Volunteer Visit-Olancho

Three weeks into training we have the opportunity to venture out on our own for our first Volunteer Visit. Each volunteer in training is assigned to a current volunteer in the field and goes to visit him or her for about four days. The idea is to give us a taste of what it is really like to a volunteer and check out what our predecessors are up to. I had the great fortune to visit a volunteer named Anna in Olancho, the Texas of Honduras (their current president is from there, go figure). Olancho is the largest department (state) in Honduras and is know for agricultural production, livestock and logging. I was able to take a direct bus from Tegucigalpa to the village of El Carbonal, in the town of Silca, in the department of Olancho. I arrived at the bus in Tegucigalpa at 6:30 am, and unfortunately the bus didn’t leave until 8:15. Luckily the bus driver knew I was coming because Anna had told him to expect me, so he was nice enough to talk to me for a while. The buses in Honduras are kinda funny; they are all used US school buses, the yellow variety. Even funnier is that lots of them have killer rims on them. Even funnier than that is that they still have the original writing on them. The bus that I took to my volunteer visit happened to be from South Bend, IN, the small town that my father was born in, go figure. The buses work well, but aren’t exactly the most comfortable for a five hour bus ride, of which the last three were on a dirt road. Although the bus ride was long there was plenty of entertainment. At just about every stop somebody gets on to sell some type of food, or somebody gets off to tell somebody something, or somebody runs up to the bus to give somebody something. The bus route is a way for people to get things done by having things dropped of, picked up, and messages passed. This is especially important when the closest large town is about three hours away from you site, as is the case with Anna. Finally I arrived in El Carbonal and Anna was outside of the school waiting for me and the bus driver dropped me off right there.

El Carbonal is a village of 90 houses with about 550 residents. They mostly focus on livestock and agriculture production. Anna is a Protected Areas Management (PAM) Volunteer. Usually PAMers are located in Protected Areas, but Anna isn’t for some reason. Nonetheless she focuses on environmental projects, such as family and school gardens, water availability, tree planting, biogas, etc. When I arrived everybody was interested in seeing another gringa and everybody wanted to meet me. Anna and I walked through the town and of course every single person (no exaggeration) knows her. After many introductions, questions like “Do you like it here?”, “Are you going to be our next volunteer?”, “Where are the other gringas?” (apparently they had seen a car with gringos and assumed more were coming), “Are you going to get married?”, etc. we finally got to Anna’s house.

Anna lives alone in a house made of adobe bricks and covered with a red tile roof. She has no electricity and was water available every other day. Her latrine and ‘shower’ are both outside along with the pila, the large cement tub that stores the water. Water from the pila is used for ‘flushing the toilet’, washing clothes, washing dishes, showering, watering plants, etc. In her kitchen she has a two burner stove fueled by a gas tank and that’s about it. At night we used candles to see and went to bed early.

Friday I was able to check out one of Anna’s projects in her community. A group of 25 families is working to install biogas systems to fuel their energy needs in the home. One of the components of this is to grow fruit trees and plant them in order to provide shade for the biogas system, which apparently it needs. A group of about 20 men, women and children got together, filled little bags with dirt and planted over 100 seeds. Later that evening we watched Charlie’s Angels on Anna’s computer. The new middle school has solar power which allows Anna to charge her computer there during the day and have a few hours of battery in the evening.

Saturday Anna and I managed to procure two horses from two of her neighbors. Although they were happy to lend the horses to us they kept asking if we would be alright, if we needed a man to go with us, if we wanted to borrow a pistol to take with us (most of the men wear pistols on their hips). In the end they let us go with the warning that if we weren’t back in 4 hours they would come looking for us. We rode to a nearby town where Anna knew somebody and had lunch and then rode back. The horses were great, they knew the trails well and nothing seemed to scare them. We arrived back in town at full speed and everybody loved thought it was so funny to see two gringas riding horses by themselves.

We returned just in time to show a movie at the school for the kids in order to raise money for one of Anna’s projects. She charges 3 limpiras for little kids and 5 for adults (18 limpiras=1 USD). By the time the movie was over we were exhausted and sore (I still am walking funny).

Anna and I returned to Teguc together this morning. She is going to spend a few days in the Capital relaxing, developing photos, checking e-mail, etc. Now I’m back in Santa Lucia and we only have one week left before we leave for Field Based Training!

I’m sorry I don’t have any photos, I took a ton, but then I accidentally deleted all of them! I’m still learning how to use my camera.