Who can save our village?

Once again, no rolling update—sorry about that. That is the best way to update this thing but I just didn’t get around to it. And for those of you who wrote me emails AGES ago, I apologize—you have something waiting in your “inbox” now. Hopefully. So there is not a lot of news news over here. When I was in a major city last to update the blog, Obama inauguration timeframe, I was there because my group of peace corps volunteers was gathered for our Close of Service conference. Its where PC gives us the laundry list of reports that need to be finished, forms that need to be filled out, medical appointments scheduled, yada yada. Since then I have been in Victoria the entire time, occasionally returning to villages to finish up work on a study and design and, in a few cases, visiting them for the first time to get to know the water situation.

The new development is that I am definitely at the point in my service where the information I collect now about villages is something I will pass down to the new volunteer who follows me here in Victoria. In the past couple of weeks, for example, I have gone to three places I had never been to before and each one is starting from nothing. But since the season for measuring the output of each water source is not until (normally) late March through early May, I will be fortunate to be able to take those measurements before I leave. And all that must happen before the topo study and design. So a portion of my work at the moment is just organizing information for the next volunteer.

One thing that is unique to what I have done here to this point is that the first week in February I started hosting a (very) brief segment during the evening news hour on Victoria’s own radio station—in case that news had not quite reached your various states yet, its 90.5 FM (www.rsvictoria.com)! My segment is ten minutes normally, once a week, and it deals with environmental and basic sanitation issues. I do a mock interview with the same fictional campesino, and each week he is defending his unsanitary or environmentally destructive actions because of complaints lodged against him by his neighbors. Hilarity ensues and we eventually do learn something each and every week. This project is largely based off the work a former volunteer did a couple of years ago, but I have a friend here who is helping me tailor it to the area.

That brings up an intriguing truth about Victoria—not too long ago the town began it’s very own radio station (complete with a satellite internet hookup), and yet electricity here is not a constant. There are families here, who have sons and cousins and uncles in the States, who live in two story mansion-looking homes, and there are families living in shacks that are pieced together with whatever materials people could find. The casco urbano, or Victoria proper (where the mayor’s office is), does not have many of those shacks, but there are some and they stand in stark contrast to the expansive homes not far away. There are only two places that have internet in the entire muncipality—the new, privately owned radio station; and at the office of the Spanish NGO in town. Not in the high school, not in the mayor’s office, nowhere else.

Victoria is one of the largest municipalities in the department of Yoro and is the poorest. The casco urbano is located at one of the extreme ends of its own municipality, right on the border of another department, Comayagua. To give an example of how oddly placed the town is within its own municipio, check this out: when I go on runs, one of the paths I take goes south and from the mayor’s office, following that path, I can be in another department (Comayagua) inside of five minutes; yet, there are some towns and villages to the north and west that are part of Victoria that are three and four hours away by bus. Very odd. It should not be hard to imagine that many of the people in these far-away villages spend much more of their time going to nearby cities (that have supermarkets, paved roads, internet, etc.) to do errands than they do going to Victoria. But none of these other, bigger cities (Santa Rita, El Negrito, Morazán) has any kind of jurisdiction over them and can not help them for water, health, or property issues, etc.

The work I do is mostly (if not entirely) in these villages far away from Victoria proper. Some of these villages are the kind where it takes a three hour bus ride and then a two hour hike to get to—completely isolated, away from everything. You can imagine what kind of assistance people in towns like this can expect from their local government, especially considering the corruption and poverty that wracks this country. Victoria has a pretty awesome mayor, an engineer who worked with an NGO in Victoria and nearby municipios for decades before running for office. There are always political factions and party loyalty issues, but nearly everyone admits the current mayor has done more in the past three years for Victoria than were done in the twenty years previous. But he can only do so much—forget about how much money he does not have to do all the projects that need doing, the mayor’s office does not have transportation. Neither the mayor nor anyone who works for him has a car or truck to go visit these villages. People who work in the office use their own motos for transport, if they have one, but a good portion of the towns pertaining to the municipio are often inaccesible to moto given the time of year and weather conditions.

So there you go, thats probably enough Victoria for one blog entry, no?! Here’s one last quick fact for use at parties/inaugural balls: there are 168 towns and villages in the municipio of Victoria and only five of them have electricity. But that is two more than had electricity before the current mayor took power. More to come, I hope everyone is well.