Christmas greeting

I flew home for a few days to see my sister graduate from New Mexico State University. It took me as much time to travel there and back, as time I had to spend with my family, but it was worth it nonetheless.

Here is a pic with my sister and my mom in her professor regalia:


Congratulations Holly and Andy!

I went by myself. Some family members were concerned about me travelling to and from the San Pedro Sula airport solita, but there are many single lady volunteers who do that stuff every day, so of course I survived it.

A volunteer I knew (who has finished up her service and gone home) once told me after a quick trip to the States, she should have never gone back home so close to the end of her service. Although I don’t exactly feel the same, now I understand. I’ve been a bit grumpy since I’ve gotten back. Maybe it’s the lingering resentment from the butt slapping (see below – which by the way, has led me to ALWAYS carry something heavy in my hand while walking around in case I need to peg somebody with it). It could be a form of senioritis – “learned a lot, had fun, time to move on.” Could also be that, with only 3months left here after Christmas that we are starting to see how SO many things we worked hard for are still the same……

Anyway, getting out and changing scenery is usually a good thing so for Christmas we will be in Guatemala. Hopefully, the change up will be enough to charge up our batteries and work these last 3 months with some gusto. On the 30th my mom will be here through the first week of January (yay!) so that will also be fun.

Here’s a parting video for this entry, a “Christmas greeting.” I took it last night right before Javi and I opened Christmas gifts to each other. (Note the beautiful wrapping of the gifts under the “tree” and the “Christmas music.”)

I’ll post some Guatemala pictures later on.

Merry Christmas everyone!

Serenity Now!!!!!!!

This is one of those stories that is still making me BOILING mad, but also makes me laugh so I thought I’d share it out here on cyber space.

So I’m walking home a few days ago, of course minding my own business and just doing my thing. I come around the corner to a street where there is no one else around except for a young kid (boy) about 15 or 16 years old who is walking towards me. As we get closer to each other, I notice that he is acting a bit strange, but there are lots of strange folks here and I am a blond headed tall gringa so that sometimes throws people off, so I didn’t take much notice of it.

As he passes me, I feel a light slap on my rear end. That’s right, that little shit slapped my ass. Fury rose up in me. Almost 2 years of constant sexual harassment (usually only verbal) on Honduran streets, and my complete resentment and dislike of it, came to a boiling point. I flipped around immediately. He looked at me and started run. Without thinking, I started to run after him!!! Now, get this, I had been carrying my sun umbrella, so I start chasing this kid, with an open umbrella yelling obscenities in English (Spanish had completely escaped me in my moment of fury!). I have to laugh now thinking what that must have looked like. Now, the umbrella was causing understandably a lot of wind resistance, so I wasn’t going to be able to catch up to the kid, also considering he was half my age and a faster runner than I am. (It never occurred to me to drop the umbrella the whole time!)

When I realized I was never going to catch him, I took the water bottle I had been carrying in my hand and hucked it at him. Somehow (and I am the worst shot ever), it got him in the back! Of course, an almost empty plastic bottle did nothing, but I sure hope it scared him. I’m sure it did, because the look on his face when I first started chasing him was of complete surprise!!!

Crazy, huh?! The fury and my reaction was a complete surprise to myself….I seriously just flipped out. I get SO tired of the treatment women get here, so tired of the machismo, that when this little kid went and took that extra step by physically touching me, I just lost it!!!! It’s just one of those times that makes me REALLY look forward to being back home.

Happy Thanksgiving!

We opted out of the big volunteer thanksgiving gatherings that go on here in Honduras to do our own thing this year. We made thanksgiving dinner at home and invited Conor over...it was my first attempt at making a holiday dinner without knowing and experienced matriarchal figures around to help. It actually went pretty well! Of course, we were greatly aided by the fact that we did not make a turkey, due to cost (expensive import from the States!) and sheer amount of meat that would have resulted (we couldn't justify 16 lbs of meat among 3 people). So, Conor picked us up a delicious Honduran fried chicken (whole) and Javi and I made all the fixins!

Traditions are important to carry on, even more so when you are away from home and in a foreign country. So, we tried to have a day as close to thanksgiving as we could get.

Example tradition 1: Carving the turkey (in our case, pollo frito)




Example tradition 2: Watching "foosball" on the tele (at Conor's house)

Example tradition 3: Baking pies

(I was quite proud how my apple pie turned out...isn't it pretty?)

Next year we will be back home and Thanksgiving will once again be relegated to those older family members who really do it right. Back to cooking all day in the kitchen with the ladies, men on the couch with top pants buttons undone and watching football, etc..... Although I miss the traditional family get togethers now, some day soon we'll be home and we'll always have the fun memories of putting on holidays here in Honduras!

Hope your's was nice as well. Happy thanksgiving!

Wires!

Honduras has a sort of haphazard infrastructure in some aspects. Roads, public transport, water delivery, etc. are all sort of "random," but one thing that really exemplifies this are electrical wires. They are strung up and around in such disorder and in ways, in what appears to my non-engineering perspective, as extremely dangerous. It seems like it was jerry rigged the first time, and then jerry rigged a 100 times after that, and you get what you see today. Its one of those things that you really notice when you first get here, and then after a while, it sort of just fades off in the distance and you become oblivious to it. For some reason, the other day I was inspired to put something about it on the blog, so I walked around Comayagua and took a few shots.

Check this one out.....holy crap!

This seriously can't be safe!

Wires strung across the front of city hall:

A "telephone pole," on our street:

Growth on wires:

Nicaragua Vacation

Nicaragua was a great trip! It was actually surprising how much there was to see and do. Here in Honduras there are a few cool things to do, but you can't have too high of standards for all the supposed "tourist destinations," so we weren't expecting the moon or anything. But it was really fun!

Here is a map (although tiny, of course) to look at if you want to see where some of the places we visited are located:
First stop, Leon:

A liberal city, with a good vibe. The cathedral above was one of many scattered around town.

Next, Granada:

(colonial city on Lago de Nicaragua)

The lake at sunset:

We met this painter who showed us some of his artwork:

Granada has a lot of fine places to eat and chill. I really liked this place in particular, with its interior garden, hammocks and colonial architecture:


From Granada, we spent one night on an island in the middle of the lake (Isla de Ometepe). The island was two active volcanoes, and here is one of them:

San Juan del Sur:

(southwestern Nicaragua near the border with Costa Rica)

The view from our hotel in San Juan:

This hotel had a fabulous balcony, as you can see. We loved it! And it was the cheapest place we stayed the whole time...just $10 a night. However, the room also came with ferocious biting fire ants, that bit at night in bed as we slept, and attacked anything and everything in our bags and trash (including dirty laundry and clipped fingernails....gross)!

Another balcony picture:

San Juan had more surfers than I've ever seen in one place. They came from all over the world for the waves that crash on the beaches just north and south of San Juan. Although we didn't try surfing (this trip at least) we took a water taxi north one day to see some of these beaches.

This really cheesy guy came up to me on the beach and started flexing to get my attention. It didn't work!!!

The waves were really big and scary! We both got rocked a few times and after one good scare I decided to keep my distance from the crashing waves while swimming in the water.

Our last stop on the trip, the Laguna de Apoyo, just south of Masaya.

(a small, peaceful lake in a crater)

We spent just one night here, although we could have done more. While out on kayaks on the lake, we could hear monkeys in the trees, even though we didn't get to see any.

In several places on the trip, we met travellers backpacking through Central America. (Central America sort of lends itself to the backpacking traveler - cheap, lots of countries close together and many fun and exciting things to do.) Its always fun to meet those travelling types and hear their stories. You get to meet people from all over the world. We even met two American guys bicycling from Cancun to Panama City. Although we were joining them in many of the same destinations, we couldn't help but feel a little different from the backpackers. Understanding the language, the culture of the region, etc gives us a different perspective. You definitely see the difference between a person who is backpacking through and someone who has lived in the area for awhile. It was nice to be the latter.

Pobre Gallina

Our friends Glenda and Giovanni came over for dinner this weekend, like they have many times before. We usually cook Honduran food, with them as head chefs and us running around as the sous chefs. Its fun! BUT, this past time Glenda got a glint in her eye and wanted to do something a little different. She proposed bringing over a live chicken, killing and cleaning it and then making sopa de gallina (not to be confused with sopa de pollo).

This is something a city girl like me has never seen before, so it was quite the experience! We documented the event with photos, so here they are -

(Caution - vegetarians and animal lovers beware!)

Here is the gallina that Glenda brought over in a Maggi bag (Maggi makes those little bouillon cubes that are chicken or beef flavored, which is kind of ironic).

"Please don't eat me!"

Next you've got us holding the chicken, which Glenda made us do before killing it. Shortly after it pooped on our floor.

Then Glenda did the actually killing. Everyone was too "chicken" to do the killing themselves (including her husband Giovanni). Glenda is a pretty tough lady!

To kill it, you've got to swing it around by the neck til you break it.

Next, we had to use hot water to pluck off the feathers as fast as you can. This bucket is also a laundry bucket I use, so with the blood and feathers, it was sort of freaky.

To get the rest of the feathers off, we lit some newspapers on fire and held it over the fire. In this picture the chicken almost looks fake!

(Notice the bloody cutting board and machete in the background. Nice!)

The cleaning and cutting:

And finally, the meal. Javi convinced them to make fried chicken, with mashed potatoes, gravy and corn (made by us) instead of soup. Well, we also made a broth soup with the chicken bones.

Man, this chicken was REALLY tough and neither of us could hardly find a bite of meat on the whole thing. But it was a skinny little chicken, not like those fat, caged chickens that end up at our supermarkets. We left a lot of "meat" on there after a good effort at eating it (I mostly got tendens and super super tough meat) but Giovanni and Glenda ate that stuff down to the bone. Later, someone at work told me you are supposed to leave it for a day so it gets softer, but I don't think there was hardly any meat to even get soft.

All and all it was pretty fun (minus the actual meal) and definitely one of those new experiences for us!

Felicidades Gringa!

So my birthday was just a few days ago and the nice people at work got me a cake:

That's right, it says "Congratulations Gringa." Funny!!!!

My birthday was pretty low key, just a few presents, a few phone calls and a nice dinner at home.

We found out some great news the other day. We wrote a post back in April about a grant we were writing for the microempresa (small business) program we set up with the Escuela Taller. Well, we were actually awarded that grant! Its from the World Bank and for $50,000 - a huge sum for the program, the school or the whole Foundation we work for! There were 5 grants in the WHOLE world of this type being handed out to business incubation programs in the first 2 years of operation - and we are one of them! The money is a "capacity building grant" meaning its a chunk of change meant to improve the program. The catch is that only $5,000 of it can be spent on "stuff" (which is still a good amount) but the rest - $45,000 - has to be spent on trainings, manuals, promotions, etc....not tangible things....and it all has to be spent in a year. Anyway, we are excited about it and so is the Escuela Taller. Peace Corps normally works directly with people and the philosophy is not to hand out money, but help people help themselves. I think that was true in this case as well, as we just helped the director of the Foundation write it, with many of her ideas in the proposal.

On another subject, we are planning on going to Nicaragua in a few weeks to venture out of Honduras for the first real foray. There should be some good photos and stories from that!!!

Thats all we got for now......

We finally ventured out......

A gathering of all the business volunteers in Honduras finally got us out of our house and away for a few days. We had been a bit paranoid about leaving the house alone after the break in, but eventually things will call you away and you just have to do it! We travelled to the other side of Honduras, to a town called Gracias.

Each project (remember, there are 6 – business, health, water and sanitation, protected areas management, youth development and municipal development) meets each year to talk about what we’re doing and share ideas. Here is a picture of us with the business group:

And this is only 1 of 6 groups! (There are a lot of peace corps volunteers in Honduras –it’s the 2nd largest post in the world.)

After that we decided to attend the “Noche de Fumadores” (Smokers’ Night) in a nearby town, Santa Rosa de Copan. (It’s a festival celebrating the town’s cigar making heritage.) We weren’t the only gringos who decided to go; only about 50 other peace corps volunteers went so we took up a long table at the event:

Getting crazy with Marcus:

Despues….we had to do one more “fun” thing before heading home – hiking Celaque, the tallest mountain in Honduras. At about ~9,000 ft it wouldn’t turn heads back home but that is sort of tall for a Central American mountain. Anyway, it took about two days so we had to backpack in. It was cold and wet up there near the top (its cloud forest up there) but it was well worth the swollen knees and sore calves (and the bit of pica pica that I got into again). The view from the top was amazing.

“TEAM SUMMIT!” (Heading out on the trail with friends Annie and Luke). That is Celaque in the background:

Cloud forest:

At the top of Honduras:

The view from the top:



And when we made it home, everything was fine. Apparently the barbed wire, reinforced door frame, Conor spending the night a few times AND hiding everything of value before leaving worked!

Bolos

Took this picture today and thought I'd write a little something about it for the blog. In Honduras, this guy is what we call a "Bolo:"



Now if you look up bolo in the spanish-english dictionary, I'm not sure if it would be there. And if you could find it, I'm not sure if it would accurately describe what a bolo truly is. Simply "a drunk" would not suffice.


Bolos are guys (although there a few bolas out there) who get so wasted drunk (usually off guaro which is aguardiente, a kind of moonshine) that they become totally incapacitated to the point where the pass out in the street. They lie there, bodies contorted, and dirty as hell. Sometimes they twitch, or will have a sudden movement of some kind. This guy, as we were walking past him, held up his two empty beer cans and mumbled something unintelligible. Before they pass out they can be seen hobbling around, usually yelling something at somebody (and gringos are especially fun to yell at), but they are on the whole a harmless group since they can hardly walk much less do anything else to harm you. A simple push in the chest would totally knock one over.


The thing that is the most interesting to me is how accepted bolos are here. People walk by, hardly giving a glance. And this from a people who generally look down on drinking (and you can imagine why if all you see is these guys and think that this is what happens to you when you drink). Its both kind of amusing and kind of sad.

The saddest thing is that (I'm told) these guys will often blow a weeks pay on their boozing, with nothing to show for it but a day spent in the streets and hungry family members. Sundays (like today) are the biggest bolo turnout days, with way more in the streets than on other days.

I just thought it would be an interesting thing to talk about, since bolos, at least in this capacity and number, just don't exist back home. You might see a homeless dude passed out with a brown paper sack but you won't see it this way, with this number of people, and with people who otherwise might be working very hard during the week and seem normal. Maybe its the boredom of the weekend, maybe its the desperation and poverty they deal with (and an easy escape) or maybe its just guys being jackasses and making a bad situation worse (i.e. spending a weeks pay when you have so little to begin with). Or maybe its all those things and things I can't possibly understand because I am not them.

Dengue/Robbery Follow Up

Here are a few follow up photos from the bad luck events I wrote about last time. Things are better (time has a way of doing that) and we've been working at making things "right" again after the break in.

Here are a few pics from dengue fever:

Sick in bed:




Our friend Glenda came over with some Honduran chicken soup and some home remedies. One of her remedies included putting raw sliced onions in Javi's sock.




Javi was enjoying the home remedies:


Glenda and her husband were really sweet. They even cleaned up the whole kitchen for us, since we were in no state for doing chores. We were barely to pour a glass of water or heat up some oatmeal.

Here is the house with barbed wire we had installed since the robbery:




We sort of feel like we are living in prison. Its definitely not pretty, but LOTS of homes have it around here. We knew why before, but now we personally know why. Unfortunately security, and especially getting stuff stolen from you, is a real problem. We know vocational students at the Escuela Taller who have SO little, and they've had stuff stolen from them too, like cell phones and such, and that from people have have nothing.

This picture is a lucky one I snapped off while shooting the barbed wire. We see this cart (or ones like it) coming down our street sometimes. We live in a nice part of town on a sort of "suburban" street. Its just a reminder that although Honduras can seemed pretty developed sometimes, ox-driven carts still cruise around town and down residential streets.


We had a crappy streak there for awhile but these types of things can happen anywhere...getting sick and getting robbed.....so we are not blaming it on Honduras and just getting on with things!