every morning, like promised. This would exemplify the nature of the general feria atmosphere for the rest of the week: loud and inappropriate noises all around. Kids and adults (always the guys and never girls or women) would shoot off fireworks or light firecrackers no matter what time of day and no matter what was going on. During the crowning ceremonies, when people were giving speeches, during the horse races etc etc. It was like Christmas and New Year’s all over again, just two month’s worth dumped into a week. Then there was the music. The carnival people’s jukebox had a very limited number of songs, but that didn’t stop people from poppin in their Lempiras and selecting those same songs over and over again. Then, just up the plaza from the jukebox speakers, another carnival table was blasting its own music in between rants by the dealer on a microphone calling out, “place your bets, place your bets, place your bets, place your bets, place your bets, place your bets, place your bets, place your bets.” So we usually had two songs going at once, and that’s if my neighbors didn’t have their own stereos on full blast. And don’t get me started on the MCs of the crownings and Cultural Nights, who didn’t know what to do with a microphone either. Another ‘benefit’ of living right on the central plaza is that, with such an influx of people looking to gamble (or looking to stare at people gambling) comes and influx of boys and men needing to relieve themselves in public. I was woken up twice to the sound of flowing liquid right outside my house—twice! And there were countless times during the week when I stepped out of my house to be shocked by these fellows. I will finish my novella of a blog post by talking about the generally strange behavior of people during celebrations here. And I’ve discussed this with other PCVs who have noticed this in their sites. But culture has it that people are at one of two extremes when it comes to celebrating ferias: Either they get uncontrollably drunk then violent and start fights and get into big trouble, or they are kind of sedated and super polite, not even applauding or dancing in public. I think that people get guilty if they are seen reacting to something that happens during a feria (perhaps because of strict religions here), or are just easily embarrassed and self-conscious. Or they’ve just never seen the point of showing their emotions in public. Mostly people seem to be content just standing around and staring at things that go on. This is quite different from celebrations in the US like Marti Gras in New Orleans or St. Patty’s Day in Boston or New Year’s in New York or basically any kind of concert or parade. Maybe it’s better?

It’s kind of crazy how different the food is here in Honduras from that of their close-by neighbors to the north, Mexico. I’d say we’re all pretty familiar with Mexican food with its spiciness and flavorfulness: salsa, colorful varities of beans, green chile sauce, mole, lime-marinated carne asada etc etc. I like Mexican food a lot.

And personally, I’ve grown to like Honduran food too. But let’s be honest. It’s not as exciting or distinctively zesty as Mexican food is. Some people may even go as far as to call it ‘bland.’ We’re talking generic brown beans, rice, plantains and scrambled eggs as the standard fare. It gets the job done but it seems to lack character or imagination. The beans are the highlight of the meal, if that tells you anything (In fact, one of the biggest Honduran films of the past decade is called "Amor y Frijoles," which means love and beans... see the screenshot).

Hondurans love their food though, and simply have no interest in trying much else. And for them, spicy food is a no-no. But then there are a couple irregularities in this bland agreement that Hondurans have made with their food that have shocked me:

First of all, for a people who don’t generally like strong flavors in their food, they LOAD TO THE MAX their coffee with sugar. And I’m talking practically a 1:1 ratio coffee to sugar. 2 cups coffee, 2 cups sugar. When I visit my neighbors I can feel my teeth start to rot out of my mouth with every sip, as I secretly wince to myself trying not to be impolite. Sure lots of people in the States find black coffee a bit too bitter for their liking, but this is taking it to another extreme. Some of my townsfolk here would probably rather just drink plain sugar itself and leave the coffee out if they could.

So their behavior with coffee would lead one to believe that Hondurans are generally quite opposed to bitterness. In fact, it would seem that they go out of their way to ensure that there is no trace left of the culprit’s original flavor. But that assumption is, in fact, incorrect on the whole. The second shocking irregularity to the bland food premise is their surprising love for superbly bitter food.

At the end of the dry season, people in Honduras excitedly harvest flor de izote, a white flower that grows at the tops of spiky palm shrubs. It’s a pretty flower, kind of rounded and curvy, bunching together into grape-like clusters. But if you decide to sauté it up with onion then scramble in an egg, which is the popular way to consume the flor de izote here, you will instantly realize that your mouth begins to shrivel, never having tasted anything as bitter in your life. Taste buds die one by one and all the moisture in your mouth is consumed by some instinctive emergency reaction. Forget trying to taste anything else for the entire meal. But, from what I can tell, Hondurans are connoisseurs and relish in this flower’s intense bitterness.

Then there’s the pacaya, a medium-sized stalk that grows in the wild, that is scorched over a flame for about 15-20 minutes then peeled. Inside you eat the white and scalding hot membrane plain or mixed into scrambled eggs like the flor de izote. And it offers about the same ultimate effect: mind-blowing and incongruous bitterness.

So I guess I am left a bit confused about how to define Honduran food. Blandish, cavity-inducingly sweet, or freakishly out-of-control bitterness.

Upon re-reading my blog post about riding buses in Honduras, I feel that I’ve unfairly excluded some of the positive aspects. The following is thus a brief defense of public transportation here. Read only the bold sentences if you want to get through this quickly: -In the first place, public transportation can take you to just about any place in the country, including the smallest villages. The vast majority of people in Honduras use the public transportation system as opposed to driving their own cars. According to the survey I did of my town last year, only 6% of people here reported owning their own car. (It does seem, however, like most people in my town at least aspire to having their own car, but as it stands, it’s prohibitively expensive to buy one and much more so to pay for gas and maintenance.) The positive consequence of this dependence on public transportation is that Honduras’ carbon emissions are immensely and responsibly low. Not to mention, Honduras isn’t involved in the messy politics of the Middle East like America (though I won’t go into their recent history with Venezuela). -Public transportation is cheap. It costs me L28 (just under $1.50) to get to Santa Barbara from my town, about two hours down the winding and steep mountain road. -On my town’s bus, as is probably the case in the rest of rural Honduras, people often use the chance to catch up with friends and neighbors and sit quietly and politely chatting (and gossiping) for the entire ride. For the most part, it’s a refreshingly friendly experience. True, things get a little less friendly once you get onto buses between bigger cities, but it’s almost never hostile. -Passengers are usually surprisingly helpful to strangers. More than once, my bus has stopped to let passengers hop off to help push stalled cars on the side of the road. When would a public bus ever stop to help another vehicle in the States? Also, people will help other passengers move heavy bags or hold kids in their laps if there’s no more room to sit. People will give up their seat to elderly people and women with children. If the bus is struggling to make it up a steep stretch of road, passengers seem happy to get off and help push or pull! In the States, people would most likely get angry and probably consider calling their lawyer. -There’s no need to wait at a “bus stop.” In fact, that concept doesn’t really exist: You can flag a bus down anywhere along the road and get picked up. The same works for getting off. Just yell out “baja” (the equivalent of the impersonal “someone is getting off here”) and they’ll stop and let you off, helping you with bags if you need it. Of course, the dark side of this is that you can be in trouble if you’re trying to get anywhere in a hurry. -If you’re hungry or thirsty at any point during your travel you won’t have to wait long for someone to offer to sell you tasty greasy/sugary food or drink. Same goes with needing pills for anything from mental slowness and forgetfulness to back pain, new toothbrushes or a chip for your cell phone, or God. It’s practically foolish to pack considering all the things you can purchase while on the bus.Ultimately, people take riding buses here as part of daily life and are much less worried about regulations and cold efficiency as we are in the States. Cheapness is mainly what’s important. That and upholding a sense of empathetic communal support (ie ‘we’re all on this bus together’ type of thing). So I’d say it’s only fair to consider all the negative stuff I mentioned in my last blog post with all this good stuff when talking about riding buses in Honduras. But when it comes down to it, I still miss the freedom of having my own car.

Before being assigned to my post, as I waited all those endless “in-between” months, I read a few books by RPCVs (Returned Peace Corps Volunteers) about their service. One was about the very first group of PCVs to be sent to the Philippines back in the early ‘60’s, the Peace Corps’ main focus then. And wow do I feel lucky to be a PCV in the 21st century. The author talked about, among other things: · the tedious voyage across the Pacific just trying to get to post · the various fungi that grew on various parts of their bodies after months of scorching heat and torrential tropical storms · how the main roads became roaring rivers during the rainy season that they had to perilously fjord in their Jeeps in order to get to site · large bugs and reptiles · and how there was no mail and no phones—well, actually, in that regard it’s kind of similar to my town here, I suppose Needless to say, they were a different kind of volunteer back then; I don’t know if I could have handled it. Life without Internet is hard enough, heh. Anyway, I hadn’t really remembered that book until just the other day, when one passage came back to me in particular: it was about the three universal mental stages volunteers went through in their two years in the Philippines. And how by watching a volunteer eat, you could tell which stage they were in. If, upon finding insects in their food, the volunteer pushed their bowl away in disgust and stopped eating, they were undoubtedly a new recruit. If, upon finding insects in their food, they meticulously picked out every bug then continued eating, they were probably around halfway into service. But if the volunteer, upon finding insects in their food, kept right on eating without giving it a second thought, it was clear that they’d been in the Philippines for a long time (too long?). The other day, halfway through a bowl of cereal (precious Honey Nut Cheerios that I’d brought back from the States and thus relished and ate only on special mornings), I realized that dozens of little tiny blackish-reddish ants had apparently invaded the box and were now floating in my milk… I kept eating. PS—I also nearly ate a moth by accident the other night. Won’t go into details, but suffice it to say that it wasn’t pleasant for either of us.

I was sitting on the already-packed and hot bus in Santa Barbara waiting for the driver to finish lunch (or whatever) to take us home. Amid the ten-year olds coming and going selling Coca Cola and deep-fried plantains stepped on board a well-dressed thirty-something year old man. He had on a tie and a man bag on the shoulder. And, unusually, he started to preach. Let me clarify. If you happened to have read my last post about riding buses in Honduras, you already know that it’s not entirely unusual for people to get onto buses and start preaching, praying, speaking in tongues, generally proselytizing, incoherently yelling, blabbering, and/or spitting. Usually they’re spitting, I guess. And the common themes of their brief and fiery sermons are one or several of the following: 1) IT’S THE END OF THE WORLDDDDDD!!!!!!!!!! 2) Don’t follow in the footsteps of those greedy sinners in countries like the United States [read: it’s God’s will for you to be poor and Americans are evil]*3) Muslims, gays, women who wear pants and the like are doomed to eternity in Hell. *the ironic part is that most of these preachers belong to various Pentacostal denominations based out of the “sinful and greedy” United States and thus receive their paychecks straight from churchgoers in the US… for me, the irony is that, listening to some of these guys, it’s as if I’m back in the Bible Belt again Needless to say, these common bus sermons (and “sermons” may be a little bit generous here) don’t usually end up making me hop up out of my seat and run to the nearest Evangelical church. Some people listening, though, shout out halleluiahs and amens, some give the preachers cash, nobody seems as put off by it as I am, but generally people are kinda indifferent. Anyway, this particular fellow in Santa Barbara who started preaching was nothing like what I’ve become used to: He was quiet, well spoken, seemingly quite educated and open-minded, and, most surprising, wasn’t radical in anyway except for his lack of radicalism. He talked about how we all have sinned and how we should seek God in our own way, not to be pressured or fooled by judgmental denominations that are “wolves dressed as sheep.” It was a nice, simple message that I felt okay with. Then, he closed his Bible and pulled out a couple new toothbrushes from his bag and asked who was interested in “buying quality toothbrushes for the low, low price of 2 for L10.” Alas…

Traveling on buses in Honduras, just like probably in any third-world country, is almost always guaranteed to provide… let’s call them interesting experiences that are either immensely frustrating or hilarious, depending on the traveler’s prior amount of sleep, general outlook on life that day, and current mood at the time of travel: · Buses can be old and rickety, usually 30+ yr hammie downs from US school districts, churches, and senior citizen groups; · Buses are usually way, way, way over-packed; · You are likely to be sitting next to someone who doesn’t recognize your right to personal space (though I’ll admit that on very rare occasions you can get lucky and this person will be a cute Honduran girl with twinkling eyes and a skirt, excited to be sitting next to a genuine gringo); · There may be barn animals aboard; · People will probably toss trash out the window without giving it a second thought (but really, what else can they do with it?); · You may be stopped and searched by police officers if the driver doesn’t bribe them first; · Schedules probably won’t be followed as efficiently as you’re used to, understating it a bit; · Full-fledged riots may ensue while boarding the bus… unsuspecting little old ladies have been known to throw elbows and bite; · On all hot days (okay, and most of the rest of the days too), strong smells protrude from fellow passengers, perishable cargo, the over-heating engine, afore-mentioned barn animals and babies; · Apparently horribly desperate vendors urgently rush up to stopping buses and yell out what they are selling as they shove their baskets up to the windows (and thus into my face if I my window happens to be open, which it usually seems to be); · If you’re a foreigner (which, thanks to my ubiquitous freckles, I certainly qualify) children, old people and most everyone else sitting near you will probably spend an average of at least twenty minutes an hour openly staring at you, mouths usually slightly agape; · Drunks may come on board an make a loud scene, even if you may be napping; · Some of the afore-mentioned desperate vendors may come on board and make loud sales pitches in the aisle, even if you may be napping; · Evangelical preachers may come on board and give loud and threatening sermons, even if you may be napping; · Despite music playing on the bus stereo system, teenagers and young adults will most likely be blasting raegeton music from their cell phones, making an infuriatingly loud disturbance, even if you may be napping (see a theme here?); · Bus drivers will probably be talking on their phone while driving way, way too fast, while changing the radio station to either ranchero (or 80s American pop) and/or eating messy baleadas; · Finally, and seriously, your bus may break down, be assaulted by armed gang members, or crash. I’m sure I could go on for a while longer with this list. These were just the first things that came to mind.Public transportation is certainly cheap in Honduras, but I suppose you get what you pay for. Safety regulations are nothing more than jokes on paper far away in the capital. Culture surrounding public behavior and common courtesy is very different here than in the States. And the word ‘schedule’ is not quite understood.Most of the time, I try to keep a positive attitude, be patient and flexible, laugh instead of cry, and keep a low-profile while traveling on buses, as they urged during our training. Honestly I do try. But it’s really hard sometimes, especially when I catch myself thinking about the terrible things that could happen at any minute. But don’t worry Mom; nothing terrible has happened to me on a bus in Honduras. (yet…)

Two weeks ago I went cave exploring with a group of local guides. Although there were times when I was certain I was going to slip on the mud and lose my grip and fall down holes, I got to go into some really awesome caves. One was down a fairly steep slanted wall that dropped down onto a level chamber probably the length of two football fields, at the end of which was a lake that went deep and probably connected to another room on the other side. There were bats and cave crabs and those creepy cave arachnids. We also saw deep and scary sinkholes. The ecotourism committee hopes to soon put in a better trail to get there. It was one of my coolest Peace Corps moments thus far, hands down.

1. Crazy cave arachnids (this one dead)

2. The cave entrance, looking up

3. Some of the endless examples of interesting stalagtite formations

4. An immense sinkhole. Fall in and you won't make it out.

5. A cool tree on the way to the caves.

For those of you out there who are keeping score at home, my last blog post was about how schools were closed for more than a month because of a teachers’ strike. So, I basically spent the entire post explaining (okay, call it complaining) why I haven’t been able to do part of the work I wanted to in my town because of things that were way out of my hands. (And hopefully those roaring political storms have calmed for a bit and I can soon restart work at the school). But I found it unfair that I didn’t talk at all about the work that I have been doing in the past couple months: so here it is, four brief overviews of solid projects that have been happening around here:1. Database system at the coffee co-operative2. Total trail system make-over in the cloud forest3. Construction finished on community center4. New project: improve health center 1. Database system at coffee co-operativeIn February I teamed up with a fellow business volunteer, Carrie Purdue, UVA grad and good friend, to design a new database system for my coffee co-operative. The administration was looking for a way to digitalize their receipts, to get up-to-date inventory reports, and to be able to track the production and credit trends of coffee farmers who sell to the co-operative over time. So Carrie shared some of her extensive Excel know-how and we sat down and put together a new program that, I’d like to think, is very simple and intuitive to use but that will hopefully be a helpful tool for decision-making. Up to this point, we’ve been finishing up this coffee harvest using both the old, inflexible and stale database, and the new one, as they’ve been getting used to the new processes. The dream is that this new system will make it easier to manage the co-op in general, using information and technology to be more successful. 2. Total trail system make-over in the cloud forestAlicia, the PCV who’s working with me on developing ecotourism, got one of her former co-workers in the Seattle park service to come down to Honduras for a month to help us work on our trails. His name is Jack and he’s got years of expertise designing and maintaining trails in the Seattle area. We held a trail building workshop for fellow PCVs and for their counterparts, as well as members of our communities, a couple weekends ago. About 25 people showed up, which for us, felt like a great turnout. In the training, Jack talked about the three main components of trail building: the grade (or slope/inclination) of paths, water drainage, and the “tread” (or path). Many of the current trails in my town are used by workers and by pack animals getting to and from coffee farms and are basically straight up the sides of hills. That’s not ideal for tourists, however, because it’s a lot more tiring to walk, and when it rains, the paths basically become muddy creeks. So during the weekend –long training and since then, we’ve been building “switchbacks,” which are zig-zag paths that wind up the side of hills to avoid the steep straight-up paths, and “water bars,” which are rudimentary drain canals perpendicular to the trails. We also have been working on taking out roots and widening the path wherever possible. It has been tough work sometimes, but it’s a lot of fun being out in the woods. We saw a coral snake and have head quetzals and howler monkeys. I think the trails will end up great and hopefully will be a boon for our marketing efforts. On a related note, we have been going out with Jack when we’re not building trails to explore new possible routes to attractions. And last week we went cave exploring! Although there were times when I was certain I was going to slip on the mud and lose my grip and fall down holes, I got to go into some really awesome caves. One was down a fairly steep slanted wall that dropped down onto a level chamber probably the length of two football fields, at the end of which was a lake that went deep and probably connected to another room on the other side. There were bats and cave crabs and those creepy cave arachnids. It was one of my coolest Peace Corps moments thus far, hands down.3. Community CenterOne of the first things that I did in my site last summer was meet with the Patronato, the local town council, every week. It was a good way to meet the leaders in my town and to see what sort of initiatives were big. Well, instead of big development initiatives like business training or children’s nutrition programs etc, they had prioritized the construction of a community center. Which is the perfect example of balancing the community’s desires with our own ideas and plans: although I didn’t think it was priority number one, they asked me to help out, so I said yes. Anyway, the good news is that construction was finished on it in February and they held the inauguration dance for Valentine’s Day. I admit that there was a certain sense of accomplishment upon seeing it finished. I will post pictures one of these days.4. Health Center To finish up, I’ve been meeting with a group of people in my town who are trying to expand the Health Center. We are going to be looking at physical expansions, new equipment and getting a doctor. Although this doesn’t specifically have to do with my business project, it may be a good side project. Though I am highly concerned with sustainability. Will continue updating on this…

I’m going to try to be careful about how I express myself on this topic, given that Peace Corps volunteers aren’t really supposed to publish opinions on political matters in their host country. Remember that these are my words, not the American government’s… But I am left frustrated by the continuing political clash between the Honduran government and the national teachers’ syndicate. Their 5 ½ week strike has just ended, but there are threats of an immediate repeat.

The teachers claim that corrupt government officials robbed the better part of their pensions fund amidst the confusion and chaos of 2009’s political crisis and that no one has yet been held accountable. [But then again, the teachers went on strike for that last year too.] The union also claims that the government is secretly scheming to privatize the entire education system of Honduras, which would, they claim, end the education of hundreds of thousands of children whose parents couldn’t afford to pay tuition. Privatization would also, not to mention, undoubtedly affect their salaries. So, for these reasons, and possibly more, the teachers’ union went on strike for more than a month, essentially shutting down blocks and blocks of Tegucigalpa in sometimes violent protests, and in effect making a mess of my plans to work in the schools this year.

It doesn’t help the delicate situation that the vast majority unionized teachers belong to “La Resistencia” (The Resistance), the political party of Mel Zelaya, the deposed president who was replaced by current president Pepe Lobo. It also doesn’t help that lame-duck presidents in past have conceded perhaps more than the government could really afford to the constantly fighting union: There is a strict one-term term limit on the presidency and increasing spending on education looks good to international aid organizations like the IMF and World Bank (that often tack on policy stipulations to their loan offers), not to mention is good for the public image of their party.

I agree that unions are helpful to put a check on capitalism that naturally pushes down wages and quality of working conditions as enterprises seek to expand profits. Indeed certain universal workers’ rights should be respected. But a balance should exist. In a country where the government struggles to collect even the slimmest portion of taxes owed to it by its citizens and that has been running on a decade-long deficit supported only by international aid organizations, the teachers have it pretty well. Too well?

You’d think it would make sense to invest in new schools, new classrooms, general repairs, new desks and chairs, chalkboards, useful books, training for teachers etc etc. But teachers’ salaries eat up a very high percentage of the entire education budget (some pundits claim more than 90%!). Plus, they don’t have to pay income taxes, hold lifelong jobs, get bonus pay if they work in rural communities (still the majority in Honduras), only have to have a high school diploma to be able to teach, and only teach half-days (a good part of which, kids are playing futbolito at recess). The principal of my school has one of the nicest houses in town with two stories and a garden. All this and teachers still found it necessary to be on strike for a month.

And what an ugly month it was in terms of resolving disagreements: riots and tear-gas in the streets of Tegucigalpa, one teacher died, several were jailed, both sides almost comically called the others’ bad names, and all the while, kids across the country simply lost all those days of potential learning. And trust me: at least the kids in my town need to study a whole lot more to be on par with children in the rest of the world in even the most basic of things like elementary reading and writing and mathematics, not to mention more complex things like science or history or just general critical thinking skills. Working in the fields or in the home instead of going to school is a problem when classes are actually being held-- and when they're not, there's no choice.

People in my town easily agreed with the teachers that the national government has been openly corrupt in the past and that little or nothing has been done to stop it. Politicians, after all, can afford to put their kids in private schools that aren’t affected by the strikes. And they would probably have been willing to fight alongside teachers for fairer rights or more education spending. But, parents were generally disgruntled at the teachers because, needless to say, they wanted to see their children going to classes. They called for other ways to fight for their rights, alternatives that wouldn’t harm kids’ education.

Then, all of a sudden, teachers started giving classes again. It seems to me that nothing actually happened to end the strike. It all feels immature and out-of-the-blue to me and certainly with no easy solution. Things seem to have gotten way out of hand over something that, in my opinion, is trivial in the grand scheme of things and simply misses the point. Both sides are to be to blame and the whole system has gotten all messed up. For me, I’m most definitely left on the sideline of this thing, with fingers crossed that people will just cool it for a while and get on with classes.

More blog posts will happen soon, I promise. In the meantime, have a happy Holy Week!

I´m writing this at 10:30 the night before I go to Santa Barbara and it reminds me of writing papers at the last minute in college. There is no Internet in my town, so I have to write all my emails and blog stuff at home then carry them on a USB to SB because I never have enough time at the Internet café to sit an type them there. Alas, here are a few things I’ve been working on recently in my town:

1. More financial analysis stuff at the coop

2. School has started up again for kids here (and thus for me too)

3. Ecotourism committee

1. Financial analysis at the coop.

On the heels of the meeting I had with the Board of Directors of my coffee cooperative, I’ve been working on ways to help them implement some of the changes I recommended. For example, I think I’ve convinced them to stop the free lunches at meetings. There’s still doing sweetbread and coffee though, heh—we’re all addicts to coffee around here. Also, I’ve been helping Lucas, the administrator, work out a break-even analysis followed up by a projected cash flow, to see how we can actually achieve an expansion in our production. We’ve also been discussing doing some local promotion to coffee farmers who aren’t members of the coop, to match our cash flow projections with ‘coffee-flow’ projections, if you will. As it stands, we aren’t buying as much coffee as we could or as much as we want to. Also, I will finally be giving personal finance trainings to the members of my coop starting in March, with the objective of reducing the amount of cash advances and loans they’re taking out each year. Finally, a team of five Canadians came down and visited the coop from Van Houtte, our buyer. They wanted to meet the members, see the farms, see the factory, and talk business. It turns out that they’ve got their eyes set on buying much, much more. It was fun meeting them and putting faces to the myths of our “Buyers up in the North.” As it turns out, in a twist of irony, Van Houtte was bought out by the American coffee giant, Green Mountain in Vermont back in December… and in case you didn’t know, Montaña Verde, the name of my coop, means ‘Green Mountain.’

2. School begins: thus my work there too

I’ve talked to the principal of the school and it looks like I’ve gotten myself roped into doing after school extracurricular groups with kids. Last year I did a journalism group with 4-6th graders. I’ll be repeating it this year, but with a different bunch of kids. I think we may work on putting together a photo-documentation pamphlet of the community and of the cloud forest to use for the community’s ecotourism project. But I’ll also have a Business club with the 7-9th graders where we will learn business fundamentals, visit various businesses, and, hopefully, they will come with an idea and start their own school business. Also, I will have a Nature Club—I haven’t decided its focus yet, but there’s a lot of material to work with here. Plus, Alicia, the volunteer just down the road from me, is a biologist, so I’m sure she’ll help with ideas if I need them. On top of three clubs, which will keep me busy in the afternoons during the week, I’ll be giving classes to the teachers in English and computation—it’s really just going over exercises they can use directly in their own classrooms to help facilitate their teaching. We shall see if they decide to show up this year. Finally, we had talked about planning monthly school-wide events like painting a world map, poetry or essay competitions, art or science fairs, rocket competitions etc. Working with youth is definitely one of the major goals of my project in the Peace Corps, and I feel that it’s always a worthwhile activity to do in my community, when I’m not at the cooperative.

3. Ecotourism committee makes progress

The ecotourism committee that I help Alicia organize is just now starting up trainings for guides. Our idea is to have a bunch of guides ready to attend tourists, once our marketing efforts have begun seeing results. Guides are crucial not because of their knowledge of trails and local plants and animals, but because they’ll know things to offer to the tourist to do—they’ll be the direct salesmen, pitching horseback riding or cave exploring or visiting a coffee farm. So we will be giving our guides a 10 session course and this next topic I’m in charge of: customer service. How exciting. We’re also working with families to offer food and room and board. The next step is working out pricing and packages and promotional deals and finally more comprehensive marketing. The ultimate dream is to form an NGO out of the committee and hire employees to coordinate things like guides, services, and marketing. But we’ve still got a ways to go.

It’s been cold and rainy for close to a week now. And before that, it was hot and dry and dusty. It can’t make up its mind. I suppose I really can’t complain though, being in the Tropics through winter and all.

Hello Internet readers. I apologize in advance for the potential (ok, definite) dryness of this entry; it contains mainly technical, number-related blabber. Read at your own discretion, as always. Or just read the bold sentences.

This past Friday I invited my cooperative’s Board of Directors to my house for a meeting. The objective was to go over the financial analysis report that I wrote so that 1) they could see how to do a financial analysis for the future and 2) they could actually use the information right now to make certain policy changes. I also had a list of a few recommendations of my own to offer, based on the analysis. I can say that as a PC Business Advisor, meetings like this feel good.

Since the Board is made up exclusively of coop members, on average they have very few years of education and little experience managing/overseeing businesses. Though to their credit, they have received some related training in the past from various NGOs and they naturally have years of agricultural, hands-on know-how.

Given this situation, I obviously didn’t want to give a meeting that was too technical or complicated that they’d have trouble understanding, because what would be the point? So I decided to also invite my main work partner in the coop, Lucas, to give me a hand with my explanations (see pic). Though also a member himself, Lucas is educated and worked for years as an accountant at a bank in San Pedro Sula, the industrial capital of the country. Currently he’s the coop’s General Administrator and Accountant, a sort of jack of all trades in terms of the coop’s money transactions (not to be confused with the General Manager, who I’ll mention later). Thus, he’s the right guy to help me out with this kind of meeting because he understands both perspectives. Plus, he’s a great guy and a good friend of mine and of all the members.

Our meeting obviously got started a solid two and a half hours late and lasted three hours instead of the planned two. I am a PCV however, and after months of practice I’ve become used to this sort of cultural delay; so, overall I think the meeting was a success and is a step forward for the coop. Here are some notes about the things we talked about. I’d be happy to hear what all you business folks out there have to say:

1. Expand sales:

The company has reported losses for the past two years. Anybody even faintly familiar with how businesses work could tell you that it is thus necessary to expand sales and cut costs in order to turn the losses around (the main solution being to expand sales). The coop is very lucky because our buyer, one of the largest coffee companies in Canada, wants to buy everything that we can produce. Great! What’s the problem then? See number two…

2. Reduce financial restrictions and costs:

The reason we haven’t been able to radically take advantage of this special, amazing deal with our buyer is that we don’t have the sufficient working capital. In fact, we’re taking out loans from a Honduran bank every year just to be in operation. They charge upward of 18% interest and have a limit of only L3 million (about $150,000), which buys only about two truck container’s worth of coffee (and last year we exported 13 containers). This year, since coffee prices are at a 15 year high, we can buy even less coffee with our fixed loan. What’s more is that people are timid to sell their coffee to us as opposed to our competitors because we can’t offer them as many cash advances and loans since we don’t have the cash on hand.

Thus, naturally, priority number one for the coop is to seek out institutions that offer lower interest rates and higher limits in the short-term and prioritize auto-capitalization for the long-term. The idea is that with more sales come greater profits. The Manager needs to be searching for these institutions and filling out the paperwork while the Board of Directors needs to designate a majority of year-end’s profits to a capitalization fund.

3. Personal finance training for members:

In a related vein, I recommended that the Board of Directors initiate a program to teach the coop members basic personal finance strategies. For example, let’s learn how to write a budget, how to begin to save, how to find the discipline not to spend all your cash right away etc etc. As it stands now, almost every member is taking out cash advances and/or loans from the coop every year before the coffee harvest just to be in operation, losing a grand portion of their profits to interest payments (see a theme developing here?). So the idea of personal finance classes is to 1) reduce the liquidity burden of the coop in the short-term and 2) help the coop members make more money in the long-term. We could even offer special incentives to the members who are willing and able to wait for their payments, like a low-interest bonus.

If we can get our members to wait before they get paid for their coffee until after we sell it to Canada (and receive that precious cash transfer), then we could in the end buy more coffee. Thus, the Board of Directors needs to get the rest of the members on board with the program then set the dates and I’ll be there ready to jump into action with beautifully planned charlas.

4. Expand our gross margin:

Gross margin is an accounting term that means the difference between Sales Revenues and Costs of Goods Sold. It is the company’s gross profit before you take out operating, financial, and “other” costs. In other words, it’s the average profit margin (markup) for all the goods/services the company sells. For our coop the gross margin is practically fixed at $10 per 100 pounds of coffee sold because of the yearly contract we sign with our Canadian buyer. The amazing thing about the gross margin is that even small percentage changes can drastically affect bottom-line profits. So, the coop should be looking for ways to both diversify its products/services and its buyers (because such sales hopefully carry lower costs and/or they earn higher differentials).

Last year, for example, we took a first step in this direction: we rented out our large, fancy machines and our exporting license to other coops and to big producers in the off season, earning a new source of revenue when our factory would otherwise have been idle. We also sold a mini-container of specially prepared coffee to a new buyer in Spain for a higher differential. Finally, members expanded production on three of the five passion fruit parcels the coop owns and began selling directly to the big buyer Horti Fruti, Wal Mart’s Central American produce subsidiary. Going into the future, the Board of Directors should be emphasizing these specialty sales as a way to expand the coop’s gross margins.

5. Limit Admin salaries, remunerations:

I took a bold stance on this one. In Latin business culture, generally speaking, there is relatively wide “power distance,” meaning that there’s a fairly rigid hierarchy in the workplace. Japan and Korea would be on the wide-distance extreme while the US is on the close-distance extreme. My coop tilts towards Japan in that the General Manager of the coop is sort of held on a respectful pedestal. He can (and does) order a factory worker to bring him coffee and almost all the coop members use the formal Usted with him. To top it all off, he comes from a wealthy family, so there’s all that social hierarchy stuff too, which comes into play with the humble coffee producers that make up the Board. All this being said, the Manager gets paid a high salary, drives a company car with all gasoline paid, and gets his entire cell phone bill paid. Not to mention, Honduras has radical workers’ benefit laws that tack on an additional 25% to his salary, just like that. Plus, the coop has sent him to Europe twice on “networking” trips.

So, although it is important to retain an educated and qualified General Manager with a vision towards the future and motivation to get the company there, the coop has had losses for two straight years. There’s got to be a balance. In my recommendation to the Board, I suggested that they negotiate some limits on his benefits, seeking a monthly maximum on what the coop will reimburse for gas and phone bills. I also mentioned a bonus system that will be paid out only if the company is profitable or if it meets certain benchmark increases in sales. And, all of this must be spelled out and signed in a contract, be it long-term or yearly. This will be the most difficult recommendation for the Board to follow because it will be culturally awkward for them to negotiate it; but it’s their job to do so, in my opinion.

6. Cut discretional costs:

Although the real difference between profits and losses will have to come mostly from expanding sales and reducing high financial costs, the English expression that says that “every penny counts” matters too. The coop spends a good deal of money that it probably shouldn’t on buying lunches for every member for every General Assembly meeting, which is 56 members at least once, sometimes twice a month. Plus, there’s a whole expense category for “Customer Service” that has steadily grown over the past three years, which is basically code for picking up the tab for visitors, mostly from outside agencies like IHCAFE and Care, organizations that should be paying for their own damn food in the first place. And the coop pays quite a bit of money on travel allowances for people running errands for the company, which basically means ‘here, eat lunch and dinner on the coop’s dime’ all while the Manager is riding around in the company car, living in Santa Barbara, where most errands are done.

I guess I get kind of worked up about these discretional expenses when I think about the losses the coop has racked up. Anyway, I recommended that the Board put an end to all this, despite the cultural consequences (it’s considered rude not to “invite” someone to food). But I stand firm in my North American hardness: the mission of this cooperative is not to give free food to members; it’s to pay fair prices to farmers and make profits that will be invested in community projects. Maybe, I suggested, the Board of Directors could offer to partially reinstall these expenses if the company achieves profitability, as a sort of incentive or bonus to those involved.

There you have it: six recommendations that will put the company on the road to “in the black.” I shall stop ranting … now.

¡Feliz Año Nuevo!

My New Year’s celebration went as follows:

1. Host family invites me to a late dinner at their house to begin at 9pm.

2. Arrive at 7ish to a houseful of children, old people and a few of us in between—dinner preparations are just beginning to be considered.

3. Host father invites me to a drink outside with friends = passing the bottle of Jim Bean then Jose Cuervo then vodka in a circle around the pickup truck telling crude stories. Do not worry, I partook hardly any. (Host father had started at 2pm)

4. Go inside after a few short minutes to escape the cold breeze and the escalating debauchery. Get a general lecture about how not enough people save their money in San Luis Planes from host grandmother—an appropriate conversation for any PCV… always on duty (actually, go granny… I begged her to give a talk at my coop!).

5. Firecrackers are going off like crazy. A few bottle rockets, a few volcanoes, a few sparklers, a few poppers, but mostly just the loud ones that go BANG.

6. Dinner is served on time at around 11:15. Three types of meat and lots of beans. Welcoming in the new year with farts all around.

7. Piñata smashing committed by those of us between the ages of 17 and 30, the real children of the group, as it turned out.

8. Midnight: burning of an effigy representing the old year (naturally, loaded with firecrackers), down on the plaza; explosions everywhere; host dad and cohorts firing pistol into air; hugs and kisses (when not jumping from the bangs); and did I mention the firecrackers?

9. Music so loud you could taste it: ranchero, techno and Lady Gaga.

10. Dancing. Yes, I danced to it all. And they had never seen such moves. Of course I would never ever even think about dancing with my 17 year old host sister. Never.

Anyway, it was a fun night and I’m very glad that I decided to stay in my community for the big day. I am also grateful I’ve got such a great host family. My host dad, by the way, showed back up at their house sometime around noon the next day with something of a headache I’m sure.

To be good and cheesy, I hope that everyone has a healthy and productive 2011.

Finally, below are a handful of my choices for top bug sightings in Honduras in the year 2010:

1. Stick Bug

2. Earring cocoons

3. Pincer bug

4. One of the many non-descript spiders in my house

5. Brown butterfly on door

Saludos desde San Luis Planes! Happy holidays; I can’t believe Christmas’s upon us already. There are only three blog points this time. I decided I’d include some bold highlights in each part, to make it a bit easier to get through. Read what interests you, as always.

1. Coffee season: the flavorful details

2. Vacation highlights: Bad roads, Mayan ruins and Caribbean islands

3. Holidays: feliz Navidad y próspero año nuevo

1. Coffee season is in full swing. My entire town is involved somehow. If you’ve ever been curious about the process, here’s all you need to know:

Coffee is ripening on the plants and it needs to be picked, or “cut,” as they put it in Spanish. Who is out on the farms picking?: everybody and their mother— literally and sadly, next to childbirth, coffee picking is about the only thing that gets women out of the house in my rural, conservative town. Kids are out of school from November to February mainly so they can help their parents in the harvest. The town is basically dead quiet during the day because everyone is somewhere up in the hills picking.

It is a basic concept: pick as many red berries as possible, which are also known as “cherries,” as I’ve heard some people refer to them. But it’s tedious work. The typical worker gets paid around 25-35 lempiras, about $1.25-1.75, per bucket which may represent as many as 30 or 40 plants worth of berries. Adults usually pick around 5-8 buckets in a full day’s work (thus earning around $6-7).

The farm owners, who hire the pickers, “de-pulp” the berries using a type of motorized press, squeezing off the fruity red outer-layer. The beans , inside the red berry part, have a yellow/tan “husk” covered in a sticky liquid called “miel’ (honey). Most farmers, after they de-pulp, wash the beans to clean off the miel. Then they have to decide who to sell their beans to. In my town, the options are one rich family that owns their own company, one “middle-man” who has the reputation for ripping people off price-wise, and then there is the cooperative I work with.

My coop weighs the coffee that comes in and pays the farmer according to the price that day on the commodities market in New York. But, since the official commodity is dried coffee, and the farmers are selling wet coffee, the coop has to take off a discount for the humidity level of the beans. Usually we subtract 45-55% for humidity, depending on how much the farmers have dried their coffee before they bring it in. [The humidity-measuring device is actually pretty cool]

Once we’ve bought the coffee from the farmers, it’s got to pass through two stages of drying so that it reaches 10-12% humidity. More, and the beans would be at risk of going sour and/or rotting and less, and the beans would shrivel up and lose their flavor. Step one is solar: we spread out the beans on our outdoor patio and hope for a lot of sunlight. When it’s really sunny, it usually takes half a day to solar-dry the beans. Step two involves large spinning dryers that were donated to the coop by the USDA and imported from Brazil. Each one holds something like 30-40 bags (150lbs each) and takes approximately 30 hours. We have two dryers.

Grain elevators then shoot the dried coffee into the next room of our plant where the coffee is de-husked, i.e. where the bean loses that second, yellow protective layer. The de-husked coffee bean has a sort of dark green tint and looks more like a lentil than the typical roasted coffee one commonly thinks of.

Finally, the de-husked coffee is sorted by weight, then runs down a conveyor belt in front of which two lines of workers (predominantly women) sit and pick out the bad pieces for hours and hours. The sorted and selected de-husked coffee is bagged and sealed and stored and then awaits a truck to take it to the port for its long journey to Canada, where all of our coffee is exported.

The company that buys our coffee is Van Houtte, one of the bigger coffee name brands in Canada, and they roast, grind, and market it there and in the New England states—if you’re up for aimless browsing of the web, check out their special Single-Origin line and look for the San Luis Planes, Honduras brand. That’s us. Last year we exported 5500 “quintales,” which are 100 pound bags. That’s a lot of pounds of coffee to be moved, especially when you realize that the five factory workers move it all manually throughout every stage of the process. This year we expect to sell 1000 “quintales” more than last.

2. Vacation highlights: My mother and aunt and a friend of theirs came down to visit me for a week at the beginning of the month. And I’m pretty sure that our trip turned out to be most memorable for them.

Travelling in a 3rd world country isn’t necessarily an easy or smooth feat, to say the least. We had decided that renting a car would be the most comfortable… our goal was to avoid using the infamous bus system of Honduras, which is made up generally of 20-30 year old hand-me-down school buses from the US, which are mostly overcrowded with people and bags and sometimes animals, that run normally on inconvenient schedules. Sure there are a handful of “luxury” bus lines, but we opted for a little more freedom and comfort.

So, thank you Budget Rentals. We rented a shiny Toyota with “4 wheel drive” and headed for my site, where, sadly, it had been raining solidly for the past week. My town isn’t what you’d call “easy to get to” and the roads aren’t “in good condition” and the rain doesn’t “help things” and the tires on this shiny new rental car weren’t “appropriate.” Needless to say, we spun out on hill after hill until we just couldn’t go up any more. It was quite a dramatic attempt and, after everybody’s blood pressure began to increase relative to the incline of the road (ie steeply), we decided to scratch my town from the itinerary and turned around and left for Copan, the Mayan ruins.

The Mayan ruins were very interesting and possibly my favorite part of the trip. We hired a guide who was of Mayan descent and learned a lot about their history and culture. Copan was a city of about 20,000 that was in its peak as a cultural center from about 400-800AD. We got to see several stepped-pyramid temples and altars. There were also countless statues of kings and gods, a huge staircase of hieroglyphics, and a ball court. I asked our Mayan guide what he thought would happen in 2012 and he told us the whole end-of-the-world thing was all just a big misunderstanding. I’m relieved.

We spent the remainder of our trip on Roatan, one of the Bay Islands of Honduras. The boat ride out was quite choppy and one of the four of us, to remain unnamed, announced “uh oh” just before she got most vocally seasick into a handy pukebag. Our days on the island were spent swimming, eating and drinking beach drinks. It was rough. One morning, Aunt Julie and I went fishing just beyond the coral reef. Again, we’ll leave it nameless, but one of the two of us caught two and the other caught less than that.

Lesson learned: all in all is that interesting and memorable vacations can be had in Honduras, so anybody reading this, feel free to come down and visit, assuming I know you.

3. Happy holidays:

I’ll be spending Christmas and New Year’s in my site, with my host family and probably with various other families too. It’s nice to be back after having been travelling and I look forward to seeing how the holidays will be celebrated here. My guess is that celebrations will most likely involve bomb-sized, earth-shaking, glass-shattering firecrackers (see my October post for more ranting on firecrackers).

I send my best to friends and family back home.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Went to Olancho, the biggest department (or 2nd, not sure) in Honduras that is nicknamed the Wild Wild East because it is a lot like Texas is in the States: everything is bigger there, there is an old timey outlaw feeling with the dust and the cowboy hats and boots and all the horses. Also, people there speak with an accent and lots carry guns. Yeehaw.

There were 8 of us PCVs who went out and we did the American thing and ate turkey, threw the football, played games and had fun. The trip out takes a long time and four of us coming from the West had to take the 4:30 AM bus from Santa Barbara and travelled all day, arriving in time for dinner. Our first bus of the day was stopped at a road check by police and Stephen, fellow male volunteer, and I had to get off the bus with the rest of the men on board and were patted down. Sherria, female volunteer, declared innocent by the police, got it on camera- Ill have to post pictures later. They didnt seem to find us too guilty looking, so 20 minutes later we were back on the road. What a way to wake up.

All in all, it was a nice trip and I dont regret not being in the States all that much, if Im being honest. Best wishes to friends and family and happy start to the holiday season. BTW, hope you are enjoying the cold weather up there in the higher latitudes: here, it got into the 90s today travelling home.

Hello loved ones and friends and random people I dont know. I am posting a lot of words here to send out a broad update on my life as a volunteer in the Peace Corps. As Ive said here in this blog before, look at the list of contents first and then go on to read only what interests you- otherwise Id feel sort of guilty obliging you to scan the whole damn entry because you feel you have to. Youd get bored that way- or I would at least.

(The picture here, on the right, is of aloe plant flowers. There are two pictures in the middle and both are of the cloud forest.)

1. My computer fixed: life has normalized again!

2. Cold in Honduras? Where am I?

3. Firecrackers: who was the bastard who sold a truckoad of firecrackers to every kid in my town?

4. Business training (yes, Im actually doing some work too): to my coffee coop and personal finanze classes to families

5. Survey and Census results: any statisticians out there?

6. Ecotourism Committee and a chat on Global Warming: environment=good

7. My work in the school: (kids=good, when no firecrackers)

8. November, December plans: Panama and a visit from family

1. My computer is fixed

The Osteens step into action. Something broken? We know how to fix it. Something highly technical requiring many difficult steps to fix? Yeah, no problem. Father and son, handymen extraordinaire, save the day... okay, youre right, normally this statement would be highly sarcastic. This time, however, it's actually true. I must thank my father for sending me just what I needed to get my computer fixed and just in time. Best of all, for some amazing miracle or other, none of my memory was lost during the months my computer was experiencing the black screen of death. So, movies, pictures, and music have returned to my life, as well as word processing (hence the long blog entry this time around) and Excel and Powerpoint and Internet (on the sparse ocassions when I go somewhere that has WiFi) etc. And it feels good.

This is not the Peace Corps of the 60s. It is my humble opinion that people need computing abilities to be able to function productively in this century. Old people may disagree with me, but, you try living without a computer for a few months, all the while listening to various Honduran radio stations, and see how long you maintain your sanity. Okay, I didnt go insane without my computer, but I was close.

2. Cold in Honduras?

Who would have guessed? I certainly didnt expect to be cold in the tropics, but it's true. The last month it has been in the mid, and even low, 50s in my site. And it's grey and rainy. It's not going to snow, but having just gotten used to 8 months of 80 and 90 degree weather, the 50s have come as a big surprise. Plus, housing insullation isn't really a known technique here. But, it is actually a welcome change and it feels like fall back home. Give me cold over sweltering hot any time of the year, and latitude of the globe.

3. Firecrackers.

Some jerk came to my site and made a ton of money marketing firecrackers to every boy aged 5 to 15 in San Luis Planes. Yes, Im simply complaining right now, but these kids have gone crazy with blowing things up and my once peaceful site now perpetually sounds like a war zone. You'll just be sitting there, maybe with a spoonful of hot soup in your hand or maybe concentrating on translating a sentence for your writeup on the census you just finished, when BANG, BANG, BANG, there's a series of explosions just outside your house. Or maybe it's 6:30 in the morning. Or maybe it's 10:30 at night.

And, sure enough, when I asked one of the little buggerfaces why they were setting off so many firecrackers these days, he said it was because Christmas is getting closer. Obviously.

4. Business training (real work).

Yes, I am still chuggin along on my actual Peace Corps work too. My life's not all technological, climatic, firecracker drama. This past week, I finally imparted a full day's presentation to the members of my coffee coop to prepare them to revise their business plan. Not to brag too much about the experience, but I feel like it was a pretty big success. We shall see in November how our revision goes, but I have high hopes.

Also, Ive been working on a series of short classes to give to families in my town on all things personal finance. According to the results of the survey that I conducted, the average number of years studied amongst the people in my town is 4.3. This means that almost nobody knows what a budget is or how (or why) to save. And, for a town that is struggling with perpetual poverty, in a place whose economy (income) depends principally on a seasonal crop, I think that some basic financial know-how could be of some real use. Sure, I'm trying to make these sessions basic and practical, so that people will actually be able to get something out of them. The goal is to start in November and Ive got the support of the local Patronato, the town council, to help me get people convinced to show up.

5. Survey and Census results.

Ive now officially completed a survey and a census of San Luis Planes. In case you're interested, here are a few of the results of the survey. There are 1325 people living in my site and 309 separate families and 349 houses. Of the 309 families, 35 have 5 or more acres of farmland (apx 11%) meaning that they are the rich people in town.

There is pretty interesting data on ages, that is good news, I think (sorry about the crappy version of the chart):

Younger people study more and have less children. But there is still a lot of work to do, obviously.

100% of the population uses wood burning stoves which, at the base of a protected cloud forest, can be an environmental risk. Not to mention that some of these stoves aren't ventillated externally and thus all the smoke stays in the house causing a wide range of respiratory problems, especially for children. And the average number of children per family is 4.4. Some families, though, have as many as 11 children and some household have as many as 12 people living there.

41% of people burn their trash and another 41% simply throw it somewhere. 6% of families still don't have a latrine in their house and have to use "campo libre" (the open field... they go outside). In 51% of the households in San Luis Planes, the mother does not work outside of the house. 49% of the population has to travel outside of the town to buy food. Also, 49% has to travel outside of the town to buy medicine. 94% of the population depends on the buses. So that means that if something happens to the buses or to the roads, half of the population would have a hard time getting food and medicine.

6. Ecotourism Committee.

The two other PC volunteers who live in my area, both volunteers working with the Protected Areas Management project (ie the environmental volunteers), formed a committee that promotes ecotourism in our three towns. By the time I arrived to site, it was already up and running and thus, I got to hop on board just after the hardest part had been tackled.

Ecotourism, of course, means that the people here have an opportunity to make money while protecting the national park. Win win. The committee is working on environmental education right now, giving a series of chats to each community on topics like local natural resources, environmentally-friendly waste management, and bird migration. Im working on the next session with a couple other members and we'll be talking about global warming and how it is likely to affect Central America and a few things that people here can do to help mitigate the problem. Of course, global warming has to be a myth made up by those crazed leftwing scientists because it's cold in Honduras right now. Heh.

In the future, the committee will be training guides and finding families that are willing to sell food and rent rooms to tourists. We'll also be working on marketing and transportation. The dream is to one day convert the committee into an NGO that strives to protect the forest while promoting ecotourism. Our community members seem, for the most part, energized and committed.

So come down and visit the cloud forest, see some tucans.

7. Work in the school.

The school year here will end in less than a month and doesn't start up again until the end of February. Almost all of the kids here help their families harvest coffee starting in November. So after the teachers' strike that lasted almost a month, I wasn't left with a whole lot of time to get things accomplished in the school this school year. Lots of my work there will start next school year.

My journalism group is down to two (perhaps three) weeks before we are done. They've done a good job so far and have been enthusiastic about getting to use the computers to type up their articles. Teaching them how to revise their articles has been the most challenging. Many of them didn't even know what "revise" meant. But, we've been working hard and I think we'll be proud of our final product. They'll be up for sale once they're printed. So while you're coming down to visit the cloud forest to help out our ecotourism committee, you can buy a local paper too.

This coming week, a Health volunteer from a town nearby will be coming in to help the two other volunteers here and me give an HIV/AIDS awareness chat to the 6th-9th graders of the school in my site. We all had practice giving such sessions during training, so it should be a piece of pastel. They are really well written sessions and I think the kids end up getting a lot out of them. We'll even be doing banana-condom demonstrations.

I think that after mulling it over for a long time, Ive decided to start giving English classes to the adults of the community at large. I tried starting English classes for the teachers of my school here, but it never worked out, they never showed up. So I was hesitant to try again with a new audience. And some PC volunteers are against the idea all together, claiming that teaching English only extends American imperialism or that we're only training people here to become illegal immigrants in the US. But personally, Im of the opinion that learning a language is good for the brain and, like it or not, learning English opens the doors for success here in Honduras. So there. I may also be starting English classes directly to the school kids next school year-- but we shall have to see about that because Im not really trying to become a school teacher (too many headaches for me).

Finally, now that our principal here finally consented to installing the 15 computers that were delivered last year, I have a shiny new computer lab to work with. I'll be starting computer classes to the teachers beginning next school year that they'll be passing on to the kids. Internet is the next step.

8. November and December Plans.

Im headed to Panama City, Panama the first week in November. Then at the end of the month, Im planning to visit friends in the Department of Olancho (which, as Hondurans love to brag, is bigger than the entire country of El Salvador) for Thanksgiving. Im excitidely expecting visitors for a week in early December. Then, some of my PC friends and I have been talking about renting an island in the Carribean for Christmas. Apparently it's quite an affordable thing to do these days. Rent and entire island. Who knew?

So that's all from me my Internet readers. Hope your eyes didn't fall out from having to read so much. I send my best from here.

Hi Internet.

Here are three pictures:

1. Inside a cave in my town.

2. A big bug. Am pretty sure it was an alien.

3. Boats at dusk on the Caribbean.

Hola. I knew that people back home have been anxiously checking my blog day and night for the past several weeks to see when some word would come from me, to see if that kid is still alive down there in that country. Was it Nicaragua? So yes, Im now finally writing a new post to say that I am still alive and still in Honduras.

1. Community Integration

2. No longer the new guy

3. "Reconnect" workshop: in which I learned how that pure coffee is not soluable in cold water

4. Life in a house in the campo, on my own

1. Community Integration. I dont think that I have a whole lot to mention for whats been going on for the past month or so. Community integration, the five dollar term that has become a cliche in the PC, means that slowly but surely, Im getting to know more and more people more closely. And so that in and of itself has been a task that Ive been working on. People in my site now know that Im not a) a Spaniard b) named Kevin (the last PCV in site back in the early 2000s) c) a tourist or d) a greedy gringo capitalist there to spy on them for the CIA while at the same time ruining their culture with McDonalds and Starbucks. So thats a small success for me.

2. No longer the new guy. Also, the newest training group, H17, was just sworn in yesterday and are off to their new sites today. That means that Im no longer a freshman in the country. Im getting old now. Respect.

3. Reconnect. We just had "Reconnect," a Business project workshop for five days. I got to meet the rest of the business volunteers from the previous training group, H14, and we shared our projects and planned to work together, building sinergies and sharing best practices, more buzz words from the life of a bz volunteer. The meeting sort of felt like training all over again (sessions on commercialization of coffee and renewable energy... good stuff indeed, though quite a change in pace for me now), but it was worthwhile, I felt. We are clearly the best of the 6 projects in PC Honduras, just so you know.

4. Living in a house in the "campo." I am still fighting ants. They are all over the place all the time and most of them bite. There are also spiders and cockroaches and dirty walls that, slowly but surely, Im washing by hand and by broom. Yes, washing the walls by broom. I do enjoy living on my own and having my own place, but it is a little bit of work. My neighborhood kids are always fascinated by what the local gringo is up to and often spend time on my front porch asking questions and learning English phrases. My host mother and I have also planted 3 garden beds in my back yard. Soon I will be eating nothing but radishes, carrots and cilantro.

Things are chugging along down here. Siempre con la lucha.

I feel like it is time for an update, but dont really have anything huge to report.

1. I moved into my own house in the end. In my backyard I have: an orange tree, several coffee plants (obviously), an avacado bush, sugarcane, banana trees, and a cinnamon tree. Ill be busy for the next few months doing small repairs and upgrades on the house. Itll be good for me.

2. One of our PC directors came and visited me last week. He said that things seem to be in order. Thats good news.

3. Two cousins surprised me and sort of showed up at my doorstep. We visited for a while and went on a short trip around Honduras. It was a nice break from my work, but I think it sort of messed up my perspective on life in Honduras. Going back to my site after being in semi-vacation mode will be strange.

Otherwise, Im staying healthy and happy and still am living the life.

Hi from Santa Bárbara.

1. Spain:World Champions.

2. The Honduran Diet.

3. Death of a Laptop.

4. Independent Housing.

5. Business Trip.

1. Spain: World Champions. I think that one of the signs of my gradual adapting to Honduran culture is my new appreciation for futbol. Ive watched close to every World Cup game with my host family on their High Def flatscreen. Thats right, they have an expensive TV. After Honduras and USA, I was rooting for Spain, so I was very happy to see them winning. It was an exhausting game with seemingly unbreakable defenses on both sides, especially the Netherlands. Right now is San Fermines in Pamplona, so I cant begin to imagine the celebration going on there.

2. The Honduran Diet. I have lost 20 pounds in the five months Ive been in Honduras. A fellow volunteer told me it was probably because Im drinking less beer here. Heh. In truth, it is most likely that Im eating very healthy and getting a lot of exercise. I also am not drinking as much beer.

3. Death of a laptop. My laptop is officially on the fritz. It caught a Honduran virus and gives me a lovely black screen every time I try booting it. No music or movies for me now; I guess it is the real deal Peace Corps from now on, if I cant fix it.

4. Independent Housing. (Considering I get official approval,) I will be moving into my own house in the coming days. Ive lived the mandatory two months with my host family and found a nice house, good location, friendly landlord, and that meets all the requirements. It will be pretty bare for a while, but that is ok. Itll be kinda like living in the dorms all over. Good news is that rent is 660 lempiras a month, which comes out to be about $32.

5. Business Trip. Went to El Paraiso, a city on the Nicaraguan border, with my coop to fill out paperwork and receive the necessary info about funding from Canada. If we are approved, we will be getting a little more than US$300,000 for environmental improvements for everything to do with coffee in our area (from farm upgrades to a new electrical system in our plant). It was a nice trip too; we got to visit the same border where Mel Zelaya, deposed president, infamously tried to cross into Honduras during the coup. I touched the same sign he did. One of these days I will be able to upload all the pictures I want to.

Hola mis compas (literally that means hi, my compatriots). The good news is that Im still living the life here. I am feeling more and more comfortable and at home in my site and have been staying pretty busy too, both of which are muy bien. Here's what I got going on:

1. Journalism group

2. Community survey

3. Coffee coop

1. Journalism group

18 kids and 1 gringo. This week I started a journalism group with eighteen fourth to sixth graders at the local school. A guy about my age is helping lead the class with me. I am using the guide of former PCVs mixed with some of my own ideas to structure the group. We will be meeting once a week for the next 16 weeks! By the end of our time together, the kids will have learned about journalism in general, about newspapers in specific, computers, interviewing techniques, how to use a camera, grammar and spelling, forming opinions, editing and layout etc. etc. And, the final physical product will be their own newspaper about stuff going on in the community. Our first meeting was a lot of fun, thanks to some standard "dinámicas" (or interactive icebreakers/games) that were inserted into the agenda-- it seems that the kids are interested in what we will be doing-- it also seems that theyre highly interested in the new gringo in town-- I read on their excited faces, "what are gringos like??!!" I will be a good experience for me...

2. Community Survey

I am doing a community survey about the health, environmental, and economic conditions affecting people in my town. Ive been going with one member of the Patronato (the local town council) once or twice a week to the different neighborhoods of San Luis, going door to door introducing myself and my project, then asking them my 25 knock-out questions. Doing a survey had always been in the back of my mind, but the PCV who lives up the road from me, Karen, suggested that I actually do it- so I am. It's helpful because I'm getting out into the community and getting to know new people, but it will also, hopefully, give me some direction about the needs of my town-- maybe to give me an idea or two about projects I can start working on.

3. Coffee Coop

We are trying to finish up the bookkeeping for the past operating cycle and it is a bit of a headache. Maybe soon we will know if we made a profit or not, heh. We canceled our general assembly meeting yesterday because of Honduras' last World Cup game, heh. I guess it makes sense.

I just realized that Im saying "we" instead of "they." Heh. I guess that's a good sign, right?

Everything else is dandy here really. Last week I went hiking into the cloud forest for the first time. It was a killer hike (for me at least, not at all for the Protected Areas Management volunteers whose job it is to be expert woodspeople), but we made it. The forest is really something else-- huge, ancient trees etc. We got to see two tucans. I'll post pictures of the trip one of these days. I am living in one of the best sites in Honduras, hands down.

Hola a todos. Im doing great and am living the life. Im still getting to know people in my community and build up confianza. I am working on a big training session with all the members of the coop on basic business practices and am about to start up English classes as well as a journalism group for local schoolkids. We shall see...

Anyway, just for your information, all you people out there on the Internet, Ive got a new mailing address. Im also putting it on the side bar of my blog. They recommend drawing a cross on boxes if you send them, and maybe even putting a Dios le bendiga on the side, to try to prevent people from opening them and taking stuff out. Im not sure how long mail will take to get to me now, but probably at least two weeks, if not longer. I dont need anything from the States as of now, but feel free to surprise me. (wink)

C. Alex Osteen, PCV

Voluntario del Cuerpo de Paz

Apartado Postal 22

Santa Bárbara, Santa Bárbara

Honduras

Greetings from San Luis Planes, Santa Bárbara! Well, I made it to site. Everything is so new and exciting here that it’s going to be hard to sum up all that’s been going on in the past two weeks. I love the community and my family and my work. I think that that’ll be a good order to try and describe things:

1. Community

2. Family/community members

3. Work/ “counterpart”

1. Community. You wouldn’t believe how scenic San Luis Planes is (“San Luis,” for short—though not to be confused with the larger city of San Luis, also in the department of Santa Bárbara). We’re above 2000 meters here, though it’s probably closer to 2300 or 2400—which comes out to be more than 6000 ft above sea level. This little coffee town of about 1500 people is surrounded by the tips of mountains that are covered with a thick forest. Clouds roll through these hills everyday bringing in beautiful views, cool weather, and RAIN. It’s been raining about every afternoon and/or night so far. It feels like Peter Jackson could have filmed some movie here, it’s such a dramatic view. I don’t have any pictures that do it credit yet, but once I take a good one, I’ll post it. The one that I am posting is the view from my back yard.

I’m kind of isolated where I am, which is great (and something I had sort of hoped for). It’s the real deal Peace Corps. I’m about an hour and a half away from the city of Santa Bárbara, the capital of the department, and the place that I’ll be going to do banking, buying groceries and other necessities (and getting Internet and cell phone service—that’s right, I don’t have cell phone service in my site). Peña Blanca, another bigger place with stuff to do and buy, is about an hour away.

I’m also about an hour and a half from Lake Yojoa, Honduras’ largest lake. On the ride up to my site, Alex Rosales, my counterpart (see number 3) and I stopped at the lake and ate fresh tilapia on the veranda of a restaurant right on the lake.

The national park here has one of the best/most pristine cloud forests in the country and we get a lot of ecotourists because of it. My two PC neighbors are in the project called Protected Areas Management, and they’re working with a local committee dedicated to developing this. I joined them last week.

2. Family/ Community Members. The day before I got into town, my future host family decided that they couldn’t host me because the madre got sick. So, when I got to town, it was a surprise meeting a new family, that I didn’t have the facts on. But, I’m actually with the brother and his family. They have a six year old son named Erick who’s in the second grade, and a sixteen year old daughter Kelyn, who lives with an aunt and uncle in Santa Bárbara where she goes to high school. (The local school only goes to 9th grade). They’re friendly and patient. The dad (along with his brother) is a community leader and is well respected in the town. He owns around 10 “manzanas” of farmland up in the hills (manzanas, I think, are approximately equivalent to hectares) where he grows coffee.

I’m still in the community analysis phase of service, where I’m meeting everyone and gaining “confianza,” or building up trust and friendship. I’m going to be going around doing a survey this week, actually. It’s really amazing how nice people are, and happy they are to meet a gringo. Most of the people I meet think that I’m from Spain because of my strange accent. I hear lots of stories about other PC volunteers who have been here in the past (two married couples, most recently) and a few Spaniards who set up the carpentry shop in town. I know my way around town already, considering there are two roads.

Almost everybody here depends on coffee production in some way or another. Either they own land where coffee is grown, or they pick coffee for the landowners, or they work for the coffee coop where I’m working. The quality of coffee is very high and I think I’m in heaven. (But asking for it without sugar confuses people.)

3. Work/ “Counterpart”. So when our training directors went around the country doing “site development,” they looked for people and organizations in our future communities that we’d be able to work with. These people they match us with are called “counterparts” in PC lingo. Some volunteers work with their counterparts for all two years while others use their counterparts as a launching point to meet the community then start work on other things.

I have two counterparts. My main counterpart I’ve already mentioned. His name is Alex Rosales and he’s the manager of the coffee coop called Montaña Verde. He’s very motivated and really wants the best for its future. He is also an expert coffee “catador” and knows all the technical stuff about what goes into making the best cup of coffee imaginable.

Montaña Verde (see picture), as a company, was founded just in 2006 with the help of an international NGO called CARE. Officially, it’s a coop of coops, that coordinates the efforts and production of 5 separate companies from five different communities in the zone to process and then export coffee. It has 56 members and buys additionally from more than 200 independent producers. All the coffee it buys and processes (11 “lotes,” or 4,125 “quintales,” or 412,500 lbs) is exported to Canada and sold there by a distributor under the brand name of Van Houte. I’ll be helping the company revise its business plan, implement a digital inventory control system, updating its accounting system, helping to broaden its marketing and diversify its financing, among other things. In the process, I’m learning all about coffee and its production. I couldn’t be more excited.

My second counterpart is the principal of the local school, where I’ll be teaching computer skills (once they get the computers set up, heh), as well as English and maybe some environmental stuff too. I am also planning on starting a journalism group with some of the kids, as well as perhaps a chess club.

As far as other work, I’m also coordinating with the ecotourism project. I am also helping with the “Patronato,” the local town council or alderman’s board, to write a work plan and help prioritize their efforts. Who knows what else I’ll be getting into in the next two years? I’m a “community resource,” according to the Peace Corps, and I want to pitch in wherever I can. Once I get to know people more, I’ll be able to understand their needs better.

Happy Mothers´Day to all the moms out there.

So this past week was our last week in Ojojona doing Field Based Training. We are all back in Zarabanda for one week left in training as a whole, then we´re all off to our sites in different parts of the country. Most of us are heading for the West, since there seems to be the most need there. This past Wednesday was "site assignment day," in which they told us where we are going to be spending the next two years of our lives. Our training director taped masking tape down on the floor of our meeting room in the shape of a big Honduran map and placed placcards where all the sites were, then made us wait as he called our names for where we were going.

I lucked out and got everything that I wanted in a site. And, in my opinion, I got the coolest place in the whole group! I will be in San Luis Planes, Santa Barbara, a town of about 1400 people an hour and a half from the department capital (Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara). I wanted a small site because it would be safer, friendlier, and easier to get "integrated," this mystical term that people throw around all the time. I will be working with a coffee cooperative there, helping with bookkeeping and best practices. I was pushing for a coffee coop all during training, and cant wait to start. Ill also be helping out in the local school giving English and computer classes to students and teachers, hoping for "sustainability." What´s more, is that there is a lot of room for developing tourism there. The cool part about my site is that Im very close to Lake Yojoa, the largest lake in the country. Plus, Im in the mountains that pertain to a national park where famous cloud forests are found. Lots of hiking in my future.

Cant wait to start. Much love from Honduras. See you on the flip side.

Hello. I’ve got a short and sweet blog entry this week! (For me, that is.)

1. Adaptation

2. Visiting Local Businesses

3. Bonfire, Cave Paintings

1. Adapting to Honduran culture. I just wanted to talk about ways that I think I am adapting slowly but surely to the Honduran lifestyle. Sure I’m still wet under the ears considering all the time I’ve got left here, but lots of things that were weird to me nine weeks ago are just part of my daily routine nowadays.

First is the food. I am completely used to and content with eating beans, rice, plantains, eggs and tortillas on a daily basis. They fill you up and I like the way they all taste together—at first it was weird mixing the sweetness of the plantains with everything else, but now it just feels normal.

Second, I’m learning how to live with and around kids. Sure, not every Honduran family has lots of kids, but many do; kids seem to be everywhere (something like nearly 50% of Honduras’ population is younger than 30!) Being an only child, I don’t really have too much experience living with young kids. But I think that my younger host siblings and I are getting along great and it’s actually been fun. We play lots of games (soccer, basketball, badminton, card games, who can make the weirdest face etc). I also get to help out with homework and English sometimes. If they start making trouble, I let the parents handle it. Win win. Also, the 17 year old host brother has become one of my best friends here in Ojojona and has been a big help with getting accustomed to the culture.

I don’t think twice about taking a cold bucket shower or flushing the toilet using a bucket. It’s inconvenient getting running water every four days, but it’s not the end of the world.

Finally, for the most part, I’m used to the weather. I still get hot, but I just don’t notice it as much. Besides, it makes my cold showers feel all the better.

2. Business Visits. As far as what I’ve been doing, we’ve been visiting lots of local businesses including a potter way up in the hills overlooking Ojojona, artisan shops in the main plaza, a tilapia farm 45 minutes into the woods on a very bumpy road, and a local cheese producer. The last made me a little nauseous, but the farm was really cool. I like how they’re making it a point to show us all aspects of typical Honduran businesses.

3. Bonfire and Cave Painting Adventure. Last weekend one of my follow volunteers had a bonfire in his back yard and we played guitar and had a good time. It’s nice to relax with on the weekend with fellow trainees. They will be a great support in the future both in terms of technical help and motivation.

Also, this past Sunday, eleven of us went on a real Honduran adventure, hiking into the woods in search of caves with wall paintings/carvings. We got a little lost because of bad directions, but it was a blast. It reminded me of Indiana Jones. We finally found the caves with the help of a local kid who lived around there. The paintings were neat, but sadly people had graffiti-ed the rest of the caves (see pic if it loads—which it probably won’t, based on my track record here). The whole thing took about five hours all together. De todos modos, it was awesome to get out into nature.

Tomorrow we’ve got our last technical interviews with our training directors in which we’re going to discuss possible sites/work.

Okay, those are this week’s thoughts. Hope everyone’s doing well in America.

Buenos días de Ojojona, Honduras! We’re beginning to approach the end of training already and it’s hard to believe. They’ll tell us our site placements sometime during the first week in May; I think we’re all getting a little anxious to know. Overall, things are still going great here. Here’s the summary of this week’s blog post:

1. Business trip to the playa!

2. Singing in Honduras

3. How manners and politeness are different here

4. Explosive diarrhea… not really, but casi

1. Beach. This past week we business trainees went on a field trip to the beach on the Pacific! Pretty cool trip. We visited various small Honduran businesses geared towards tourism and then wrote up business plans about them. The weather was hot and humid, but we got to camp on a beautiful beach (see pic if it loads). There was some beach volleyball involved as well as a bonfire, guitar playing and singing and cards. It was a great break from our classroom training and a time for some real “team-building.” The next day we visited the town of Amapala, located on Tiger Island about 20 minutes south in boat ride off the mainland. Another super hot day, but the town was muy tranquilo. To top it off, we ate at a seafood restaurant that was literally right on the beach. We had ceviche, “curiles” (black clams, normally eaten raw, that live in the freshwater mangrove swamps along the Southern coast) with lemon and lime and pico de gallo, and a great paella. Delicious—even the curiles. Plus, better yet, I didn’t get sick! All in all, it was an awesome trip.

Our training director hinted that one of the 18 of us might get placed there for the two years. I think it would be cool to live on a Pacific island for my service, even if it were in sweltering heat and humidity. I’d get used to it, right?

2. Singing. Just a quick observation on singing here in Honduras (okay, it’s a stereotype, I’ll admit). Nobody sings in tune here. The hymns at church remind me of holidays with family in Iowa (not to mention any names), people singing along with the radio is painful to listen to, and even the Honduran bands that are played on the radio are often live versions that are horribly off key. And boy do they blast music everywhere. Somebody else in my group was talking about the same thing and they compared the radio here to a drunken karaoke night. That’s kinda harsh, but funny. I’m sure there are some people here in this country who have a hint of musical ability in terms of tone; I just haven’t found them yet. I mean good for Hondurans for just singin’ their little hearts out, without caring or knowing they’re making me squirm a little.

3. Manners. Another generalization about Honduras that has struck me as noteworthy over the weeks: how manners and politeness are different here and, perhaps, a bit contradictory. On the one hand, Honduran people are super conservative and polite to the maximum in terms of how they use their language—they treat almost everybody with “Usted,” the formal “you.” It’s sort of like calling everybody sir or madam in English. They certainly don’t do that in Spain; and we certainly don’t do it in America (though I think Southerners are the closest thing to it). What’s more is that they say “mande” instead of “what” or “yes?” when somebody calls their name. Literally translated, they say, “give me orders” or “take charge.” Even another example is that they say “con permiso” all the time—when they walk in front of somebody, when they get up from the table and when they want somebody’s attention. It basically means, “with your permission, I will pass or get up from the table.” It’s like they’re all still living under Spanish colonial rule, begging permission from the Peninsulares that are in charge. It’s nice, but a bit extreme in my opinion.

Yet, on the other hand, lots of things that are big no-no’s in America are acceptable here in terms of manners and politeness. These very polite Hondurans who treat everybody formally, have no problem spitting on the floor in their house, right on the tiles. I mean, what’s wrong with that, right? They’re just going to mop the floor in a few days anyway. Another thing is that they throw trash everywhere except in trash cans: out the bus window, on the same floor they just spat on, on the street as they’re walking. There is no second thought about littering. I guess the public sanitation services aren’t quite on par with America’s, but still… Finally, when you go to the local corner pulpería (market) to buy something, it’s customary for the attendant to greet you with, “what do you want?” I haven’t gotten a courteous “hello” or “good afternoon” yet. Nice customer service.

4. Sickness. So I haven’t had explosive diarrhea yet, but I’ve gotten sick to my stomach here two times now and it’s not fun. But, I’m not sharing this to gross you out or for sympathy, but rather journalistic accuracy: just to admit that yes, my gringo stomach has a lot to get used to. It’s part of the adjustment of the Peace Corps I guess. I think everybody in my group has gotten sick to the stomach at least once in the past couple months here. The first time I got sick was definitely my fault: I ate a “minuta” from a street vendor in the central park here in Ojojona on a really hot day. Bad move. Minutas are basically fruit icies with shaved ice (most likely made from unpurified water which we’re not supposed to drink/consume, no matter what physical state), covered in three types of fruits (strawberries, pineapple, and tamarind which probably were not washed or very fresh) and topped off with a healthy pour of condensed milk (that had probably been sitting out in the sun all day). It tasted damn good, but boy did I regret it that night and over the next couple days. The next time I got sick was the next week and was most likely due to fish soup which tasted okay, but was questionable. Ugh.

Finally, one last sickness, I got a pretty mean sinus cold that hit just yesterday. No stomach symptoms yet. All the kids in my house are sneezing lots these days, probably caused by the change in weather over the past week (it’s been rainy and cold), and nobody knows how to cover their mouth. So snot is flying all over the place all the time (literally sometimes). Plus, they’re kids who like to go to school and share their sickness with other kids. And I’m a gringo with an immune system not used to these tropical bugs.

Actually, I wanted to say that the Peace Corps Medical Officers (PCMO’s) have been really great and are just a phone call away. They deliver medicine right away and tell you how to get better. But they threaten to take a stool sample if you don’t get better in a few days. Some people in the group have apparently had parasites already, so I feel pretty lucky. If you’re lucky, I’ll be filling you in on all of my illnesses over the months to come.

Sorry about all the parentheses; my teachers have always told me that I use too many of them, but that’s just how I roll. Okay, enough typing for now. Take care.

Happy Holy Week and Easter to all. I’m entering my sixth week of training (half way through) and things are still going strong. I think that I’ve decided I like summarizing my paragraphs in a sort of table of contents at the start of my blog entries, so I’m doing it again. Read what interests you but don’t feel obligated to read it all, obviously. I’ve written a whole lot this week:

1. holy week vacation: visiting extended familia in Tegucigalpa and Valle de Angeles

2. alfombras de aserrín take two (sawdust carpets)

3. rain during the dry season!, subsequent power outages (apparently all too common)

4. NCAA basketball tourney (Duke Puke)

5. cultural day in the PC training center (singing, dancing, pickup lines and dodgeball)

6. training: ask and ye shall receive… hands-on activities

1. Holy Week. Holy Week is a pretty big deal for most people here in Honduras—since people are either very religious or, if not, they’re at least appreciative of the entire week off of school or work. Many people use the time off to go to the beach or to visit family. The Peace Corps gave us Thursday and Friday off, so I got to relax a little bit myself but it also gave me the chance to get a couple really cool peaks into Honduran culture that I feel kind of special for having been able to experience. The fam took me on a two trips in their car (a big luxury!) to visit extended family.

On Thursday we went to one of the poorest neighborhoods in Tegucigalpa where Jose’s (my host dad) elderly aunt and uncle live with their children and grandchildren. They had two rooms in their house that were separated by a hanging sheet—nonetheless, not to sound intentionally cliché, they were probably the nicest people I’ve met in Honduras yet and went out of their way (and probably their budget too) to make me and my host family feel welcome there. They said that the running water only comes to their house once a month and that they’ve got to ration it or else they’ll be in big trouble; I can’t even imagine. Even though all of the houses around them were as small and humble as theirs, the neighborhood was actually kind of bonito (“beautiful,” a term Hondurans use a lot) because of all the trees everywhere. I was surprised to see so many.

On Saturday we went back to Valle de Angeles (where I lived for three weeks for the first part of training) to visit more extended family living there. Valle is a real tourist destination and it was packed since it was perhaps one of the busiest vacation days in the whole year. But I actually enjoy the town a lot—it’s colonial and historic with a nice downtown park and lots of artistry places—the climate there is very agreeable as well.

2. Sawdust Carpets. Last blog post I lamented the fact that I missed the traditional sawdust carpets. Well, good news. All the PC trainees were invited to Don Ricardo’s house (he’s one of the super rich fellows in town who apparently always invites PC people to his complex) on Black Friday to help make our own sawdust carpets. He had bought two pickup truck loads of sawdust of just about every color. The twelve or so of us who showed up were down on our knees playing around with sawdust for about six hours making religious designs. (see picture-- if it decides to upload) It was fun for about the first hour or so, but got tedious pretty quick. We also met some other Americans from the US embassy. The sort of sad part was that only three hours we finished it, it started to rain, which brings me to my third point.

3. Rain! It rained here for two days in a row this week! It was the first time it had rained in four months according to my host family. For a country that is experiencing a pretty severe drought, that’s a big deal. I liked it because it really cooled things off around here. It also settled some of the dust that’s been pretty rampant these days. The bad part is that when it rains, the power often goes out. So, we had about 5 hours of electricity over the span of about two and a half days. I think that’s bad for the food in our fridge.

4. Basketball. I luckily got to watch the two final four games on Saturday and hope to be able to watch the championship game. It’s too bad that I’ve missed the entire tournament, my favorite sports event of the year by far, but I feel privileged to have been able to watch these last games. Duke Puke.

5. Cultural Day. Last Wednesday the PC trainees put on a Cultural Day in our training centers and invited all of our host families. Each of our Spanish class groups gave a presentation about something related to American culture and a few Honduran groups did the same with their culture. It was actually a lot of fun. Since one of the other guys in my class knows how to play the guitar, I borrowed my family’s guitar and we played (and sang!) a hit bluegrass song called “Wagon Wheel” by the band Old Crow Medicine Show, which talks about a guy’s trip “heading down south to the land of the pines” looking to start a new life. Of course he’s talking about going to North Carolina, but we thought it could work for us going down to Honduras since there are pines here too. It went over well, I think (after we explained the lyrics and what bluegrass was to the families). Other groups taught the Electric Slide, American pickup lines, how to make ice cream floats and Dodgeball. Fun stuff.

6. Training. In my last post I think that I more or less lamented the fact that training here in Ojojona hadn’t really started getting interesting yet and that I wanted to do more hands-on stuff. Well, lucky me, the other volunteers who already speak Spanish and I will be giving 16 classes on various business topics to the local technical school over the course of the next several weeks, starting this week. Not to mention that in a couple weeks we’re all going to be doing a three or four day business simulation at the local high school, as well as a charla on HIV/AIDS. Also, finally, at the end of this week, the whole Business group is going to the beach in the south (on the Pacific) for a two day long field trip.

Okay. Wow. I’ve definitely overstayed my welcome in terms of length of this blog entry. I never wrote this much about my life when I was in Spain or in college or in high school, but for some reason being here in the Peace Corps I feel like it’s my duty to write down a lot of details—I’m guessing this will change over the months to come, but until then, you’ll be hearing about everything that’s happening. Pues, ya está. Hasta la próxima vez. Mucho amor desde Honduras.

Hola familia, amigos y desconocidos. Hi all. Here’s a list f the summaries of my paragraphs:

New family

New community

The start of Field Based Training

Charla (educational chat) in a local technical school

1. So I’ve been in my new community Ojojona, for a week now. I’m with a host family that’s quite different from my first one: it’s bigger and more religious. My host dad, Jose, is an Evangelical pastor and the family reads the Bible and prays in the mornings and in the evenings. Church service is held on their front porch every Sunday. There are four kids- 17, 11, 6 and 4 and the young ones have a lot of energy and a lot of questions. The 17 year old, Gabriel, is very tranquilo (chill) and conversations with him provide some real peace of mind amidst the not-so-seldom noisy chaos. The madre, Alba, is a homemaker. They’re all very nice and caring, though I’m pretty sure that I agree with about a quarter of their religious ideals. Nonetheless, I suppose that I’ve always enjoyed listening to religious discourses and I think that living with this family is going to give me a great look inside a prevalent part of the Honduran culture (as many people here have been converted away from Catholicism over the past thirty years or so). Plus, listening to the different thoughts of different people, and sharing my own, is what the PC is all about.

A related event: After the six year old, Caleb, told me that he thought it was a bad thing to go far away from home, I told him that I didn’t think it was all that bad, since I am far from my home right now. He looked at me and shook his head and said that actually, I wasn’t far from home and family right now because I was home, that his house was my new home and that his family was my new family.

2. Ojojona is a quiet town of about 8000 people, an hour to the southwest of Tegucicalpa. It gets pretty hot during the days, but it cools down at night time; I feel lucky because the other training groups (Heath and Water/Sanitation) went to much hotter places. Since today was Palm Sunday, many of the Catholics in town got up at 4am to work on “sawdust carpets.” It’s a big tradition here that they lay drawings of religious icons made from colored sawdust on the road between the two churches. Then they march their santo in a procession from one church to another. I’m sure it would have been beautiful, but my family is very against it (and Holy Week as a whole), so they didn’t tell me about it until after it was too late, after the procession happened and after the carpets had been all stomped on and blown away. I still went to see the remnants and took a couple pictures.

3. Our hands-on training hasn’t quite lifted off the ground yet here after the first week of Field Based Training (with one exception, see pt 4). A month into training and we’re still going over a lot of basic stuff—sure it’s important stuff, but I think we’re all ready to put some of our knowledge into practice and get out into the field and start doing stuff. Nonetheless, we’ve got some exciting plans coming up. All along I’ve been shaking the rust off my Spanish and have learned lots of “Hondurenismos” (Honduran phrases)—I’m understanding the accent here more and more each day.

4. Finally, one of the most exciting/interesting parts of training here was the one afternoon that we finally got to leave our classroom and do something. We broke down into small groups and did a charla (educational chat) about SWOT analysis at the local technical school. It was a lot of fun and my group had a good time; I think the kids enjoyed it too.

My time here is up. I'm still having a great time. Hasta la proxima vez.

Last weekend I went with another trainee on a “volunteer visit” to a town called Lamani about 3 hours away and stayed with a volunteer who’s about to finish up her service. Wow was it hot. I think it was in the upper 90s the three days we were there. Our volunteer, Jessica, showed us around her town and introduced us to the mayor, who she works with. She explained that all of her three original counterparts, the Hondurans that she was working with directly, eventually stopped working with her for one reason or another. She said that now she mostly just goes into the mayor’s office every day to help out with technical stuff there, but loves interacting with the people in her town nonetheless. I was impressed by how integrated she was in her community; everybody knew her name and stopped to chat as we passed. She was great about answering all the questions we had and gave us a clear insight into how real volunteer service is going to be. After visiting her town and experiencing a typical day in the life of a PCV in Honduras, we got to visit the city of Comayagua, the original capital of Honduras. We toured the cathedral there and saw a clock in its bell tower that they claimed was the oldest in all of the Americas (not sure if I believe it, but it looked cool and old).

Tomorrow we all leave for Field Based Training. I’ll be staying with a bigger family this time and my host dad to be is an Evangelical pastor—there are also four kids, the youngest being a 4 year old. It’ll be a good experience for me. I am going to miss my current host family though, because they’ve been great. That’s all for now. Adios.

Saludos again from Honduras! I’m still having a blast and learning a lot. The following are a few paragraphs highlighting some of the things that have been going on here. I´ve summarized the paragraphs-- read what interests you.

1. Technical training, rough schedule2. Other training (safety, language etc)3. Tegucigalpa safety4. Jam packed public transportation5. Hot weather, hiking, family members6. Rooster coop outside my house, scorpions in my bathroom, doing laundry by hand, Latin soap operas7. Volunteer visits coming up, conclusion

1. Training is in full swing now and we’re going in to the PC training center every day except for Sunday from 7:30 to 4:30 (on Saturdays we get to go home early at 12:30 though). So that means that I’m getting up at 6:00 every morning and going to bed by 9 or 9:30. Que loco. The schedule has definitely taken some getting used to, and I never thought I’d be saying this, but I’ve now become accustomed to waking up before the sun rises.

2. We have started our “technical” training now and I’m learning all about Honduran businesses as well as strategies for teaching adults and general development principles. They’re also going over general safety stuff (like dealing with unwanted attention, how to travel safely etc) and more medical stuff (what to do if you find fungus growing on parts of you etc). Also, finally, we have language class almost every day and I’m learning and relearning a lot, especially all the new Honduran words and phrases.

3. Of course the Peace Corps has told us all about various dangers present in Tegucigalpa, especially the crime there. They want us to be smart when we travel and ready for anything—ultimately, they want us to be safe. But considering that the capital city is so important to a small, sparsely populated country like Honduras, we’re destined to have to deal with the city various times throughout our service.

4. So, as part of our training, they sent us in small groups into the city on a sort of scavenger hunt, to test our language skills, to see if we could handle getting from parts of the city to others. Anyway, one morning, I got onto a bus with one other group member (from my group of three) and left for the city at 7am. Let me tell you that I have never seen, much less physically experienced, so many people get onto a bus before in my life. It just kept on stopping along the way to the city picking up more and more people. Finally, people were literally hanging onto the side of the bus. Add to that the curvy roads and the loud 80’s American pop music blasting on the PA and, by the time we got to the city, I was feeling kinda carsick, ready to get off. I can’t imagine having to deal with that every single day going to work, but for 10 lempiras ($.50), what can you really expect? At least it was an interesting experience, right? I have a feeling that’s going to be my theme or slogan for the next two years of my life. The rest of the city wasn’t bad at all—nobody got mugged or lost and we all bought vegetables for our families at the market, as per our assignment.

5. Up to now the weather here has been both really hot some days (in the 90s) and unexpectedly cold some nights (down to the 40s); I haven’t gotten too, too sunburned yet, but my freckles are out in full force. I’ve had the chance to do a little hiking around our neighborhood over the weekends with my host family. The views are really amazing as is the Honduran “flora and fauna” if you will. Last weekend, speaking of which, my host madre’s family came here for a visit from the city and we went out for a walk—it was a bit crazy getting used to so many Honduran family members talking at once all around me, but fun at the same time.

6. My 12 year old host brother, with the help of a cousin, just finished building a “gallinero” or a rooster coop outside our house with plans of raising roosters to sell. As a Business volunteer, I like his entrepreneurial spirit, but I’m not looking forward to the ca-cawing in the middle of the night right outside my bedroom. Sadly, however, the first night he actually brought the rooster and hens home, a stray dog clawed its way in and left only a few feathers on the ground. Ovidio was pretty upset. On the topic of nature, my madre found and killed an alacrán (scorpion) in the bathroom the other night, then later on I found four baby scorpions in our bathroom sink, which she proceeded to spray with Raid. Ugh. And speaking of ugh, all that’s on TV are telenovelas (soap operas—the dramatic latino kind). Also, I have learned how to do all my laundry by hand on a washboard outside.

7. At this point, I’m rambling on, so I’ll try to wrap it up here. I just purchased a cheap Honduran cell phone. Call me if you’d like, depending on how much it costs of course (email me for the number); I may be calling the States at some point because the plan on my end is pretty cheap. Finally, this weekend I’ll be travelling with another Business trainee to a small town called Lamaní in the department of Comayagua to visit a current Business volunteer there. Then, next week I’ll be heading off to the town of Ojojona, 1 hour east of Tegucigalpa, where we Business volunteers will have “field-based training” for the next 7 weeks. Wow, I wrote a lot here; I had hoped to keep my blog posts concise, but so much is going on right now that I couldn’t help myself.

Hola desde Zarabanda, Honduras! I’ve arrived safe and sound after a very easy and painless day of travelling. I am glad to have finally made it after so many months of sitting around, waiting during the application process; I guess it’s exciting to be experiencing the fruits of my patience. Things are very different here, obviously, and buckets of information are being thrown at us from all sides all the time. I say ‘us’ because I am in a training group of 55 people, including 3 married couples and two middle-aged people. We’ve got people from all over the states and from all different schools. Nobody else is from my school, Wake Forest, but there’s a Tarheel and a William and Maryite and a Cavalier etc. I was surprised at how big our group is. Everybody’s been very friendly and many have interesting travel backgrounds. Our trainers are mostly Hondurans and have so far been going over all the basics of the main topics like language and safety and culture and medical etc., like who to contact if you get bitten by a dog or not to toss things when people ask you to pass them to them (because that’s a big cultural no-no). We’ve had our first round of vaccinations already and they’ve given us our mosquito nets, which I skillfully hung up in my room after standing on my 5 foot tall dresser and looping a couple shoelaces around one of the wooden rafters supporting the tin roof. Which brings me to my next topic, my familia. There’s a PC family coordinator who went around the community of Zarabanda (and Valle de Angeles and its ‘aldeas,’ if you want to get technical here), which is about 45 min up the mountain from Tegucigalpa, to meet the families who were interested in hosting us gringos, and to check out the houses and rooms. Well, this coordinator certainly did a great job in my case because my family’s great. I’m the first PC gringo that they’ve had and so we’re all sort of trying it out together. My madre is Meesabel, she’s a hair stylist in her forties, and she’s a recent widow. She has two kids: a daughter, Flavia, who’s 18 and who goes to the national public university in Tegucigalpa studying banking and finance, and a son, Ovidio, who’s 12 and who just started the first year of secondary school. They’re very friendly and very accommodating and have had no problems so far with giving me all they’ve got in terms of speaking very fast in authentic Honduran Spanish; my language wits have been tested and I’m already learning lots of new words and phrases (and remembering lots of words that I had forgotten). The house is certainly plain according to American standards, but is pretty nice for here, I think. No running water, about six light fixtures total, two bedrooms, one bathroom, and an open living room/kitchen/dining room. So I’ll call it rustic yet cozy. The shower the first morning was quite an experience because it was a ‘bucket shower’ with ‘non-heated’ water—in other words, it woke me up really quickly. My madre has since been so very kind as to heat up some water on the stove for me before I get up. The awesome part about the house is its location. Sure you have to walk up a pretty steep and perilous and long hill to get to it, but the view of the mountains of Zarabanda is amazing. I’m posting a picture of the view from the front stoop. Well, okay, that’s all I’ve got for now. I’m enjoying things so far and am ready to get through all the basics in training and start learning some more relevant and profound topics. Oh yes, and by the way, for all of you reading this who are still enjoying the cold and snow, I’m sorry to say that it’s been in the 80’s here every day.

One of the last things that I'm doing to prepare for my departure is deciding about insurance. Sure I've been mulling it over for a few months now, but the time to make a decision is upon me. The questions at hand are:

1. Should I sign up for the Peace Corps endorsed life insurance policy?

2. Should I get personal-property insurance for my laptop and camera?

If I had a lot of money, I'm sure it would be an easy decision to pay for both lines of insurance. But I'm a recent college grad and I don't have a lot of money to mess around with. So, at this point, I'm leaning towards declining both:

1. I don't plan on dying- but who does? Why not keep the $60 that it would cost to buy the policy?

2. My laptop is getting old now and I'm probably going to need to get a new one in a couple years any way. I'm also backing up all my data before I go, as well as bringing a few memory sticks with me. Point being that I won't be devastated if my laptop gets stolen or broken. I have a pretty cheap digital camera and I wouldn't be too heartbroken if something happens to it too. I'm not planning on taking anything else of any real worth.

Personal property insurance isn't necessarily cheap, especially compared to what the PC pays us. The insurance company that the PC recommends (Clements International) charges a premium of $50 for $1000 of coverage. At this point, I'm not sure how much I'd need to get covered, but it would probably be more than $1000.

It seems that not every PCV in Honduras gets their laptop and camera stolen. Will insurance give me true "peace of mind" or will I feel ripped off if I've paid $50+ month after month for coverage that I didn't end up needing? To be honest, I think that if I pay for the insurance, I'd almost hope that my laptop gets stolen just to have made it worthwhile.

Some people have rational fears like the fear of drowning or speaking in public. But when people ask me what I'm most nervous about in relation to going to Honduras, the first thing that inevitably comes to my mind is something very irrational. Sure I think about the difficulties of adjusting to a new culture and fitting into my community, dealing with poverty, strange food and all the other normal things to be just a little unsure about. But what I can't help shake in my mind is my hopeless fear of spiders.

If I were to be logical about it, I'd reason that car accidents or heart disease kill many millions more people a year than spiders do. Logic would have me conclude that I should be deathly afraid of driving and butter and cigarettes instead of insects that are one one hundredth my size that mostly just want to avoid me. But tell logic to shove it because it can't see how creepy spiders are! It's spiders' many beady eyes and their hairy legs and their fangs and the way they crawl and the way they surprise you then disappear when you look away. Yes, I'm like a six year old, I'll admit it.

Once in Bolivia, I stepped into the shower (which is one of those few places where you're completely exposed) and found a huge tarantula just chilling on the wall, staring at me with all its eyes. I'm pretty sure I saw it lick its lips when it saw me step into its lair. Okay, it was probably a normal-sized one, but it seemed big at the time. So what could I do? I froze at first to make sure it wasn't going to jump on me and bite me in the face then I slowly backed away, put my clothes back on and called my friend to look too. Needless to say, I didn't take a shower that day. The spider won that round.

Seriously though, I'm sure that spiders won't be a real problem for me in the long run. I probably won't see very many and when I do, I'll try to man up and shoo them away. But thinking about Honduran spiders is just one of those crazy obsessions that you can't help avoid when you're preparing yourself mentally for what lies ahead. I just hope I don't have any more in my shower this time!

I've been trying to decide whether or not I should buy a Kindle to take to Honduras.

Pros:

-Very light-weight compared to paper books

-Wide selection of books available

-Affordability of books (after initial cost of the Kindle itself)

-Quicker to get new books as opposed to traveling to a bookstore or mail

-Conversation starter?

Cons:

-Risk of theft or getting lost/broken

-It would be something that many Hondurans don't have (I don't want to own a lot of stuff that separates me from the people in my community-- I'm not even sure I want to take my laptop)

-I'd have to worry about maintaining it/keeping it safe

-Access to/dependability of electricity in my house may be questionable

I like books and want access to both technical/academic books and books for pleasure while I'm serving in the Peace Corps. The other option to the Kindle is of course bringing a few paper books with me, then buying more while I'm there or having them shipped to me. Though I know that mailing things is expensive and takes forever, especially things that weigh as much as books. Also, I'm not sure what to expect in terms of selection of books at librerias in Honduras.

I have been invited to serve in the Peace Corps in the Business Development Program in Honduras! I start on February 22nd, 2010. Although I won't know where exactly I'm going to be spending the next two years of my life now, it will most likely be a community of 1,000-3,000 people. The Peace Corps tells you where you're going to be after you've completed the 3 months of training.

This past May I graduated from Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina with a BA in Economics and Spanish. I was an exchange student in Pamplona, Spain during my sophomore year of high school. Then in my junior year of college I got to go back to Spain, to Salamanca, to study for a semester. I've been to rural Bolivia twice to do service work through my church in my hometown of Highlands, NC. I've also tutored Hispanic kids and translated for a local Hispanic outreach nonprofit. All in all, I'm pretty near fluent in Spanish, though I have a hard time translating songs and Spanish citcoms. I do speak with a Castillian accent, though I have a feeling I'll be picking up a new dialect in Honduras.

I applied for the Peace Corps in January 2009. I knew that I wanted to do something interesting while I was young and before I started grad school or looking for a job. I met a Peace Corps recruiter on campus at a career fair and knew right away that I should apply. What a way to give back to the world. I also figured that doing the Peace Corps would be a good way to put my economics into practice, as well as solidify my Spanish.

But the Peace Corps takes a long time to process your application and I didn't know if I was in or not until just a month ago. So since graduation in May until November, I was hanging out on the fence of life, not knowing my future. They said to stay positive and keep a sense of humor while I waited, but I was ready to know one way or the other.

So, I am relieved and pumped at this point, to finally have a date and a destination. I've been studying up a lot on microcredit and the general theory behind poverty and how to help fix it. I've also been reading other volunteers' blogs as well as everything I can find about business development and Honduras. It's been very interesting following the recent politics of Honduras, considering it's the first country in Latin America to have had a coup since the end of the Cold War. Of course Micheletti and his supporters say it wasn't a coup, but we'll leave it at that. I am relieved that the country had elections just a few days ago and hope that it means the healing process is under way. It's going to be so fascinating being there in the wake of all of this and I can't wait to get a better grasp on it all.

I plan to use this blog as a way to let my family and friends keep tabs on me, as well as anybody else out there considering the Peace Corps or just wanting to read about one person's adventure abroad. At this point there's no telling how often I'll get to add to it, but I'm going to try to write as often as I can.