Summer's Coming

My 6th graders after building the garden

5th graders

The other 3 kids in this group didn't show up, so these 3 made the bed by themselves. Needless to say, they were fairly tired by the end.

Another group after their bed was complete.

Picking out the seeds

Workin' hard

Mark and I in Amanda's latrine

Just Jacob

I felt it was necessary to demonstrate how to open the compost box at the bottom of the latrine. Mark felt it was necessary to take a picture.

Amanda and me

Showin' off...Cuerpo de paz=Peace Corps

It’s starting to get really hot here. It hasn’t rained since before Christmas and for the past couple weeks it’s been in the 90’s every day. Luckily, I live next to a giant watershed and our town still has water coming out of the faucet. However, almost every other region of the country is in some stage of a drought. I think Clint Black’s “Summer’s Coming” is a pretty good title for this post. However, instead of having summer break here, I’m starting to work more than ever down here.

I’ll start out by giving you guys a quick update on my pila project. About 2 weeks ago I turned in a grant requesting funding from Peace Corps for my project. I got a call from our country director the other day, and we talked for a long time about the sustainability of what I’m doing. She told me that in all likelihood Peace Corps would be able to provide the funds. However, I need to make a few changes to the design of the project first to make sure the beneficiaries understand what is expected from them in return for the materials. I met with my board of directors for the project this past week and we wrote up a contract that everyone will have to sign in order to receive the materials. The project basically states that the beneficiaries agree to contribute some of the materials to build a pila, to pay for transportation of materials, to complete certain tasks by their appropriate deadlines, and a couple of other little things. Overall, I think the project is much more transparent to the people here. I came into town today to print out the contract, and then we will have a meeting with all of the community members involved this week to explain the contents of the contract and have them sign it. After that, I’ll show my country director the contract, and talk with her some more to make sure everything is ready before she approves the grant.

I’ve finally started teaching in the schools here about a week and a half ago. I teach environmental education to 4th, 5th, and 6th graders twice a week, and English to 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, and 9th graders once a week. It’s keeping me really busy, but I’m enjoying it a lot. Last Monday, I had all the kids bring in hoes and pickaxes and we cleared out a plot of land in front of the school to have a garden. The kids cleared out all the rocks, cut all the grass and weeds, and built up beds. We were going to start planting the seeds, but there was no water coming out of the faucet in the school (due to the amount of heat we’ve had recently), so we have to wait until next week after we talk to the town’s water board to try and get them to turn on the faucets for the school. I can tell these kids are really excited about the garden by how hard they work and how they are always asking me questions about it. Hands-on learning is something kids in my community have never experienced, so I plan on having the majority of my classes be activities completed outside in the open air. Next week, I plan on taking them to the river nearby to measure the current. Above are some pictures of the kids working to build the beds, of them deciding which seeds to plant, of a couple of the groups in front of the bed they constructed, and of all of them after a couple hours of hard work.

Some of the other pictures above are from other trips. Some are from when Mark, Amanda, and I went to a meeting for AJARCO (the water board for my protected area). Others are from last week when Mark and I visited Amanda, who is about an hour from us, with Jacob, a buddy of mine who is a youth development volunteer, to see her compost latrine project. Jacob is interested in constructing compost latrines in his school, so we used this as an excuse to get to chill out, do a little work, and have a nice lunch together.

Alright, until next time.

Peace,
Miles

Workin' Man

I have come to realize that this blog is getting updated so infrequently that I can no longer really describe to you guys what my life is really like. I’m learning something new everyday and have definitely had my fair share of adventures. So since I would never be able to describe all the cultural challenges and escapades I’ve undertaken in one blog entry, I’m just going to focus on my work this time and try to update my blog more often in the future. For this reason, I’ve named today’s entry after the song “Workin’ Man” by Cherryholmes, which is actually a bluegrass band instead of country.

So starting with my pila project, everything is just starting to come together right now. In case it wasn’t clear last time I explained it, a pila is a water tank. People here need to have a water tank in their house because water isn’t always available (meaning sometimes I turn on the faucet and nothing comes out), so when it is available they need to have a way to store it. I started out by forming a committee, or board of directors, to manage this project back in November. So with those 7 community members, we tried to have meetings once a week or so to figure out who would be in the project, what kind of pila we wanted to build, what materials we would need, how we would manage the construction aspect, etc. We weren’t able to have meetings as often as I hoped for since people here are always really busy working on farms or taking care of their families, so the work was kind of slow paced. The most time consuming part of these meetings was writing the grant. I think this was so hard because I, a gringo who can barely speak Spanish, was teaching a group of Hondurans that only speak Spanish how to write correctly. I can’t tell you how many times everyone in the meeting would be talking and I had no idea what they were saying. But after hours and hours of me trying to say what we needed to do and them slowly explaining what they were saying, we finally got the grant done and the project planned. When the grant was done, we went to visit a couple of organizations to ask if they could fund our project and to give them the grant. We didn’t have much luck, and I think this might have something to do with the political problems Honduras has been having. After talking with 5 or 6 different NGO’s and government agencies, we went to visit the new mayor, who just entered office in late January. He said our municipality had some PVC piping that he could give us, which would cover about 3% of the cost of the project. So after all the traveling and begging for money, I decided to just request money from Peace Corps through the Small Project Assistance (SPA) program. I filled out the forms and turned it into my boss while desperately hoping they would fund the project. This was one week ago from today, and I still haven’t heard anything. I’ll let you guys know how it turns out next time I get on the internet.

With this pila project coming together, I’m getting busy and don’t have much time for the other work that I have devoted myself to. The pilas are only in my neighborhood of Quebrada Grande, but my project in Mata de Platanos is constructing latrines. This project is WAY bigger and harder to manage. We have 150 houses out of about 400 that don’t have a latrine or any other kind of bathroom. In January, the town nurse and I went around to all the sectors of Mata de Platanos to give a little informational session about types of latrines that exist, proper latrine maintenance, and the importance of having a latrine in preventing sicknesses. At each session, we elected one person from that area to be in the committee to manage a latrine construction project. With this committee, we visited every house in Mata de Platanos to see who needed a latrine and to collect demographic information about the potential beneficiaries of this project. After this survey was completed, we took the information to a couple of NGO’s and institutions in the capital to see if they could help us. Getting funding for latrines is easier than getting funding for pilas…or so I’m told. Pretty much every place we visited told us the same thing: they don’t have any money right now, but if we write up a grant, they might be able to help us in the future. So we returned to our community to start writing the grant. This is going a lot faster than the pila grant because 1) I know what I’m doing now, and 2) my Spanish is way better than when I first arrived. I’m not really sure if we will be able to get money anytime soon, and I’m thinking we’ll just write this grant so that the community will be able to solicit funding later when the government isn’t in such a mess. I really hope the community gets latrines, however, because there really is a huge problem of water contamination in the area. I’ve seen a couple houses that have their toilet bowl connected to a PVC tube that just travels down a hill into the creek. Children play in that creek and farmers use that creek to wash off crops that they have grown. Something really needs to be done to prevent this kind of contamination, but without money, I can’t think of anything I can do other than teach people about the dangers of not having latrines.

As far as working in the schools, I think I’ll have a very full schedule. I’ll be teaching English to all the grades (1-6) every Monday. Then every Monday and Wednesday I’ll be teaching environmental education classes to all grades. We plan on starting a garden in the school so the kids can learn about how plants work, the parts of a plant, different types, etc. I might be helping families build gardens at their actual homes later, but for right now we’re just going to start with the kids. Some other volunteers have also been working to develop an environmental education manual for schools in Honduras, so I will be one of the people testing this new manual and helping to revise and edit it. In addition to the classes during school hours, I plan to have a science club that meets after school once a week. This club won’t be as strict as the classes, and the kids will have the opportunity to pick which topics they will want to cover.

I think between these three projects, I’ll be extremely busy. The thing about Peace Corps is that there is always work to do; it’s just a matter of figuring out how to make it count. Another project I’m working on is helping to develop an association called AJARCO which, when translated, means the Corralitos Reserve Water Board Association. Corralitos is the protected area that I live next to, and this water board will help to protect the natural resources of water in the reserve. Right now, AJARCO is just getting formed and trying to get legal documents in order before they can do any kind of project, but I think down the road this group will be able to do a lot of good. I’m working with two other volunteers that live very close to me, Amanda and Mark, to help develop this group. We give talks at meetings about why proper watershed management is important and possible projects.

Here’s a quick list of some of the other things I’ve been up to:
Reconnect – a weeklong reunion with all the volunteers in my project group from this year along with the volunteers from last year. We talked about community integration, project management, grant writing, environmental education, women in agriculture, proper care for cattle, and a couple other administrative stuff. This was great because I got to meet all the other PAM volunteers in Honduras
VAC – Volunteer Advisory Committee. I got elected as the representative for our project group to meet with the country director every few months to talk about policy issues and problems that volunteers have been having. It’s kind of like student counsil for the volunteers here. We had this meeting about 3 weeks ago, and it was cool because Peace Corps paid for me to come into the capital and stay in a hotel.
Scabies – I got scabies…and it was awful. Somehow about half the volunteers in country got it, and I think I got infected from someone at reconnect. Peace Corp was great about sending me to a dermatologist and getting everything taken care of, but I still had to use this cream for a while and boil all of my clothes and bed sheets.
Garden – I started a little garden with Mark, the volunteer near me. The corn I planted is doing well, but the onions and tomatoes are slow going. Mark already picked some radishes, but since neither of us like them, we just gave them to neighbors.
Mark’s dad – Mark’s dad came to visit in early February, and while he was here we went up to visit a tiny village called Montaña Vieja, to help get some kids into the next town over (because there isn’t a school in their town, and none of the kids are being educated). We also went into the capital to meet up with some other volunteers and go Salsa dancing. It was great meeting Mark’s dad and hearing about everything in the states.
Costa Rica – My family is going down to Costa Rica from March 31 to April 5, so I will be flying down there to meet them. I’m really excited for this trip because I’ll be able to see my parents and brothers, I’ll be able to see another Latin American country, and we’ll be staying in a nice hotel with hot water and nice beds. Yeah…I’m excited
Frisbee – I’ve started teaching Frisbee in the physical education classes here. The kids in my village don’t know any other sport besides soccer, so they are excited to learn something new, but they aren’t really picking the game up really well. I’m completely devoted to this however, so I’m confident they’ll get it eventually. Thank you to Brian Phelan and the University of Illinois’ Men’s Ultimate Team for donating Frisbees to us.
Dance – Mark’s community had a dance the other night, which I was able to attend. The community hired a DJ and rented some lights, so it looked to be really fun, but then the DJ’s computer broke and Mark had to bring his computer over to play the music. The dance turned out great, and the community made a lot of money. Not only that, but Mark got to copy all the music that the DJ had onto his computer, which means we now have all the popular Honduran songs. I can’t wait to bring them home and show everyone what I’ve been listening to every day here.
Puppy – I got a puppy. She was adorable and amazing and all my neighbors loved her. She got some kind of parasite or disease and died three weeks after I got her. I will never get a puppy again.
Food – I like Honduran food, and I like my host mom’s cooking. But I’ve decided that I shouldn’t rely on her anymore, and I might really like cooking for myself. So I bought a refrigerator, a stove, a table, and a couple boxes of Macaroni and Cheese and I feel like I’m back in college.
Farms – I still work on random farms here all the time. The coffee season just ended here, so now when I work on farms it’s usually corn or some other boring crop. Sometimes I help with the cattle, but that just usually involves making sure they don’t run away.

Ok, this is a wicked long blog so I’m done. Until next time…

Peace,

Miles