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.