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