So I pretty much stopped blogging, but I wanted to finish out my Peace Corps blog since my Peace Corps experience is finished. So I will give a basic idea of what happened in all that time. I finally did my stove project. I trained like 15 people to build the stoves, and gave a lecture on the environment to the people receiving the stoves. Then I built 76 improved stoves. It took quite a bit of time considering it was only me and the volunteers who learned how to make the stoves, constructing them. It was a good project, and I felt well afterward. The people were happy receiving the stoves and bettering their health and I was happy to help.
I also did a municipal spelling bee. The people had never had spelling bees in my municipality, and spelling is one of the worst parts of their education. Not even the teachers spell well! And they hate to teach it. So a spelling bee was a great way to get kids motivated to study spelling. We held school spelling bees and the top two winners from each school were then invited to the municipal center to attend the municipal spelling bee. It went really well and everyone was happy. The top three places were all from small villages, and every said it was nice that the villages got to win for once, because they almost never win against the kids in the town center.
I also have been giving computer courses. I gave three different computer courses. One was to high school students, another was to more high school students, and the third was a village without electricity. A NGO donated a solar panel and a computer lab with computers so the people could learn computers. It was hard teaching people that had never really used any type of technology.
In addition, I have been giving lectures on HIV, hand washing, and GPS. But at different times of course lol!
My last big project was working with the women’s office. The women’s office got a new head, and she is energetic, and willing to work and learn. So we started right off organizing women in every village and creating women’s groups. I then created what I call the 12 step plan, because it is 12 different speeches and trainings on how to become an independent self loving woman. They different trainings included gender and sex, and equality and inequality, self esteem, women’s rights, good communication skills, basic business, and more. At the end we got loans for each group to start their own small business. Unfortunately, I was unable to finish the project because Peace Corps was evacuated from Honduras(see last blog) but I left the head of the women’s office with all the knowledge and training to finish it herself.
Other than work I was mostly hanging out with my boyfriend and dog. We have gone on lots of hikes to waterfalls, and just around my municipality. We have gone on two vacations, one was to the big lake in Honduras where we stayed for a weekend with Peace Corps friends, and we went and saw a big waterfall and were actually allowed to walk underneath it with a tour guide. It was very intense there was so much water coming down on your head and with such force you couldn’t see and could barely breath, but it was a great experience, very empowering. Tilo , Dulce,and I also went and stayed on one of the southern islands for a weekend. It is a volcanic island with all black sand beaches. It was a very nice relaxing vacation with beautiful scenery, but you couldn’t swim in the water. There were millions of jellyfish in the water! Tilo and I took a kayak out and just stayed at the edge of the water and saw hundreds of them. We were so afraid to tip especially because it was a really cheap unstable kayak and we had dulce on board too, who kept running from side to side. We tried to leave her on the beach, but she came swimming after the kayak! So I have been having lots of fun along with all the work I have been doing.
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