Running from the runs, and a bit of holiday cheer

Since we last posted, the two major events in our lives have been getting ready to move and digestive issues (warning: if hearing about digestive issues makes you queasy, please skip to the section below the tribute). After nearly five months without having major stomach problems – a near miracle for new Peace Corps volunteers – Dan had it coming out of both ends so we headed to the Hospital Evangelico (our second visit; my dog bite being the first). When his stool sample was analyzed, his diagnosis was a virus and bacteria. A week of antibiotics and rehydration salts – more about those later – and he was back to normal.

About a week after his recovery, we both had the runs again. Since this is a fairly normal occurrence in our Peace Corps experience, I wasn’t too concerned for myself, but was worried that perhaps Dan needed more antibiotics, so back to the hospital we went (trip number three). This time, Dan’s diagnosis was parasites, or as they are sometimes called in the campo, animalitos (the direct translation is “little animals”). Three or four days later, with a low fever and continuing digestive issues, I decided that perhaps I, too, had animalitos. When we went to the Hospital Evangelico for our fourth visit in a little over two months in Siguat, my diagnosis was also parasites. We learned two important things from this experience: Peace Corps volunteers have wonderful medical care, and that the old saying is true: the couple that shares parasites together stays together.

After drinking rehydration salts, called Sorassel, on and off for numerous weeks, our appreciation of them is great. Dan, the poet laureate of all problems digestive, has written a tribute in their honor, which we hope you will enjoy.

A long overdue tribute to Sorassel – Sales de Rehidratacion Oral

Diarrhea, vomit, diarrhea again, days and nights alongside old friend John,
Parasites, viruses, bacteria too have made guest appearances at the toilathon,
12 select ingredients, sensuous and simple, rehydrate our parched souls,
7.1 grams of granulated solution replace our mournful losses to toilet bowls,
Glucosa Anhidra, dear friend that it is, constitutes much of this magic elixir,
Neither Pepsi nor Coke nor exotic fruits could dare hope to trump this mixer,
We must also make mention of another olive carrying dove, sodium, as well
Which delicately delivers peace to our stomachs after antibiotics have raised hell,
Pour, mix, and drink it up until the scorching sun bakes the bottom of the cup
And as the cup’s core is seared all the more, to the last precious drop we’ll sup,
Sorassel, sweet and salty, deliverer of countless brilliant and microscopic pearls
Diligently instructs how to dissolve and create that precious gift for he who hurls,
Sorassel, dear sweet, and salty, Sorassel, to the world we owe your story to tell

Now that our systems are back to normal, all of our energy can be fixed on getting our house ready. After living with host families for over five months, and house searching for two, we finally found the perfect house. It is a little green house with a front porch that will be perfect for chatting with neighbors and a backyard that will allow us to plant sugarcane, corn, papaya, bananas, a little vegetable garden, and anything else we could hope for. There are already two mango trees there (to those who are interested in visiting: mango season is roughly March-May), which we hope will be bearing an abundance of fruit in the springtime. Fortunately, our next-door-neighbor has a tree that produces so many mangos she can’t give them away, so even if our trees are still too young to bear fruit, we will be able to work out a deal with her.

Our house from the backyard

We are currently cleaning the house in preparation for painting before we finally move in. The neighborhood we are in does not have water 24-7, so we have water in half-days (for example, we’ll have water in the morning on Monday, in the afternoon on Tuesday, in the morning on Wednesday, etc.), so we are learning to plan around this schedule. The pila (a big concrete basin with a washboard next to it) will provide water for us in the times that the water is turned off, but currently needs to be cleaned so it does not become a dengue-breeding house. We will spend the next couple of days cleaning and painting in preparation for moving in this weekend.

Anyway, we hope you are all enjoying the Christmas season and that your hearts are filled with all the joys the season has to bring. Peace on earth and good will toward all!

Lost in Translation...but we've returned.

Well, where do we begin? It has certainly been a busy month since we last posted. In fact, we’ve been away from the office so much so that our old friend the keyboard currently feels a bit like a stranger. For the second and third weeks of November we traveled with a medical brigade from the States that was brought in to treat people affected by the storm; our role was to translate between English speaking doctors and nurses and Spanish speaking patients (that having been said, one of the doctors is more fluent than we are, another speaks enough to get by, and the others picked up a bit as time went on). We certainly saw a number of people who were affected by the storm, including people whose homes were flooded or destroyed and others whose crops were damaged, if not destroyed. As for the medical relevance of all this, many people we saw were dealing with colds, the flu, lack of access to clean water – and subsequently dehydration and water-borne illnesses – and different types of skin fungus, which may been caused or exacerbated by the moist conditions.

Dan translating

Although it may sound like sensationalism to include these next few observations, truly the purpose is to describe what daily life is like in many of the communities we’ve visited. One little girl we visited was sneezing up worms, which, fortunately, is easily treated. In another town, after we had already finished a full days work a young man in his twenties came to the home where we were staying, escorted by his elderly father; his hands were a mere mess of blood. The young man, who is right handed, had been cutting through something, which he held in his right hand, when the knife suddenly broke through the object he’d been cutting and immediately sliced deep into his ring, middle, and index fingers. It seems that the tendons in his middle and ring fingers were completely severed, for which he’ll need reparative surgery to fix. Fortunately one of the doctors in our group, an emergency room physician, was able to stitch up the man’s hand with the help of the other members of the team, at least stemming the blood and giving the young man an opportunity to seek further medical attention in the coming weeks and months. We also saw a number of patients with psychological problems, some of which stemmed from the flooding, others of which were perhaps exacerbated by the flooding, or were in fact unrelated to it. We spoke with people who suffered from depression and loneliness, at least one person who seemed to suffer from mental illness but had never received counseling, yet more people who had been victims of domestic violence or sexual abuse, and for many people the subtext to all of their hardships was that they had been displaced by the flooding, or at the least that their dwellings and livelihoods had been compromised by the storm.

Emily to the right translating along with the Docs in "El Centro Social Municipal"

Many of the communities we visited were difficult to reach, leaving us bouncing around in the back of the truck with all the medical supplies during a rainstorm, but some of the villages were nearly impossible to reach, and had we not been there, they would not have received medical assistance. The main bridge of one community was washed out so we had to walk across a cable bridge, which the community had dubbed “la hamaca” or “the hammock” because of the way it swayed when people walked on it. This bridge was constructed with five heavy metal cables: two as railings to hold on to and three on the bottom. Community members had placed wooden boards across the three cables to walk upon, but in many places there were two or three boards in a row missing and the only option was to walk across the cable. Fortunately no one in the group was afraid of heights! Another community was inaccessible except by boat or walking waist-deep in water, so we, and all the medical supplies, were transported by boat. Life in the Peace Corps is typically a humbling experience but these past few weeks of working in a supportive capacity to this medical brigade and the people they’ve been treating has punctuated that sense of humility.

Traveling with two nurses and the medical supplies

While Emily worked with the medical brigade for the entirety of two weeks, I was only there for a week and a half. For the latter half of the first week I helped translate for a British engineer who was flown in to help install two temporary water plants in communities whose water systems had been damaged during the storm. For anyone who has a knack for assembling and disassembling machines, and certainly for any engineers who read this I can say that it was interesting to be part of the process of installing these temporary water plants which are accompanied by 10,000 liter inflatable tanks. These water plants consist of three parts: a primitive crank start diesel powered pump which pulls water from a nearby source (a creek for instance), a filter which utilizes a series of probably 30 plastic tubes, approximately 1 cm x 40 cm, which, with the help of a fine powder constitute the first of a two part treatment process, and a third machine that dispenses chlorine in small quantities before the water finally arrives at the inflatable tank. These filters were last used in relief efforts for the Christmas tsunami of 2005. If I’m not mistaken, the filters were brought out of a warehouse somewhere in southeast Asia, put on an American Airlines jet and a week later were delivered to Honduras. Aside from marveling at the efficacy of this quick installation water treatment plant (it takes approximately 3 hours to install the system and educate someone on how to operate and maintain it), I’ve also learned a bit about the potential conflicts in marching into a community and introducing new technology without adequate preparation beforehand. While in one community we found people who were familiar enough with plumbing and water systems to quickly learn how to operate the system we were installing, in another community the people we were teaching how to operate the system didn’t have enough prior experience to feel comfortable operating the system without extensively repeating the lesson, which created a palpable sense of tension at times. Everyone involved was there of their own volition, to help, nothing more. Good intentions aside, I do wonder how might the installation have gone more smoothly – aren’t there always new lessons to learn?

The water system

As far as major sporting events go in Honduras, the November 19th fútbol game against Mexico was as good as it gets. The game was to decide which teams would pass on to the next round of qualifying games for the 2010 World Cup and if Honduras lost, they would be eliminated. We, the doctors from the brigade, and another translator, went to a “sports pub” to watch the game projected onto a large wall. After a tense and cold (another cold front passed over Honduras last week and had us wearing fleeces and hats again) first half, the game was still 0-0. In the second half, Honduras scored a goal through a corner kick that went off the foot of one of the Mexican defenders. Honduras went on to win the game 1-0 and honking cars could be heard late into the night celebrating the country’s victory. We’re looking forward to the next round, which will start in February, and give us another occasion to wear our selección shirts.

Dave, John, Digger, Cathy (all Medical Teams International volunteers),

Daniel, Daniel and Emily (the translators)

Since ending our stint as traveling translators we’ve been back to one of our most practiced pastimes, home shopping. Despite our best efforts, the most promising homes we’ve seen thus far haven’t worked out, for a variety of reasons. As we imagine we’re preaching to the choir here, we’ll keep this relatively short; when home shopping, it seems the whole trick to the game is to get back on the proverbial pony and just keep going, even when you’re sick of being shown that repugnant pink house time and again. It would make sense to mention that there’s no “official” process by which people search for homes here in Siguatepeque. The objective is to wander the streets in neighborhoods which you like, asking anyone who seems potentially knowledgeable about the housing market whether they know of anyone who is renting a home (interestingly, the only group excluded from our canvassing effort is the 5 years and under crowd). Our favorite strategy is to speak with the owners of corner stores, known as pulperias, and launch into our routine, “Disculpe (Señor, Señora, Don, Doña), andamos buscando una casita con dos cuartos, una cocina, un baño, y poco terreno. ¿Sabe si alguien está alquilando una casa en este barrio?” Finding a home with two rooms, a kitchen, a bathroom, and a little bit of land has proven to be a challenge, no doubt. However, as Queen’s Freddy Mercury so famously belted all those years ago, the show must go on. Wish as luck, if you will.

A few days ago, we celebrated Thanksgiving with a couple of friends in the department of Santa Barbara. Jessica and Brenna had already started on dinner when we got there on Thursday around noon, so we ate lunch with them and got back to cooking. When it was all said and done, dinner consisted of a baked chicken, green beans, stuffing, mashed potatoes, pumpkin pie, and wheat rolls (all from scratch). We also enjoyed a bit of wine during the cooking process and with dinner. We hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving and were blessed with friends, family and a great meal. ¡Hasta la proxima vez!

Thanksgiving dinner...yum!

Jessica, Brenna, and Dan eating on the deck

¡Tenemos hormigas en nuestros pantalones!

As you´re already aware if you´ve read our last blog or followed more obscure bits of international news, we´ve had a lot of rain here recently, so much so that many regions of the country are experiencing a disaster. Countless communities are still flooded, and as a cold front is moving through much of the country, many people who were staying with relatives or in shelters and struggling to find food may also now find themselves trying to fight off the cold. We´ve certainly been trying to help out through the large scale relief effort our counterpart organization is undertaking. At the same time, the word disaster signifies that the scale of the problem is beyond any immediate sweeping solution, short of the storm ceasing and the sun returning from its nearly month-long hiatus. Perhaps what´s most worrisome is that we have another month of eligibility left in the hurricane season and well-respected people who have lived here for quite a while are whispering about similarities between some of the damage already caused by this storm and that which was caused by the exceptionally devastating Hurricane Mitch almost exactly 10 years ago. That having been said, fortunately the country learned many lessons from Mitch and the loss of life is substantially lower this time around, not to mention this storm, which is not a hurricane, has been less devastating due to its slow, albeit steady progression. There´s not much left to say aside from the fact that we, along with hundreds if not thousands of others will keep chipping away at the stone, hoping that the rain will subside.

If you didn´t catch the meaning of this blog´s title, it´s “We have ants in our pants!” So what about those ants, anyhow, and how might they relate to the storm we’ve been experiencing? As any amateur biologist – by this I mean relatively observant human – already knows, when the weather´s miserable, most creatures like to find the safest shelter around. By the dozens, ants have decided that our room is a likely shelter. I don´t want to misquote Benjamin Franklin, but as I´m writing this I have no way to check; as I believe Franklin once mused, “Guests are like fish, they stink after two days”. That sentiment is magnified when the guests arrive by the dozens, unannounced, and stay for weeks on end. The worst part of it all is that, tenemos hormigas en nuestros pantalones! No, we´re not looking for a cliché to say that we have cabin fever; nearly every morning we find that we have dozens of ants in our pants, although occasionally they´re tucked into a shirt instead. I guess it´s sensible that they too want a warm sheltered environment to hunker down, although, in its own special way the garbage can is also a warm sheltered environment, with all of its Kleenex and wrapper insulation – one has to wonder why they aren´t there, with the free crumbs and all. Regardless, our morning routine now has an additional step: 1.) hit the snooze once or twice, 2.) wash face, brush teeth, shave, etc. 3.) shake half-inch ants out of pants, 4.) breakfast and begin our walking commute. We hope you noted the size of these ants. When they fall from our pants to the floor they actually make an audible thud and then scurry away to find another garment to hide in. At first we were fighting them, sweeping them out with a broom, but they just keep coming back, so we have resigned ourselves to their presence until the storm is over.

Speaking of cold and rainy weather, what would you guess the temperature is here if we told you that we´re walking around with flannels, fleeces, and winter hats on? 18 degrees C = approximately 64 degrees F, which for us amounts to a cold streak. If it weren´t for a lifetime of schooling and logical thought to influence us, we just might be looking up at the sky, waiting for the snow to begin falling. It´s safe to say we`ve acclimated to the warmer climate here. And if you´re curious, yes, the showers are as cold as ever =)

Thinking about snow is enough to make us break our 3-cups-a-day rule. Because we´re in a coffee growing area, it is a sign of hospitality to offer a cup of coffee to guests and it would be quite impolite to refuse. Subsequently, we are often drinking 3 or more cups of coffee each day, regardless of the fact that we didn´t even drink coffee in the States. Fortunately, the coffee here is excellent, though I think we´ll be returning to the States with a caffeine addiction we didn´t have before.

On Sunday, we ventured out (all bundled up, of course) to the cemetery and experienced Siguatepeque`s way of honoring the dead on “Día de los Muertos”. While in Mexico, “Día de los Muertos” is a day when families go to the cemetery to picnic with their deceased relatives (eating the food that their family member most liked, and drinking on their behalf if they were a drinker in life), here in Siguat the celebration resembles Memorial Day in the States. Many families come to clean and lay beautiful tropical-flower-bouquets on the graves.

Take care, and stay in touch.

Relief Work

Due to not having internet access for the past few days, all our devoted fans (our parents) will receive two blog posts in one day. If you have a passion for watching international weather news, you may know that the quantity of rain Honduras has received in the past week has caused massive flooding in many parts of the country. Fortunately for us, Siguatepeque has not been subject to this flooding. However, since we work for Aldea Global, we have been able to help in some of the relief work to communities that are suffering from flooding.

Yesterday, when we got to work, we attended a planning meeting right away because Aldea Global had received a request for help. As we made a list of all the things we could provide this community, Dan (with his background in Natural Hazard Mitigation) suggested that water would be of the utmost importance for this community. We next started brainstorming about where we could get filtered water for free. We remembered that CEASO, an integrated farm we visited during training, has a large tank of filtered water (runoff from their roof that passes through a carbon filter into a 2,800 gallon tank) that we would be welcome to use. So, Aldea Global rounded up every empty receptacle that could be used to carry water and off we went to CEASO. Because the truck was needed for something else, Dan and I got dropped off with all the empty bottles (each ranging from 2.5-5 gallon capacity). As it started raining again, we came up with a system to fill and transport the bottles to where they could be loaded back into a truck. When it was all said and done, we contributed over 100 gallons of water through collaboration with this other organization.

While we were filling up water bottles, other members of the Aldea Global team were buying more water, gathering up medical supplies, and generally getting everything organized for us to head out. We then traveled to a large warehouse where blankets, canned turkey, anti-bacterial soap, and all sorts of other emergency supplies are housed. Everyone formed a human chain as we passed boxes into a large truck for delivery. Once we were all completely drenched with sweat, and the truck was full, we headed to the small aldea (village) that had requested our help. At first when we got there, the situation did not appear as bad as we had expected, but once the trucks were all parked, we got out and walked around the corner. Fortunately, we were wearing our rubber boots, because we were soon standing in over a foot of water and by the water-marks on the houses, we could see that the water had been waist-high.

We handed out water to the families in this small community while other members of Aldea Global unloaded other supplies from the large truck. When the day was over, our arms and backs were a bit tired from our day of carrying water jugs, boxes, and bags filled with blankets. However, we were glad to contribute in our small way to those affected by the storm.

Cheerful in our tropical depression

Our reactions were mixed when we learned early last week that we were in the midst of a tropical depression. At first we just resigned ourselves to being drenched for an indeterminate amount of time from the persistent rains. Then, during one of the many afternoons we spent holed up inside Emily suggested that “tropical depression” need not only be a weather phenomenon that limited our mobility. Why, it could be the name of our very own tasty tropical beverage – meet the tropical depression! We`ll let you know how it tastes when it debuts. For now, we´re just stuck inside dreaming of tropical depressions, the tasty variety that is.

In all fairness, “stuck inside” isn´t an entirely fair characterization of what we´re up to these days. We`re still traveling and attending meetings with our counterparts, albeit on a limited basis due to the many floods plaguing the country. Emily is currently engaged in a few health initiatives ranging from HIV/AIDS support to self esteem development, and I´m principally a laborer, helping transport a few thousand trees a few times a week to support a reforestation initiative in our park. There´s nothing like carrying plants and pushing a wheelbarrow for hours on end to remind me I´m in good, but not great shape. Ultimately, as is the experience of most volunteers early in their service, we´re busiest getting acquainted with our community, the language, and what we may be doing in the future rather than actually “working” much in any traditional sense, although I think we´re contributing a bit. Let that be the context for this anecdote. A successful day may look something like this: a fellow volunteer who is helping form a cooperative of female hammock makers sent us an email with an enticing offer to have a hammock made in the colors of our alma mater (go Ducks!) for an affordable price, and in time for the holidays at that. Finding a hammock is, in and of itself, enough to polish the day.

We´re still living with our host family and enjoying their company. Game nights are especially fun as we get to watch the Honduras national team (La Selección) play against other teams for a spot in the world cup. Our mom is a consummate good hostess and makes sure we have soda and popcorn for each game – tasty! As is the case with many sporting events the world over, it´s encouraging to watch the entire country unite behind the national team, in spite of the many conflicts that may be barriers to communication on other days. More than a few times we´ve heard that wearing the jersey of La Selección on game day is virtually a free pass to travel anywhere in the country without incident, including areas that are traditionally dangerous even for Hondurans. Of course we´d not be interested to test this theory, but the unifying element of fútbol here in Honduras cannot be easily overstated.

As a fun way to wrap this up we´ll share a few recent experiences that have already become normal to us, but that would have been anything but when we first arrived to Honduras a few months ago. Two weeks ago we were sitting in some makeshift bleachers at the local cancha de fútbol when a horse entered the field from an adjacent dirt road, crossed the field at full gallop (we clearly heard the pounding of its hooves from 100 meters away), jumped a ditch, and continued down a road on the other side of the field, still at full gallop. Oh well, we thought, these things happen. Just the other morning when we were on our way to work in our botas de goma (knee high gum/rain boots), sombreros, and raincoats – our normal garb these days – Emily interrupted me in mid story to point out a potential perro bravo that was suspiciously eying all passersby. ¿What did we do, you ask? Well, of course we walked through the foot deep puddles in the ditch on the other side of the road to evade a sticky situation. If it comes down to it I´ve discovered I myself have a pretty intimidating bark, and we´re both capable of tossing a few rocks, although we`re definitely honing our sixth sense for problematic dogs to avoid having to exercise our own animal instincts. Last but not least, we´ve discovered that cold showers are downright intimidating when the weather´s rainy and chilly, but one must bathe. While we grow braver with each shower, I think we´ll always have a soft spot for hot water heaters and that precious commodity they produce! If you have hot water, enjoy a nice shower for us, would ya =)

As always, we hope you´re doing well. Please drop us a line when you get the chance.

-Em and Dan

The Hair of the Dog that Bit Me

Well, we’re doing well as we near the end of our first week in Siguatepeque, which will be our home away from home for these next two years. Considering we´ve only been here for a week, we´ve already had a number of new experiences, ranging from the challening to the exciting. ¡Welcome to our life as Peace Corps Volunteers in this little nook of Honduras!

First things first. We are indeed volunteers! After wearing the name of aspirante (trainee or aspirant) for nearly three months, last Friday we attended our swearing in ceremony at the U.S. Embassy and then enjoyed an afternoon of swimming and exploring the grounds at the ambassador´s residence, although as circumstance would have it he was in the States at the time. The ambassador´s grounds have a number of toronja (grapefruit) trees, so we relished the opportunity to gorge ourselves on that sweet vitamin C.

Here are some pictures from our swearing-in:

Michael (a Youth Development volunteer) and us

The Muni-D girls with our new Peace Corps shirts

Municipal Development:

Top row: Mark, Natan, Ryan, Dan, Kristin, Jessica D., Chad
Middle row: Erik, Alejandrina (the boss), Emily, Brenna, Jorge (our training director)
Bottom row: Emilie, Jessica G., Casey, Ana, Ellie

With our new Peace Corps shirts

Upon our arrival to Siguatepeque Saturday afternoon, we entered the gate of our host family´s home (per Peace Corps policy, we´ll be living with a host family for our first two months at site to acostumbrarnos – acclimate ourselves – to this new location), which seemed a sensible thing to do since we were in fact at our new residence and were tired after a few hours of continuous travel. I wasn´t able to enter the gate as quickly as Emily because the bags I was carrying were stuck together. As a result, she entered first and bore the wrath of our host family´s perra brava (vicious female dog) when she broke her chain and gave Emily a nasty bite in the calf. I don´t think we´ll soon forget that first half hour of being at our host family´s house, which included the dog biting Emily and soon being restrained by our host mom (first minute), digging out our Peace Corps issued medkit to grab bandages and stem the bleeding (first five minutes), calling the Peace Corps doctors for instructions (first ten minutes), scrubbing the wound in the shower to disinfect it (minutes ten to twenty five), and catching a cab to the hospital (at the half hour mark). Being the stalwart and strong gal she is, after arriving at the hospital she bore with good humor a second scrub of the wound, several injections directly into the wound, and two stitches. For my part, I gave her a hand massage as they delivered her injections and put the stitches in. Needless to say, it was the least I could do.

Although my harrowing tale is not nearly as harrowing as hers, my weekend didn´t pass without incident either. Here in the altiplano, which signifies high plain, (we´re at about 3,000 feet) thunderstorms arrive quickly and are quite fierce, not unlike what many of you are accustomed to in the States. Well, as I made my way home from buying groceries for the first time, I found myself huddled under the eaves of a pulpería (hole in the wall convenience store, of which there are many in just about every community) as the street was transformed into a river (sound familiar from a previous blog entry?) and as ambulances and police trucks raced by periodically, undoubtedly tending to mishaps caused by the storm. As I tried to count the gaps between thunder and lightning to judge when it was safe to dash home, it was no small challenge to distinguish between flashes of lightning and flashes from the passing emergency vehicles. Although soaked to the bone, I made it home without incident, just in time to begin our first work week with my now somewhat-hobbled wife.

The week´s highlights were many, despite a rough start. First and foremost, our host family is very kind. Our host mother, who is very good natured, had the perra brava sent to another home and served us our meals in our room for almost two solid days so that Emily could keep her leg elevated. Our host siblings are also very nice, and we have a chihuahua named Terry (the origin is terrible) who we already like a great deal. Regarding our work, in addition to reading manuals (me) and attending meetings (Emily), we´ve already traveled to some of the aldeas (small communities) where we´ll be working, all of which have their own personality and rather rustic beauty. Meeting the people of the communities is of course the greatest joy. Each time we see the wizened grins of the elderly and the timid but brilliant smiles of the kids as they peak over window ledges and through door frames, we´re impressed by the kindness and humility of our new neighbors.

One trip that will be particularly memorable was a trip we completed yesterday, under the guidance of my counterpart. We visited a community that exists deep in the national park our organization oversees where we met with a family to discuss the sustainable and responsible development of resources in the very fragile and precious section of the park where they live (because they lived there long before the territory was declared as a park, they´re entitled to stay and to some degree make use of the land). Although Emily and I are more or less along for the ride at this early stage in our service, we learned a great deal and have fond memories of meeting the family and being guests on their land. The trip to their home was, in itself, a memorable experience as we had to first summit a series of deeply riveted and rocky mountain roads in our 4x4 pickup (as volunteers we´re prohibited from driving except for in very rare circumstances, so my counterpart does the driving) before parking at the base of a mountain and starting what would become a 3 hour round trip hike. During the trip we saw a few exotic butterflies the size of my hand, one of which was cobalt blue. We also ate bananas we found in the jungle, and drank from mountain streams (yes, the very same streams we´re trying to protect). The forests in the park are naturally stratified very distinctly according to elevation, so at one point we found ourselves, in the span of 2 minutes, transitioning from highland pine forest to bonafide jungle.

Here´s a picture of Lago Yajoa, which is near Siguat, that we were able to take while on one of our "business trips."

Last but not least, we may have found a home after a good bit of questioning pulpería owners and tracking down the homes, often with the help of a willing neighbor. Details will be forthcoming if we actually get the house (we will start renting the 1st of December, si dios quiere). In the meantime, wish us luck!

I think that´s about it for now. We´ll look forward to giving our next update as the month of October moves along. We hope you´re doing well, and please keep the emails coming!

¡Siguatepeque!

Well, we finally got our site assignment and we will be living in Siguatepeque (See-watt-e-peck-ay), which is pretty much in the middle of the country. We´re working with Proyecto Aldea Global (Project Global Village), which is involved in Food Security, Health, Domesitic Violence, Protected Areas, Education and a number of other things. Dan will be doing a lot of work in Parque Nacional Cerro Azul Meambar, and I am still figuring out which part of the organization I would most like to help with.

We are currently exploring our new community and organization because we are on a 4-day site visit. We will return to our training site for 2 weeks of additional training before we swear in on the 26th (finally becoming official volunteers) and then head out to our site permanently on the 27th to start our two years of service. We will live with a host family for our first 2 months in Siguatepeque and then can find our own place.

Here´s a little info about Siguat:
It´s heading into the mountains, at a little over 3,000 feet, so the temperature is cooler here than in other parts of the country (low to mid-80s during the day). We are near Lago Yajoa and Parque Nacional Cerro Azul Meambar, so should have lots of great outdoor recreation nearby (and if anyone wants to come visit, it would be a cool place to stay). Siguat itself is relatively large (roughly 50,000 people) with many of the amenities of a larger site (eg. internet), but the barrios (neigborhoods) feel like much smaller communities, with dirt roads, roosters crowing, and cows and horses grazing.

¡Adios chancleta! ¡Que le vaya bien!

Last Saturday, our Municipal Development training group had a joint birthday party for Ana and me (Emily) at Kristin´s host parent´s house. We danced, ate cake, and had a wonderful time. The last couple hours of the party, it started to rain really hard, but we just figured it would pass. After a while, Dan and I decided we shouldn´t wait any longer because we were going hiking the next day in Parque Nacional la Tigra, so we chose to brave the rain.

We headed out, getting absolutely drenched in the process, but we only had a few blocks to get to our host parent´s house. Suddenly, we came to what had formerly been a cobblestone street and was now a river. I decided to ford the ¨river¨ and stepped in, only to find that the water was at least a foot deep. I took another step, and as I lifted up my right foot, I stepped out of my chancleta (flip-flop). As soon as the chancleta popped up, it started shooting down this quickly-moving river. I started to chase it, almost knee deep in water and with only one chancleta on, but it hit a gutter and floated even faster than before and "se fue" (was gone). So all I could do was say, ¨Adios chancleta. Que le vaya bien (Goodbye, flip-flop. That your journey goes well).¨ Here are a few pictures of this eventful night...

Here is a picture of the ¨raging river:¨

Here I am, soaking wet, with the remaining chancleta:

...and Dan and I with the chancleta




Though I mourned the loss of my chancleta, I received lots of ¨Peace Corps Points¨for my story. ¨Peace Corps Points¨are given when something very Peace-Corps-like happens. For example, our friend, Ana, received a lot of ¨Peace Corps Points¨when she was on a bus to her site visit and the woman sitting in front of her spat out the window and the spit flew through Ana´s open window and hit her square in the face. She received significanly more "Peace Corps Points" for this incident than I did for losing my chancleta. We will be sure to keep you posted when we earn more ¨Peace Corps Points¨ in the future.



The next day, we went for an amazing hike in Parque Nacional la Tigra (which is only a half-hour bus ride and a beautiful, but mostly uphill, hike from our current training site) with Kristin and Jessica D (we have 2 Jessica´s in Muni-D). We hiked for a number of hours and were able to see some spectacular waterfalls and gorgeous tropical plants. Here are some pictures from that hike.

Jessica standing next to a beautiful and enormous tree:

Heading into the jungle:



Also, here is a picture of our street at our Field Based Training site. Our host family´s house is on the right, though it´s hard to see. But the picture gives a good idea of what our lives look like right now.

We will be receiving our site assignment on Monday (finally), so most of our energy right now is going toward being patient. In a little less than 48 hours we will know where we will be living for the next two years. Thank you to all of you who have sent us updates. It is so wonderful to hear from you and to hear about your lives right now. Please keep the emails coming!

Love,

Dan and Em

entrenamiento

Entrenamiento. That pretty much sums up our lives right now. We´re perpetually in training and will be for the next five weeks. For the most part everything´s going just fine. There will always be the adjustment of having to live according to a schedule that resembles that of a high schooler with long days in class and an early curfew, but we´re fortunate to have a nice host family, good friends, and an appealing little city in which to train. Our host family is composed of two parents and four children, two of whom are teens and two of whom are toddlers basically. We spend a lot of time just shooting the breeze with the youngest two, which is both fun and a good reminder that having kids is an enormous responsibility (needless to say, we´re not there yet).

For those of you who are reading our blog fairly regularly, our diet is still very similar to what we ate back in our previous community before transitioning to field based training. There´s a lot of rice, beans, tortillas, and sometimes we have chicken, cheese, salad or a bit of potatoes on the side. Generally speaking, we eat very well and as a result are in great health. The past two weeks we´ve each had colds, but we´re finally feeling a bit better now. Since it´s the rainy season here, we have pretty extreme tempature swings, which I would guess are between 70 and 95 degrees fahrenheit, contingent on whether it´s raining (the rainstorms are always downpours) or sunny. These temperature swings are, I believe, partly to blame for our colds. They also make life interesting from one day to the next, so there´s no complaining.

We´re currently starting our SDPs (self directed projects) which will take up a majority of our remaining time in FBT (field based training). Just a future warning, Peace Corps absolutely loves acronyms, so you`ll see them popping up in our blog from time to time. Emily and I will be running a few short workshops about food security, natural hazard mitigation, and HIV-AIDS with high school students in a neighboring town. In only three weeks or so we´ll get the news about where we´ll be living for the next two years and at the end of September we leave for our site, so we´re starting to anticipate the completion of training and the transition to our permanent location and roles here in Honduras. Please stay in touch, and as always email or post comments with anything you´d like for us to read.

¡Adios!

We wanted to add a few pics:

First night in Honduras

Dan washing clothing by hand

Just outside of town

Daily Life

I just thought I´d put a few little things in here about our daily life. Food usually consists of rice, beans, avocado, eggs, cheese and lots of tortillas. Our host family is also fond of ¨mantiquilla¨which roughly translates to butter, but in this case is a lot closer to sour cream, and they eat it a lot (though are kind enough to put it on the side for us so we can choose not to eat it). We also have coffee at least once a day and sometimes we have it with dinner as well. Hondurans like their coffee with lots of sugar and milk, but the coffee is good, so we´re not complaining.

We are currently visiting another volunteer and are experiencing a completely different climate from where we are training. In our training site, the rainy season is really felt, with almost daily torrential downpours. Everything stays pretty humid and damp, which is causing our clothing to mold, something we are learning to avoid through proper ventillation. Here, at our site visit (we´re shadowing another Municipal Development - Muni D - volunteer), the sun is intense enough to keep us inside in the early afternoon. We are enjoying seeing another part of the country and actually finding out what another volunteer is doing (she only has one month left, so has accomplished a ton in her two years). During our visit so far, we have attended a drag-race and followed our volunteer around the construction of the park she has helped plan, amongst other things. Until next time...que le vaya bien (that it goes well with you).

Our first couple of weeks

This is our first opportunity to use the internet other than to dash off a quick email to our parents to let them know we arrived safely. We took the bus to a neighboring town and are sitting in an internet cafe. We live with a host family in a rural mountain town and are enjoying learning about the culture of Honduras. Monday through Friday we have classes from 7:30-4:30 and Saturdays we have class only in the morning. Our classes focus on language (we usually have 4 hours of Spanish class each weekday), culture and job-specific training. There are three project groups training at the same time: Youth Development, Protected Areas Management (PAM), and Municipal Development (our training group).

We usually wake up around 5:30 (which sounds obscenely early, but we go to bed around 9:30 so it´s not that bad) and take turns showering. Our first few days we took bucket baths, but our family has since installed an electroducha (which is an electric showerhead that heats the water), so we now have hot showers, a luxury we are enjoying while it lasts. It is the rainy season now, so it is common to have torrential downpours for many hours of the day, but when the sun is out, it is fierce. We are learning the basics of life here, such as washing our clothing by hand and hopping onto a packed bus. As part of our formal education, we learn about different Honduran ethnic groups, and yesterday we were able to meet with representatives from 7 different groups from around the country. We spoke with them, sampled their food, and learned about the specific issues each group deals with.

We´re playing lots of soccer with the neighbor kids and we´re enjoying trying all sorts of new food. We hope all is well with all of you and look forward to hearing from you soon. We may not be able to respond in a timely manner, but we will try to get back to you as soon as possible.

Love,

Daniel and Emily

Until our next post...

Hello everyone. We just wanted to post once more on the eve of our departure to share a bit of news, which is as follows: we'll only be posting sporadically, and certainly not very often over the next few months due to limited internet access during training. However, stay tuned and please continue to write emails - we'll be very pleased to receive them. Best wishes and we look forward to being in touch.

10:40 in Portland

We just created our journal and thought it may be nice to write an initial post. Well, let's see, where do we start? Today we were bitten by all sorts of crazy spiders, monkeys, and other volunteers, including one another. We thought we were tough enough to handle the Peace Corps, but phew! Ok, so in fact it's 10:40 on Monday, June 2nd and tomorrow's a work day here in Portland, Oregon. The only news we have thus far is that we'll be attending our staging event somewhere in the States from July 7th to the 9th, before flying to Honduras. Thanks for your interest in our goings on, and stay tuned for the next update!

Em and Dan