¡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