Hike

Hello everyone!

A week ago last Saturday we went on a really nice hike near Danlí. A family friend of our host family’s who was always over at there house when we were living there knew we liked to hike so he came over one and invited us on a hike Saturday morning. Luke was the one who answered the door so he didn’t get all the info like who all was going, where we were going, etc. but we decided to go anyway. Turned out to be pretty fun. Ended up being our host family’s friend (Carlan), four of his middle-aged guy friends, two ten-year-olds and a Japanese volunteer who is living with Carlan’s parents, and Luke and I. We drove for about 35 minutes on a dirt road out of Danlí and ended up hiking for about 4 hours through one of Carlan’s friend’s private property that is still really well forested. The guy who owns the property definitely had to be with us because we weren’t walking on any well worn trails. We walked through dense jungle, moving over and under logs, pushing vines and branches out of the way, etc. We didn’t make it to the top of the mountain we were headed to due to lack of time but we did get some good exercise and got to see wild monkeys! We started hearing their growl/howl soon into our hike but didn’t actually see any until we got pretty deep into the jungle. We saw them from below as they were high up in the trees but one of the guys had binoculars. They made some really cool sounds and were pretty big (about the size of a 10-year-old kid). We also saw a small waterfall and returned to Danlí in the afternoon around 2. Here are a few pics. I´ve got more from the hike but don´t have time today to wait for them to download but I´ll post them soon.

Getting ready to head out of town

A close-up pic of coffee beans. Coffee won´t be ready to pick until Nov/Dec.

On the hike we stopped by to look at a field of red beans.

A neat pic Luke took of the landscape.

Work update

Hey everyone,
I feel like I have to apologize for not blogging enough every time I blog, but Annie seems to keep everyone up to date on most of the goings on. So sorry for not blogging and you’re welcome for marrying a blogger. It is also a challenge to blog because life really isn’t that exciting…..although Saturday we saw some 100 lb wild monkeys, which was exciting.

I have been spending 3-4 days working in El Paraíso per week and the other days either chasing other work around the area or working on the computer. I have a copy of EPAnet software and AutoCAD software and some different GIS softwares that I am trying to find the time and projects to work with so I can keep up-to-date with engineering softwares. Work in El Paraíso still consists of me following around the técnicos from project to project trying to get things built correctly. JAM currently has 7 projects that are scheduled to end in September and construction needs to be done by then (when the bank account quits giving Swiss money). I am still of minimal impact with this organization. The técnicos are very capable in my opinion (and they speak the native language). It has still been beneficial to me though as I have seen quite a few different projects, the subsequent problems, and have done a few surveys that have saved them some time. I have also had some worthwhile experiences. For example, just today I spent 5 hours hiking around the rainforest in the rain (imagine that), and I managed to fall down in the mud on 3 separate occasions. We were walking along the newly buried conduction line to check if some new air valves were installed correctly so the trail was nothing but saturated clay. My second fall was the best. We came to the top of a hill and the trail was pretty steep. There were 2 ways down, slide on your ass or try and sort of run/slide down and stay upright for the 40 yards of downhill. I tried the running method (genius) and my foot caught on a root at about the point of maximum velocity and it was a face first yard sale into the mud and water. The guy I was with thought it was hilarious how much earth I moved with my face/shoulder. I then took a shower and washed my clothes in an overflow from the water system along the way because I figured I might as well just be wet and not both wet and dirty. I promptly fell down a third time. On the way home I rode in the back of the truck.

Of interest, the project we were working on is right along the border with Nicaragua and in one of the areas where the heaviest fighting took place during the contra war in the late 80’s between the Nicaraguan Sandinistas and the American backed Contras. You can still see machine gun placements along the ridge, and the stories that the guys I am working with tell are not of a pleasant time, especially for the communities unfortunate enough to be in the area. If anyone wants to know more about what was going on at the time (politically, culturally and economically) read the biography “The Death of Ben Linder.” I can’t remember the author, but it is definitely worth reading and a book both Annie and I recommend.

Here are some pics I took on a visit to see a community building a tank last week:

Charlas with the 5th graders

I thought I’d get some pics up and blog a little about the charlas I’ve been doing at two different elementary schools in Danlí. I’m doing a 3-month course with 5th graders (I’m working with 6 classes in all which is about 210 students), dealing with topics like good communication, self esteem, values, stereotypes, relationships, puberty (physical changes), pregnancy, HIV/AIDS prevention, and future goal setting/plans. So far it’s been difficult but lots of fun working with the kids. I think I mentioned in another blog how difficult it is to be heard because of how each “aula” (classroom) has windows open to the courtyard. I almost lose my voice after giving two charlas in a row! And when it rains...it´s impossible! The schools have tin roofs and when it´s raining, I have to quite early. I have some pics to post thanks to a Japanese volunteer (a nurse) who is doing a 2-year volunteer program similar to Peace Corps and is living in Danlí. She accompanied me to a charla the other day to see what I was doing with 5th graders and took a few pics.

The pic below shows me doing a self-esteem demonstration. The bottle represented one’s inner self-esteem. The volunteers against the board each took turns reading a slip of paper I gave them with either a positive comment (Annie, I like your shirt) or negative comment (Annie, your charlas are boring). With each positive comment, I filled the bottle up a bit with water and with each negative comment, I squirted the bottle at the students (I poked a hole in the bottle with a seam-ripper so every time I squeezed it, it shot out a stream of water). The students loved it! We then talked about how we can make sure our “self-esteem” bottle stays at an equilibrium and how it’s ok to feel sad or not content with yourself sometimes.

Here is a class of students intently listening to what I have to say! Notice the uniforms…every public school I’ve seen in Honduras requires their students to wear uniforms. Girls in skirts, boys in pants. For physical education, the girls wear skirts with shorts underneath and the boys wear shorts.

Here’s me monitoring a “dinámica” (fun participatory activity). The kids got into groups and had to write positive comments (we first practiced what a “positive comment” is) to their classmates, writing them on a piece of paper taped to their back. The students then got to look at their list to see if the qualities their peers see in them are qualities they knew they had. I stressed the importance of giving compliments and their homework was to intentionally give at least 5 positive comments before going to bed that night.

A big sincere thanks to family members who have contributed to this project! GRACIAS!

Work update and pics

As some of you already know, we’re finally in our own place! It’s great to be on our own again (after 5 long months). We are living pretty simply with very little furniture (only 1 plastic table and 2 chairs and 2 thin foam mattresses for the floor that we sleep on) but we couldn’t be happier. Our next big purchase will be a couch, a few more plastic chairs, a bed, and maybe eventually, a tv. Send me an email if you want to see pics of the house.

I am sitting here on my plastic chair on a cool (low 70s) Thursday evening thinking of something to blog about so I thought I’d talk a bit about the sand filters that Agua Pura and Rotary International have been installing all over Honduras. I’ve tagged along three times now with employees from Agua Pura and an American environmental engineering student who is here doing a third-party evaluation of the filters. In the department of El Paraíso, around 9,000 filters have been installed. Each filter costs about $27 and is installed inside a family’s home. The family is responsible for coming up with 200 lemps (about $10) of the cost. Check out the pic below to have an idea about what it looks like.

Before I go any further, a little about how the filter works…the cement column contains several layers (starting from bottom) – gravel, smaller gravel, sand, and a layer of water on top of the sand. To keep the filter functioning, at least one 5-gallon jug of water has to be poured into the filter each day to every other day. Basically viruses in the water are attracted to the sand and parasites and larger bacteria get trapped in the sand. Other bacteria are killed off by the biological layer. So, by the time, the water comes out it’s drinkable.

Through the third-party evaluation, they have been finding out that many people are not using the filters correctly or at all. (Ahhh…the joys of development work!). The problem is that the 4 employees (all Honduran) of Auga Pura in Danlí cannot possibly oversee the proper use and maintenance of 9,000 filters. So what we would like to bring to the drawing table is training the already established community leaders in the monitoring of their community’s filter use and general hygiene and come up with some way of reporting back to Agua Pura so they can keep a better eye on things.

It’s so interesting to see all that goes into a project like this. This is the first NGO that I’m really getting to see a lot of the inner workings of. After the several trips we’ve been on to communities to either do water samples or present the idea of bringing filters into a community, the environmental engineering student (and now a public health student who’s also here for 6 weeks doing an internship) and I have to have coffee and debrief to process everything that is involved. Some of the issues that have come up are:

If a community already has a water system, do they really need household sand filters or are there other methods of water purification that would be more suitable?
If a community has a system and was previously treating their water at the tank with chlorine and have now stopped chlorinating because chlorine doesn’t work with the sand filters, what do the people do in the community who don’t have the sand filters?
Are the sand filters being provided because it’s really in the best interest of the community or because numbers are needed to report back to the administration so funding and jobs of the employees can be secured and foreign donors can feel good about themselves?
If filters are being installed to provide clean drinking water but not much is done in the way of education on general hygiene (washing hands, wearing shoes, keeping animals out of house, keeping trash covered, use of latrines, etc.) people will still get sick so how do you manage that (staff, funding, etc.)?

I’m neither for nor against the filters…just bringing up some of the questions that I imagine arise when working with any NGO or similar development agency.

Anyway, below are a few scenes from the campo on one of the visits I went on with Agua Pura. To check out Agua Pura´s explanation for why they´re working in Honduras click on: http://www.purewaterfortheworld.org/our-projects/why-honduras/

Bridge we had to cross to visit a home with a filter.

Corn sitting on someone´s kitchen floor ready to be milled to make tortillas.

The joys of living abroad

Living in a foreign country has its advantages and disadvantages. There are things about Honduras that we love (fresh fruit and veggies, hospitable people, etc.) and there are things that are more difficult to grow accustomed to. Luke and I spent some time thinking about things that we are dealing with or have seen here in Honduras that to us seemed funny, strange, or just something that we’re not used to in the States and wanted to share it with you. Enjoy the list!

· Sweet-tasting ketchup
· Not flushing your toilet paper (systems can´t handle it)
· Cockroaches
· Feeling “chilly” when it’s 79 degrees
· No speed limits, stop signs, or any regard for what we would consider “safe” driving
· Restaurants that are closed during meal times
· Ropa Americana (American clothing) that has somehow made its way to Honduras. We’ve seen t-shirts that say things like: “Too sexy to study,” “Baby princess,” “My boyfriend’s out of town” “In God we Trust,” etc.
· Putting a plate of food to be eaten later in the microwave (somehow the microwave will keep anything fresh and safe for hours or even days)
· Water shortages
· Difficulty starting things on time
· A love for music from the eighties and early nineties (especially the sappy ballads)
· Excessive honking – could almost be considered it’s own form of communication
· Badly dubbed American movies in Spanish
· “Store dogs”: dogs, usually short legged long-haired ones, that belong to the owner of a store and hang out in and on the street nearby the store
· Stale baked goods
· “Piropos” from men (catcalls)
· Not covering food that’s in the fridge
· Men who walk around ringing a bell selling ice cream from a cooler on wheels
· Being woken up around 4 or 5 am by loud “bangs” that sound an awful lot like gunshots but are really firecrackers called “cohetes” that people use to celebrate birthdays, anniversaries, etc.
· Bolos – drunk old men who fall asleep in the sun on the sidewalk or are really chatty
· Buying then drinking purified water out of ½-liter plastic bags
· Drinking liquados, soda, and natural juice out of a plastic bag with a straw
· Lots of Tweety Bird posters, paraphernalia, car accessories, etc.
· Seeing commercials on tv for rewards for having more “remesas,” (money sent from family/friends who are living and working in the US). Banks here offer prizes – the more “remesas” you deposit into your bank account, the more chances you have to win a new fridge, car, or whatever it is they’re offering.
· Being asked over and over by everyone why we don’t have kids (we´re married so why wouldn’t we??)
· Seeing an entire family (mother, father, child) all riding on a one-person bicycle

Work update

Hey everyone,
Things here are progressing, I am not sure if the progression of things will lead to any tangible results, but they are progressing…and that is a good thing.

We recently took a trip with an hombre from a NGO called Vecinos Mundiales (World Neighbors) that works here in Honduras. We made this contact earlier on a trip with another guy from Vecinos, I think we blogged about that trip already. Anyhow, it seemed to be a quite successful trip, and we have tentatively planned to stay around 5-7 days a month in the community we visited working on a number of things from beginning to start to think about the potential of a water system, and working with some agricultural producers to giving talks at the schools about self esteem and things of that nature. Vecinos seems excited to have Annie available to work in the health sector as they do not have a health worker in the zone right now, but are doing a lot of health education there.

We left on Monday at about 2:30 and after 3 river crossings on a dirt road big enough for one vehicle and 3 hours in a pickup (I was in the back covered by a tarp to keep dry while Annie was crammed into the single cab with 2 workers from Vecinos) we arrived at the community. It is pretty high up in the mountains, 1,300 meters, and was actually pretty chilly, although to us 75 F is chilly. We talked with some people and found a place to stay. Vecinos is building an office and once it is finished hopefully we can stay there when we are working in the community. Right now they’re using a part of a family’s house as their office where have several desks and a couple of cots to sleep on when they’re in town. We stayed at the house of the lady who makes food for the Vecinos employees while they’re there. The food is “típico” but excellent – rice, beans, cheese, tortillas, eggs, fried plantains, and of course sugared coffee.

The zone is dominated by coffee production and is pretty rough, steep, wet country. Deforestation is taking its toll, but fortunately hasn’t yet left the place an eroded desert. There are 2 small communities that don’t have potable water systems and I am going to attempt to find out how much interest there is in these 2 communities to build a system. I am looking forward to the opportunity to work there as the communities right now don’t have anyone working with them on the water system so I will get to start from almost the beginning and ‘si Dios quiere’ in 2 years some progress will be made towards a potable water system, and maybe they will even have a functioning system. The barriers at this point to the communities getting a functioning system seem almost endless, but you have to start somewhere.

The place we stayed was nice. The outdoor showers in the morning were a little chilly with no hot water (Annie says she could see her breathe while she was showering). When we go to the campo people are usually very hospitable and this time they even moved stuff around so we could have the “master” bedroom. Mostly because they thought I was too gigantic to fit on any of their smaller beds. It is very nice of them to go so far out of there way for us, but sometimes it just makes me feel like more of an intruder…I really can sleep wherever (please no rats if possible)…and I get the feeling that since we’re gringos they think we’re pretty soft. And in comparison we are pretty soft, but I would appreciate a chance to prove that I am not a total pansy ass and can sleep on the floor just fine.

I will try and post a blog sometime soon on all of the things that starting these waters project is going to entail…….once I figure out what that is.

So things are going well for us here, thanks to all who have kept in touch and kept us in your thoughts and prayers.

Hasta luego,
Luke


A couple of additions to the campo trip that Luke blogged about. On Monday night when we got there, the sun quickly set (the sun still sets here around 6 pm…Honduras didn’t do Daylight Savings Time) and the temperature quickly dropped. I was chilly the entire time we were in the campo except for during the day from 9 to 5. The first night it started to rain during dinner and kept raining hard all night. I was convinced that the whole mountain was going to slide away, taking us and the house with it. Luke told me not to worry but in the morning told me that he too worries about mudslides even though he knows it would takes days of hard rain to wet the earth deep enough to make a mountain slide away. Anyway, I woke up the next morning knowing I would have to take a cold shower outdoors while the rain continued to poor down. Sure is a good way to wake up! To give you an idea of how “cold” it is…I was wearing my jeans, boots with socks, a long sleeve shirt and my rain jacket and was wishing I had a sweatshirt and a stocking cap. It’s supposedly “winter” here now that the rains of started but even with the rains it hasn’t been exactly chilly in Danlí so the fresco of the mountains surprised me.

Luke and I both complained about the sugared coffee when we first got to Honduras but now we both enjoy it when we’re in the campo. It seems to fit with the “plato típico” and gives you a bit of something sweet that you otherwise wouldn’t get.

Quick update on the “house hunt:” WE FOUND A HOUSE! Some of you have heard our good news by email but to let everyone know, it’s official! We signed the contract today (Sunday) and paid the first month’s rent. It’s a really nice house only 2 houses down the street from where we live now. We’re happy with the neighborhood (only a few blocks from the main plaza and plenty of neighbors that will “watch our for us”) and even happier with the house. We’ll have a bit of a yard and an 8 foot wall that gives us complete privacy! Now the task of finding furniture and other household items. We have to buy everything from a fridge to a bed to kitchen utensils and a couch. Bit by bit. We may be sleeping on “colchones” (small mattresses you put on the floor) and sitting on plastic furniture for awhile. But I’m not complaining…we have a house! We hope to be moving into it at the end of this week. -Annie