Ian's Visit La Costa Norte

Friday we made our way to La Ceiba on the north coast and stayed with my friend Cindy (below) for the night before heading to Cayos Cochinos.

Saturday morning our guide actually picked us up at Cindy’s house with no extra charge and took us to Sambo Creek, a Graifuna community east of La Ceiba, and from there we took a boat out to the keys about an hour of the coast. By the time we got there my abs were a little sore; it was quite choppy and Ian and I were sitting in the very front of the boat so we had to brace ourselves on every other wave. First we went to one island to check in and then our guide left us there for about 30 minutes with no explanation…hmm. Although we got a little impatient it was a good opportunity to meet the other people in the boat, one of which goes to Mercyhurst College in Pennsylvania and has been to Ashtabula, Ohio (the O’Donnell-McCarthy’s home town). What a small world!
Libny from Mercyhurst & me

Our guide finally got back and we went snorkeling and then on to the inhabited island for lunch, dancing, snake handling, coconut cracking, swimming, chatting with locals and relaxing.
After lunch they brought out the drums and everybody took turns dancing. I of course had to take a turn…Later on somebody came up to me and said “Mire es la chica que baila como negra.” Which means “Look it’s the girl who dances like a black [girl].”



Here I am holding a Boa Rosada (Pink Boa) which is apparently only found on the islands of Cayos Cuchinos. One of the locals found it on the big island and brought it over to where we were staying to show the tourists (and charge $1 to take a picture of it). Although it is small it is strong, I was amazed when it wrapped its tail around my forearm.
Ian decided that he wanted a coconut and that he wanted to open it himself, so Minor went in search of a coconut and then taught him how to open it using first a machete and then his teeth (brilliant). I dislike the taste of coconut but I did try this coconut and it was like nothing I have ever tried, and I liked it.
Our boat ride back was even bumpier than our ride out; I think the driver was in a hurry because we were all over the place. Again, our guide dropped us off at our next stop free of charge and we made our way to the Omega Lodge at Pico Bonito, a large national park on the north coast of Honduras. I was incredibly impressed by the lodge and was very intrigued by the signs in the bathrooms…

This was, by the way, very hard for me to do.

The next day we went rafting on the Rio Cangrejal on class 2 and 3 rapids. I was a little nervous beforehand but it wasn’t too scary. Ian and I were on one small raft with a guide.

This was our biggest drop


About halfway through the trip we stashed the rafts and hiked into the park to a waterfall.
Of course the boys had to jump off of something high (I passed this time).
Although I passed at the waterfall, I did jump farther on down the river. We got out of the rafts and climbed onto a boulder on the bank and jumped off into the river and then floated down the rest of the rapids without the raft. The jump was about 25 feet and I definitely did not want to do it, but I did in the end and I was very proud of myself since I am generally a wimp. We finished the day with more great food at the lodge (second best food I have had in Honduras) and more reading in hammocks and then spent the night in La Ceiba again before Ian flew out the next day.

The more tourist stuff I do the more I appreciate Honduras as a tourist destination (go figure). So, if anybody wants to visit I am always available to play tour guide.

Ian's Visit Phulapansak

Thursday we jaloned (hitchhiked) to Phulapansak falls with two of the youth HIV facilitators I work with.

It takes about two hours to get there normally by car and it took us three hours to get there hitchhiking so it wasn’t too bad (although hitchhiking is not a commonly accepted mode of transportation in the states it is perfectly safe in Honduras...unless of course the bed of the truck is full of pineapples and you have to straddle the edge of the truck).

On the way back we actually got picked up in an SUV and he stopped to buy us drinks and then took us past where he was going to drop us off in Santa Barbara.

First we went with a guide into the water below the falls which is completely ridiculous and unsafe, but great fun. As you can see from the picture, the water is dirty due to rain, which also means that the falls were extra full and the current extra strong. Then we jumped off the rocks below.

Ian and I also did the canopy tour (it is not actually a canopy tour, just a series of zip lines, the last one crossing over the falls).

I was pretty scared beforehand but it actually wasn’t that bad, even if you look down.

Ian’s Visit Santa Barbara

Thanks to the good advice of my grandfather, my cousin Ian was able to stop by Honduras on his way home from El Salvador after a high school trip. He arrived on Monday July 7th from San Salvador and I went and picked him up from the airport in San Pedro Sula (which was the only international airport in commission since they were reminded that the runway at the Tegucigalpa airport was too short when a plane ran off the end of it and crashed into a highway killing several people). We had lunch at La Canasta de la Vida (The Basket of Life), my favorite vegetarian restaurant in town.

Tuesday we woke up early and went with Rosita, my landlord’s daughter, to a rural school about an hour away from Santa Barbara. Rosita has been a teacher there for 12 years. At the beginning of this school year she had 51 kids in six grades all in one classroom and she was the only teacher. Just last week she got another teacher to split the class and take three grades, so they put up a divider in the room and each teacher now has only three grades. She ias a phenomenal teacher, full of energy and patience while dealing with three grades at once; they were the most well behaved kids I have ever seen in Honduras. We mostly just observed and talked a little bit about our projects and showed the kids where we are from on the map. Ian gave a very impressive speech about the things he likes to do (eat and swim) and the members of his family.

Ian at the school

Katie at school

Classroom

That afternoon we stopped by the prison in Santa Barbara and Abelardo, one of the inmates that I work with, give us a tour of the facilities. It was actually a great opportunity for me because I usually just go straight to the classroom and have never had a chance to see other parts of the prison. The prison is divided into 9 cells, or dorms which each houses about 50 inmates (one of the cells is for two women inmates). The beds are stacked four high and the ceiling is full of clothes lines to hang stuff. I can’t imagine how that many men live in such a small area. There are however a few lucky individuals who get deluxe accommodations. The director of the education (himself an inmate) has his own personal room with a TV, radio and fan. The religious leaders have their own room and there is one room that can be rented (I’m not sure if I understood this part correctly, but it sounded like if you had money you could rent your own room). There is a large common area where people make goods such as hammocks, fishing nets and food and play billiards and cards. There is also a little store that sells pop, snacks and toiletries. There is a stand for haircuts and there are 7 conjugal visit rooms. Abelardo pointed out that 7 rooms isn’t enough for 361 inmates. In the end Abelardo explained to us how each dorm has an elected leader that is responsible for communicating with the administration. He said that this was a very good system for maintaining control and that it is used all over the country. I wish I had pictures, but I didn’t really think it was that appropriate. Ian and I both felt secure on the tour, comforted by the fact that everybody knows and respects Abelardo, since he is a teacher, the health coordinator and a religious leader.

The next day we visited the new Agua Pura filter workshop that is just now getting up and running. We had problems with leaks in the filters in the previous workshop and the owner was going to raise his prices substantially, so we switched to a new owner, hopefully we will have better luck with him.

New filter workshop

Santos (middle) came from Choluteca, another Agua Pura site down in the south, to train the health promoters and the workers at the new shop.

I finally feel like a real volunteer

After a year of working 30-40 hour weeks (which is actually a lot for a Peace Corps Volunteer) I am starting to feel more like a “real” volunteer (whatever that means). Whereas some of my fellow volunteers had read 40 books within their first few months in site, I was busy waking up at 6 am and working eight hour days with Agua Pura and squeezing in other project when I could. Although I felt very useful working with Agua Pura it was often times stressful to deal with the local and international Rotary Clubs and doing administration and translating for an NGO is not exactly what I envisioned when I signed up for the Peace Corps. My boss with Peace Corps kept asking me to take on more leadership responsibility with the HIV initiatives and I kept telling him no because I was too busy already and couldn’t handle more work. The goal was always to work less and less with Agua Pura and more with HIV, but it never seemed to happen…until now! Starting in June I finally feel like I don’t need to work with Agua Pura as much. When this first happened I was a little bored, but then I got over it. The goal of a Peace Corps volunteer is to work themselves out of a job and I think that is almost what I have done. During my first year there were many administrative, educational and technical aspects of Agua Pura that needed to be addressed, so I worked a lot to get things up to speed and now that they are up to speed they don’t need me as much. It is a good feeling.

Now that I don’t work 8 hours a day with Agua Pura I have started working more on HIV projects, which is what I was actually interested in all along and it has been very fulfilling so far.

The Prison

When the Minnesota Rotary Club was here in February they took a dental brigade to the prison and afterward expressed an interest in doing some type of intervention there. So I started off by holding a focus group with the leaders within the prison population and discussed their biggest health problems and what resources and information they need to deal with these problems. While there I met the prisoners who act as teachers in the school and the leaders of the cells (the prison is divided into 9 cells for 361 people). I also met a group of “high school seniors” who need to do a practicum to get the equivalent to a high school diploma. To help them fulfill part of this requirement I met with them to work on a talk about TB that they could give to a group of the other inmates. Five of us met for a few hours and we planned what they would do. It was actually fun because I was really able to help them. They more or less knew the information but needed a lot of help organizing it and thinking about how to present it. They also really appreciated my help, which is always nice. Then I went back to watch them do the presentation and it went pretty well, although it was interesting to see what things they understood and what things they didn’t. For example when they made up “charla papers” (big white papers where we write up the information instead of using a power point) I told them it was better to write just bullet points but they wrote out everything word for word. Also, we had planned out an activity to do at the end to review the information with the group but the directions didn’t quite get across.
Abelardo giving TB talk

Right now I am working on applying for a grant through PEPFAR (Presidents Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief). Peace Corps Honduras has received $43,000 to do community interventions based on abstinence, condom use and care for people living with HIV. I plan to do a training of trainers (TOT) with the inmates using the Peace Corps methodology of “Here Among Us…” which is used to teach HIV prevention to adult men. The idea is to train a group of the inmates to be facilitators and then they can give the workshop to the rest of the inmates. I was very excited about this but then I heard that another organization was already doing this in the prison! At first I was incredibly frustrated…why didn’t anybody tell me? Sometimes I am still baffled by the lack of communication in this country. So I decided that they wouldn’t need me to do the TOT after all and I should start thinking of other projects. I went to the prison to watch this other organization (called CPTRT, Hondurans love long and meaningless acronyms) do their training. It turns out it was just a power point presentation. Of course the information was correct and acceptable, but it was boring and although the leaders who are receiving the training are literate, many of the inmates are not, and therefore a boring power point presentation is not the most effective method to reach the population. So…then I started to reconsider the idea that we could still do the TOT with the men using the more dynamic and fun methodology with is much more appropriate for an illiterate population and if the people from CPTRT like the methodology they can use it as well! So, since then I have been back a few times to talk to the guys and brainstorm the plan. It is always a pleasure and they are incredibly respectful and thankful for my help. Peace Corps volunteers often run into a common problem of planning meetings and inviting people and then nobody comes; it can be very frustrating. Luckily, I never have this frustration working with them; they are always there and always ready to work with me.

The Fruits of my Labor

I am also doing more HIV workshops in various communities of Santa Barbara, but I never do them alone. Since being here I have held two TOTs; one for youth and one for adult men. From these trainings, I now have a few people who I can call on to help me out with workshops, it is great, I love to see how they are excited to help and improving with every workshop they give. The young ones still need some work, but it is a good feeling to build an ongoing relationship and be able to help them improve.

Daykoro is 20 and is out of school and doesn’t have a job, so he is perfect to help me out! He is really comfortable with the audience and does a great job.

Charles (far left) used to work with Youth Without Borders so he knows all the activites and helps me out once in a while.

Taxi Drivers

Back in May facilitators from the Red Cross came to Santa Barbara and gave a workshop on Stigma & Discrimination related to HIV. The idea was that those that received the workshop would then train taxi drivers to talk to their passengers about HIV and give them pamphlets about HIV to put in their car and a cassette about HIV to play (there’s that whole training of trainers concept again). Well, just like CPTRT they used a power point and expected the taxi drivers to come to meetings and sit for a few hours and listen to a power point presentation. After the workshop we met with the taxi drivers to see if they were interested and of course they were (they always are in the beginning). Then we planned some meetings and a few people came the first time and then the numbers continued to dwindle. Finally we decided that if they wouldn’t come to us we would go to them. Since then one of the other members of the HIV Network and I have been going to the taxi stops a few times a week and just chatting with the taxi drivers while they wait for their next passenger and it has worked incredibly well. We are using some of the materials from the “Here Among Us…” manual and gee whiz, they work a lot better than a power point presentation. So far we have gone five times and talked to over 20 taxi drivers. Now that they know us and are interested they are suggesting we have a real meeting with everybody there (go figure). This more than anything makes me feel like a real volunteer, just sitting on the curb talking to taxi drivers in their element and answering the questions that they have. At first I was a little nervous, but they are really nice and most of them are pretty interested. Now when I walk through the streets all the taxi drivers say hello to me (which is much better than them giving me cat calls).

And the not so good…

Although I have had some great experiences working with people that are actually interested in working, it is not all great. A few weeks ago the HIV Network was asked to go to a large school event and put on an EXPOSIDA (using big games and questions to teach youth about HIV, it actually works really well). Youth Without Borders is an NGO that developed the EXPOSIDA and has all the games and materials, so I communicated with them to see what we could do and it was one of the worst experiences I have had here. The coordinator was so difficult to work with, the whole time I felt like she thought she was doing me a favor (whereas it is actually the other way around because I am the volunteer and this is her job). Getting her to do anything was like pulling teeth. All she could think of was the obstacles which would stop us from doing the event and not any of the solutions. One of our problems was finding prizes to give to the kids (if they win the games and answer the questions correctly they get tickets and can buy small prizes). So, like three days before the event we start asking people to donate prizes (way to plan ahead right). Sometime during this process it comes out that there are left over prizes in the Youth Without Borders Office that we could use. So I ask the coordinator why she didn’t say anything and why we don’t use the prizes that they already have. She reasons that if we use the prizes now we won’t have prizes for the next time we do an EXPOSIDA. I was absolutely flabbergasted at this reasoning and tried to explain that this event is a little more pressing because it is two days away and that after we can get more prizes for the next event (whenever that may be).
Me at the prize table

Anyway, the event went well, people were interested and actually learned, so that is good. However, afterward I felt like I never wanted to work with her again. I have very little patience for people who don’t want to work and do everything they can to get out of doing their job.

Relaxation

In addition to more HIV activities I have also been relaxing more. I sometimes sleep in until 7, work out, meditate and start work around 9 or 10 am. I am reading Harry Potter 6 and watching season 2 of House with Katie (series are so addictive). I also took a cooking class from the vegetarian restaurant in town and learned how to make soy milk, tofu, gluten and lots of other great vegetarian stuff. So far I have experimented with the soy milk and the gluten and neither turned out so I am going to have to try again. Although I know that once I return to the states I will never have time to make tofu from scratch it is nice to have the opportunity to do it here so at least I can say that I can do it (well, hopefully I will figure out how to do it successfully before I get back to the states).