Dog update: you think these updates are going away and that maybe I’m paranoid and overselling the dangers of man’s best friend down here in Honduras. You are mistaken. My sitemate, Gen, took a trip last week to other parts of the country to attend some classes and get some training, etc. She was supposed to come back Sunday, mid-day, but I did not hear from her and as I walked by the house she’s renting on Monday morning I noticed that she had not yet returned. Skip ahead to Monday afternoon and a text message I received from Gen: “I am coming home today, got bit by a dog in La Esperanza and had to stay a little longer to get rabies shots—argh”. You see? Don’t ever doubt the validity of my warnings…they are dire and they are real.
But returning to Gen’s trip as a segue to a completely different subject, along the way she made a stop in the capital. While in the capital she visited the main PC Office and, as any true-of-heart Peace Corps type would, decided to pick up my mail for me. I won’t disclose here just how much mail I received, nor who it came from—if you, yes, you reading this blog right now, have not sent me mail, well then…you know. No, the important part of this story is that my folks came through like the superstars they are and sent me another care package the contents of which included the third season of Arrested Development. Yes, after several months and far too many blog entries to recall without a reference to one of the funniest shows ever made, I am now able to return to the humble origins of this blog. Thank you, mom and dad, you have done me and all the many, many readers of this blog a great service. What would an online journal entitled “Amor Prohibido” be, after all, without Arrested Development?
Ok, so in the event that I spoiled you last week (two weeks ago?) with stories of Presidential helicopters in corn fields and high school girls parading on stage to the hoots and hollers of an entire town, there will be nothing of the sort in this entry. I will tell you instead about some blood spilled—both on a village visit I did last week and in general on the TV news here. First, the village visit: I was in a truck driven by a gentleman working for the Centro de Salud of the municipality and riding with us was my counterpart at the mayor’s office. We were going to visit a tiny community of about 150 people at the absolute top of a massive hill to talk to them about instituting a rainwater collection system in their town. At the moment they have no water system of any kind and the relative elevation of their village means that their options are limited. The roads getting to this town are brutal and, truly, do not see cars pass over them much at all. (Seriously, I talk about how my town has nothing but dirt roads in all directions for hours but I live in the center of a booming metropolis compared to some of the sites I am visiting, this being one of them.) It was not a surprise, then, at a fork in the road nearly half way up the mountain to see a massive tree blocking further passage. This was no doubt due to any of the many storms that have come through recently and who knows how long ago the tree had fallen because the only thing on the other side of it was the village we were going to visit and I doubt they leave their perch very often.
We had in the back of the truck a moto because the mayor’s office guy had to run an errand even further out later on that day and the roads in that direction are not wide enough for a truck. There was no way to cut the tree and move it aside because we didn’t have a machete or ax so we decided the moto was our only option. Now during the discussion of what to do not once did walking the rest of the way even come into consideration for the gentlemen I was with, despite that we had clearly gone the majority of the way. Well I decided to show them who was the man and announced that I would hike to the town while the gentleman from the Centro de Salud rode the moto. Obviously, stupid on my part—but that’s not the point of this story. Three hundred meters in elevation and forty minutes after I began my trek (covered in sweat and still not having arrived at the village), I come across a man coming down the mountain on horseback. We exchange greetings and I ask him how much further to the town. He says another twenty minutes or so on foot, and I understand this part clearly, but then he goes into something about how “the man with the moto is coming back down right now behind me because there was an accident and I’m bleeding”. I was confused but understood that he was injured and I asked where and he directed me to the other side of his horse and pointed at his foot—there was a white rag tied around his foot covered in blood.
The man continued on down the road and I continued up, expecting to see my moto guy and get some better idea of what happened. Sure enough within two minutes the moto comes tearing around a corner and I flag him down and ask “How’d it go”, not really sure where the bloody foot guy fit into things and mostly asking about the rainwater presentation to the town. He answered very bluntly: “Not well. There weren’t many people available for the talk and then a man asked for a ride on the moto and we started to go and his shoelace got caught in the wheel and cut his foot up.” And that was pretty much that. We all went back down the mountain, got the man into the truck, strapped the moto down and went into the centro de salud in the nearest town. Once we were there and the injured man was receiving care from the medics, I took a look at the wound. From one side of his ankle all the way around the back to the other side was sliced open—his foot didn’t get ground up in the spokes but must have been cut by the disc which the spokes rotate on. Anyway, the cut was deep, deep enough that I worried that his Achilles tendon might have been severed. Apparently not, though, because the docs cleaned the wound and stitched him back up—18 stitches on one ankle! The whole time this man did not so much as grimace despite the fact that it looked like his heel might fall off. Calm and collected under excruciating circumstances. Unreal.
Now let’s move to blood spilled on the TV news. I figure you guys want bits of life down here every once and awhile and not just the exciting stories of romance and world-saving that I involve myself in on a day to day basis. So here it is: in Honduras the television news programs show things that I have not seen in R-rated movies…and they do it all the time. There is no warning either, no “what you are about to see may disturb you…” etc. They’re just talking about the news and then BAM—and you throw up in your mouth!! I’m going to give you just a couple examples, so you get the idea, but rest assured these are not the worst I have seen in my brief time down here. What you are about to read may disturb you, so skip ahead to the next paragraph if you don’t want to picture a couple unsettling images as you sit there in front of the computer. First one comes from a recent flood that hit the capital and while that got most of the footage they did stop to do a side story about how the commotion of the flood gave a new mother the chance to dispose of her unwanted child. Yup, then they cut to a shot of a plastic bag opened with a newborn baby inside, still covered in blood and clearly dead. Second one is a little more intriguing, no less disturbing. A couple of men were picked up on charges of having raped and murdered two five year old boys recently. The other prisoners knew of their alleged crimes as well, because within three hours of first arriving to the prison the men were burned alive. I missed the back story initially and walked into the TV room in my host family’s house and saw what looked to be a burned log in the middle of a concrete patio. And then I saw the kicker: a human arm extending sideways from the “burned log.” Yeah, the arm from the elbow up was completely normal but the body was unrecognizable as human; just a large, coal-black mass covered in flakes occasionally blowing away in the breeze. It can make mealtime an adventure.
On the lighter side of news, I was very pleased to see the US National Team win the Copa de Oro last week. You are all Americans and currently living in the US, so this regional tournament of the world’s most popular sport likely passed undetected on your sports radar (ie Sportscenter)—if I was in the States it would have happened to me, too. Anyway, the national teams from North America, Central America, and the Caribbean were represented—12 teams in all. The entire tournament was played in the States, too, with Mexico and Team USA being the heavy favorites. In fact, in the 8 times that this tournament had happened leading up to this year’s event, the USA and Mexico had won it between them 7 times. The only other team to win the tournament is Canada, so it is not a small thorn in the side of Central America that only teams north of C.A. have won it. This year’s final ended up being between USA and Mexico, of course, and the yanks came from behind to win 2-1. ¡Excelente! Next up for the US is the Copa America, which takes place in Venezuela (it started this week) and features all South American teams and also the US and Mexico. The US has gained significantly in worldwide stature in recent years (despite the ’06 World Cup) and we look good heading into this tournament having just won the Copa de Oro, but with teams like Brasil and Argentina around our boys are definitely not the favorites.
In Peace Corps news there is good and there is bad. The good is that my work has actually picked up a lot in recent weeks and I have barely had time to do leisure reading, let alone multiple viewings of the same movies. There have been many visits to villages to see what kind of water issues they are having and mostly these end without any blood shed on anyone’s part. There is also the occasional town meeting type event, where I basically introduce myself and sit back down and that’s it, but those have been great for meeting community representatives one on one and discussing problems to be fixed. So the work is good and at times has made me feel like I am actually beginning to do something here. The bad news is that recently three people I know pretty well decided to go back home for good. One of these was a close friend who left suddenly and since I haven’t been able to check email in almost two weeks I don’t know the details, just that he’s gone. The other two were people in my wat/san group as well and both were solid. I’m not going to pretend I know how Peace Corps life goes and how this impacts things specifically, but I do know that after a few months in my site I was looking forward to reuniting with people I trained with and know fairly well and that now these people will not be there. But what can you do besides go one day at a time. As the wise people at Sportscenter have said, “So-and-so is listed as day to day…but aren’t we all.”
To conclude this entry I will return to something I began last time, a “housing” update. In the last edition I talked about the imminent joys of living solo and described the place I had found, etc. Well I had made arrangements to rent this particular house and the people left in charge of it (the owner is in the States) assured me they would spend the next couple of weeks “fixing things up”. There has not been so much in the way of “fixing things up,” unfortunately, and the other thing is that while this house is pretty cool its location leaves something to be desired. On one side is the town liquor store and down the other side no more than ten meters is a pool hall, reknowned in Honduras for being filled with the town drunks and bums. Excellent. Now safety is not an issue because there are bars on the windows and the house has a wall and gate around it besides and since Hondurans love to put barbed wire on things, there is barbed wire snaking around the top of the gate and wall. But nearly every time I walk by now to check to see if anything is being “fixed”, I have noticed drunks passed out right in front of my new house-to-be. This is going to be fun. More to come from me, I hope all of you are doing well. Much love, Joe
Thursday, June 28, 2007
Saturday, June 16, 2007
Wes Anderson, Noam Chomsky, and high school girls…
Dog update: I have a new running route, this one has some serious hills and some seriously awesome views of the country. Really, if not to visit me some of you need to get down here just to see some of these vistas! Anyway, new route means new potential dog dangers, this must always be kept in mind. But to my surprise and delight I have not encountered any dogs interested in my running by enough to chase and/or attack me yet. In fact, to this point my site here in Victoria has become a run-without-a-stone-in-hand type of place…excellent.
Ok, so if week four helped me to see how my service could begin to take shape, then week five helped me to see how enlightened and cool I can become by watching Wes Anderson flicks and reading nonfiction books. Yes, it was a return to the general malaise of the first three weeks wherein there is much to be done but just not…right…now, damnit. The deal is us PCV’s are forbidden from riding motorcycles at all because in years past there were a number of deaths due to moto accidents. Ok, understood. Except that everyone in my neck of Honduras gets around by moto and when I say everyone I mean even the mayor. All of the roads are pretty bad around here, none of them are paved, and some aren’t big enough for cars. The municipality’s only car is in the shop, naturally, and so we have had to wait until the Centro de Salud made up their calendar for the summer of what towns they are going to visit so we can hitch a ride in their truck. Did you want to know all that? It means that next week there are villages to visit and work to begin…but this week, ahem, not.
Back to the issue at hand, Wes Anderson flicks and nonfiction books. If any of you dear friends and family out there have not yet seen either “The Royal Tenebaums” or “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou” then I suggest you do so. Now I don’t plan on making this blog a “wow, this is the coolest movie/book/music group” type blog—no, that doesn’t interest me at all. But speaking purely objectively, if you have not seen these movies then you need to, and fast. They are brilliant and it is a kind of brilliance that transcends taste, I think. You know how seeing a Will Ferrell movie more than once makes it much funnier? Well, seeing a Wes Anderson movie more than once makes it funnier, cooler, and significantly more layered and complex than you initially realized. Seriously, get on it. I have watched each three times in recent weeks, with audio commentary and without, and I might not stop there.
To be completely honest, I should point out that the Wes Anderson flicks in question have been the only movies available for me to watch. Ever since arriving here in Victoria I have been leeching off of my sitemate, Gen, and her collection of books and movies (and Wes Anderson is all she’s got). See I was under the impression that movies and books would be a waste of luggage space and would lie useless on some shelf somewhere as I busily saved the world. But quickly I discovered that when the work comes along as slowly as it does, there are only so many times one can walk around the town waving to people or hours one can sit and read or play “solitaire”or “hearts” on the computer before pulling one’s hair out becomes the next logical step. Hence, other people’s movies. This is not a smooth and subtle request for movies or books, either. Once the work starts up I think it will occupy a lot of my time and if I had an entire library of movies it might definitely cut into my town integration time, which will be important. Also, once I come back to the states I don’t want to lug boxes of the stuff back with me. But you see the situation I was in. Gen and Wes Anderson to the rescue!
Nonfiction books. I finished Tom Friedman’s “The Lexus and the Olive Tree” last week and am now tackling “Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky”. What does all this mean? It means that in the very near future I am going to be much smarter than you. Ok, that’s not what it means at all. But for anyone who’s ever wanted to ditch work and responsibility and just sit in a chair and read, something they’ve always wanted to read but never did, for hours on end and for days in a row—the Peace Corps might just be for you! That is not, as I understand it, the current slogan…but it could be. And just in case the work does actually kick in soon and I do not have the opportunity to enlighten myself with the teachings of the Friedman’s and Chomsky’s of the world nearly as much, then I am making sure to take full advantage right now and really choosing to occupy myself with little else.
A couple of other things have happened since my last entry which were pretty unique. One was the beauty contest in my town and the other was the President of Honduras coming via helicopter (that whole dirt roads for hours in every direction thing, I imagine) to a nearby town. The beauty contest was between about 7 or 8 high school girls and is called “Novia del colegio” or, literally, “Girlfriend of the high school”—basically their version of Homecoming Queen. Except this is not held at a high school dance but rather at the town’s event center and the entire town is in attendance. The girls walk one by one onto the stage and do a prearranged routine for the crowd, some of them looking very comfortable in this kind of environment, others as if they had just put on high heels for the first time. Then they all stand next to one another and a middle aged man with a microphone asks the crowd to scream for each girl and that’s how the “novia” is chosen. Good times. The worst was that there was a dance for the town in the same center but everyone had to leave after the beauty contest so they could set up for the dance, etc., but the microphone dude wasted so much time having the previous year’s winner come and put the crown on Miss Novia del Colegio 2007 that by the time she got the microphone to thank everyone half the people were on their way out the door.
Then in the middle of this past week there was an event put on by the government in a nearby town to promote some corn growing initiative. It was held in the afternoon in the middle of a corn field just to emphasize the point, I guess. The only problem with that is the rainy season began last week and the rains, at least up here in Yoro, are well known for starting in the afternoon. And it’s true; nearly two weeks into the season and every single day the rains have started sometime after 3pm. So there is a pretty big crowd in this corn field listening to people talking about the initiative and how the President is on his way. Then we see a couple of choppers come over some distant hills and the camouflaged, rifle-toting military dudes drop some yellow smoke deals in the field and the choppers land and Mr. President hops out. That was a cool spectacle to witness and I wondered if Marine One has ever landed in some cornfield, perhaps in Iowa. Anyway, there’s a line of handshaking, sign waving, normal presidential fanfare, he gets onstage, makes his speech. The rain starts slowly and sporadically while he is talking, he does a good job incorporating it into what he’s saying, and before I know it he’s done, off the stage, and heading back to the choppers. Well no sooner does he get into the chopper, and this is just before it takes off, than the sky opens up and the rain starts coming down hard. We’re in a cornfield with no trees or buildings or hope for cover, only a handful of people brought umbrellas, and the one road leading to this field is packed with about seventeen yellow school buses, all from different towns, which are now chaotically filling up with people who want to get the hell out of dodge, all at once. It didn’t happen smoothly, as you might imagine. But it was a great event and something like out of a cheap Hollywood script—President comes to rural town to give speech, then leaves without incident, rains come, everyone but President looks like they went swimming with their clothes on.
Lastly, the housing search. Life with my current host family is rapidly nearing an end, and while that means no more meals cooked for me or laundry washed for me, or TV of any kind (not that theres ever any good TV), it also means complete independence and privacy and comfort. I’ll take the good with the bad on this one. There is not much in the way of available housing in Victoria, but after talking with several people I was able to find a little place available to rent. It has a small patio in front and even a back yard, so I’m crossing my fingers that all goes well and I can actually move into this place in a couple of weeks. It may be a bit longer before I have, you know, a bed to sleep on or chairs to sit in, but before you know it I may have my own fully functional place for any and everyone to come and visit. Excellent. OK, that’s it from me. I hope you are all doing well. I love and miss you guys.
Joe
Ok, so if week four helped me to see how my service could begin to take shape, then week five helped me to see how enlightened and cool I can become by watching Wes Anderson flicks and reading nonfiction books. Yes, it was a return to the general malaise of the first three weeks wherein there is much to be done but just not…right…now, damnit. The deal is us PCV’s are forbidden from riding motorcycles at all because in years past there were a number of deaths due to moto accidents. Ok, understood. Except that everyone in my neck of Honduras gets around by moto and when I say everyone I mean even the mayor. All of the roads are pretty bad around here, none of them are paved, and some aren’t big enough for cars. The municipality’s only car is in the shop, naturally, and so we have had to wait until the Centro de Salud made up their calendar for the summer of what towns they are going to visit so we can hitch a ride in their truck. Did you want to know all that? It means that next week there are villages to visit and work to begin…but this week, ahem, not.
Back to the issue at hand, Wes Anderson flicks and nonfiction books. If any of you dear friends and family out there have not yet seen either “The Royal Tenebaums” or “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou” then I suggest you do so. Now I don’t plan on making this blog a “wow, this is the coolest movie/book/music group” type blog—no, that doesn’t interest me at all. But speaking purely objectively, if you have not seen these movies then you need to, and fast. They are brilliant and it is a kind of brilliance that transcends taste, I think. You know how seeing a Will Ferrell movie more than once makes it much funnier? Well, seeing a Wes Anderson movie more than once makes it funnier, cooler, and significantly more layered and complex than you initially realized. Seriously, get on it. I have watched each three times in recent weeks, with audio commentary and without, and I might not stop there.
To be completely honest, I should point out that the Wes Anderson flicks in question have been the only movies available for me to watch. Ever since arriving here in Victoria I have been leeching off of my sitemate, Gen, and her collection of books and movies (and Wes Anderson is all she’s got). See I was under the impression that movies and books would be a waste of luggage space and would lie useless on some shelf somewhere as I busily saved the world. But quickly I discovered that when the work comes along as slowly as it does, there are only so many times one can walk around the town waving to people or hours one can sit and read or play “solitaire”or “hearts” on the computer before pulling one’s hair out becomes the next logical step. Hence, other people’s movies. This is not a smooth and subtle request for movies or books, either. Once the work starts up I think it will occupy a lot of my time and if I had an entire library of movies it might definitely cut into my town integration time, which will be important. Also, once I come back to the states I don’t want to lug boxes of the stuff back with me. But you see the situation I was in. Gen and Wes Anderson to the rescue!
Nonfiction books. I finished Tom Friedman’s “The Lexus and the Olive Tree” last week and am now tackling “Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky”. What does all this mean? It means that in the very near future I am going to be much smarter than you. Ok, that’s not what it means at all. But for anyone who’s ever wanted to ditch work and responsibility and just sit in a chair and read, something they’ve always wanted to read but never did, for hours on end and for days in a row—the Peace Corps might just be for you! That is not, as I understand it, the current slogan…but it could be. And just in case the work does actually kick in soon and I do not have the opportunity to enlighten myself with the teachings of the Friedman’s and Chomsky’s of the world nearly as much, then I am making sure to take full advantage right now and really choosing to occupy myself with little else.
A couple of other things have happened since my last entry which were pretty unique. One was the beauty contest in my town and the other was the President of Honduras coming via helicopter (that whole dirt roads for hours in every direction thing, I imagine) to a nearby town. The beauty contest was between about 7 or 8 high school girls and is called “Novia del colegio” or, literally, “Girlfriend of the high school”—basically their version of Homecoming Queen. Except this is not held at a high school dance but rather at the town’s event center and the entire town is in attendance. The girls walk one by one onto the stage and do a prearranged routine for the crowd, some of them looking very comfortable in this kind of environment, others as if they had just put on high heels for the first time. Then they all stand next to one another and a middle aged man with a microphone asks the crowd to scream for each girl and that’s how the “novia” is chosen. Good times. The worst was that there was a dance for the town in the same center but everyone had to leave after the beauty contest so they could set up for the dance, etc., but the microphone dude wasted so much time having the previous year’s winner come and put the crown on Miss Novia del Colegio 2007 that by the time she got the microphone to thank everyone half the people were on their way out the door.
Then in the middle of this past week there was an event put on by the government in a nearby town to promote some corn growing initiative. It was held in the afternoon in the middle of a corn field just to emphasize the point, I guess. The only problem with that is the rainy season began last week and the rains, at least up here in Yoro, are well known for starting in the afternoon. And it’s true; nearly two weeks into the season and every single day the rains have started sometime after 3pm. So there is a pretty big crowd in this corn field listening to people talking about the initiative and how the President is on his way. Then we see a couple of choppers come over some distant hills and the camouflaged, rifle-toting military dudes drop some yellow smoke deals in the field and the choppers land and Mr. President hops out. That was a cool spectacle to witness and I wondered if Marine One has ever landed in some cornfield, perhaps in Iowa. Anyway, there’s a line of handshaking, sign waving, normal presidential fanfare, he gets onstage, makes his speech. The rain starts slowly and sporadically while he is talking, he does a good job incorporating it into what he’s saying, and before I know it he’s done, off the stage, and heading back to the choppers. Well no sooner does he get into the chopper, and this is just before it takes off, than the sky opens up and the rain starts coming down hard. We’re in a cornfield with no trees or buildings or hope for cover, only a handful of people brought umbrellas, and the one road leading to this field is packed with about seventeen yellow school buses, all from different towns, which are now chaotically filling up with people who want to get the hell out of dodge, all at once. It didn’t happen smoothly, as you might imagine. But it was a great event and something like out of a cheap Hollywood script—President comes to rural town to give speech, then leaves without incident, rains come, everyone but President looks like they went swimming with their clothes on.
Lastly, the housing search. Life with my current host family is rapidly nearing an end, and while that means no more meals cooked for me or laundry washed for me, or TV of any kind (not that theres ever any good TV), it also means complete independence and privacy and comfort. I’ll take the good with the bad on this one. There is not much in the way of available housing in Victoria, but after talking with several people I was able to find a little place available to rent. It has a small patio in front and even a back yard, so I’m crossing my fingers that all goes well and I can actually move into this place in a couple of weeks. It may be a bit longer before I have, you know, a bed to sleep on or chairs to sit in, but before you know it I may have my own fully functional place for any and everyone to come and visit. Excellent. OK, that’s it from me. I hope you are all doing well. I love and miss you guys.
Joe
Wednesday, June 6, 2007
life begins...
Ok, so I have not done an exceptional job keeping this bad boy updated but this may be the new rule rather than exception since I have to travel to get to internet capable towns. Really, you all don’t want to be reading much more from me than once every ten days to two weeks anyway, do you? Didn’t think so…
So things here in Yoro, that is life as a Peace Corps Volunteer, started out very slowly. They told us in training that the majority of us would go through exactly that, especially at the beginning, but I chose to believe they were talking about other people. Wrong. I will not bore you all with the details of why the work did not begin right off the bat, just be content with the knowledge that it did not. I read two books during the eleven + weeks of training; I read three in the first three weeks here. I walked around the town meeting people and just waving and saying hi so much that I think the allure of a new gringo in town had long since faded and most were just annoyed…“Look, here comes the new gringo. He’s gonna wave and say hi, let’s duck inside real quick as he passes!”
Yea, it was kind of odd, definitely frustrating, and despite the people I had met and the books I had read, there was not much to show for the effort. I thought about all the stories I had heard of some volunteers that just end up reading books for two years. That idea does have some romantic qualities to it but if you were in my shoes you’d be feeling the same thing—WTF, I didn’t come down here to read!! Another thing I did do is settle into a decent running routine, too, which I mention as a way of transitioning to the beautiful views that are all around my town. It’s great pasture land with rolling hills covered in vegetation down one path and down another you’re running alongside a river that cuts between little mountains—just beautiful. So even though there was not much going on, I was occasionally pretty pleased with myself when I would stop and look around and take in the surroundings on one of these runs! Sustainable work? Nope. Any work at all? Haha, no. Beautiful Central American views? ¡Si!
Week four began with a bang, though, and continued on with a very different theme from the previous weeks—things to do, projects to begin. On Monday I went with a guy from the Muni, who is the mayor’s very knowledgeable water guy, and a gentleman that works at the Centro de Salud, or health center (sounds like a gym, think more a village hospital type deal). We went to a village up in the hills that has no water system at all to talk to the local leaders and see for ourselves what the situation was. Long, winding, unpaved, rocky mountain roads for over an hour, 1000 meters higher in elevation and we were there. Man, what a difference in weather a little mountain elevation can give; it was breezy and actually quite comfortable up there as opposed to the stifling heat of my town.
Anyway, we trekked all over town taking elevation points, checking their water source in the forest and where they think a tank would go, seeing how high other important sites in town were, etc all day. One might call it a feasibility study—nothing scientific, just checking to make sure they had what is needed for a basic water system.
Anyway, that took all day and by the time we returned I realized I had just completed a genuine day’s work for the first time here…it was pretty exciting. Later in the week the Spanish NGO in town hosted a seminar for the representatives of about 16 communities in the area about the importance of adding chlorine to their water systems. This was pure gold because I am the new water volunteer in town and instead of meeting all of these guys one at a time by traveling to 16 different villages, they were all in my town for the last two days of the week. It was an excellent seminar because in the area, for those communities that have water systems set up and running, most are not treating the water with anything. So while it is great that they have water there are still problems with illnesses, especially in the children, and they need to know how to manage treating their systems with chlorine.
The opportunity to meet all of these men who are on the water boards in their towns was excellent and what they were learning about was tangible and necessary. At one point during the training it struck me that there is no other place I would rather be than here, doing what I am doing right now. It seems odd, to be writing about grown men, local leaders of their communities no less, learning for the first time about the how and why of adding chlorine to their water systems. But that will have such a significant impact on the health of their towns that it is kind of exciting to witness. The other thing is these particular men are representing towns that are fairly well off in comparison to many others. The two towns I visited prior to this seminar had no water system at all—none at all. Every last drop of water that is used in these towns—for bathing, washing clothes and dishes, cooking, drinking, using the latrine, etc.—is coming from a small river running nearby in one case, and in the other from a small ground water source that runs into a very shallow rock bed. In both cases the water source runs very close to dry during the summer and is never very clean when there is water. The people in these towns often have to choose what tasks they can and can not do on a given day based on how much water is available.
I could go on and on but you get the picture. After last week I am more excited than ever to get to work and make an impact in the lives of the people I am meeting. It was very nearly an accident that I ended up in this program, but I can not think of anything else I would rather be doing. I just read a very funny book, one of the things I was busy with during the first twenty or so days, called “The Sex Lives of Cannibals.” It’s about a guy who goes with his girlfriend to live on a remote island in the South Pacific because he’s not satisfied with how his life is turning out. He relates his adventures and most are laugh out loud funny, but in one case he describes a situation where he had a lack of water available in his house. He is describing how he was frantic at one point and suddenly realizes that when you break life down to its most basic necessities, water tops the list—there is no one thing more important. My folks were kind enough to send me a care package which I received recently and in it was the Green Issue of Vanity Fair. Check this out, it comes from an article in the magazine about “Big Water”:
“According to a report prepared by the International Water Management Institute, a respected international research group, one person out of every three on the planet today lacks reliable access to freshwater, whether because the water is unsafe, unaffordable, or unavailable.”
One in three?! This is followed by a quote from an author and national chairwoman of a citizen’s advocacy group describing how more children die everyday from dirty water than from HIV/AIDS, malaria, war, and accidents combined. I personally had no idea the worldwide water situation was so dire but it seems clear that in the coming years this is an issue that will begin to take hold more and more on the world stage.
Anyway, things in week four helped me to see how my service here could begin to take shape and that was exciting. But to return to “The Sex Lives of Cannibals” if I could (and I can), I would like to close this particular blog chapter by making an observation about animals—dogs, to be more precise. In his remote South Pacific island, Maarten (the author) remarks that he never thought he would be in a place mentally where he would feel ok hurling stones at dogs. As his new life on Kiribati unfolds, of course, he comes to feel very comfortable doing just that. Similarly, dogs here in Honduras seem to share little with their North American brothers and sisters. For one they are never spayed or neutered so at any moment one is liable to witness doggie love in action, which the first couple of times is somewhat amusing but soon becomes depressing. They are truly scavengers here, roaming the streets with chunks of their fur missing if they have any, many with permanent scars carving lines across their snouts or bodies, and feeding themselves off the garbage they can scrounge from the streets.
It goes without saying that, for the most part, they are not welcomed into the homes of Hondurans as they are in the States. Certainly there are many homes and families that have a healthy relationship with their dog and in those instances the extent of our North American love-fest with these animals does seem a tad sickening. But generally speaking Hondurans have no love of man’s best friend and he returns the favor. If I had a nickel for every PCV that came to help us during training with a hole in their jeans who had a story about a run-in with a dog or pack of dogs—well, I would have several nickels. During FBT in Sabanagrande one could not go on a run without a rock in hand and expect to complete the run unmolested. To this point the dogs here in my town are of the lay-around-all-day-regardless-of-how-close-anything-comes-to-their-“territory” type as opposed to the spittle-spewing-psychos-with-a-taste-for-human-blood type. This is a good thing…but I do keep a close eye on how close rocks are at any moment as I walk around town, just to be safe. More to come.
Joe
So things here in Yoro, that is life as a Peace Corps Volunteer, started out very slowly. They told us in training that the majority of us would go through exactly that, especially at the beginning, but I chose to believe they were talking about other people. Wrong. I will not bore you all with the details of why the work did not begin right off the bat, just be content with the knowledge that it did not. I read two books during the eleven + weeks of training; I read three in the first three weeks here. I walked around the town meeting people and just waving and saying hi so much that I think the allure of a new gringo in town had long since faded and most were just annoyed…“Look, here comes the new gringo. He’s gonna wave and say hi, let’s duck inside real quick as he passes!”
Yea, it was kind of odd, definitely frustrating, and despite the people I had met and the books I had read, there was not much to show for the effort. I thought about all the stories I had heard of some volunteers that just end up reading books for two years. That idea does have some romantic qualities to it but if you were in my shoes you’d be feeling the same thing—WTF, I didn’t come down here to read!! Another thing I did do is settle into a decent running routine, too, which I mention as a way of transitioning to the beautiful views that are all around my town. It’s great pasture land with rolling hills covered in vegetation down one path and down another you’re running alongside a river that cuts between little mountains—just beautiful. So even though there was not much going on, I was occasionally pretty pleased with myself when I would stop and look around and take in the surroundings on one of these runs! Sustainable work? Nope. Any work at all? Haha, no. Beautiful Central American views? ¡Si!
Week four began with a bang, though, and continued on with a very different theme from the previous weeks—things to do, projects to begin. On Monday I went with a guy from the Muni, who is the mayor’s very knowledgeable water guy, and a gentleman that works at the Centro de Salud, or health center (sounds like a gym, think more a village hospital type deal). We went to a village up in the hills that has no water system at all to talk to the local leaders and see for ourselves what the situation was. Long, winding, unpaved, rocky mountain roads for over an hour, 1000 meters higher in elevation and we were there. Man, what a difference in weather a little mountain elevation can give; it was breezy and actually quite comfortable up there as opposed to the stifling heat of my town.
Anyway, we trekked all over town taking elevation points, checking their water source in the forest and where they think a tank would go, seeing how high other important sites in town were, etc all day. One might call it a feasibility study—nothing scientific, just checking to make sure they had what is needed for a basic water system.
Anyway, that took all day and by the time we returned I realized I had just completed a genuine day’s work for the first time here…it was pretty exciting. Later in the week the Spanish NGO in town hosted a seminar for the representatives of about 16 communities in the area about the importance of adding chlorine to their water systems. This was pure gold because I am the new water volunteer in town and instead of meeting all of these guys one at a time by traveling to 16 different villages, they were all in my town for the last two days of the week. It was an excellent seminar because in the area, for those communities that have water systems set up and running, most are not treating the water with anything. So while it is great that they have water there are still problems with illnesses, especially in the children, and they need to know how to manage treating their systems with chlorine.
The opportunity to meet all of these men who are on the water boards in their towns was excellent and what they were learning about was tangible and necessary. At one point during the training it struck me that there is no other place I would rather be than here, doing what I am doing right now. It seems odd, to be writing about grown men, local leaders of their communities no less, learning for the first time about the how and why of adding chlorine to their water systems. But that will have such a significant impact on the health of their towns that it is kind of exciting to witness. The other thing is these particular men are representing towns that are fairly well off in comparison to many others. The two towns I visited prior to this seminar had no water system at all—none at all. Every last drop of water that is used in these towns—for bathing, washing clothes and dishes, cooking, drinking, using the latrine, etc.—is coming from a small river running nearby in one case, and in the other from a small ground water source that runs into a very shallow rock bed. In both cases the water source runs very close to dry during the summer and is never very clean when there is water. The people in these towns often have to choose what tasks they can and can not do on a given day based on how much water is available.
I could go on and on but you get the picture. After last week I am more excited than ever to get to work and make an impact in the lives of the people I am meeting. It was very nearly an accident that I ended up in this program, but I can not think of anything else I would rather be doing. I just read a very funny book, one of the things I was busy with during the first twenty or so days, called “The Sex Lives of Cannibals.” It’s about a guy who goes with his girlfriend to live on a remote island in the South Pacific because he’s not satisfied with how his life is turning out. He relates his adventures and most are laugh out loud funny, but in one case he describes a situation where he had a lack of water available in his house. He is describing how he was frantic at one point and suddenly realizes that when you break life down to its most basic necessities, water tops the list—there is no one thing more important. My folks were kind enough to send me a care package which I received recently and in it was the Green Issue of Vanity Fair. Check this out, it comes from an article in the magazine about “Big Water”:
“According to a report prepared by the International Water Management Institute, a respected international research group, one person out of every three on the planet today lacks reliable access to freshwater, whether because the water is unsafe, unaffordable, or unavailable.”
One in three?! This is followed by a quote from an author and national chairwoman of a citizen’s advocacy group describing how more children die everyday from dirty water than from HIV/AIDS, malaria, war, and accidents combined. I personally had no idea the worldwide water situation was so dire but it seems clear that in the coming years this is an issue that will begin to take hold more and more on the world stage.
Anyway, things in week four helped me to see how my service here could begin to take shape and that was exciting. But to return to “The Sex Lives of Cannibals” if I could (and I can), I would like to close this particular blog chapter by making an observation about animals—dogs, to be more precise. In his remote South Pacific island, Maarten (the author) remarks that he never thought he would be in a place mentally where he would feel ok hurling stones at dogs. As his new life on Kiribati unfolds, of course, he comes to feel very comfortable doing just that. Similarly, dogs here in Honduras seem to share little with their North American brothers and sisters. For one they are never spayed or neutered so at any moment one is liable to witness doggie love in action, which the first couple of times is somewhat amusing but soon becomes depressing. They are truly scavengers here, roaming the streets with chunks of their fur missing if they have any, many with permanent scars carving lines across their snouts or bodies, and feeding themselves off the garbage they can scrounge from the streets.
It goes without saying that, for the most part, they are not welcomed into the homes of Hondurans as they are in the States. Certainly there are many homes and families that have a healthy relationship with their dog and in those instances the extent of our North American love-fest with these animals does seem a tad sickening. But generally speaking Hondurans have no love of man’s best friend and he returns the favor. If I had a nickel for every PCV that came to help us during training with a hole in their jeans who had a story about a run-in with a dog or pack of dogs—well, I would have several nickels. During FBT in Sabanagrande one could not go on a run without a rock in hand and expect to complete the run unmolested. To this point the dogs here in my town are of the lay-around-all-day-regardless-of-how-close-anything-comes-to-their-“territory” type as opposed to the spittle-spewing-psychos-with-a-taste-for-human-blood type. This is a good thing…but I do keep a close eye on how close rocks are at any moment as I walk around town, just to be safe. More to come.
Joe
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