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!