(Almost) Two Years in the Peace Corps in Review

Here I am with my host family celebrating Christmas Eve.
Can you spot the gringo?

Hoping that everyone had a wonderful Christmas and Hanukka. I was lucky enough to be invited to spend Christmas Eve with my host family, a silly and fun adventure in and of itself. My main goal nowadays is to enjoy the last few moments here in my community, amongst my friends and work partners.

I dare say that now that we are approaching the arrival of a new year, it is an appropriate moment to reflect on one's life. So that's what this post is all about.

Some of my favorite magazine editions are Time’s “Year in Review.” It has been a positive experience, amidst the current dramatic turmoil of PC-Honduras, to do something similar and try to recap the past 22 months I have spent as a Peace Corps Volunteer in this fascinating, generous country:

Work Related

Book your trip now!

Classes taught: 8

Manuals written: 3

Videos made: 1

Volunteer events hosted in my site: 2

Tourists who have

visited my community: 300

Kilometers of new trail built:  5

Gain in profit at my coffee co-op from 2010-2011: L2,000,000 ($100,000)

Cultural/Honduras specific    

 

Heading to my bathroom...

1: spider larger than a tennis ball found in my house

1500-1600 : cups of coffee drunk

4 : buckets of coffee picked

1:  number of times I have been shocked by faulty electric installations

1/4 : bowls of traditional tripe soup successfully/politely downed

Personal Time

Books read: 35... top five:                        

1. The Sun Also Rises (Ernest Hemingway)
2. The Sex Lives of Cannibals (Maarten Troost)
3. The Gone Away World (Nick Harkaway)
4. American Gods (Neil Gaiman)
5. The Sparrow (Mary Doria Russell)

Movies watched: 185 ... top five:

1. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010)
2. Death Proof (2007)
3. Sin Nombre (2009)
4. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)
5. The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)    

                                                     
                                               Other

Quetzal.

    Number of months without a personal computer: 7.5

    Apx number of hours of television watched: 25
 
    New countries visited: 2     (El Salvador, Panamá)

    Hikes in the cloud forest: 15

    Quetzals seen: 7

    Shots of tequila taken / shots of tequila regretted: 5/5

    Pictures taken: 2279

    Illegitimate children: 0

Things I will miss…

                    Most

Plato típico = Standard fare

The natural beauty of the Santa Barbara Mountain

All things coffee

My friends and work partners, fellow PCVs

The Honduran plato tipico

The exercise I get on a daily basis

The quiet evenings

Getting piropo-ed (I don’t care if it was by 9^th graders)

Gallina = culprit 1

                    Least

The unease of travelling

Risks of being a gringo here in general

Milk products of Honduras

Gallinas  (chickens) and cohetes (firecrackers)

Cohetes = culprit 2

Riding buses in general

Having no cell phone coverage and being the last to hear about important news

The 60 year old female mayor of Santa Barbara winking at me and squeezing my elbow during meetings

Things I missed from the US… 

Most

Dr. Pepper

Dishwashers

Trash management

Being up to date on news and major events

Driving

Current movies

Ubiquitous Internet

Dave Letterman

Being paid in dollars

The comfort of public security

Being within my native culture

(Friends, family)

Least

"I make America look good."

The fast pace and pressure/stress connected with trying to become a successful adult in the United States

Facebook

Expensive consumer goods

Partisan politics

The economic crisis and not having a job

American television

Donald Trump

Will see everyone back home quite soon. Happy New Year's from San Luis Planes!

The Future of PC-Honduras

This is a tough blog post to write.

Two days ago all PCVs in Honduras received a bomb-shell email from our Regional Director, our boss in charge of all Peace Corps programs in Latin America and the Pacific island countries. He told us that the decision was made to suspend Peace Corps Honduras and that all volunteers are being sent back to the US for at least 30 days on “Administrative Hold” while the future of the program is deliberated in Washington. That is bureaucratic code for “Honduras is being shut down.”  It was a decision that we had feared might be coming for months now, but one that I had hoped wouldn’t actually happen.

It has been a rough year for volunteers in this country. San Pedro Sula, the second largest city in Honduras, is statistically one of the two or three most dangerous cities in the world. Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras, is not far behind. In essence, gang warfare and narco-trafficking in the country are out of hand and very little is being done to effectively put a stop to it. This has been a reality that all PCVs in the country have come to understand and was a major focus of our 3 months of training. For the most part we are very careful about travelling in the country and generally try to keep a low profile. Even though it has been a precarious situation for a while now – considering that volunteers were still getting robbed at gunpoint and having their houses broken in to etc – major crimes still had not been directed at PCVs. That is, until this year.

We PCVs here are definitely a family and we pride ourselves on the mutual support we give each other professionally and personally; we’re all in this together, kinda thing. So, when something like this happens to a fellow volunteer, we all feel it, we all get shaken. But earlier this year, two female volunteers were raped within a month’s time. I can only imagine how something so ugly will change their lives forever and it makes me sick to think that there are people out there so messed up they’d do something like that, no matter what country they’re from. Naturally, the US government is ultimately held responsible and actions must be taken.

Combine this new reality in Honduras with major budget cuts to Peace Corps worldwide and you get the level of change that has hit our program here this year. Policies were shifted, six projects were cut down to four, staff and volunteer numbers were reduced, more places became off-limits for PCVs and, they announced the cancellation of the arrival of the new training group scheduled for this coming February. Amongst this whirlwind of changes, our Safety and Security Officer (SSO) resigned. I stopped by his office before he left to thank him for his hard work despite his tough job and he told me how much the events of this year had deeply affected him and, basically, that he couldn’t take another month of his job.

Reading all this as I write it makes it sound like a bad dream that keeps getting worse. A few weeks after our SSO left, our Safety and Security staff aid personnel was also let go as part of the earlier-mentioned office cutbacks. Then, as our Country Director was in Panama for a conference, the last straw finally broke the camel’s back: a female volunteer was shot in the leg in an armed robbery gone bad, as she travelled back to her site from San Pedro Sula (see La Prensa article, Spanish). It was a classic case of “being in the wrong place at the wrong time,” as an official in our office put it in his email, and it could have happened to any of us. Thank goodness, she is alive and recovering, but that did it.

I’m not happy with all this, obviously. The last five months of my service, perhaps the most important part, have been robbed. My projects, which were counting on another combined nine months of PC volunteer support, are now having the rug pulled out from under them, putting their continued wellbeing at risk. For example, my major Health Center project is put on hold, and the help my community was expecting won’t be coming now. How do you think an incident like this will affect our tourism project? Additionally, I have to say goodbye to my friends and work partners here all of a sudden, just like that, after almost two years of living here. Essentially, the criminals of the big cities in Honduras are making the innocent rural communities lose out.

On a personal level too, we are being picked up and dropped into a very different life, most suddenly. I do not know if I will be ready to go back to the United States, considering the rapid cultural change that represents. It is safe to say that the majority of volunteers in my training group, who still had another five months here, do not have jobs lined up yet, places to live, or money to support ourselves! We were counting on that crucial time to get our futures straightened out.

When I told members of my co-op what was happening, the president of the board of directors wept as he apologized on behalf of his country. They all felt awful that a volunteer had been hurt and furious that Honduras is in such a bad place right now, that nothing is being done by their government to fix the situation. I told them that even though I feel very safe and comfortable here in San Luis Planes and that our work together was great, that I have no choice in the matter. I will always remember my time spent here positively and think of them warmly. Maybe I will be able to return some day.

In the mean time, those of you reading this, please know that I am healthy and safe. Please do not send mail because it probably will not get here before I leave.

To be fair and consistent, here is the official statement from PC Washingon: http://www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=resources.media.press.view&news_id=1932

Also, I just found out that this news made the NY Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/22/world/americas/peace-corps-cuts-back-in-honduras-guatemala-and-el-salvador.html?scp=1&sq=peace%20corps,%20central%20america&st=cse

And MSNBC: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45762937/ns/world_news-americas/t/peace-corps-pull-out-honduras-over-safety-fears/#.TvNV_TXDiq9

And CNN: http://edition.cnn.com/2011/12/23/world/americas/central-america-peace-corps/index.html?hpt=hp_t3

Here is the article that appeared in La Prensa, San Pedro's central newspaper: http://laprensa.hn/Secciones-Principales/Honduras/Tegucigalpa/Por-inseguridad-se-retiran-de-Honduras-Cuerpos-de-Paz-de-EUA

Finally, the main newspaper in El Salvador also released an article, which got a lot of pretty ugly comments (Spanish): http://www.laprensagrafica.com/internacionales/centroamerica/238775-eua-suspende-promocion-de-cuerpo-de-paz-a-guatemala-y-salvador-.html

Celebrate Something New this Holiday Season

Report: month 22

 “Where is my Mind? Way out, in the water. See it swimmin’…”
-The Pixies

I came to a shocking realization the other night, quite out of the blue. What do the state of North Carolina and the Honduran department of Santa Barbara have in common? Well, there are at least two things that I can think of. They are both places that:

1. I, Alex Osteen, have lived in for longer than 1.583 years.
2. Celebrate the human foot in strange, mutated-morphological ways. North Carolina proudly displays the sole of its troublingly blue foot, stained with a viscous black substance and Santa Barbara’s famous symbol is a foot with a rainbow feather growing out of it. Weird, right?

Does this mean that there’s something horribly messed up with my sub-conscience, that I have somehow ended up living a vast portion of my life in Bizarre Foot World?! I don’t think I’ve done it intentionally, but that would just prove it’s my sub-conscience at work. Indeed, this is precisely the kind of thing that I ponder at nights here in the GRAND OLE United States Peace Corps.

I hope everyone has a happy holiday season 2011 and remember, celebrate your feet.

Commencement speech at my school’s graduation

This past week the 9^th grade class asked me to be the commencement speaker at their graduation ceremony. Since my town’s school is a K-9, the 9^th graders have a graduation similar to seniors at a high school in the US. For the majority of these kids, 9^th grade will be as far as their education goes, so it’s an equally important ceremony for them and their families.

As with many other events that I’ve experienced here in Honduras, this graduation ceremony was, in many ways, quite similar to its US counterpart, but with a few standout details that made it quite distinct.

Same things

• decorations: balloons, flag, cutouts of diplomas and graduation caps etc
• speeches: from the principal, the class’s teacher sponsor, class representative (and me)
• honors given to the student with the highest grades
• lots of proud family members, lots of pictures
• diplomas were given
• party afterwards

Different things

• started 1.5 hours late, naturally
• it was the first graduation in the new community center, in the middle of town, so bolos showed up outside to noisily loiter for the entire ceremony (bolo is the loving colloquial name given to the town drunks, who are important actors in any town social event)
• they hired a professional soccer announcer to be MC, so the ceremony progressed very dramatically, much like listening to a soccer game
• a local 20 year old was the sound guy and played the Titanic Celine Deyon song, 80s American pop and Puerto Rican rap as the background music about four notches too loud, throughout the entire event, during speeches and all
• each student brought a padrino, or a community member who contributed to their education, whom they respect, who escorted them to the stage to receive their diploma and who danced a waltz with them at the end of the event (see fellow PCVs' post: http://nolanandnicki.blogspot.com/2011/11/pomp-and-strange-circumstances.html)
• secret Santa amongst students and teachers
• the final toast in which the teachers filled the 15 year olds’ champagne flutes to the brim with strong liquor then said congrats and bottom’s up!

Although sitting on stage at the mesa principal I felt much like an American puppet for the teachers, their token gringo that they can show off to the parents, I still strove to take the event seriously, be grateful and give a polite and warmly motivational speech. It was, after all, the first time that I’ve had to wear a tie in almost two years now. But, in all seriousness, I was honored and thought that it was a very nice gesture of my friends and neighbors here in San Luis Planes.