The End of My Blog...

I have decided to stop writing this blog, to let it rest in peace in the bowels of the Internet as a historical documentation of my experiences as a Peace Corps Business Development Volunteer in Honduras. Thank you for reading and commenting all these months. Please feel free to contact me in the future regarding these posts at: alex.osteen.pchn@gmail.com . If you are interested in getting involved with the Peace Corps, I say do it!

Also, in case you're a movie buff, check out my new blogging endeavor, my movie critiques:
http://thepicturegrande.blogspot.com/

Back in the US and a look towards the Future

After two goodbye parties in my town, a whirlwind of sorting and packing and selling two years' worth of junk, a four day Peace Corps conference at the Hotel Maya in Tegucigalpa, and hundreds of goodbyes, I successfully travelled back home. The million small differences between San Luis Planes and Highlands, NC are adding up to a relatively large shock, but luckily I'm unemployed and poor and don't have a lot of things to do other than work on my adjustment.

Currently, I'm deciding what to do with this blog, whether to change its focus to my life as a young professional in the US or let it fade into being a relic of one person's go with the Peace Corps.

But as for the BIG QUESTION, "What now?" honestly, there is no concrete answer. The limbo that I'm in is definitely going to cause some stress, but I also have to believe that there is great opportunity to be had. So here are the possibilities (I daresay they are similar to those of lots of my fellow PC-Honduras volunteers):

1. Ideally I will get into a graduate school program in Environmental Policy and Economics/Business Administration in the fall.
2. Keep fundraising for my town's Health Center project.
3. Travel a little and visit friends/family.
4. Catch up on news, politics, movies etc.
5. Get a part-time job in the mean time.

Thanks to my friends and family in Honduras and in the US for the support you have shown me throughout this time of unexpected transition; it means a lot.

(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.

Expanding my Town's Health Center

The following is the grant proposal that I'm turning in to the Peace Corps on behalf of my town. We are going to be doing a PC Partnership grant of $40,000. You can donate to our project very soon:
Also check out our YouTube videos in English and Spanish!

Executive Summary

San Luis Planes on a cloudy day.

The more than 4,000 villagers of San Luis Planes and neighboring towns have identified the expansion of their health center as the area’s top priority.

Health-related problems abound and, because of the highly limited physical space in the current health center, they simply are not adequately being attended to in San Luis Planes. The nearest hospital is an expensive emergency trip away (the equivalent of five-ten days’ wages for a local laborer), preventing many impoverished families from visiting a doctor.

The goal of this project is to more than triple the size of the current health center’s physical space. By doing so, the center will add ten new rooms, including an area dedicated to vaccinations, a maternity ward, an overnight room  and a doctor’s office, thus providing crucial new health services. Ultimately, with an improved building, the town will be able to receive the placement of a full-time doctor from the Ministry of Health and will thus begin work on preventative health and education, the truly sustainable solutions to the area’s health problems.
Community leaders representing the town’s various key organizations have come together to form a committee to oversee this project. They understand the importance of improving their community’s health and are dedicated to fighting for it. Additionally, the mayor of the city of Santa Barbara, the municipality of which San Luis Planes forms part, has promised to support to the project. The two parties together will contribute a total of nearly 65% of the entire cost.

Health is a fundamental public good and a person can’t hope to live a productive life without it, just as a town can’t hope to develop without prioritizing the health of its citizens. Thus we hope that this project will directly contribute to the area’s economic advancement and well-being.

Background Information

A local girl helps her mother on the coffee farm.

San Luis Planes is a village located within the municipal limits of Santa Barbara, the capital city of the department with the same name. The town rests on a plateau at around 1300 meters above sea level, within the buffer zone of the Santa Barbara National Park. There are approximately 1325 habitants and 290 households, putting the average number of people per house at around 4.6. What’s more, the nearly 4000 people of the seven surrounding villages also use the health center. People make a living primarily harvesting coffee and other agricultural endeavors. The average household annual income is approximately 25,000 lempiras (around $1315). San Luis Planes contains a K-9 school with twelve teachers, a coffee cooperative, three churches, a community center, a police sub-station, a soccer field, and said small health center. The town was connected to the national electric grid in 2008.

The town's soccer team and my left index finger.

The greater area has felt the need for this project for years, but hasn’t been able to obtain financial support until now. With that goal in mind, 25 community leaders from various key organizations in San Luis Planes (churches, the town council, the school, the coffee cooperative etc) came together to form a committee to work on this project.  They also have the support of the town councils of the surrounding villages as well as the mayor’s office of Santa Barbara.

Community Need

The Catholic Church during mass.

In San Luis Planes, like in many places in rural Honduras, the population’s overall health is sorely lacking. Some of the most frequent sicknesses include respiratory problems; skin diseases; diarrhea, amoebas, intestinal parasites and other stomach problems caused by contaminated water and food; high blood pressure, high cholesterol and general heart problems; diabetes; and injuries/emergencies related to non-mechanized manual labor. What’s more is that maternal care and sexual education is a growing necessity, considering the high birth and teen-pregnancy rate in the area and the effect they have on family economics.

This second-hand American school bus represents the primary
mode of transportation for most people in my town.

The nearest hospital is 36 kilometers away and an emergency trip there can cost between 500-1000 lempiras, the equivalent of five to ten day’s wages. Because of this steep cost, many poor families simply do not have the resources to visit a doctor when they get sick, much less for frequent checkups. To put it basically, the limited space and resources of the health center are simply not meeting the needs of San Luis Planes and even less so for the greater area. These problems will only become greater with time because of the rapidly expanding population.

The members of the health center committee believe that these problems can begin to be resolved by obtaining a doctor. And in order for the Ministry of Health to send a doctor to San Luis Planes, the health center must be expanded according to a list of specific requirements, more than tripling the square footage of the building. The idea is that along with being able to render more services, the health center’s doctor and new space/equipment will be able to focus more on preventative health and education. More physical space also means a bigger medical storage room and thus the ability to provide more medicine to the patients who need it.

This woman, posing with three great grandchildren, represents the
elderly population of San Luis Planes.

 Community Initiative and Direction

The committee that was formed elected its officers in its first meeting.  An in-depth community analysis followed, using survey results, input from representatives from various community-wide organizations and members’ own experiences and opinions. After the health center came out as the top priority, the committee wrote a work plan and the project proposal. The committee meets minimally once a week for two to three hours in the afternoon, but the officers often work much longer during the week and donate time and transportation without a second thought. Only after all this work was finished did committee members approach the Peace Corps volunteer to ask about ways to go about raising the funds required.

The Health Center's nurse likes to give shots.

Several members of the committee have worked with Peace Corps volunteers in the past on other large projects including eco-stoves, latrines and a new school. Additionally, almost every previous project that brought the current community buildings to San Luis Planes was implemented by at least one person on this committee.

The committee keeps the minutes during meetings, records agreements that are reached, stays in contact with the mayor and other town councils, and works closely with the Peace Corps volunteer who is helping them. When it comes time to buy materials and begin construction, the committee will take charge of managing the inventory, overseeing the foreman’s work, keeping accurate and transparent records of finances, and communicating progress to the rest of the community and to the other donors.

Community Contribution

Tripling the size of this health center will be relatively expensive at more than $40,000. However, between the people of San Luis Planes and their elected officials in Santa Barbara, the community will be contributing nearly 65% of total costs, approximately $26,000.

This is the crowded waiting room.

The people of San Luis Planes will donate the equivalent of nearly 900 work days in difficult manual labor supporting the foreman in the construction of the building. This includes not only helping to move and prepare materials, but also digging a large hole for a septic tank, leveling out the terrain for the new building and helping to install the plumbing, roofing and electricity. When put into dollar form, these 900 work days total out to nearly $7,000, which, for a town whose habitants’ average annual income is only $1,315, is substantial.

The municipality has promised to provide a few of the basic materials needed for construction, like rebar and steel roofing beams, a value of approximately $10,500. They will also pay the foreman and engineer in charge of the building’s architectural designs and construction, totaling more than $8,500.

The remaining 35%, $15,000, will come from this Peace Corps Partnership Program, paying for the rest of the construction materials and the value of the contract to install the building’s ceiling.

Project Implementation

The project’s first phase, which is the phase that corresponds to this Peace Corps Partnership profile, will take seven months. After writing the profile comes fundraising. The community will be in charge of promoting the project locally and organizing the work that people will contribute. The Peace Corps volunteer will be in charge of promoting the project abroad. The committee plans to spend four months on this fundamental step.

The Health Center from the outside.

While fundraising, the committee will also hold a community-wide meeting, passing on the details of their planning to the general public. They will also choose a foreman and write up a contract. Once the funds are raised the committee will purchase the materials and begin construction in February. The construction is planned to last four months until May, when the finished building will be inaugurated.

During the construction, committee members will take turns managing the inventory and will continue meeting once a week to give progress reports. Once the construction is finished, the committee will evaluate the project as a whole, and then enter into a second phase. The second phase will take the committee into November 2012 in which time they will work on obtaining the appropriate equipment and furniture and the placement of a full-time doctor. After the year is up, the committee will switch members. The goal, however, is to maintain the committee indefinitely, giving support to the employees of the health center.

Project Sustainability

Although a better building doesn’t automatically mean development, this project has everything it needs to be sustainable.

The committee, holding up the blueprints of the
Health Center's expansion.

In the first place, this committee is made up of people who have lived here their entire lives, whose families have lived here for generations, and who are dedicated to seeing their town develop. Their dedication to seeing this project through now and into the future is unquestionable because they have a real interest in seeing their area’s general health improve. Another reason they will be the first to defend the well-being of their health center because of the 900 work days they are going to put into its renovation.

The members of this committee are also learning valuable skills when it comes to project design and management and community analysis. The knowledge of how to organize a project this big will be useful years into the future as they start to tackle other issues confronting their community. This, in reality, is at the heart of sustainable development.

Finally, once the health center meets the Ministry of Health’s requirements, San Luis Planes will receive a doctor who will be able to better attend the health needs of people here. But also the doctor will handle education and work on preventing health problems. Education is the key.

Any contribution to a town's health and education is a contribution to its economic development.

Bringing Technology to Rural Honduras

I live in a place that until three years ago did not have electricity. There is no cell phone coverage and no landlines. Until last November there were only two or three computers in my town. Then the school installed 15 computers as part of a government program of the former president, Mel Zelaya, who was deposed by the coup back in 2009. (By the way, if you are doing the math, it took the school almost two years to get those computers out of the box and installed!) I am just now wrapping up computer classes to the teachers at my school, the majority of which had never touched a computer before. Ben, in El Dorado, and I have just started a new round of computer classes for the general public in our two towns.

And now, thanks to now Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Alicia, a few people in her town, and my coffee co-op, an Internet company a few miles away just constructed two antennas, one of which is strapped to the roof of my coffee co-op, to bring in a Wi-Fi signal to our two towns. Now the library in El Dorado and my co-op are connected to the World Wide Web.

In other words, this community has gone from no electricity, no light bulbs, no TVs, no fridges three years ago, to having Internet and YouTube, Facebook, email, Skype, Google, news, Wikipedia and viruses, porno and conspiracy theories galore. The good and the bad is all here now. How do you think this will affect the people in my town? My prediction is that their minds will be blown out of their eyes...

Good news is that I personally don't have to travel 2.5 hours to check emails any more. My life also will be turned around now, making my PC service turn a corner. This is the 21st century and it's here to stay!

Recent smells on the bus

Here is a list of smells that I have had opportunity to experience on the bus from my town to the city of Santa Bárbara:
1. rotting cabbage
2. old man refried-bean farts
3. fermenting coffee beans
4. baby
5. vomit
6. cologne on any male adolescent on board, always overdone just a bit
7. the ubiquitous body odor of people from the campo
8. feet
9. manure

Painting an environmental mural in the mountains.

This past weekend, my environmental club and I --along with the help of two other PCVs and a Honduran artist/volunteer from Santa Barbara-- painted a mural at my school. It turned out to be a surprisingly fun project, though a lot of work. The theme was "conserving the environment" but from there, the kids had free reign. We worked the entire weekend and on Monday too and Im very proud of the final product. Lots of them drew a standard fare of birds and flowers and trees, but there was some critical commentary too: one kid drew a skeleton of a poached animal, another a fish with a chain around its neck. All in all, they worked hard and had a good time and are happy about how the mural turned out. The teachers also seemed pleased. In fact, the social studies teacher approached me afterwards about repainting the world map, a project left by the last PCVs in my site which has become quite worn away. There is some paint left over, so we shall see...

Fellow volunteers, the Constant Transition.

Well, Alicia, the PCV just down the road from me, just finished her two year service and left our neck of the woods among a series of goodbye parties, endless farewells and last-minute work tasks to return to the last few days of summer in the beautful West Coast. Alicia and I have collaborated a lot on various projects over our more than a year of shared time on the mountain: the ecotourism committee, her library in her town, and environmental education and training.

She also dragged me up into the cloud forest for many a challenging hike as I (often clumsily) supported her scientific survey of the amphibians and reptiles of the mountain she was doing to complete her masters' thesis. (I'll have it be known that I found one frog).

Initially, before even making it to site, I had thought that I didnt want to be placed nearby another volunteer for fear that it would impede my community integration. And I guess that I didnt get placed in a site with another volunteer, considering she lived in the next town over. But our proximity was actually a good thing. It was nice to have an ally so close by, someone to talk work with, who knew the same people and the same issues, someone to eat American food with (even though she is a vegetarian) and to culturally escape with. It was, in fact, because of Alicia that my town filled out the paperwork successfully to get a volunteer. In essence, I ended up in San Luis Planes because of Alicia. She became a good friend and a big support, and we will all miss her.

Since Karen, our third amigo (amiga, I guess it would be), left us back in January, I was going to be the lone remaining volunteer when Alicia departed. But lucky, Alicia's community received another volunteer a couple months ago, Ben, who had to be moved away from the site he'd been living in for the past nine months because of worsening security issues. Ben is a sociable and fun person who has already become friends with just about everyone in his town. He seems to be dedicated to carrying on the work that Alicia left behind and may have time left to get another project done too. He will be a good ally.

So now that Alicia's entire training group (labeled arbitrarily H-15) left the country at various times during the past month and a half, my training group (H-16) became the oldest and wisest in PC-Honduras (heh, yeah right)... the seniors, so to speak, considering there are four training groups in country at one time.

We lost a lot of friends and good volunteers, reminding us of our own ticking clock. 27 months is a long time but it is also so ephemeral. My last eight-nine months here in a way seem hard-earned yet too few. Thus is the way of the Peace Corps, I suppose.

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%.

The death of a laptop, take two

Last Saturday, the most powerful electric storm that Ive perhaps ever experienced in my life struck my town. Though it only lasted for about two and a half hours in total, it was mightily intense and ultimately destructive. Lighting was striking all over the place and continually. The storm gods were angry. The night sky lit up more or less perpetually. And the wind toppled trees and made my (not-so-sealed) house rather breezy. But, one of the damned lightning bolts struck somewhere immensely close to my house in a booming explosion and blew out two lightbulbs (literally, as the shards of glass on my floor could attest) , made my cell phone charger start to smoke, and, worst of all, fried my laptop. In my defense, it was plugged into my surge protector. But it didnt matter. So, about six months after recooperating my laptop from a virus which shut it down for nearly four months, Im again sin portatil (without laptop). Life goes on without a computer, just much less efficiently. Luckily, it was under insurance (Im glad I went for the PC-endorsed property insurance after all) and I had all of my most important documents backed up on my harddrive back home and on my USB here. So the lesson to be learned is either 1) invest in a super heavy duty surge protector (in retrospect, mine was only about $20 from Target) or 2) unplug everything during any storm where there may be lighting.

PS- this is not the real picture of what happened to my laptop, rather an exaggeration