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
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
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