My Environmental Club

One of the five after school clubs/classes that I lead during the week is my environmental club. There are 18 members aged 13-18 and we meet for a couple hours every Friday afternoon. A guy about my age in my town, Henry, volunteers to help me lead the sessions. And although Im certainly no expert in science/nature things, Ive found that other PCVs have been very enthusiastic to give advice and point me in the right direction. Not to mention my perennial friend Wikipedia. ;)

So Henry and I planned an 18 week calendar in which time we will be covering lots of big topics like local natural resources, organic agriculture, trash management and global warming. The idea is to give a brief lecture on the topic, no more than 30 minutes, just to explain the background info, then to go out and do an activity related to the topic.

For example, when we covered trash management, one week we had the kids bring in a week's worth of organic scraps from their kitchen and we made a compost pile in the school yard. We will use the compost, when it is ready in a couple months, when we plant our radishes during our discussion of organic agriculture.

The week following the compost pile, we were able to coordinate with the arrival of a group of 15 British high school students doing social work in Honduras to dig a mini-landfill for the school. It was tough work, digging the (3 meter deep!) hole, but now the school has an alternative to burning its trash.

We've also been on a bird-watching scavenger hunt, we've taken pictures of flowers and insects on a digital camera, we've planted flowers and other plants, and have made handicrafts out of recycling. Next week we are going on a hike in the cloud forest to look for birds and interesting trees. The week after we will be painting an environmental-themed mural at the school. Then the week after-- hopefully-- we will be planting trees in a deforested part of town.

It's been work that has kept me on my toes, considering how out of my element I've sometimes felt with this material, but the kids have been very enthusiastic and I believe it's important material. The hope is that these kids, who hold the future of the national park in their hands, will develop an awareness about how their actions affect their local environment and how that, in turn, affects their town.

Take the Sun Seriously!

Always wear sunscreen.

My pale, be-freckeled Irish skin is not the appropriate match for work in the campo in the Tropics. I am, in this regard, 100% gringo. It is not to say that I never used sunscreen over the past 17 months, but I didnt use it enough, because during our mid-term medical checkups, the PC doctors agreed that I should go in and get two of the moles taken off my right arm. It was an easy and quick out-patient deal, and the biopsy came back benign. But it was a wakeup call. There is history of skin cancer in my family; I guess I realized that this isnt something to mess around with and that it is silly not to take the thirty seconds in the morning to put on sunscreen or a longsleeve shirt. Theres just too much at stake.

But actually, there is kind of a typical PC cross-culture story about the whole medical procedure. They sent me to a plastic surgeon in Tegucigalpa. And basically it was like walking onto an SNL skit: the surgeon had slicked back hair, he wore his designer button down shirt opened about five or six buttons, he had a gold chain around the neck, and spoke English with a smooth Latino accent. He was the Honduran Vincent Cassel (you know, the French theif from the Ocean's movies?). On the wall were a couple 'tasteful' paintings of naked women and, on his business card that he gave me, there is a pair of bare breasts. About the first thing he told me was that about 90% of his business is cosmetic surgery and that he does breast augmentation for the elite of Honduran women across the country.

He was nice and did a professional job, but it was all just about too much to handle without laughing out loud. I was definitely the 'other' 10%.