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.
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Saturday, August 21, 2010
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.
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.
Saturday, August 14, 2010
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!
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!
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
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.
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.
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