thanksgiving and beyond

Well a lot has passed and not much has happened.  I guess the last anyone heard from me was when I was in the capital for Thanksgiving.  Well the next morning after our very sub par meal at TGIF's I was peer pressured, very easily so might I add, into going to La Paz, La Paz to eat dinner at another volunteer's house for TG dinner.  It was totally worth it.  The food ws awesome (we even had pumpkin pie) and the company was even better.  There was maybe about 35-40 volunteers there for the night.  The whole month of November La Paz has their feria so after dinner we all headed out to the central park to watch the torres de fuego.  A wooden structure that resembles a bull but has fireworks that look like sticks of dynamite all over it.  A person picks up the bull and lifts it over their head and the fireworks are lit and they run through the crowd with it.  After a few minutes the bull is passed off, still lit, to another person who then also runs through the crowd.  OK, maybe you had to be there, but I have some movies that I took and will try and post.  I left the next afternoon to go back to Teguc to try and catch the GA v GT game with Saira (who went to Tech).  We made it in time for half time, so we watched the rest of the game and tried to head back to her site, which is in the same department as mine.  Apparently we missed the last bus that was supposed to leave at 6, even though we were there at 5:45. 

 

The month of December pretty much flew by here.  Especially because I spent almost half of it in the states.  But before I left I finalized everything for my house (or at least I thought I did) and had a meeting about our chicken project.

 

The chicken project is supposed to take the chickens that the women already have and make them healthier and better egg producers.  I invited 20 women and by 2:15 no one had showed up, the meeting was to start at 2.  By 2:30 5 were there and by 3 15 were there.  I never really believed that whole one hour later thing because almost all of the meetings I have attended started about on time, but that's ok.  I didn't really have a whole lot going on that day.  I spent a lot of time getting ready or this meeting, making posters and name tags and agendas and prat icing what I was going to say.  I didn't think I was exactly ready, but prepared regardless.  It turns out that over half of the women that were there cannot read or write, so my posters were useless, they didn't get my ice breakers or they cheated, and they wrote so small on the name tags I couldn't read them.  On top of this some of them experienced the mind block, as I like to call it, of my Spanish.  This occurs when someone does not care to understand you even if you are speaking perfect Spanish because you look and act different.  Luckily for me about 5 women in the community are very use to my Spanish and helped me translate from my Spanish to their Spanish.  There were very few questions but the ones they did ask were very pertinent.  I thought all had gone fairly well until I got back to my site and and asked Suyupa what people has been saying and I know she wanted to be nice so she said she hadn't talked to anyone about it.  But honestly, a woman approached me to have this project, it wasn't the other way around, so I can keep working with the water board and still be very busy, although I would really like to have all the chickens in San Isidro in chicken coops, purely for the reason that I hate them and they bite me, no seriously they bite.  More to come on the chicken project as it develops.

 

Right now I am also trying to write a watershed management plan that we can begin to implement in our town and then can be easily transferred to other villages.  This is not the easiest task.  If anyone has any suggestions please let me know!

 

A few Honduran anecdotes:

The other day I was at the pulperia and this very North American looking girl walked by, she said hola and only spoke in Spanish, surely I thought to myself if she was from the states she would realize I was too and talk to me in English.  Who is that I asked Elida.  That's the gringo's daughter.  What? I said, where does the gringo live?  Arriba, she told me.  (Arriba to my community it anywhere above where you are standing, and abajo is anywhere below where you are standing).  Arriba where? I demanded.  Do you know the cantina?  No I said I don't KNOW the cantina, but I know where it is (a cantina in the mnt is a guy who sells warm beer and guaro out of his house).  There, he lives there.  Ohh, I said, you mean he's Honduran but looks like a gringo.  Yeah, she says.  So he doesn't speak English then?  No of course not, she tells me.  Aye, if I had just asked from the beginning, but instead we played this game for 7 mins or so.

 

 

The day before I left to go to Teguc to fly home I was supposed to go to the mayor's office to pick up the form requesting a new volunteer for Teupacenti.  I told them I would be more than happy to take the form into the PC office. Of course I had ulterior motives, but they didn't know this.  So I get to the office early to pick up the form.  Oh he's not here, one of the women working there tells me.  When will he be here?  He's in Teguc right now.  What do you mean he's in Teguc?  Don't worry she tells me, he should be back later today.  When later today?  By 3, she tells me.  So I wonder around the town until 3 and return.  He's there but is very surprised to see me.  I came to get the form I tell him, what form, he asks.  I explain and he has to ask the mayor if it's done.  He comes back and tells me, no it has not been completed but maybe if I wait around it might be done in a few hours.  OK I say, I'll wait.  I doesn't get done so I tell him if they really do want another volunteer in Teupa the form needs to be done in Jan.  Oh well, he tells me, I thought we could have it in by March and be ok.  You do realize the volunteers come in Feb, right? I say.  Yes, and he stares at me blankly.  Things aren't looking good for me having anyone near by.

 

So going home was nice, but extremely overwhelming.  I thought I wouldn't notice the commercialization or the people and while it could be because of the holidays, I couldn't stop gaping at these things.  While it was nice to have a hot shower and food options, I couldn't believe how rude the people were and how horrible the traffic was and basically everything I took for granted before I left.  It's very strange how accustomed I have become to not having choices or not having anything.  Conditions I would never have put up with the states are just another part of everyday life here.  I'm not sure what it will be like when I go back for good, but I guess I understand why the PC says readjusting to the states is much harder than leaving. 

 

I got back to country on the 30th and almost immediately took a bus 7 hours to La Cieba to see one of my better friends in the Peace Corps who's mom is dying of brain cancer and therefore will be leaving for good very soon.  La Cieba was extremely disappointing.  The beaches were beyond dirty, we saw a needle lying on the road and there was a brown pelican swimming in an absolutely horrible river with a broken (or something) wing.  I couldn't wait to leave that place and go back to my site.  Although I hear the islands are very nice, the only ferry to them is through Cieba and that alone may keep me from going to them.  We celebrated the 31st like Americans, but all the fun in Honduras doesn't begin until after 12am, everyone spends the evening with their families and then goes out.  But we managed to still have a good time.  Also another difference about the north coast, more people speak English because the population is mostly made up of gurifinos (relatives of African slaves brought over to work in the plantations) but the English they do speak is a pidgin and often very hard to understand.  We found it easier to speak to them in Spanish.  I also met a bunch of people that went illegally to the states and lived in Miami (or near) and it seems all of the people that go illegally to the states in my mountain live in Virginia (near DC).

 

So I got back to Teupa and went to see if I could get on the bus with all my luggage (I brought back 2 solar panels, one for me and one for my counterpart) and it turned out the bus wasn't running because the road had gotten so bad from the rain the past 2 weeks (before I left I seriously doubted I would be able to get down the mnt, because it rained straight for 7 days).  So I walked about 7 more blocks to the salida to wait for a car to pass, for 3 hours only one car passed and it was already very full.  By then it was getting close to sun down and I had been sitting with a lady from San Isidro, where are you going to spend the night? she asked.  I don't know I said.  By then it had started to rain again so she told me to come stay with her at her mom's house.  So away I went.  I ate dinner with them and slept there.  She assured me we would leave early to get back to the mountain.  By 3 PM I was still sitting around waiting.  Finally at 3:30 we left.  I got to my new house to find it still very much occupied.  Great, I thought, Esperanza (the owner of the house) comes out and sees me and proceeds to tell me that my boss told her I wouldn't be moving in until the end of the month, which I know was a bold faced lie.  But don't worry she says tomorrow we'll move.  And for tonight I say?  You can sleep with us, she offers (right there are already 3 women, an infant, a 20 yr old and an old man).  Thanks I say, I'm going to go ask some others.  So leave my stuff in her house and go around saying feliz ano nuevo to everyone.  I ended up finding 3 more places to sleep and was hanging out at one family's house when Antonio showed up (my counterpart).  He basically insisted that I spend the night there, which was fine.  The next morning I went over to my house to see if they needed any help and almost everything was gone from inside.  So now I have my house with all my stuff in it and a borrowed bed and that's about it.  And also 4 1\2 people living right outside my door (a least until feb).  But I have high hopes for it, I bought some nails and a new lock and I am going to start fixing it up!

 

Hope every one's new year started off on the right foot.  Take care and I will write more soon.

 

PC Amor,

Bridget