Post script to "What we do"

Just FYI, the last post was not actually what Javi and I do personally. (Oh my God that would be crazy.) It is a list of what EVERYONE in the BUSINESS PROJECT (Honduras) does, which includes almost 30 people. I had a few people emailing me saying that we must be pretty busy down here with all those projects that we have going on. We have about 5 projects right now between the two of us. I'll write something about that later.

cheery-o!

What we do

I wrote this summary a few weeks ago, after all the business volunteers (both old and new) got together for our the annual "reconnect" meeting. I know some of you may be wondering what we actually do down here as so-called “volunteers” in the very vague area of “business.” Maybe this will help clear some of that up. We all had to give brief presentations of what we are working on, so I took notes of what people's projects are.

I’ve arranged this list by project, versus person, since you wouldn’t know people by names and there is some overlap with some people working on similar types of things. Most people are working on more than one project. So, without further ado, THIS IS WHAT WE DO:

• Support Caja Rurales (rural banks) and local Savings and Loans through trainings of members and staff in banking concepts and other types of organizational support
• Website development including design, content and maintenance
• Business Plan trainings, especially at the lower levels of Honduran society (ladies who make coconut bread or farmers for example). Javi and I are organizing a business plan curriculum to be taught to the students at the Escuela Taller here in Comayagua (we will actually end up teaching bits and pieces of it as well).
• Marketing and promotion for artisan groups (including many native peoples) and local tourist initiatives.
• Business simulations (like we did during training) for students in local middle and high schools
• Computer classes for all age groups, from everything on “this is how you use a mouse” to advanced programming courses. One volunteer is developing curriculum for a high school computer class in advanced computing topics.
• Supporting small business co-ops and groups on everything from trainings in how to organize and manage your business to support to find funding and get started. Many are women’s groups who make artisan goods or food items.
• Needs analysis and strategic planning for start-up NGO’s
• Implementation of databases (using excel) for organizations ranging from the local Health Center (to look up medical information) to collecting taxes at the local municipality
• Support to local coffee growers – including promotion of their product and improved fertilization techniques
• One volunteer is working with a water/sanitation volunteer to bring a landfill to his town (trash is currently thrown on a mountain side and is blowing into the town’s water source)
• Support to business youth groups (marketing surveys, product improvement techniques)
• Tourism development – including websites, tourist literature (tour guides, brochures, posters), cultural programming, even cutting trails for new ecotourism projects
• Support for an initiative that wishes to turn trash collection into a small business, with recyclables being sold off and organic items being turned into fertilizer.
• Building libraries in small towns and in schools. One volunteer has been recruited to become an elementary school’s part time librarian.
• Solar ovens (not yet started)
• AIDS charlas (lectures) to men’s only groups and school aged kids
• One on one computer training
• English classes
• Local town newspaper published by high school students, taught through a computer class
• Baseball teams
• The “colgate” project (How to brush properly)
• Why to stay in school charlas
• “Odyssey of the mind” (creative thinking competition among school kids.)
• The world map project (paint a giant map of the world on a school’s wall ---I am starting this one on Wednesday…..yikes! kids and paint!!)
• Someone started a rugby team (is that really considered development?)
• Pen pals programs with kids in the US
• And….this one is great so I’ll put it last….one girl has started heading up “Ladies Night” at her small town’s new gym. This might not sound legit, but actually, educating about physical fitness and teaching appropriate ways to work out definitely has its place.

There were a few more….but I was getting tired of typing them up and ome were hard to explain in a single bullet point.

Honduras has six areas that volunteers work in. The other five are Municipal Development, Youth Development, Health/HIV-AIDS, Water/Sanitation, and Protected Areas Management. Other peace corps countries may have the same projects, or may have different ones depending on the needs of the particular country.

Sometimes day to day, you can feel as if what you are doing here isn't making much of a difference. But I was inspired (at least temporarily!) when we all got together and I saw what our project is doing here in Honduras.

Hurricane Felix

Well Javi and I thought we were in for our first hurricane, and a category 5 no less, yesterday evening. I checked the internet midday yesterday to see an image of a massive hurricane, the eye of the storm which was supposed to pass right over central Honduras! Mild panic and excitement set in!!


Up until that point, I thought the storm would only affect those on the north coast. We got a call from our project manager to tell us to "stead fast," or as we interpreted it, "hunker down," so we went around town in a frenzy buying food and stocking up on water. Hondurans, to the contrary, were pretty laxy dazy about the whole thing and continued on with their usual, laxy dazy pace. We figured this was due to one too many hurricanes passing through their country.

Anyway, after we were all stocked up, we waited. Some heavy rains came, but nothing worse than we had seen before. Turns out, (we found out this morning) Felix turned into a tropical storm by the time it hit land, mostly dumping rain on the swampy region that lies between northeastern Honduras and Nicaragua, the vast jungle wilderness of the Mosquitia.

Many had been comparing this hurricane to MITCH, a storm that wreaked havoc on Honduras in 1998, killing 11,000 (?) people and damaging the already feeble economy. I thought the most interesting part of the whole thing was when a guy at work told us that there were some people who were praying that the hurricane would bring that kind of damage, because then Honduras would get international attention again and the aid money would come poring in. That is crazy.

Another interesting antidote was a story I read on weather.com before we knew Felix would turn into a tropical storm. This guy had been evacuated from Roatan and was waiting for a flight back to the States. He was quoted as saying something to the effect that he hoped all this mess was worth it, because he had only gotten 7 dives in so far on his vacation, and he was a bit put out. SEVEN DIVES. And absolutely no thought for the rest of the people who actually live there on that island. Wow.

Well, thats all I have to say about that. Next time I will be posting something about the different kind of work business volunteers do here. Bye for now!