happy early thanksgiving

Hi everyone -

  I hope the holidays have started treating y'all well.  Here in Honduras it really wasn't starting to feel like the season until Sunday.  A cold front has come through.  Right now in the valley it is not freezing, but in the mountain, where it is almost 3000 asl, IT IS ABSOLUTELY FREEZING.  For the past few nights I have slept in my Northface fleece in my 32 degree sleeping bag with socks and gloves on and I'm still cold.  The actually temperature, so I'm told, is only about 15 degrees C (about 60 F) but with the wind that whips through the mountains, I swear its below freezing.  The first night the front came through I woke up and thought I was in the middle of a hurricane, and when I got out of bed it actually did resemble the aftermath, all the trees had their leaves ripped off.  Anyway that was Sunday, and here it is Wednesday and still no let up.  This unexpected weather has presented several problems in my daily routine.  On top of the water coming straight from the stream cold, now its freezing, so bathing has turned into a nightmare.  I boil water but still, the shower is outside with the windchill, its just absolutely absurd.  Alright I'm done complaining.

   I came into town today to have a meeting with the engineer from the NGO IHCAFE, who I finally tracked down after almost three months of searching and waiting for him.  It turns out too that its a different guy and the other has left.  But he seems to be very interested in my assistance and projects so hopefully this will be a fruitful partnership, but if not, just as well.  Tomorrow morning I'm taking the bus into the capital for a Thanksgiving dinner with friends.  TGIF's said they would do a turkey dinner for us, we got a room reserved and are just going to hang out and watch football.  I wanted to stay and watch the UGA GT game but I think I'm going to try and come back to site Sat morning.

   The schools have let out for the year, until February.  And now they are having their graduation ceremonies, Saturday is SI's kinder graduation so I'm going to try and make it back for that.  Wednesday is our 6th and 9th grade graduation.  I was invited to the 9th grade graduation by a family\boy in SI.  I'm not really sure what all it entails, but I know there is a lot of eating involved.  I'll take pictures and let everyone know more in depth what exactly is involved in this celebration!

   Its hard for me to believe, but I've been in country almost 6 months and in site for 3.  Right now I have started planing what projects we will be doing for the years to come.  It looks like the first large project will be a formal plan on the watershed.  Included in this will be the reforestation of the watershed, but herein lies the first problem.  A man in our community owns the land and is not willing to sell it.  If this is any indicator of the problems to come I can't wait.  I'm starting now to get maps and wiping the polvo off the GPS so we can do all of this legally.  Another organization came to SI to talk to us about giving us funding for this project, but the lady said we needed to own the land first, she also said we needed to reforest where our PVC tubes are laid, so, that's another issue.  But the monies would be helpful because there are many houses in my community that do not have potable water, although the current stream does not have the capacity to sustain the entire community, so looking for more water and building the system are two large and expensive tasks.  Also educating the community on the importance of the watershed and what exactly one is will be included in this plan because right now no one, aside from the water board, understands exactly how they effect their own water system. 

   More projects will follow but for right now, this is my main focus.  Though tomorrow it might very well change, who knows.  I'm trying to get everything on a time line so we can have a solid work plan but Hondurans are not planners, as I've been told and have come to find out for myself. 

   Almost forgot, I was walking back from soccer field the other day and saw a coral snake in the road, and then two days ago I was walking to some one's house and saw another greenish\blackish snake and then yesterday I woke up and there was a scorpion on my wall in my room.  I didn't have any idea how to say scorpion in Spanish so I looked it up in the dictionary and walked to the living room and said to Antonio, um there's a...pause...escoporion in my room...Antonio gets up and walks into my room and looks up at the wall and says ohh yeah, it is and then smashes the thing with a broom handle on the wall.  Apparently they are not lethal here but pica duro (carry a fierce bite), someone told me she was bit as a kid and her whole arm hurt for 2 days.

    Well that's about it I believe.  Hope all is well and I hope everyone has a great day tomorrow.

 

PC Amor,

Bridget

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Bridget Kathleen French
954.650.5084

one more thing

Hi sorry all for two emails, but I didn't want to short anyone on more anecdotes from Bridget!  I have more time seeing how I will be spending the night in Teguc to go to a dermatologist today about my face, as much as I say I like Honduras it doesn't want to get on the boat - triste.  Anyway, I don't know how many of you have read or even heard about the book, "Don't Be Afraid Gringo," it was one of the books they recommend reading before you get to country (although I just finished it a few weeks ago).  It's about the campasinos fight to have their own land to farm during the 70s and 80s told by a female activist.  After the country passed a law that said any land that wasn't actively being used could be passed over to farmers with no land, well basically that's what it says.  So her and her group started taking rich land owners land and squatting it for days until they could get the government to sign the paperwork to give it to the farmers.  Many people were killed and assassinated, and many violent battles.

      Now that you have the background, one the groups that was started back then is still active today and was squatting on a piece of land on the way up to the cabins we went to this weekend.  I kind of felt like I was getting to see history in the making, I have a feeling that I was the only one that thought it was really cool, but whatever.  I wish I had taken some pictures but I didn't.  They had a Honduran flag flying and a banner that said something about land feeding the hungry.  And they stand along the fence with their machetes and watch the road.  All very dramatic.

   Also a volunteer who lives on the boarder of El Salvador showed up because he heard a bunch on gringos were in town (I would have done the same thing, this is what our excitement has been deduced to) and he told us about PC El Salvador, apparently they have around 150 volunteers, which I think is absurd for the size of the country, but we all decided that the people of El Salvador really need it.  Also, my parents should be very happy about this, it is apparently FAR more dangerous than Honduras as far as number of murders per year.

 

     Alright, I think I have finally run out of interesting things to say, at least for right now.  Its is possible that you all may get yet another email since I have access to FREE internet and really nothing to do here.

 

PC Amor,

Bridget

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Bridget Kathleen French
954.650.5084

chicken brains, el salvador and rambo

Hi everyone -

     Nice subject title right?  Wanted to keep every one's attention.  I'll get to explanations in a few lines I swear.  Right now I'm in Teguc, I just got back from a little trip and decided to wait for the next bus to my site and hope the jalon gods are with me today so I could print some stuff out and go buy a jar a of peanut butter (a whole jar in 3 weeks isn't ridiculous, right?)

     So the last time I wrote there were some things that I completely just left out.  Rambo, the other dog of my counterparts was ran over by a car., this happened in September when I was away for the conference in Olancho, I guess I'm over it now, but he was a cute dog.  Named Rambo after a futbol player, not after the movie character which is what I originally thought.  I suppose why I wanted to mention it before was because I found it very strange that he was hit by a car, when maybe only one passes every 3 or 4 hours, if even that.  Maybe that's why he got hit.  I'm still looking for a puppy but still haven't had any luck since Paluka's died.  The other house that I am trying to figure out a way lease has a nice fenced in yard, but the other doesn't.

    Meat in my community, and most of Honduras is a luxury.  Chicken is by far the cheapest, no one really ever eats beef or pork and if they do its very fatty and a  poor product.  So about once a week we have chicken at my house, Nolvia has about 30 chickens, she counted the other day, which in my opinion is 30 too many, but I'll get to that.  So with the 30 chickens and every so often they actually hatch their eggs, we continuously have more, so one a week is doing no damage to the population.  Its always boiled or fried chicken, but mostly boiled.  Some times we have it in soup and some times just with rice and beans.  When we have it with soup we usually will eat it for two days straight.  These chickens usually don't have a lot of meat on them to begin with, and to be perfectly honest I usually pick a little bit off and give the rest to the dog, but one day I was eating soup and could find almost no meant on the bone, while I was turning the bones over and over and picking out little pieces here and there it occurred to me what I was holding in my hand - the skull.  And I had been eating the brains!  I know Nolvia had been watching me eat and I'm sure its because she wanted to know what I was going to do with it, and then of course it could have been my paranoia, but all she said was, not a lot of meat on that one.  Whatever, I stopped eating it and gave the rest to the dog.  Life went on, but no, it didn't taste like chicken.

    Not much else has been going on in my site, I'm here right now in Teguc looking for some information to start teaching an english class and when I get back I'm going to start looking for some wild growing medicinal plants, because the nurse and I are going to practice making some remedies and then we're going to have a class kinda thingy to teach these remedies to all the health center guardians that live in each community.

    This weekend I went to visit another volunteer that has a rural tourism project going with some of my friends from my training class.  His town is outside of Marcala called Zancudo.  This town use to be part of El Salvador, but during the last war it was given to Honduras.  But the people there are a little confused, they travel freely from El Salvador to Honduras to buy groceries and what not, the area has also been declared dry by the president, I suppose because he is afraid a war will break out induced by alcohol consumption.  Bu there are plenty of people there that have horror stories about what happened to them, their family and friends during the wars.  One of the ladies that was cooking our food at the lodge lost a son by an American bomb that El Salvador dropped.  I asked the volunteer that lived there if there were many people with post traumatic stress or anything and he didn't really seem to notice anything, although he thought the people that were considered the "town drunks" had the most horrific experiences.  We went to a boarder town named Purkine (sp?) and it just seemed completely different over there, we could see the two active volcanoes as well.  Although most of the people in this region make a living my "chopping wood" the forests in this area didn't seem as deforested as near my site.  The weather was much colder, although right now in Tegus its kinda chilly so its possible that "winter" has spread across the whole country, but I doubt it.  The site is higher up in the mountains too, and seems more piney than my site. 

     The tourist place was really interesting, apparently there have been people asking around the area for a place to stay, the project is really only marketed at locals and I guess the occasional PCV, but right now there are 3 cabins with two double beds and private bathrooms and one cabin with bunk beds and a bathroom outside (to be used kind of like a hostel type room).  They were still putting the finishing touches on everything when we were there but they were quaint wooden structures, all made there because next to the land is a wood shop kind of place that makes wood furniture.  Also on the property is going to be the office of the NGO that is developing the project and a tourist office type place.  A little further up from there is going to be a restaurant for the people staying in the cabins (also made from wood). 

     There isn't much to see or do, but we went on a nature walk to Zancuda which round around a stream and through the forest for about 30 mins.  Once we got to Zancuda we checked out the town (this is the volunteer's site) and then sampled some of their corn products they were having for their corn festival.  It was typical corn products, atol - which is the juice that comes out of the corn after it is ground, tamales de alote which is just the ground corn (when its still moist) and wrapped in corn husks and steamed on a stove and corn on the cob 0of the different types of corn they grow.  Also later that night we ate the tamales de alote fried (in my site they like to add sugar after frying them).

     We did a lot of hanging out and were supposed to leave on Sunday but decided on the trip last minute.  So here I am and I'm getting ready to head back to my site, I have to catch a bus at 12.  More to come later.

 

PC Amor,

Bridget

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Bridget Kathleen French
954.650.5084