One Month at Site/I Finally Have Internet Access!

            I have been in my site for exactly one month! And on top of that, after more than 3 months and around 1/4 of my monthly living allowance, I finally have internet access! This past Saturday I took a two hour bus ride from my site to the nearest "big city" (it is a big city for me because it has a bank, one small grocery store and a population of more than a few thousand people) to meet up with some other volunteers and buy an internet modem.  After a frustrating 45 minutes in the shop selling modems, I finally walked away with my own modem.  The good news is of course that I have internet access.  The bad news is that it is pretty slow, not the most dependable connection and a little on the expensive side for a broke PCV like me!  That being said, slow and expensive internet is definitely better than no internet at all!  Just to bring everyone up to speed, a lot has happened in the last few months since my last posts. I have now been officially sworn in as Peace Corps Volunteer and I am now living in my site, where I will be for the next two years!  During my months without internet, I tried to keep writing blogs about what was going on in my life.  I will go ahead and post those blogs now so all of ya'll can read about what I have been up to lately!

            Life here moves in my town moves pretty slowly and I am going to have to practice patience here if I want to make it for two years with out going stir crazy! I have been spending my evenings playing soccer and basketball and other games with a lot of the kids in town.  I live right across from the street from the town’s central park.  The park is really nice and has a basketball/futballito court.  While it is not in the best condition, it is way better than some random patch of dirt somewhere.  I am doing what I can to bring an end to machismo in the this country by making sure to beat all the teenage boys at HORSE the basketball game (which they call Burro, which means donkey), whenever I can! I am also thinking about starting some girl’s sports teams.  I hear there used to be a girls soccer team, but that it fell apart a few years ago because of lack of organization. I have seen a few girls playing sports, but mostly, it is just the boys.

            Two weekends ago I took my first trip overnight trip away from my site. I went to a nearby village that was hosting the yearly Mora Festival.  Mora is a type of blackberry that grows in the mountains here in Honduras, especially in my part of the country.  I was able to try berry jam, wine, pastries and anything else you can put blackberry into.  I also was able to watch a blackberry-eating contest, a bike race around the town park and a soccer game, which pitted the local mayors (who I might add are mostly older and a little over weight) against a local team.  The main reason I went was to meet up with some other Peace Corps volunteers in the area. There were 8 of us in total and it was nice meeting some of the people that will be my neighbors for the next few years. 

            Work is slowly but surely starting to pick up for me.  In the past few days I have even been approached by some people in the town wanting help with different things from helping out the local library to giving classes on how to run a small business.  I am also going to start working with a fellow volunteer on a project he will be doing in my town with local bread making micro business.  I am glad that there seems to be a lot of great opportunities here for me over the next two years!

Site Placement!

Before I stat with all the details of my home for the next two years, let me start by saying it is Peace Corps suggestion that I do not mention my site location or name in my blog.  That is why it might seem like I am leaving out some important details of my site! 

            I have been at my site for about two weeks now.  I can’t believe how quickly time has flown by! I have already been here in Honduras for 3 months now.  Let me start by telling everyone about my site.  I am living in a small town and when I say small, I mean really small.  The town center has a population of around 1000 people, although I think this number has been exaggerated!  The town is located on a mountain and similar to most small towns around Honduras, the majority of the people here depend on small-scale farming and coffee in the highest altitude areas.  There is running water and electricity here (although, in the short amount of time I have been here, the power has already gone our 4 or 5 times for a few hours at time, but that’s rainy season for ya).  There are no banks, grocery stores, gas stations or type of large-scale business here.  There are a few pulperias here (kind of like a small convince store that sells basic goods) and a small weekend market that sells produce.  It is really quite beautiful here and I look forward to getting to know this place over the next two year. 

            I have received 3 community partners or counter parts here in my town.  I will be working with the local high school, a few small businesses supported by the local parish and a small savings and loans cooperative. 

            The high school has expressed interest in receiving assistance to train their youth in personal finance topics.  The school also has several vocational workshops (wood shop, metal shop, farming, baking and sewing) and wants to set up a business incubator for their students.  They also are interested in any support I can provide teachers and students in improving their computer skills.  They have also expressed interest in me helping out with English classes. 

            The local parish has a youth entrepreneurship program and educational program that is supported financially by the members and also by the income generated through the micro businesses that the program currently manages.  They are currently running a cement block factory and a silk-screening business as well as agriculture and productive activities (vegetables and tilapia farming).   The youth benefited by this program attend the local high school to get their degree and they also receive vocational training.  The youth comes from the surrounding areas that are very rural.  They have no access to a high school education in their towns and have very few options for their futures except farming.  The youth stay in a boarding house that has been set up on the church grounds.  They would like me to be able to help them in setting up better management procedures in their businesses and to help them develop and implement a plan to generate enough income for their program to be self completely self sustainable.

            The cooperative has 117 members and does a number of different things.  They run a small shop in town that sells some farming tools as well as seeds and fertilizer. The cooperative would like assistance from me in providing trainings and support to their beneficiaries on business topics like business plan writing, bookkeeping and basic accounting, basic computer and ICT skills, marketing, added value and commercialization.

            I am a little out of my element here, as most of these groups some sort of manual labor and my knowledge of tilapia farming and metal works in pretty non-existent!  On top of this, I still have a ways to go with my Spanish language skills.  Things have been moving a little slowly, but I am confident that in time I will have a lot of really great work to do here! Luckily I have two years here to figure everything out! 

           

Feild Based Training

 FBT: March 23-May 4

            I have spent the last 6 weeks in Yuscáran, El Paraíso.  As you can guess, I did not have access to internet here and that is why I haven’t been able to keep this blog updated.  I will try to catch everyone up on what has been going on in my life during FBT.

            My Monday thru Fridays have been spent having a combination of both Spanish classes and technical sessions where I am learning a little bit about a lot of different topics regarding business opportunities in Honduras.  We have talked about everything from agro forestry, income generation projects to tourism niches.  We also had the opportunity to do a number of hands learning activities.  We spent an afternoon planting home gardens and learning how to start a tree nursery.  I knew I was really in the Peace Corps when I received a text message from Jesus, my training specialist, asking if we could ask our host families if we could barrow a machete for the afternoons activates! Another fun activity was a business simulation we did with a local school.  For one week we worked with some 6^th graders and taught them about the basic principals of business (Marketing, Production, Accounting, ect). Then the kids got a loan from Peace Corps for about $20 USD to start their own business.  It was a really fun week and both the kids and us trainees. 

            Some other highlights from the past 6 weeks would include a tourism field trip we took to a number of 3 tourism locations near Yuscáran.  The trip was overnight and all 18 of the business trainees plus our language teachers and Jesus all spent the night camping on a man made beach next to some man made lakes!  We had a bonfire and even roasted some marshmallows!  It was a lot of fun and something I never though I would be doing in Honduras.

            I also went to visit a current volunteer in her site for three days.  It was one of my first experiences traveling in public buses here and let me say, I think it is going to take some getting used to! The common form of transportation here is yellow school buses that have been brought over from the states. I am keeping my eyes peeled for a bus that has one of my old school districts name painted on the side!  I went to the department of Valle to a town with the reputation of being the hottest town in Honduras and it was definitely HOT HOT HOT.  I am used to hot weather living in Texas, but the difference is that we have air conditioning in our homes, cars and offices in the states!  I literally showered three times a day and never stopped sweating the whole time I was there. All in all it was a great experience to learn about what volunteers really do here in Honduras. 

            Over the past 6 week I have really become close with all the other Business volunteers.  Outside of classes we have been doing all kinds of things to keep ourselves entertained. I love Yuscáran, it is a great little town, but there is not a whole lot to do here.  We have had to get very creative at time to mitigate our boredom.  A few times we have hiked up a hill to an old tree that overlooks the town.  We have played countless games of cards.  A few times we have gone hiking in a nearby biological reserve.  They are some waterfalls and lagoons up in the mountains, but unfortunately, we where there during the dry season.  After of few hours of hiking we got to see a few trickles of water and not much else.  One Saturday, we planned a soccer match in a neighboring town (a one and a half hour bus ride away) with the group of Water and Sanitation volunteers who were in training nearby.

            All in all, FBT was a wonderful experience.  I improved my Spanish and learned a lot more about doing business in Honduras.  I also have made some really great friends among my fellow PC business trainees.  It’s a little sad to think that soon we will all be living all over Honduras. On May 14, we will all be headed to our sites!