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

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.

Introduction

I have been invited to serve in the Peace Corps in the Business Development Program in Honduras! I start on February 22nd, 2010. Although I won't know where exactly I'm going to be spending the next two years of my life now, it will most likely be a community of 1,000-3,000 people. The Peace Corps tells you where you're going to be after you've completed the 3 months of training.

This past May I graduated from Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina with a BA in Economics and Spanish. I was an exchange student in Pamplona, Spain during my sophomore year of high school. Then in my junior year of college I got to go back to Spain, to Salamanca, to study for a semester. I've been to rural Bolivia twice to do service work through my church in my hometown of Highlands, NC. I've also tutored Hispanic kids and translated for a local Hispanic outreach nonprofit. All in all, I'm pretty near fluent in Spanish, though I have a hard time translating songs and Spanish citcoms. I do speak with a Castillian accent, though I have a feeling I'll be picking up a new dialect in Honduras.

I applied for the Peace Corps in January 2009. I knew that I wanted to do something interesting while I was young and before I started grad school or looking for a job. I met a Peace Corps recruiter on campus at a career fair and knew right away that I should apply. What a way to give back to the world. I also figured that doing the Peace Corps would be a good way to put my economics into practice, as well as solidify my Spanish.

But the Peace Corps takes a long time to process your application and I didn't know if I was in or not until just a month ago. So since graduation in May until November, I was hanging out on the fence of life, not knowing my future. They said to stay positive and keep a sense of humor while I waited, but I was ready to know one way or the other.

So, I am relieved and pumped at this point, to finally have a date and a destination. I've been studying up a lot on microcredit and poverty. I've also been reading other volunteers' blogs as well as everything I can find about Honduras. Speaking of which, it's been very interesting following the recent politics of Honduras, considering it's the first country in Latin America to have had a coup since the end of the Cold War. Of course Micheletti and his supporters say it wasn't a coup, but we'll leave it at that. I am relieved that the country had elections just a few days ago and hope that it means the healing process is under way. It's going to be so fascinating being there in the wake of all of this and I can't wait to get a better grasp on it all.

I plan to use this blog as a way to let my family and friends keep tabs on me, as well as anybody else out there considering the Peace Corps or just wanting to read about one person's adventure abroad. At this point there's no telling how often I'll get to add to it, but I'm going to try to write as often as I can.