un dia typico

19-Julio-2006

 

Hi everyone!

            Thank you all for your concern about my health the past week.  Sorry to be writing again so late, but this week just flew by.  I am feeling much better than last week and my knee is also doing a lot better.  Aside from the week ending pretty poorly I had some other realizations the weekend before last that kind of set a bad week into motion.  Let me explain.

 

            Two weekends ago my neighbor (Heidi) and I went with our uncle to visit his finca and another mountain that is home to a 'typical' agricultural pueblo.  The finca that Yeti owns is right next to the one that my host mother owns and harvests each year.  I found out this past weekend that she harvests so many frijoles that the whole family (I think some extended parts we well) does not need to buy frijoles for the whole year and they is plenty left over to sell.  This is A LOT of frijoles, considering we eat them todos los días .  Anyway, we went and checked out his crops, he grows corn, beans, several types of squash plants, and many fruit trees.  He told us what everything was in Spanish, I got most of it but in general it was just nice to get out and see what a real finca looked like.  It was raining and the hills were steep and muddy but the whole side of the mountain was green beyond belief.  I took pictures that will hopefully get posted in the next batch. 

 

            After leaving his finca we drove out of Santa Lucia a little bit to a road in between Santa Lucia and Valle de Angles.  We drove up this very steep dirt road in the rain with no windshield wipers, in an old Mitsubishi pickup truck.  If I had known we were going on this side trip I might have opted out.  But clearly we made it because I am here writing now, but this was basically my worst nightmare, even in the states.  We made it up to a school and got out and checked out the school, it had open classrooms, solid walls but they were not all the way to the tin roof.  They had an internet project going on at their school, with three IBM laptops, that was pretty neat to see especially after what we saw next.

 

            After leaving the school we stopped first at a 'friends' house to say hello, and I think Yeti wanted Heidi and I to see what a real farming family lives in.  The house was made of wood, we walked a little off the road, to get there.  There was a little overhang in the front.  Heidi and I hung back when Yeti knocked, but soon we were standing in the kitchen, dining room, and living room.  It was probably about four feet wide and ten feet long with adobe walls and a dirt floor that was damp from the rain.  Through another doorway was another room I could imagine was a sleeping area for three people that might have been ten by ten feet.  The old man that lived there was eating frijoles and tortillas when we got there.  That's all they ever eat Yeti told us, for every meal and everyday.  They offered us food but Yeti told them that we had to go home because Maribel had lunch waiting for us.  We left that house and stopped at another 'friend's' house.  This lady had two young girls both walking around barefoot, six or so kittens and four or so puppies running around.  This house was larger but still had dirt floors with two rooms and no furniture.  I wanted to know how they slept but I didn't want to ask.  The stoves both families used were adobe lit with wood scraps and the smoke from the fire had no ventilation so the roofs are charred black.  I wish I could describe these scenes better because they were my first taste of a real Honduras, but it's difficult.  We left the mountain and came back to our house and ate boiled Honduran shrimp with cocktail sauce and watched the World Cup.

 

            Clearly my English is getting poorer the more days I am here.  But I wanted to tell everyone what I've been doing, what a typical day is and what kind of concepts I am learning in training.

 

            Monday through Friday we start class at 7:30.  So I wake up around 6:45 and eat breakfast, which is usually fruit (mangos, papaya, and banana), and cereal (a cornflake type or granola) and often fresh squeezed orange juice.  A little note about the oranges here:  they are actually green and the juice is pretty, well not very tasty.  Another fruit that is very confused down here is the lemon, or is it the lime, I'm not really sure, but a lemon is green and a lime is green.  Also for breakfast I get two pieces of toast, not really knowing what to do with all this food I started taking a pb & j for a mid afternoon snack.  Luckily, she understands what I am doing and gives me a piece of plastic to take it in.  Sometimes for breakfast I'll have pancakes, which was good, but I'm VERY happy with my fruit and cereal.

 

            In the mornings we have Spanish class usually until lunch (sometimes for a few hours after lunch).  At 11:30 we eat lunch; lunch for everyone I think, is usually a fun surprise.  Some days it'll be fried chicken or fish with rice and tortillas and fruit or vegetables, sometimes its pasta, or soup (especially when I don't feel good).  The only thing I haven't liked that I have gotten in my lunch so far was this shell pasta thing that had a red sauce on it that tasted like ketchup (the ketchup here is another issue – its sweeter and people use it as a tomato sauce). 

 

            Usually after lunch we have tech training or a CORE activity (I have no idea what CORE stands for).  This will either be about our individual projects (there are 3 in training right now: Youth Development, Municipal Development (this is where all the other IA majors are), and Protected Areas Management) or about things that effect all of us, like learning styles, teaching adults, AIDS, or health presentations.  In tech training we haven't gone over very many specific things yet but last week we made a traditional compost piles and another type called bocashi, which is faster decomposing but more expensive to start.  On Monday we planted, by shoots and fruits several different types of plants: pataste, sweet potato, bananas.  We also learned the proper way to plant a grafted fruit tree.  On Tuesday we planted seed beds for transplanting in raised beds.  After that we actually transplanted some vegetable plants into plots that we cleared, plowed, pick axed, and fertilized.  This is a lot more work than one would imagine.  I'm pretty sure all of us have blisters and one of the guys in my group (there were 3 to a group) cut his finger open on a machete that he was sharpening (he ended up needing stitches).  So now we have these plots to keep an eye on and water when needed, although it hasn't stopped raining for more than 30 minutes since we finished that project.

 

            Today we went to a farm called Loma Linda, it was originally run by a famous innovative agriculturist in Central America.  But he has since passed away and his wife has taken over running this farm.  This farm is considered a 'human farm' because of its use of natural fertilizers, crop rotation, use of mixed plants in beds to prevent pests and finally because everything produced there is consumed there as well.  The farm mostly serves now as a training facility for farmers in Honduras, with rooms for board and a mess hall and conference room.  The produce we saw today really was amazing, a three year old mango tree was producing mangos twice the size as they are in the states and a lime (or maybe lemon) tree that had fruit bigger than a softball.  I have no idea what one would do with that but it really shows that natural methods work in the long run.  This farm has been operating for 28 years though so it's going to be hard to relate it to the right now for many people in Honduras.

 

            We get done with classes around 4:30 (Honduran time, so closer to 5).  And we all walk home.  One day a week I have a Spanish tutorial that lasts an hour so then I get done at 5:30.  Once I get home I do my Spanish homework, talk to my host mother about what I did in school, to practice my Spanish.  Around 7:30 or 8 I eat dinner, the way they cook here does not really allow for more than one meal to be ready at once so I'm usually sitting there eating by myself and then Cristobal is served and then Maribel comes and eats.  So my whole waiting till everyone is served has become a painful habit to break.  The typical dinner around here is frijoles (refried), avocado, eggs (scrambled, fried), queso (a white cheese), and 3 or 4 tortillas.  That's usually what I have every night but some times there are variations.  I've eaten Chinese take-out, homemade pizza, lasagna, and a casserole.  After I eat I'm usually headed off to bed around 9ish and asleep around 10.  In fact, it's getting about that time now.

 

            Saturday my project is going on an overnight fieldtrip to Campimiento to visit a coffee research center.  We will return sometime on Sunday afternoon.  Nothing else planned for the weekend right now, looks pretty tame but hopefully I will have some entertaining stories when I return.  The first weekend of FBT (Field Based Training) I will be making up my volunteer visit with a guy who lives closer to our new city so I will not have t travel through Tegus by myself, but it would have been cool to go and stay with the girl I was assigned.  I heard she was doing some neat things.

 

PC Amor –

  Bridget

 

Oh yeah "bolos" in Spanish are drunks.

--
Bridget Kathleen French
954.650.5084