Feria

Feria in Santa Barbara started on December 1st, and hasn’t stopped since. Throughout the week there have been vendors set up in the park selling food and crafts (and junk).

Every day there are parades in the morning and music at night.

The queen of the feria has a busy schedule during the feria, she basically attends every event and rides or walks in every parade.

This is a princess of the feria, Claudia, she dances with me in the folkloric dance group.
The president of Honduras even showed up to ride in the parade on his horse. He is the one of the left with the big mustache.


Now this is a rare yet refreshing sight for Honduras

World AIDS Day

On December 1st Santa Barbara joined with cities all over the world to celebrate World AIDS Day. The HIV/AIDS Network in Santa Barbara managed to organize a huge event for the day, including a vigil, parade, a testing campaign, education games with prizes, presentations, an HIV/AIDS rapid testing campaign and musical, theater and dance presentations. December 1st also happens to be the start of feria (festival) in Santa Barbara which gave it even more publicity. The HIV/AIDS Network is made up of most of the organizations in Santa Barbara that somehow work with HIV and they all pitched in to organize something that I never could have done on my own. Sometimes things in Honduras are horribly disorganized and sometimes they just fall into place, it’s amazing.

Friday night the Catholic Church sponsored a vigil to honor those infected and affected by HIV/AIDS.
The Central Park where we held the activities
Sign translation: HIV/AIDS Network Santa Barbara
Community leaders such as the vice-mayor, the director of education and many of the members of the HIV/AIDS Network sat at the head table to support the event.
For me the testing campaign was one of the most important aspects of the day. There is still substantial stigma surrounding HIV/AIDS and many people are scared to get tested. In order to help reduce the stigma of even getting tested and promote the importance of having the test we asked community leaders to get tested as an example. Here the vice-mayor is getting the test done in the central park in front of everybody. In total we did 36 HIV tests during the day.
One of the local cultural centers brought a group of kids to sing. How cute.
The folkloric dance group that I dance with also performed

Overall it was an amazing success and I hardly had to do anything (and that is exactly how it should be).

Thanksgiving Honduran Style

The Saturday before Thanksgiving I flipped a coin to help me decide what to do; stay in Santa Barbara or go to the north coast. I felt torn because if I stayed in Santa Barbara I would get to dance at the opening of the Cultural Center, which would be attended by the president of Honduras and I would get to attend my first quincinera (like sweet 16, but 15, it’s a big deal here). On the other hand, I wouldn’t get to visit Mary and Raphael on the north coast or share in their holiday meal. In the end I flipped a coin and went to the north coast (in the end it was the right decision, the president didn’t show up, big surprise). Katie, my site mate, and I started off early Thursday morning and arrived at Mary’s house in Sonaguera about 7 hours later.

Translation=war zone

Although it was a long trip it went well a luckily we didn’t have to take the advice of this sign that was posted at the front of the bus…
Translation=Ask for a bag in case of vomiting (which unfortunately happens quite often on buses here).

We decided to celebrate on Friday, since not everybody could make it for Thursday. The next morning when we woke up I asked Mary if she had turned off the fan in the middle of the night and she replied that the power was out and she had been lying awake in bed since 6 am trying to figure out what we would do if the power didn’t come back on. The problem is that Mary has an electric stove and oven, so no power means to turkey. Well, Mary’s neighbors have a gas stove and oven, so they said we could use their kitchen to cook if the power didn’t come back on. Well, eventually the power came back on, then went off again, then came back on, then went off again, etc. until it finally came back on and stayed on in the early afternoon. Then the cooking began! We had virtually everything you could want on Thanksgiving Day: turkey, gravy, stuffing, roasted vegetables, mashed potatoes, green beans, cranberry sauce, sweet potato pie, pumpkin bread, pumpkin pie and apple pie! We had to go shopping all over Honduras to get the ingredients but we made it work.
The spreadFrom left: Me; Katie; Raphael; Dan (Raphael´s friend visiting from the states)

I was especially excited about the pumpkin bread, one of my favorites. I can’t buy canned pumpkin in my site so I had to buy it in Tegucigalpa, the capital, when I went to the Peace Corps office. Most people in my site don’t even know what a pumpkin is. When I tried to explain that pumpkin pie is a Thanksgiving favorite people seemed confused. First of all, the word for cake and pie is the same (pastel) and the word for pumpkin (calabaza) refers to a gourd or a calabash in general. So, I’m sure they were imagining a cake made out of gourds and it probably didn’t seem very appetizing. Katie made excellent pumpkin bread and pumpkin pie, although we had a little trouble with the pie at first. The crust around the edges collapsed and the filling started spilling out in the oven. We had to take it out, clean the oven, fix the crust and then bake it, but it tasted great in the end.

It was wonderful to be with good friends and enjoy Thanksgiving even though we were all far away from home.
Peace Corps volunteers, friends from home and Agua Pura volunteers

We also did lots of relaxing and reading. Here is Katie sitting in the hammock in Mary’s apartment reading. Why don’t we have hammocks in our living rooms in the states? They are so much cheaper than couches…
Katie relaxing in the hammock in Mary´s apartment reading Psychology Today

On Saturday a few of us headed up to Raphael’s site in Trujillo, which is right on the beach. From what Raphael tells me his site is scorching hot in the summer and raining constantly in the summer. Luckily we had amazing luck as it was absolutely beautiful the entire time we were there; clear blue skies and not too hot.

View from Raphael´s roof

While in Trujillo we of course at Thanksgiving leftovers (actually we ate most of the leftovers on the bus on the way from Sonaguera to Trujillo because we got hungry), visited some tourist sites, swam and relaxed.

This is an old Spanish fort located on the hills above the beach

On Sunday we visited Casa Kiwi, a hostel owned by New Zealanders a few miles outside of Trujillo. They actually keep their beach clean (unlike many other beaches in Honduras) so we took advantage and went for a swim (my mom would like it, the water is really warm).
Clean beach Dirty beach

The water is not super clear, so there wasn’t much to see, but Raphael did find a starfish.
Katie & I with a starfish on my shoulder

Another interesting attraction was the very large beached boat about a kilometer down the beach from where we were swimming. Apparently something went wrong during a storm and the boat got stuck and has been stuck for over a month (the crew we met assured us that they would have it out by next week and they were nice enough to give us a tour).
The crew that got left behind to deal with their beached boat, I think they were getting pretty bored...

Again, relaxing in hammocks, which is great until the wind dies down and the sand flies attack! They don’t hurt at first, but after about a day they itch like crazy.

The highlight of the trip for me was seeing and dancing the punta. The punta is a traditional dance danced by the Garifuna. We got to the dance club and at first they were playing reggaeton and reggae and people were just chill. Then, the punta band showed up with various types of drums, maracas, and a conch shell and the entire scene transformed immediately. Everybody formed a circle around the band and people took turns going into the middle of the circle to dance solo or in a pair. But before you could dance you had to give money to the band by dropping it in their bowl and then you can dance. Everybody that went in the middle to dance was great. The beat is incredibly fast and the dance involved moving your hips up and down with the music while keeping the upper body basically static. I was nervous at first to dance in front of everybody but I knew I would regret it if I didn’t, so I paid my 5 lempiras and went in the middle to dance, but only for about one minute because the punta is hard!

Overall it was a great weekend and I hardly felt homesick. I think the thing I missed most about Thanksgiving with my family in the states was sitting around after eating and just talking (and of course eating leftovers).

Danza Folklorico

Dancing is one of my greatest passions and one of the things I miss most about the states. So, to help fulfill my desire to dance again I decided to join a local danza folklorico group in Santa Barbara. Danza folklorico (Folkloric Dance) is traditional Honduran folk dancing. There are about 80 different songs (think ranchero type music) with assigned choreographies to each one. The dances are generally danced in groups with partners and represent the dances that Hondurans traditionally danced. I joined the dance group Guayabal about 3 months ago and practice with them every weekend. The age range of the group varies from 14-50 years old, and most of them have years of dancing experience. The steps are all very simple and easy to pick up, for me it’s just a matter of memorizing the choreographies (so far I know about 5). Although I still miss the salsa and samba I danced in the states, I have really enjoyed dancing with Guayabal. It is a great way to meet people from my community, both within the group and when we do performances. Also, it is interesting to learn the dances themselves and indirectly learn about Honduran culture and history.

I did my first performance with the group on October 27th in a neighboring town for some type of cultural night. I wasn’t nervous at all because we dance in groups and with a partner so it takes the pressure off the individual. I only danced two of the dances, one of them I learned the night before, but it was fine because my partner knew what he was doing. My favorite part is the skirts and how they flare out when we spin (although they weigh a ton!)

Minnesota Rotary Men

When Andrea and Bernardo, the previous PCVs left Santa Barbara in July they left me with a list of contacts from the states that they had worked with in Santa Barbara in the past and who would be expecting to work with the new PCVs when they returned to Santa Barbara. One such group is a Rotary Club from Minnesota that has been coming down to Santa Barbara every year for the past two decades to do medical brigades and other projects. They had a reputation for being the most fun and having famous “security meetings” at Jose’s Sports Bar every evening before dinner. A few months ago one of the members of the Rotary Club contacted me to say he would be coming down late in October and would like to work with Agua Pura on a water project (ie. designing and building a water system to deliver water to communities). At first I was hesitant because Agua Pura works with water filters, not water systems and I personally know nothing about water systems. Furthermore, the community they wanted to work with, Buena Vista, is over 3 hours away from Santa Barbara and difficult to get to. The Club discovered Buena Vista during one of their previous trips and found a great need there and suggested Agua Pura install filters there, which they did. When I found out that Agua Pura had installed filters there I questioned the decision to install filters in a community so far away because of the great transportation costs (gas and delivery of filters) and time (6 hours driving a day). Considering that there are other needy communities much closer to Santa Barbara I wondered if we should spend more time and money to install filters so far away. In the end I referred the group from Minnesota to Katie, the Water & Sanitation engineer in Santa Barbara to work with them on the water project.


Chris and Dr. Ted arrived on Sunday night and met with Katie and I and the local Rotary Club to plan their week. They would be returning to Santa Barbara in February with a large group of about 25 so the goal this week was to plan the projects they would do in February. They planned to visit the hospital to prepare the medical work, visit Buena Vista to investigate the water project and find schools eligible for construction projects. This planning process was quite different than my experience with the previous Rotary Club visit; for which I planned their entire week for them weeks in advance. I think that the fact that the group has been coming down for so many years has gotten them used to how things work here and thus they have come to be pretty flexible and laid back (or maybe that is just how they are naturally).

From Left: Larry from Colorado; Dr. Ted from Minnesota; Rene from Santa Barbara; me; Chris from Minnesota

At the meeting Chris and Dr. Ted re-emphasized their interest in the Buena Vista water project and stressed the importance of working with this community with no water, no latrines and no electricity. They said that if they didn’t help them nobody else would. This made me re-think my economic analysis of where Agua Pura should install filters. If a community really needs something is it okay to spend more time and money helping them than you could spend helping somebody else who is maybe a little less needy? Yet, at the same time I remind myself that they are only funding the projects and aren’t the ones that will be making the 3 hour trips daily, so the extra time and money spent isn’t as palpable for them. What is the best balance between economics and compassion to help us determine who gets helped and who doesn’t?

Monday morning we met for breakfast and headed to the hospital to meet with doctors and administrators to talk about what medicine and equipment the hospital needed and plan the surgeries to be done in February. Dr. Ted had been doing surgeries and supporting the Santa Barbara hospital for over 20 years, so he was well known and respected and even had wards dedicated to him. He was able to introduce me to many people that I didn’t know but was also pleased to see that I already had already formed relationships with many of the people in the hospital. I served as the translator between the groups although Chris can get by just fine with his Spanish. One big change that is happening this year is that the Minnesota Rotary Club will not be sending a medical brigade that will be going out into communities to see patients; the doctors will stay in the hospital in Santa Barbara and focus on surgeries. The reason for this change is that they had come to believe that sending generalists into communities was not effective. Another one of their goals was to figure out how they can make medical brigades into the communities more effective. The general feedback was that specialists were more in demand, such as gynecologists, dentists and optometrists. Working previously with medical brigades I have come to agree with this idea more and more. Honduras already has family doctors that can give vitamins and general medical attention. It doesn’t make sense for foreign doctors to spend lots of money to come to Honduras to do what a Honduran can easily do. However, if foreign doctors can come to Honduras to provide care that Honduran doctors do not have the technical knowledge or financial ability to provide, then it makes more sense to me.
After leaving the hospital we went out to lunch at the new vegetarian restaurant. During lunch Dr. Ted asked me about my eating habits and I said that I eat everything and have never gotten sick. I think I jinxed myself! All of a sudden I started feeling horrible and I had to tell Chris and Dr. Ted that I was sick and needed to go home. My stomach hurt, I became very tired and I felt like I was going to have diarrhea and throw up at the same time. I went home and slept all Monday afternoon and Tuesday. As usual when I am sick I am a big baby and cry and want my mom. Obviously my mom couldn’t take care of me, but luckily Katie has gotten used to me when I am sick and does a pretty good job of taking care of me.

By Wednesday (October 31st) I dragged myself out of bed to go to the lab to get a blood test, urinalysis and a fecal exam (I was convinced I had parasites since my stomach was making so much noise). It turns out that I didn’t have parasites but I did have a mild bacterial infection so the doctor gave me a prescription for antibiotics. Then I met the Rotarians for dinner. Dr. Ted showed his Halloween spirit by showing up with a bag of candy and an Osama Bin Laden mask. When I saw him I started crying because it made me miss Halloween in the states.

Dr. Ted on Halloween

Thursday I joined the group to investigate construction projects for schools. Larry is an engineer and in February he will bring down a construction team who will replace school roofs and paint schools. We got a list of possible schools from the local Rotary Club and set off to check them out (because sometimes the schools don’t actually need what the list says they need and the group insists on helping those farthest away who are most in need). Two have asbestos contamination and need new roofs and a paint job and one is perfectly fine and doesn’t need anything at all. I was happy that I could work with them and help translate but I was still exhausted from being sick and just sitting in the car made me tired.

Every year there is a large PCV Halloween party in Copan Ruinas where local businesses hold parties and PCVs from all over the country gather. I had planned on going and even had my parents send me my belly dance costume. Unfortunately I still felt sick and had very little energy so I decided not to go. It was disappointing but I think I made the right decision. So I hung out some more with Dr. Ted in the hospital and was lucky enough to observe surgery. Katie and I both went with Dr. Ted and put scrubs on and were actually allowed to stand in the surgery room and watch a c-section, a circumcision and a hernia (obviously we didn’t watch a hernia, we watched the doctors fix it, but I don’t know what the surgery is called, they just called it a hernia is Spanish). It was really interesting and probably not an opportunity I would ever have in the states.

From left: Me (yes I am smiling); the Cuban surgeon; Katie

Katie and I always joke about how we want to meet handsome Cuban doctors working in Santa Barbara who can dance salsa but I think this one is a little too old for both of us.

Above: Katie and I, below: Dr. Ted and Katie

Overall it was a wonderful week (even though I was sick). Dr. Ted, Chris and Larry were amazing to work with because of their laid back yet get things done attitude. I could really see that their years of experience have taught them how things work down here and how to effectively help people (so many times foreign aid groups have no clue how things actually work with the people they are trying to help and don’t even speak their language). They are well respected by everybody who knows them (which is a ton of people; they actually introduced more people to me than I introduced to them) and are willing to give their time and money to help those who need it most. I can’t wait until they come back in February!

A Food Revolution in Honduras

When I moved in to my own apartment about four months ago I realized that I had never had to cook for myself before, I didn’t know how to cook very much by scratch and I didn’t have any recipes. So, I sent out a call for recipes to my friends and family and didn’t get very far (not even my mom sent me recipes). Although some of you did indeed send me some good stuff, so I thank you. Then for my birthday Katie, my site mate in Santa Barbara, gave me a Peace Corps cookbook with recipes accumulated by PCVs. That served me well for a few months and I started to figure things out. I cooked beans for the first time in my life (which takes forever! No wonder people buy beans in a can) and started shopping in the market.

Then one day I get a package in the mail that I had completely forgot about…Susan Garcia, a friend from my samba group in Cleveland sent me The New Laurel’s Cookbook! For those of you who have or are familiar with this cookbook you know how amazing it is. For those of you who don’t, it is a vegetarian, health food cookbook that has tons of wonderful information. I have spent hours just sitting and reading the cookbook and imagining all the wonderful things I am going to make. It is great because it has information about different vegetables and grains and how to cook them and what nutrients they have in them. The book totally inspired me to eat and cook with tons of vegetables and whole grains. Also, I realized that my two years in the Peace Corps was a wonderful time for me to learn how to cook because I probably have more time now than I ever will in the future and I have a fresh vegetable market available to me every day. I don’t have much choice but to buy local, in-season produce. Yet, at the same time it also made me a little sad because some of the amazing things that they talk about in the cookbook I just can’t get here, like whole grain flour and brown rice and tofu and lentils and cottage cheese and yoghurt, etc. Basically my options were white rice and beans. I longed nostalgically for health food stores in the states.

Then another amazing thing happened, I discovered that I could buy flax seed and soy beans in the market and that every once in a while the mini-supermarket has lentils and garbanzo beans.

And then, yet another amazing thing happened, a vegetarian, health food restaurant opened up in Santa Barbara!!!! The owner is an American man and they make veggie burgers and whole grain bread and soy milk and all sorts of other good stuff. What’s really great about it is that they use brown rice and whole wheat flour which they are willing to sell to me, so I will actually be able to cook with whole grains. Honduran food is not generally very healthy and usually involves meat, so a vegetarian health food restaurant in a small town in central Honduras is a pretty progressive thing. So far people seem to like it though, so maybe the whole idea will catch on.

Winter Wonderland

Okay, so Honduras isn’t quite a winter wonderland but it is “winter”. Honduras has two seasons: winter (aka the rainy season) and summer (aka the dry season). Right now we are in winter and things are actually starting to cool off and it feels amazing. Summers in Santa Barbara are usually around 90-100 degrees, I try to wear as little clothing as possible and sweat constantly. I sleep with a fan on me all night long. Now that it is winter the temperature probably gets down to around 60. During the day it can still be hot but at night it is usually cold. While in the summer I wear flip-flops 24/7, now I can actually wear socks and tennis shoes with jeans and my fleece. Not only do I no longer need my fan at night I am actually cold because all I have on my bed is a sheet. So I had to dig my yoga pants and long sleeved shirts out of storage and wear warm PJs to bed. Although I hate being cold and I don’t want it to get any colder here it is nice to feel cozy and drink hot tea for a change. In the states I never really appreciated seasons (because I didn’t like the cold ones) but being here makes me a little nostalgic for the activities that come along with the seasons. I reminisce about fall growing up and going to the cider mill, picking apples and drinking hot apples cider and eating donuts. There are actually apples available here but they are imported from Washington state and cost a ton so I probably won’t be making apple cider anytime soon. Although we will have to make an exception and splurge for Thanksgiving so we can have apple pie.

Another element of winter is the rain. Before the rainy season came around I was a little scared because I imagined non-stop torrential downpours. Luckily it isn’t that bad (at least not yet, they tell me the rains will still get harder). It usually rains in the afternoon and sometimes at night. If I am inside at night I love the sound of the rain outside and it makes everything very cozy. If I have to walk in the rain it is not as pleasant however. Although the rain can be nice it does bring some difficulties. I now have to strategically plan washing and drying my clothes. During the summer I could basically do my wash any time of the day, hang it outside on the line and it would dry within a few hours. Now if it is overcast it takes forever to dry, or if it is raining I´m totally out of luck. One time I put my clothes out in the morning and they didn’t dry because it was overcast so I left them out all night and brought them in the next day. Although they were dry they smelled a little musty from being wet outside in the cold. Another problem is that people don’t seem to want to do anything if it is raining. Sometimes this makes sense, for example if we are planning to install filters in a community but the road is washed out obviously we can’t work. However, sometimes it is just a lame excuse. Last week Katie and I invited three friends over to eat pizza with us. Well, it happened to be raining that night so only one showed up and the others called to say they weren’t coming because it was raining. So what, you get wet! It perplexes me that in a country with a rainy season the rain can stop so much from happening. I guess in the states the weather (especially rain) doesn’t affect our daily activities as much because most of us commute in cars from our garages at home to our offices and most of our roads are paved so most weather doesn’t stop us from working. At least I should be thankful that it didn’t rain during my Men’s Health workshop last week, otherwise I probably wouldn’t have even had 13 show up.

Men’s Health in Santa Barbara

The past two weeks I have been busy preparing for the Men’s Health training of trainers in Santa Barbara. I was awarded a community grant from the Peace Corps in order to do a short term HIV/AIDS prevention activity. I decided to use the money to hold a 3 day Men’s Health workshop to train adult men in Santa Barbara to be facilitators of the “Aqui Entre Nos” methodology to teach HIV prevention and other men’s health topics to adult men. The first two days of the workshop involves teaching all the information and the third day the participants actually have a practicum for which they teach the activities they have just learned to other groups of men. I worked in collaboration with the Santa Barbara HIV Network to plan the event and facilitated it is with three other Peace Corps volunteers. All in all the event was a success, but there were a number of “glitches” that made for an exciting planning process…

First, the overall process of planning in Honduras happens a little bit more last minute than I am used to, which caused a slight bit of stress on my part. I had initially hoped to deliver invitations with 3-4 weeks notice, since the workshop was held on Thursday, Friday and Saturday people may need to get off work and I wanted to give them enough notice. Well, I printed out all the invitations and signed them and was ready to have my counterparts, the president of the HIV Netowrk, sign them as well. It turns out she was on vacation for over a week, which I didn’t know about. The following week I was out of town and then our weekly meeting with the HIV Network were canceled for a few weeks in a row. In the end we didn’t end up giving people the invitations until about a week or two in advance. Some of the invitations were delivered a day or two in advance and some were never delivered at all because the members of the HIV Network never got around to doing it. I had hoped to have 25 participants and the day before the workshop we had 25 confirmed…how many showed up? 13! Growing up in the states I became accustomed to the fact that if you say you are going to do something you usually do it, if you RSVP to something it generally means you will go, or call to cancel if something comes up. Well, here in Honduras, when you say you are going to do something it means that you may or may not do it and that one can’t really know until the last minute. For example, I talked to some of the confirmed participants in person the day before and even the morning of the workshop and they assured me that they would be there…and then they didn’t show up and didn’t call to explain. Sometimes I feel as if many people here have no sense of responsibility and that their word means very little. I think it may come from a desire to please. Those who I invite want to make me happy and so they say they will do something because I ask them to, but it really doesn’t mean they actually have the time or desire to do it. So, in the end only 13 showed up…although 25 would have been better, 13 is better than nothing.

Second, setting up the practicum groups was also challenging. Like I said before, the third day of the workshop consisted of the participants themselves teaching the material they had just learned to other groups of men. It is an important part of the workshop because it forces them to immediately put in practice what they have learned and move from just listening to doing. It also shows them how hard it actually is and that they have to do a lot of preparation to do well. The members of the HIV Network were instrumental in organizing the four groups of men and everything worked out well in the end, but was a little rocky getting there. Two wonderful members of the HIV Network (who actually do what they say they are going to do) organized one group of police and two groups of prisoners. Another member said she would talk to Real Juventud, the Santa Barbara division II futbol team to see if we could do the practicum with them. Well, a month later and she still hadn’t even approached them to talk about it, so I figured out how to meet with their coach and asked him the week before if we could work with them, which we couldn’t because the players would be traveling that weekend. Later I told another member of the HIV Network that I was really embarrassed to have asked the coach with only one week’s notice if he could work with us. My friend didn’t seem to understand why I was embarrassed. Maybe I need to remember that lots of things happen last minute in Honduras, so even though I feel like it is rude to ask somebody to do something last minute, they don’t think it is. So, then we were left without a group…I told the members of the HIV Network that we needed another group so someway or another they better make it happen. Since I didn’t have much control over whether we could find another group or not I just figure I would leave it up to them and things would work out in the end.

Third, we had to find a location to hold the workshop and so one of the hard working members of the HIV Network managed to get the mayor’s office to loan us a conference room in the municipal building. We confirmed and re-confirmed that the room would be reserved for us for free, with AC, for three days. Well, when the day finally arrived Raphael, Cynthia, Conor and I all arrived early at the municipal building to meet with members of the HIV Network and start to set up the room. Well, when we walked into the room we discovered that the mayor was holding a meeting in the room that was supposed to be reserved for us. We talked to the Vice-Mayor and he said the meeting would be done by noon. No problem, our workshop didn’t start until 1:30 pm, so we could come back at 12 and still have an hour and a half to set up. Well, we come back at 12:30 and the meeting was still going on. I talked to the Vice-Mayor and he said they won’t finish until around 1:30 so we would just have to postpone our meeting because the mayor is the ultimate authority. I wanted to scream at them! I wanted to ask them what the word RESERVED meant to them because it was obvious we had different understandings of the meaning of that word. In the end they finished a little before 1:30, we set up quickly and didn’t start until 2:15 anyway because people arrived late. Another issue with the room we were using was that it was the main entrance to the mayors office, so everybody would use it to cut through to the rest of the building although there was a side door. I put a sign on the front door announcing the meeting and asking that only participants enter. On the back door I put a sign that said meeting in process, please do not interrupt. Well, either nobody can read or they simply don’t care because people walked in and out of the door throughout the three days we were there. Most of the time it was just obnoxious but sometimes it was very disruptive. For example, we had an HIV positive man come and give a testimony about his life and people were continually walking through! Then the final glitch…Friday it occurred to us to ask who would be opening the room the following day (Saturday) and at what time. Well, they informed us that the office wouldn’t be open on Saturday so nobody would be there to open and close the room. So apparently RESERVED means that you can write your name down on a calendar but it doesn’t actually mean the room will be unoccupied or open for use! So, Friday afternoon we started to brainstorm other conference rooms we could use. In the end the guy with the key agreed to come in the morning and open the room and then leave the key with us to close it at the end of the day. He actually ended up arriving 5 minutes early the next day and ended up staying to close the building at night! These things get me so worked up while they are happening but in the end always seem to work out (most of the time anyway).

Lots of fun activities so the men don’t get bored. This one is like group rock-paper-scissor, but with wall, hunter, deer.

The workshop itself went well. Raphael, Cynthia, Conor and I all took turns presenting different activities. I had to present some I had never done before so it was challenging and I felt slightly self-conscious about my Spanish because the rest of the group speaks better than I do. The group was a little quite and a few of them a little young, but all-in-all seemed to enjoy the activities.

In addition to teaching HIV prevention we do “quickies” (pun intended) that quickly touch on other men’s health issues such as smoking, different types of cancers, erectile dysfunction, domestic violence, etc. Here Raphael and I are demonstrating how to do a testicular self exam.

The first two days we presented all the materials and did the activities for them and then on Friday afternoon we broke them up into groups and had them start preparing their materials and presentations for the next day. We originally had arranged for 4 groups because we anticipated having 25 participants, but since only 13 showed up we combined 2 groups into one. Two groups went to the jail to work with inmates and one group worked with a group of police and Social Promotion students (10 of them showed up but they misunderstood that the workshop was only for me and sent 5 girls and 5 guys, se we sent the girls home and the 5 guys joined the police).

Although all the needed information for each activity is written out in the manual, including a materials list, the activities still seemed to challenge the participants. The concept of reading through something and figuring out what you need to do to prepare and practice seems like a foreign idea to them and we had to hold their hand through the whole thing. It was clear that many of them hadn’t even read through their activity and just got up and stumbled their way through the presentation.
Charles is one of my counterparts that attended the workshop. He is the coordinator of Jovenes sin Fronteras, an NGO that teaches HIV prevention to youth. He was the best participant and I can’t wait to teach Men’s Health with him!

As I said, two of the practicum groups went to the jail and presented to the prisoners. I have only been in one jail in the states (in Georgia) so that is my only frame of reference, but I think it is safe to say that the jail here is a whole lot different than the ones in the states. Conor, another Peace Corps Volunteer described it as a little city with walls around it. First of all it is right in town, about half a block from the central park, right behind the cultural center. Second, it doesn’t have individual cells like in the states, it is all just open. They have pool tables, open space for sports, people cooking, people making hammocks and hanging out. I actually wasn’t working with on one the practicum groups so I visited all the groups to take pictures and make sure they had all their materials. I arrived at the entrance to the jail and said I wanted to go to where they were doing the practicum. A guard escorted me to the classroom and left me there. I hung out a while in what looked like a regular elementary school classroom with the alphabet, shapes, numbers and classroom rules on the walls (except it was for adults).

Practicum group in the jail.

When I arrived they were in the process of figuring out role, who was supposed to be there and who wasn’t (lots of people wanted to come).

This is Telma, she is a retired teacher and a very active member of the HIV Network. She was one of the most helpful people throughout the entire planning process and made sure things got done that needed to be done. She has worked with the prison extensively through the Catholic Church so she was able to set up the two practicum groups there. Here she is calling role and doing a darn good job of it.

Although I wasn’t there very long my general impression is that the inmates didn’t seem like malicious or dangerous men. More than anything they seemed young and uneducated. Many of them couldn’t read and probably came from very poor backgrounds. When it was time for me to leave (I don’t think my parents will appreciate this…sorry) the guard had already left so I just left the classroom by myself and found my way to the entrance, meaning that I had to walk through the open courtyard of men alone. I was wearing a nametag (which I forgot I had on) so many of them called out my name, but they weren’t disrespectful and I didn’t feel at all threatened. When I came back later on during the morning to deliver the diplomas for the participants the guard recognized me and just opened the gate and I walked to the classroom alone. Although Santa Barbara is considered a more low key prison and I felt safe and had no problems it is probably not a very safe practice.
Practicum group with the police and 5 Social Promotion students.

Overall the practicum groups managed to work their way through the 4 hour workshop with the help of the Peace Corps volunteer assigned to help each group. Two participants actually didn’t show up the morning of the workshop so we had to jump in and take over their parts. One of the participants that didn’t show up sent me a text message saying he was sick and may God bless him and give him strength to recover. I didn’t believe it for a second! Later that day I ran into his mother and asked how he was doing and she said he was sick with sinusitis. Later that night I saw him out at the disco and called him out and told him I didn’t like to be lied to. He said sorry, he wasn’t sick, just hung over. As far as the other guy that didn’t show up I called his house and talked to his mom and told him he needed to come because he had a responsibility to his group and she said she would send him but he never showed up…

This is Juan, one of the workshop participants, leading an activity during the practicum.

Once we finished with the practicum we all got back together as a group and ate lunch. Four of the participants had to leave early because their last bus left at 2 pm and we weren’t scheduled to finish until 4:30 pm. On the invitation it said that you had to be present for the entire workshop so I didn’t want them to leave early but there wasn’t much I could do about it. I had them fill out the final evaluations early and gave them their diplomas so they could catch their bus on time. When some of the other participants saw that others were leaving early they said they were also going to leave early. I told them they had to stay for the entire workshop and because they didn’t have a reasonable need to leave early they would have to stay. It was an incredibly frustrating situation, I felt like I was dealing with little boys whining about how “It’s not fair that they get to leave early, I want to leave early too!” Well apparently I let my annoyance show a little too much and upset on of those who wanted to leave early. He told Cynthia, one of the other facilitators, that I was rude to him and he was going to leave right then. He did end up staying to do the final evaluation but pouted the whole time. Cynthia told me that she apologized to him for me but that I should also apologize to him. At first I had no intention of apologizing to a grown man acting like a child. In the end I realized it is better not to burn bridges and if I wanted to work with him in the future I should drop my pride and apologize. I did apologize and he was completely fine after that and told me not to worry about it at all.

In the end we quickly did an evaluation of how the practicum went then we had them fill out post-tests, final evaluations and community agreements. The post tests are given so we can measure if the participants learn anything, but I still haven’t analyzed the data so who knows if they did or not. The final evaluations are given to provide us with feedback so we can improve, but usually they are almost all positive and very hard to read. The community agreements are given to the participants so they can write down an action plan about how they are going to use what they have learned to teach others in their communities. Their plans always sound wonderful and ambitious but if they actually follow through remains to be seen. If I want to see the multiplier effect actually work then I personally will have to follow up and work with each of them to plan, prepare and execute future workshops. Right now they are not ready to go out on their own and give the workshop but I think there are a few who have potential if we work together a lot in the future.

So what did I learn from this experience? First, things will never be perfect, something will always go wrong, sometimes terribly wrong, but in the end things usually end up okay. Second, if I want something done right I have to do it myself, but I don’t have time to do everything myself and things don’t really need to be 100% right so I need to get to know the people I can rely on and focus on working with them in the future.
The local TV station and radio station both came to interview me! Luckily I didn’t see or hear myself but other people did and they said that my Spanish was good.

Men’s Health National Presentation

During reconnect, Helmuth, the Health Project Manager, invited me to be on the Men’s Health Team, which means that I would be part of the planning for the Men’s Health projects for Peace Corps at a national level. It turns out that the first event I would take part in with the team was a biggy. The day after the Rotary Club left I went to Teguc to help the team put on a National Men’s Health Presentation. The goal of the meeting was to present the Men’s Health teaching methodology developed by Peace Corps to national and international institutions in Honduras. The meeting was attended by representatives from the Ministry of Health, USAID, ONUSIDA, the National Police and Military and other major institutions, which meant we had to make it perfect. I arrived Sunday night and the team was already hard at work. We worked late, went to bed late and woke up the next day at 5:30 to start working again. I personally woke up in a horrible mood and in no mood to work. I had just gotten over a bite on my foot and exhausting weekend, the last thing I wanted to do was work on five hours of sleep. Well, I got over it and we worked until about 10 pm on Monday. Tuesday was the big day, the event was held at the Clarion hotel in Teguc and everything went very smoothly. I didn’t have a large presentation role, so I helped out mostly with the behind the scenes logistic work, making sure all the little details were taken care of. In the end I enjoyed the whole event and the team was very pleased with the outcome. When I signed up for the Peace Corps I definitely did not see myself doing even planning for national meetings in fancy hotels attended by heads of organizations…but hey, not much of this experience has been what I expected it to be.
The Men´s Health Team, that´s me, second from the left.


After all the work was done we went to Ruby Tuesday’s for dinner and I discovered they have amazing veggie burgers! Who knew? I was amazed and can’t wait to go back there. I also discovered a great Argentinean café with incredible sandwiches with real crusty gourmet bread, not of the Wonder Bread kind. The owner of the café also gives tango lessons, so next time I go to Teguc I am going to try to check them out. If the lessons are anywhere near as good as the food at her restaurant I am in luck.

My “infected” foot and the Maine Rotary Club

Agua Pura para el Mundo is funded by a partnership with local and international Rotary clubs. Currently we have grants from Rotary Clubs in Maryland and Maine. Part of my job as a Peace Corps volunteer working with Agua Pura has been to facilitate communication between the local Rotary Club, Agua Pura and the donor clubs in the states since the folks in the states don’t speak Spanish and the folks here don’t speak English (although Nineth is coming along with her English). Periodically groups of Rotary Club members from the states come down to Santa Barbara to check out the project here. I had been working extensively with them to plan the trip and was very excited about meeting the people face to face who I had been e-mailing for months. I had planned to spend the entire week with them to translate and help them out.
The Agua Pura crew, a few local Rotary Club members, a local driver and I picked them up at the airport. While at the airport I unexpectedly had to fight back tears, I think being there made me miss my family, like I should be picking them up at the airport instead of strangers. We loaded their 15 suitcases and the 7 of them into three cars and headed back to Santa Barbara without any glitches. Well, except that it started to rain on the way back and the bags were in the pack of the pick up so we had to stop and buy a tarp, no big deal.

We checked them into The Gran Colonial, the nicest hotel in Santa Barbara and let them get situated. That night myself and three other PCVs met their group for dinner at Casa Blanca, also the nicest restaurant in town, to talk about the possibility of working on other water projects.
We all woke up early on Sunday and headed to Descansadero, San Nicolas, to do a filter training. We had a great turnout and the Rotary Club from Maine was very impressed with Nineth’s presentation and ability to capture the attention of the audience and use humor when appropriate. Nineth giving a hygiene talk in Descansadero
The Rotary Club from Maine


While there something apparently bit my foot and immediately started to swell. During the training itself I had to loosen my Tevas all the way and they were still tight. By the time I got home my foot was huge and became very painful to walk on.


That night we had a meeting and dinner with the local Rotary Club to give an introduction to Santa Barbara. By the time dinner rolled around I could hardly fit my foot in my flip-flops and I had to call Nineth to come pick me up with the Agua Pura truck. I limped around the meeting and dinner to follow and Nineth dropped me back off at home afterward. I intended to take Benadrly before I went to bed except we had to wake up early the next morning and I was scared I wouldn’t be able to wake up, so I didn’t take anything and I hardly slept both because the pain in my foot and worrying about what I would do the next day if I couldn’t walk. We had arranged for the Rotary Club to go to El Nispero, a neighboring town of Santa Barbara where another PCV lives to visit a school and give the kids shoes. Well I called the volunteer that would be accompanying them at 5 a.m. and told her I wouldn’t be able to go because I could hardly walk. Luckily she thought she could handle it. I finally took a Benadrly and slept all morning.
I basically just sat around the house all day and read and iced my foot. Eventually I made it to the doctor’s office and he told me that my foot was infected. Well, this didn’t really seem right to me because the only sign of infection was swelling and it seemed a lot more like an allergic reaction to whatever bit me. I told him this, but he was convinced that it was an infection so he gave me an injection of antibiotics (Hondurans really like injections) as well as antibiotic cream. At first he wanted to give me the shot in the butt but I started crying and refused to let this old man who I had no confidence in give me a shot in the butt. He tried to convince me and repeatedly asked me why I didn’t want a shot in my butt and finally resigned to giving it to me in the arm only to tell me that it would hurt more and I would be sorry and when I came back the next day for the second shot I would want it in the butt. Later I called the Peace Corps Medical Officers (PCMOs) in Teguc, the doctors employed by Peace Corps to take care of all our medical needs and she said it was probably an infection and it would even turn into a staff infection and spread to the rest of my body and be very serious, so if it didn’t get better soon they would have to send a Peace Corps car to come pick me up and bring me to Teguc for medical attention.

The next day I had to call the Rotary Club to tell them I wouldn’t be able to go out again, but luckily, Erin the other PCV was still with them. Then I called and talked to another PCMO and luckily this one agreed with me. I told her what the doctor said and she thought it sounded odd as well. She suggested that I go see another doctor for a second opinion. Luckily I knew a doctor who works at the hospital who I know and trust, so I called him on his cell phone and he told me to come right in. I assumed this meant he would still be there and attend to me, but when I got there he had already gone to lunch so I had no idea what to do and was on the verge of tears the whole time at the thought of some other doctor I didn’t know wanting to give me a shot in the butt. They checked me into the hospital like a regular patient and took me to the ER. Eventually the doctor saw me and ordered blood work done just to make sure it wasn’t an infection, which of course the blood work showed it wasn’t. I was on the verge of tears the whole time because the hospital was such a depressing place. It was incredibly dirty and full of poor sick people. It almost made me feel guilty that I could just walk in there and get almost immediate medical attention and have confidence that the Peace Corps would pay for everything. The doctor ordered me two shots of hydrocortisone and Benadryl, one of which had to be in the butt. Again I started crying when I heard this, but at least this time it was a woman nurse and she just smiled so I felt a lot more comfortable with her. However, we were in the middle of the emergency room with no privacy so I made her take me in the other room where I had to lay down on filthy sheets and get a shot in the butt that really hurt and made me cry even more. I went home and was completely knocked out by the shot and felt horrible. I was also mad at the first doctor for telling me my foot was infected when I knew it wasn’t.

Up until this point Katie had done a great job of taking care of me, but then when she came home she felt like she was coming down with something and had a fever! We both just laid around being infirm. Then we had another decision to make…Wednesday, the following day, Katie and I had both been invited to go to Copan Ruins with the group so we had to decide if we were well enough to go. I decided that I should take it easy so I would be ready to work with the group on Thursday and Friday when we would be taking them out to do filter work. Katie woke up the next morning at 6 and called them to tell them she still had a fever and couldn’t go. By Wednesday the swelling in my foot had gone down substantially and the redness had pretty much gone away, but I was exhausted because again I could hardly sleep worrying about not being with the Rotary Club and trying to find a comfortable position that didn’t hurt my foot or the shots in my arm or butt. Since the redness had subsided in the rest of my foot the actual bites began to look a lot worse. In all I had three visible bites, but one in particular looked pretty bad, about the size of a quarter, red, raised welt that itched all around but hurt in the center.

So, Wednesday Katie and I watched movies and read and wrote e-mails and just took it easy to get better to go to work on Thursday. I had to call Nineth to bring me food for dinner because we were both almost out and neither of us felt like going to the market. Although I couldn’t be with the group for the first three days things went smoothly anyway, which made me feel like I did a good job planning so that even though I wasn’t there things still happened on their own.
Thursday I was finally able to walk on my foot although it barely fit in my tennis shoe. We went to Jimilile, a village with filters, to do monitoring. Which means we went to each house with a filter to make sure it was working properly and to talk to them about how the filter had impacted their health. Every family that we talked to reported improved health, most of them experiencing no diarrhea since initiation of filter use. This aspect of our work was very important for the Rotary Club from Maine to see because it showed them what an important impact the filter project has on real people’s lives. That afternoon we went to the filter workshop to show the group how the filter production process works. I actually hadn’t ever observed the whole process so it was a learning experience for me as well.

Thursday night we had two meetings; the first was to look through the financial records of Agua Pura to make sure everything was in line and the second was with the local Rotary Club, the Rotary Club from Maine and the Agua Pura team and National Director. I was slightly nervous about both meetings for a number of reasons; first I would have to translate everything between the groups and second because we had to bring up some potentially sticky issues (like paying salaries on time) and I didn’t want to be in the middle of it all. Luckily, the “audit” went well, Nineth had everything organized perfectly. The second meeting also went surprisingly well. We were all able to communicate well, clarify operational issues and make some important decisions that will improve our future functioning. I think that having the Maine Rotary Club here brought a certain authority that helped give us [Agua Pura] negotiating leverage. It was an interesting position for me to be in because I could see a marked change in the attitudes of the local Rotary Club with the presence of the gringos (the ones who are actually paying for the project).

Friday we went to Descansadero to install filters. We went in three cars and the car that I was in with the Maine group arrived first followed by the rest of the group and a local Rotary Club member. Then Nineth calls me to tell me that the Agua Pura staff and the Agua Pura truck are stuck in Santa Barbara because something is wrong with the truck…I remained pretty calm and actually felt fine with just saying “Who knows…” when our visitors kept asking me questions like “What happened to the truck? When are they going to get here? Where are the filters to install? Do the people here know we are coming?” So we just figured out where the filters were and started installing and eventually the Agua Pura truck showed up and the day was a success. We finished up by eating tons of fresh corn on the cob, which has never tasted so good to me in my life.

That night we went to another meeting with the Rotary Club, but this time it was a little more formal. The district governor, who is in charge of Rotary Clubs for Honduras as well as two other Central American countries was there, so everybody was dressed up and the entire Santa Barbara Rotary Club was there, including friends and family. I had the pleasure of translating in front of everybody which can be really awkward because some things just don’t translate well. Hondurans use lots of flowery language, especially when they are in formal situations, so the local Rotary Club president would take 5 minutes just to say welcome and thank you for being here, then hand the mike to me and I would say two words. The meeting lasted about two hours and was incredibly boring because it basically consisted of the local club talking about themselves and all the wonderful things they have done. I have gotten to the point where I just sit and smile as I listen to them make themselves feel good and realize that in the end it doesn’t really matter how full of themselves they are as long as we are helping people.

Saturday we packed up the cars again and dropped the Rotary Club at the airport to fly back to Maine. Overall, it was a great week and important to have them come down here and get a sense for what is really going on in the field. Often donors have no idea how the projects they are funding actually work, so it was important for them to come see things first hand and meet the people on the ground. It was also important for me to meet the people I had been e-mailing with face to face and communicate my concerns. One important thing we talked about was my role as a PCV working with Agua Pura. Since being here I have felt a great deal of pressure to take care of all the communication between the states and Honduras and I felt that there was on over reliance on the foreigner working with the project. I was able to talk with the club about this and stress that although my role here is important it is really up to the Hondurans working on the project.