Almost Home

Almost Home

The reason I’m using Craig Morgan’s “Almost Home” for my post title is because I am no longer planning on moving into a new house, like I mentioned in my last post. I discovered this fact while talking with my counterpart last week about what I had hoped would be my new living situation. He informed me that my host mom was really “triste” or sad that I would be leaving her. He also doesn’t want me to live any farther away from his house in fear that I would stop coming to visit. Even though the house I would move into is only 5 minutes away from where I currently live, everyone around me is begging me not to move. Since I am currently living in a bedroom attached to an empty house that has not yet been finished, my host mom has offered to finish the rest of the house for me. After trying to convey to everyone how much I would prefer to move into the other house, I decided staying where I am and finishing this house isn’t so bad. Once I agreed to stay, we started talking about fixing up the rest of the house. I offered to help with any kind of labor that they needed and some of the neighbors are going to pitch in as well. My host mom then told me she doesn’t have money to pay for all the materials, and asked if I could pay for the cement and flooring. Oh well, I guess in the end I’ll at least have my own house. If you scroll down to the end, you’ll see I posted a little movie to show you what my house looks like. Enjoy.

About a week and a half ago, we had a regional safety and security meeting. This was cool because 1) I got to meet all the other volunteers that live close to me, 2) I got to sleep in a nice comfortable hotel bed for 2 nights, and 3) I got paid for it. We met in a town called Santa Lucia, which is a beautiful place where Peace Corps used to do it’s training. We had a full day of lectures about the emergency action plan, recent safety incidents, medical stuff, and some presentations of current projects from some of the volunteers that have been in country for a while. It was a long day, but the food was good and we all went out afterward and had a good time.

Here’s a kind of funny story: So when I first arrived here, I had a community meeting in my neighborhood (Quebrada Grande) and then another one for Mata de Platano, which is the larger town here. In the meeting for Mata de Platano, we decided on a few things that would be good to do for projects, and then set a date for our next meeting when we could discuss which project I would commit myself to and how the project will go. The date we set was November 15, and after that meeting I started working and visiting houses here. On November 10, I called my counterpart to see if he wanted to sit down and prepare for the meeting. He didn’t pick up, I left a message, and he never called back. On November 14, I told my host mom we were supposed to have a meeting the next day, and she said everyone had probably forgotten about it, and it was too late to tell people. So November 15 came and I assumed the meeting was cancelled. I woke up, made breakfast, did some laundry, and went to church. Toward the end of the mass, a woman walked up to me while the priest was speaking, bent over, and started talking to me very quietly. Now, my Spanish isn’t too hot, and I couldn’t really make out what she was saying, so I just kind said “Oh si, si…esta bien”, which is what I say every time I don’t understand something. She looked satisfied with my answer, turned around, and headed back up to the front. When it came time for announcements, she got up, read off a couple of events coming up, and then said “And we have one more announcement, come on up Miles”. The entire congregation turned to look at me while I stood up and started walking slowly up to the front of the church. I bowed to the priest (I wasn’t really sure what the rules are for walking up to the alter), took the microphone, and said the only thing I could think of,

“Hi, I’m Miles”.

Everyone kind of smiles and sits there waiting for more…but I got nothing. I turned to the lady who had called me up there and gave her a look that said, “What the hell do you want me to say?” She whispered “el reunion”, meaning the meeting, and I realized why I was standing next to the priest in front of everyone. I turned back to the couple hundred faces staring at me, and told them in my broken Spanish that we were going to have a community meeting to discuss a latrine project that same day (which is what I plan to do after I’m done with my pila project), and that everyone was invited. Looking back, I probably should have been able to guess why I was up there since I knew we were supposed to have a meeting that day. However, I had had it set in my mind that the meeting was cancelled, and had therefore completely forgot about it up until that point. In the end, it all turned out really good because a lot of people showed up to the meeting, and I had a lot of info I wanted to share with them. But I’m never going to forget how scared and confused I was while walking up to the front of the church packed to the brim with Hondurans staring at me with absolutely nothing to say.

As far as my current pila project goes, everything seems to be working out as much as I could hope for. While I was gone at the security meeting in Santa Lucia, my “directiva” or board of directors, went door to door in my town to see who needs a pila. It turns out we will have 54 pilas to build, which is a pretty big project. They also got a list of prices for all the materials to build a pila. After doing some math, I found out that the maximum amount of money I’m allowed to request wouldn’t cover the costs that I had been hoping for. This just means that the families who want pilas are going to have to pay more…hopefully we don’t have too many people drop out of the project because of this. Also, last time our directiva met, we had planned to have another meeting this past Friday, to go over the info they collected and to plan a meeting with all of the families involved in the project. I was really encouraged because my president showed up half an hour early. But as we sat and talked about the project, it was clear that the other 6 members of the directiva forgot about our meeting, and no one else showed up. Us two got pretty much everything done that we could, but I’m really hoping this situation doesn’t repeat itself in the future.


As always there’s lots of stuff going on here, but it’s tough to write it all. Things are definitely picking up, but the idea of living here for 2 years still seems like an impossible task right now. I guess adapting is just going to be a really long process. It’s good to hear from people back in the states though. I’ve received letters and packages from a few people, and it really helps. Also, it’s going to be really weird not celebrating Thanksgiving with my family. I wish I could come home to be with everyone and eat all that delicious food…I should have thought more about the holiday feasts I’d be missing before I signed up for the Peace Corps. Oh well, you win some you lose some. So to sum up, here are some things I learned since my last post:

1) Don’t assume people remember there is a meeting if you told them 2 weeks ago
2) Assume people remember there is a meeting if you told them 6 weeks ago
3) Ask who will buy the materials for a house before you agree to live in it
4) Always check your cowboy hat for spiders before use
5) Always check your boots and shoes for spiders before use
6) Always check the inside of the toilet bowl for spiders before use
7) I almost hate spiders more than I hate cockroaches…I really hate cockroaches


Peace,
Miles

Famous In A Small Town

This is my "directiva" or my board of directors for my project.

Me and my counterpart, Santos, after picking coffee all day.

Teaching Santos' kids how to juggle. The boy on the right, Pedro Luis, eventually got the hang of it.

This is my host mom and her daughter making tamales.

A pretty cool rainbow

This is basically the view from my front porch

This is my pila...my project will be constructing these for families that need them.

Me next to a guayaba tree...which is one of my new favorite fruits

My host mom with her son and his daughter...who are my nextdoor neighbors

This is my host mom with 2 of her kids and some grandchildren

Mark and me at the swearing in ceremony

My counterpart, Julio Antonio, the U.S. embassador, Hugo Lawerence, and I

My old host family during training.

Me teaching my community how to line dance during cultural day in training.

Our PAM group after a 'team builiding' exercise













Hey everyone,

I finally got some pictures on here. They are in order from top to bottom with the most recent at the top. I've got more pictures on my facebook if you want to check those out.

I’ve been in site for 6 weeks now, and all in all things have gradually been getting better here. The culture shock was pretty overwhelming when I arrived, and during my first week in site I was honestly scared to death of living here for 2 years. It’s weird to say, but the truth is I was overwhelmed by having nothing to do. Getting accustomed to small town life is tough, but I think I’m starting to get the hang of it. When I had nothing to do before, I would sit in my room and drive myself crazy thinking about what I’m doing here. But now, I have work to do almost everyday, and if I don’t, I find myself visiting neighbors just to pass the time…just to sit and talk. I feel more comfortable with my host mom and her family as well, even though I only understand a little over half of what they are saying to me. It’s a very stress-free lifestyle here, and I’m getting use to it more and more everyday.

I’m continually surprised at how interested people are in me. I think I’ve been the talk of the town for the entire 6 weeks. Everyone knows who I am here and they all want me, the “gringo”, which is a fairly friendly term that basically means “white guy from the U.S.”, to know them and their family. I met a complete stranger the other day, and when I introduced myself, they said they already knew of me. They also said that they knew that I don’t like cilantro in my soup (something I told my host mom a week before), and that they have cilantro on their farm and that they really like cilantro. Anytime leave my place, people know, and if I decide to walk down the street, everyone will stop what they are doing to watch me walk. They will of course say hello, just as they greet everyone that walks down the street in this tiny village. However, after they say hi, they usually turn to whomever they are with and say something along the lines of “Look, he’s going down the road today”, or “There goes the American”, or “That’s Miles, he doesn’t like cilantro”. Sometimes I welcome the attention because it makes it easy to talk to people, but sometimes it’s kind of awkward, and a bit annoying, to have everyone gawking at me all the time. I decided “Famous In A Small Town” by Miranda Lambert is a very fitting song to title my post since it so perfectly describes my life right now.

Last week, I met a woman who said she would be willing to rent out a house for me. It has 2 bedrooms, a living room, and a kitchen. It took a bit of sweet-talking, but I eventually got her down to a price that I could manage on my Peace Corps budget. I’m supposed to live with my host family for 2 months before I’m allowed to live on my own, so I plan to move into my house on December 15. As of right now, the house doesn’t have a stove, refrigerator, bed, or anything else in it. It has an indoor pila and latrine, which is really nice, but the latrine leads to a tank, which is cracked open in the back, and really needs to be repaired. I plan on buying some kind of electric stove or hotplate, but there’s a good chance I’ll have to build a wood-burning stove in order to cook when there is no electricity. All in all, I’m really excited about it, and hope everything goes as planned.

As far has my daily life goes, I don’t really have a routine here. I kind of just tell people I will visit them or work with them on their farm on whenever my next free day is. I usually wake up around 7, have a cup of coffee with my host mom while making something for breakfast, wash some clothes by hand in my pila and put them on the line to dry for the rest of the day (while hoping it doesn’t rain too much), and then either work on a farm, travel into town on the bus, visit Mark in his town (half hour walk away) and work on a farm there, or visit houses in my community. As far as farm work goes, I’ve been doing things such as picking coffee beans, planting cucumbers, picking mandarins, installing irrigation systems, picking eggplants, picking cilantro leaves and wrapping them up into banana tree leaves (which is how they sell it in the local market in order to cut back on packaging material), picking plantains, or just cutting weeds with a machete. If I travel into town, it’s it do my grocery shopping, use the Internet, and get a nice meal at a restaurant.

A couple weeks ago, I went around to every house in my community to introduce myself and ask them about problems that I might be able to help with in the community. This was a fairly long process as everyone wanted to sit and talk. I took my notebook along to write down anything that could be useful, but everyone wanted to make sure that I was writing all the things that they were telling me, no matter how useless it was. By the end, my notes honestly looked something like this:

House 1: Wants to build a latrine
House 2: Really likes the Evangelical religion
House 3: Uses a barrel as a water tank and would like to build a real pila.
House 4: Went to visit the nurse Friday and liked the walk because it was good exercise.
House 5: Has a 6 year old that refuses to wear clothes.

Despite listening to countless stories that were fairly useless or that I could only barely understand, it was good to visit all the houses and get to know the people in my community. I got to really see how much poverty there is here, and how much help they need. I can’t tell you how many times I walked into a house that more than 6 or 7 people living there and it only had 2 rooms: a 10-foot by 10-foot kitchen filled with smoke and a bedroom with 3 or 4 single beds. There were a lot of times when people had really devastating problems, and would ask me to help them. I was asked for medicine to cure their cough which they had for 3 years, to get them access to drinking water, to help them find work for their 12 year old sons, and to help get supplies for their 16 year old daughter who is pregnant. These were all real things that people asked me for, and I didn’t always have an answer for them.

After visiting the houses, meeting with the local water board and town counsel, and talking with my host mom, I’ve decided to start a project here to build pilas for houses that don’t have them. There isn’t always flowing water here, and so when there is, people like to store it. A pila is just a big water-tank, about 100 gallons, that has a space to wash clothes and dishes and do anything else that requires water. Since having continual access to water is so important, almost every home in Honduras has a pila. However, those who can’t afford a pila simply have a faucet out in their yard with a bucket or barrel that they fill up with water. If there is no water in the community for more than a day, these families will run out quickly and won’t have water to cook or bathe. There are a total of about 90 houses in my community, and 55 of them don’t have pilas. This past Friday, we had a town meeting to discuss the problem and to form a board of directors to manage the project. My role will be to work with this board and help them write the grant for funding and coordinate everything. For a project like this, there aren’t a lot of options for funding. We plan to request money through Peace Corps, but even the maximum amount that they can give us isn’t enough. So we plan on using materials that can be found in the community such as sand, rocks, and wood, to construct the pilas, and use the little bit of funding though Peace Corps for the rest of the materials (cement PVC pipe, etc). We will then have a professional show the people here how to build a pila, so that they can do it themselves and not have to pay someone else to do it.

So life here is different, but so far so good. As corny as it sounds, there’s at least one point almost everyday when I think to myself, “Wow, I can’t believe I’m doing this…this is so cool!” Then again, there are a lot of times when I get sick of not being able to communicate with anyone, and I think about just throwing in the towel. Peace Corps life is not for everyone, so right now all I can do is keep working and hope it turns out to be right for me.

As always, comments, emails, letters, packages, or anything else are all welcome and greatly appreciated.

Peace,
Miles