La Isla

After holding a Men’s Health “training of trainers” in Santa Barbara I have been working with some of the men trained to organize and facilitate further workshops, in hopes of having a multiplier effect. Of the 13 men trained in the original workshop, I have worked with 5 of them to hold 2-6 hour workshops throughout Santa Barbara. Just recently, I worked with an NGO called Plan Honduras to organize a Men’s Health workshop in La Isla, one of the communities where they work. I was a little apprehensive for a number of reasons. First, although the facilitator that I was going to work with was very enthusiastic, I was uncertain about his ability to lead an activity. Second, I had never worked with a group of older men in a rural setting; most of the workshops we have done have been for men in their early 20s in more urban settings. I was a little nervous that this group would find the methodology inappropriate or vulgar.

We were supposed to leave from the Plan office in the Plan truck at 12:30 pm to arrive in the community at 1 and set up so we could start at 2 and finish at 6. I of course arrived right on time and was informed that they needed to use the truck for something else so we would leave at 1:30. So, I just sat in the office and waited for an hour. When we arrived in the community a little after 2 nobody was there, so I just sat under a tree for about an hour and learned tongue twisters in Spanish from a group of little kids. Since Plan was in charge of organizing the event I just chilled and waited to see if anybody would show up. At first, it didn’t look good, but eventually a small group came to the school so we decided to start. By the end we had a group of 15 men, ages 40 and beyond.
Charles, on the left, had to read the pre-test out loud to the group because most of them could not read.

None of my fears were realized; the facilitator did very well and the men loved the methodology, they even recommended we do it for the younger men in the community. Another thing that was also different about the workshop was that there were women and children watching from the windows and doors the whole time and nobody seemed to care. I would smile at the women once in a while and they would laugh at the whole thing and smile back. Even though the workshop is designed for men I think it was good that the women were watching in the background because it gave them a chance to just listen, but not be pushed to participate (which they probably would have been too embarrassed to do). Maybe they even went home and talked to their husbands about sex, wouldn’t that be amazing!!!
Although La Isla is pretty close to Santa Barbara, it is on the other side of the river, so it took over 30 minutes to get there in the car, so the group I was with said we would come back by canoe. At first I just thought they were joking, but sure enough when we finished the meeting we walked about 10 minutes down to the river and paid a guy to take us across in his canoe. Then we got off on the other side and walked about 20 more minutes to the road where the Plan car picked us up. It was definitely an adventure.