Happy time in Oropoli

Wow I can’t believe I have been in my site for 2 months already! How time is flying before I know it my 2 years is going to be up and I am going to be very sad to leave. I have definitely fallen in love with my village. I love the mountains, and the sun. I love the people! I love going to the river and swimming with the children when it’s hot out. I love that every time I go walking in my village everyone always shouts hello or good day morgaine(well it’s more like morgay because they can’t pronounce my name lol.)I love that every time I pass the guy that sells oranges he tries to give me one for free, just because I am the Peace Corps volunteer. I love that people here are constantly telling me how beautiful I am( and It doesn’t even bother me anymore all the people trying to marry me off to their sons lol) I Love Love going to the outlying villages in the mountains. SOO BEAUTIFIL. I love that my friends come over to hang out or play cards. I love going to the hot springs with my friends late at night. I love that my friends invite me to eat corn on the cob and tamales when their corn is harvested. I love dancing with my friend’s baby girl and how she laughs when we play! I love going to the soccer games to watch my friends play. I love that people with so much less than me are constantly offering me things, just because they are so generous and so honored to have a Peace Corps volunteer in their village. I hope I can live up to their standards. I love the bus systems! I love that even without a car I can get on a public bus and go to the big city! I love that everyone always wants to paint my nails and do pretty designs for me.
Although there are still many cultural clashes and things that I don’t like. For one, FOOD POISONING. Yep that’s not fun. I got it for the first time in my life last week and I don’t remember being so sick to my stomach before. It was TERRIBLE! And I am having a really hard time eating Honduran food now. It’s like my stomach is rejecting it in fear that I am going to be sick again. It is a good thing that I am moving out of my host families house soon so that I can cook for myself and make sure that I don’t get sick again, and I can use a ton less oil to cook with. I am sure my stomach will appreciate that. Another thing I don’t like is the phrases later or another time. Always whenever I ask when we are going to do something the typical Honduran response is later or another time. This annoys me to no end because I like more structure I would like it if they said we will work on the project Monday at 5, not later or another day. This doesn’t tell me anything and I hate keep asking when we are going to do things but the answer is always later. It means I have to push a lot to get things accomplished.
Speaking of getting things accomplished to my shame I still haven’t done too much in my village. I know it takes time so I am trying not so freak out to much right now and am concentrating on networking. Through my networking I have come up with a few potential projects that I am very excited about. I have made friends with the nurse that works in the medical center way out in one of the poorest villages way up in the mountains. He said we can work together on giving charlas(educational lectures) to the people. Also he told me that an NGO is putting computers and internet in their village(not sure why most of them don’t even have electricity yet) However, they are going to need someone to come and teach them how to use the computers and internet and he invited me to come help with that when the project is finished. In addition I think Zamorano( University) is putting up their solar panels in that village for electricity, and I know they said I would be able to help with that when I talked with them before coming to my site. So I will be taking the 2 hour car ride up into the mountains a lot to help out this village. However the village is beautiful and the sights on the drive take your breath away. Another future project is in an outlying village Barro it is evenharder to get to because the road is so bad. Its near impossible to get to by car, but we are gonna try and do it. If not I need to learn to ride a horse, because unfortunately Peace Corps says that we are prohibited to ride motorcycles and dirt bikes which is the major way of getting to this village. My job in this village is going to be helping a Caja Rural( small farming cooperative) I am going to make sure that they are organized correctly and try and help them find funding. I also hope to help out the mayor’s office by helping out the man who works in cadastre (he does all the zoning and properties) Right now he takes measurements of properties and draws up sketches on microsoft word. I am going to teach him to use GPS and GIS so he can do it more accurately. Also the main project that I am really excited about is helping out the man who works in the Environmental Office. He wants to put a tree farm right by the towns hot springs. At the same time the town is trying to build up the hot springs more for tourism. So I am going to help him by going with him to the hot springs and taking exact measurements with the GPS where we want everything, the trees the kiosks, and everything else. Then we are going to digitally sketch up what we want it to look like. I am them going to help him to get a grant for this project and make pamphlets for tourism! I am so excited about the project. The increased tourism would help the area economically and in addition we are planting a lot of trees and helping the environment!!! Furthermore, I am also thinking about starting up two English classes, one for adults and one for children an hour a week or so. So many people have asked me about teaching them English so I am giving in I hope I can do it, I am no teacher! I already taught a few classes to some high school students to help them before their exam, and they well. It was ironic the teacher that teaches them English can’t speak English himself he just reads right out of the book without actually understanding most of it, and his pronunciation is horrible!
I move into my new house next week and I am soo excited it’s perfect! It has a little porch to sit on in the evening and I will have lots of neighbors to talk to plus my best friend is my neighbor, and it’s the main street so everyone is constantly walking by. So I won’t be bored. It has a nice large living room and 2 bedrooms. The kitchen is extremely small but I guess I will just have to put things in the living room if I need more room. The refrigerator and dining table is already in the living room. I have my own nice little yard where I can put a dog or plant some flowers. Its also very safe which is very important here. The yard is surrounded by a large wall and barbed wire and I have bars and mosquito screens on the windows and double locks on the doors! O I forgot to mention my house is coming furnished! The lady I am renting it from lives in the big city so all the furniture is going to stay within for me to use! There is 2 beds so I have an extra for when friends and family come to visit (HINT ;) have to things to hang clothes in and one thing to put my shoes in. I have two couches an entertainment stand (without tv) and an cabinets O an best of all I have an oven! This is very rare in Honduras usually there is only 2 or 3 people in the village with ovens and they don’t use them, and my house is one of them so I can actually cook food that’s not fried!! Lol
As far as adventures go I have been having so many here in Oropoli. I had been wanting to go swim in the hot springs really bad after they cleaned them because the river nearby overflows during the rainy season and all the dirt flows into the hotsprings. So one night my friends call me up and the four of us went and swam in the hot springs. They are so nice just like hot tub pools. I also go to the river a lot with my friends and swim and take pictures. I have gone to my friends house in an outlying village several times and had so much fun doing it. The one time the only car we could get to go was this old beater truck without windows and without a windshield, the door had to be held on by a clamp. We laughed the entire trip to the house driving in that crappy car on the terrible bumpy roads, and my friend was honking at everyone just to embarrass my other friend because of the car haha. I also love my trips out to the mountains with the workers going out there to bring supplies or pick up the nurse. They are always adventures stopping to take pictures on the giant rock table outlooking the mountains, or stopping to let the engine cooldown and exploring a bit. Also, I have been having a few adventures with my fellow peace corps friends. We had our regional welcome party the other weekend. I traveled 6 hours in 2 buses to go probably 50 miles. We had fun thought it was nice to speak English and be able to vent with people that understand. We had a cute little campfire and smores as well. In the morning it was hilarious because the electricity went out right after we cracked 14 eggs to eat. So we decided to make campfire eggs and it actually worked and they were delicious.
Well I hope everyone is enjoying reading my blog!

My new site

Well I am officially a Peace Corps volunteer and in my site! Oropoli is very agricultural and not very well off. In addition, during the winter which it is right now, the municipality is pretty much completely cut off from the world. We literally had to drive through, not over but through 15 rivers to get here. It was scary driving through some of those rivers. One of them had a very strong current and I could feel the tires of the pickup sliding on the rocks. There has been no passage in or out of the municipality at all this week because the road is so eroded from the rain that the bus got stuck in it so the municipality has been trying to level the road out. In addition, one village in my municipality is completely cut off because the river you normally drive through to get to the village has grown so much that the river split and took the path of the road, and it’s no little river it is raging and not possible to cross. The municipality needs a lot of help, and I don’t know where to begin. When they said this would be the toughest job you’ll ever love they weren’t kidding. I am extremely stressed. The municipality just isn’t sure what to do with me. In addition it is always hard for me to start a new job and find out what I am supposed to be doing, and here it’s worse. Not only is it hard for me to meet people and get to know them like always but it’s even harder here because of the language barrier. I feel like I can communicate more or less, but I feel personalityless when I speak because I have a hard time expressing my personality in another language. To top that off I feel like I don’t have the skills they need to help them. We will see how it goes I have a few plans of what I am going to do in the next couple months. Hopefully they work out. My last host family is very nice and they have like 50 chickens in the courtyard of our house which wake me up every morning. Their children are in their 30s and they are very nice also and have introduced me to some important members of the community because one is the director of the schools in the municipality and the other works in the high school. My family also has a farm in one of the outlying villages with cows and they have already taught me to make Honduran cheese and butter. My room itself is also very nice it has its own door out to the street so I can come home last and not feel guilty. I just wish I would have been told to bring furniture. All my room has is a bed and a wooden table. I have nothing to put my clothes in and no fan or anything, and I was in a Wal-Mart on my way and I was in a car so it would have been very easy for me to buy something and bring it. Unfortunately now I have to wait till I can go to a big city and I am going to have to bring it back on the bus. Also I can’t wait till I can move out into my own place! Peace Corps rules say we have to live with a host family for 2 months but after that I can move into my own house. I have already been shown a really nice house that’s for rent in my town. It’s perfect right in the town center, right by the town hall where I work and it’s new and looks really nice. It will be nice to cook for myself! I don’t mind the Honduran food. But I can only eat beans rice tortilla and smoked meat so many times before I go crazy. Not to mention they give me such giant portions and my host mom doesn’t understand why I don’t want to eat it all. Every time I tell her just a little and she makes some comment about how I am on a diet or about how I don’t eat anything. And I don’t like everything that my family gives me for food. I had cow tongue for the first time the other day! The meat itself isn’t bad tasting but the texture is horrible. It’s so tough and you can feel the taste buds still. I couldn’t finish it, but my host mom was ok with that and said she wouldn’t give it me again. I am starting to make friends slowly there are a couple unmarried women without children around my age in my town and for that I am very lucky its not very common in Honduras especially in rural areas. These women are nice and have started to try and befriend me, and they even brought me to the dance last weekend at the municipality. It was a lot of fun and I got to know some of the people better. The mayor even was there and he bought me a beer! I am really not supposed to drink in public because I am a woman and the idea here is that women that drink are loose. However we were behind closed doors with just friends and I was handed a beer and was told it was from the mayor. So I drank it. It hasn’t seemed to cause any damage I figured if the mayor said it was ok it probably was.
Things have started to get better here in Oropoli. I have made some friends so life is not quite so boring and I am starting to help them out with some small educational projects and life is going well. I have also helped to organize the municipal education committee and have become a member. I hope things continue this well for a while

The Strike is Over!

I was awakened this morning my host family blasting the news the strike had ended! It was such a glorious time everyone was happy including the kids that they could finally go back to school. It was such a great sight to see the kids in their uniforms once again instead of playing marbles in the streets and getting into trouble. I even ran into one of the kids in my neighborhood that I had been worrying about lately. I had been worrying because he seemed to be hanging out with kids much older him that were going to influence him in the wrong way and the cute 10 yr old little boy that I first befriended was suddenly too cool to play with the other kids in the neighborhood and me. Instead he sat around and played marbles and whistled at girls as they walked by with the older guys. Although I saw him on his way to school this morning and he was excited to be going back and learning and that gave me hope that now that he’s back in school with kids his own age he hopefully won’t go down the wrong path. That is how I feel about all the kids of Honduras. School is not only a great place to learn but also to grow in a safe environment where they aren’t going to play in the streets and fall into trouble.
In other news I have been busy as usual these past few weeks. I gave a charla on project design management which was a very boring topic and very very long and we had to give it to a group of high school student that had no need to learn it. However, it was good practice because I will need to help the people in my municipality and teach them project design management. I also gave a charla to an older audience with one member from the municipality and several parents about what global warming is, what is means for Honduras, how to prepare for disasters and how to create a local disaster relief committee. It was difficult because none of the people had even heard of global warming before, and although from hurricane Mitch in 98 they know that disasters are very possible and that flooding and landslides happen all the time they didn’t want to think ahead and prepare they just had the mentality that it won’t happen to them or that they don’t have the money or resources to prepare. All in all I thought it went ok I made them all prepare their own maps of threats around their houses like a river that could flood or trees that could fall, and then draw in their resources they could use in an emergency like the fire dept and a friend with a car or where they could buy water or food. However, I guess they didn’t think it went so well because we prepared another speech to give to them about transparency today and they canceled on us.
Other than speeches I went to a proyeico school which is a school directly paid by the government from funds from NGO’s. After hurricane Mitch the other countries gave a lot of money and demanded schools in the outlying villages for the children and the proyeico schools were founded and they are the worst of the schools in Honduras its several grades in a large room with an unlicensed person teaching. Although it’s better than no school and the proyeico schools couldn’t go on strike they always attend 200 days of school. It was sad how much less these schools have and the manner of teaching is just writing things on the board and having the children all shout out the answers at once. The education system in Honduras definitely needs reforming.
Also the other day the medical brigades came to town. They are a group of students from around the world that go around to the villages and give free exams and medicine to the poor people. After getting passed the armed guards that keep the people under control me and a few other volunteers offered our services if they needed anything. I helped by reading off the names and handing out the medicine and giving the people directions on use and also afterwards I went to the table and translated for the nurses asking them if they had any symptoms, allergies and what medicines they were taking. It was nice to be able to help because very few of the people in the brigades speak Spanish. I also went to a school and planted trees with some children and they will then care for the trees and when they grow large enough transplant them to a microforest where they will help the purity of the water
Also the other week we had our cultural day my host mom taught me and a friend to make catrachas which are fried tortillas with beans and cheese on top. Then we brought our dish to the fiesta for cultural day. At the party the Hondurans prepared several traditional dances and also kids danced on stilts which are also very popular culturally for this region. One of my firefighter friends teaches dance and actually taught the dance for the kids on stilts and he dressed as a wolf and went and danced with them for a bit and it was hilarious. My group did a demonstration of swing dancing to show American culture and then we taught everyone to dance it. Also the other night me and two of my friends made cookies for our host families and they all liked them very much. So it is safe to say the cultural sharing is going very well.

Honduras in Chaos

I have been very busy the past week. I have been giving a lot of charlas(lectures) to kids on different sorts of information. My favorite was definitely the 4 hour HIV speech. I was really nervous about it because it is a very taboo topic here and I was afraid the high school kids would be very standoffish. However, we did a few exercises to get them over their embarrassment and everything turned out great! They all had a blast and many of them said they learned how to use a condom for the first time even though they were most likely sexually active. A few of them even gained enough confidence with us to ask some good questions. When we were done they applauded for like 5 mins in a row. It was great! I also gave a savings and a health charla they wen´t very well too.
Also I had my last technical interview to tell my supervisors what type of things im interested in working in and site location that sort of thing, and the Muni D tech director said she knew where she was putting me and she dropped a few hints. I found out my site is near Tegucigalpa but not too close. it’s a smaller site, I am the first Municipal Development Volunteer there ever, and I am the first volunteer in a long time period. I also found out my projects will be everything I wanted! One of my counterparts is a women’s empowerment organization so I will be working with that. I will be helping to create a trash and recycling program and educating people of what to do. Also, I will be doing education in schools with varying topics. I am soo excited I really really wanted the women’s organization and trash collection projects those are two things I think are very important!
On a sadder note Honduras is kind of in chaos right now. The teachers are still on strike and its turning more and more political because the teachers are for Zelaya the president that was kicked out last year in the ¨coup.¨ So now not only are the teachers protesting but other political groups are joining them and Tegucigalpa is a mess right now. To add to that stress it won´t stop raining! Honduras has already had more rain this year than the average rainfall for an entire year. Now we have all kinds of tropical storms circling Honduras and it just keeps raining. Tegucigalpa keeps flooding and sinkholes are forming and killing people and there are crazy landslides. The entire Tegucigalpa region has been on red alert. My teacher also told me that shes in a less dangerous region for landslides and flooding but there are still high winds and her neighbor’s roof flew off the other day! Don´t worry about me I live in a safe area in Cantarranas, I am away from the river and runoff water path. However, others have not been so lucky. Friday was a very sad day. In the morning 5 very poor mud built houses were damaged by landslides and flooding. Luckily no one was hurt the families woke up when they felt their house shaking and ran outside, but they lost everything the one house and everything was completely destroyed. We went in the evening to talk to the people and see what we can do. We are going doing a food drive for the families and are going to work on trying to build trenches and walls to change the runoff patterns. Also, on Friday I watched a beloved dog die. It was so sad. Most Hondurans have a very different idea of what a pet is, to them its just an animal not a member of the family. However there is one house where I had classes where they had two cocker spaniels and they actually cared about their dogs and treated them very well. Unfortunately the one dog ate a poisoned rat and when we were over there baking brownies the dog started seizing and died a painful death. It was horrible to watch and the grandma and mom were both crying I felt so bad and it was such a sweet dog too. Hondurans really need to stop using poison to kill rats and to start using traps because I have heard of this kind of thing happening often.
On a happier note I am still having a lot of fun here and making many new friends.

Halfway through training!

Hello again followers! Everything is still going very well here in Honduras. I am training hard but having a great time and making many new friends. I have been very busy the last few weeks. My friend Nancy and I gave a charla (speech) on recycling and the importance of not throwing your trash in the streets to an elementary school the other day. It went ok. It was very hard to keep their attention, at one point when Nancy was talking there was a gecko on the wall and the one girl stood up and pointed it out and then everyone was watching the gecko instead of listening to us. The other hard part about the speech is that they have to recycling program here. It is almost impossible for these kids to recycle they would have to have someone drive an hour to go to the capital to sell it to a recycling company. So we gave them basic information on how it would be possible to recycle but we concentrated more on the importance of throwing your trash away and separating it into things you can burn, things you can reuse, organic materials, and trash to go to a landfill. Then we gave them a few ideas on how they could reuse certain materials. It was definitely a hard charla for us to give because we Honduran recycling is different than US recycling but my one Honduran friend Marcos who works in the Municipality went to the university for natural resources or something like that and he had lots of power points and information on his computer on everything recycling so that helped us out a lot. The last few days I also learned how to make improved wood burning stoves. Almost everyone cooks on wood burning stoves here. However the problem is that they use a lot of wood which is costly and increases deforestation. Also, many of the stoves are indoors in the kitchen and they smoke a lot and the women cooking over them all day and the children playing by them all have lung problems. So one of the main universities here, Zamorano designed an improved model which caters to the Honduran culture and uses much less wood and produces much clearer and less smoke which is pumped outside through a chimney. We spent three days traveling back and forth to Zamorano we learned all about the design and how to make it and we practiced making it with earth, and then the final day we went to these poor houses in the middle of nowhere. It was so hard to get to! It’s a good thing the Peace Corps land rovers are beasts because the terrain was so bumpy and we were trucking it up this hill. Also there was so much water because the rainy season is really bad this year, so we had to drive through rivers. This one spot was particularly bad there was this tiny bridge the exact size of the car so any error and we would drive off it, but on top of that the river was so high the water was flowing over it so we couldn’t really see where the road was! The river was flowing pretty fast too, but one of the engineers that came from Zamorano got out of his truck and walked onto the bridge with a pole so we could see where to drive and how high the water was. It was crazy, but we made it! The 19 municipal development trainees split into small groups and we built 5 stoves for 5 different families that had bad stoves before. Our stove turned out really nice and it was so nice to be helping these people.
I have also helped teach English to an Educatodos class one evening. Educatodos is a program for people that couldn´t attend regular schooling during regular hours because they had to work. It is a very nice program to help educate people that never had the opportunity for education and the teachers are like saints. The one guy was telling us that he walks for 5 hours to give his classes and he almost never gets paid. So one evening we came to help out and learn a little more what the classes are like and they were actually just beginning to learn English and we helped out. I also have been helping one of my fellow trainers start a tutoring session with some kids I have helped in teaching basic math to the kids. The problem is the classes are so large here that many of them just make it through without actually learning and understanding any of it. We discovered this when my friend was trying to teach his host brother long division for his homework and he discovered the kid couldn´t even add. So we went back to the basics and have been helping him and some others with their math. It is especially important right now because all of the teachers in the country are on strike and no one has school. The education system here needs so much work! The teachers are employed by the teachers union and the union has the right to fire the teachers if they don´t go on strike when the union decides to. That seems like the opposite of the point of a union. So the teachers are always on strike and they get paid when they strike so the kids miss out on their education.
Other than work I have also been having a lot of fun I am good friends with a lot of the other volunteers and have made some friends with many of the Hondurans in my village. One weekend we all went to this beautiful park nearby and hiked up to this waterfall. It was so beautiful but sooo hard! We had to hike 2 hours straight up a mountain just to get to the park entrance, and then we hiked another 2 hours to the waterfall. I wasn´t even sure if I was going to make it into the park for a while, but once I made it into the park it wasn’t so bad because it was so beautiful and we stopped a lot to take pictures. The park is inside a cloud forest because it is so high up in the mountains and everything was so jungle like because it is always wet, and everything was so cool. Other than that excursion I have just been enjoying hanging around Catarranas with my friends. Life is really good right now. I hope everything is going well for everyone back home. I miss you all!

First Month in Honduras

This is my first blog in honduras! I have been here almost a month and have so much to talk about!I will start from the beginning! I left June 22 for training in
Houston. We thought we had a shuttle to the airport but we didn't. Fortunately I saw two people with large backpacks looking for the Hilton too and I took a shot and asked them if they were in the Peace Corps too and they were. That was how I met Erika and Celus. I was lucky I met them because it ended up being a 45 minute taxi ride, and it cost us $25 a person. The Houston training was nice, we filled out a bunch of paperwork and did activities to get to know the other 56 people. Although the training was very long and we didn't get to eat the entire time, and we were all starving by the time they let us go get food.
Next, I arrived in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. It was ironic the first restaurants I saw in Honduras were Pizza Hut, Applebees, and Burger King. Tegucigalpa is just swarming with US restuarant chains. Next we went to our training center in Zarabanda and not long after i went home to Las Canadas with my new host mom. My host family is so nice. MY host mom and dad are in their late 50's. They have two daughters one lives at home she is 20 and an older daughter in her 30s. They also have a son in his late 20's who is married with a 3 year old boy and 4month old child. They are often at the house and the 3 yr old Alejandro has decided I am his new best friend. We are constantly playing with his toy cars. He is such a cute little boy always laughing and playing.We also have a puppy that lives outside named duque and 2 chickens and a rooster.
Training is going very well we usually spend half a day in language training and the other half learning about health issues, saftey and security, or introduction to Municipal development. Unfortunately after only 2 days of language training my instructor got sick and then resigned. So we got bumped around to different instructors and classes untill the last two days at the training center when we finally got a new professor. Training has been a lot of fun the trainers are all real nice and I love all the other volunteers.
Honduras is so beautiful. It is so green and with so many mountains. The roads are crazy and winding and the drivers just whip around them and pass eachother. The weather here is so inconsistent, one minute it is sunny and the next it is pouring. When it poors hear it is soo loud! you hear all the rain on the tin roofs and it always comes through the roof and poors into the kitchen.
This last weekend I went on my volunteer visit. I went to Sabanagrande and learned about the town. I also got to work on the Colgate and World map programs. We walked up a mnt for 45 mins in the pouring rain to get to this tiny 20X20 room where 40 students grades 1-6 all study in the same room with one teacher. They also have a tiny 8X8 shack where the kindergardener students play it is without a door or window. The volunteer in sabanagrande is using the grant to build another schoolroom for the students and put a door and window in the kindergarden room. It is at this school where we gave our colgate speech. The other trainee that I went with and I got to give the colgate speech ourselves and the volunteer just helped us if we needed it. We demonstrated how to brush your teeth and they practiced with us and we played games to teach them what foods are good and bad for their teeth and gave them toothbrushes and toothpaste. Then afterward we began painting the basecoat on the wall with the 5th and 6th graders for worldmap. They will later paint the world on the map and the volunteer will teach the teachers to use it to teach geography and math to the students. The visit was a lot of fun and the volunteer was very nice. I can't wait to start helping people.
I have arrived in my new house in Catarranas. The peace corps made our arrival a sort of "practice" We all got off the bus and had to drag our own bags all over town and find our new homes ourselves. The volunteer that lives in Cantarranas came and helped us tho so it wasnt hard finding our houses but it was terrible dragging my 50lbs bag all the way across town on dirt roads. It was sad leaving my old host family but my new one seems very nice. My host mom and dad are both 33 and they have two sons a 6 and 4 yr old.My house is ballin as far as Honduras homes go. It seems very clean and we have cable.
Although it literally takes up the entire room I have a queen size bed, and i also have my own bathroom in my room with a shower and running water! so excited no more bucket baths! We just finished putting my mosquito net up and good thing too, I see two mosquitoes sitting on it, and dengue is an epidemic here in Catarranas. I hear dengue is one of the most painful illnesses and everwhere on your body hurts so bad you can barely move to even drink water. It can be fatal but usually not the first time you get it. However, each time you get it it gets worse and you eventually start having internal bleeding and can die. Soo no thank you id rather not get dengue. On that note i just took my maleria pills we have to take every week. I hate them so much they taste terrible and make me naucious.
To top it off they don't even prevent maleria, they just prevent the bad symptoms and when we leave the peace corps we get something to kill off the maleria.
My first week in Cantarranas has gone very well. I really love my barrio all the people are very nice and i have 4 other volunteers who live very close. All the kids in the barrio love us and we are alwyas playing cards and taking walks with them. The kids took us to the big river behind the city and it was very beautiful except for all the trash. Hondurans just throw much of their trash in the streets and it ends up in the river. It was a shame to see such a beautiful place so polluted. I would like to educate the community of the importance of not littering where i am going to be placed.
They have also been fumigating so much this week. They have trucks that drive in the streets spraying the chemical that kills the mosquitos and their larvae and they also have men that walk around town and go doorto door and spray in the houses. They have to do every place 3 days in a row. I know this chemical can'tbe good for ourlungs. I have only been here a week and already breathed it in 5 times and had to wait in a different location while they sprayed the area i was in. So they are spraying this terrible chemical all over town to attempt to avoid people getting dengue in the near future but down the road everyoneis going to have cancer from breathing this stuff in. Saturday I went with my host family to suyapa, a very rural village 30 mins away from catarranas. We went to see family and I took all the kids to the river there so they could all swim in the river. Although my host brother got very sick and we left inmedatly because we were afraid he had dengue. However we found out later it wasnt dengue just an infection. While i was in suyapa i saw some really bad poverty. All the children looked like the children in the donation commercials. They were all very thin and dirty with torn clothes and red tints to their hair to show malnutrition.
I have made some honduran friends that work in the municipality. Saturday night was the coronation of the indian queen for the end of the week of the indian. It was so cute all the children were dressed as mayans in their little outfits and they all marchedonto the stage with the prices and new queen last with their ring of warriors. After that there was a dance and me and two other volunteers went to the dance and saw our friends from the municipality there and we danced with them all night long it was so much fun. They were even kind enough to walk us home since it was so late at night and kind of dangerous to be walking around.

Three weeks to departure

After all my waiting I finally received my invitation into the Peace Corps! I will be departing for orientation and training June 22. I will be serving in Honduras! I have a multitude of emotions about my departure for Honduras. I am nervous about leaving my family and friends for so long and departing to such a faraway and unknown place. However, at the same time I am excited! I can’t wait to depart on my new journey , meet many new people, and learn many new things! Most of all I can’t wait to be able to start helping people. I hope I can make a difference over there! I do not know how often I will be able to get on the internet, but I will try to blog at least once a month to let everyone know what I am up to in Honduras. There is much to be done before I depart. I just hope I don’t forget anything!