March 24, 2008

Semana Santa in Danli

We have successfully made it through our second Semana Santa (Holy week) here in Honduras! Semana Santa is a week-long holiday celebrating the death and resurrection of Jesus. Pretty much every business, both private and government, closes down for the week. Some typical Honduran activities for the week include: traveling to visit family, going to the beach, river, or pool to go swimming, going on a picnic, and participating in the religious processions It’s sort of the official start of summer so any sort of water-related activity is in order. All the stores in Danli a week before Semana Santa started selling blow up pools, inner tubes, balls, etc. Luke and I had planned to do a hiking trip but decided instead to spend the week relaxing and hanging out in Danlí. We spent the week gardening, bike riding, watching movies, going on walks, and cooking. (Not that much different from a normal week I suppose!). On Thursday and Friday there were processions by the Catholic church and since our house is so close to the city center, we could watch them from our front door (see pics below).

Thursday am procession:
Kids in the window are Andrea & Daniel. They live on our street.
Carrying a statue of Jesus on the cross


Friday am activities: preparing an ¨alfombra¨(carpet) made of sawdust for the procession later that night.
Processions Friday evening that went right by our house:

March 15, 2008

Duck farming in Danli

Hey everyone, here is an article I recently wrote for our Peace Corps Honduras volunteer newsletter…

For those of you that caught my last article (in the newsletter) about gardening in Danlí this one is not nearly as good or funny. At no point have I almost died while duck farming, so feel free to skip ahead to the COS surveys. But I have made sure that my Tami Flu is close by. If anyone in this country is going to get bird flu I assume it would be the gringos living in close quarters with 2 ducks.

Along with our garden, the ducks are our attempt at molding the “Peace Corps Experience” to more of what we thought it would be. Everyone remembers what they thought they were getting into before we rendezvoused in Washington DC. The way we tried to explain what we were going to be doing to friends and family. Going off to live a simpler life with people who still value things like agriculture and cultural traditions. I remember explaining to relatives that we would most likely be living in a rural community with no running water. I was after all joining the Peace Corps under the program of Water and Sanitation and Peace Corps only sends volunteers to communities that ask for help.

We could see it all so clear, helping the people understand the need for clean water, organizing and motivating and the whole nine yards. Culminating at around 18 months in site, finally designing the simple hydraulics on paper that would bring the clean water! Meanwhile throughout the whole process we would be enjoying our time sharing a life’s worth of knowledge. I could draw on my years of dairy farming experience to improve nutrition and introduce economic opportunity, Annie could help start gardens and introduce new recipes in cooking classes. At one point when we were younger Annie’s family had 20,000 laying hens and my family was raising 5,000 turkeys so certainly a small chicken coop project would have found its way into our schedule. I had already envisioned myself raising thanksgiving turkeys to distribute to the community as a cultural exchange...... all of this spaced comfortably throughout hammock time in our adobe house.

But that was before DC.

That was before “safety and security” trainings, before cell phones and saldo, before NGOs and SANAA and “development work”. That was before sites of 75,000 people and a 2-hour daily commute (worse than most big cities in the States mind you), before regional hospitals, and houses with 9 foot walls and razor wire. That was all before.

That was all before I bought 2 ducks.

The ducks have what I call a Pato Confinement System (PCS) in our back yard. This is mostly scraps of stuff that was in our yard when we moved in and starting cleaning the place up. The ducks are named Gladys and Melvin after our host parents in Santa Lucia. They constantly escape the PCS and eat our garden, even after 224 lempiras of chicken wire we can’t keep them from getting into the compost pile or eating our snap peas down to the ground. Melvin has one leg tied to a post inside the PCS to keep him from escaping and both their wings are clipped, but no matter. They still escape.
Their eating the garden makes Annie crazy. The garden is more hers then mine. I help out and do most the tilling of the soil, but she dictates what vegetables and flowers get planted and where. I offer to make the ducks go away but she won’t let me. They wake me up in the mornings well before I feel like getting out of bed (more accurately getting off the colchon). Melvin used to escape and then Gladys couldn’t find him so she would chirp and chirp and chirp. It’s worse than a rooster. Nowadays Melvin is tied up by one leg so he can’t get out but he taught Gladys to escape, and she escapes in silence. Now Annie wakes me up and tells me MY ducks are eating HER flowers. So I have to get up and chase Gladys back into the PCS. We put up with them for some reason.

Gladys and Melvin came to Danlí from Mata de Plátano. Mata de Plátano is the site of one of El Paraíso’s resident PAM volunteers. I went there to help survey a spot for a new basketball court. Mata de Plátano is one of maybe 2 or 3 Peace Corps sites in Honduras without electricity. It is more of what I had imagined pre-DC. Gladys and Melvin were just fuzzy little creatures, living with the pulpería lady, eating pataste and shitting on the floor. For some reason she asked me if I wanted a pair of ducks. I initially said no. How would I get them home? Would we eat them? Where would I put them? Who would feed them when we were gone? Later that day I went back to the pulpería and told the lady I’d take the ducks. ‘What the hell’ I figured; it would be nice to have some livestock.

I put Gladys and Melvin in a box that afternoon and the next day I caught the one and only bus out of Mata de Plátano at 6 a.m. As with most days and projects, things hadn’t gone that well on this trip. People didn’t show up to help us work. The municipality was late with the materials they had promised. I was headed back to a big city that wasn’t friendly and work I didn’t really feel like doing.

But then about 6:10 something happened. Someone on the bus spoke to me…. Some campesino dude with his rubber boots and machete asked me, “What’s in the box?” And I understood him. I knew exactly what he said. Here I was, so damn far out in the middle of nowhere, and I could understand what this old man was saying to me. He wanted to know what I had in this box. So of course I smiled big and told him I had a box of ducks.

A box of ducks.

And at that moment the bus driver cranked the reggaeton music so loud you could no longer hear anything anyone said inside the old school bus. The sun was shining through the pine trees as the bus bounced and jolted and stopped and backed up and steamed and lurched and roared and skidded down the mountain. We passed a house with a whole family outside standing under a big sign on the porch that read “Vivir en Paz”, and I smiled. After an hour and a half the reggaeton was still blaring and the bus stopped to put more water in the radiator and all the men got off the bus to take a piss off the side of the mountain. I got back on the bus and set my box of ducks on my lap again and everything was good.

I had forgotten all about “safety and security”, NGOs, SANAA, and “development work”. All the bad was gone for that 3-hour bus ride down the mountain. It didn’t matter at that point that my time here won’t count towards professional engineering certification in the States. It didn’t matter that whatever it is that I do here is nothing like what I imagined or signed up for. What mattered was that I was crammed onto a school bus riding down the side of a mountain listening to incredibly loud reggaeton music looking out the window with a huge smile on my face holding a box of ducks…… This is what I signed up for.

So I still count down the months, I still get angry at NGOs and SANAA, but I am still here in Danlí enjoying my duck farming.