September 28, 2007

Trip to the campo

This week Luke and I headed out to an aldea to work and came back with lots to write about. Luke’s assigned counterpart organization (JAM – Juntas de Agua Municipal) picked us up on Tuesday morning at 6:30 to drive us the 2 ½ hours to an aldea called El Recuerdo de la Esperanza. It was a long drive on dirt roads but luckily we were in a double-cabin Toyota pick-up so we weren’t too uncomfortable (and luckily I had remembered to take my motion sickness medicine before leaving). We went to the community with several objectives. The first was to take a look at the water tank the community has been building and check their progress of burying water pipes to get water to each house. This water project (funded by COSUDE – The Swiss Cooperation Orginization through the JAM) was supposed to be finished no later than September 30 but the community still has not completed everything (COSUDE provides all the funding for the project; the community provides all the labor, the JAM provides the technical assistance). We went to “check-up” on them and encourage them to get the project finished. The second objective of the visit was to do house-to-house visits with a community volunteer, going over basic hygiene and health issues. Part of the water project involved installing latrines for every house so I was also to go over maintenance of the latrine and make sure everyone in the family, kids included, are using it. This community is very poor and very isolated. To give you an idea of just how poor…before the water project began, only 2 of 41 houses had latrines (this means that people were just going to the bathroom somewhere outside, literally "didn´t have a pot to pis in"). Because the community is so isolated, their diet consists of mainly tortillas, beans, rice, and eggs and lacks fruits and veggies. Most of the kids are shoeless and were dirty from head to toe. A good number of them have the puffy bellies from parasites, malnutrition, or a combination of both. And, of course, there is no electricity.

We got to El Recuerdo at about 9 am on Tuesday morning after a bumpy ride and after crossing several rivers (without bridges) and many streams. We set off to hike up the mountain to visit the site of the water source and where the tank and filter are being built. The water source for the community (once the tank and system are finished) comes from several natural springs in the mountainside. The community sits in a valley with mountains on both sides. The one side of the valley is covered with vegetation and trees (the side with the water source). The other side of the community has been cleared and the farmers burn what remains in order to plant corn and beans. The side that has been slashed and burned has ZERO water sources and looks dry and dusty. (Wonder why??)

Standing on vegetated side, looking at the slashed-and-burned side.

After visiting the water tank site and filter to see how the job is coming along, we had lunch and then headed to the house where Luke and I would be staying the night. The house we stayed at was relatively nice compared to most houses in the community. There were three rooms – a kitchen and 2 bedrooms (each with 3 beds in them). Near the house that was perched on a hillside were the latrine and shower (see pic below).

The front side to this outdoor shower was open. It looked down the hill that was covered in coffee plants. No running water so we used a bucket of water and a paila (paila is a plastic container/bowl that is used here to shower, to wash dishes, hands, etc.). It was a cold, breezy shower!

Luke worked until 5 pm with some guys from the community, laying water pipe in front of the house we were staying at.

Luke working with the guys from the community

We ate dinner at 6 pm (avocado, rice, beans, and tortillas). Soon after, everyone in the house went to bed! Even though is was only 7 pm Luke and I decided to follow their lead and go to bed. It got dark around 6 pm and since there’s no electricity, by 7 pm it feels more like 10. We got out of bed the next morning around 5:15 and had the feeling that we’d missed breakfast. I asked the señora of the house (Doña Olga) what time she had gotten up at and she said 3:45! I suppose if you go to bed at 7, 3:45 doesn’t seem so early??? We had breakfast (eggs, beans, tortillas) then Luke set off for the tank to help out and I stayed around until Doña Olga (one of the community volunteers) was ready to go house to house with me. We were able to visit 13 houses in a little over 3 hours. Doña Olga did the introductions and then from there let me do the talking. At this time of day, the only people home are the wives and children. At each house I did the following things: looked over the latrine to make sure it was clean and asked to make sure everyone was using it, asked them how they were purifying their water (either by boiling it, using chlorine, or setting the water in the sun), asked about the family’s health, and if there were kids around, I gave a mini-charla on hand-washing and had all the kids wash their hands with me. I think I washed my hands with around 30 kids in all!

Clean hands! This pic was taken after I showed the kids how to wash their hands and explained to them when they should wash them.

Several things I noticed:
1) No one is purifying their water. The water system, once working, will bring treated water (with chlorine) to every house. However, currently their water is coming from a hose stuck in the mountain and they are not treating the water at all before consuming it.
2) A lot of kids were dirty and shoeless, running around outside with bare feet, stepping in chicken, pig, and/or dog poop then tracking it inside.
3) Almost every household has chickens and they are free to roam wherever and inevitably end up inside the house (see pic below of chickens roaming the front of the house where we stayed at).
4) Many women do NOT have chimneys on their wood stoves in the kitchen. In several of the houses I had to stand outside the kitchen to talk to the women because my eyes immediately started burning and I couldn´t help but cough because of all the smoke. The women are used to breathing that in on a daily basis and don’t realize it’s a health risk, especially for babies and young children. (See pic below of an example of VERY nice kitchen in a newer house in the community).
5) The kids are not in school! Apparently several months ago the teacher’s contract ran out (why the government would sign a contract that ends 4 months before the school year is over makes no sense to me!). According to many, the teacher was great and even organized a women’s group in the community. You can’t blame her for not wanting to stay if the government wasn’t going to pay her. It was sad to see all these young kids at home when I was doing the visits that should’ve been in school.

Chickens! They are very annoying and constantly try to get in the house. I took this pic right after the grandmother tossed some corn kernels on the ground for them. If this is what they call “free-range” chickens than I want mine from the cage! :)

A nice kitchen! Notice that this stove has a chimney.

Someone came to get us on Wednesday afternoon and we made it back to Danlí by about 6:30 pm. It was a good trip and we hope to get back to the community soon to help them finish up their water project and do some health-related education. Unfortunately, Luke and I both woke in the middle of the night the night we got back with some digestive issues. I suppose this is to be expected even though we were chlorinating our water. Luckily the problems didn’t last but more than a day.

Luke and I both enjoy visiting and staying over in the campo. Living in Danlí it’s easy to forget just how isolated and poor some of the communities in Honduras are. Plus, the people are very friendly and every time we go we always end up with stories to tell!

September 24, 2007

Portón

Hey everyone! Wow…. sorry about the lack of blogs, we are still in Honduras (amazingly enough). We have been in and out of Danlí lately and not had a lot going on work wise (this is driving me crazy). It is Monday morning at 7:30 while I am writing this. I have to go to find some guys to ask them a question about a design I am working on for a water system today and then go to a meeting at the mayor’s office. I am not exactly sure what the meeting is about but I got invited so I am going, and taking Annie with me so that I have a chance of understanding everything that goes on. My Spanish is getting slowly better and I can now understand all of the major themes in most conversations but I occasionally miss important details or fail to explain myself very well so when I can, I take Annie with me and then after the meeting we have to have a debriefing to make sure I got all the information.

So for lack of anything better to blog about Annie suggested I blog something about life here in Honduras. We live in a pretty big city so we were only allowed to live in certain neighborhoods in town. These neighborhoods in Danlí are very typical of most Central American neighborhoods in that they are surrounded by a wall or a iron fence topped with razor wire, barbed wire, broken glass bottles, or an electric fence. We have an electric fence on top of a concrete block wall. The electric fence is actually kind of annoying, it uses electricity for one and it makes our house stand out too much…like I should hang a sign outside that says “DO NOT FEED THE GRINGOS”. Our house is odd in that we are the only family living behind our wall. Most places have at least two families (always siblings or parents + an assortment of other random relatives) living behind the wall. We also have a big green “portón” or door that opens to the outside. The portón is big enough to pull a car through and is the only entrance to our little compound.

Our big green portón



The portón has caused some funny scenarios. First, it is the only way into our compound (a huge design flaw). When we were first looking to rent this house we committed to rent it even though we hadn’t seen behind the wall yet because at that point you couldn’t get inside the portón. Some one had run into the portón with their car and it was mangled to a point that it wouldn’t open, so no one had entered our little compound for over a year, there was no way in and the electric fence was still on. Side note - no one had actually ever lived in this house before, it was built 2 years ago with “remesas” which is the name for checks sent down from the States and the lady never came back to Honduras. This is quite common…a lot of communities have large American-looking houses with no one living in them or that are unfinished. People send money from the states to build a big house and then they either get deported and the remesas run out or they get citizenship and never come back to the house they had built. Back to the portón stories…people have to knock on the big green door or ring the doorbell if they want to find us which means we don’t have to let them in. We can instead just yell over the top (¡¿Quién?! = “Who is it?!”) to see who it is first. For example, when the Jehovah’s witnesses come you can just pretend that you don’t speak Spanish. Just yesterday the Mormons came over (they send ladies here) and I opened the door and I could tell they wanted to come in but I just didn’t open the door far enough and they were stymied (I was nice though, the Mormon church is right next door so I didn’t want to be rude and pretend to not know Spanish, best not to piss off the neighbors, plus it was a good opportunity to practice a little Spanish). An early morning portón visit (we woke up at 7 am on a Saturday morning to the doorbell) was the nice pulpería owner from down the street. (A pulpería is a little store run out of your house that sells mainly junk food, some basic staples, soda and beer). Anyway, she wanted our 5 empty beer bottles back because the bottle guy was coming to pick up empties later that morning. Nothing like being woken up on an early Saturday morning and having to look around for empty beer bottles while the neighborhood pulpería owner waits outside your portón. Another early morning portón story…a few Sundays ago I was away and some guys stopped by really early in the morning (6:30) looking for me. They were going on a hike in a protected area that Annie and I had hiked with them several months ago and wondered if I wanted to go with them again. Annie answered to portón in her pjs and found a truckload of middle-aged guys looking for me.

We desperately need one of those peepholes!

September 5, 2007

Youth camp

A few notes before I get into the blog...hurricane Felix dumped some light rain on us starting last night around 10 pm and ending sometime early this morning. No flooding, no wind. Sounds like it lost power when it got into mainland. We didn´t even lose power! Also, be sure to check out Luke´s blog below on the corn festival. I added a few more pics to it today as well.


I am finally going to blog about the youth camp for young leaders that I participated in a month ago….

The health PCV about 20 minutes south of Danlí got a grant to work with at-risk youth so we spent a weekend with around 32 youth between the ages of 15-20ish at the beginning of August. This health PCV works with a youth organization in her community that had already identified young leaders and many of them have been to talleres (like a capacitation/training) on HIV/AIDS, Sex Ed, etc. We trained (and re-trained) the young leaders on HIV/AIDS prevention, gang involvement, drugs, and abuse over the weekend and did lots of camp-like activities like a bonfire, scavenger hunt, team-building activities, etc. They rented a building that is used for these types of things about an hour from Danli near Nicaraguan border. We all slept at the building on colchones (4 PCVs, 3 other youth leaders, and the 32 youth) and got about 4 hours of quiet sleep. Here are a few pics from the camp:


Four of us PCVs helping out



The week following the camp the youth leaders willwork with the kids at a school for street kids here in Danlí (the “at-risk” youth) on these topics. A youth PC volunteer works at this school on a daily basis. The leaders were divided up into four groups, each assigned with a different topic to work with the kids on. I was assigned to help lead the HIV/AIDS project. My group came to Danlí the Wednesday after the camp and we worked with the kids from this school for several hours on HIV/AIDS prevention. I helped the young leaders design the presentation and activities but just sat back while they led it. We gave the presentation to the 10-15 year-olds at the street school. They had never received a formal HIV/AIDS charla before so it was interesting to see what beliefs they had about HIV/AIDS (one thought, for example, that there was a cure). I felt, and so did the leaders, that the kids learned a lot. And the leaders had a great time doing it! Some of them mentioned wanting to come back and volunteer at the school.

A little info on the school….
The school got started about 5 years ago when the director went around town looking for the places where the street kids hang out. “Street kids” is sort of misleading because most of them do have somewhere to sleep at night, even if it is in a one room shack with tarps for walls. When they’re not in school, they spend their time hanging out on the street and beg. Many of the kids have been sexually abused and/or raped by other family members or older street kids. The PC youth volunteer in Danlí has been volunteering at this school for almost two years now (her COS (Close of Service) is in December). The project has definitely had its share of problems. A major one being that because the government doesn’t fund the school, they have to depend on the local government and donations. The local government only gives the schools 10,000 L per month ($529) and that is supposed to pay the salary of 3 people, buy supplies, and maintain the school. Definitely not enough. The other major problem besides money is that the teachers who get assigned to the school (only 2 teachers for abouat 30 kids between the ages of 5 and 15) often decide to quit soon after starting or just don’t show up a lot. I’ve complained and blogged about the educational system before so I won’ t do it again here but just to reiterate, there really is no system of accountability or monitoring so if a teacher decides not to come to work a few days a week or decides to put a movie on during school hours so she can use that time to plan, no one is there to fire them or even take some money from their paycheck for the days they’ve missed. These kids need stability and teachers who care which is a rare thing here. They have had a few good teachers move through but that is definitely not the norm. A few pics from our day at the school: