Housing, food, work update...

We’ve been on the hunt for a new housing situation. The host fam thing is starting to get old, REAL OLD (even to Javi who has been cool with it almost the whole time). We’ve looked at some houses in a safe neighborhood that is near the center and our favorite sitting spot, Plaza San Francisco (see photo at right). We’ve got our eye on one that has a high wall (i.e. undisturbed hanging out in the front yard), a place for a hammock on the front porch and flower-planting potential. There are already some purple and pink flower bushes that grow along the wall which practically sold me before I even saw the inside of the house. We are waiting on Peace Corps before we can make our next move.

We are still eating out almost every meal (or making PBJ) to avoid the kitchen and we’ve definitely scoped out the good eating spots in town by this point. The other day I was craving a salad big time, and because Hondurans are not the salad eating types, it can be hard to come by (impossible, really). Wendy’s however, one of our fast food joints here in town, does have salads. We’ve eaten there a couple times just so I can get my green leafy vegetable fix. Well, iceberg lettuce fix at least, which reminds me its kind of sad when Wendy’s is your only option for salads in town. While we were eating there for lunch, a rather large overweight American man (presumably from the base) could be seen eating 2 large hamburgers with Biggie fries and drink. Its hard to escape that image, even in Comayagua, Honduras. DISCLAIMER: WE DO NOT PLAN ON EATING AT WENDY’S ONCE I CAN GET GREEN LEAFIES AT HOME IN A SANITARY KITCHEN. (Its kind of embarrassing to admit that we have eaten there while in Honduras.)

Work is going well. We attended our first Chamber of Commerce (Camara de Comercio) meeting last Thursday. We’ve gotten our first project with them, which is to evaluate their brand new website and help them with the placement of advertisements on the site. Today we spent the day looking at other Chamber of Commerce websites in the States doing a comparison between whats out there and what their site has, and we came up with some decent suggestions. Their site is at http://www.camaradecomayagua.hn/. Maybe in a few weeks it might look a little different.

At the Escuela Taller/Programa Colonial de Comayagua, we’ve been hard at work on the two projects we’ve got going there right now (see left, Javi "hard at work"). One project involves us looking at the administration process and flow of cash through the organization. We are interviewing different employees to get an understanding of what they do, and then we are mapping out their different processes. This not only allows us to get a closer look at their operations (and therefore understand what goes on there) but helps us to identify areas where they might streamline operations or do things more efficiently. We’re still on the understanding bit, since that process takes awhile (especially in Spanish). When we work on that project we start to feel like auditors again, Javi as the senior and me as the associate. Its kind of fun.

The other project is working on the business incubation program the school wants to set up for the students. (Reminder: the school teaches kids from the marginal neighborhoods of Comayagua in a trade – carpentry, metal work, electricity and construction – for free. The PCC then uses the students to complete some of the restoration work they are doing on the colonial buildings around town). The school wants to teach them entrepreneurial skills in addition to a trade, in the hopes that some might open their own businesses, therefore creating jobs for themselves and for others. We are there to help them set up the business curriculum and facilitate a “business incubator” where students would receive support and resources from the school in their second year of training if they were interested in starting a business. We have been busy researching the subject and making contacts with people who can help us create a methodology for this thing.

This weekend is Javi’s birthday, so we are thinking of getting out of dodge to celebrate the first day of his 29th year and get a little R&R away from Comayagua. Where we are going is still up in the air, but where ever it is, we’ll be sure to post a few pixs and write a little something.

Javi has made a full recovery from his bout with dengue fever. He’s been back in action since about Sunday of last week (that would be the 13th). If it comes up, many people here in Comayagua say that they’ve had dengue once before, and what they remember most was the way their body ached. I think Javi would agree.

We had a great week at work. This past Thursday, Friday and most of Saturday we attended the PCC’s (Programa Colonial de Comayagua) annual planning meeting which they held at a charming hotel in Valle de Angeles. (Valle, if you remember, is where we would check internet and make calls while we were in Cantarranas last month.) The meeting was supposed to be held at the lake but plans were changed last minute on Wednesday night due to some scheduling issues with the conference room we were going to use. What’s funny is no one told us, and we had packed clothing for the hot and humid lake, and lots of bug spray. Valle is in the mountains, there are few bugs and it gets quite chilly at night. We’re not sure if Ana Carolina, the director and our counterpart, was too busy (she is an extremely busy and overworked woman) or if no one thought to tell the random gringos that had started showing up at their office recently, but we didn’t find out until we were on our way out of town, and the driver started heading south on the highway, instead of north. We are pretty flexible people and were not too offended by their oversight, but having only tank tops and sandals wasn’t fun at night in Valle. However, we learned A LOT about the PCC and the people who work there. We have meaningful projects and we really think the work they do there is valuable.

(Photos - top right, in front of the fountain at the Valle de Angeles hotel. Bottom left, us sitting on the planning meeting.)

We were given our own room at the hotel and three solid, tasty meals, all courtesy of the PCC. This was EXTREEMLY appreciated by us, since we could not have paid for it otherwise. We were also happy to use the opportunity to catch up a bit on our budget. You see, we are each “paid” 4000 lempiras a month by Peace Corps, which is about $200 a month, or $6.67 a day. (This amount is in addition to what they pay for our housing.) In Honduras, $200 a month is both a lot of money and next to nothing to different groups of people. The people that we work with at the PCC would be considered part of the small middle class in this country. They have a decent standard of living and can afford apartments in the historic center of town, go out to eat and go to the bar, some drive cars and they have stylish new clothes. We are not exactly sure what they make, but we can definitely tell you that $400 a month between the two of us does not buy this lifestyle. Then there are many people in this country who live off of much less, and you have only to walk a little ways out of the central district of Comayagua, look out the window of the bus on the highway, or walk the streets of Cantarranas to see how obvious that is. A lot of things cost the same as in the States, maybe not housing, but lots of food, toiletries and housing items do. Plus, we have the American base near by, which we hear adds to inflated prices for both food and housing here in Comayagua. We have been having trouble staying within this budget, especially since we have to eat out most meals due to the less than sanitary condition of the kitchen in the host family house we have to live in right now. It seems like all we do is eat and use internet (and occasionally call our moms) and we spend more money than we are given. So we are stuck in a strange socio-economic limbo here in Comayagua as Peace Corps volunteers. Many people think we are “rich” (at least in a Honduran context) contractors from the base, since that is the situation of most all the other gringos in town. We also work with people who aren’t super wealthy by any means but definitely have more disposable income than we’ve got to work with. But then you’ve got the ultra-poor, so we ourselves are not truly poor, especially when you consider that we have the Peace Corps to pay our medical bills, generous family members to send us packages and who would help us out in a bind, and a small savings. There are stores full of imported household goods (25,000 lempira refrigerators, stoves, couches) which some Hondurans can afford, but many can’t, including us. We are feeling what it is like to have so many things for sale in front of you, but not be able to buy them.

In training, some of us would joke that we were Peace Corps “lite” here in Honduras, compared to other countries peace corps works in where volunteers work in physical conditions much more extreme than we deal with here. In some places, we have running hot water, cable tv, refrigeration, electricity and American fast food. Of course, there are volunteers here who do not have these things in the smaller villages, but we do here in Comayagua. But I don’t think we are Peace Corps lite, by any means. It is a different kind of a challenge to live in a place where there ARE things to buy (unlike the sticks of Africa) but not be able to buy anything. It’s also quite a different story to live in a country so affected by its giant neighbor to the north. 1 in 7 Hondurans are illegally (a few legally) working in the US, many sending money home. This leads to a myriad of economic and social factors in this country. One I notice every day are “piropos” (“compliments” in Spanish but really catcalls) that are 80% of the time directed to me in English (“Hey baby, I love you…etc) learned in person or taught by a friend who spent some time working in the States. So while we might not have to eat dinner from a communal food plate like volunteers in Morocco or carry water from a well to our house like my step sister Chelsea did in Guinea, it is definitely hard and different and a challenge everyday.

Well, I got off track there and wanted to talk a bit about the PCC – what they do and what our place will be in that organization - but that will have to wait until another entry. This one has started to get long.

Last thing, I wanted to post this picture from our swearing in ceremony the day we officially became volunteers. The other two are our friends Kate and Sean. They are in the western part of Honduras (Santa Rosa de Copan) and we really miss those guys. But they've got a nice site so we will definitely have to visit!

My First Week of Work and a Visit from Dengue

Sara and I started our work as volunteers in Comayagua this week. This is what I recall:

I had been sick for a couple days with a sore neck, back, and joints, headache behind the eyes, fever, some vomiting, and lots and LOTS of diarrhea. I had resisted going to the hospital because I was convinced it was something I got from making food in our not very ‘hygienical’ kitchen and I wanted to fight it off since we had another 7 weeks to live in the house. Being sick like this also reminded me of the time we were sick in Nepal for a week and all the weight we lost from it and after 3 years of Dallas and 3 months of Manteca, a six pack was in my near future again if I could only hang on a little longer.

On Wednesday, realizing that I could no longer fight this stomach bug nor miss another day of our first week of work, we decided to check out the Honduran Hospital system. We had already heard some horror stories about the medical system, but heard it was standard procedure to give blood and a stool sample for stomach illnesses and a buddy of mine told me that he got an IV when he went in which sounded really exciting that morning in my very dehydrated state.

Sara came with me first thing in the morning and after a blood test, a very awkward stool sample (Sara had to hold my IV bag in the men’s bathroom), 3 IV bags, and seven hours we found out that my plaquetas were very low and that I might have dengue fever. The doctor asked me to return the next day to see if the plaquetas (platelets) bounced back. He said if they didn’t it could be a very severe kind of dengue which results from bleeding from all orifices and patients have to be hospitalized so that they can monitor them. He gave me a bag full of pills and some bolsas of floura (the stuff that gives you the good bacteria back, segun Sara) and I went home plumper from the IVs but not feeling that much better.

I was impressed with Comayagua’s hospital care it was very clean and had a friendly staff. I have been told that Honduran doctors shoot first with the needles and ask questions later, but in my case they didn’t give me anything until they gave me some IV’s and took the appropriate tests. I thought it was unusual that during the whole time there they did not use gloves at all not even for IV inserting or collection of samples.

And so it’s Friday now and the first week of work is done. I can honestly say I only worked about 3 hours all occuring on Monday before the diarrhea began. The 3 hours consisted of an awkwardly short meeting with the mayor and another very dengue sweaty meeting with our counterpart. I thought it was a very unlucky, unproductive start here, but my lovely wife reminded me last night that I have already been infected by one of the four types of dengue in the first week of two years (there are supposedly only 4 kinds of dengue and you are only able to get infected once by each one). Pretty productive week afterall :)

Photos from Comayagua

Here are some photos we took this afternoon of Comayagua. Of course, these are of the nicest parts of our new city so it doesn't look this good everywhere. These photos are of spots around town that the taller (shop school) we are going to work with has fixed up with the help of the Spanish government. They have done a fabulous job.

City hall with Honduran flag:

Parque Central:

Plaza San Francisco:

La Catedral and Parque Central:

Caxa Real:

We will post another update of how we are doing here soon.