Field Based Training

Hola familia, amigos y desconocidos. Hi all. Here’s a list of the summaries of my paragraphs:
1. New family
2. New community
3. The start of Field Based Training
4. Charla (educational chat) in a local technical school

1. So I’ve been in my new community Ojojona, for a week now. I’m with a host family that’s quite different from my first one: it’s bigger and more religious. My host dad, Jose, is an Evangelical pastor and the family reads the Bible and prays in the mornings and in the evenings. Church service is held on their front porch every Sunday. There are four kids- 17, 11, 6 and 4 and the young ones have a lot of energy and a lot of questions. The 17 year old, Gabriel, is very tranquilo (chill) and conversations with him provide some real peace of mind amidst the not-so-seldom noisy chaos. The madre, Alba, is a homemaker. They’re all very nice and caring, though I’m pretty sure that I agree with about a quarter of their religious ideals. Nonetheless, I suppose that I’ve always enjoyed listening to religious discourses and I think that living with this family is going to give me a great look inside a prevalent part of the Honduran culture (as many people here have been converted away from Catholicism over the past thirty years or so). Plus, listening to the different thoughts of different people, and sharing my own, is what the PC is all about.
A related event: After the six year old, Caleb, told me that he thought it was a bad thing to go far away from home, I told him that I didn’t think it was all that bad, since I am far from my home right now. He looked at me and shook his head and said that actually, I wasn’t far from home and family right now because I was home, that his house was my new home and that his family was my new family.

2. Ojojona is a quiet town of about 8000 people, an hour to the southwest of Tegucicalpa. It gets pretty hot during the days, but it cools down at night time; I feel lucky because the other training groups (Heath and Water/Sanitation) went to much hotter places. Since today was Palm Sunday, many of the Catholics in town got up at 4am to work on “sawdust carpets.” It’s a big tradition here that they lay drawings of religious icons made from colored sawdust on the road between the two churches. Then they march their santo in a procession from one church to another. I’m sure it would have been beautiful, but my family is very against it (and Holy Week as a whole), so they didn’t tell me about it until after it was too late, after the procession happened and after the carpets had been all stomped on and blown away. I still went to see the remnants and took a couple pictures.

3. Our hands-on training hasn’t quite lifted off the ground yet here after the first week of Field Based Training (with one exception, see pt 4). A month into training and we’re still going over a lot of basic stuff—sure it’s important stuff, but I think we’re all ready to put some of our knowledge into practice and get out into the field and start doing stuff. Nonetheless, we’ve got some exciting plans coming up. All along I’ve been shaking the rust off my Spanish and have learned lots of “Hondurenismos” (Honduran phrases)—I’m understanding the accent here more and more each day.

4. Finally, one of the most exciting/interesting parts of training here was the one afternoon that we finally got to leave our classroom and do something. We broke down into small groups and did a charla (educational chat) about SWOT analysis at the local technical school. It was a lot of fun and my group had a good time; I think the kids enjoyed it too.

My time here is up. I'm still having a great time. Hasta la proxima vez.