Post #2, checking in from Field Based Training

Hello everyone,
So I guess a blog post every month is not really what I had planned for, but its surprisingly hard to sit down and crank these guys out, not to mention our (very) limited internet access so far.
When last I wrote we were training in a small mountainside town called Zarabanda; we’ve now split up into our separate project groups in three different towns or cities and won’t be reuniting with our Health or Water/Sanitation friends until the beginning of May. Luckily the Wat/Saners are only about an hour and a half away from us, and we were able to have lunch with some of them this past Saturday, which was really great. It had only been two weeks since the last time we saw them but it felt like a reunion with old friends. (As a side note, we’ve only been here six or seven weeks but the depth of some of the relationships we’ve made don’t reflect the time we’ve been here)
The business group is training in a town of about four or five thousand people called Ojojona; it’s about an hour and a half South-East of Tegucigalpa and is well known for its artisans and clay working. They’ve recently been putting a big emphasis on tourism, including a new central park/plaza which was finished about two months ago. Sundays tend to bring a lot of people from the big cities that’re looking to get some fresh air and relax in a nice small town.
This week was Semana Santa (holy week) which means that all of the schools were on vacation and no one worked after Tuesday; friends in Tegucigalpa said it was a ghost town as most of the city was in beaches at the North Coast. There were a lot of religious ceremonies this week, including a procession of “alfombras” which translates to ‘rugs’. Townspeople wake up extremely early in the morning and make large religious images on the streets in front of their houses out of colored mulch and sand. The alfombras lead from one church up the hill to another church in the center of town, and the priest leads a procession on Sunday morning through the alfombras. It’s pretty neat looking; hopefully I’ll be able to show some of the pictures on here.
The trainees had classes on Monday and Tuesday, then a cultural day on Wednesday with our host families, and we’ve been off ever since. We’ve been playing a lot of soccer, volleyball, and cribbage on the weekends or even after class during the week.
Training is going well in general, but I think we’re all starting to get antsy about getting to our sites and getting some work going; we came to work, not sit in classes all day! Next week we do our sessions on tourism, including a trip to an island off the south coast of Honduras called Amapala. On Monday night we’ll be setting up a bonfire on the beach, cooking s’mores and hot dogs and sleeping on the beach before visiting some businesses on the island on Tuesday.
We had our second technical interviews with Jorge and Jesus (the business group bosses) last week. During the technical interviews the trainee and Jorge and Jesus talk about potential site placements and projects the trainee would like to work on after swearing-in. Some of the sites are tiny (a thousand people in town) and some of them get quite a bit larger (100,000 plus). The projects that we’re aware of include tourism, working with Cajas Rurales (essentially micro-financing projects), working with women’s groups, IT projects, a media marketing project (we have one member of the group who has a film and production background, so the assumption is that this project is his), teaching youth, and Business Incubator projects. We have one more technical interview before site assignments, which are given on Monday the 4th of May. We’re getting pretty close to finding out our assignments, which everyone is pretty anxious about. I have a pretty good idea of where I’m going based on what Jesus and Jorge have told me, but I’ll wait until something is official before spilling the beans (I will say that I’m going to a large and apparently very cool city).
Some side notes that I don’t feel like writing paragraphs about:
• I wish I had brought my DVD’s; there’s not a lot to do here in the evenings
• I wish I had brought a computer game or something similar (for the same reason)
• I think the thing I miss most from the US so far (other than all of you of course) is washing machines. Washing clothes by hand is time consuming and miserable. Let’s get some kind of award to the man who invented washing machines.
• Sticking with the clothes-washing theme, I don’t think any of my clothes are going to survive these two years. One of my grey workout shirts (which I’ve worn only twice) is already about 30% larger than it was when I got here. Tech wick shirts were definitely the way to go; they breathe great, don’t expand, and feel nice. I’ll definitely be picking some more of those up the next time I’m in the US.
• We lost our first two trainees last week, a married couple named Ross and Susan. Everyone is pretty down, and we all wish the best for them. Here's hoping casualties are limited in the future

First post from Honduras!

Dear friends and family,

Greetings from Honduras! It hasn’t even been two weeks since I left but I already miss you all very much.

My first couple of weeks in Honduras has been a whirlwind of emotions, new people, new cultures, and learning to live with less; we’ve hardly had time to breathe and take it all in.

There are a total of 49 Peace Corps Trainees currently in Zarabanda from three projects: Water and Sanitation, Health, and Business (that’s me!). I don’t think I could have asked for a better group of people to start this adventure with. Everyone is highly intelligent, educated, and (most importantly) motivated and anxious to start working in our communities.

There is a wide range of backgrounds present among all of the different projects. Most of the volunteers are 25 or so, with a handful of recent college graduates and another larger group around 29 or so. Additionally, we’re lucky to have two more seasoned members with us; a gentleman from the California and Seattle area who has spent his career in nursing (spending a lot of time with Hispanic immigrants) who will be a part of the health team, and a woman from Colorado who has run her own local business for a number of years in the Vale area. They’re both very experienced and knowledgeable, and the rest of the group is looking forward to learning from them.

My first 3.5 weeks in Honduras are being spent in a small town about 30 Kilometers out of Tegucigalpa called Zarabanda, a small mountainside community of a couple thousand people. These first few weeks are spent living with a host family and are strictly for training, language classes, and cultural acclimation. At the end of those 3.5 weeks the projects will divide up for FBT (Field Based Training) which is where we’ll start getting our hands dirty and working on some projects. It’s still considered training, but we’ll be able to visit some current volunteers and see the projects they’re involved in (including some sites that are currently looking for volunteers from our group). FBT lasts for about 7 weeks, at the end of which we’ll get our site assignments / projects, which we’re all very anxious about. Following FBT we come back to Zarabanda for a week to take care of final preparations before swearing in as official Peace Corps Volunteers at the US Embassy in Tegucigalpa on Friday, May 15^th. We’ll leave shortly thereafter for our sites.

It seems as though most of the volunteers are having very positive experiences with their host families so far, and I’m definitely very lucky to have been paired up with Don Cristobal and Doña Norma. Cristobal and Norma have 10 children (all are grown up), seven live in Zarabanda close to us, one lives in Tegucigalpa, and the other two are living in the United States. Even though the house is just Don Cristobal, Doña Norma, and I, they have many grandchildren in the area so we’re guaranteed to hear the pitter patter of small feet outside our doors or in the kitchen. Norma is a great cook and has unfortunately spoiled me, since I won’t be able to create anything close to what she’s been cooking me when I go out on my own. She recently made me some pan de naranja (orange bread) to bring to the other trainees for a snack. The scene reminded me of those discovery channel movies where some meat is dropped into the Amazon and you watch as piranhas devour it in a matter of seconds. That’s what happens whenever I bring Doña Norma’s cooking to the training site.

We live in a very humble house (pictured) with no running water and unreliable electricity, but I have plenty of space for my bed and belongings and have no complaints about the living situation (though bucket showers could get old pretty quickly)

This past Saturday all of the families hosting Peace Corps Trainees in Zarabanda (trainees are placed in 4 local towns) threw us a surprise party at the town community center where they played some music, brought some local food… and PIZZA! It was a very nice event and a great opportunity to meet other members of the local community. Host families had a chance to speak about their experiences with Peace Corps volunteers and we were all touched by their positive words. Many of them had formed lasting friendships with volunteers who they had hosted, and others had reaped the benefits of projects we’ve conducted in local area.

It’s been extremely encouraging to see how we’ve been greeted so far and what a positive image the Peace Corps has in Honduras. At times our potential projects and our desired impact have been distant and abstract ideas, and the training period can be trying as we try to imagine what kind of impact our two year commitment will really have. I’ve had more than one conversation with fellow trainees about our concerns and doubts about our service. But then we meet local businesses who’ve worked with volunteers, or we see videos about Business Incubation projects that make a huge impact in their communities and are awarded large grants to continue their work, and that trepidation becomes excitement, the doubt turns into certainty and potential to change communities. The feeling is empowering, and I know it’s not naiveté or wasted energy because the results of previous groups’ work are right in front of our faces and on the lips of the Honduran people. In short, bring on the work!

Finally, the Peace Corps training staff in Honduras is simply amazing. They’ve done a remarkable job of bringing in 49 strangers and making us into a team, while simultaneously teaching us Spanish, teaching us about Honduran culture, safety, preventing diseases and illnesses, and giving us technical training for our specific projects. In addition to being good trainers they’re also great people and we’re lucky to have had them here waiting for us in Honduras

Well, this has been a long first (real) blog post and there’s more to be done and delicious food to be had (did I mention the food here is delicious?). I’ll try to keep this updated every 2 or 3 weeks if I’m able to. There are apparently some decent G3 modems that can be purchased locally that will provide internet access for our laptops, so I may be in communication more frequently depending on whether I’m in a decent G3 area or not (not that I know what that means…)

Abrazos

Jose

P.S. I don’t think I had a cup of coffee in my life before coming to Honduras. Now I have 3 or 4 per day. And… I kind of like it. The world is ending…

Welcome to Jose in Honduras!

Hello friends and family,

As you probably know by now I'm on my way to Honduras on February 24th to serve as a Peace Corps volunteer working as a Business Development Adviser! I'll be using this website to keep in touch, including pictures and all those other fun bloggy things

The site is up right now just so people can bookmark it and so I can play around. Each Peace Corps country has different rules and regulations about what can be added to a Volunteer's site, so I likely won't be able to add much until I get on location and can speak with the country Director.

If there's anything in particular any of you would like to see, please feel free to leave comments. Until then, Happy Holidays and I look forward to seeing many of you before I leave for Miami on February 24th

Cheers,

Jose