First Project

It begins with the matter that it is, it becomes recognizable as an observation, it takes form as a suggestion, then sparks with an idea, sprouts with taken interest, and grows with the motivation to back it up. Thus started my first project that I will take on with the community. I noticed some people like to plant flower gardens but why not vegetable gardens as well. Sure they are harder but the benefits are so much higher because you can feed your family with the fruits of your labor and enjoy a more nutritious and varied diet.

So I bounced ideas around many different people and formed a vision a family garden project. Obstacles, of course, are plentiful. A) It doesn’t rain from November through July here-plants need water. B) This is the tropics, there are a lot of things that want to eat what we don’t want them to. C) Chemical pesticides and fertilizers are expensive and bad for the environment and people. D) Chickens, cows, pigs, horses, and whatever other random animals people have are all free range- they go where they want and eat what they please. F) Materials are expensive and people don’t have too much extra spending money-seeds, fencing. D) Many more smaller problems and others that I haven’t yet come across.

So here’s what we are going to do: For the people that have access to extra water that can be spent on gardens, they will make home gardens and start little compost piles to use as fertilizer. Hopefully we will be able to build little fences from wood or wire for everyone so the animals won’t eat the crops. For those people who don’t have extra water, we have obtained 3 plots of land that farmers have donated for the season where we will start community gardens. These plots are irrigated to take care of the water problem and we are going to start large compost heaps from plant material, animal poop, ash, and wood shavings to fertilize the plants. We are still deciding if we want it to be one big community garden or if its better to divide up the land so each participant has their individual plot. A community garden is good for building team work and letting people to help each other out more but individual plots help to avoid the inevitable problems that arise when some people are working more than others but everyone wants an equal share of the produce. As for seeds, we have obtained donations from a couple of sources and plan to start the seedling nursery soon so we can transplant the plants by January.

We had our first meeting in early November and 25 people showed up, which is a good number to work with. We discussed ideas and problems we may encounter and reiterated the fact that I am here to help teach and organize projects, not to hand out free materials. Our group is a mix of men and women with more men than women because growing food is generally considered a male occupation. However, I originally wanted this to be more of a women’s project and I can already see the frustrations of those who are interested in participating but feel uncomfortable working with so many men. Of the three plots, we are going to try and make one specifically available for the women to work on together to help work this out.

Our second meeting showed only 8 men and 1 woman. A significant decrease and unfortunate discouragement. As expected, some people I believe lost interest in the project for various work or money related reasons but others had excuses and other engagements that kept them from attending. The meeting was kind of short notice so I hope that these excuses will not be a recurring theme. Our next meeting is this Friday and we need to start getting to work so I am crossing my fingers that people are going to come.

Settling In

Hola, me llamo Angela y soy una voluntaria del Cuerpo de Paz. (Hello, my name is Angela and I am a Peace Corps Volunteer). This is how I began. Meeting after meeting, house after house, person after person. Here I am, this is what I am here for, and this is what I will try to do. These words I said so many times they became almost meaningless in my head. So many people to meet that the faces all blur together. Please don’t ask me if I have met so-and-so yet because I honestly could not remember. Let them say whether or not they have met me because one new face is easy for them to remember but 1500 new faces is going to take me a long long time.

But I have to start somewhere, so I go with my host-mother house by house to meet the families individually. We shake hands and I give my little introduction speech in Spanish as best as I can remember. They listen patiently and when I am through they gaze questioningly at my host mom and she reiterates everything I just said apparently in real Spanish. A question or two may be tentatively given before regular conversations and gossips ensue to fill the empty air as I awkwardly sit silently, smiling and nodding every now and then because I cannot understand them not hardly they me. Alright, they know my face and my purpose more or less, we take our leave and move on to the next house. Oi, how many people are in this community again?

Stranger to Stranger

So I have come to realize the incredible amount of trust I have to have in people in a country where I have been told to take very good caution in whom I trust. I left my home to go to Washington DC and meet people from an organization I only superficially know and they quickly send me and 49 other strangers like me off to a foreign country where we are met by other people working for the organization. Okay, that’s not so bad. However in only the second night we are split up and individually sent home with different local people, who speak only Spanish and are complete strangers to us, and who take us to their houses to live with their families. But no worries, because the next morning we are picked up by yet another stranger who says he is to be our chauffer and will take us to the training center. Alright, as soon as we are starting to feel comfortable here and kinda know the people we are split in three groups and whisked off to three new towns to start all over again. This time our well-known trainers have not yet arrived so we are set loose in the street and told to walk through the foreign community with our heavy packs and find the houses with the new family of strangers with whom we will be staying. Alright, everyone must have made it okay because we all showed up at the new training center the next morning. Cheque. These families take us here and there to other towns and markets and we get to know Honduras a little more. Great.

After a few weeks we return to the first community and are reunited with our first families and our friends and trainers that were sent off to different communities. Everything almost back to whatever can be defined as ‘normal’ after a couple weeks when suddenly some new strangers show up. These people are introduced to us as our new counterparts (or community work partners) and we get to chat with them for a couple hours before the end of the day. The next morning we are individually sent off with our counterparts who take us to whatever far corner of Honduras they are from. Now in yet another new community, this time as the only American, I am handed off from my counterpart I hardly yet know to another house with another family of strangers with whom I am to live. Okay I think I am getting better at this part now. From here I am still sent off to various places with strangers who are friends with the strangers that are related to the strangers that strangers working for this organization in this foreign country sent me off to work with. What’s that old saying, “A stranger is just a friend that I haven’t met yet.” Yea okay, I like that.

Here I Am

Time is moving at a pace a little faster than me right now so I haven’t been able to keep up on everything and sadly had to sacrifice a few of the ‘extras’ so I could keep everything else moving. Thus is my excuse for not writing so long and I apologize to those who were starting to wonder why I just disappeared from the high-speed world of the internet after I moved to my site.

That being said, here I am alive and well in this beautiful community in southern Honduras. The misty mountains are gorgeous, crystal rivers gush fresh from the heart of the mountain watershed, colorful birds sing in the forest canopy, and my hope is that I can help keep it that way.

This is a poorer community but nevertheless a community with a heart that wants to beat. Of all the communities nearby it is the one that has proven the most that it wants to work to help improve the lives of the people. Everyone is very nice and supportive and once I can slide into a groove and get my head together, we will see what we can do.

The End of the Beginning

We are counting down the final days of training here.  It has been an intensive 2 ½ months and I have learned more than my tired mind cares to remember.  My Spanish has improved dramatically in this short period.  I went from barely being able to communicate or understand anything more than simple phrases and easy concepts to now being able to communicate the basic idea of what I want to say and I can understand most of what is said too me as long as it is not to rapid or complex.  It’s still lacking a lot but it’s enough to get by on for now and I will just have to keep on learning more once I get to my final site.  I have also learned so much information and skills that I can use in my projects, yet there is always so much more that I wish I had the time and capacity to cram into my head before I leave training.  But information resources are always available through the Peace Corps so once I figure out specific projects I can look up more information.

It has been difficult adjusting to so many new things here.  It is different from everything I have ever known from growing up in the northern United States.  It is going to be sad to leave training.  I have made so many new friends in these past months and now we will be spread out all over Honduras and may not ever be able to meet up again in entirety like we are now.  It will also be different to be completely submerged in Honduran culture and not get to see my fellow Peace Corps volunteer friends who are the last remnants of North American life that I encounter daily.  The end of training will be bittersweet because I also am really excited to get to my site and actually begin working with my community and put into action all the things that I have learned in all the past years of my life.  The time draws nearer…

Placement

I have officially been placed at a site!  Yay!  I got to visit it for a few days and it was awesome!  It’s a small community of about 1200 in a southern mountainous region.  It gets hot during the day but nothing too bad or uncomfortable.  There are many fruit trees there such as mangos, avacados, liches, oranges, tangerines, bananas, etc.  I love fruit so this is very exciting.

The community is awesome and I can’t wait to start working with them.  I will be doing projects such as: reforestation of the local watershed by starting a tree nursery in the school, forming a cooperative with the local farmers to make more efficient market transportation, working with women to make home gardens for better nutrition and chicken coops, as well as some work with building latrines and fuel efficient fogones (mud and brick fire stoves).

I will be staying with a host family for the first two months to help me adjust to the culture and community.  After that I will live in a house within the community and work from there.  This house is going to be the old health center of the community because they just recently were able to build a new one.  It’s a little bit of a fixer upper.  Right now there is a bat colony living in it.  Though I do love animals and think bats are really cool, I don’t really want to be living with a colony of them so they are going to be evicted.

One more week and I will officially be a volunteer and will move to site.  I can’t wait!

Despedida

Our final week at our field based training site we decided to have a goodbye fiesta for our host families as a thank you for housing us for 5 weeks.  We bought a lot of food, prepared songs to sing, practiced a swing dance, and created a slideshow.  Unfortunately, four hours before the event we received some tragic news that had happened within the hour.  A couple miles from the community a 16-year-old girl was taking down clothes from the clothesline because it had started to rain and she was struck and killed by lightning.  In these small communities most families are related in some way to one another so this struck the community hard as she was of relation to many of them.  Thus out of respect for the families and the traditional 9-day mourning period we canceled our fiesta.  It is such a randomly tragic way to die as there are many storms here in Honduras and the girl had strayed no farther than her backyard to do a normal everyday activity.  It makes you wonder about life.  If you may be struck dead at any random moment, will you look back on the life you lived up until this moment and be able to say to yourself, yea my life was worthwhile, I was the person I wanted to be.

Miracles of life

Our world is a busy place, cars are honking their way across busy cities, bicycles are running here and there, people are negotiating prices and meeting times, and cell phones are ringing off the hook.  Keeping up with the pace of life is essential lest you get left behind and miss an important meeting or the latest soap opera episode.  With so much noise and run around going on who is to notice the simple miracles of life that occur at the birth of each day?

Did you see that hawk lift off silently from the tree limb and climb high into the sky?  It soared elegantly through the cool morning air, riding on the currents of the wind and tasting the breath of a thousand generations.  It circled high above your head with feathers caressing the wind.  Did you pause for a moment, a second even?  Did you marvel at how a creature heavier than the air developed into a figure that can dominate the sky?  So thin the air is, nothing more than molecules spread out and blowing about.  And yet so graceful the flight of a bird, its challenge to gravity as it climbs ever higher so sure that it will not fall to the ground, the freeness of its path to go this way or that, the horizon of its view that reaches beyond the limits of our simple world.  When was the last time you silenced your mind and just watched a bird soar?

But perhaps you care to see something a little more down to earth.  When was the last time you got down on the ground and really smelled the life of the soil?  So simple it  is yet so rich with the degraded matter of a million lives that it can breath new strength into the living matter that takes it up.  Do you see that ant crawling among the soil particles?  One of God’s smallest creatures, it climbs over these specks of sand as though they were boulders.  Watch as it makes its way long its path.  When was the last time you followed an ant?  That you watched it move each limb as continued on its invisible trail, feeling everything with its antennas and working its jaws at a bit of edible food.  How far does this one ant journey every day?  What is a mere pace to us is like miles upon miles in its world.  How would you view the world if you were but an ant underfoot?

Or perhaps you would prefer something a little more dangerous spark your interest.  Did you ever light a match just to watch it burn?  What is fire exactly?  What is this strange force that suddenly erupts from a thing from the mere application of heat (the friction of a match on a matchbox or one stick against another produces nothing but heat)?  This colorful force radiates heat and produces light, from what, a mere piece of lifeless cardboard?  It radiates like the sun and leaves behind a weakened black skeleton of what it once was.  Carbon, and nothing more.  Yet really what is this fire?  Is it a dead thing that dances freely before our eyes?  Or is it a life, a bodiless soul that burns forth and lives for however brief or strongly before wind, water, or finite resources smite its existence?  What does it mean to be alive?  A fire breathes oxygen, it moves, it consumes, it produces heat and it dies.  Yet with a simple ember it can be reincarnated, cloned again and again, yet never the same.

Take the time to notice the basics of life.  We try to explain everything away again and again with science, biology, chemistry, etc.  We strip life down to the basic skeletal system and then forget the richness that was lost with each layer and molecule that was peeled away from the being of life.

Consumerism

What is the ultimate goal in life for people? What is it that a person really wants and will spend their entire life seeking after? To be happy? Is it the desire for happiness that drives people to work long hours during the day to earn that extra bit of income? Is this what we are looking for when we go to the malls to buy cool toys and pretty things? Will one of these new gadgets finally be the one that will satiate our hunger and make us satisfied with our lives? How many hours of work, how much money must be earned, how many things does it take until a person finally reaches that state of bliss that they so desperately seek? But maybe it is not in these things that we make with our hands. Many people have many things and much money, are they necessarily any happier than those with few things and little money? But perhaps they have more leisure time to enjoy their lives the way they wish because modern conveniences, such as dishwashers, washing machines, and microwaves, dramatically cut down on the time that needs to be dedicated to these chores. With these machines we buy more time for other things in our life. So what exactly do we do with this extra time? Some people decide to work even more so they can make more money and buy more things. Others decide to fill their time with entertainment of various sorts to distract themselves from the drudgery of everyday life. This commonly includes television, computer games, and other forms of easy distractions that require little effort or energy. Some take a different approach and choose alcohol or drugs as a preferred distraction mechanism that allows them to temporarily ease out of the realities of life and live a little more care-free for as long as the intoxicating effect will last. But in the end has real happiness been found in these distractions of life? Do these people reach the end of their lives, look back, and say ‘yea, I found what I was looking for’ or do they still feel that gaping hole that there was still that something missing that they just could not find.

So where is this happiness that we all seek in life? Why is it we are still left feeling empty at the end of the day when all is said and done. Perhaps it is not at all in the places that we are looking. Consumerism is like a disease. You work hard to earn a little money, go out and buy something a little extra or unnecessary, find that it brings you some satisfaction so you then work more so you can earn more money and buy more things to bring these drops of satisfaction into your life. But where does it end? Was happiness ever found at the end of a shopping receipt?

Paroozing and Foraging

Trees are quieter in the places I have been here in Honduras. There is something missing that was so common back in Minnesota. Those familiar little faces that were always on the lookout with their bright eyes and bushy tails. They would often be seen hopping from tree to tree, scuttling up and down trunks and hopping across the ground in everlasting quests for nuts and berries. The funny antics of squirrels used to entertain me for hours as they chased one another up and down trees, as they braved the ever increasing challenge of robbing birdfeeders, and as they would confusedly scuttle forward after a stubborn piece of food that insistently hops away as soon as it is within grasp, leading the poor squirrel on in a game of squirrel baiting put on by a group of bored students.

But here there are no squirrels, or at least so few that they are rarely seen. However, there is another creature here that is just as abundant and fascinating to watch. These animals also have the intricate social systems and quirks of life. Chickens roam freely throughout the neighborhoods and are often the cause of the strange rustling in the bushes or the half eaten fruits on the ground. They will amble ignorantly into households only to be chased out time and again. They can be quick witted and will often compete with cats and dogs for kitchen scraps, often losing, but sometimes winning as they scuttle off triumphantly with a piece of bread or other tightly clutched in their beaks. They can turn up anywhere, inside of boxes or abandoned clay ovens, in trees or shrubs, poking their heads out from sheds or peering around doors. Hens will even wander aimlessly through small classrooms only to discover halfway through that there are people occupying the seats. They then scuttle panickedly out the other side of the room followed by their brood of squeaking chicks. Occasionally one or two will be too chicken to follow and will cry ceaselessly by the front door until someone manages to chase them through to reunite with their anxious mother hens. In the end the quest of the chicken is the same as the squirrel as they continually search for idle foods and good pickings. Luckily for them there are many fruit trees here and the ground is constantly littered with fruits this time of year. They need only battle with birds, bugs, and occasional humans wishing to partake in the bounties of nature. Luckily for them there are many fruit trees here and the ground is constantly littered with fruits this time of year. They need only battle with birds, bugs, and occasional humans wishing to partake in the bounties of nature.