Diplomacy

Before I got to the Peace Corps I prided myself on being a good communicator and felt that being direct and honest were always the most effective ways to communicate. I can recall tons of situations in which I had a conflict so I confronted the situation head on and dealt with it in an open and honest way and the result was always positive. However, after about 3 months in site I have realized that being diplomatic may be a better approach than being direct. Hondurans tend to be far less direct than Americans are, so instead of trying to change the way Hondurans communicate I need to adapt to their way of doing things, I am the foreigner after all. However, this means that I will have to hold my tongue and swallow my pride from time to time (which might be hard to do, but I am willing to give it a try). My dad quotes his boss, saying “do you want to be right or do you want to be effective?” There have been many times since I have been here when I just wanted to tell somebody off and make them understand how ludicrous their reasoning was or how rude their actions were or call them out when I knew they were lying to my face. Yet, in Honduras this is not an effective way of dealing with my problems, so even though I really want to be right I have to get over it and put my goals as a Peace Corps volunteer above my desire to prove my point. For example, one of the organizations I work with is funded by a local philanthropy group and whenever we meet with them their main focus seems to be on signs and logos. They always ask why we put their logo on the ride side of the paper and not the left and why our logo is bigger than their logo and why we don’t make a sign and put it at the entrance of town, and why their logo is not on our shirt, etc. It infuriates me because it makes me feel that all they care about is letting everybody know about all the good things they do and don’t actually care about the content of what we are doing. So, I could try to tell them to get over their obsessions with getting credit for getting credit for work they don’t even do and start focusing on the important stuff. However, I don’t think that being told off by a 23 year old female would help out working relationship…I need to realize that these men hold power in this community and in order for me to be an effective Peace Corps volunteer here over the next two years I need to be on their good side. So, I should just suck it up and say “your right, letting people know who we are and what we do is really important, we’ll make sure your logo is more visible from now on” (Wow, I’m getting good at this already, I even believe that!)
Luckily Nineth, my counterpart, is very open and I feel like I can be totally honest with her, so it gives me a little break from feeling like I have to be diplomatic all the time. She is also a good mentor, constantly telling me that I have to understand how things work here, that there are protocol and hierarchies that I am not allowed to break (although being a foreigner gives me a little leeway, I can always blame it on my lack of understanding of the language and the culture). So one of my new goals is to finish my Peace Corps service knowing that I can be direct or diplomatic, depending on what the situation calls for.

Bye bye Chris

Chris Green has been working with Agua Pura has a volunteer for the past six months. Unlike a Peace Corps volunteer he didn’t get a living allowance or great health care coverage. Rather he paid his expenses out of his own pocket and never once complained about it. He has a huge heart and an inquisitive mind that has inspired me to have more compassion for the people I work with. Chris’ departure leaves our apartment complex almost empty; now it is just Katie and I. The other three apartments are now empty and will probably stay empty for a while because there aren’t any new volunteers coming any time soon and the landlords don’t like to rent to Hondurans because they say they make trouble…
Katie has also been on vacation this week, so now I actually feel like a normal Peace Corps volunteer who isn’t surrounded by foreigners and doesn’t speak English more often than Spanish. It is kinda nice (although I do like Katie’s company so I can come home at night and vent and we can cook together, because as my aunt says, it is not healthy to eat by yourself).

Blender

I bought my first home appliance this week. A brand new Black & Decker blender! It was really expensive and I love it. I inherited a little blender from a volunteer leaving and it was cracked so when I would try to use it I would literally get sprayed all over, so I decided it was time to invest in an upgrade. I mostly use it to make smoothies. Ironically, I miss the huge frozen fruit bags that we used to buy from Costco to make smoothies at home, that’s a little sad. Even though I have access to fresh fruit here it is so much more work to go to the market everyday and buy fruit and clean it and cut it and it is expensive and if the fruit is not in season it’s not in the market. It shows me how spoiled we are in the states to have any food from any reach of the earth whenever we want it and for cheap.

Things that I do in Honduras that I never did or would never do in the States

• Paint my toenails every week
• Wear flip flops everyday (and I have the tan line to show it)
• Take malaria medicine every week (luckily I haven’t lost my hair or started hallucinating so I think I’ll stick with it)
• Go to bed by 10 pm everyday (sometimes as early as 8:30 pm) and wake up at 6 am everyday (although on the weekends sometimes I sleep in until 8:30 am)
• Clean my entire apartment every week (usually Friday night)
• Read Newsweek everyday because Peace Corps sends it to us for free (even though it is usually a few months old)
• Cook for myself everyday
• Hitchhike
• Suck on sugar cane straight from the field
• Use an umbrella everyday, even when it is not raining
• Take cold showers by choice (my electroducha has three settings, off, warm, hot and I use the off setting)
• Wash my clothes by hand
• Go to the Catholic Church because it is the most liberal
• Teach middle school kids how to correctly use a condom
• Work out by myself everyday (I’d rather work out with others, it is more fun)

What I love about Honduras

• The central park where everyone hangs out, especially just after school lets out and the huge Catholic Church that overlooks the park


• Greeting people on the street


• Red tile roofs & palmtrees
The view from my roof

• My apartment


• Sitting in the hammock and listening to the sound of rain on the corrugated tin roofs and how the rain cools everything off


• Betty’s Baleadas (flour tortilla with beans, eggs and avocados and tomatoes, Betty’s are huge and delicious and cost less than $1)


• That it is cheaper for me to call the states with my cell phone than it is for me to call within Honduras (actually I wish it was cheaper to call within Honduras, but it’s a pretty funny irony probably attributable to the fact that there are about 1 million Hondurans illegally living in the States)


• Baths in the pila
Jose, the baby of the landlords, gets a bath in the pila

• Hammocks


• Free time (but not too much)


• That my landlords bring in my clothes off the line when it starts to rain and I’m not home


• Mangos, pineapple, avocados and choco bananas

Flexibility in the name of the game

Those of you who know me well know that I am a pretty organized person, some might say I am slightly neurotic. I like to make lists, plan everything, maintain good communication at all times, show up early to all meetings, etc. One of the most valuable things my parents have sent me since being in Honduras is a beautiful pink planner which is one of my most prized possessions (too bad I can’t insure it). Anyway, those of you who have ever been to a developing country or have ever even heard of how things work in a developing country probably know that things here are not always neat and organized and planned and clear and prompt. For a slightly neurotic person like me dealing with this cultural difference has been one of my biggest challenges.
A few weeks ago a fellow volunteer e-mailed me and invited me to a planning meeting to be held August 7th-10th a few hours from site. She would send more details later. Well, Monday the 6th arrived and I hadn’t heard anything so I e-mailed her to follow up. Tuesday the 7th (the day before the meeting was to be held) my project manager gave me a call to tell me that he was in a nearby site and wanted to visit me in my site the following day (Wednesday the 8th, the first day of the planning meeting). I told him I couldn’t because I had to go to a meeting. He then informed me that that meeting had been canceled but I would be going to another meeting to lead a training at the end of August. Well, all this was news to me and I was pretty taken aback. So, my meeting was canceled and my boss was coming the next day and wanted me to set up meetings with all of my counterparts so he could talk to them.
I had to make a decision, was I going to get pissed off at my boss for canceling a meeting and not telling me and then dropping in on me with one day of notice and informing me that I would be leading a workshop that I didn’t know about? Or was I going to just go with the flow and be adaptable and amenable. I decided that if I got pissed off every time something like this happened (which will, undoubtedly, be a frequent occurrence) I would drive myself crazy.
My boss showed up and we had a wonderful morning. Without having made any appointments ahead of time we just stopped in to chat with all the people that I have been working with and were able to talk to most of them immediately. At first I was worried because I hadn’t had time to call and tell them that we would be coming, but the beautiful thing is that none of them cared that we just dropped in, because that is how things work here!
Patience, flexibility and adaptability are three traits that I seriously want to cultivate in myself over the next two years (although my boss told me today he thought I would be staying for more than two years, so we’ll see how long it takes me to learn some patience…). Instead of getting upset that things change at the last minute or people show up without any warning or forget to tell me about an important anything, I should just learn how to deal with things on the spot as they come up and become a wonderful problem solver.