Sabanagrande...

So last Sunday the water/sanitation group made the trip south to Sabanagrande. It is a town slightly bigger than Santa Lucia but somehow there seems to be less going on. No worries, we’re not here to make friends, we’re here to get down to business. Right. The idea is each program (Wat/San, Business, and Health) all split up for the next five weeks to get intensive technical training…we here in the Peace Corps call it Field Based Training (FBT). For Health I think that means giving charlas about how HIV is bad news, for Business it’s where can we set up a new Starbucks. I’m kidding, I dig people in both groups and I am sure at some point they will be able to do something productive…though perhaps nothing like bringing potable water to a community in need!

We have a new policy this year with Peace Corps, apparently, and it involves serious movement restrictions for our entire class. Because of the transgressions of individuals in previous groups we have been forbidden to leave our little site for the next five weeks unless the families we are staying with take us somewhere with them. This poses a bit of a problem because, as I mentioned before, there seems to be less to do here than in Santa Lucia. So all of us are sweating the coming thirty five + days but of course we are all good government employees and will do our best to abide by the new rules of the man.

I am one of the lucky ones, though, because at the moment my family has plans to get the heck out of dodge for Semana Santa. With that to look forward to I may be able to get through two weekends of no activity—that’s what I’m telling myself anyway. Speaking of my new family, it is a young woman and her three year old daughter and they are fantastic. My mother’s mother is also hosting an aspirante and has done so for decades and before that her mother hosted aspirantes forever…and also has one of her own right now, too. The living is a bit more rustic than my previous digs in Santa Lucia but I actually kind of like it. My room is a corner of the living room with plyboard walls six feet high separating me from the rest of the room…my ceiling is the living room ceiling, my light is the living room light. There are mosquitoes everywhere because my madre runs her own pulperia out of the house and always has the doors open, but I do have a mosquito net to sleep in—my own little fortress of solitude.

For the first couple of days showering consisted of getting a bucket of water from the pila in the back yard and dumping bowls of water on myself in between lathering up. Now there is water in the tank so I can stand under a showerhead and take a cold shower like everyone else. But I think this process repeats itself at the end of every week. Brushing my teeth was the same deal, going to the pila in the back and dipping a cup of water into it to rinse out my mouth and brush, but now I can use a little sink in the back. There is not a mirror to be found in the entire house, either, so to shave I use the little plastic coated mirror that came in my travel toiletry bag. But all of this—my 6 by 8ft room with no shelves, the occasional bucket shower and backyard toothbrush sessions, no mirror anywhere—amounts to stuff I am not used to but not really anything too rough. Anyone could do this and I think it is actually good to live like this, at least for a time. But that’s kind of what I think about the Peace Corps in general—it is a great experience that anyone can do and everyone would benefit from. I’m still green and naïve, I know.

I should also point out that there is a mother and her three year old daughter who rents a room from my host madre and lives here during the week. So at night, that’s right, there are two 3 yr old girls running around, screaming and squealing and giggling and shouting and crying and fighting. It was a bit to take at first but I am slowly adjusting to the pitch of the volume during the evenings in my new home. And lastly, my madre is cooking three meals a day all week for a church group here in town. In addition to making thirty meals three times a day which some young dudes come and take to the church, there are also church bigwigs coming over and making themselves at home during meal times, which is also very cool. This means that around 7:30 pm every night there are two 3 yr old girls running around shrieking, my madre working herself into a frenzy in the kitchen, and three or so older evangelical church dudes sitting in the living room, eating and laughing and inviting me to hear the word of God. It’s a good time.

Actually, like I mentioned, the girls don’t bother me much anymore. But the longer I am here (and I realize it’s been less than six weeks at this point) the more I come to loathe organized religion. Ok, that’s a bit harsh. My view of Catholicism hasn’t changed because I have not come into contact with it much on a day to day basis here. I have always been a pick and choose Catholic anyway, and while my previous madre in Santa Lucia was very Catholic and went to church often, she never forced it down anyone’s throat—myself included. But between the evangelicals and the mormons down here you can not go a day without being lectured or witness someone being lectured to about the salvation of their soul and what they need to do to achieve it, etc etc. They are like ants in the towns that I have visited and lived in here in Honduras—a little army of Bible carrying youths trying to convert an already fairly religious region of the world into a different type of Christianity. Cool.

That’s kind of a downer subject to leave with, so I’ll go ahead and do just that! No, I forgot to mention that me and two other guys are spending the majority of the week teaching first and second graders the ins and outs of computers in the local elementary school. So we have that going for us. At the moment it is trying to help them discover a nice median between being afraid to touch the mouse at all and having a Vulcan death-grip on it. More to come on this subject…

Before I sign off this entry I want to thank all of you who sent out birthday love, either in email or blog comment form…it was much appreciated. I may or may not choose to remember all of your birthdays in the coming weeks and months—don’t I have a two year pass on that? And for future reference, in the event that any of you put together any sort of care package, the only thing I can really use some more of that I do not have access to is Extra gum (polar ice, preferably, but any flavor will do) and/or Orbit (sweet mint). This is not life or death, though, so do take your time and put some thought into these care packages—I know you’ll make them with love!

Things to look forward to: this time next week I will be going south to the beaches Honduras shares with Nicaragua and El Salvador with my family and later that week to the beaches in the north for Semana Santa!! Take care everyone and keep me updated on life in the States.

Joe