Dreams of Green

Lazy days and Merry Christmas

2008-12-24T09:36:00.000-08:00

Since the last post about my Christmas in Mexico, not a whole lot has happened, but I figured I'd put in a few words to keep the fam updated on my status and whatnot.

Days have been lazy and slow. We drive or hike somewhere most days, check out a few new sights, and spend most of the day lazing around the hotel, reading, and swimming. I bought myself a mask and have been diving around the rocky areas looking at the fish. It is really pretty incredible. I probably saw more different kinds of fish (in the wild) in the first 30 seconds than all the rest of my life put together. It's like a huge aquarium. There are even some small blobs of coral in places. One challenge has been resisting the urge to go off swimming by myself more often.

There's an old Canadian couple in the room next to ours who just sold their house and are spending their time travelling around now. The guy, whose name is Art, gave me a book that he wrote with some of his own creative scientific theories in it about continental drift. I didn't really have the heart to tell him that the continental drift theory was replaced about 20 years ago. He and his wife are both obviously very lonely, and they are really friendly and helpful and want to visit as much as possible. They're also both pretty old and somewhat loopy, especially Barbara, the lady. It must be pretty sad and lonely travelling away from your home and friends like that in your declining years, trying to see as much of the world as possible while dealing with failing health and memories. I don't think I'd do it. Better to be among friends, even if it's in a retirement home or something. Interestingly, they live in the Bridge River valley in British Columbia, where I expect to be doing a fair amount of field work next summer. Art says they only leave BC in the wintertime when the cold is hard to deal with, so I have promised to come visit them next summer when I am up there.

We are going to be cooking some turkey (not a turkey, since we have to do this in two toaster ovens, but some turkey, i.e. two legs and a breast) for Christmas and some other veggies and stuff. Amber and I went to a supermarket in the large nearby town of Manzanillo the day before yesterday and brought back a ton of food, so we have plenty of gringo eats for Christmas. I bought Amber and Link some gifts in the states and brought them with me, but I don't have anything for Terry (Amber's mom) or Barbara (her grandma - yes, another Barbara). They both buy stuff from the shops constantly so I'm not sure what I could get them that they don't already have. Hopefully a thank you will do. Maybe a card. The opportunity to go on this trip was pretty awesome in and of itself.

Okay, rambling. Time to stop. Love to everybody; have a wonderful Christmas and a happy New Year. Sorry I'm not in Washington to be there with you.

G

Greetz from Melaque

2008-12-19T18:02:00.000-08:00

Wow... sitting down to write a blog post after so much time brings back strange memories. Namely of typing these things up on sticky keyboards in the stifling heat of Choluteca, my backpack and several bags of groceries sitting next to me. It's strange that only traveling seems to motivate me to do this.

We had an epic journey getting here. When I left Bellingham on Wednesday afternoon, there was about an inch of new snow on the ground and it was piling up fast. Mount Vernon already had at least three to four new inches as I drove through. Amber, leaving Bellingham around 1:30, later reported to me that there were already four inches of new snow by the time she left.

Seattle was bizarrely clear; I spent the rest of Wednesday there visiting with Maya and Jake while waiting for the flight out at 5:00 a.m. on Thursday. The plan was to meet Amber & co. at the airport. She called me at about 9:00, however, to say that our flight to Phoenix had been cancelled and the next one didn't leave until Friday. We resolved to drive down to Portland and catch another flight leaving at 11:20; from there we could catch a later flight from Phoenix to Puerto Vallarta.

So that night, Maya dropped me off at a hotel in Sea-Tac where I got about four hours of sleep before we piled into the car again and continued on through the dark and lots more snow, four hours down to Portland. As we parked and walked to the bus stop to go to the airplane, it was snowing so hard that my bag was covered in seconds. Things looked grim, but it cleared up almost immediately afterwards and our plane was able to take off without incident.

Because the delay resulted in us arriving in Puerto Vallarta at 9:30 pm, we had to stay the night at a hotel there and finish the drive to Melaque, another 3.5 hours by car, this morning. We got settled into our hotel and have been relaxing and exploring our surroundings. In some ways this town reminds me of the Honduran beach town of Tela. It's about the same size and has a similarly laid-back atmosphere. The beach is stunningly beautiful though, better than any I have been on before, and the town is clean and quite full of gringos.

So much of this area reminds me of southern Honduras, and so much is different. Oddly, the trees are similar but the small plants are not. One of my favorite sights has been the plantations of light blue agave plants, hiding behind big front gates and elaborate wooden signs of the inevitable tequila distillery in the middle of the plantation.

Our hotel is beautiful and not the least bit ostentatious. Nuff said about that. The weather is absolutely frickin gorgeous. 80-85 in the daytime, cool at night, sunny.

Travelling with Amber's family is going to be an interesting experience, I can tell already. She is a rock and her grandma, the trip sponsor, is a travelling expert. Link and Amber's mom, however, are pretty green. They have enjoyed the heck out of themselves thus far though, which I'm especially glad is true for Link, since it's a bit hard for him to be outside his comfort zone.

I expected this all to be a big jolt (weather, culture, suddenly being back in Latin America), but it's almost ucanny how natural it feels to be here. The two weeks that stretch in front of us, which I first worried might be a bit long, now suddenly seem far, far too short.

Love to everybody,

Gabe

Totally jealous

2008-03-11T19:22:00.000-07:00

OK, I'll admit it - I achingly wish I were as awesome as this guy: http://xkcd.com/archive/

On the other hand, it's very comforting to know that my generation is coming up with this kind of stuff.

Philosophy Schmilosophy

2008-02-15T21:04:00.001-08:00

Got into a long and interesting discussion with mom today when I mentioned that I don't give a damn about contributing something to society, because I think that society is an abstraction that will never be convincingly or permanently impacted by my actions nor do I think that there is any way that one person can concretely improve upon it. People who make such claims are bullshit artists extraordinaire. If you change human beings' external circumstances but invest no time, friendship, or knowledge in those actual human beings you're pretty much just slapping a new coat of paint on the same rusted-out, busted-ass, rickety old ocean liner. Or so I said. This is one of those conclusions I came to via the Peace Corps. Furthermore, I said that trying to fix social problems on a large scale was a big waste of time and that social changes were simply a completely uncontrollable process. I also claimed that the events we mistakenly identify as having triggered social movements were in fact just the first convenient excuse to come along at time when social change had become inevitable given existing social conditions.

Mom cited some contrary examples, none of which I can recall right now but she made some excellent points. Ok wait, here's one - the interest other countries have recently taken in Columbia causing the Columbian government to get all embarrassed, get off its butt and deal with the FARC. If other nations hadn't intervened, would things in Columbia still be the same today? Maybe. Given the rudimentary understanding we had on this topic, both viewpoints were based mostly on speculation.

If I had to personally take my mom's side of this argument I'd probably want to mention outstanding leaders such as Ghandi, Hitler, Jesus Christ, etc. It's pretty hard to say that outstanding individuals haven't had real effects on human history. Was there some social necessity present that created these leaders? Some void into which someone inevitably had to step? If Hitler hadn't led Nazi Germany, would someone else simply have emerged and done the same things? Or was it the individual will of these people - their unique existence and their conscious choices that was the real driving force behind the social changes that surrounded them? I'm pretty sure this is a topic that has been hotly debated by the historians, and I'm no authority to present my views on the matter, but it sure is an interesting question to think about.

When it comes to my own life, however, I've found that it's most fulfilling and appropriate to concentrate on the small, concrete, and human. When I said I didn't give a damn about society, I was being entirely honest. Society certainly doesn't give a damn about me, so it'd be pretty meaningless to invest my mental or emotional energy in that particular one-sided relationship. It's just about as abstract as a devotion to God, which is another thing that many people find meaningful and I just can't get on board with. Nope, I don't think I owe allegiance to anything besides the people in my life that I have enough contact with to understand on a personal level and if I want to make a difference in the world, I'd do best to start with trying to make a difference in their lives. In fact, I don't believe I have the right to go even that far if it involves neglecting myself, because then I'll just end up contaminating them with my own problems. If you can't even keep your own shit in order, what business do you have presuming to improve other peoples' lives?

Footnote: This blog post was definitely made possible by Kurt Vonnegut. I know I'm under no academic requirement to cite my (unofficial) references here, but in this case it feels ungrateful not to.

Quitting?

2008-01-29T21:19:00.001-08:00

The other day I suddenly got all emo and uninstalled all my online multiplayer computer games
in one fell swoop. I have previously vacillated back and forth with how I feel about being a gaming geek; some days I feel like I've wasted colossal chunks of my time doing it and some days I scoff at that kind of silly crap and accept that for some reason or another, it's been an important part of my life. Both of these things are probably true. Computer gaming got me an internship in California with somebody I'd never met before who then became a great friend of mine, and gaming has, if anything, been immensely helpful to my social skills. As a hobby it's cheap, fun, and accessible. I love the imaginative voyage of single-player games and I love the competitive challenge of online games.

However, I guess I just decided I wanted to try and allocate my time in different ways. A large part of it had to do with my gradual disillusionment with the world of online gaming - its inability to advance beyond anything more than a hedonistic playground for foulmouthed teenagers. There is a vast, VAST untapped potential for this medium. And what do we get? Derivative, uninspiring, and often unfinished pieces of software, designed to be ever more efficient at shocking your senses and testing your reflexes. Overall, computer games have actually gotten noticeably LESS deep and mentally challenging in the last decade, and I think most older gamers would agree with my opinion in that matter.

I disapprove of "quitting" games because it rarely works - usually, just wanting to not do something anymore isn't a good enough motivation - you need something tangible that you'd RATHER be doing that takes you away from the other activity. This is why most people who say they are quitting are full of crap. The people that really quit just disappear from the online world, because they've found something that holds their attention more. I guess we'll see if that happens to me or not.

I won't say that I'm done with games because that would be silly - it's something I like to do, and I try not to say things that could make me a liar in the future. It's just that in the last couple of years, I had a chance to get used to not playing computer games very much, and these have been unquestionably some of the best years I can remember. My life was different in a lot of other ways in the Peace Corps so I can't be too sure that those two things are connected, but I'm going to try this idea for awhile and see how it goes. I feel like I'm doing it for the right reasons now finally - not out of shame or guilt for enjoying a "nerdy" or "childish" hobby, but because I want to move on to other things.

The school system

2008-01-26T16:38:00.000-08:00

Well, I guess updating this blog every week was a big fat lie. We'll just have to see how often I can do it.

I've started working as an on-call emergency substitute teacher in the Burlington-Edison school district, and hopefully I will be employed by the Mount Vernon S.D. by next week as well (since
only having on-call jobs in one district is making it difficult to work often enough). Being back inside our public school system for the first time really since I left it upon graduating high school in June of 2000 (was it really 7.5 years ago? My God...) has given me an interesting new perspective on all kinds of things that I took for granted or didn't notice when I was a student.

As a substitute, your main challenges are to maintain order in a room full of 30 kids who are urged to make trouble by childish impulses or raging hormones , to understand and adapt to all the unique rules and standards in your various working environments, and if you manage the first two, to try and follow along with the absent teacher's necessities as closely as possible so that they don't lose a day with their kids doing nothing in the hands of an inept substitute teacher. I never imagined it as being a particularly stressful job, but it is somewhat, because managing other peoples' kids feels like a pretty big responsibility and once you find yourself in that role, it's hard not to worry about whether or not you're doing it as well as you possibly can. As with most things in my life, the biggest challenge is not taking myself too seriously.

Our public schools in and of themselves are really fascinating environments, and have a significance that most people probably don't think about. Our whole social order in miniature lives within every one of those buildings, complete with government, laws, criminals, and justice. In fact, it seems to me that the real purpose of public schools is less to educate children about the physical reality of the world than to imprint them so strongly with the norms and rules of our social system that when they emerge, they'll be able to function instinctively in our society.

Take for example the simple act of sending somebody to detention. A wrong of some kind is committed in the classroom and the teacher, acting as policeman, writes down the kid's crime on a piece of paper and removes him/her from the rest of the class, where he/she goes to sit in an office somewhere isolated from the rest of the group and watched by a school official. In order to get out, the student usually has to talk to the school official and provide some kind of justification as to why they know what they did was wrong. It's almost exactly like sending an adult to jail and releasing them through a parole hearing.

Another interesting thing is the way teachers are isolated from students both socially and physically. We don't use the same bathrooms, don't relax in the same spaces and don't discuss sensitive topics with them. The whole effect is to discourage kids from thinking of their teachers as normal, fallible human beings whose ideas can be called into question. A little more disturbing even is the way the school faculty extends their influence through willing "student leaders" who often act as representatives of the school among their colleagues.

Don't get me wrong, a functioning modern high school of 1200 kids is a miracle of social control. Given the parameters, I don't think the situation could be any other way. There aren't enough teachers, and the basis of the our education concentrates too much on the intellectual, and not enough on the human, development of children.

All this makes me think that the old feudalistic model of making society function through the more powerful controlling the less powerful hasn't really changed as much as we'd like to think. We've just gotten a lot more subtle about it; better at it. Is it possible to have schools, or a society in general, based on caring and human relationships rather than a controlling outside force? Does man's nature even allow it? I know one thing for sure; we're not going to find out anytime real soon. There's just too damn many human beings in the world.

I meant to post this a long time ago

2007-12-31T17:02:00.000-08:00

Gabe’s Peace Corps Book Log
Now with ratings!
1 – Teh Suck
2 – Bad
3 – Decent/good
4 – Very good/excellent
5 – A++, would read again

Title – Author – Rating
(x2) = read twice

1. Wicked – Gregory McGuire – 3
2. Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon – 2.5 and a WTF
3. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson – 4
4. Siddartha – Herman Hesse – 3
5. Ishmael – Daniel Quinn – 3
6. A Blessing on the Moon – Joseph Skibell – 3.5
7. Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe – 4.5
8. The Handmaidens’s Tale – Margaret Atwood – 3.5
9. The Education of Little Tree – Forrest Carter – 4
10. (x2) On the Road – Jack Kerouac – 5
11. (x2) Tropic of Cancer – Henry Miller – 5
12. The Jungle – Upton Sinclair – 4
13. (x2) Slaughter-House Five – Kurt Vonnegut – 5
14. Breakfast of Champions – Kurt Vonnegut – 5
15. (x2) Look Homeward, Angel – Thomas Wolfe – 5
16. Romeo and Juliet – Da Bard – 4
17. King Lear – Da Bard – 3
18. (x2) Timequake – Kurt Vonnegut – 3
19. (x2) One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel García Márquez – 4.5
20. Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions – Richard Erdoes – 3
21. For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway – 3.5
22. The Power and the Glory – Graham Greene – 4
23. Angel of Darkness – Caleb Carr – 3
24. The Street Lawyer – John Grisham – 2
25/26. Wheel of Time 3 + 4 – Robert Jordan – 2.5
27. Victory – Joseph Conrad – 4
28. A Walk in the Woods – Bill Bryson – 4
29. The Aquitaine Progression – Robert Ludlum – 2
30. Valhalla Rising – Clive Cussler (Worst. Book. Evar.) – 0.5
31. A Brief History of Time – Steven Hawking – 4
32. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer – Mark Twain – 4.5
33. The Alchemist – Paulo Coelho – 3
34. Naked Lunch – William Burroughs – 3
35. (x2) A Confederate General from Big Sur – Richard Brautigan – 3.5
36. (x2) True History of the Kelly Gang – Peter Carey – 5
37/38/39. Wheel of Time 5, 6, + 7 – 3
40. The Man with the Golden Arm – Nelson Algren – 4.5
41. (x2) La Sombra del Viento – Carlos Ruiz Zafón – 5
42. Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates – Tom Robbins – 5
43. The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown – 3
44. Harry Potter y la Piedra Filosofal – J.K. Rowling – 4
45. (x2) Zorro – Isabel Allende – 4.5
46. A Bend in the River – V.S. Naipaul – 3.5
47. Candide – Voltaire – 4
48. Plainsong – Kent Haruf – 4
49. Jayber Crow – Wendell Barry – 5
50. Ironweed – William Kennedy – 4
51. Ratking – Michael Dibdin – 3.5
52. On the Beach – Nevil Shute – 3.5
53. The Secret Agent – Joseph Conrad – 4
54. Nostromo – Joseph Conrad – 5
55. The Farthest Shore- Ursula K. LeGuin – 3
56. Moby Dick – Herman Melville – 5
57. Typee – Herman Melville – 3
58. Wheel of Time 9 – Robert Jordan – 3
59. (x2) As I Lay Dying – William Faulkner – WTF (tentatively rated 4)
60. The Beach – Alex Garland – 4
61. Lonesome Dove – Larry McMurty – 4
62. The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner – 4
63. The Portable Faulkner – 5
64. The Rocket Boys – Homer Hickman – 3.5
65. Cosmic Banditos – A.J. Weisenberg – 4.5
66. The Bonesetter’s Daughter – Amy Tan – 5
67. Guns, Germs, and Steel – Jarod Diamond – 4
68. Anthills of the Savannah – Chinua Achebe – 4
69. The Sparrow – Mary Doria Russell – 3
70. Lazarillo de Tormes – Anonymous – 3
71. The Ghost of (Canterbury?) – Oscar Wilde – 2.5
72. Franny and Zooey – JD Salinger – 4
73. Tristes Tropiques – Claude Levi-Strauss – 3.5
74. Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides – 4.5
75. Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison – 4
76. The Monkey-Wrench Gang – Edward Abbey – 5
77. Batman and Robin – Michael Jan Friedman – A TEN!!!!!
78. Sick Puppy – Carl Hiassen – 3.5
79. Angels and Demons – Dan Brown – 2.5
80. Fong and the Indians – Paul Theroux – 3.5
81. Herzog – Saul Bellow – 4
82. The Songlines – Bruce Chatwin – 3.5
83. Falling Off the Map – Pico Iyer – 3
84. A Stillness at Appomattox – Bruce Catton – 5
85. August 1944 – Robert A. Miller – 3.5
86. The Botany of Desire – Some Dude – 4.5
87. Cold Fire – Dean Koontz – 3
88. The Giver – Lois Lowry – 4
89. The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera – 4
90. Jack Maggs – Peter Carey – 5
91. The Kite Runner – Khalid Hosseini – 3.5
92. The River Why – David James Duncan – 3.5
93. Friday Night Lights – H.G. Bissinger – 4.5
94. Dharma Bums – Jack Kerouac – 4
95. The Mother Tongue – Bill Bryson – 3.5
96. The Eternal Game – David Shenk – 5
97. The Magician’s Assistant – Ann Patchett – 4.5
98. Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel García Márquez – 3.5
99. The Ordinary Seaman – Francisco Goldman – 4.5
100. Eats, Shoots, & Leaves – Lynne Truss – 4
101. Great Short Works of Edgar Allen Poe – Guess Who – 4
102. State of Fear – Michael Crichton – 3.5
103. His Dark Materials Trilogy – Phillip Pullman – 5
104. Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded – Simon Winchester – 3
105. A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush – Eric Newby – 4
106. Frankenstein – Mary Shelley – 3
107. Green Hills of Africa – Ernest Hemingway – 2
108. The French Lieutenant’s Woman – John Fowles – 4.5
109. The Robber Bride – Margaret Atwood – 4.5
110. My Name is Asher Lev – Chaim Potok – 3
111. Skinny Legs and All – Tom Robbins - 4

Where to from here?

2007-12-30T01:10:00.001-08:00

Well, I knew that my blog was going to be updated less frequently once I got back into my old lifestyle, but man I didn't expect to go over two months without writing anything here. I really enjoyed writing about all my experiences in the Peace Corps, but I think a large part of the motivation that kept me doing it on a regular basis was that I felt that I really had something interesting to share; something worth writing about. I got a fair amount of positive feedback and encouragement to keep writing, which was very much a pleasant surprise. Knowing that there were actually people out there reading this blog gave me a greater sense of duty to keep it updated.

Then when I got back, as I should have forseen, everything changed. Suddenly I was doing nothing that seemed interesting or noteworthy enough to bother writing about. In one sense it was helpful, because I was able to slide rather easily back into a comfortable routine. As I understand it, other returned PCVs may get a little more singed on their re-entry back into the atmosphere of the regular world. Unfortunately for me, my urge to put up anything on my blog died immediately and almost entirely. It was exactly what I was hoping wouldn't happen.

One thing I have learned from the positive feedback that I got for this blog is that I'm a much better writer when I'm simply trying to describe real things exactly as they are. This makes sense, because I've gradually come to understand that my character tends towards a very dry, factual assessment of the world. Many of my personal attributes are directly related to this. I can be very naive about other humans' tricks and schemes, I'm absolutely terrible at lying, and try as I might, I suck at writing anything that requires making stuff up. So when the factual events in my life are too tedious to bother describing, I really don't have anything I can write about.

I have to figure out a way to change this, because now I'm facing the prospect of nine months without any decent challenging projects or intellectual hobbies until I go to grad school (assuming I get in) and I feel like I'm rotting on the vine. Therefore, I am going to try and keep finding interesting things to talk about here at a frequency of no less than once per week - even if it's something really short, and I'm the only one reading it. Therefore, the content is probably going to take a drastic turn for the geekier, since I'm pretty much just indulging myself now.

I already have something else interesting to talk about, so I won't cheat and claim to have fulfilled this week's requirement already and just save this until next week.

Someone had posted a link on an internet forum that I frequent to an article talking about how testosterone-driven male behavior leads them to attempt humor a lot more than women. (article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7153584.stm ). I posted a couple responses and was ridiculed by some other forum members for trying to act clever and intellectual. I kind of like what I wrote though.

Quotes from the article:

"Research suggests men are more likely to use humour aggressively by making others the butt of the joke. "

"Often the men's comments were mocking and intended as a put-down. Young men in cars were particularly aggressive - they lowered their windows and shouted abusively. "

I thought the article was really perceptive, and I wonder if that aspect of male psychology has really been studied much. It makes a lot of sense if you think about the way males are, in the human species and otherwise.... always trying to outdo each other in order to impress the females. In our society there's really nothing that's generally considered funnier than a good "burn" (the internet provides many examples of this) but I have a great appreciation for people who can be funny without having to put others down. Mocking is certainly the easy way to humor. But is it really the only, or even the best way to be funny? Not at all.

I acknowledge, of course, that I am weird and most people find this kind of thing hilarious. But then, most people don't like to think very hard, and as I said, put-downs are the easy route to humor. Why? Because they require no creativity. Human beings are full of flaws and it's easy to find them and point them out if you are so inclined. Add a few swear words that are easily mixed around with each other in amusing combinations, a dose of superior attitude, and there you have it. Insulting humor goes down easy because it's always comforting to have more ways to rationalize yourself as being above other people somehow, especially if you're insecure.

There are, in fact, nobler routes to being comedic. A good example of someone who's an expert at non-negative humor is Ellen DeGeneres. To me, she is extremely clever and genuinely funny. Or how about the movie The Big Lebowski? Many people from my generation would cite it as one of the funniest movies ever made, and it relies almost entirely on silliness and surreality.

Don't get me wrong; I think satire can be hilariously funny when done in a subtle way (see: Stephen Colbert roasting GWB at the White House Correspondent's Dinner), but I think that put-down humor is often used as a crutch by people who aren't really funny and clever but want to be seen that way.

There. I wrote about Something Interesting.

The Long Road Home

2007-10-30T10:20:00.000-07:00

A warning to other readers: I am mostly making this blog entry in the interest of preserving an account of what-all I did during my last couple weeks in central america, because I know I will be glad to have it later when I can no longer clearly remember the trip, but it will be long and boring to read.

After I finally left La Ceiba, I spent a day and a half in the town of Tela on my way back towards Tegucigalpa. I pulled into town in the morning, and while checking into the sketchiest dive hotel I have ever stayed at, I suddenly ran into a couple of European travelers (one woman from Germany and one from Austria) who were looking to do the same thing as myself that day - namely, see the Lancetilla Botanical Gardens on the outskirts of Tela, an area of approximately 2,000 acres that used to be an experimental station for the United Fruit Company. We quickly hired a cab to take us out there, and once at the reserve, hired a guide to show us around the farthest reaches of it. Your vacation expenses can actually stack up pretty quickly in Central America in this way, but sometimes it is worth it - most of the best things to see are private and require an entry fee, and paying a guide will get you a very interesting source of information that you otherwise would not have. I normally am not the kind of person to have much interest in guides, but I am always curious about the biology and physical/human geography of any place, so having a knowledgeable local around to pester with questions is a major plus, even if you have to pay for the service.

This was the case in Lancetilla, although I quickly tired of our guide Pedro's inane jokes and leery attitude towards the European women (at least they weren't phased by it). We got to try like 8 different fruits that I've never had before in the arboretum, saw some ridiculously huge trees, and got photos of a fantastic butterfly. We also saw a humongous freakin' snake slide across the path at one point and into a pile of dead branches. It was black and yellow, probably four inches in diameter and eight feet long. No anaconda, but the biggest snake I've ever seen in the wild. No pictures, unfortunately.

The next day I left Tela, attempting to reach my friend Josh's village (El Majastre) that afternoon. I had to get on the bus at like 5:00 am, and I still didn't make it to El Majastre - traffic in the city of Tegucigalpa, which I had to pass through, tied down my taxi cab and I missed the crucial 11 am bus out to the municipality of Guimaca, the main stepping-stone to El Majastre. I ended up spending the night in Guaimaca and randomly running into Josh there the next morning - he was on a standard trip to town with his wife and step-family. We ended up hanging around Guaimaca the entire day, finally leaving for the village at about 7:30 pm.
I had planned to briefly visit Josh and then hop over to another friend's site on the other side of his protected area (Montana El Chile) but the fact of losing essentially two days in Guaimaca forced a revision of plans. Instead I hung out in El Majastre for two days, helping fertilize about an acre of coffee the first, going hiking the second, and savoring my last taste of slow-paced country life. Josh's step-family are some of the friendliest, most hospitable Hondurans I met during my time there, and they cook some amazing country food. It was another difficult parting, but they are all people that I fully expect to see again in the future, one way or another.

The time had finally come to pick up my brother Sam from the airport and start our (shortened) trip around Central America. I spent my final night in Tegucigalpa and picked The Brah up from the airport at 9 am the next day - Tuesday, October 9th. Our plan was to first make a brief visit to Agua Fria before continuing on to Nicaragua and Costa Rica, but getting there the same day would have been unlikely so we tarried awhile in the capital, having some coffee and a brief visit with Claudia, my former Project Specialist and collaborator (ok, boss) in the new volunteers' training program. During the time we worked together with the trainees, we had become really good friends and never got much of a chance to socialize outside of a work setting. Just getting to have one last coffee was a little sad, but I was glad of at least that opportunity.

Sam and I left for Choluteca that afternoon, and rolled into town at around 5 pm, making sure to check into an air-conditioned room at my favorite budget hotel downtown, the Santa Rosa. We visited a little, rested a lot, and had a classic Choluteca dinner of fried chicken and beer.

The next day, misfortune struck our planned trip to Agua Fria in the form of relentless precipitation that stopped the public buses and all the private vehicles that could have taken us to my village. We analized the situation carefully and decided to cut our losses rather than lose a full day in a hot town with very little to do and no guarantee of good weather or transportation the following day (the opposite actually being more likely). Instead, we caught a bus to the pleasant town of San Marcos de Colon near the Nicaraguan border and spent the rest of the day wandering around the deserted streets and the surrounding area and planning out places to visit during the next seven days. In the evening we caught Annie at home (the current volunteer in San Marcos) and had a nice visit with her.

It was Thursday morning, then, when we really began our trip in earnest, getting up early to cross the border at El Espino and begin a whirlwind succession of buses and taxis through Nicaragua that got us to the colonial city of Granada by about 2 pm. We spent the rest of the day leisurely exploring the beautiful colonial part of town and trying to stay as cool as possible in the sweltering heat. After evaluating the different options, we decided to try and hike on the nearby Volcano Mombacho during our subsequent layover day.

The next morning, we got up early and caught a bus about fifteen kilometers out of town to the main turnoff up to Mombacho. There was transportation available from the base of the volcano up to the visitors' center on top in the form of a large army truck outfitted to carry groups of tourists, but we decided to walk up and save the money as well as see more of the countryside. I estimated that it was about 7 or 8 kilometers to the top from the main road, and the majority of the hike was through coffee plantations with maybe a 1.5 kilometer stretch of protected cloud forest near the top.

From the visitors' center, we could hike on a very short trail around one nearby section of the park by ourselves, but if we wanted to hike the longer and more remote trail we had to hire a guide, for "security" reasons. It would have been a disappointment to do the free hike and only see like a mile of the cloud forest after all that effort spent getting to it, so we grudgingly forked over about fifteen bucks and went with a guide to see the longer trail. It turned out to be quite a challenging hike, almost all on steep up or downhill slopes with lots of stair climbing. The conditions sucked (it was clouded in and drizzling/raining the whole time) so we got none of the promised amazing views and also didn't see any wildlife, but our guide was energetic and full of interesting information, and the cloud forest itself was a joy to behold (though permeated by mysterious sulfury smells most of the time - guess the volcano isn't entirely inactive). We ate lunch at the visitors' center afterwards, hiked back down the mountain, and were back in Granada by midafternoon to take showers and relax for the rest of the day.

The next stage of the trip was to travel south from Granada across the border of Costa Rica to the town of Liberia, a medium-sized provincial capital in the northern part of the country. It was another day of travelling that took less time than I had expected, even though we got stuck for almost two hours at the border crossing, mostly just waiting in line to get through. We had a couple of questionable ex-patriates to talk to while we waited, but that conversation got old pretty quick.

Anyways, Liberia was another stiflingly hot and humid town, and it rained even more there than it had in Granada, which just seemed unfair. During the three days in that town, I don't believe we saw the sun there once.

We stayed in a cheap, mosquito-ridden hostel (nevertheless, nicer than that place in Tela) and took another layover day to hike in the nearby Rincon de la Vieja national park, another volcano that had lots of interesting things to see around its flanks. There were some mud pots and bubbling pools, some really nice places to swim, and the hike to the top of the volcano was supposedly a great one, but we didn't get to do it because the trail was closed due to bad weather. So we hiked around in the tropical dry forest - so-named because it gets really dry during the dry season - and avoided swimming because of the danger of flooding (it rained even more than on our Mombacho hike). The highlights were probably the fantastic gnarly strangler figs that seemed to be the dominant species in that forest, and a couple good wildlife sightings of medium-small mammals. We also passed a pretty dramatic waterfall, which according to the sign posted near it, does not flow at all in the dry season.

Our final stop was to be the cloudforest reserve of Monteverde, a point that I might normally avoid because of its being a super tourist hotspot, but we had very little time at that point and couldn't get too far off the beaten path. Regardless, we almost didn't make it there because of - you'll never guess - bad weather. This was the exact reason I missed out on Monteverde the first time I was in Costa Rica, travelling with mom, and I wasn't going to be deterred again. Unfortunately, there are no paved roads that go all the way to Monteverde and all of the three or four dirt access roads were in critical shape. We left Liberia a little late and ended up having to backtrack at one point because of bad information that we had gotten, so at four p.m. we had to break down and spend a (relatively) large sum of money on a four-wheel drive taxi that got us up the hill to the town of Santa Elena, the main stopping-off point for people going to the reserve.

Santa Elena, surprisingly, turned out to be relatively cheaper to stay at than other places we had been previously, our hostel was really very nice, AND there was a much-needed laundromat there. We pulled into town pretty late, got ourselves installed, and prepared to take a trip to the cloudforest reserve the following day.

Hiking around in Monteverde was probably the best experience of the trip, in no small part because the rain actually let up for half a day, allowing us to finally get some views out over the surrounding countryside and hike comfortably dry instead of soaking wet. The cloudforest itself was a gem, and we saw more wildlife, most notably a butt-ugly central american porcupine, an orange-and-black tarantula, and a posse of howler monkeys. We concluded the day drinking and socializing in our hostel's kitchen with the other foreign travelers staying there.

The final leg of the trip was to travel from Santa Elena to Alajuela, just outside of San Jose, and spend the night there so we could get to the airport early enough for my 6:30 a.m. flight the following day. The trip to Alajuela was pretty quick and we got there around noon, which left me time to do a side trip that afternoon and visit some organic producers that I had been wanting to see in the town of Alfaro Ruiz, near Zarcero. These were the guys that had come to Agua Fria on a couple different occasions representing the Costa Rican NGO CEDECO as part of an agricultural extension program to support producers starting up with organic agriculture in other Central American countries. After a bit of searching around, I found their fresh-foods packaging facility and had time to visit briefly with a guy named Henry, who had gone to Agua Fria the second time CEDECO sent extensionists out there. It was pretty cool to see how far they had come since starting, and helped me end my experience in Central America on a positive note, seeing that the challenges faced by COCAGUAL could actually be surmounted.

The next day I got up at 4:30 a.m., and just about 20 hours later, I was home. This, then, concludes my blog entires about my time in Central America (at least, THIS time). I plan to continue posting things here, but they will probably be much less frequent because now I have a cell phone (GASP) and my family can call me whenever they want. I would like to write a little about what coming back has been like, but maybe some other time.
Gabe

On the Road (Again)

2007-10-02T09:25:00.001-07:00

After I posted that last blog entry, I spent a couple more days in Tegucigalpa fixing up things and finishing my service. I meant to leave the city Friday in the afternoon, but a miscalculation related to opening my bank account forced me to stay one more night. Apparently, when you deposit money in the bank (and sometimes when you open a new account) those funds are not available the same day. I put ALL of my cash into my account and then got an ATM card, expecting to take a small amount of funds out later that day to get me to Siguatepeque. I ended up broke and stuck in Tegucigalpa, and I had to bum off my site replacement, the newly-sworn-in volunteer Elizabeth to get a hotel room and survive the evening. Hilarious. I will be able to pay her back when I visit my site with Sam, at least.

That wasn't the last of my bank troubles. This morning I was getting money out of an ATM here in La Ceiba so I could head out to the city of Tela, and the damn machine ate my card. This time I got the cash at least, but I most likely will have to stay here another day while I wait for a technician to go fix the ATM in the afternoon. I've already been in La Ceiba for three days and would like to move on, but I don't feel inclined to get too upset about it, because I know very well worse things could happen.

Since I got to La Ceiba late on Monday, I mostly spent that evening settling in. I was tired out from nights staying up late and hanging out with friends in Tegus, so I went to bed early and got up late on Sunday. I meant to try and get out and see some of the national parky stuff around here, but absolutely everything was closed and I couldn't really get any information about where I might want to go. So I just hung around La Ceiba; walked out on the pier, learned the town, went to see an awful movie (Evan Almighty), and took it easy. Just after noon I wandered into a really beautiful park off the center of town in the property of the Standard Fruit Company which is still based here, albeit in the hands of Hondurans these days. There are large fields of pineapples, bananas, and african palm all around belonging to them. I talked to a guy hanging around one of the buildings and he told me that the brand we see in the states for this fruit is Dole. So when you eat a banana with the Dole sticker in the U.S., it may come from here.

Yesterday, I finally did manage to make it out of La Ceiba and went hiking on a trail in Parque Nacional Pico Bonito. I did a lot of asking around and it seems that for the most part, there really aren't hardly any hiking options for this park. Most tourists go out to the Río Cangrejal to raft, or just stay at a lodge up at the base of the park, but even these two focal points don't really have any trails. There is just the one I went on, which was apparently built by a USAID project. It was short but very sweet, passing two significant waterfalls, several nice places to swim, and going through some really nice elevated-canopy rainforest. I was there all by myself, probably because it was obvious all morning that the weather was going to be bad.... and it was. I got absolutely poured on, but somehow even that made the experience more fun. I stood on a rock at the edge of the river and watched it slowly rise during the storm. Unfortunately, I forgot the stupid camera. D'oh!

While the sights around La Ceiba, and Honduras in general are not too shabby at all, I think my favorite thing about travelling in this country is the openness and friendliness of the people. On Sunday, when I got out of the movie theatre I found that the streets were totally flooded from the heavy rainstorm that had fallen while I was inside. I had to cross a part of the road with over a foot of water in it, and to avoid getting my tennis shoes soaked, I started walking myself along the side of a chain link fence that ran next to the road. About halfway down it, a guy on a motorcycle pulled up alongside me and offered me a ride to the other side, which I accepted with delight. This kind of thing is not uncommon around here. I wish we could learn not to be so afraid of each other in the USA so people would be more open to such random acts of kindness.

-out-

No long goodbyes

2007-09-26T11:01:00.000-07:00

I left my site for the last time (as a Peace Corps Volunteer) on Monday morning, and by Friday I will no longer by a U.S. government employee at all. It's kind of wierd.

The last few days up to my evacuating Agua Fria were pretty busy ones, filled with lots of urgent appointments both work-related and social. It wouldn't exactly be accurate to say I "finished" my "projects", unless you accept a definition of both words so broad that it'd be a statement worthy of an American politician. Nevertheless, I feel pretty good about my service overall. Perhaps I ruminate most often about the specific things I really wish I'd done and hadn't, but I think it's in my nature to concentrate more on negative outcomes and think about what I should've done differently or how to fix existing problems. As others have pointed out, I am typically my own biggest critic.

Leaving Agua Fria was harder than I expected. Up until the last couple days, I hadn't thought about it that much, and I don't think most people were all that clear about when I was actually leaving, so it wasn't until those final days that I was really saying a lot of goodbyes to people and imagining what it would be like not to see them again. Based on the kind of conversations I had throughout the rest of my service about my eventual departure, I was a little apprehensive about the goodbyes because I expected them to contain a large amount of people asking what stuff I was going to give away when I left. It was an extremely pleasant surprise that, when it really got down to the last few days, I heard almost none of this. Just people telling me how sorry they were that I was going, that they'd miss me, that they appreciated the work we'd done, and that they hoped we could stay in touch somehow or that I would come back to visit sometime. It was very touching. Suddenly, it seemed a lot harder to leave than I'd expected.

On Saturday, my final day with the Maestro en Casa kids, we had a little party and cut a cake, and they all signed a Maestro en Casa uniform shirt for me to take home. That same day, I went down to talk with the captain of the soccer team I'd played with most often, to see about exchanging the team's old ball (signed by all the players) for a new one that I'd bought the previous week. Instead, they decided to give me a signed team jersey, since the old ball was so stripped and soggy that it was impossible to write on. They also decided to plan one last soccer game on the following day, Sunday, my last day in site.

The game was a typical one for us, on a rocky and rutted field in hot, humid weather and played rough. I got a going-away present from the other team of severely overextended quad muscle that I haven't hardly been able to bend past 90 degrees until today, but before that happened I managed to sink a penalty kick (my teammates insisted that I take it) and we went on to win 5-4. After that we signed the jersey and talked about all the fun times we'd had.

Later that evening there was a small going-away party in the cooperative's office, with wonderful food made by one of the women members, orange juice, and coffee. Just some of the people I had worked most closely with were in attendence, and we talked mostly about the different projects we'd done, expressed appreciation for each others' contributions, and speculated about the future of middle-school education in Agua Fria and the coffee cooperative. It was really nice; ideal for my personal preferences. I got some more going-away presents and everyone went home to sleep at bedtime around 8:30 pm. :)

That's pretty much all that happened worth mentioning. I've been in Tegucigalpa since yesterday now, and will be here until Friday (and maybe Saturday) fixing administrative issues and doing my final medical tests. I was invited to attend the swearing-in ceremony of the new trainees tomorrow at 11 am, which should be interesting. Working with them has been kind of like watching my own service come full circle.

I'm going to miss being part of an organization that I'm proud to be part of. I don't think I've especially felt that way about other labels I've carried previously in my life, besides maybe family surnames. High School Student at Lakeside. Kid from Washington. Geology Student at Western. Cross-Country Runner. I just didn't have any emotional attachment to them (but then, I've never given much of a damn about being a member of any specific group anyways). But I've truly enjoyed being able to say that I'm a Peace Corps Volunteer. I guess now I understand a little better that aspect of the appeal of political parties and religions - belonging to something you believe in.

After I officially sign myself out of service on Friday, my general plan of action until Sam gets here October 9th is to go see some of the cool stuff on the north coast of Honduras that I've never gotten to see yet (like the national parks and wildlife preserves, which are reportedly awesome; the best in the country), and visit a couple volunteer friends on my way back. It should be good times. I'll try to keep some small updates posted here.

One more thing before I end this post - I took my Spanish interview yesterday, and got rated Superior (the highest level you can achieve in the type of evaluation we use). Considering where I entered the country at, this is an achievement worth feeling good about. And I do, very much so. It was a goal I'd had for myself but was more wishfully hoping than expecting to achieve. Going into the interview I didn't feel like I was doing very well, and expected to get what most other people in my group who started at a comparable level to me got - Advanced High. I was pretty psyched when I heard the result, and have been feeling awesome about it since yesterday. Now I can officially claim (with evidence to back it up) that I am fluent in my second language. Schwing!

Gabe

Wrapping it up

2007-09-14T08:10:00.000-07:00

Well, the time has finally come (sort of). My peace corps service officially ends the 28th of this month, and I need to spend the three days previous to that date dealing with pending administrative and health issues in Tegucigalpa, so I only have about twelve full days left in my site. This week and next I’m going to be working on fixing as many loose ends as I possibly can before I scramboozle (which certainly isn’t as many as I’d like to), but if I stuck around until everything I have been working on was definitely concluded, I’d be living for the rest of my life in Agua Fría.

Probably what I’m going to get the most closure on is my Maestro en Casa 9th grade class, although even there I won’t be able to stay until they finish this school year. I have had to make some tests to be applied and graded in my absence, but I’ve gotten to the point of knowing who the capable people around here are that I can leave this kind of job with, and I’m not extremely worried about it. Right now we have a couple extra Saturdays, since it suddenly turns out that we’re ahead of schedule, so I’m doing a small presentation on AIDs that I learned two weeks ago along with the trainees. I think this is a pretty great idea and I’m glad I got to learn and implement it before leaving.

The proposal to get a Centro Básico built around here that I started working on a couple months ago is now officially turned in, but I suspect there will be follow-ups necessary to keep it moving. In Honduras, simply having 70 sixth graders annually with no access to further education isn’t enough to get a project built on its own merits. You need to have political connections as well, send five proposals, stage a demonstration outside the regional office of Public Education, etc. Either that, or start greasing palms left and right, which isn’t really a viable option for myself or the Agua Fría community organizations. The least I can do, I guess, is recommend the project in the strongest possible terms to my replacement (still don’t know who this is going to be just yet, but I will next week). As I may have mentioned previously, it’s really a shame I fell into this idea too late to follow it all the way through.

Speaking of the trainees, I finished my last section with them last week, which was probably a good thing since I was starting to get strange paternalistic feelings towards them. This group of PAM volunteers is quite substantially different than my training group was. Very few of them have the kind of background you might expect for a Protected Areas Management volunteer (Only a couple are real educated hicks, like several people in my group were). They’re also so cool and unflappable with the cultural adjustments, at least as far as I can tell. I seem to remember that we had a much harder time with it. Then again, as a whole they speak much better Spanish than we did. Furthermore, they seem to have a minimal interest in partying. The entire time I was with this group, I don’t think I ever heard a discussion about being inebriated. You couldn’t spend five minutes with my training group without that subject coming up. I think my overall assessment is that they’re going to do a great job, as long as they’re patient and stick it out.

I’m starting to reflect a lot on my service: the good times, the bad times, the fun, and the frustrations. Certain vignettes stick out especially. I clearly remember the feeling I used to get walking from my house up in the middle of freaking nowhere down to Agua Fría every day, marveling every time that I was actually living in another country, I was actually walking to work through coffee farms and tropical deciduous forest, seeing tropical birds, tasting tropical fruits, and working with people who spoke a different language. It was so cool. That kind of excitement wore off a long time ago, but I can easily recall what it was like.

I remember with a distinct shudder all the conversations I had with the director of the Maestro en Casa program, trying to work out a solution between us and the elementary school so they wouldn’t lock us out of the classrooms on Saturday. I’d try to drown out her bitching about the elementary school’s director by imagining what it’d be like to stand up and say “WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU? THESE ARE TRIVIAL PROBLEMS!! THE ONLY REASON THEY EVEN EXIST IS BECAUSE YOU AND PATRIK BOTH PUT YOUR PERSONAL PRIDE BEFORE THE EDUCATION OF 80 STUDENTS! HOW IS IT POSSIBLE THAT PEOPLE LIKE YOU CAN BE EDUCATIONAL DIRECTORS?” But of course I didn’t say anything. Then I’d have to go and play both sides of the argument, reasoning, pleading, and cajoling until I got them to come to some kind of agreement through me, hating every second of it. Was it worth it? ABSOLUTELY.

I recall the way all the conversations I have with Isaí go, the both of us alternately defending or denouncing Honduras or the United States, discussing what was wrong with the world or awesome in Agua Fría, or going over the miniscule details of his agricultural methods. Every conversation with Isaí is a kind of argument, but somehow you’re always in agreement at the end.

I clearly remember something a técnico said yesterday in the middle of giving a training session on small agribusiness management. He was talking about how it isn’t good to blindly follow the directions of other people; how it’s important to try things out and see them for yourself. He then gave the example: “If I hear a preacher say something, for example, in church, I don’t just going to take his word for it without thinking at all myself! I go home and consult my own bible, and see if he got it right!” Cue hand-over-eyes-forehead-slap. Incline head forward and shake slowly, if desired. Talk about stifling cultural paradigms.

Another incident that comes easily to mind was the cold, windy night in January 2006 when we started loading up the 2005 coffee harvest to send out in trucks the next day for Siguatepeque. It took three times as long as anybody thought, and at 11 pm I finally started pitching in just so the poor workers, who were all threatening to go home, could get the job done. At about 2 am we gave up and I half-slept curled up in the middle of a nest we’d made of full coffee bags on Doña Ada’s front porch with cold air leaking in all night (somebody had to be there so they wouldn’t get stolen).

I remember lonely nights spent in the middle of the city of Choluteca, and nights spent alone but happy in my house, well-accompanied by a candle and a book or a pen. I also remember the night I spent during my first October here when a thunderstorm rolled in around 7 pm and raged until after ten, the lightning strikes hitting so close that I’d count less than half a second between the blinding flash and the earsplitting crack. I sat out on my front porch for awhile as that storm started, and actually had to go cower inside because it got so violent I was too scared to stay out any more. Half a bottle of rum saw me through safely.

I could go on like this with recycled material all day, but you get the general idea. Right now I mostly feel impatient to finish going through all the motions that need to be gone through, and anxious to see my family again (and Washington!). Stand by ‘til October 19. :)

International Development: Recommendations For and Against

2007-08-20T10:15:00.000-07:00

Thinking about getting involved with, or donating money towards an international development organization (known more commonly these days as an NGO, non-governmental organization)? Maybe you want to know a little more about the directions in which international development is going these days. Maybe you want to know about the kind of work that different NGOs are doing in reality, on the ground. Maybe you just want to know where to send your used socks and baseball equipment (if that’s the case, don’t bother reading this – you won’t need it).

Honduras, famously the second-poorest country in the western hemisphere, has a ton of international aid organizations currently at work, ranging from large projects from foreign governments (like USAID) to small local groups, such as the coffee cooperative that I work with which sits at the extreme “small” and “local” end of the spectrum.

This isn’t really my area of expertise enough for me to write much of an analysis of international development in general, but concretely, I can point out some of the characteristics of NGOs and their projects here that, in the opinion of myself and other Peace Corps volunteers, do good work, and why:

Effective NGOs tend to be run on a local level, by local people. The bigger and more remote a project is, the more money gets wasted in administrative costs, the less contact there is with beneficiaries, and the less knowledgeable about local situations the project designers tend to be. USAID is a good example of an organization that routinely commits all these sins and is generally held in low esteem by Peace Corps volunteers. Homegrown NGOs are finally starting to get their act together around Honduras and my opinion is that they generally do much better work than the big projects, even though they may be under-funded and have less technical capacity.

Effective NGOs tend to concentrate on basic social services projects. A good project should benefit everybody in the village or town where it is built, and the more specialized the project is, the less people are going to participate in it. The three types of projects that are most built, most all-inclusive, and most effective are those that deal with water, education, and health. Seriously, you can’t go wrong with a water or latrine project. One of my favorite projects done around here is the water system-with-water-board. Water is important enough that the water boards function a lot more commonly than other community organizations because people put pressure on them to function. The necessity of making a water board work also teaches accounting practices, leadership, organizational skills, and community responsibility.

Contrast this kind of project with the expensive irrigation systems USAID was donating (and still is, I think) to produce huge quantities of jalapeños - complete with market contacts to sell them. Those projects tended to benefit only a few large producers with the capacity to make them run, and despite being supposedly highly profitable, are now mostly abandoned. This style of development has been mostly phased out by now on a worldwide level, but USAID is to this day still supporting it. Why waste time with this crap when Honduras has lots of places with no water, no latrines or health centers, and a national educational system that never should have made it out of the 18th century?

Maybe the Honduran government shouldn’t be getting so much of a free pass to neglect water, health, and education, but there’s probably a way to apply pressure to them to get their act together while continuing to support basic social services projects.

Effective projects don’t give stuff away. Charity sucks. It undermines local production and makes people dependent. Charity on a large scale does more harm than good. This is not an exaggeration.

I guess I hit on all the most important topics, especially in my first point. If I had one suggestion to make to people interested in international development, I guess it would be this: Either just support basic social services projects, or actually go to another country and spend some time working with the people there. Some development projects do in fact cause more harm than good, so be careful.

A final note - it may seem like I'm picking on USAID a lot, but they certainly do some good work as well, and there are many other organizations that make the same mistakes they do.

--------------------------------

This week has been pretty weird. I came back from working with the trainees and traveling a lot, to find that there wasn’t anything to do real immediately in my site besides prepare for future events. I’ve finally gotten close enough to my Closure of Service (COS) date that I’ve started to think about it quite a bit, and this has produced a large range of mixed feelings. I really want to see the States again, but I don’t want to leave my beautiful little house in the mountains. I really want to have running water and hot showers again, but I don’t want to deal with regular working hours. I really want to see my family and old friends, but I don’t want to leave my friends here.

This might partly be made easier by the fact that most of my best Peace Corps friends in Honduras are gone – my normal COS date was August 12, so now the only people left from my training group are the ones that extended their service – myself, my friend Joshua, and Nicole Hubby, who lives WAY up on the north coast. And I’m all by my lonesome down in the south. :( I suppose I am going to have to become a nostalgic has-been with the new trainees and load them with all my hopes for everything that I didn’t accomplish as a Volunteer. It’s kind of funny, how young and green and enthusiastic and idealistic they are – just like my group must have been two years ago.

I don’t know if I had mentioned this previously, but the large project that I have been working with COCAGUAL to apply for got approved by FORCUENCAS and we are all set to start working (we started this grant application around April). I haven’t talked about it in much detail here because of past experiences with trying to get money and not wanting to say too much until it was solid, but it is now – so here is what will be done:

- Build a roofed area and a shed to make and store solid/liquid organic compost for sale as a source of income for the cooperative.

- Produce 1,000 baby coffee plants for each member of the cooperative to use in the renovation of their plantations – replacing old and decrepit coffee.

- Provide seed for 100 meters of a special kind of live barrier (erosion control method) for each cooperative member.

- Do several different training events related to organic certification, plantation management, commercialization, and how cooperatives work.

- Go on a field trip with 12 people to Nicaragua to see a technologically-advanced organic coffee farm and how it works.

- Get some equipment for the cooperative like a telephone and antennae for the office where I work.

- Implement to a small degree some other improvements in people’s farms, like worm composting, drying with screens, and making better traps for honey-waters (a contaminating by-product of coffee processing).

FORCUENCAS is putting in 700,000 Lempiras, which is like $35,000. The entire project probably costs about $50,000 when you factor in all of the work that will not be compensated, and will directly benefit about 45 producers and their families. I’m pretty happy about the project because it was essentially formulated by members of the cooperative (especially Isaí) with me helping to direct their ideas. Most (maybe all) of the work will be done after I leave, but at least I have the satisfaction of getting a freaking project approved, which would not have been the case if I’d put all my hopes on the BCIE (Central American Bank of Economic Integration -jerks!!). I only regret I wasted so much of my time with the BCIE and we didn’t start working with FORCUENCAS until it was almost too late, but that’s how the cookie crumbled I guess. The person to replace me in Agua Fría will not be bored at least. They’ll get to teach English to my Maestro en Casa class in October too, haha. Good times.

Smooches to all my homefries,

Gabe

If this were A.D. 1300 I'd be so dead

2007-08-05T12:15:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago I noticed a couple white bumps on my left elbow, pretty much like pimples but a little bigger. I drained them and figured that would be the end of it. Instead, after a little scab formed, they got infected again. This isn't extremely unusual for me around here, especially with the climate, so I drained them again. After over a week of this they still weren't healing, which is somewhat outside the norm and had me a little concerned. Each time I cleaned the two spots, they got infected again and the scab grew a little bit bigger.

After a couple weeks, I noticed that some recent mosquito bites that I had gotten on my legs and scratched had gotten infected too. This is also not uncommon for me here, but before they've always just been red and sore for a little while and then gotten better. This time, the same thing started happening on my leg that I had on my elbow. Puzzling, considering these were scratches where I'd BARELY broken the skin.

Last Saturday (not yesterday, but the Saturday previous) I went to the Feria of San Marcos de Colon, a nearby town, and had a great time. However, the next day I noticed that I had another infection on my hand, this time from a scratch so minor I didn't even remember getting it. My theory is that I did it with my own fingernail while riding a mechanical bull. By Sunday night it was horribly infected, and I had a sore red line creeping up a tendon along my arm. That's when I finally realized I had to go to the doctor and get some antibiotics, because my immune system was getting its ass kicked. At this point, I was in Santa Lucia getting ready to start working with the new Peace Corps trainees the following day and I didn't want to miss work, but there didn't seem to be any choice in the matter.

The doctor at the Peace Corps office cleaned all my infected spots (six total) with iodine and gave me an oral antibiotic as I'd expected. The following day they took a culture of one infection and did a blood test on me to see if I had any kind of chronic disease (apparently diabetes can cause this kind of thing; who knew?). I kept cleaning myself and taking the antibiotics per doctor's instructions, but it wasn't until a couple days ago that it became clear I was definitely getting better. My blood test also came back normal.

I know I don't have very good habits with regards to taking care of my cuts and scrapes, but on the other hand I'm used to healing from scrapes as minor as the ones I had. This thing sprung up literally out of nowhere and was, to all appearances, getting the best of me by the time I went to the doctor. It makes me wonder if I'd have fought the infection off without the aid of modern medicine, or if it would have just kept getting worse. It seems kind of silly because I did absolutely nothing really damaging to my health. But it's the kind of thing that could've killed me without antibiotics.

Despite that minor drama, things have gone as smoothly for me as I could reasonably have hoped this week, considering I had to run back to Agua Fria loaded down with all my crap over the weekend just to give class yesterday, and then return to Tegucigalpa today for the second half of my two-week stretch with the trainees. So far that has gone off without any real serious problems, although my role here isn't quite as involved as I'd imagined it would be. They already have most of the training explicitly planned out and ready to roll; my job will essentially just be to be present and help the trainees along with whatever we're doing. I did get to design one session (the day when we learn about coffee) but that won't be for awhile yet.

The new recruits seem just about like my group was back when we were in training - fresh, idealistic, inexperienced, bad at spanish, appalled by the greasy food, etc. There were originally supposed to be 15 of the PAM trainees, but 3 canceled at the last minute and never made it out of the states, and another dropped out during training. Nobody from either project in my training group did that, but I guess we might have been more of an exception than a norm. I heard that of the training group that followed mine, 35 started off and only 22 are left. We were 32 I think, and 28 made it to the end. Sheesh. Volunteers these days. Standards must be slipping...

Anyways, since now there's only 11 of them and two are married we're pretty stretched thin for filling all the sites that people were going to be sent to. Agua Fria should still get another volunteer, but La Palma, the site I recommended and that had a volunteer for 3 months before he got kicked out for a stupid reason, will not. At this point I can only hope that the rest of them stick it out through training and at least get to their sites. If anyone going to my site quits early it would have to be someone who really shouldn't have done Peace Corps, because my site is a great one and it has tons of work. I guess you can guess by my tone that I'm a little worried, but at least I'll get to have a hand in picking the person who replaced me in Agua Fria (well, I think I will). The good news is that THREE of them are "advanced"-level spanish speakers, and a few others are close to it, which is one of the things Isai and myself specifically consider important for someone who's going to be working with COCAGUAL.

Tomorrow, Tuesday, and Wednesday I have my COS (Closure of Service) medical exams and I'm going to be trying to get up to Santa Lucia (which is pretty near Tegucigalpa) in the afternoons to work with the trainees. We'll see how that goes. Also I'll find out if I have any outstanding intestinal parasites or other notable infirmities. Whee!

Love to everybody,

Gabe

Peace Corps Adventure Quest!!

2007-07-23T09:01:00.000-07:00

Note that this is not intended as a criticism of anyone, except possibly myself.

CHARACTER INFORMATION
ENTER THE NAME OF YOUR CHARACTER:
- IdealisticYouth
IDEALISTICYOUTH, ENTER YOUR EDUCATIONAL BACKGROUND:
- BS, natural sciences
INSUFFICIENT QUALIFICATIONS FOR PEACE CORPS ADVENTURE QUEST. YOU MUST SPEND SEVERAL WEEKS DOING VOLUNTEER WORK THAT WILL HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH YOUR MISSION IN PEACE CORPS ADVENTURE QUEST.
- But…
JUST DO IT!
(three months pass)
- Now am I qualified?
ENTER YOUR DENTAL RECORDS AND MEDICAL EXAMINATIONS:
- Here you go.
NOW ROLL THE DICE FOR YOUR COUNTRY ASSIGNMENT:
IdealisticYouth rolls dice.
CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR ASSIGNMENT IN (COUNTRY)! YOUR MISSION WILL BE THE FOLLOWING: SAVE THE EARTH. ARE YOU PREPARED?
- Yes
LIAR! YOU WILL FIRST BE REQUIRED TO SPEND THREE MONTHS IN PRE-MISSION TRAINING.
- Oh, ok.
CHARACTER SUCCESSFULLY CREATED. YOU'RE READY TO BEGIN PEACE CORPS ADVENTURE QUEST!

INTRO
Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, there was a Hero, who lived in the prosperous land of “Yousa”. The Hero lived a happy, carefree childhood, frolicking with his friends in the forests and cities of his country. But as the Hero grew older, he began to learn of other lands, far away from Yousa, where the people were not happy or carefree. He heard from his elders that there were places where the people were sad and miserable all the time because they had less stuff, and gradually he began to feel that he wanted to do something to help these people in the other, less happy lands, such as (country). So the Hero set out on a quest to (country), to make everything all better for the people who lived there, so that everyone in the world could have lots of stuff and be happy, forever.

TRAINING
WELCOME TO (COUNTRY)! asd!”·$ weeble 241 lkja jork blarg?
- What?
YOUR LEVEL IN THE LOCAL LANGUAGE SKILL IS INSUFFICIENT. YOU WILL BE ABLE TO UNDERSTAND WHEN YOU REACH LEVEL "MEDIUM". BEGIN TRAINING!
IdealisticYouth trains 12 hours.
YOU ARE READY FOR YOUR FIRST SUB-QUEST. YOU MUST GO TO THE MARKET AND BUY SOME FOOD.
IdealisticYouth goes to the market
Man: Glarble blork buy weru sok gonk mango?
- What?
Man: Mango nerk ouwen snark you buy?
IdealisticYouth buys mango.
Dire Mango: Triple threat stomach attack!
Idealistic Youth vomits
Idealistic Youth vomits
Idealistic Youth gets horrible diarrhea
IdealisticYouth loses 5 pounds
- Oh well, I didn’t want ‘em anyways.
IdealisticYouth trains some more
IdealisticYouth levels up!
YOU ARE NOW LEVEL "MEDIUM" IN LANGUAGE! YOU ARE WMERL TO BEGIN SIJ MEK IN PEACE CORPS ADVENTURE FWITZ.
- But I still didn’t understand…
SURE YOU DID. OFF YOU GO.

THE QUEST
YOUR FIRST SUB-QUEST IS TO LOCATE LOCAL PEOPLE AND GAIN THEIR TRUST. READYSETGO!
- Now this, I can do.
IdealisticYouth encounters Local Guy 1.
Local guy 1: What’s your name?
- (name)
Local guy 1: Beef rib?
- (name)
Local guy 1: Walleye?
- (NAME)!!
Local guy 1: Okay, Meester. Nice to meet you.
YOUR NAME HAS BEEN CHANGED TO MEESTER!
Local guy 1: So you’re a Hero, huh, Meester?
- Well, I wouldn’t exactly put it that way.
Local guy 2: Sure he is. He’s from Yousa. I hear everyone there lives in a marble palace and has superpowers.
- Not me.
Local guy 1: Wow, a Hero!. Hey, wanna be our friend?
- Uh…sure.
YOU HAVE MADE TWO FRIENDS!
FIRST SUB-QUEST COMPLETED.
- Wow, that was easy.
DON'T GET TOO COCKY, WISE GUY.

YOUR SECOND SUB-QUEST IS TO ENCOUNTER THE MYTHICAL LOST TREASURE OF THE PROJECT GRANT FUNDING AND USE IT TO MAKE EVERYONE HAPPY, FOREVER.
- Leave it to me!
Meester does essentially nothing for a few months
Engineer Man: Project Grant Funding! Getcher Project Grant funding here!
- You know where the lost Treasure of the Project Grant Funding is?
Engineer Man: Of course I do. All you have to do to find it is fill out this ancient Application Form, and you will find the mythical Project Grant Funding in four to six weeks.
Meester fills out the ancient Application Form
Engineer Man: And find the legendary artifacts “Map of the Project” and “List of Beneficiaries”
Meester finds the artifacts
Engineer Man: And prove ye worthiness in the ancient rite of “Cost Analysis”
Meester undergoes the ancient rite of Cost Analysis
Engineer Man: And provide…
- Why didn’t you tell me about all this in the first place?
Engineer Man: Your mind was not yet prepared, my son.
- So what else do I need to do to attain the mythical Project Grant Funding?
Engineer Man: To prove ye worthiness, ye must also make a “Timeline” of the “Activities” ye will undertake with the mythical Project Grant Funding. Then ye quest will be fulfilled in four to six weeks.
Meester makes Timeline of Activcities
Meester waits for six months doing essentially nothing
Engineer Man: Hearken! The format of the ancient Application Form has been updated. Ye must now fill out the Modern Application Form! Then in four to six weeks ye may obtain the mythical Project Grant Funding.
Meester fills out the Modern Application Form
Meester waits three months
Engineer Man: Hear me, meester! Ye must undergo the ancient rite of “Cost Analysis” once more, because ye failed to divide a part of the mythical Project Grant Funding in observance of the sacred custom of “Paying Me to Supervise.”
- Are you just making all of this up?
Engineer Man: Ye dare question the Engineer Man?
- Fine, I’ll undergo the ancient rite of “Cost Analysis again…”
WHOOPS, YOUR PEACE CORPS ADVENTURE QUEST TIME LIMIT HAS RUN OUT.
- What? Did I complete my quest? Did I save the earth?

- Hello?

- …Hello?

Class

2007-07-13T07:34:00.000-07:00

Avast, rambling soap-boxing dead ahead!

Being in a third world country makes you think a lot about differences in social class and how they are expressed/reinforced. Here in Honduras, rich people do a lot to set themselves apart from the lower classes. They live not only in their own neighborhoods, but in, like, their own towns. They have their own schools, hospitals, and restaurants. They go to their own clubs (they don't mix socially with poor people). I had this somewhat explained to me when I went through training a long time ago, but mainly just being in a different country made me take a special interest in a lot of things that I hadn't thought too much about before, and that was one of them.

I began to realize how much more aware of class I'd become when I went back to the states last week. I had never thought of my family as wealthy before, but suddenly we seemed super rich. I mean, grandma has all kinds of beautiful wood furniture and a real piano in her house! Is that not the height of opulence? I was hard pressed to see even one beat-up or old car in her neighborhood of Olympia fields. All my relatives walked around the house with their personal mac laptops constantly online with the wireless internet network, loath to leave our air conditioned splendor and go outside into the muggy Chicago heat. Is this really a normal standard of living for us?

You could make the case that we're not as class-oriented in the states, and we may not be, but: those differences exist, and once you start to see them, nothing looks the same anymore. The airport is a place where we especially go out of our way to make rich people feel like superstars and everyone else feel like cattle. Seen at a departure gate in Chicago: a blue carpet ringed with gold cordons and a sign that said "special elite access" or something to that effect. Hey, why can't I walk on the special elite access carpet? Then there was the fact that literally almost every single person in my family had their freight-class flights delayed or canceled trying to get out of Chicago. I wonder if that happens to the world class business travelers? You think they get assigned the same level of importance as everyone else and bumped down when a little cloudburst rolls in?

Thinking about this kind of thing had me in kind of a pensive mood when I got to Atlanta, where I had a 12-hour layover. Long enough to justify a hotel, something I can't really afford. Neither can the majority of American travelers! So myself and at least 100 other people were stuck in - guess where - the shopping center of the Atlanta airport, trying futilely to find a way to get comfortable and sleep. This was a big, circular atrium with four stories of shops ringed around its edge and some pieces of airport art scattered around the middle and a few hard vinyl chairs. I looked all around it for a decent place to sit and found every corner occupied by sleeping travelers. So I went and checked out the Delta airlines desk at like 11 pm to see if I could get my boarding pass and go out to my gate, where there would certainly be more (and more comfortable) places to lounge. No, the well-groomed Delta representative said. Not until less than six hours before my flight. I could go relax in the atrium, if I wanted. "No seats", I muttered, turning away. There was nothing he could do, of course.

So I went and tucked myself up against a potted plant on the beautiful shiny (freezing) stone floor and tried to get some Zs using my backpack as a pillow. It didn't work very well.

Why do we put up with shit like this? In Central America, at least it's okay to be poor. There are many poor people, and they take care of each other. Almost anyobody can afford a hotel for a night if they really need one. Almost anybody can manage to find a meal if they really need one. A person doesn't have to own a car to be treated like a human being.

On the other hand, the defining superficial factor for getting respect here has more to do with the color of your skin. It may even be less pronounced in Honduras than in other countries (like Guatemala), but racial prejudices are still so deeply ingrained in the society that most people aren't even aware to the extent that they exist.

This point was driven home on the third leg of my three-airplane trip from Chicago to Tegucigalpa, when I did a miniscule puddle-jump from San Salvador. When I checked in, the person working at the TACA airlines desk printed me out a business-class boarding pass. I didn't even notice until I was getting on the plane and tried to find my seat. Probably, she was too afraid to ask me what class I was flying and look disrespectful, because of course EVERYBODY knows that all gringos are rich. After what happened in Atlanta (A lonely, depressing night by any account) it was poignently ironic and lifted my spirits quite a bit. Practically every time I board an airplane I wonder what it's like to fly first class and if I'll ever do it. Apparently, the chairs are nicer and they give you a free newspaper. Also, you get off first which means being at the front of the line to go through Immigration and Customs (my favorite perk).

Even living at the economic level of a completely normal Honduran (somewhere just above secretary and below taxi driver, or thereabouts), it would be a lie to say that I really feel the sting of discrimination here. How can I? I'm white. I've just gotten the barest glance of what it's like to be treated like a second-class citizen. Living with it all the time must be pretty hard on a person's sense of self-worth. This talk of reducing or erasing poverty in the U.S. and the world is ludicrous without assuming some kind of change in our social mentality. If no respect is ever given to the poor class, how can they respect themselves?

Putting stuff together

2007-07-01T10:08:00.000-07:00

As this year continues, I have gradually been feeling more and more situated with regards to my current activities and my future plans, with a kind of sureness I haven't had in quite a while. This, I'm starting to realize, can be quite comforting. When I left the states and came down here, I didn't really know what to expect and I wasn't even attempting to think of my long term future, which was exciting. It's wonderful to see your adult life opening up, free of plans and constraints. But after awhile, you start to get concerned about your lack of direction. What do you want to do with yourself, really? Where would you like to be in five years? In ten years? I've learned enough by now to know that whatever those goals are, you aren't likely to achieve them without planning. So then you start to look for opportunities, see what catches your eye or your interest, and you necessarily are forced to set constraints on your own freedom in order to follow any specific path. It's a trade-off, for sure.

I had gone a long time without any clear idea what I wanted to do besides work in a scientific field. I was never real sure about it, besides the fact that I enjoy science and simply pursuing knowledge. In retrospect, I can say that the indecisiveness that has so long plagued me had a lot to do with not having enough real-world experience to base my judgments on (although, more than other people perhaps, it's also just a part of my character). Then, through the course of this year, I've finally grabbed onto the idea of wanting to be an educator of some type and I feel pretty darn good and pretty certain about it. It was an idea that before I'd always held in reserve, as a kind of "If things don't work out, then..." but I got to a point where it just seemed really appealing to me. Then, the more I thought about what my goals in life really are, the more sense it made.

I noticed from Sam's last email (some of you may have read it as well) that he's experiencing something similar to me right now, like a feeling of purpose, and I find it interesting that we've both, in our own ways, gravitated towards working with the development of youth. I'm sure he was exposed to other possibilities during his studies and time working with natural resources and tourism, and I even remember a time when he and some of our other friends talked about having their own guided outdoor adventures company or something of that nature. But I think Sam, like myself, always had a nagging suspicion that something better waited over the horizon, something worth waiting for and investigating.

A lot of those necessary constraints that are already starting to make me feel tied down again have become more defined in the past month or so, which is exactly what I was expecting would happen, but on the whole I feel pretty darn good about things. At the very least I should be extremely busy until december or so, which is how I like things to be anyways.

This month of July, I first have to go to Chicago for grandpa's funeral which is going to cut into some of my plans here but really, it can't be helped. I thought about it and feel good with my decision. After that, I need to advance as much as I can in finishing my little projects in Agua Fría (mainly the finca maps and a proposal to get state funding for an all-week middle school in Agua Fría), and try to set up the rest of this school year for my 9th graders. Starting July 30th, I will be working as an "acompañante" (helper) in the peace corp's new volunteer training program for the new group of trainees. I more or less know what to expect since I passed through that program myself two years ago. It should keep me very busy and be an excellent experience in adult education.

Between that and wrapping stuff up in Agua Fría I doubt I'll have time to catch my breath before October and my (hopeful) vacation with The Bro and return to the States. Then I need to put myself full-time into college applications (maybe find a temporary job, though that's hard to think about right now). My undergraduate grades aren't the most superest so that means I need to own it up on the GRE, which I plan to do.... I already started studying. Hopefully I'll find an interesting program with a Peace Corps Fellows school (You can get a master's degree and a teaching certificate in two years with this, even if your undergraduate study had nothing to do with teaching). Maybe I will be able to figure out more specifically what kind of environment I'd eventually like to work in.

We'll see how things work out, I guess. At least we finished the FORCUENCAS proposal, yay! They're going to review it for approval next week. If it passes I will have been a key factor in getting this coffee cooperative $35,000 to work with. :)

Love to everyone,

Gabe

La Boda

2007-06-10T14:38:00.000-07:00

That means "the wedding". I went to see my friend Josh get married this weekend, at a medium-sized town near his site just a little bit northeast of Tegucigalpa (this is the same Josh who I'm going to be working alongside to help the Protected Areas Management staff do the training for the new PAM volunteers that arrive July 11). For awhile now he's been engaged to a Honduran teacher in his site named Urania and they sent out invitations to their wedding the last time everyone in our training group was together; at the COS conference in Tela last month. I think maybe over half the invitees showed up, but a lot of people didn't.... lameasses!

It was a nice wedding. They brought down a bilingual Catholic priest from the states who did the ceremony in both English and Spanish (but mostly Spanish), along with a full regular catholic mass. He did it pretty quickly though and he was an excellent guy to boot. When I first got into Guaimaca I went looking for Josh and ran into the priest instead, who immediately offered me help finding a place to stay for the night (the reason I was looking for Josh) with some of the groups of people who were there and then he gave me a diet soda. When he said he was the father I thought "But Josh said his dad had a beard...." Then later, I was like oooohhhhhhhh....... right.

After the wedding was the reception (I guess this is standard procedure) with cake, food, some beer brought down from the states (YAY JOSH'S PARENTS!!!), and of course dancing. I tell you what, that is something I will miss greatly about this country... the dancing at every justifiable occasion and sometimes just around the house. When I was an awkward middle schooler mainly looking for a way to make myself invisible at homecoming dances I never imagined I'd get to like it this much. Later, I found out about a miracle drug for my problem commonly known as BEER. Having broken the barrier though, now I just like to dance whenever. :)

After the reception, we got a ride up to the site of Lindsay Galpin, another PAM volunteer who lives close to Guaimaca, in the back of a big covered bread truck. There was an old guy picking bolero tunes on his guitar and singing in that classic warbly voice all the way along as we zoomed through the misty night. At Lindsay's it was your standard Volunteer Gathering, sitting around and visiting, but really at this point any occasion to hang out with those guys is great since all of them will be leaving kind of soon (August 12 or before). In them - the members of my peace corps training group - I've certainly found some of the best friends I could have hoped for.

That was last night, so today I went back to Choluteca and here I am. I did miss a day of Maestro en Casa classes because of the wedding, but I found someone to cover for me who I know to be capable and I left a good set of materials for her to keep them busy with, so I'm not too worried. Unfortunately, the program on the whole has been kind of staggering because of personal issues between the current director of the school (who gives us permission to do classes there) and the retired former director (who happens to be the director of Maestro en Casa in Agua Fría). It's some pretty silly crap that's been going on since the Maestro en Casa program was started here almost three years ago, but it could honestly sink the program and I've already had to play the idiot and mediate between these two people who are both too proud to put aside their differences for the good of 70 students. These are not issues I like to even think about much because they don't merit the mental energy I'd waste worrying about them, but I DO want my students to graduate this year.

As far as other news goes, there really isn't much. We still haven't finished the FORCUENCAS proposal, which is starting to worry me because of the time frame issue. It'll get done, but if we don't hurry up things could get pushed back. Sam and I are now officially planning a trip around central america after I finish, and it is going to eclipse every other trip ever done in the history of mankind with its epic awesomeness. Totally.

Love you all.

Gabe

Hey, what d'you know

2007-05-21T07:52:00.000-07:00

I just clicked on my Blogger profile by accident and it says I was born in the Chinese year of the Dog. I never knew that. Seems about right, though.

Since the wet season started, rain has been off and on in about equal portions but last week several days passed where nothing fell from the sky. I'd hesitate to say "dry" days, because there was still so much humidity that you'd have to wring a towel out after flapping it around in the air for a bit. It kept getting warmer and warmer, too, because the evening storms are absolutely essential to cooling things down at night at this time of year. A few days last week were some of the hottest and sultriest I have seen yet in Agua Fría. I didn't dig it much. Almost everything else about life in Honduras has gotten to the point of being pretty much normal to me now, but the heat only seems to get more intolerable. Blah!

Something I forgot to mention in that last blog entry was that I signed on to help out with the training of new volunteers during the last 11 weeks of my service. This means that I will be working in my site and in Santa Lucía (near Tegucigalpa), alternating every two weeks and travelling home for two days in the middle of the volunteer-training periods to give classes in Agua Fría. It's going to be a ton of work and will take away a substantial amount of my time for working with the cooperative, but the fact is that I have to separate myself from them at some point and this way they'll get a chance to practice filling in the stuff I used to do but still have me sort-of-around to help out. It will also be an awesome thing to put on my resume, I'm pretty sure.

Visitor

2007-05-15T08:07:00.000-07:00

Here's another good animal story. The day before yesterday, I was just sitting around in my kitchen packing up my bag to get going for the day and this animal bounded right in through the door as if it owned the place and ran over to the table area where I was sitting. It was a ferret! I had no idea they lived around here. I stayed as still as possible while he checked around the various corners of the room and ran right up to within a foot or so of my leg, at which point I got a little nervous that he was going to climb up me and made some slight movements. He backed off a little but stayed there watching me, the insolent little bastard. I made as if to get up and he finally bounced back out the door, like he was in no particular hurry. By the time I had walked outside, he'd disappeared completely. I was thinking about putting out some meat or something and see if he comes back, but I'm probably just asking for trouble. I hope I see him again, though. His attitude kind of reminded me of Baron Weasel, an animal described in the book My Side of the Mountain (which I have read at least 3 different times).

It's been awhile since I've posted much decent news, so I better do that. The most relevant thing that has happened lately was my COS conference (the acronym is from Closure of Service), where we start doing all the things necessary to wrap up our service and prepare for life after the Peace Corps. This was last Wednesday-Friday in Tela, a town on the north coast, which was kind of an interesting coincidence because that was the same place we went as trainees on our very first vacation on a 3-day weekend during the first month in Siguatepeque. They put us in a nice beachfront hotel with great catered food, which was a nice way for Uncle Sam to show some appreciation for all the work we have done, I guess. During the conference we spent about a day and a half in various different activities, such as preparing for the job search, hearing about possibilities for Returning PCVs, and going over all the formats and other things we have to turn in before leaving. This includes doing our Description of Service report, kind of a final wrap-up summary of what the hell it is we did exactly, that is going to go and rot in a file somewhere in Washington.

I also met the new Peace Corps director, who is stricter than her predecessor in terms of adhering to the Peace Corps Washington rules and guidelines, as many people trying to end their service a little early or extend have found out. My friend Joe almost had to cancel his wedding plans, and my petition to stay until the end of October was shot down out of hand, because apparently it's bad to have two volunteers in a site at the same time, even if it's just for a month. There is a certain rationale behind this, although I think I can make a stronger argument in favor of my idea (especially since it was essentially suggested by my community partners.... and who are we doing this work for, exactly?). At any rate, I just got an email stating that my extension has been approved until september 28, so I'll just have to make the most of the extra month and a half. And there you have it, everyone who has been asking.... the date when I will officially be coming home.

Besides that, I'm still plugging away at with my 9th graders - we finished Math and are already getting close to the end of Natural Sciences. I have been impressed with their responsiveness lately, which is heartening because since the beginning I have been insisting on running my classroom with some significant stylistic differences from the Honduran teachers, which caused difficulties. Maybe after all this time they're finally adapting to the way I do things, which is what I was hoping would happen.

Work continues with the cooperative as well, still polishing this grant proposal that we're going to submit to FORCUENCAS (although it's actually just about done, I think). I'm going to turn in what may be a final draft today, after I burn it to a CD. We're also plugging along trying to improve the coffee producers' documentation of the work they do, which is essential for organic certification. I'm about halfway done with the maps of fincas, but the other ones should be a little easier because they are all closer to me. They also have to keep registries of all their applications of fertilizer, de-weeding campaigns, all the days worked by the laborers they employ, and all of their incomes and expenses. As you can imagine, this is a significant challenge for those guys, some of whom are barely literate, or not at all.

As some of you may know, that bus ride from Agua Fria to Choluteca or vice versa is a huge bummer. It's long, hot, bumpy, and can be ridiculously crowded, which was the case this morning. I counted at least 70 adults and maybe another 15 babies and small children (this is on a US school bus, mind). It was so bad that I was desperate for something to get my mind elsewhere, and came up with.... anagrams! My name, if you use the full first name and no middle (Gabriel Hensold) is damn-near perfect for making anagrams. The possibilites are endless. In two hours, the best I could come up with was:

I shall b geo nerd

Which takes some liberties with the spelling of the word "be", but is pretty satisfactory otherwise. Nonsensical results that I like nevertheless include "Beheld L.A. groins" and "Greased hill nob".

Cheers,

Gabe

Optimistic

2007-05-02T07:52:00.000-07:00

I keep pretty good tabs on my overall health - how I feel physically (energy level, fitness, illness/injury or lack thereof), mentally (concentration, creative energy, etc) and emotionally. The state of those first two factors can almost always be explained by outside events. Do I feel exhausted and crappy in the morning? Maybe I'm coming down with a cold. Do I just sit there and stare at the wall after dinner and not feel like picking up a book? I probably wore myself out so much during the day that I can't even summon the mental energy to read. Those kinds of days, the best thing you can hope for is a thunderstorm for some front porch entertainment.

My emotional state, however, is not often as easily explained. I can feel like crap because of a cold, be bored and without work, and still keep a generally positive outlook. In other moments, I might have a great day working, the weather could be fantastic, and everything could be generally peachy and sometimes I still feel sorta blue. I don't know if it's still the wierdness of my 'new' life that I'm adjusting to, although I think in general I've always sort of been this way.

The main truism about me is that I seem to have a pretty hard time keeping a bad mood or any kind of negative mindset for a significant amount of time, and if this is a simple fact of my character then I also know that it's something to give thanks for. Mom spent many years struggling with depression and later described it carefully to us kids so we would know what to look for - lack of energy, lack of motivation, a general feeling of being worthless, etc, and how it colors the entire world, even though from a practical point of view maybe things could be a lot worse. It's hard to understand this kind of testimony if you haven't been through it yourself, especially because we like to think that fixing emotional problems is just a matter of changing your attitude. For me, it sort of seems like I got the opposite end of the stick, then. I'm relentlessly, irrepressibly, irresponsibly, and naively optimistic, even when I'm in a situation that should be acknowledged as problematic.

In the large scheme of things, I know I don't really have anything serious to complain about, but then, does anyone? I can't help but feel that if I were a poor Honduran I'd probably be just as happy-go-lucky, maybe moreso. There are difficult aspects of my life that could probably get me down if I chose to dwell on them. My childhood was quite a bit more unusual than I used to believe, but then how could I have the perspective to notice that until I'd left it far enough behind? I could ruminate about being by most accounts a pretty average person when I used to imagine that I was somehow special, or about having half-assed several important goals in my life like my college experience and now, getting on to grad school. I could depress myself thinking about the fact that I don't really have any close friends that I can visit with on a regular basis and I almost never have. I could whine about my apparently permanent lack of female companionship.

But why bother? Most of those 'problems' just have to do with who I am. That's me. And nobody else is much better off in the long run. When I think about where I've been and where I might be going, I can never manage the effort to really feel dissatisfied. I'm always reminded of a quote from the movie American Beauty, which comes right at the end and I think more than anything else was what made me love that film, because I immediately identified with it:

I guess I could be pretty pissed off about what happened to me... but it's hard to stay mad, when there's so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I'm seeing it all at once, and it's too much, my heart fills up like a balloon that's about to burst...
...and then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on to it, and then it flows through me like rain and I can't feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life...

That's me when I get philosophical. Amazed and grateful. Is it possible to not be all that impressed or even necessarily satisfied with yourself; who you are and what you've done, but love life anyways? Well, I'm going to give it a try.

Semana Santa 07

2007-04-19T08:28:00.000-07:00

Well, I’m back from a rather long and patchwork vacation, in which I spent the week mostly visiting other volunteers and otherwise participating in events related to Semana Santa.

Semana Santa, or holy week, is a holiday mostly observed over a period of five days – from Wednesday until Sunday, celebrating the events immediately before, during, and after the crucifixion of Jesus. In the states we generally only celebrate Easter Sunday, and now that I have a somewhat outside perspective on the situation, I have to say that we have some pretty strange customs considering the actual significance that the event is supposed to have. But whatever.

Here, as everywhere in Latin America, the greatest festivities take place on Good Friday, when Jesus was actually crucified. There are long processions, costumes, re-enactments, mannequins, crosses, you name it. Most of the activities on Friday and all the other days of the week have to do with some kind of re-creation or remembering of all the original characters and events that took place on those days. It’s a fun holiday; serious and very authentically traditional but energetic at the same time, filled with that Latin flair for the dramatic.

I didn’t quite set out to spend much time checking out the “genuine” Semana Santa festivities; it’s not a holiday I’ve ever celebrated much (not even Easter) and the fact that nobody works at all that week makes it an ideal time to go on vacation and visit friends. That’s exactly what I did, but by chance I managed to get in some cultural sightseeing as well.

I left town way before dawn on Sunday the 1st of April, starting the trip up north to the area near Lake Yojoa where my friend Jeremy lives, one of the Protected Areas Management volunteers from my training group. His birthday was that same day and I wanted to get there at a decent hour in order to participate in some of the festivities, hence the ridiculously early start.

I was going to walk down to the nearby village of La Fortuna, which has an earlier bus than Agua Fría, but the sugarcane workers’ bus caught up with me at about 4 am right after I got down to the main road, and I jumped on it. There were only a few people on it at the time, dressed in ash-smudged clothes and all carrying big water jugs and the same type of wide, flat machete that looks like a cross between a meat cleaver and a scythe. As we went down the mountain, passing through other communities along the way, the bus kept filling up until there were three people wedged into every single seat. They almost all smoked a cigarette or two on the ride, besides the youngest kids, some of which couldn’t have been any older than twelve. It was an extremely rowdy, macho atmosphere; a kind of secret men-only club that I hadn’t glimpsed before here and hadn’t even imagined. They told off-color jokes and made fun of me all the way to Choluteca, laughing about how they were going to invite the gringo along for a day of real men’s work. I imagined what it must be like for the youngest kids, the first day they rode on the men’s bus to chop burnt sugarcane all day in the burning heat of the flatlands, teased and praised by all the older workers. What an initiation into manhood! How proud they must feel to be part of that group, to be going off to blister their hands and earn $5 with “their own sweat”, as the men say here.

I got to the city at 5:30, earlier than I’d thought possible (my previous record was 6:30) and immediately jumped on a bus to Tegucigalpa that rolled up to me as I was walking to the bus stop. By about 3:00 pm I arrived in Jeremy’s site, Cerro Azul. There were already a bunch of other Volunteers there, and more arrived soon after me. We visited for awhile, went on a hike to see a really nice waterfall near his house, visited some more, made some food, played some cards, visited, etc. Everyone left the next morning, and I was left without a solid plan of what I wanted to do for Semana Santa.

I called around to some other Volunteers who I had talked to beforehand, trying to get a feel for what people were up to, and most of my leads petered out (everyone seemed to be too broke at the time to travel), but I finally got a positive response from Suzanne, another geologist volunteer who maintains one of the blogs in my links. She and some friends were going to the city of Comayagua to see some special activities they do there, but not until Wednesday. I decided to keep heading north and use the spare time to see the city of La Ceiba, one of the more well-known touristy destinations in the country, which I had never visited before.

I was in La Ceiba for a couple days and it turned out to be a fairly uneventful leg of the trip; seeing the town and going out once to one of its famous nightclubs. At that point though I was running on three consecutive days without sufficient sleep, and mainly just trying not to nod off and get robbed, so it wasn’t a terribly exciting experience. I mostly strolled around, saw the dirty and drug-dealer-infested beach, sampled some of the north coast’s distinctive cuisine, and visited with Max and Lynette, two volunteers who live there (my OTHER link is their blog). Then on Wednesday morning I caught a bus which Suzanne and her site-mate Christy were already on, coming from their town Olanchito, and we headed back south to the center of the country – the city of Comayagua.

We were in Comayagua for three days, eventually joined by three other friends of Suzanne and Christy – an older couple named Jim and Deb, and a Health volunteer named Robin. We hung out and saw the sights and mostly took it easy. On Friday we saw a couple processions of people depicting various stages of the day Jesus was crucified. In the morning, people had built dozens of colorful “rugs” made of damp dyed sawdust along the processional route for the people carrying the figure of Jesus to walk along. They were beautiful, many of them really detailed works of art, and they only lasted about two hours before being messed up by people walking all over them, and then swept up. I felt privileged to see something made with so much care that was only intended to last two hours.

That same night we went out determined to find some margaritas and realized everything was closed, but we lucked out and found a place run by a young Honduran who’d lived for most of his youth in the US (like fifteen years). We got to talking and I found out that his favorite drink was a White Russian and his favorite movie The Big Lebowski. Small world! He insisted on paying for three of our drinks so I hid a fifty-Lempira bill under a coaster when he wasn’t looking. That’s like $2.50, lest you think I’m bragging about my generosity.

My final stop, starting on Saturday, was the site of my friend Joshua Bogart, just north of Tegucigalpa in a miniscule town called El Majastre. He is engaged to get married in June to a Honduran teacher from his community, and I got to meet her and a bunch of her family during the visit. Josh and I talked a lot and ate some great food and took a hike to some of the most beautiful forest I have ever seen a couple kilometers above his house; a deep and lush grove of immense oak trees draped with beautiful orchids and hundreds of other epiphytes. I’d be tempted to say I liked it even better than the rainforests I saw in Costa Rica. What a lucky bastard! Fortunately, I’m going to be back in the area again soon for the wedding. Josh is going to be sticking around for some time to come, so if my application to extend my service gets approved, we may have time to try an expedition up into the highest parts of the Biological Reserve he lives right next to, which I would REALLY love to do.

On Monday I finally started the trip home, stopping off in Tegucigalpa for a couple hours to confer with my project manager Menelio and drop off my request-for-extension form. I got to Choluteca at night and made it back to my site on Tuesday.

All in all I think it was the best “vacation” trip I’ve taken so far (besides the ones with the fam, obviously). I especially enjoyed hanging out in Comayagua; we had an awesome hotel with a pool and (GET THIS) an elevator, and it cost about the same as a shitty hotel in Tegucigalpa. Suzanne was unfortunately feeling crappy but her friends were a hoot and the weather was unseasonably cool the entire time.

Here’s some trip statistics:
Days: 9
Stops: 4
Kilometers traveled: At least 800
Different buses taken: 14
Interesting new people met: 13
Objects lost/stolen: 1 black leather belt (misplaced somewhere), 1 cellphone (pickpocketed in a crowded bus).
Books read on the bus: The Botany of Desire
Future trips thought up: 2

Since then I’ve been doing more work with the cooperative, mainly polishing the proposal for funds from FORCUENCAS and doin’ the teacher thing. I spent a day making maps of coffee fincas cuz the organic certifier Biolatina is requiring them and most of the producers can’t really make one to the level that they’re asking. So I’m going to be helping out with that (like 6 down…. 36 more to go… should keep me pretty busy). It’s really fun work. I get to go hang out with all the different producers, tour their fincas, and then draw a map of it afterwards.

Lates!

Gabe

Plans

2007-03-29T09:09:00.000-07:00

I have a blog entry all written up and ready to copy/paste, but it got usurped this morning by something else that happened on the way to the bus stop.

On the route down to the main road that I walk pretty much every day to get to Agua Fría or grab the bus, there is a high pass where I almost always stop and rest for a little while. The wind likes to blow through there even on the stillest days, cooling you off after the climb, and it's also a point where there is cell phone signal so I can check my messages. I stopped there this morning for about five minutes (you have to wait awhile for the company's system to detect your phone and send messages sometimes), then I realized that I was in danger of missing the bus and started off again. Just a few steps beyond the high point where I was sitting, I heard some leaves rustling in the forest up to my left and I looked just in time to see a medium-sized spotted animal with huge eyes. It was an ocelot! I think it heard my footsteps in exactly the same moment I heard its, because I only got an instant's good view of its startled, wild face before it turned tail and disappeared.

I had heard from various people that there was a tigre around (jaguar), which I didn't believe because that mountain doesn't have nearly enough wild range or food for a cat that size. Other people said there was a tigrillo ("little tiger", or ocelot), and I sort of believed it but had been REALLY hoping to see the animal, although I didn't really expect to. Where I saw it was exactly the same spot where other people told me they'd seen it. If I had sat there with my cellphone a few seconds longer, I might have actually seen it cross the road in front of me.

I was walking on clouds all the way to Agua Fría, punching the air and whisper-yelling words of triumph. Just as nothing upsets you quite as much as unexpected catastrophes, nothing makes you feel quite as happy as the unexpected or unplanned good things that can happen in life. It's important to recognize those moments and I feel like I had one this morning. Just last week, too, a hawk landed in the trees right next to my house and I got to take a really good look at it. This may not seem like a big deal but hawks are extremely rare around here, because people shoot them every chance they get (they commit the unpardonable crime of eating baby chickens). Maybe I'm just in a lucky streak.

Alright, back to your regularly scheduled programming:

It’s been awhile since I’ve said much about what I’ve been working on, and I guess now I finally have some activities worth talking about. The Maestro en Casa classes are in full swing; fun times with negative numbers and graphing linear equations. We’ve already had three tests, and, as I should be used to expecting by now, about half the students are passing and most of them are copying. A few of them have already gotten zeroes for copying and I hope the idea finally gets into their heads that I don’t tolerate that kind of thing (they have had VERY ample warning). The problem is that the other teachers always have tolerated it, because otherwise some of them won’t pass, and that means (gasp) more work for everybody. Hence, I’m getting tests back with answers like: 9 - 6 = 15. I’m not making this up. SEVERAL students missed this problem on the negative numbers section of the test, and we’re talking about ninth graders here. A second test on basic arithmetic with negative numbers hasn’t improved the situation much, if it all. Luckily we have a pretty decent amount of time for math (until May) and the book isn’t too extremely long. But still, damn.

Lately I’ve been working with Isaí on some more proposals for financed projects, which is almost like a bad joke for me at this point, but circumstantial evidence indicates that there’s a lot better chance they will pass while I’m still here in Honduras so I can at least help the cooperative get them off the ground. Also, there will probably be another volunteer here in Agua Fría after me (there SHOULD be one, anyways) so even though I might not see all the work being done on these projects, my efforts will have resulted useful for something at least.

The proposals, specifically, are two – one to the Fondo Cafetero Nacional (National Coffe Fund) and another to this NGO I talked a little about earlier, FORCUENCAS. The Fondo Cafetero project is relatively small; producing a bunch of grafted fruit trees in one nursery to give to the cooperative’s members (a very good family income-related project around here because this area is excellent for fruit). There are tons of mangos and avocadoes but they’re almost all wild and aren’t hardly worth anything in the market.

The other project, which we hope that FORCUENCAS will fund, is a whole lot larger. It’s also oriented specifically towards the cooperative and its members (rather than various different communities in a large geographical area, like the interminable Banco Centroamericano tree nursery proposal). We’ve talked to FORCUENCAS a few times about what we’re doing and they seem to be all for the idea, but on the other hand we handed them a piece of paper with all the activities we’d like to do over three weeks ago now asking them if they’d just take a look at it and tell us which they can fund and which not…. and they still haven’t managed to do it, despite the fact that it can’t possible be more than an hour’s worth of work. AND we keep calling and pestering them. So, who knows. I’m not even going to talk about what the project is right now because I’ve learned my lesson about that kind of thing, but maybe in a month there will be good news.

Sometimes I feel a little bit annoyed by the route things have taken during my course of work here, and from day to day it often seems like I’m not really doing anything. However, looking back at the state of things around here (especially with the cooperative) before/after I started working, things have actually changed. This place where I work in Agua Fría was four cement walls and a roof; now it’s a fully-equipped meeting room and office with a small library of technical materials. The cooperative had sold one year’s harvest of certified organic coffee, but it ended up going to the internal market as conventional coffee along with all the other crap. Now, they’ve sold two harvests of coffee to a German importer, getting more than 10% cost premium on average for quality and the organic certification.

It’s not like those results can be attributed solely to my presence (95% at the very least corresponds to the Hondurans), but I unquestionably was closely involved with things. The certification was especially difficult - although they managed to get that before I came here, it was managed by an agency in Honduras of the international company Biolatina that was almost comically inept and lax. When they were folded into the Nicaraguan branch last year and THOSE guys started doing the certification, it was a sudden and major increase in the amount of paperwork and the adherence to the rules. I may have even managed to enforce Isaí’s knowledge, despite how good he is at acting like he knows everything. :P

We’ve also gotten a computer and been working professionally. We have done a crapload of proposal-type stuff, which mostly hasn’t shown any results yet but I’m starting to understand how badly I underestimated the time needed to go through this process, and none of it had been started when I arrived. The Maestro en Casa program, too, as I’ve gradually learned was about ready to go tits-up in 2005 when I got here with incompetent teachers mainly doing it as a for-profit activity and lots of friction between the people running the program. Some of that friction still exists, but between myself and the two new teachers who signed on in 2006 we’ve turned it into something that actually resembles an institution of learning and we are applying academic standards, something you don’t see in almost any of the public schools.

The main thing, I guess, if I want these advances to feel like an actual success of some kind is to look to how I can shore up what I’ve done so far to ensure its sustainability (now there’s the hottest buzzword in international development these days) rather than trying out a bunch of new stuff that I no longer have the time to start. The organic certification, for one, is a continuous process that I’m going to keep helping out with on the level of the producers, trying to work on how to manage registries and the other kinds of basic paperwork they need to fill out. I need to keep working on computer classes as much as I can possibly get people to come to them, because, even though there’s no guarantee that anybody I teach is actually going to stick around here and work in the area, it’s the best I can hope for and SOMETHING needs to be done.

We’re also going to submit a proposal (I know, ANOTHER proposal) to the educational system for a “centro básico” (grades 1-9 school) here in Agua Fría, to take the next logical step from the Maestro en Casa program since there’s obviously so much demand for it – this year there’s over 80 students in our 7-9th grade program, practically twice as much as you see in a lot of the rural primary schools. That same project has been submitted for a nearby community but they haven’t actually gotten off their keisters and done much to make it happen, so people in Agua Fría are starting to talk about building it here. Maybe in a couple years there will be 7-9th grade classes five days a week in this town, with paid teachers and everything.

Working with the Hondurans to make sure they are building the skills necessary to continue on their own after I leave is the most important thing to focus on, I guess, but I’d also really like to make sure this community gets another Peace Corps volunteer after me. Not only that, I’d feel a lot better if they could be given some support during the first period here, because the 3 months of training don’t really adequately prepare you for the specific work you find in your site. The volunteer who was in La Palma was supposed to be the backup plan for that, but now I’m considering applying to extend my service for a couple months so I can work with the theoretical new guy for a bit. I need to talk to some people in the main office and see what they think.

Several days ago I got visited by another volunteer who lives a long ways away and she helped me get a slightly better perspective on my situation. She also taught me a whole bunch about the birds around my place, so it was time very well spent. This week has been the first one in ages, maybe since I finished training, where I actually have a pretty good idea what I’m going to be doing for the next while and a sense of purpose about it, which is not a bad feeling at all. Those two new proposals are practically done so my next mission is to enjoy the crap out of Semana Santa. I think I can handle it.

Gabe

Favorites

2007-03-15T08:28:00.000-07:00

Continuing with my latest theme, which is a complete dearth of news-related topics, here's some of my thoughts that I've written down lately.

I was just now looking back through some photos of Washington that I have stored on this computer and marveling at how strong the memories are that they evoke. Just a few small images of mossy logs, some trunks shrouded in fog, a path carpeted with leaves are enough to transport me back to my western Washington. I can smell the mist, see the damp streets, feel the slick asphalt under the knobby tires of my bicycle. Hear the crunch of wet snow under my feet and above all, the sound of nothing. You might think that the middle of nowhere in Central America would be a pretty quiet place, but it’s at least as noisy as any city I have lived in, though that’s not saying much. Not a moment passes when there isn’t some dog barking, rooster crowing, bird singing, or little kid shrieking somewhere. And the locusts! They last for six months and you wouldn’t BELIEVE how loud they are. I’m not complaining, you know, that’s just how it is. The coniferous forests of my homeland are like a different planet, almost.

I remember when I actually lived in Washington, like way back in the day, I used to sometimes feel a tangible connection to the land, a sense of place or something like that. I have no idea how to describe it. I think the best way would be to say that being able to experience the environment there was a vital commodity for me. Anytime I felt crappy, I just went for a walk in the woods and my internal tranquility reserve filled up again. I never understood why the western Washington ambience depressed people. I loved the cool grey days, the subdued watercolor shades of everything, the light rain and soft sun, and most especially the mist-wreathed greenery. I carry that world around inside me all the time, still as alive as if I had left it yesterday. I’m like an inverted greenhouse; outside me it’s Honduras, but inside, it’s still Washington.

As great as my experience in here in Honduras has been, I’ve never gotten that umbilical feeling of connection to the land, for some reason, and I will say that I think it took me less time than two years living in western Washington to start feeling that way. Perhaps the heat here has something to do with it, the fact that I can’t walk anywhere at any time of the year without sweating through my shirt. In a more general sense, the ambience in Honduras doesn’t inspire that same sense of peacefulness. There’s always something crawling, eating, flying, rotting, procreating, making noise, excreting, or growing. The light is outrageous and exaggerated. The air seems to hum with vitality. If there isn’t a torrential thunderstorm falling, there’s the merciless tropical sun beating down. If my clothes aren’t covered in dust, there’s probably mold growing on them. I dig it for being so MUCH everything, like I appreciate anything that is new or unique, but for some reason it still doesn’t feel like my own. Maybe I passed the stage of life of “taking to” a place. Or maybe it’s just because it’s SO different here.

Here there be some favorites of mine so far during service:

Best Books
First of all, let me clarify that these aren’t necessarily the “best” books that I’ve read, the ones you’re most likely to see in a university text or Oprah’s book list or any of that junk. They’re simply the ones I got the most enjoyment out of reading. I read 100 Years of Solitude twice, certainly a masterpiece of literature, and neither time was it as fun as La Sombra del Viento.

Jayber Crow – Wendell Berry
This guy is Mark Twain’s rightful spiritual heir. Those that know me pretty well will understand the class of compliment that this is from me. This is earthy philosophy, eminently readable and so American it hurts.

The True Story of the Kelly Gang – Peter Carey
Fascinating, awesome writing.

Nostromo - Joseph Conrad
Conrad is one of my three or four favorite authors of all time and this is the best book of his that I’ve read, with the possible exception of Heart of Darkness.

Cosmic Banditos - A. C. Weisbecker
Hilarious; Weisbecker has a wonderful style and spontaneous wit. Cosmic Banditos is a ridiculous book with no point that goes nowhere, and wallows in mindless self-indulgence along the way.

All the William Faulkner that I’ve read here
Faulkner’s style is overblown and gets on my nerves like nothing else, and he unnecessarily overcomplicates the structure of his stories, and despite those problems I still can’t stop reading his books. And I’ve just scratched the surface. I still don’t know what to think about some of his stuff, which is always a sign of true greatness. Like As I Lay Dying. What in the hell was that?

Breakfast of Champions, Slaughterhouse Five – Kurt Vonnegut
I can’t believe it took me so long to discover this author. Fantastic. Going to read more!

La Sombra del Viento – Carlos Ruiz Zafón
This is probably about the closest thing to a romance novel that I’ve read, apart from that Isabel Allende book mom sent me (I think anything written in the Spanish language turns into a romance something or other, somehow). The author takes some extreme narrative liberties, but the underlying plot and the character development are so damn good you have to forgive him. I’ve never gotten so emotionally attached to characters before. Zafón uses every cliché you can think of and bends them to his evil purposes, and even conscious of the crap he’s pulling, you can’t help falling for it. The English version is titled The Shadow of the Wind, but I read a few pages and it didn’t feel the same. :P

A Stillness at Appomattox – Bruce Catton
Entertaining, dramatic, and beautiful, it feels more like a novel than a history book about the American civil war. I especially love the way he weaves in the touching bits of humanity that were passed between the two sides even during the most brutal fighting ever seen on the continent.

Anthills of the Savannah – Chinua Achebe
Achebe is a master storyteller with a razor sharp sense of irony. The book has a strong moral wisdom to it, but besides that it’s also an engaging story that feels absolutely real, from the characters to the events that take place.

The Bonesetter’s Daughter – Amy Tan
I didn’t have too much interest in Amy Tan before picking up this book on a whim, and I’m sure glad I did. She is an absolute master. Subtly and unpretentiously, she weaves the lives of the characters around you until you suddenly find yourself experiencing life through their eyes, navigating a mysterious story more vivid than reality.

I guess this is kind of a lot of favorites, but lest you think I’m indiscriminately throwing everything I’ve read on here, keep in mind that according to the list I’ve kept I’m almost up to 90 books so far since leaving the states. I’ve read a lot of mediocre books too and a few that just plain stunk.

Best Music
Louden Wainwright III – So Damn Happy
Beautiful.

Salif Keita – Mansa of Mali
I think this guy has jumped to the front of my favorite dudes from Africa that Dad has introduced me to. Hell, it’s a tough call.

My World Music mix CD
There’s this one song at the very end of it that I never noticed much back in the states and I can’t remember who it’s by, but it beats the everloving crap out of everything else on the CD, and that’s saying something. Help, Maya?

Neville Bros – Brother’s Keeper (before it got ruined by the humidity)
One of those CDs you listen to a lot, and then don’t hear for years and years, and when you hear it again it sounds even better than all that time ago.

Green Day – American Idiot (before it got ruined by the humidity)
Glad to see that my once-favorite band has redeemed themselves for Warning. I guess my taste in middle school wasn’t so bad after all. :)

Old Crow Medicine Show – OCMS
I thought these guys were from like the 60s and then found out they’re a new group. Excellent! I just have a soft spot for fiddle music, I guess.

Dad’s Labor Day program CD (really!)
I gave Dad a hard time about his locution when he was here, but I’d only listened to the CD a couple of times and he was right, he just sounds scared more than anything else. I hope my words didn’t discourage him from ever trying a similar project, because after all told I love these two CDs. There are many, many awesome songs on them.

Out of all these, I’d say So Damn Happy has probably gotten the most play. That guy is one hell of a songwriter.

Worst Books
Well, for every best there has to be a worst, right?

Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon
Pynchon might be a genius, but who cares. I’m still trying to figure out how I managed to finish reading this interminable piece of crap. Thank God recent authors have gotten out of the habit of trying to one-up each other with the longest run-on sentence possible.

Valhalla Rising – Clive Cussler
The only proper response is to laugh. Although even that is getting difficult since I realized that it probably sold five times as many copies as Jayber Crow. I’m not sure I could summon a more depressing thought if I tried.

The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
O V E R R A T E D. Brown has a numerologist’s knack for making everything sound like some kind of conspiracy, but underneath the hype and transparent suspense-novel trick of making every chapter three pages long is some really mediocre prose.

Worst Music
Ok, so I don’t actually own all of this.

Regguetón
This genre of music, born in Puerto Rico, takes American rap vocal techniques (more or less) and “cash & b****es”-type lyrics, puts it against the exact same backbeat in every single song, and trades out the black or white bimbos for latina ones. ‘Nuff said.

Candy Shop – Ludacris or something like that (appropriate name)
That toothless, devout, sombrero’d sixty year old farmer on the bus doesn’t know what he’s actually humming along to, but dang, it’s catchy.

Ashley MacIsaac – A newer CD (didn’t see the name)
Sorry Sam, hahaha. Maya says you like this CD. The music is good and all but the lyrics are pure comedy; I don’t think I’ve heard any this ridiculous since Gravity Kills. He should probably stick to the fiddle.

Later guys. :)

Relativity

2007-02-27T06:24:00.000-08:00

The fact that a Honduran read and commented on my blog entry from a couple weeks ago was extremely beneficial for me. First of all, it kind of surprised me (I had gotten lazy and started letting myself forget that what I post here is not a private message to my family, but completely in the public domain) and it reminded me to think carefully about what I write. That, in turn, got me thinking a lot about what I posted last week, how accurate it might actually be and whether or not it was fair to both sides of the issue.

I get the sense that I can be pretty negative here sometimes, which could give someone the misconception that I look down upon Honduras or Hondurans. This is definitely not true, and the interesting thing is that in real life (IRL) I’m an extremely optimistic person. It’s just like the newspapers, I guess…. what is news always about? War, tragedy, economic problems, and occasionally sports. The good news, often the very best news, gets neglected because it’s not as interesting. Really, the absence of bad news is about the best you can hope for most of the time.

I realized one important flaw about what I wrote last time, which was essentially how it sounds like I’m blaming the school system for everything. This was actually more of a problem with my way of thinking before and not just a thoughtless exclusion, but I got to thinking more about it, and the truth is that what I see as the situation in the schools is more like a reflection of the same issues that permeate the society as a whole. It’s all part of the same system. To wit: the aspect which I perceive as problematic is the tendency towards paternalistic treatment of the “lower” classes. This presents itself a lot in the classroom because the teachers are generally from a different class than the students.

A funny thing about Honduras, in fact, is the existence of classes because most people aren’t even aware of them or haven’t thought much about it. When I sometimes ask pointed questions to try and get people’s opinions, I’m often met with simple incomprehension, like, “What do you mean everyone on Honduran TV has really white skin? Isn’t that normal? Aren’t light-skinned people just more attractive?” etc. It’s more subtle than the outright racism in some other countries; more insidious, and so ingrained that it’s just taken for granted. I’m absolutely sure you could trace this back to precedents set a long time ago, foundations in the country’s social history that have probably had lots written about them by people who are more expert about this kind of thing than myself.

Like I say, it’s not that there’s no good news about Honduras. It’s a free society that has a long history of relative political peacefulness. A lot of the corruption has been getting rooted out lately and exposed in their admirably free press, which may not be perfect but is probably better than our own at this point. The fact that it’s taking the country a long time to catch up with the rest of the world, so to speak, is often seen as an inexplicable problem that must be due to some grievous errors on the part of the people “in charge”. The fact of the matter is that we’re not just talking about economic changes that are taking place, or physical changes. These are cultural changes, and that takes a hell of a long time.

Going through these changes is a slow process because people are like that. The laws of physics say that the tendency of an object is to remain in its current state – if it’s in motion, to remain moving, if it’s at rest, to remain at rest. We call it inertia. People have inertia too, and lots more than any normal physical object. People resist change in their lives, and large groups of people display cultural inertia as well, resisting change even more effectively than one person by his or herself. Why do people still employ slash-and-burn migratory agriculture, despite how many times they’re told that it’s bad and unsustainable? Because that’s the way they’ve always done it, since like FOREVER, before the Europeans even got here! That kind of inertia needs patience and time to overcome.

Some people might be tempted to cite those poor countries in Asia that are developing at the speed of light. The thing is, from what I understand they were culturally ready to do this before the technology made it possible. In fact, all the countries that were culturally ready by the beginning of the 19th century have pretty much joined the race at this point, whereas those that weren’t, mostly haven’t. No amount of technology is going to do much about this. It reminds me of the computer center some people have talked about building here in Agua Fría, where I have 9th grade students that can’t write a complete sentence to save their lives! To me, the investment in a computer center seems frankly obscene when there’s a halfway functional school system to fix first, that could really use that money. Am I the only one who feels this way? We need to think a little harder about priorities.

On some days I think the best thing we could do for these countries is to meddle with them as little as possible. If I may arrogate myself to claim this, the main problem Honduras has, “el problema” as it were, is America. Why? Because they’d probably be a lot happier just doing their own thing here if they didn’t have to worry so hard about keeping up with the rest of the world. I appreciate the fact that social justice as well as basic sanitary conditions of living need to be assured, but the truth is that isn’t what seems to be bothering people the most here.

No, what most Hondurans really need these days is more money. More cars, more cellphones, more stereos, etc. I personally know people whose income would probably classify them as some of the poorest people in the world, who have spent two months’ worth of salary to buy better cellphones than mine (granted, I have the cheapest one you can possibly buy). Again, priorities. Congratulations, America. Why is it that our cultural values that I hate the most are the ones we’re the most adamant about spreading around? Einstein proved that position and movement are totally relative. He should’ve expanded that theory and just said that EVERYTHING is relative. Hondurans might not feel so shitty about themselves if they didn’t have our shiny happy people with their expensive clothes and toys on all their televisions, and our products on all their billboards, and our crap in all their stores. But the fact is that their biggest point of reference to compare their own country to is the US, and we’ve somehow tricked them into using our standards to prove that relatively, they don’t measure up.

Am I the only one with the creeping suspicion that this is bullshit?

Correction

2007-02-21T11:18:00.000-08:00

My mom pointed out a huge, disgusting glaring error in that last post. The Circus McGurkus is so-named because the kid's name is Morris McGurk; the old guy's name is Sneelock! Dammit! Too late to change it all now. You'd think I could remember a little thing like that, especially since I loved that book so much.

Mr McGurkus

2007-02-14T07:49:00.000-08:00

One of the things about being from the United States around here is that you’re sometimes seen as some kind of demi-god, a human being trained and able to do pretty much absolutely anything. I don’t know if I mentioned this comparison in my blog sometime before, but it always reminds me of that Dr. Seuss book, The Circus McGurkus. For those of you who don’t remember the book, it’s about this kid who wants to build his own circus in an empty lot behind a mom and pop general store owned by an old man named Mr. McGurkus. He starts out mentally creating his area and entrance, where he realizes he’s going to need someone to sell lemonade…. Ok, that’s fine, Mr. McGurkus can do that. He surely won’t mind. As the imaginary circus grows ever more elaborate, the kid makes up for his real-world lack of human resources by assigning all the toughest and most important challenges to Old Man McGurkus, including such things as wrestling gigantic tigers and skiing down a narrow greased ramp filled with cacti hundreds of feet above the ground without a net. “I’m sure he won’t mind.”

As you may have already guessed, in this metaphor, Mr. McGurkus is…. me! I can understand how people end up with this conclusion, to a certain extent. I have a college education, for one thing (a REAL liberal arts one) so that means I can do almost anything of what amounts to professional work around here… make a technical drawing to scale, write reports or proposals, do basic math/accounting, manage computers and all kinds of electronic devices, and, for better or for worse, I can sit on my ass for hours and do office work without going nuts because I’m used to it. There are people here who are very good at any one of these things, because they specialized in one or two them, whereas in our educational system they’re all prerequisites to specialize in other things. This makes me (comparatively) kind of a new-age renaissance man.

Probably more important than that, though, isn’t the content of the education I’ve had, but the style. It’s hard to communicate in words how different things are for schoolkids here, especially in the earlier years. Instead of being taught to ask questions and participate, they are told to shut up and listen. Instead of being given activities to do and allowed to reach their own conclusions, they are carefully guided to learn exactly what the teachers want them to memorize. This makes for a lot of people who reach adulthood with stunted abilities in problem-solving, originality, and thinking for themselves. It shows. When you go to a meeting and ask people a question, especially in the poorest communities, they will usually (more often than not) sit there and wait for you to tell them the correct answer, rather than risk answering it and being “wrong”. Therefore, anyone unafraid of making decisions or voicing their opinion becomes a leader entirely by default, even if they lack people skills or don’t really know what the hell they’re doing. 90% of the time these types of people are the rich ones, because economic power necessarily involves a certain amount of managing human resources. To give one specific example, all the mayors (in my area at least) are rich and most of them don’t have a clue what they need to do to help out the people in their municipality, ESPECIALLY the poor. This paragraph could probably be taken as a pretty good example of my opinion as to why Honduras is the way it is, actually.

This comes back to me because any activity I involve myself in, I inevitably find myself in a leadership role by default. I’m from the United States, I’m a “professional” (ha ha) and I am used to contributing my opinions, be they right or wrong. Do this enough in Honduras and eventually you start hearing the phrase "Yo no sé; usted..." Which means "I don't know, why don't you do my thinking for me!" Or something to that effect. It can be exasperating. I'm starting to just repeat that phrase back whenever I hear it.

Another aspect of the problem is, as I mentioned, the McGurkus effect. I get old guys who walk up to me in the street and ask for money so they can rebuild their houses, people who ask me to give them my clothes, or my watch, or whatever. The most common one is people who want to know if I can put in a good word with the embassy so they can get a passport (or just if I will "carry" them to the states with me when I go back). A filthy drunk followed me around all over San Lorenzo one time (the Pacific port town in Honduras) mumbling unintelligibly until someone finally explained to me that he wanted me to take him to the states. One dude was pestering me in Choluteca last year about getting him some equipment that could magically detect gold underground (this was during the brief and now-concluded El Corpus Gold Fever episode). It literally took an hour to convince him that a gravimeter costs more money than I will ever see in my life, and even if I did know more about it than that I'd never waste my time here looking for gold. I will NEVER repeat the error of letting a stranger know that I'm a geologist.

I basically have to keep two things in mind when these kinds of things happen. One is, why I'm here. And the other is that no matter how amazing people might think I am, I'm still just me and even though they might treat me a certain way, that's no reason to let myself assume that role. At least I have the good luck of being capable of doing breathtakingly stupid things from time to time, so that helps keep me grounded. I see the NGO coordinators that demand coffee wherever they go and immediately call everyone "vos" (the informal or less-respectful "you" verb tense) and promise myself I'm not going to do that. How can you get the campesinos to think themselves worthy of being heard if you keep reinforcing the stereotypes that they aren't?

At any rate, things are going well here. It just keeps getting hotter, but all the trees are blooming now and it's been really beautiful in Agua Fría. Since Pat got kicked out of La Palma, I've kept in contact with people from that community and I'm helping them do a small proposal to FORCUCENCAS to plant some trees around their community water source, cap it to prevent sedimentation, fix some latrines, and build "improved stoves" in all the houses that use less firewood to conserve forest resources. It sounds complicated but it's infinitely more simple than the tree nursery project that we're still waiting on (everything we hear indicates it's still in the works, but this has become like some kind of bad joke to me). I am just helping out the La Palma people with the proposal; when the project starts they are going to manage everything themselves with help from FORCUENCAS. Based on the meetings and work sessions we have had so far I think it will work out very well.

We kicked off the school year last Saturday with a meeting to plan some basics and put together a note to the school of Agua Fría soliciting the space for this year. Last year, the director Patrik kicked out one of the classes because they were abusing the school equipment (scratching desks, breaking chairs, etc) and nobody was sure he was going to agree to let us use the place again. My philosphy is that if somebody commits an offense of that type then they should be made to fix what they broke or buy it, but Patrik has made it abundantly clear that the solution he favors is to kick the person out (or their entire class by default if they can't be identified). I think this is bullshit, but he makes the rules and we DID explain to all the students last year how they needed to behave. Discipline isn't really my strong point and this year I have the rowdiest and largest class, and I'm really not looking forward to dealing with Patrik if we get kicked out. We're tossing around some ideas about student councils and self-monitoring and whatnot, but the fact is that I can't promise with 100% certainty that somebody isn't going to write on their desk. Once something happens, as it almost certainly will, then we'll see what kind of solution can be found. Today, the Maestro en Casa coordinator is picking up the schoolbooks and I copied Patrik's list of rules to give to each student and left a message to be sent by radio that classes officially start this Saturday at 8. Until then I still won't have a good idea where we stand.

The El Corpus Feria was good times. I went on Saturday the week before last after heading out to Cofradía, a small community near Juanita's farm that wants to get a Peace Corpus business volunteer to help them with their computer center. The town was pretty quiet when I arrived at 3 pm, just the hard-core drunks out and a few people eating lunch or buying candy. It was like that until 6, when the annual "coronation" of the local queen took place. Then hundreds of people magically showed up (there might have been up to a couple thousand), crammed into the central square in front of the church to see some poor scared 15 year old who was led up in front of everyone and be-crowned. It was without a doubt the most uninteresting event I've ever seen that many people make a big effort to come to. It gave me the impression that the reason everyone comes to the coronation, is because everyone comes to the coronation.

Afterwards, there was a dance in the high school. This I went to not expecting much (it sucked last year), but it turned out to be awesome! First of all, I actually knew several of women present this time so it was fairly easy to find someone to dance with. There were actually more girls at this dance than guys! That is an incredible rarity. The other thing was that a musical group from La Ceiba, which is almost away in Honduras as you can get from El Corpus, was playing live music almost the entire time. Not only was it good stuff (punta, salsa, merengue, etc) as opposed to the rap knock-off crapola known as reggaetón that's usually the standard fare, they were very good musicians and had a full set of horn players, a guitarist, a marimba, two male singers and one female. I would rate it as one of the better live performances I have seen, definitely not the type of thing I'd ever have expected in el Corpus. Plus I thought I was only paying $5 to come in and dance. A very nice surprise.

Well, this blog entry feels long enough. Cheers! I love you grandpa!

Plaguey

2007-02-01T12:41:00.000-08:00

These last couple months I've been through a pretty rough week on two different occasions when I thoughtlessly walked through a cow pasture somewhere and then forgot to check myself for ticks afterwards. The first was when mom and Maya were here (luckily, they escaped my itchy fate) and the second was at the beginning of this week. Sometimes people complain about their cows or dogs or whatever being really plagoso, or ¨plaguey¨, i.e. covered with pest insects like ticks or sandflies, and that's me right now. I've got approximately fifty different bites (yes, I counted) on my knees, upper legs, and around my groinal area. The good news is that they don't carry any diseases like Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever or Lyme Disease, but the bad news is that they're exponentially more numerous than ticks in the States. Also, I don't know if these little bastards give you itchier bites or what, but I sure as heck notice them more (maybe it's the sheer quantity). I've definitely had some of my more miserable moments so far in Honduras lying awake at night in hot sheets, tossing and turning for hours and trying futilely to stop thinking about itching.

From what I remember, last year had much less problems with ticks and more problems with sandflies, I think because it was cooler and wetter. It was reasonably cool through the first part of January, and rained as recently as December (last year it stopped raining right at the end of October) but lately it has been getting pretty darn hot, noticeably hotter than I remember it being before, especially in Agua Fría. Choluteca is in a league of its own for uncomfortable temperatures, just like always.

Last week, I spent three days in Siguatepeque at a gathering of PAM students called Project Workshop (we did it last year too in December). It was a good opportunity to meet all of the people from the new group of PAM volunteers that came in september and discuss opportunities for project collaboration with them. I helped out by working together with two other people to give a presentation on coffee production and commercialization to the newbies, because they apparently didn't get sufficient information about it in training and many of them live in coffee-centric communities. That was really a pleasure because I got to be the expert and present some information that my audience was extremely interested in. You could probably say I enjoyed it so much because, with respect to other peoples' perception of me, I'm kind of insecure about being seen as a knowledgeable guy. I wouldn't necessarily argue that point. Well anyway, I had to enjoy that while it lasted, because it may be the last time anyone gives a crap about most of the things I learned in the peace corps, haha.

After four of the guys in their group got expelled for idiotic reasons (see one of my december entries for details), they are down to ten girls and four guys, but they still seem to have some spunk and I think they're doing pretty well in their communities. There is one volunteer from Wyoming who is not only a geologist, but also knows a crapload about using GIS, which I have wanted to try and work with because it would undoubtedly come in handy. I don't know if I'll have the opportunity to learn some stuff from her, but I intend to try.

Now I'm back in ¨the zone¨ again, as they say, and getting ready for the coming school year as well as helping the cooperative wrap up some coffee sale-related things. I have also giving computer classes to a local girl named Ingrid who is helping the cooperative with some of the secretarial work that was piling up faster than they could take care of it. She is one hell of a smart cookie (I could swear she picks up on computers faster than I did when I was learning) and I hope she sticks around the area, because she would be an invaluable help for the cooperative after I go back to the states. It's a big relief to finally be teaching SOMEONE else to use that machine, dangit.

I had to go back to the community of La Palma a couple times to follow up on some of the work that Patrick was doing there, including getting them a cellphone antenna and putting together a proposal for a small tree project to an NGO that just arrived in the area called FORCUENCAS. They want to plant some trees around the community's water source, which is always a good idea. FORCUENCAS (the acronym stands for some name that's so long and ridiculous that I can never remember it all) seems pretty straightforward and disposed to get projects moving, which is a good thing to see, and they have offered to help us out with certain aspects of our own tree nursery project. I have my reservations because I've definitely heard THAT before (*cough*USAID*cough*), however they do seem to have a different attitude and more focus on building physical projects. Their name just keeps turning up in communities all over the area, and I have a feeling we'll be seeing a lot of those guys.

The yearly Feria, or town festival for El Corpus, started like yesterday or Tuesday and will be going on until its culmination on Saturday. That's the day I plan on going, along with Osmaris and a few of his friends. Some people around here talk shit about the El Corpus Feria and say it's no good because there's nobody getting gored to death in the bullring or anything of that nature, but I really liked it last year.... it's a small, beautiful colonial town with stone streets that gets packed with people and good food and drunks and lots of fireworks. How can you go wrong?

As always, I love you guys and miss y'all (Glad we got to talk, sibs! Even if it was briefly). Love and prayers to Grandpa, of course. I do miss bread and beer, you know.

Gabe

Travelin' fool

2007-01-15T07:53:00.000-08:00

Things have been pretty busy around here lately, as a result of the fact that it's coffee selling time, and just like last year all the stuff the cooperative should have done to get ready to export their crop got put off until the last minute and is now being done in a ridiculous hurry with some fast-approaching deadlines that may have already been missed. For example, the container of coffee they have promised to sell this year is supposed to be on the boat the 21st, it has to sit in storage in Siguatepeque for at least 12 days before going anywhere, and not all of that coffee has even made it to Siguat yet. D'oh.

Regardless, they're negotiating in some way or another up there in Agua Fría while I run around with the truck drivers taking loads to Siguat and coming back. Two trucks full of about 180 sacks each have already gone, and a third is supposed to leave this afternoon. I'm still waiting to get some kind of confirmation about this. I think it might not leave until tomorrow. Either way, I'll probably be racking up three trips to that town within a week and then I'm going back there AGAIN the 23-26th for this year's Project Workshop. Fun times!

My last post was pretty shortly before New Year's, which was a lot of fun. Once again I ended up hanging out a lot with the extended family of my friend Osmaris.... his grandpa Don Genio who's one of my neighbors, his dad who owns the pulpería in town, and all of his uncles and aunts and cousins. They were all at Don Genio's house for a few days having fun, so I really didn't have a good excuse not to walk over and visit. Plus they are really an entertaining bunch to hang out with, besides the fact that they seem to be trying to marry off one of their Don Genio's granddaughters to me. I might not even mind that much considering how extremely beautiful women seems to be a family trait of theirs, but they're all super evangelical (two of Osmaris' uncles are preachers) and also try to get me to participate in their services. I'm still trying to figure out how to tell them politely that I'm not interested in being reborn in Christ or fearing God. This particular service I was at was a little more intense than the one last year and I started to feel like a damned phony, sitting there and participating but not buying a word of it. It's not that I think their beliefs are wrong or dangerous or offensive, but just being their passively and not letting them know what I really think made me start to feel guilty and really insincere, not something I like to be. I need to just find an excuse to explain my personal beliefs to the preachers, and then they can preach at me all they want and I won't mind. :) As I said, they're great people anyways.

Speaking of the Gutierrez clan, Osmaris is back home again after getting fired from the electric plant in San Lorenzo. On the selfish side, we can hang out more now and play chess and stuff. I do hope he gets a job again soon though. He has a girlfriend in the area that I think he'd probably like to marry but he needs to get his employment situation under control first.

The weather here has been pretty awesome lately (Maya and Mom can probably attest to this claim since it was near perfect December weather when they were here, besides being slightly warmer than usual). Lately it has been more windy, but continually cool and clear, and the bugs are evaporating along with the puddles. This is my favorite time of year right now, when it's dry and cool and bugless, but hasn't started to get really hot, dusty, leafless, and brown like it will around March-April.

I can't think of much more relavent/interesting news at the moment, and this time I'm all out of philosophical observations, so I guess I'll wrap this up and hit the post button. Love to everyone, especially grandpa, who based on what I hear probably won't be able to tune in much to my blogs from this point. My thoughts are with you, Grandpa.

A very busy Christmas

2006-12-30T10:42:00.000-08:00

Mom and Maya came to visit last week, and hung around for nine days with me in Honduras so I could be all accompanied and stuff for Christmas. My last blog entry was during the first stage of that trip (picking them up from the airport in Tegucigalpa) so this one will pretty much pick up right where it left off.

I spent some time that first day I got to Tegucigalpa trying to get bus tickets arranged in advance for our travelling the following day, but wasn't able to do it because the bus lines here apparently don't sell passage in advance during the holiday season. But I did manage to make some hotel reservations and figure out the best option for a bus line, and when mom and Maya got to the airport and we had our happy hug-filled reunion, I already knew at least where we had to go next. Mom had changed some money into Lempiras in Houston so she already had some cash (although she got totally ripped off there), I had money, and we changed some dollars at the airport so by the time we got on the bus going north towards Lago de Yojoa, we were set to go for the next few days.

It was night time when we got to the turnoff to go to our hotel Agua Azul, and I got a nasty surprise that the bus lines which I knew ran from that turnoff in the direction we were going stopped at 5:30 (it was like 6:30), but luckily, there was a family getting off the bus with us in the exact same situation, and they had sent their relatives or friends in the area with a car to pick them up. They immediately offered to help us with a jalón (hitch) to cover the few kilometers down the road we needed to go. So off we went, Maya giggling every time the truck's wheel wells scraped against the tires because the shocks were bottomed out from so many people in the cab.

We got to the hotel and gratefully dumped our stuff in the room, a really nice cabin with wooden floors and walls (almost everything is cement or maybe brick around here, when it isn't adobe), and basically stretched out to relax. Mom and Maya were really tired from the trip. We shared an exhorbitantly expensive plate of comida típica at the hotel's restaurant and hit the hay.

The next morning, we got a leisurely start and hopped on a local shuttle around 9 am going farther north towards Peña Blanca, a small crossroads town that I knew pretty well from previous trips to the area when I was getting some training in coffee processing. We asked around about good places to see and how to get there, and had two locations recommended to us - a private ¨ecological park¨ called Puhlapanzak that mom had read about in a guide, and an archaeological park called Los Naranjos. We opted to check out Puhlapanzak and hopped another bus in Peña Blanca, a short ride that took us to a dirt turnoff. From there it was maybe a kilometer walk to the park, which was a pretty well-kept place with a lots of big trees and a river that had some places to bathe in at the upper end of the park, and an awesome waterfall down at the lower end. I later learned that it was 47 meters tall, which I guess is about 150 feet.

We had managed to while away most of the day by the time we left Puhlapanzak, but since Los Naranjos was only 3 kilometers from Peña Blanca, we decided to check it out real quick before heading home. A 15 passenger van (which they called a ¨taxi¨) took us to the entrance, where we argued with the gatekeeper about paying the $5 ¨for non-residents¨ entrance fee until they let us in for 35 lempiras, which came to about five bucks for all three of us. We had to walk through a sugarcane field to get into the park, because the first few hundred yards or so of the official trail were under water due to the lake's being at the highest level it had in years. Los Naranjos was extremely deserted and really pretty, especially the part where a raised wooden walkway went through an inundated forest. It felt kind of like being on a bayou in the states, at least in my imagination.

We had to leave Los Naranjos pretty quick because it was getting late. We grabbed some takeout food from a cheap comedor in Peña Blanca and went back to the hotel, packed tighter than sardines into an airport-shuttle sized vehicle that probably had something like 40 people in it. Maya didn't think we'd get on, but as I explained to her, one of the rules of transportation in Honduras is that there's always room for one more on the bus. :P

Back at the hotel, we relaxed some more and once again went to bed shamefully early. The next day, we were thinking about trying to get up someplace high on Montaña de Santa Bárbara, a national park that sits right on the edge of the lake, but we sort of realized that it was going to be too time-costly and we had no idea how to do it. So we went back to Los Naranjos instead and saw all the parts that we didn't have time to hike to before, including a somewhat undeveloped archaeological site that felt like a tropical park, although it was hard to figure out where the things we wanted to see were. We ran into a french-canadian couple that day looking for the rather scanty archaeology, and hiked around with them for awhile. As far as I can remember (maybe someone can correct me on this), they were the only other foreign tourists we saw the entire trip.

That evening, we got home a little earlier to have time to rent a boat at the hotel and paddle it out on the lake, which I did with mom. Maya stayed home, fearing the wrath of the mosquitos I think. We got some nice pictures I think of the lake at sunset, and possible of some white egrets although it wasn't possible to tell because mom had a digital camera with a busted screen. An hour and a half of that was enough, then we rowed back in and jumped in the pool before it got totally dark. That night, since it was our last one there, we splurged and ordered some of the hotel's fancy dinners and a few cocktails. Their margaritas were cheap and unbelievably good.

The next day was Christmas eve, and I was pretty worried about the transportation situation so we got up pretty early and got out to the main highway heading back south to Tegucigalpa. Getting on a bus outside from the side of the road like that often means you won't get a seat and have to stand up all the way to your destination, but we lucked out somehow and the first bus to Tegucigalpa that came by had seats for mom and Maya right away. A little farther down the road someone else got off and I was able to sit down also. Yay!

We got to Tegucigalpa a lot earlier than I'd expected and went over to Juanita's house (I had called her husband from the lake to let them know we were coming), because he'd invited us to spend Christmas eve and day with them. The reason for this, besides having a nice place to spend Christmas and hang out with a great family, was logistical - no transportation whatsoever runs on the 25th, and we wanted to get to my place by the 26th which meant having to spend the night someplace reasonably close to Choluteca so we could get there by 12:30 am that day.

Christmas at Juanita's house was a lot of fun. Although we felt pretty awkward at first, and were even thinking the whole thing might have been a mistake since mom and Maya didn't know them at all previously, we all sort of warmed up to each other and pretty much had a great time. Humberto took us around to see parts of Tegucigalpa on the 24th and on Christmas day, driving out to pick up some special rum that he was looking for on the one occasion and going to see the biggest, fanciest church in the city on the next. We sang and danced and had lots of fun on Christmas eve, and on Christmas day we made an apple crisp to share one of our special gringo holiday foods with them.

The 26th, all transportation concerns went relatively smoothly, except for the Agua Fría bus being way more crowded than normal. We just stopped for an hour and a half or something like that in Choluteca to go to the bank, get some lunch, and check email and arrived at my site around 2 pm. Mom and Maya, once more, were pretty tired so we grabbed some necessities at the pulpería and went right to my place to set up camp. We relaxed the rest of the evening and visited.

The two days we had at my site were both pretty relaxing as well; almost exactly the way it was when Dad and Daya were there. We got out and went on some hikes, going to the top of the Cerro Guanacaure and heading to Agua Fría a couple times, but did nothing real ambitious. We got to eat some more good Honduran Christmas food when Isaí's wife Elsy brought us down some chicken tamales wrapped in banana leaves, and squash cooked with so much raw sugar that it was turned black.

As all good things must come to an end, so did this trip. Mom and Maya's plane was going to leave from Tegucigalpa at 1:30 on the 29th, which I was slightly concerned about. 90% of the time I can make it to Tegucigalpa by 11 am using the normal transportation, but we were worried about possible problems and it was a flight they really couldn't afford to miss. Luckily, the pulpería owner Neri was making a trip to Choluteca anyways that day so he gave us a ride and we got there nice and early, rolling out of Cholu by 7 am and arriving at the airport in Tegucigalpa by like 10:15. I hung out with mom and Maya there for an hour and a half or so as we ate some pizza hut and said our goodbyes. Then I got on a bus and headed home.

So I'm back in Choluteca, typing up this report. I should be getting on a bus pretty soon to go back to my site, where I'm planning on staying for awhile heh. New Years' should be fun and from there I am going to start right away giving computer classes to a local girl as full-time as she or myself can manage. As always, I send my love to you all as well as hopes that you had a great Christmas and that the New Year will see you with health, spirit, and determination.

Gabe

Utter bullshit

2006-12-20T12:36:00.000-08:00

About six months ago, during the training period of the most recent Protected Areas Management volunteers, a group of four guys in that group were asked by an armed guard if they'd take a picture with him. They all got in the photo, unloaded his gun, and held it along with the guard for the shot.

I'd never have found out about this apparently irrelevant event, as indeed I shouldn't have (because who cares?) if somehow the picture hadn't found its way onto one of the computers here at the Peace Corps office in Tegucigalpa. From there somebody saw it and sent it to Carolina Cardova, the acting Country Director (or she found it personally) this week or last week. As a direct consequence - at least as far as I can tell - the four volunteers who were in that photo taken six months ago holding an unloaded gun with a guard were summarily kicked out of the peace corps. One of them was my new neighbor Patrick who was in the community of La Palma, an outstanding guy who I was really looking forward to working with and having as a friend for the remainder of my time here. Though I didn't really know the other three much, they are all held to be some of the most motivated, serious, and hardworking volunteers out there. So not only did I lose a friend, neighbor, and co-worker, but the program as a whole lost four excellent volunteers for doing something SIX MONTHS AGO that probably none of them imagined was an offense.

Now there may be facts that I'm not privy to. Facets to the case that escape my notice. I'm sure it's a very complicated case, a lot of ins, a lot of outs, a lot of what have yous......

Yeah, right.

I can't believe they are doing this. It could so easily have happened to me. Nobody was really consulted outside of the country-level administration before the decision was made, neither the volunteers in question, trainers, nor our project director. These guys set aside two years of their lives for the peace corps, jumped through all the hoops to get in (which commonly takes up to a year), suffered through three months of intense training, and were just getting settled into their sites and by all accounts enjoying their work. How is kicking them out of the peace corps at this point the best solution to this perceived problem? How is it the best option? How is it even necessary, to say nothing of appropriate?

I heard somebody mention some kind of so-called justification having to do with "loss of trust." Yeah, I think I know who really lost trust in who here.

They'll all be gone by tomorrow (two are already) but Pat is still around luckily, so if yall will excuse me I have some last minute hanging out with friends to do. Hopefully I'll manage to make it through the evening without doing anything to get myself kicked out of the peace corps.

Nuttin much

2006-12-16T09:37:00.000-08:00

I figured it was time to give the ol´ blog an update, even if all I have to post is that there isn't much to post. Following the theme from last time, I guess I could talk about my cat. Man, am I really writing about my cat on the internet? I need help.

There isn't that much to say I guess, just something specific that happened with her. A couple weeks ago I put her out for the night as usual. Although I think she was finally learning to use the sand-filled pail, I didn't quite trust her yet. Around midnight I was woken up by her cries, which is sort of normal on a given night as she is quite the crier. I heard a special note of what seemed like desperation in the cry, but I was too semiconscious to pay it much mind. She quieted down after awhile and I drifted back to sleep.

The next morning, I couldn't find the cat around the house. I figured she had gotten hungry and wandered off to the neighbors' or something (which she'd already done once), which was probably why she had been crying. I went about fixing breakfast, frying an egg, then grabbing my coffee pot to take it outside and rinse it out. Suddenly, I found my kitten.

Floating in the water barrel.

I gasped in horror and then sat down heavily on the back step of my house, then cried for quite awhile. Sometimes, I really don't like myself very much. I'm not talking about suicide thoughts ¨I hate myself I want to die¨ crap, but I just get so mad and frustrated about being a fuckup. That week was one of those times. I buried my cat and went back to life as normal within the same day, but it still hurts when I think about that poor little kitty who trusted me and liked me an awful lot drowning, and me within hearing distance not doing a goddamn thing. Well, that's the drama that my life was lacking I guess. Most if not all members of my family have already heard about this, but I felt it should be recorded here because I am probably going to save all these blog entries after my peace corps service for of a history of the experience to have when I get old and even more forgetful than I am now.

Since then, things have been pretty quiet around Agua Fría. I've been planning a lot for what I want to do next year with the schools, because with all this free time to figure out how I want to spend the rest of my service I'm feeling most interested in schools. I want to teach environmental education (which would be the project-oriented side) but not just that, any science education I can incorporate, trying to get these kids thinking critically and problem-solving and becoming more observant of the world around them in general.

The one other event that I guess has some significance was the meeting to wrap up the year of Maestro En Casa work. Myself and two of the three other teachers in our school went to Choluteca to meet with the people who direct the program there and do an evaluation of the year, discuss problems, and put forth some ideas for the coming year. It turned out to be more of an excursion slash meeting because we got on a bus and went out to Cedeño, a beach on the Gulf of Fonseca near Choluteca and had the meeting there. Not too shabby a locale, if I do say so myself. I had heard that the gulf beaches were substandard, but for my own personal tastes I would beg to differ. Now, I don't know about the swimming... the water was pretty turbid and one of my fellow teachers Denis told me he was almost run-over by a leviathan turd last year that he saw at the last minute as it bore down on him riding the crest of a wave. I'd stay out of the water, personally, though I'm not much for swimming in saltwater anyways. But the view was actually pretty awesome, you could see volcanoes in El Salvador and Nicaragua as well as Isla Del Tigre (an extinct island volcano in Honduras) and it was cleaner than I expected.

We spent a couple hours on the meeting, then ate lunch and lounged around for a couple more hours. I had a fun time visiting with my fellow teachers Nancy and Denis, who are some of the few educated Hondurans that I get to interact with on a regular basis and thus are important friends for me.

Today I'm in Choluteca planning my trip with mom. Looks like we're going up north a little bit to Lago de Yojoa to check out that area, and might spend Christmas with some Honduran friends somewhere in Siguatepeque or Tegucigalpa if it works out. I'm more or less in vacation mode now because this needs to be planned carefully. Transportation around the holidays in this country is a real mess. If you've never seen it, imagine the holiday rush in the States, and then double the percentage of people travelling, make 90% of them use public transport instead of private cars, and subtract 75% of the paved highways and you'll have some idea.

Merry Christmas! Grandpa, if you're reading this, I'm thinking of you!

Kitteh

2006-11-24T08:00:00.000-08:00

Last week, we were working in the office and I heard a strange, high-pitched sound from near my feet... almost like a cat crying. I looked down.... nothing. Heard the sound again. Man, that's wierd. It was definitely like a kitten's cry. Checked around my feet some more and finally saw it, a tiny little grey tabby kitten with the pinched-eye look you typically see in cats here that indicates malnourishment. It must have wandered in through the cracked door of the office, from who knows where… there are no houses that are what I would consider within walking distance for such a tiny animal. I reached down to pet it and it responded immediately, showing no fear and reaching out to rub up against my hand. As soon as it got the idea that I was going to pet it, it started crying more and kept it up as long as I wasn't touching it. Finally I pulled the noisy little ball of fur onto my lap and resumed working.

I haven’t had any pets here and didn’t have any plans to get one. They’re trouble to maintain, and I don’t have the patience to put up with ¨accidents¨ in my house and destroyed personal items for long enough to train them. Plus, pets are always a form of roulette… sometimes you get a really great one, and sometimes you get an animal that appears to be possessed by Lucifer himself, like several cats we’ve had. So I was just hanging out with this stray kitten for a little bit while I worked, but the darn thing took to me so readily that by the end of the day it was desperate anytime it wasn’t in my lap. What was I going to do? Leave it there to get eaten by a stray dog? So I stuffed it in my messenger bag and took it home. That night I fed it a little cheese and by bedtime I already wholeheartedly regretted my decision to take it home because it was the noisiest cat I had ever seen. Anytime it wasn’t in my lap, it cried. It cried and cried and cried some more. After I went to bed, it kept up the wailing for about half an hour before finally quieting down.

The next day I fed it again and left it in the house with a plastic pail full of sand, not knowing what else to do…. When I got home, three objects in the house were peed upon, two of which luckily were sheets of plastic but the third was my bed. Little fucker managed to get my pillowcase, sheet, cover, and a spot of the foam mattress in one shot. Since I got home late, I had to sleep in the hammock with a sleeping bag over me, rebuffing attempts by the kitten to climb in with me all night long in a state of half-consciousness.

The next morning was Sunday. I was planning on feeding the wretched animal to Isaí’s carnivorous dog, Tigre, but got sidetracked with cleaning up my sheets first and then I went on to sweep out the house. While I was doing my bedroom, the kitten suddenly got a bee in its bonnet to crawl behind my bookshelf. It was back there for all of three seconds, and then suddenly emerged holding a mouse that, I am barely exaggerating here, was 2/3 as big as the cat was. It stopped kicking in another couple seconds, its neck snapped. I was amazed, considering the kitten looked like it had passed the point of being old enough to eat solid food maybe three days previous (although I think its tiny size fooled me; it was probably due more to malnutrition than age). At that point I decided she could stay (Pretty sure it's a female), although she’s still in the red for those sheets. I haven't named her yet and don't really plan to.

So today I have to pick up some cat food and figure out a better litterbox arrangement while I'm in Choluteca, recovering from the massive amounts of food I ingested yesterday. Soooo good! We had a Thanksgiving feast at the house of Levi and Megan, two volunteer friends in Choluteca. It was much smaller than last year in San Marcos de Colón, but nice... and all the important food items were there: Yams (yes!!!), pumpkin pie, mashed potatos, squash, and a turkey.... sort of. I was the dude this year who brought the turkey, which sort of made me feel proud at first but over the course of yesterday that feeling slowly evaporated in a tepid wash of disappointment about the quality of the bird. I need to learn how to judge a turkey while it's alive.

What happened was, I heard a woman talking the other day in Agua Fría that she had a turkey she wanted to sell to someone who was supposedly going to breed them. Cool, I siezed the opportunity to cut into the conversation and said that if she didn't sell it to the other person first, I would buy it to eat for Thanksgiving. A few days ago, a local guy came to my house to tell me that they would bring the turkey to my house if I was interested in buying it. I hadn't heard back from my friends in Choluteca at that point so I couldn't commit to anything because I didn't know if we had an oven or not. They text-messaged me that same evening, so the next day I just walked over to the guy's house and bought the turkey - he wanted 350 lempiras for it, I offered 300, and he agreed to it without more argument. That should have been my first sign of trouble. Well, also and the fact that he told me it was two years old. It looked pretty big anyhow. All those feathers do that.

I took it to a neighbor's house and said I'd pay her some money if she would kill, pluck, and clean the turkey since I don't really trust myself to do that right. She was agreeable, and I went to Agua Fría right away to see about getting some freezer space reserved to store it in. That was Wednesday, so the very next day in the morning I took the now-frozen turkey out and hopped on the 6:30 bus to Choluteca to start cooking early.

When I finally took the turkey out of the plastic bags it had been wrapped in, I began to sense that something was wrong. Where was the breast? It looked like a ribcage with legs stuck on it. Well, whatever. We poked some holes in the sinew and put in garlic cloves, rubbed some spices on it, and stuck it in the oven. It was done in less than two hours and came out smelling awesome. The I tried to carve it, and there was nothing to carve. Most chickens literally have more breast meat than this stupid turkey did. It had some leg and thigh meat, but it was like tough beef. Ripping the bones apart and then trying to pick what meat there was off them was more effective than using a knife. Eating it was like chewing meat-flavored gum.

I apologized to my friends, but they all praised the turkey anyways despite the fact that it was like some kind of cruel joke. We had a good time visiting and playing Boggle. A lady from one of the spanish NGOs in town came over, and so did a JICA volunteer (the Japanese equivalent of the peace corps) so we even had some diversity. It was funny talking to a Japanese girl in Spanish, you could really hear the difference in her accent.

Going to take that turkey home before I catch the bus and make soup out of it hehe. Happy thanksgiving everyone.

Gabe

Everything's busted

2006-11-06T06:23:00.000-08:00

Well, my cell phone finally stopped working completely. I guess the honey was too much for it. The computer in Agua Fría seems to have gone on the brink too, and I am pretty sure we need to at least buy a new power supply, if not do more. Today I was hoping to buy a new phone (they are on sale right now, the cheapest phone that exists here for $30). Since there are no special deals and no real phone ¨plans¨, the hardware itself is usually pretty expensive. I kind of like the way you buy minutes though, it's basically a ¨phone card only¨ system where you buy a card when you need to and it lasts until you run out. No wasted time, no overcharging. It runs a bit on the expensive side, but I don't use my phone much so it's the best for me.

Incredibly, one of my projects seems to have gone somewhere. Then again, maybe it wasn’t what I did. Need clarification? Read on….

I mentioned in a previous entry that I had spent some time putting together a note to SOPTRAVI, the Honduran national road construction and reparation thingy. Suddenly, when I came back from my barely-planned vacation in Copan Ruins (more on that in a bit) I found out that SOPTRAVI had approved the reparation of the road – all the way over the mountain, through Agua Fría, and down the other side to the neighboring municipality. Woohoo! The reason I kind of suspect that it might not have been the results of my work is twofold:
1. Neri, the owner of the general store, went directly to the capital with a politician friend to put some pressure on SOPTRAVI to fix the road at about the same time I sent that note, and
2. I sent the note to the wrong guy at SOPTRAVI.

Nevertheless, it’s good to see that things are going to happen, and there’s another way that I can contribute with this. The piece of road that they are going to repair is not actually the same one we asked for; it’s more of a connecting route but doesn’t get close to quite a few small villages that could really use the access. However, the SOPTRAVI guys said to Neri that if these other communities want to get their road included in the project, they need to make their own little proposal (didn’t I already do that?) and present it as an add-on before the 17th of this month. Yesterday I was talking with some guys from these communities and they apparently have no clue what they need to do (there was a ridiculous amount of misinformation circulating already) so we’re going to work on that next week.

The school year is coming to a close, and with it, we are wrapping up the Maestro en Casa classes. Saturday was the final exam for the last class of the year, English, a tough subject that I have been fairly impressed with my students’ performance in. I think that my class has several students who are quite talented in language and have good creative abilities, which may explain why they seem to have done well in English and Spanish – even though a couple of them can’t solve a math problem to save their lives, which is one of the reasons we have class next Saturday: more ¨recuperations¨. I have to give three of them – two to a couple students in my 9th grade class (math and geography) and another English test to the 8th graders, more than half of which are still failing. I might have to give another English test to my 9th graders too, who knows, but my hopes are high.

Coffee season is upon us, and I’m looking forward to getting immersed in that. One reason for this is that I like doing coffee related work – it’s fun and interesting and technical; there’s a lot to learn and talk about. The other reason is that I’m still feeling kind of down and I need to keep occupied. Before I go into the details of that, let me say that it’s a bunch of crap that I wouldn’t really expect anybody but my mom to be interested in reading. I’m officially against whining about personal problems in a public forum such as the internet because it’s pure hubris to assume that anyone else gives a crap, but I think that my family members like to know about my mental/emotional state, and since they are so awesome and caring and supportive, I try to keep ‘em entertained.

Many months ago, around February or March I think, I was talking with a couple of veteran volunteers in Choluteca (both of which returned to the States awhile ago) and one of them mentioned how strange it had been when he’d visited his hometown during his service. ¨You don’t notice until then how much Peace Corps changes you,¨ he said. ¨It’s kind of depressing, actually.¨ That piqued my curiosity, because it seemed to go against other things that I’d heard. ¨Why’s that?¨ I asked him. ¨Is it, like, the culture shock?¨ ¨No,¨ he replied, ¨it’s just kind of… depressing. You’ll see.¨ The other volunteer agreed with him, but I couldn’t get any more details out of them about it.

This bothered me so I kept pondering it, and I think I have begun to better understand what they meant. It was my misinterpretation to think that they were saying the Peace Corps experience changes you in ways that are depressing. The Peace Corps, like any difficult/interesting life experience, simply changes you – assign a value to that if you wish. What’s depressing is that you start to feel like you can’t relate to your old life anymore – your old friends, old places, even the memory of your old self. It all starts to feel foreign and unnatural. On the other hand, you don’t really feel at home in the new place either, because twenty-two years of cultural training can’t be done away with in two, especially as an adult. So you end up feeling out of place everywhere, lacking a solid cultural context to help define your identity.

Don’t get me wrong; this is liberating. Everyone should try it. It makes you more capable, independent, and best of all (for me anyways) more fearless. But the truth is, most of us human beings need our home base, with its comforting absolutes. In a landmark bad move, God burdened us all with a need to belong to a group, be a part of an Us that provides its own self-approval because We’re the same, I’m like You and You’re like Me and We’re different from Them, and from there of course it’s a real small step to the conclusion that We’re better than Them.

Holy tangent, Batman. Anyways, what I’m groping around to try and get at is that this feeling of rootlessness seems to be the source of my unease, more than something as simple as a lack of work, which I’m stressing myself out less over lately because I was taking myself too goddamn seriously. I even have the fantastic luck of having a dad who was also a Peace Corps volunteer, and understands what it’s all about (insert joke about teenage angst and ¨nobody understanding me¨ here). But he’s in the States, and I’m here, and getting to see him in August was great but I still miss him and the rest of my family.

So there are other Peace Corps volunteers, and we certainly do have quite the informal support group going (there’s a formal one or two also actually). People who have been in the Peace Corps or have jobs related to it comment about how volunteers tend to cling together, and now I can see why they say that. We’re quite the clingy bunch. We stick together like covered wagons in Apache territory. Getting together with other volunteers usually results in a group bitching session or a group gushing session (more often both) about all the funny, frustrating, or just plain surreal experiences we share. For me, this is useful for about an hour a month, then I want to talk about other things – what kind of projects we’re working on and stuff like that. I think that I get the most out of hanging out with other volunteers when it’s in the normal context of our lives here – visiting friends’ sites or seeing them in mine, hanging out with gringos and Hondurans alike and talking about projects or cultural differences/similarities. That’s when I feel like I have an ¨Us¨.

Unfortunately, there’s times when I feel like I can’t relate to anyone, not even my fellow volunteers (Well, moreso than the stuff that’s a consequence of my simply being a seriously weird person). That really sucks. Usually it’s when we try to have a big Gringo Party and recreate our lost college-era Gringo Paradise here for a weekend. I have a problem with big noisy parties in the first place… it seems like the more people there are and the more mixed-up and crazy it is, the more I tend to retreat into myself. I can’t handle that much stuff at once, then I start to get depressed because everyone’s having a good time but me. Some of my loneliest moments ever have been at parties. Strange but true. Add that to the fact that such an event here, in the context of my new life (such as it is) is just really weird and gives me a what-the-hell-am-I-doing feeling, and you have a recipe for a bad time.

If you’ve guessed by now that I’m alluding to my weekend in Copan Ruins, congratulations. The funny thing is, I thought I was having a good time all along up until the morning I had to leave, then my frail wall of self-deception crumbled and I was left feeling lost… homesick for the home I don’t seem to have anymore, heartsick for the woman I apparently never will, and a little sick to my stomach from drinking more than one beer for the first time in over a month. I got on the bus feeling like the whole trip had been a mistake.

I don’t think I’m a particularly outstanding example of the human species, but one thing about myself that I thoroughly approve of is a distaste for wasting time with self-pity. As the bus wound back through the lush green countryside I was already beginning to regain a sense of perspective and feel better. Vacations are therapy for me not because of the escape from responsibilities (which if anything only makes me feel guilty) but simply because I’m traveling. Going new places. Watching the land change. For me, looking out the window of a bus or car as the country scrolls by is like what relaxation music or meditation or spurts of drunken debauchery are to other people – just the act of doing it unburdens my mind, makes me feel better.

To be honest, there were many good things about the trip. I stopped in Siguatepeque on the way there and on the way back to visit Vilma Valladares and her kids, the host family I had way back in the days of training. It was really a great experience seeing them again and I had even more fun than I'd expected visiting with Vilma. Now that my spanish level is pretty decent, we could talk about a lot more things that weren't possible before. She's a really sharp lady, something that I kind of missed during the whole two months I was there last year.

Also, it was great to see my friends again, no doubt about that, and it was important to take that opportunity to visit the ruins (not exactly what I'd pictured, but beautiful nevertheless) because I probably won't get another decent chance to do it during my time here. So, I eventually came around to the point of renouncing my feeling that I shouldn’t have done the trip. Sure, I could come up with a few things I regret, but what would be the point…. mostly they have to do with not getting to sit down and have a real conversation with friends I hadn’t seen in almost a year (but I’ll get a chance to rectify that in February if not sooner) and the usual girl-related regrets as well… heh, whatever. Damn women, giving me a bummer in my head. They were less of a problem when I had access to my family for heavy-duty emotional support. :p

Bleh. I pity the foo’ who read all that. Hasta la próxima.

Gabe

I went to the pitcher

2006-10-26T09:02:00.000-07:00

"Se fue a la porra" (the title of this entry) is an idiomatic expression I've heard from Isai quite a few times, which describes a common situation with the work around here. It means the person you were working with was left with some kind of responsibility and they just took off to go do their own thing. This week, that person is me because my peace corps friends in Western Honduras, most of whom I haven't seen since last January, are organizing a shindig for Halloween and I finally couldn't resist leaving my paltry responsibilities in Agua Fria any longer. I have gone on a couple decent vacations already (Semana Santa in El Salvador and with Dad in Guatemala) but the reason I consider this event a first is that I pretty much decided, definitely, to do it last night, and now I'm in Tegucigalpa getting some stuff taken care of before I continue on to the town of Copan Ruinas. If you didn't guess, this is a pretty touristy spot that has direct access to the Mayan ruins of Copan. I am still in the inicial stages of this journey, so I will have to give more details about it when it's over.

My work lately has been the usual mixture of different things, but for some reason I'm starting to feel a little less anxious about the lack of a big meaty project. I have always said, since I first started, that if I had any spare time I would put it into education projects and now I want to set aside time specifically to do that. I am starting to figure out what I'm going to be doing exactly in the next few months too, which is EXCITING! It's coffee harvest time again and there's a shitload of work to do with the cooperative, so I'm going to help out with any of that stuff that I can and work on setting up our office here, and start planning for the next school year which starts in Febuary.

This week and the last one I spent a decent amount of time running back and forth with Guillermo Martinez doing a small proposal for funds that we're going to send to the FHIS (Fondo Hondureño de Inversion Social) to build a couple cement culverts across the large creek that runs through his community of San Juan Arriba. Our computer here in Agua Fria has been messed up lately and working/not working erratically (I think it's either the humidity or irregularities in the electric current) so we had to go down to El Corpus to do that work, and then we found out that the FHIS wasn't going to do any cost studies, i.e. they had to present the entire thing with the costs, including quotes on prices for materials and stuff, so Guillermo went to Choluteca for that stuff and we went back to El Corpus yesterday to finish the proposal. It's short but sweet and I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. If it passes, which seems to be a more likely scenario with the FHIS than it is with certain other institutions, it will be one of the most significant things I have done here, which is ironic considering the relatively small amount of time it cost me.

Yesterday had a couple other interesting events besides that.... one was that, when we got there, the electricity was out so we had some dead time, and I went to the health center in El Corpus to have them take out a "torsalo" that I have on my head. What's this, you ask? It's a larva of the botfly, an insect that lays its eggs on you and the larva lives under your skin for a few months, feeding off your live flesh until it's ready to come out. I went to the health center in Agua Fria a few days ago, but the nurse there told me to go to El Corpus because "these Cuban doctors don't numb you before taking the larva out, they just start cutting. And they don't always get the torsalo out."

So, confident that I was going to get a serious medical treatment, I went to the doctor in El Corpus. This was his solution: Put me on a gurney to stabilize my head and squeeze my scalp as hard as he possibly could, while his helper hovered overhead with a pair of tweeezers waiting for the larva to show itself so he could grab it. It didn't work. I guess I have to wait until it gets bigger.... well that's freaking wonderful. I'll probably stop by REAL clinic in Choluteca that the peace corps will pay for on my way back to Agua Fria.

That same day in El Corpus, I bought a 750 ml bottle of honey (Flor de Caña rum label still attached) and took it back to Agua Fria with me. It was unusually cheap (50 lempiras, or about $2.50) and really good. I arrived in the afternoon and got caught up in some stuff with Isai, so it was about 7 pm and dark when we were ready to go back to Agua Fria but a rainstorm descended, so we headed to a friend's house to wait it out. While there, I decided to show them the honey I had bought and share a little because it was so good, and when I opened my bag I saw a liquid disaster. At some point in the trip from El Corpus to Joselino's porch, the glass bottle had broken (guess it wasn't as sturdy as it looked) and emptied its beautiful amber contents all over everything in my backpack, which of course only contained the following things:
My cell phone
All my papers and notes relating to the Maestro en Casa classes
All the notes I've taken relating to other work since like June
My calculator
A bunch of other less-important stuff

The cellphone, currently, still works, even though the honey oozed all up inside it and who knows how much longer it will last. I was able to SORT of wash off the notebooks, but the paper had absorbed that honey and is never going to be the same again. I didn't have time to clean my bag thoroughly so I left it hanging from a beam, but it'll probably be an ant nest when I get home anyways.

I need to get moving. Hope everyone is well!

Gabe

Melancholy Winter Days

2006-10-11T08:42:00.000-07:00

Been feeling kind of blue lately, stuck halfway between seeing Dad and seeing other people from my family, fighting off yet ANOTHER cold, not really in the middle of any significant projects and wondering if I ever will be. I suppose the title of the blog might conjure up images of me sitting around in my house and watching it piss rain, although actually I can’t even claim that excuse. The weather has been bizarrely dry and sunny for over a week now, which is not only very weird for this area in October, it’s really bad for the farmers who all need another month of rain for their crops or they will lose the harvest. Funnily enough, it just started raining right now as I’m typing this, so let’s hope the trend lasts.

Me, I’m just sick of being too hot all the time. I stared longingly at a picture of Dad and Daya in front of a snowy Tum Tum house for quite awhile the other day. I kind of thought I was supposed to have gotten over this kind of homesickness by this point, but I guess not…. A lot of things, actually, that I assumed I was ¨over¨ from my past life continue to dwell in my mind. I miss hot showers a lot. I miss my computer and the wonderful magical things it does still. I miss my bike. I miss Washington weather. Most of all, of course, I miss my old family and friends. We hang out a couple-three times a week while I’m sleeping, but unfortunately it’s not a good substitute for the real thing. I know I should be making friends here, and to some extent I have been, but my two best young friends that I had in this area both moved to Choluteca to get jobs and I see very little of them. In the rest of the community, I haven’t really found anyone to replace them who’s very close to me at all, distance-wise and age-wise. A lot of the people I work with or even interact with on a daily basis are simply old. This community has a serious deficit of smart young people, because, being smart, they have all left for the cities looking for work.

The times I do get for visiting have been sort of slow lately too. I normally spend a lot of time BSing with Isaí, but he’s been really occupied in his finca for over a month, trying to get some little coffee plants that he’s got in his nursery planted out in the finca, and he’s thrown himself headfirst into tomato and sweet pepper production too. I also had kind of an upsetting conversation with him the other day, in which he spent about an hour telling me how, besides himself and Juanita, nobody else in the area is capable of stepping up and running the coffee cooperative and he fully expects it to become inactive the instant they step down from president and vice-president (which is this month). He doesn’t seem to think anyone has the skills for the job, or the least interest in working for the good of the group, which may be true, but if so, then what the hell am I doing?

Saying that working with the producers around here is a big fat waste of time because they’re not interested in changing the way they work their fincas (not very many are, it’s true) and that they have even less interest in helping each other out has kind of depressing implications on what I am doing and continue to do. I got a little bit pissed at Isaí and I don’t think he really caught onto this or why I might be; didn’t make the connection between what he was saying and what it meant for me. Either way, if he wants to sit around and work his own finca and not worry about the other producers, that’s fine with me, but I’ll have to find others people to do projects with. This bums me out because I really like working with Isaí, but I need to do something and I need to believe in what I’m doing.

This not having a solid ¨main¨ project defined for myself is starting to really bother me too. More than half of my Peace Corps service has now passed, and I’m dangling at the end of a string with these funds from the Central American Bank of Economic Integration (BCIE), with which we planned to do the tree nursery project. We have been working on this proposal for very close to a year now, and the higher-ups really don’t seem to give a shit, nor have they in any moment since we started, that these projects actually get done. Two weeks ago I thought that I would know what the deal was by last week, according to what they told me. Last week, I called and they said we’d know this week. Still no word has come. When do I know when to give up on this? They keep saying we’re getting closer and closer to completion; that in any moment things might happen. Yet we still have not heard anything remotely like a definite date from the bank itself. I continue to keep myself busy with the Maestro en Casa classes and other little projects, but I want something more definite and solid to be working on, my OWN project, something substantial that afterwards, I can say ¨I accomplished this in the Peace Corps.¨ The truth is, the project we have planned to do with the BCIE money would be perfect, and I could even do a lot of that work on my own without much in the way of funds. But I keep wasting time with this proposal, for some reason.

I reckon it’s time to start thinking about what I should do if the BCIE project fails, and I can already think of several things that would be enjoyable. One is, I would like to work more with the young people of the community. I’ve neglected this sector in the past because, by and large, the young people here in Agua Fría are mainly looking to get out of Agua Fría, not stay in the community and contribute to its development. But the truth is, I pretty much consider any time spent working with the formation of young people time well spent. I could do some limited computer classes here in the COCAGUAL office with our one computer, I could do a lot with environmental and natural sciences education in the 1-6 grade school, and I could simply hang out more with the young people and share ideas with them. I recently acquired a chess set and have been wanting to put it to good use… maybe we could start a club of some kind.

Speaking of those small projects that I’m keeping myself busy with, there have been several lately since my last blog posting. One was resuscitating the soccer team. I stopped playing and participating much in the organizational aspect for awhile hoping they would get their act together, but they didn’t and myself and another guy named Amilcar who’s the real leader of the team got sick of not playing. :) So we organized a game for last Sunday, which was a disaster in most aspects. First of all, 3/4 of the good players that used to play with us have moved to Tegucigalpa and are working there. Not only are the best players gone, but nobody else seems to have any interest any more. We sent a challenge to another local team a couple days before Sunday with full confidence that we were going to have enough players because EVERYBODY said they wanted to play, and then of course ¨a la hora de la hora¨ only six showed up, counting me. We had to go door to door scraping together people and bring on three extras from other communities and we STILL had to play 10 vs 10. Then we got frickin’ shellacked like 11-0, and one of our players who’s always a pain in the ass started a fight and got himself expelled from the game. When I tried to explain to him that it’s better to deal with a few elbows and bad calls than lose a player, he said ¨But that ref is so horrible Gabriel, he doesn’t even know his own name.¨ Ok, whatever dude, I’m sorry that you’re 30 years old and you still haven’t learned to keep your mouth shut or behave yourself. The main thing that keeps me loyal to this bunch of jerks is Amilcar, who is an excellent guy and puts a lot of effort into the team even though they mostly don’t deserve it. I’d feel bad to leave him hanging, I guess.

Last week I also spent three days walking all over the place collecting signatures from the presidents of the local Patronatos (these are like the village councils who work on community projects). We’re putting together a letter to SOPTRAVI, the Honduras highway institution, soliciting them to come this year with the caterpillars and everything to turn that dirt thing that winds through the mountains to Agua Fría into something that most people would recognize as a road. I mean heck, it’s only twelve communities and like 6,000 people that depend on it. No big deal, right? Well, I got nearly all the signatures for that letter and it should be turned in by the end of the week.

I also did some follow-up stuff to a little extensionist work that I’d started a couple months ago, doing finca management plans, identifying problems and solutions and what kinds of activities people want to implement in their fincas this year. The project never really got anywhere, I guess because these guys all know exactly what they want to do in their fincas, but the main reason they don’t invest in improving them is because they don’t know how to manage money. I feel kind of lost in how to proceed with THAT theme, but at any rate I managed to get a couple producers interested in grafting a few mango and avocado trees, which went quite well. First I talked to my good friend Guillermo Martínez (president of the Patronato of a local community) who is a whiz at grafting, and followed him around a couple days that he went out to graft to see how the pros do it. Then I arranged a day to work with Don Foncho and Lucas Galindo, the interested parties, and went and got some stems from Guillermo that morning. After a few screw-ups, I think I was getting the hang of it and I’m pretty sure more than a few of those grafts are going to pegar, as they say here (stick). Ahem, si Dios quiere.

Check yall later.

Gabe

Five minute friends

2006-09-26T12:52:00.000-07:00

The last blog entry about traveling got me going on a track towards another theme I've been thinking about expounding upon, the conversations you have with random friends you meet traveling in Honduras.

First let's define ¨traveling¨ as going anywhere beyond the 2-km or so zone where absolutely everybody knows you. Now, as soon as you get outside that radius, you're eligible for Random Conversations. Some of these are random not because of their content, but because of the people or places involved. For example, when I take the bus to Tegucigalpa I can more or less expect to discuss the following things at least once, and more likely several times:

Where I'm going (the opener that never, ever fails)
The weather
Someone's relative in the states
The ten words of English that my conversational cohort knows
Whether or not I like Honduras
The corrupt government and how it's to blame for absolutely everything
Hurricane Mitch and how it's to blame for absolutely everything

The reason I refer to this kind of small talk as five-minute-friends is because people are so darn friendly. I talked with dad about this a little when he was here and came to a funny conclusion - that I actually like having these conversations, and that they almost never get old. Thinking about it I realized that what bothers me about the triteness of most small talk that I'd participated in before wasn't the lack of content, it was the lack of feeling. If I meet someone who's genuinely enthusiastic to talk to me, it doesn't really matter much if the topic is stale. People here, especially in the really local areas, are more skilled in talking about stuff than Americans. That's what you do when you get bored in the evening and there's no TV, no computer, no car to take you to the movies and no way to work once it gets dark.

I suppose I probably have a certain advantage as well for being an american, an outsider. But then, it's refreshing to be in a place where outsiders are actually treated with friendliness and respect. Some people go out of their way so much to be friendly and get a conversation going, they'll bring up some pretty goofy things.

A few weeks ago I was in Choluteca, and a fat middle-aged guy approached me who I'm pretty had had a few, but then it's hard to tell sometimes because you run into a lot of super-friendly people who say things that don't make a lot of sense. He held out his hand for me to shake, and asked me something about what I was doing there. So we got into the explanation about the peace corps, he gave me some fruit he was selling from Nicaragua, etc. Finally I had to go and, wanting to part as friends, he said:

¨If you're ever in Nicaragua, just ask for Mario!¨

Just like that. I loved it. It was almost the title for this blog entry. After a question or two I managed to get the name of the city he lived in (I forget its name now). Apparently if I ask anyone there for Mario, they'll know who I'm talking about.

Just this week, I was walking from El Corpus back to my house and passing through one of the aldeas on the way, I crossed paths with an older guy I'm fairly sure I'd met before. He said:
¨Hey, it's going to rain.¨
me: ¨Nah, I have time to get home.¨
him: ¨So, when are we going to go to Choluteca to eat some POPSICLES?
me: uh....
him: ¨Hey, do you read the Bible?¨
me: ¨Well actually...¨
him: ¨That's great! God knows everything! Well, see you later!¨

I also like the questions people ask about the United States, which are sometimes either inane conversations starters to kill a dead space in the talking or demonstrate a surprising amount of ignorance about the outside world. But then, a lot of these people have never been farther than Choluteca.

¨So, do they have rubber boots in the states?¨
¨Do people work where you live in the states?¨
¨Are there animals in the states?¨
etc. I like telling stories about snow (that's a sure way to get everyone's attention riveted).

In the news, I've been a little unoccupied lately. Awhile ago I started to pursue some extensionist-type contacts with a few of the cooperative's members, going to their fincas and checking out all their crops and making maps and talking to them about their concerns and stuff. It didn't really work out as well as I thought, perhaps because there seems to be a general assumption that there's nothing they could possibly do to improve their fincas besides waiting for God or an NGO to intervene. I try to start talking to people about what they could do to make more money, for example, and apparently they fail to see the connection between the idea that getting more income out of their finca is theoretically possible, and the reality of them trying new stuff. Gah. Next week, hopefully, we will do some grafting of avocadoes and mango trees, so I guess that's a step in the right direction.

With the tree nursery project, we had a meeting last week and finally got the assurance that our project has passed by the Costa Rican agency charged with revising the proposals once and for all with their seal of approval, and is now getting a final inspection from the bank. They said we might know this week what's up, and supposedly they're trying to get the projects rolling by October 15. I think November is a little more realistic, but this looks like we might make a real breakthrough pretty soon and actually *gasp* start working. Woohoo!

I haven't been playing soccer lately because the team is sort of disorganized right now, and although I could probably step in and get them rounded up, I don't want that to become my job, especially because i don't have the time for it. SUPPOSEDLY there is a game scheduled for next Sunday, but that's what they said last week and then there was no game. I should talk to the captain at least, see if he wants me to go take a note to another team's captain (I am the secretary, heh).

This Saturday there is a party of sorts in Choluteca to welcome a new group of volunteers that showed up, and say goodbye to another that is leaving by November. This time, there are PAM volunteers (my project) both coming and going, so it has a special importance for me. I will be saying goodbye to all the Chuck and Vince from San Marcos de Colon, and welcoming a new companion in the community of La Palma named Patrick, just down the hill from me. He came to my site to say hi on Saturday and seems like a pretty promising volunteer. He's good with Spanish and patient with a lot of the adjustments he's had to make. There's also a female PAM volunteer going to San Marcos de Colon who I haven't met yet, and probably a couple people from other projects coming to southern Honduras. The people around Choluteca are the ones I see the most, since it's pretty hard for me to travel outside that area.

Enough blogging for today. I hope this entry finds you all well, especially grandpa.

Gabe

The HTS

2006-09-12T12:34:00.000-07:00

I've been contemplating a blog entry about my adventures with the Honduran transportation system for awhile now (almost a year actually) but wanted to save up a lot of interesting experiences first. I might as well just write it though, because I'm starting to forget some of the earlier ones. The Honduran Transportation System, while not an official organization by any means, functions in a very organic and integrated way, all developed around the necessity of getting a large population that's too poor to own a car where they're going, in the absolute cheapest way possible. If there's no bus to a certain town and it's too far to walk, somebody in the town will start up a small business taking passengers and produce in their beat-up pickup truck. If nobody in the town has a truck, somebody from nearby will discover the opening and fill the niche. Any town with more than a couple thousand inhabitants will have a bus to it, most likely several. There are forty buses that run daily through El Corpus, the pop. 1700 head of my municipality, most of which continue out to more villages beyond or to the slightly larger town of Concepción de María. They run in all daylight hours and you're always guaranteed a spot... though not necessarily a SEAT. If you're ok with that spot being the produce rack on top, then the bus being full is certainly not a worry.

Customer service, to an HTS bus driver, has absolutely nothing to do with getting their customers anyplace on time, but rather consists in making sure everybody and their chickens get on the bus, loading/unloading up to several hundred pounds of produce or supplies for them, and stopping to let someone off or on wherever the hell the urge strikes them. Oh, and don't ever ask somebody when the bus is going to come. ¨Ya va a venir¨ is always the response (which can mean it's coming in 10 minutes or in 3 hours), so why waste your time? I am mentally designing a T-shirt for the HTS with the slogan: ¨What are you, in some kind of hurry?¨

Then there's the taxis. Towns as small as 5,000 inhabitants will have taxis, and larger towns have amazing numbers of them.... the general rule being quantity over quality. Choluteca, a city of some 100,000 people, has almost 600 taxis and they are all, without exception, complete pieces of shit… Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras with a population of about a million, has almost nine THOUSAND taxis, a few of which are not complete pieces of shit. However, the drivers can get you where you're going if you don't know the town, and they're cheap. There's no limit on ride distances either; I can go almost to my house in a taxi, as long as I can find a driver who'll do it and who has a taxi that can handle the road, and I'm willing to pay 400 lempiras (about $20). This may not seem too expensive, but when you consider that my living allowance is about $200 a month, and a normal ride in Choluteca costs 65 cents…. yeah.

The new innovation is ¨moto-taxis¨, tiny 3-wheeled vehicles with the motor in the back that look kind of like an overgrown version of those baby carriages you can tow behind bicycles. They're even cheaper than regular taxis, and probably cost almost nothing to buy, maintain, and refuel, which would explain their growing popularity. Their only weakness is the 10¨ wheels, which might theoretically be a problem sometimes with the roads here.

95% of the roads in Honduras are dirt and get destroyed every year during the rainy season (even some surprisingly major routes), but if the government doesn't come and fix it, the local Patronato will put together a work group and they'll get 'er done manually. There’s even unofficial freelance roadwork in the form of kids that throw a few shovelfuls of dirt in the potholes and stand around all day by the side of the road, waiting for people who pass by in buses to drop them token amounts of money. It’s a bit like the urban ¨squeegie guys¨ in the United States, something that’s not begging but comes fairly close. Well, any way it gets done, the roads mostly stay passable because they have to. I'm not saying this is necessarily a good thing (i.e. the government should theoretically be doing a lot more), but that's how it works. People make things happen when they're forced to.

This principle not only applies to road maintenance, but to the entire range of travel-related issues. When you set out to travel in Honduras, you'll definitely get where you're going - it's only a matter of how much time! Really, you never know what might happen when starting a trip. The situations that can arise are endless. People do protests constantly and block the roads. Cows block the roads. Flat tires aren't a matter of if, but when (since, why change a reasonably functional tire before it flats?) The gas stations have a funny habit of running out of gas. Landslides are extremely common (in september and october, the height of the rainy season, one will occur somewhere around my area practically on a daily basis). Traveling sometime other than during daylight hours simply isn't an option unless you're going between Tegucigalpa and one of the other most major cities: Comayagua, San Pedro Sula, or La Ceiba. And in those places, traveling at night is a great way to get held up at gunpoint around one of the bus terminals.

In spite of these problems, since the whole system is designed to fly by the seat of its pants and everyone is used to it, you can almost always find a way to get where you're going. When I went to the beach in El Salvador for Semana Santa, I didn't do any route-planning at all beforehand. I knew that the name of the town I wanted to go to was La Libertad, but I hadn't even looked for it on a map yet when I got on a bus in Choluteca heading towards El Salvador and basically started striking up conversations with fellow passengers to glean more information. (¨So, where are you going? San Salvador? Ah, I see. Me? I'm going to La Libertad. Yeah, I want to hang out on the beach for Semana Santa. Say, do you have any idea where that place is, or how to get there? Oh, I have to pass through San Salvador?¨ At this point the guy in an adjoining seat, who lives in San Salvador, will pick up on the conversation and offer to give you some pointers for getting around the city.) Keep in mind that I relate this as an example of what you CAN do, but certainly not what you SHOULD do. Planning always helps. You just have to be ready to discard or modify said plans when the unforeseen contingencies start to arise.

Speaking of random-stranger-assistance, there is a general rule I have learned with central americans. If someone here doesn't want to rob you or otherwise take advantage of you for economic gain, they will invariably help you out, or try to anyhow. I guess maybe it's the social system that develops in a difficult livelihood where people are forced by necessity to band together and rely on each other's help… plus I suspect that most Hondurans feel honored to lend a hand to el estimado señor gringo.

On a related note, one interesting theory I am developing about safety and trusting people is that you can feel a lot more secure in asking a certain person for help if you are the one who initiates the conversation. When you’re feeling lost, if you go out and ask a random person who looks trustworthy, your odds will be the best. Don’t just sit around there looking stupid and waiting for someone to offer assistance, because people who want something out of you are going to approach you to try and get it and you’re giving them lots of time and a wide opening to do this.

Getting back to the logistical problems of traveling in Honduras, I’d like to relate an anecdotal tale about something that happened to me last wet season. It’s one of those things I was waiting to include in my blog and haven’t until now, but I can still remember it pretty well. This happened sometime in October, at the height of the rainiest part of the rainy season, which, considering this place is called a ¨dry forest¨, was pretty friggin’ rainy.

I was coming back to my house from the city of Choluteca in the early afternoon with some foodstuffs and a spare foam mattress I had just bought. The afternoon rain hadn’t begun yet, but it had rained tons the night before and had been raining hard every day that week, so the countryside was pretty soggy despite the hot sun. The bus turned off the main road which runs between Choluteca and El Corpus and started up the long, steep climb on the narrower, more crappily-maintained road that goes to Agua Fría and many surrounding villages. In a flat part just above the turnoff, the bus suddenly slowed and stopped momentarily – there had been a small mudslide across the right side of the road up ahead during the day (the bank had given out), and about 2/3 of the road was covered. Luckily, or so the bus driver must have thought at the time, it was at a part with a fairly wide shoulder on the left side, and there was plenty of room for the bus to pass.

What Mr. Bus Driver failed to notice, however, was the small stream of water trickling alongside the bank, which had been rerouted by the slide and now crossed the road, running out along the seldom-driven left shoulder we were about to traverse. About halfway past the slide, the bus lurched heavily sideways as its left tires sunk axle-deep into the soupy muck that innocent little diverted stream had created, and stopped. All the women passengers freaked out for a few momoments (¨Nobody move, it’s gonna tip over!¨ ¨Get to the right side of the bus!¨ ¨Oh my god, we’re going to go right over that cliff!¨) but within a couple disaster-free minutes, we evacuated the bus. Upon getting outside, we could see that, despite being tilted at a worrisome angle towards a pretty long and steep drop-off, the bus was firmly stuck and not going anywhere... not over the bank, and certainly not forwards or backwards.

Some of the passengers pitched in and we worked on throwing some gravel in the ruts for traction, digging out around the tires as best we could, and engineering a new channel for that stream so it flowed off the road farther back. However, after a few attempts with no progress whatsoever, it became clear that we weren’t going anywhere without some more heavy-duty help. Both of the bus’s left wheels were sunk so deep into the mud that the frame was even digging in all along that side, and spinning the wheels was mostly making matters worse. It started to rain, softly at first, but then much harder, the clouds seeming to materialize and darken right overhead. I threw my crap inside the bus and put my poncho on, but took it off pretty quickly when I got too warm and was soon totally soaked, standing around outside with everyone else waiting for a care to come.

A pickup truck showed up eventually, and we hitched it to the front of the bus to pull it out, but that sucker didn’t even budge. When people realized what was going on, there was a stampede for space in the bed, but 40 people don’t fit in one pickup and most of us just hung out, waiting for another chance. It was at this point I think that the bus driver sent his helper down the hill on a bike to get a tractor from the big melon farms, probably 10 kilometers or so away.

Very soon another small truck came, and got loaded up also, but my mattress didn’t fit in there with the people packed crotch-to-butt and frankly, I’m not pushy enough to compete with Honduran women when it comes to getting a seat. At this point it was just myself and a few other people left, working a little more on digging the bus out but mostly waiting for the tractor. The rain had barely let up since it started, and after a couple more hours of waiting with no sign of any help, I figured it was time to bail out. We’d probably gotten stuck around 2 pm, and it was now getting past 5 o’clock – that tractor clearly wouldn’t be coming until tomorrow, and I didn’t want to get stuck 9 kilometers from my house in the dark and rain. So I threw the poncho over my backpack as best I could, shouldered that mattress (it was wrapped in plastic, thank god) and got to hiking. It took me a little less than two hours to get to Agua Fría, and the rain didn’t stop or even lessen much during the entire hike…. it continued to pour down relentlessly, which I guess was kind of nice for the long uphill hike, keeping me cooled off and grimly determined to get home.

I pulled into town at about 7 and stopped briefly at the general store to rest and relate my adventure, and was given some nice hot coffee and a wonderful plate of tortillas, beans, rice, and chicken. It was completely dark at that point and I wasn’t really in a hurry anymore, so I sat in the roofed patio and bullshitted with my local friends for awhile, watching the rain continue to hammer down. At around 8 pm, we heard the sound of a vehicle through the dull roar of the rain, and somebody sitting there said, ¨hey, there’s the bus.¨

¨That can’t be the bus,¨ I said. I knew it was impossible, because I’d just hiked up that entire road and, besides the fact that the bus was irremediably stuck, and that it was dark and pouring rain, the road was in some of the worst shape I’d ever seen it. At that point in the year, almost every ride involved getting out and helping to throw gravel under the tires to get it up the steep parts and even pulling the stupid thing with ropes, so how could the driver manage that road alone under such conditions? The sound of the vehicle continued getting closer, and presently a big metal apparition materialized out of the storm, headlights shining a dull yellow through the fog.

It was the goddamn bus. Apparently the tractor HAD finally come and pulled it out, and the driver had then somehow made it up that road without incident. You could tell he was pretty psyched, walking around the general store’s patio with a huge grin on his face and talking about the fact that going to such extremes to get the bus to its destination was just part of his job, because after all, the people needed their supplies from Choluteca, and if the bus didn’t run, who would bring these things to them? I reckon he earned the right to strut.

On the news front, I have been working lately on what I hope to God is a final revision of my proposal to the Central American Bank of Economic Integration for my vivero project which I have thought at various times I would start 6 months ago, then 4 months ago, then this month, and now it looks like maybe next month or November. In the last revision they added a bunch of new required fields and graphs and stuff that weren't there before, and introduced this complex convoluted website that we're going to use to submit reports and generally let the bank know what's going on with our objectives and how we're spending their money. Too bad we don't have internet in Agua Fría, ha ha. Sigh.

I'm currently doing what I've mostly been doing since March or so with regards to this project, sitting around on my ass waiting for them to respond. If I hadn't thought for most of that time that we could start working fairly soon and that I would be very busy with said project, I probably would have started something else by now, but I didn't think I was going to have the time. It's getting pretty frustrating never knowing when we might start, not to mention the fact that every time we wait for a long time and then have to submit the proposal again, we have to re-plan all our activities to reflect the change in seasons with the project's starting date, and I have to completely redo all the money-related analisis stuff because it needs to be represented by phases (they will only give out a maximum of 35% of the total funds per phase, 3 months minimum each phase) and also map out how much money is going to be spent in each activity and on what. It's over two days of tedious, difficult number-crunching each time. Bastards!

I finally got some volunteer visitors at my house a couple days ago, when three guys from my training group came up and spent the night (two from the Business project, one Protected Areas Management guy). They liked the place and we had a great time drinking rum with pure fresh-squeezed orange juice (the ONLY way to make that stuff taste good, in my humble opinion), and playing a very fun card game called 500 that Jeremy, the PAM volunteer, taught us. From what I gather, it's similar to bridge but maybe less difficult.

Today, I'm on my way out to Tegucigalpa to turn in my bi-annual project report to Luis Estrada and go to a meeting tomorrow about the Fair Trade market, which my coffee cooperative hopes to involve itself in, because they could get substantially more money for their coffee with that certification. Should be interesting.

Love you all,

Gabe

On the road

2006-08-22T09:16:00.000-07:00

For those that don't know, I have been away from site and not working for about 3 weeks now because my dear ol' dad came and visited me. We've been planning this for quite awhile. To get ready, I tied up my loose threads of work as best I could and on the 2nd of August, I left for Tegucigalpa to spend the night and head out to the airport the next morning and pick Dad and Daya up. There was some anxious moments at the airport because I was mistaken about he flight time (and, erm, airlines as well) but Dad and Daya rolled in just about an hour and a half later than I expected and there was a joyful reunion (man, I knew I missed my family, but actually I didn't realize how much until I saw some of them).

We went straight from the airport to a hotel in Tegucigalpa (the one near the peace corps office that myself and other volunteers always stay at) to decompress and leave some of the heavy bags that Dad and Daya were carrying. We wandered around the city a little bit that afternoon, checking into the office to say hi to Luis Estrada (but he wasn’t there) and later heading downtown, through the central park to see some of the churches and introduce my family to Juana María Ponce, the president of COCAGUAL who I have mentioned on here so many times. We had a nice visit with Juanita and her husband Humberto, and then headed out as it was getting on towards evening to check out a Spanish restaurant Dad and Daya had spotted right across the street from the peace corps office. It turned out to be a pretty fancy place, not somewhere I would ever go on my peace corps budget…haha…. but the food was really good and it was fun to eat at a nice restaurant for once.

The next day we got going as quickly as could be managed with Dad and Daya being as worn out as they were from the long journey, and grabbed a bus heading south to Choluteca. We actually managed to stumble upon the ¨directo¨ line bus right as it was leaving (I didn’t even know this bus existed) and the journey took about an hour less than I planned since we weren’t stopping every 2 kilometers to pick someone up or drop someone off like usual.

In Choluteca, we got some necessities taken care of (going to the bank, checking email at an internet café, buying food) and then hopped on the ¨chicken bus¨ to get up to my house. Dad and Daya were both relieved to get out of the unholy Choluteca heat and were sufficiently impressed by the steepness of the road that goes up to Agua Fría (that a full sized school bus goes up this hill has to be seen to be believed). That day, and during the rest of their time in Agua Fría was unfortunately some of the most uncomfortable weather I’ve seen here…. as hot as frickin´ April it seemed like, but humid as well… but we got some instant relief from the 2 km slog to my house when a thunderstorm blew in just as we arrived, cooling everything off.

We spent a very relaxing three days around Agua Fría; visiting with Isaí, Elsy, and the girls, hiking a little bit around the area to the top of Cerro Guanacaure one day and down through the village of Los Cocos another, birdwatching, visiting with folks in Agua Fría, or just chilling out on my front porch. The last day there, we sat out on Isaí’s porch with all of his family and visited for quite awhile, neutralizing a couple dangerously full beers in the process. It was a nice finish to this slow-paced portion of the trip in my site.

From Agua Fría, we left in the morning to check out the town of El Corpus, basically just doing a little sightseeing detour since it is a pretty scenic, sleepy colonial town (although I think Dad or Daya would tell you that it would be a lot more scenic with some garbage control). That same day we headed back down through Choluteca and out along the Pan-Am highway towards Nicaragua to San Marcos de Colon, near the protected area La Botija which supposedly has some cloud forest. The bus suddenly blew out two tires on the way, and since they only had one spare it looked like we would be stranded for awhile, but the driver made a call on his cell phone and they sent another bus along in an amazingly short amount of time.

In San Marcos, we wanted to hike around one day in the protected area, say hi to my volunteer friends that live there, and maybe just wander around town a bit since it is a very clean, pretty little pueblo. Unfortunately, the volunteer friends were all at a conference up on the north coast and since I was also counting on them for information on how to get to the interesting parts of La Botija, we had to do some random questioning of the locals to get the dope on what places would be interesting to check out. We got a couple different suggestions and ended up settling on one that sounded like a shorter hike to a waterfall with surer transportation out to it. This bus also ended up blowing a tire, surprisingly bad luck considering I had only experienced two flat-tire incidents during my entire year in Honduras before someone came to visit me. The jerks also had no spare or a wrench to change it this time, so we waited a little over an hour while the driver and his ayudante (helper) hitched a ride back to San Marcos to bring a tire out.

I was worried this would tank our plans to hike out to the waterfall, but we ended up still having enough time, although it was a bit farther than I had anticipated (at least 5 kilometers one way I think, maybe 6) so we didn’t have much time to hang out at the falls. On the other hand, the waterfall itself was quite a bit more impressive than I expected and the walk was nice too, even though a lot of the countryside there was kind of sad-looking thin pine forest that had obviously seen some logging in its days.

The rest of the ¨Daya¨ portion of the trip was mostly business and went through without incident. We took a bus back to Tegucigalpa the day after our hike out to the waterfall, I went to the peace corps office and the bank, and Dad and Daya took another walk through Tegucigalpa to check out an art museum that their guidebook mentioned. That night, we ate at the Spanish place again (look at me, the big spender!) and the next morning we dropped Daya off at the airport and got on a bus that same afternoon out towards Guatemala.

Daya told me that it had been a really interesting experience and she was glad that to have had the chance to come down here and see what my life and work is like in Honduras. I think she and Dad would say different things than myself about their impressions of the experience, since everything about this place was new and interesting to them, whereas for me everything is stuff that has long ago blended into the background, besides the fact of having my family to visit with. I certainly made sure to extract a lot of hugs from them since they are a scarce commodity around here.

Leaving Daya at the airport was sad, but on the whole I like the way the trip worked out, having a portion with just Dad and myself, because it gave us more father-son time and made traveling in unfamiliar territory a bit less stressful, since we are both capable Spanish speakers (Daya can speak and understand some Spanish, but not all the time). We started out on the two-day trip to Guatemala City the same afternoon after dropping Daya off at the airport in a Costa Rican bus line, ¨Tica Bus¨, which actually had air conditioning in the bus and professional service that would easily put Greyhound to shame. Well actually, now that I think about it, that isn’t so hard to do. Anyways, they guided us through the border crossings without incident, and the only low point was that we had to spend the night in a LOUSY and overpriced hotel in San Salvador at the Tica Bus terminal. We arrived in Guatemala City at about 11 am on the second day, took a taxi across town to the terminal for another bus line, Halcones (¨Falcons¨), and by 2 pm we were on our way for the final leg, up northwest through the Guatemalan high country to Huehuetenango.

This was the most interesting part of the trip for me, because we were suddenly traveling through country that was unlike anything I’ve seen before in Central America. This part of Guatemala sits on a very high plateau, much of it above 6,000 feet elevation, and all the plants are different. There was still lots of corn of course, but a lot less beans than my area and the corn was a different variety; more like what we have in the states. Also we began to see a lot of vegetables, such as carrots, cabbage, lettuce, green beans, tomatoes, and more. In the REALLY high parts we drove through, up to like 9,000 feet I think, people were growing apples, apricots, and even some minimal amounts of wheat (Dad said there used to be more, but probably the loosening of import tariffs for U.S. wheat forced the farmers here to grow other things).

It was night by the time we got to Huehuetenango, and in the center of town we encountered a surprisingly huge crowd of people, with obnoxiously loud music, tons of street vendors, banners, and other telltale signs that some kind of fiesta was in the works. We had to try about five hotels before we found one with a vacancy, and over the course of this exploration we learned that a big running event was to take place the next day, from the center of Huehue, which sits in a big valley, up to the top of the very high mountain range that runs alongside the valley. These mountains, the Cuchumatanes, contain the highest non-volcanic peaks in Guatemala, reaching well over 12,000 feet. Apparently the race was to start at about 6,000 feet (that’s where Huehue sits, approximately) and go for 20 kilometers up to about 11,000 feet, but not down again. Whoever invented this race needs to get his or her head examined.

We milled around in the festivities for awhile before losing interesting and retiring to our hotel room, and the next day we got going early without waiting to see the start of the race. At this point, Dad was really feeling anxious to get out to San Sebastian, his old peace corps site, and I was excited to see it too.

We rolled into San Sebastian on a local bus line a bit before 9 a.m. I think, right in the middle of the Sunday market. It was crazy! This town, which in terms of acreage must be significantly smaller than El Corpus, was so packed with people that it was literally difficult to walk in many places. Dad taught me that the local slang term for this kind of activity was alegre (Spanish for ¨happy¨). The crowd was a swirl of colorful traditional dress, and as we wandered past stalls looking for the eatery of one of Dad’s old friends, Doña Marta, I had the sensation of suddenly being in a completely different country, because nobody was speaking Spanish! The language in San Sebastian, and all the surrounding countryside, is ¨mam¨, one of the native Mayan dialects spoken in Guatemala. We also towered over the populace, which on average seemed to be a bit shorter than the people that live in my part of Honduras.

Despite the unbelievable crowd, we found our way without too much trouble and plunked down in Doña Marta´s comedor with a brief but warm greeting (she was too busy with business for much else) and ordered pipian, Dad’s favorite local dish. It was chicken and rice doused with this really great red sauce (ask Dad about what-all is in the sauce… I just remember something about three different kinds of tomatoes and a bunch of peppers and some other stuff). Incidentally, Doña Marta is the sister (younger, I think) of the guy in San Sebastian whom I am apparently named after. This Gabriel unfortunately died at a somewhat young age quite awhile ago, so I never had the chance to meet him.

After breakfast, which Doña Marta refused to charge us for, we thanked her and lugged our crap through more market madness to the house of a family that was also old friends of Dad’s. The old heads of the family had died fairly recently (although I think Dad saw them both when he visited in 1999) but we were greeted warmly by their daughter (this is embarrassing, I can’t remember her name), and her two young-adult sons, Carlos and Francisco. The place also contained her brother Miguel and his wife, but it was quite a large house and they invited us to stay there during our time in San Sebastian. We gratefully accepted.

We spent the rest of that first day in San Sebastian checking out the market and visiting with other old friends of Dad’s, especially the family of Lacho (another brother of Doña Marta’s) and Santiago, Dad’s old work counterpart and very good friend who ran the government reforestation program by himself for sixteen years after the peace corps was no longer sending volunteers to help out. That day Lacho was on-call with his job in the electric company and out repairing power lines, but we talked a lot with his wife, daughters, and grandkids, all extremely bright, warm, and friendly people. Later in the afternoon Santiago came in his pickup, which he uses for business carrying people and stuff from the remote villages into town and/or back out. We went out to his place, saw his little finca, and visited there for awhile as well.

During the next two days, we went out in Santiago’s pickup truck to the more remote villages up in the Cuchumatanes where he and my Dad had worked together 27 years ago, handing out seedlings to be planted and giving talks on the benefits and necessity of reforestation. We got to see some of the larger parcels of land that had been reforested through the program, and also the small areas and trees scattered throughout the villages that people had planted voluntarily. We also made an attempt on the first day to climb to the summit of the Cuchumatanes, but were thwarted by some clouds that rolled in and got us worrying about getting lost. Of course, the clouds cleared almost as soon as we got down out of the mountains.

It was interesting to see the lasting effect that the forestry program was able to have around San Sebastian, and to contrast the situation with what I face in my community and the kind of effect that I hope my work will have. One thing I noted is that the people seemed to need less convincing about the need for planting trees and protecting the soil, which is something that can really be kind of frustrating for me. I have moved away from direct extensionist work and more towards helping out this organization, the organic coffee cooperative, precisely because I don’t see that much serious interest in reforestation. It has been tried before, and in some cases failed spectacularly, because people do not like to give up any of their corn/sugarcane/pasture–growing sun to tree cover. On the other hand, where there are coffee fincas in my area, people are more than happy to leave trees to grow and even plant them because the relatively low elevation in my site makes shade trees (and lots of them) an absolute necessity for success with coffee.

The institutions have also tried to get people to adopt more soil conservation techniques, such as live barriers, terraces, retention walls, live fences, etc, but with the exception of live fences, the only places where you actually see these things is where the institutions have basically paid people to construct them, and in their own land! Despite the wide public acknowledgement I hear about the need to protect the environment, there are very few people around Agua Fría taking an active role in doing this. Contrast this with the area around San Sebastian, where nearly everyone had some kind of soil conservation technique in their corn plantations, including things that are an awful lot of work to construct like big terraces with certain types of grass cultivated carefully on the edge for retention, or full-blown rock wall terraces. I began to speculate that this must have something to do with the underlying social history of the place. The people farming that land around San Sebastian have not only been doing so since recorded history in the area, but LONG before that. It is their native land that they have been working since basically forever, and they have a much stronger tie to it.

On the other hand, most of the people in Agua Fría and the surrounding villages are from immigrant worker families that were brought in to farm the coffee and sugarcane plantations as recently as a couple generations ago, and who have never owned their own land, or own very, very little of it. They don’t have the same ancient tie to the place, most of them don’t have the same motivation for protecting it because the land they work doesn’t even belong to them, and they are not what you would call farmers – they don’t control resources or manage their crops or concern themselves with improving a plot – they only work it with their machete or planter for the cruel joke that passes as a daily wage around here. This is kind of a depressing thought for me, because, as Dad pointed out in referring to the extremely bigoted way the indigenous Guatemalans are treated by the authorities, it is hard for someone in our position to change this system that is fundamentally unjust. However, we both do agree that education will always be a genuine benefit for the people, and if it’s the only lasting thing we can do, it might also be the most important.

This post is getting unbelievably long, and so I am going to try and be a little more concise for the rest of it. We spent lots more time in the evenings in San Sebastian visiting with Lacho (who showed up on the third day) and his family, and also with Miguel and his sister and her boys. They were all really wonderful people and it was great to get to know them. They insisted that we come back again and visit as soon as possible, and we tried to express our desire to do so without being too specific as to a time frame. ;)

The fourth morning in San Sebastian we had to leave. Instead of taking the bus all the way back to the capital on the way out of Guatemala, we talked to Santiago and offered to pay him gas money and the daily earnings he would be missing if he’d accompany us for a couple more days in Quetzaltenango (also known as Xela) and Lake Atitlán. Having a vehicle would make us more flexible, and Dad also wanted more time to hang out with Santiago. He agreed, and it worked out well. I was also glad to get the chance to know Santiago better.

We spent one afternoon and the next morning in Xela, which is a very picturesque old colonial city. We had some good food, saw the market and its beautiful central park, and checked out its natural history museum which contained some hilarious examples of taxonomy gone wrong (I especially liked the pelican whose head was attached with packing tape). We should take Aunt Nancy there some day.

After leaving Xela, we continued to the town of Panajachel alongside Lake Atitlán, a very touristy locale bustling with foreigners and Guatemalans who employed many ingenious ways to part these foreigners of their money. To be fair, much of the crafts, fabrics, jewelry, art, etc on sale there were nice pieces of work. But at the end of the two days we were around Lake Atitlán I was ready to get the hell out of there. Some of the people who were on foot peddling fabrics and knickknacks were so insistent that it was hard to enjoy the place for more than a couple minutes before you were being pestered again. I resisted my best, but ended up buying a couple things for Maya and Mom, and a hackey sack for myself. It was worth it, I guess.

We did manage to extricate ourselves from the vendors once in awhile for long enough to enjoy the scenery, which, honestly, was breathtaking. Lake Atitlán is an outrageous shade of deep blue, an enormous crater ringed by a steep emerald green rim. Three huge volcanoes sprout up on the opposite side of the lake from Panajachel. You can tell just by looking closely, especially from a boat in the middle of the lake, that it is one gigantic caldera (like Crater Lake but much bigger and more ancient) and that the three volcanoes, which themselves are huge, have sprouted up near the side of it after some kind of unimaginable catastrophic eruption which created the caldera, long before human beings ever arrived in the New World.

After two nights in Panajachel, our trip came to an end. Santiago left in the afternoon before the second night and Dad and I got going the next morning before the crack of dawn in one of Guatemala’s garishly painted school buses towards the capital city. From there, everything was a reverse of our trip in, including the night in San Salvador (but we stayed in a better hotel this time) and went off without a hitch. Back in Tegucigalpa, I called Juanita to let her know I was officially back in business and on the spur of the moment she asked Dad and I if we’d like to be driven to the town of Valle de Angeles in the mountains near Tegucigalpa that afternoon to check out the nice scenery and the arts and crafts. We said hell yes, and they shortly picked us up at a nearby corner. Valle de Angeles, which I’d heard about but never visited, was a really nice place and had some amazingly cheap, well-made carvings, hats, paintings, and all manner of craftsmanship. We sat down next to the central park and had some great street meat and a beer, but had to bail out sort of hastily and head home because a storm descended. However it was a great side journey and I was delighted to get to know that area. I will definitely head back up there some other time.

The next morning before going to the airport, Dad finally got to meet my project manager Luis Estrada, and we had a visit about the program Dad had worked on in Guatemala and his old project manager, Basilio Estrada, who Luis is a friend of. After that we took a taxi to the airport and I saw Dad off, both of us making valiant efforts not to cry and expressing how glad we were for having had the chance to take this trip. Besides finally getting to see some people from my family after more than a year, it gave me some very interesting new perspectives on my peace corps work, and I think Dad probably feels the same way.

There’s one more item of news that bears reporting before I close up this behemoth of a post. The day I saw Dad off at the airport, I didn’t go anywhere myself because I had my mid-term medical exam with the peace corps the following day. With the rest of the afternoon free, I mainly lounged in my hotel room and watched TV because I was feeling quite under the weather with a cold. That evening some of the volunteers from my training group that I haven’t seen since like, freakin’ January showed up and we had a great evening making rum and pizza disappear and catching up on everyone. Medicals the next day were a breeze; I found out I don’t have any parasites (woohoo!) and even got my teeth cleaned. That evening we went and saw Pirates of the Caribbean 2: Curse of the Ludicrous Plot (or something like that) and I went back to my site the next day, where I am now typing up this post in advance for the next time I go to Choluteca since it’s really too much work to accomplish there.

Dad and Daya, if you feel I left lots of things out and/or would like to add your own perspective or comments on the trip, I am pretty sure I can set this blog up for more than one contributor – i.e. you could write something and post it here as well if you’d like. Send me an email or leave a comment if you do.

Peace, Gabe

OK seriously, women's development

2006-07-28T06:49:00.000-07:00

Gender and women’s development in Honduras is a big issue. It would be pretty noticeable for me even if all the NGOs weren’t talking about it, because the gender roles are so much more defined than what I’m used to. Coming directly from the states I would have thought of this as innately bad, because that is what has become mainstream knowledge for us. However, in certain ways, especially in the rural areas, you can see how the system makes sense to them. Women cook and clean and raise kids because almost all of the paying work available is very physical work. More do home-oriented small businesses such as bake or run a pulpería (mom and pop store), but these are usually just part-time. At least somebody in the family is sure to dedicate themselves to child-raising, as opposed to in the United States, where this job is in many cases usurped by TV and video games, extremely poor substitutes for the presence of a real parent. It certainly shows in their family unity.

To be honest we could use some of this ethic in the states, where the women's movement has blown by its objective and passed into the realm of Victim of Commercial Culture. It seems to me we failed to create an environment where women feel free to determine their own destiny and now, instead of being told they have to marry and have children to be successful in life, they are told they have to work as many hours as a man and make lots of money and buy lots of things.... to be successful in life. I don't know how qualified I am to say this, being a man and all, but it seems to me that if what a woman wants to do is raise children, that should be cool too. SOMEBODY has to do it. I'd certainly pitch in as a husband or even stay at home if I had a professional wife who loved her job too much to leave it, but at the moment we are definitely putting families on the back burner. Sorry for the tangent, but I had to say it (ask Maya, she knows).

Back to Honduras: so although I wouldn't hesitate a moment in saying they often have more family togetherness than we do in the states, the situation for women certainly isn't all roses. First of all, the problem, in my opinion, isn't that they are staying at home and raising children or doing family businesses or cooking or cleaning or whatever. On the contrary, many women are apparently happy in their roles because they feel useful and needed (no illusion for sure, the women do ALL the heavy lifting in this society). They don't have washing machines and ovens and tv dinners and vacuum cleaners and TV to keep the kids busy, so they have a full job all day long. They also take a lot of pride in their work, and the times I have tried to help out in ¨women's business¨ such as cooking or cleaning when there was already someone else doing it have mainly resulted in embarassment for both parties involved.

The problem, then, is not that women do all these jobs and not really much of anything else, but that they don't really have any say in the matter. The patriarchal fathers are expected to ¨keep control¨of their house and their woman (even though they contribute essentially nothing to it besides money) and they often do so in a way that isn't respectful to the voice of the women. There are no statistics available I'm sure that could be remotely accurate with regards to domestic violence. The machismo culture demands of a man that he rule with force, because a REAL man doesn't ask questions, he gives orders. A man saying thanks to his wife for bringing him coffee? Not likely.

Ironically, there also exists an active pressure for men to cheat on their wives. It's not like they don't know it's bad, but it is certainly one of the best ways for a guy to prove his manliness to his male buddies. Someone who has various women is often looked upon with respect, if not awe. When you consider the way women are looked upon who dare to cheat (or even, sometimes, to have more than one boyfriend in their life), this blatant double standard becomes immediately obvious.

I've thought a lot about what I could possibly do with regards to women's development, but as a male, it is really really hard. I didn't notice this as much until a couple months ago, when Nicole, one of the previous volunteers in El Despoblado, came to visit her old friends from the area, a group of women that I have talked to a fair amount (the son of one of them is a fairly good friend of mine). The easy trust and friendship that she had with these women blew me away. It made me realize more clearly how reserved and even tense the older women are when talking or working with me. With women my age, it's hard to keep track of the work through all the flirting. I have tried to work through this with basically no success. It's interesting, because female volunteers often complain about the difficulties they have of working with men who aren't really disposed to take their ideas seriously. Whereas they miss out on one half of the society's activities, I miss out on the other half, and I'm not entirely convinced I have the better deal, even though being a guy helps a lot for working with the male-heavy community organizations. The women are just AWESOME. I look at the 50 year old Honduran doñas who have raised 8 children and held their house together for more than thirty years and still go about their daily lives with a cheerfulness and lack of complaint that absolutely puts the men to shame, and I am awed.

So to reiterate the question, what can I do? At this point I am trying to be patient with the women I know in the community and hold on to my conviction that often times, simply being a good person and setting a good example can have surprisingly large effects in this world. This, along with eventually being a good parent, is what I consider the surest investment of my time to improve the world. Everything else is more unsure. This attitude also helps me to not get too uptight about my work when things aren't going well, because I know that the value of my friendships with the people in my community is not something to be dismissed lightly, at the very least for myself.

The secrets of J.J.

2006-07-13T09:27:00.000-07:00

Well, it really has been an exceedingly long time since my last blog update. I've made three tries at it and been thwarted every time by computer problems. The most recent attempt, I took mom's advice and started typing my post up in Word beforehand so I couldn't lose it with an Internet Explorer problem, and then the power went out. I might as well just type up the posts online since if I remember to use blogger's save feature, they at least get saved on a remote computer that won't lose them.

Since I have so much catching up to do, I am going to keep this post mostly to news and try to do more musings and stuff in my next one. That way I will at least be sure to get the basic stuff out.

June started out stormy and then turned just plain rainy, with some weather that kind of reminded me of last september.... gray and drizzly all day long. Pretty soon my house was all humid and the doors and windows had expanded again, making them a pain in the butt to open and close. I spent a lot of time in June working on Maestro en Casa related stuff, because we had the ¨recuperaciones¨, which are make-up exams for people who have failed a class to try and pass an exam that counts for all the marbles. I had two students who failed math, and the majority of my English class failed, so I had lots of work grading papers, preparing more exams, and scheduling some extra study sessions for the people who wanted to brush up some more before taking the recuperation.

I should mention here that this exam is usually when the teacher removes all the difficult questions and hands the kid their passing grade on a silver platter, which must be why my math students didn't know a damn thing they should have about math, and my english class was full of students I could swear failed last year. I've probably mentioned before that the flagrant apathy for academic standards pisses me off, so I explicitly told both classes that the makeup exam would be every bit as hard as the first one, but with the same format and the questions changed. Both my math students failed again (they got worse grades the second time, as far as I can tell they didn't study) and only like 6 of the 30 english students taking the recuperation passed. They will get another chance in November, but I figure probably only the most motivated will pass that time since they will have had so much time to get rusty. Sometimes I feel bad about the results of English, but mostly I don't because almost none of the people who failed turned in all their homework or came to every day of class. The people who did that passed. Coincidence? I doubt it.

So we passed through that stuff and have almost gone all the way through Spanish as well. It was interesting for me to teach this class because of how much easier it is to teach than English. I have had at least 8 classes of Spanish grammar, that I can remember, and maybe 2 of English, so ironically I am better-equipped to teach my second language.

I deviated from the book a little bit, cutting out some of the grammar stuff that is just a big fat waste of time (learning the different types of determinants, grades of adjectives, etc) and adding in some writing practice. I think this has gone very well, and while the writing abilities of most of my students are still apalling, they seem to have made noticeable improvement. This is pretty cool considering the short time we've been working on it, and the fact that being able to write coherently might be the most important thing I can teach them.

More recently, we had another round of beekeeping workshops, this time with the theme centering around how to raise good queens and keep the colony from being polluted by ¨bad¨ genes; bees that don't work hard or keep the hive clean, or bees that are too agressive, etc. In some cases people WANT really mean bees, because theft is such a problem, but that's another story. This workshop was just as fascinating as the first, and I'm looking foward to the next (and final) one. Tomorrow I'm going to a meeting related to this project, and we'll see what the actual logistsics are with the beehives they are supposedly going to give away. Apparently it is Heifer International behind this, doing one of their ¨pase de cadena¨ projects (I don't even know how to translate this well into English... ¨chain passing¨?). AHPROCAFE, an organization that really does tons for coffee cooperatives in Honduras, is managing the project and funds/materials it seems, which must be why it's a bunch of coffee producers participating. I guess eventually they are going to hand out some hives, and the compromise of the person taking the hive is to give away the first queen they produce and teach the person they give it to how to beekeep. I wonder how well this theory is going to really work, considering how complicated and scientific beekeeping is. It would take a damn long time to teach someone about it.

Heifer does this kind of project with cows too, stipulating that when they give someone a cow their compromise is to give its first born offspring to another person. It's a nice idea, but in the functional reality, it really isn't that much different than giving people money in my opinion. When anything goes wrong, as things inevitably do, people start to lose interest, the chain gets broken, they sell their cow for a cool 7,000 lempiras or so, and the local Hondurans who are supposed to be monitoring the project turn a blind eye. Of course they're not going to tell on their neighbors; what does Heifer expect?

So it will be interesting to see how the project plays out in the long term (for me personally, it's a pretty small blip on my radar) but at the very least these workshops are really interesting.

After that, me and the good people of COCAGUAL busied ourselves with a new little thing that came up: a workshop on organic coffee farming right in our home of Agua Fría! I guess it was a little more than a month ago, somebody from AHPROCAFE called up Juanita and asked if we would be able to get everything ready to host the event, which would have experts from Costa Rica running it and attendees from organic cooperatives all over Honduras. Isaí initially thought at first that the area didn't have the infrasture or the advancement necessary in organic practices to pull it off, but I said it seemed like a good idea and Juanita was practically chomping at the bit to do it.

So the cooperative said yes, and we began to organize the nuts-and-bolts type particulars: housing for 30-35 people coming for a week, food, materials, places to work, fincas to go to, and buying all the special materials we would need. We were tighest on lodging, so actually I ended up volunteering my house with my two foam mattresses for a couple people, figuring to just sleep in my hammock. For the cooperative, this was really a big event. Other cooperatives coming from all over to see our area, and two very famous experts from Costa Rica, one of which is sort of world-known I believe (or at least very locally famous in central america): one J.J. Paniaguas. The Js stand for Juan José as I recall, but as that's spanish people call him ¨hoeta hoeta¨ or just ¨hoeta¨. Isaí told me about this guy in reverential tones when we first learned about the workshop, saying ¨since he's coming all the way to visit us like this, then he must have to give us all his secrets.¨ He said it without a trace of irony, but I asked him,

¨His secrets?¨

¨Yes. The secrets of J.J.¨

It was like dialogue from a kung fu movie or something. I figured the guy must be some kind of scientist, but Isaí talked about him like a sort of revered guru. In a way, it turned out he was more correct.

The workshop started last week on Tuesday, and went until Friday. One of the experts present was a real coffee farmer, whereas J.J. farms vegetables, but is famous for the breakthroughs he has made adapting Japanese techniques to Latin America, and the incredible success he has had. He is actually not a scientist or even a person with a high level of formal education, but an extremely driven self-educated guy who, like many organic enthusiasts in the states, preaches it not only as a simple farming method but as a way of life. The first day, we sat through a few basic presentations by the coffee expert (really nice guy, too) and then J.J. came up and floored everyone, pouring out all his ideas in a speech that would make the most highly-paid motivational speaker from the states jealous. In a sense, it reminded me of that, too.... somehow, he had a way to relate all of the world's evils to a lack of organic farming, and likewise present organic farming as the cure to all these evils. Of course, he also had a very strongly religious and family-centered message, which if you cut out the Christian propagand I was pretty strongly in agreement with. I've never had much faith in trying to make people be better people, but I reckon that's not really my calling, and most people aren't as skeptical as me in that regard. The Hondurans responded very positively, and with that good start, the rest of the workshop was practically smooth sailing. I learned a lot, everyone else learned a lot, and we hardly had any technical difficulties.

There were some problems the night of the little going-away event because some wise guy hired a band (¨Los Pérez, the same guys that played at the May 3 thingy) to see off the group, and of course a bunch of locals showed up to raise a general commotion and look for free booze, having a completely erroneous idea of what was going on. I left early because I had to teach Spanish the next morning and didn't get to see the eventual confrontations, but I guess nobody got killed or even machete-wounded. Overall the event was a tremendous success for the cooperative. I can't even claim to have played a major role, since it was mostly Isaí and Juanita that worked on the organizational stuff, but I helped out where I could and enjoyed myself in the workshop. I guess there will be a follow-up in November, also in Agua Fría, and it should be good times.

I had an uncharacteristically large amount of free time this week and tried to start working on a little personal project I have been planning, to go to the different fincas of members of the cooperative and help them plan out how they want to improve them and how they are going to manage their money to make those things happen (easily the biggest obstacle to the small farmers getting things done around here... nobody has a clue how to manage money). I've done some preliminary trips to learn about fincas, and next week and I'm going to work more on it, hopefully spending a couple of days analyzing finances also with people.

Our tree nursery project proposal apparently passed, or it is ¨at 100%¨ at any rate. We still can't tell for sure I guess. The news has been so drawn out and come in such bits and pieces we never really had one moment to feel elated about it. I guess maybe that will happen when we figure out when/if we can actually start working on the darn project, or if it's just a red herring. News could come from the bank any day!!! yeah.....

That about wraps it up for the happenings since June. I love all of you, and I'm sorry Sam that I didn't get the chance to call. I got stuck in my site working on stuff, as seems to happen to me. I wonder if we'll get to talk before you get out of Australia? You got a land line? Hope things are going great over there! We Hensolds are just heading south, fast aren't we. :P

Gabe

This was about women´s development

2006-06-12T06:48:00.000-07:00

Wow, I just spent over an hour typing a post and it all got deleted. I´m sorry, but I´m too pissed off to make myself do it again.

The game starts at eleven

2006-06-02T07:29:00.000-07:00

After a few weeks off, I´ve been playing soccer again.... and rather than against the same nearby aldeas we always play, I went up to the military post in Agua Fría Arriba last Saturday and challenged them. This is the group of like 17 soldiers that are ostensibly protecting the forest, thanks to that initiative by Mel Zelaya (the new president of Honduras). They said sure, and so we scheduled the game for Sunday, the following day. Per the soldier´s suggestion, we agreed to start at 10 am, which for us is 9 am because the country decided this year to use daylight savings time for 3 months, something it has never done before. However, since life in the campo revolves around the sun and not a clock, everyone here is using ¨la hora vieja¨, the old hour. Honestly, I should have known better than to agree to this, but the team was all like ¨sure, we´ll be there at 9!¨ This of course was a lie, but the kind of unintentional lie so totally commonplace here where somebody tells you they´ll do something that they´d sure like to do, but if they actually stopped and thought about it realistically would realize that they´re not going to do.

In the case of soccer games, there´s a rule around here: the game starts at 11. I personally have tried to get them to start earlier, have told everybody 3 times the week before that we were going to start at 9 because of the midday heat and because 4 games needed to get played those days; I´ve gone around dragging people out of their houses at 8 am and then by the time everybody is ready it´s 9:30, and it´s 10:30 by the time we get to the field and then of course they have to goof around and warm up for half an hour or 45 minutes before starting. I´ve finally gotten used to it because it´s not worth the headache trying to start a game earlier. It´s like nailing jello to a tree; impossible. It was just interesting playing the soldiers because they got to the field right on time and their lieutenant, the guy I talked to, was getting on my case constantly from that point on about what time we were going to start the game. That was me a few months ago, but I guess I´m starting to lose my gringo obsession with punctuality. The fact of the matter is, out here it just doesn´t matter that much. It´s a bad habit I´ll have to break when I get back in the states, but it isn´t something I´m ever going to change in my Honduran friends, so I have to either adapt or go crazy. It was just kind of funny seeing our total lack of organization again through the eyes of the soldiers.

But hey, we started by 10:30 (that would be 11:30 by the official time), the earliest I´ve ever seen a soccer game begin. And incidentally, we won, and we won the second game against them on Thursday too. They got punished after losing on Thursday by the new lieutenant and had to run behind the hummer 5 kilometers back to their post. He made a speech trying to recruit some of the locals before we started the game, but after seeing that and the way he yelled at his players the entire time I don´t think anybody on the team was really psyched to join the army.

One interesing bit of news of late is that Nicole came to visit, one of the previous volunteers in the area. She served from 2000-2003 (if memory serves) and lived in a house only a couple hundred yards from where I am at. She is 34 years old and currently finishing up her PhD in Boston; she came back for a follow-up to the study she did here as a volunteer. Her main projects in the area had to do with environmental education. It was really nice talking to someone with her completely unique perspective, I would venture to say the only person I would trust to give me a real evaluation of what I´ve been doing. Interestingly, perhaps for this reason, I suddenly felt really self-concious talking to her about my work. I know I sound like a depressed teenager saying this, but nobody really understands exactly what I´m doing here, not even totally the peace corps volunteers in other parts of the country because their sites are so different. Nicole on the other hand knows exactly what´s up, and talking to her I began to doubt myself all over the place...... shouldn´t I be working more concentrated and with fewer people, instead of running all over the place? Shouldn´t I be working more directly with the poorest, most needy sector? Shouldn´t I be doing more for women´s development?

Regardless of these doubts, I have to remain aware of the fact that in a certain way, I haven´t failed in my mandate as a peace corps volunteer. From the beginning I´ve mostly responded to interests voiced by community members, and I honestly feel like these are well-intentioned, not concocted for personal gain. The only thing I need to be wary of is my tendency to be a Polyanna and view really bad situations from a too-optimistic standpoint, which could possibly lead to barking up the wrong tree with projects.

Other than that, I´ve been involved in a variety pack of little things.... extra classes in the Maestro en Casa program since the house of one of the teachers burned down and he hasn´t been around, fixing the roof of my house, and going to some classes of beekeeping in Choluteca since a small project is going to be starting up in the area funded by AHPROCAFE (Asociación Hondureña de Productores de Cafe) and I might be able to give people tecnical assistance. In that regard, it was nice to learn about bees, their life cycle, how they work, how to produce honey, and all that.... but I think I am going to avoid working with them if I can. It´s not like I don´t have anything else to do, and dammit, they scare me. These are africanized bees. They´s
ornery.

I love you guys! I will try to be in town on Monday or thereabouts to call some family members since it is my birthday and stuff. I already discussed this with mom; dad and Sam, do you have a specific time I should try to call? Remember it has to be a land line. Cell phones in the states from here cost about $2 a minute heh.

Gabe

Honduran look-alikes

2006-05-18T07:26:00.000-07:00

Maybe it´s just because I haven´t seen you guys in forever, but I have started noticing Hondurans every once in awhile that bear an eerie resemblance to somebody I know from the states.... except, you know, darker-skinned, wearing cowboy hats, and sometimes missing a few teeth. Just in case you´re interested, here are the people who I know for sure have dopplegangers here:

Kevin Ritzer: I see this guy often, he lives in a community near mine.

Joe Hundley: The ayudante (¨helper¨, i.e. guy who collects fares) on a bus near the El Salvador border.

Pauly Shore: This dude is my neighbor, and he not only looks just like pauly shore, he even has the same goofy way of talking! It´s scary.

Bruce Campbell: It must be the Latin chin. I´ve seen at least 3 Bruce Campbell look-alikes.

More to be posted as they are discovered!

This last week I have made two separate trips to Tegucigalpa, because our tree nursery project proposal finally got passed on by the Costa Rican agency that was reviewing it to the actual Central American Bank itself, and they sent it back with a bunch more corrections (these mostly regarding money-related stuff, like having to show all values for everything in dollars as well as Lempiras). I think we got it back a week ago (last Thursday) and they said they wanted it by Monday. This turned out to be impossible, but we did turn in what I fervently hope will be the final draft of this thing, weighing in at well over 200 pages with all the annexes (the project profile, which is what I spent the most time on, is 45 pages). I went to Tegucigalpa on Friday to work on it with Juanita at her place there, then back to Agua Fría on Saturday, and we failed to get anything done on Sunday because the computer was locked up in the house of somebody who had gone to Choluteca. Monday was a very full day fixing things up in Agua Fría, on Tuesday I went to Tegucigalpa and we put the whole package together in the afternoon/evening, and yesterday morning (wednesday) we turned it in. Then I came back down south, which is where I´m at right now.

While I was in Tegucigalpa, I turned in some information to the peace corps office about two different communities near mine where I think it would be possible to send another volunteer. The next group of PAM (Protected Areas Management, my project) is going to arrive for training next month and start working in September, and my project manager asked me to suggest some information about other communities in my area where I thought they could send somebody. The two I have been most impressed with are La Palma and San Judas, which are both reasonably close to my site but you pretty much have to make a day out of it to visit, so I went and visited them and talked with people from their Patronatos (this is like a town council) about the opportunity and what they would have to do to take advantage of it. I brought my own observations to my project manager so we´ll see what they think. The people in La Palma at least are super excited about the possibility because they´ve had very good experiences with visiting peace corps volunteers in the past, and people from San Judas also have told me that they´ve always wanted their own volunteer. From my point of view, having a companion in either place would be a big help so the peace corps will have to decide which is better. Dare I hope that two more people come?

The weather has definitely taken a turn for the better since my last posting..... the rainy season officially arrived the monday of last week and it has been raining almost every day since then, with much more livable temperatures. The forest exploded in leaves and small flowers after the first 2-3 storms, and now everything has greened up beautifully as well. Isaí's coffee finca, which looked ready to kick the bucket at the beginning of this month, is vibrant and green once again, and also flowering liked crazy. Coffee puts out a ton of small, white flowers that smell really good but wilt after only a couple days.

We´re also just about at the best time of year for all different kinds of fruit to be ripe (except bananas). There are mangos everywhere as big as your freakin head, and softball-sized avocadoes with rich buttery-yellow meat. My favorite fruit that I have found here, called Mamey, is also in season (these are totally unknown in the states, and even in most of Honduras).

To be honest there isn´t all that much more to tell this time, except that we finished up science class (I think all of my students passed) and I will be moving on to teach english next. I have to teach english 3 times (to my own class of 9th graders and also to both classes of 8th graders) because the other teachers really can´t do it, but they are going to cover for my class while I am teaching theirs.

Next up also is getting a road-repair project rolling that we planned as a component of the tree nursery project, to assure that the communities we´ll be working in are accessible. Soliciting help from the the World Food Programme was unbelievably easy to do by comparison to the Central American Bank (fill out three one-page forms) and I believe it was already approved, so we just need to go to the communities and get them to organize some workers and a couple people to oversee the distribution of the food rations that people will be getting in compensation for their work. The idea is not for it to be like a payment, but simply a motivator. Ideally the government SHOULD take care of local infrastructure, but it never seems to have money for it so usually the communities end up having to maintain their own roads, which they aren´t always able to do. Getting some food rations and organizing the work will assure that it gets done this year in the communities we will be working in.

Gabe

Futbol

2006-05-08T07:08:00.000-07:00

This week I´ve got a pretty fair amount of time free to plan my activities (how novel!) and a friend of mine informed me on Saturday that there was a soccer game in Choluteca on Sunday - the local professional team (Valencia) versus one of the bigger pro teams from Tegucigalpa (Motagua). Valencia usually gets eliminated fairly early on, but they have been doing good this year and are currently in the number 3 spot in Honduras, plus I´ve been here in Honduras for almost a year already and haven´t seen one professional soccer game, so I figured I had to go. It was definitely worth it.

We hung around Agua Fría all morning waiting for a ride, and finally got one just in time to get to the stadium 30 minutes before the game started. All the good seats were already gone of course (or should I say ¨places to stand¨) but me being a tall guy here has its advantages and I didn´t have a hard time finding a person to stand behind that was short enough that I could see over his head without any problems. The crowd was crazy. The little stadium got absolutely jam-packed full, and it seemed like everybody had some kind of banner or noise-maker. Ther was lots of drum-pounding and a small horse show while the players warmed up (since Valencia´s mascot is a horse). Motagua seemed to have at least as many fans as Valencia (maybe more!) because most people in Honduras, sick of their local team never winning, end up choosing to root for one of the two Tegucigalpa teams, Motagua or Olimpia, who always seem to face each other in the finals.

The game started right on time at 4, and at first it looked pretty bad for Valencia. They were almost never controlling the ball, and making a lot of errors like passing poorly and kicking the ball out of bounds. Motagua, which is backed by a lot more finances, played much more in-control, passing more smoothly and controlling the ball for more time. There domination of the ball would continue for the rest of the match, but after about 15 minutes Valencia got into their groove and started making some nice attacks on the other goal. It was interesting how much difference in style there was between the two teams, Valencia playing a lot more agressively and losing the ball more, but also getting some really nice fast breaks. They also clearly had a better defense than Motagua, especially their sweeper.... he was this enormous black guy who towered over everyone else and looked like he should be playing american football rather than soccer. Despite his size, however, he was quick, and he totally dominated Valencia´s end of the field.

After about half an hour, Valencia had a nice attack where four or five of them got a fast break on the goal, and they scored. I screamed a bunch and the rest of the crowd went nuts too, mostly telling the other team ¨salite!¨ (Just leave already) or ¨Fuera!¨ (get out!). The game pretty much continued in the same after that, with Motagua controlling the ball but not managing to get past Valencia´s D. With about 10 minutes left in the game, Valencia scored again and the Motagua fans started leaving, getting harassed by the Valencia fans I was standing with as they walked by. Judging by the general fervor I expected to see at least one fistfight, but nothing happened. I think everything was pretty much par for a central american soccer match.

The other interesting thing I´ve been doing lately is helping the community prepare for a little environmental festival that Juanita envisioned and mostly planned for the 3rd of May. This day, for the Catholic church, is ¨día de la cruz¨ (day of the cross) and traditionally they do mass on top of Cerro Guanacuare at the big cement cross that the church built about 50 years ago. Lots of people from the aldeas around Agua Fría come, and people even show up in cars from bigger towns like El Corpus and Choluteca. Juanita´s idea was to use this large group of people as an opportunity to do our own event and be guaranteed a crowd, in order to start promoting Agua Fría as a touristic possibilty... not necessarily for tourists from the states and Europe, but more likely locals, because Choluteca is hot and crappy and the Cerro Guanacaure already has a lot of local fame as being very cool (ha! that´s a relative term) and beautiful.

We planned a few meetings at the outset, getting together representatives of all the important community organizations (the catholic church, the water committee, the patronato, guys from the new military post, and representatives of the Maestro en Casa program) to brainstorm activities and delegate responsibility for them to various groups. The church ended up agreeing to organize some stands of organic produce that members of the cooperative could bring from their fincas, I decided to organize a group of people to do a cleaning campaign and get rid of all the trash on the road into and through town (helped by the Patronato and water board) and the students and teachers from the Maestro en Casa program decided to do most of the work putting on a presentation of environmentally-related poetry, music, theatre, and some traditional dansas (dances).

After meeting again with the Maestro en Casa students and other community members, we fixed a date for the cleaning campaign and asked an NGO that´s been working in our area if they could help out by bringing us some plastic bags to put the trash in, which they agreed to. The day of the event rolled around, and we had a huge force of Maestro en Casa students - maybe 60 - and 12 or so community members. I´m sure the students showed up because they assumed they were going to get points for it, and it was a good thing because otherwise we wouldn´t have had nearly enough people. Even less community members showed up to clean than the ones that came to the meetings, and I told them to tell everybody they could about it and bring as many people as possible. That was pretty disappointing, but at least we didn´t lack for manpower. I split the volunteers up into four groups, each assigned to a different part of the road, with certain more responsible individuals in charge of each group. The group I was with started in Agua Fría and went down the hill towards Choluteca, covering about 2 km down to the community of San Juan Arriba. It took us about 3 hours and I was quite happy with the job we did and the enthusiasm of my group. All you had to do was wander 10 meters from the road to find massive amounts of trash that we´d never have had the time to clean up, but the idea this time was just to make it look good for the event.

The cleaning campaign was on Thursday the week before the festival (which was the following Wednesday), and after that I concentrated on trying to make a video of all the beautiful areas and wildlife that one can find in the Cerro Gaunacaure to show at the presentation. Sure, the people were going to climb the mountain themselves, but they wouldn´t see a lot of my favorite places in the area where the biggest trees are, and they sure as heck weren´t going to see any wildlife with the huge groups that were coming. I spent a couple days getting footage around my house, then passed the camera off to another teacher from Maestro en Casa who took it down to his side of the mountain to get some better shots of the nice trees and scenic parts of the stream that they have down there. He sent the camera back on Sunday and I took it in Tuesday to get edited (mostly just cutting out the bad parts and adding some music, text, and transitions), which I knew wasn´t going to leave us enough time but that was what we had to work with. I ended up having to stay the night in Choluteca on Tuesday to wait for the editor to finish it on Wednesday morning and try to get back up to Agua Fría in time on the afternoon of the festival. We still didn´t have enough time and I had to take a half-finished product, then I ended up missing the bus and getting back to Agua Fría through a mixture of hitchiking and walking in the suffocating, dusty heat, and missing part of the festival in the process. Luckily I actually didn´t miss that much of it, being as they started two hours late (nothing ever starts remotely on time in Honduras).

We didn´t have a projector like we wanted, or a TV, so I set up our computer on a table where most people could see it and tried to play the movie. It didn´t work. I had told the guy at the video editing place the format I wanted the video to be in, because I knew all we had on our computer was an outdated version of Windows Media Player, but apparently he misinterpreted me or something. Well, that was the rotten cherry on the dog-turd sundae. I´m actually going to go back to that place today because the same guy said he would finish up the editing job right and give us a finished product. Maybe I can also get the codecs we need for our computer so it can play these videos.

Besides my glaring failure to deliver, the festival actually went pretty great. Josh randomly showed up, great friend that he is, after going back and forth between Choluteca and El Corpus a couple times in buses trying to find the turnoff for Agua Fría, and walking 4 or 5 kilometers in the aforementioned smothering heat. He´s been to a coffee festival that another town put on with the help of their Volunter last year, and he said that in most regards, the event that we did was better organized and had a LOT more community participation. I would have to say that the Maestro en Casa students totally saved our butts, but you know it´s not necessarily a bad thing that the younger generation is involving themselves even if their parents seem kind of disinterested. My favorite part about the event was the ranchera band that we paid to come up from a nearby aldea and grace us with their tunes, ¨Los Pérez¨. They were awesome! I hope we have an excuse to invite them back before next year´s environmental festival.

Josh spent the night at my place (my first real vistor at my house!!!!) and it was really nice to have some gringo conversation for the first time in awhile. He didn´t have to worry about taking a packed school bus back to Tegucigalpa, either, because he got a ride the next day with couple of my supervisors from the peace corps who swung by to check up on me and talk about the possibility of putting another Protected Areas Management volunteer in the area. I had already been thinking about this and I know some local aldeas I would recommend, which I´m going to visit this week. The next group of volunteers starts training in June, and will be going to their sites in September. I can´t wait!

The next things on my burner are that, start teaching Isaí how to use a computer, and fix my termite-rotted door and roof. whoo! I can move at my own pace more, though, and I´ve decided to just put this tree-nursery project out of my mind for awhile until we either hear yes or no, and continue on either way. It´s not like I´m going to be bored around here if the project doesn´t pass, and it was certainly a great experience working on that proposal.

Hope THAT update satisfies the complainers.

Cheers all,

Gabe

Semana Santa and other stuff

2006-05-02T10:34:00.000-07:00

I got about thirty minutes into typing this entry and then the computer I was working on froze and lost it all, so I´m going to summarize:

I see it´s been exactly a month since my last blog update, not much happened the first week of april, and the second one (Semana Santa) I went to El Salvador with my friend and co-volunteer Chris from Orocuina to surf. I left on Tuesday but planned badly and ended up spending a night in San Salvador rather than making it all the way to La Libertad, where he was already set up and surfing happily.

Back to normal flow:

I rolled into Playa Tunco, about 15 minutes west of La Libertad by bus on Wednesday at about 10 am. Chris and another guy from my training group, Sid, were just rousing themselves from their hangovers to head out and surf (or in Sid´s case, as was soon to be my case as well, to head out and eat salt water for two hours). I got set up in Papaya´s Surf Lodge, where they were staying, and then went out to check out the beach. Compared with every other beach I´ve seen in Central America (omitting Costa Rica) this one was amazingly clean and well-kept, not to mention uncrowded and had some really nice black sand. The temperature wasn´t too hot either.... considering the time of year, it was actually rather pleasant, maybe 85-87 degrees or so but dry and with a nice constant sea breeze. I met my compatriots later for lunch, then we headed back for some reading, movie-watching, and chess-playing at the lodge. I also made an agreement with Sid to share the board he was using and pay half the rent for the rest of the days I was there, since neither of us really felt like using it all day every day. Personally, my lack of enthusiasm had mostly to do with the burning salt water that was forcefully injected into my nasal cavity and throat every time I fell off the board, which happened every time I tried to ride it. I think one thing is that I need to be a better swimmer first before I can be serious about learning to surf. Maybe if I had a nose plug or something, I dunno. I reckon I will try surfing again sometime (In theory, it´s a sport I would like: it´s physical, it´s outdoors, it requires skill and there´s a lot of room for personal improvement, and it´s totally eco-friendly) but this time I think it´s safe to say that I won´t be the next Kelly Slater.

As it turned out, the money was mostly wasted. I was at Playa Tunco for five days, and of those I maybe surfed a total of 10 hours. On the other hand, I got in a ton of quality time watching movies, reading ¨Jayber Crow¨ by Wendell Berry (the best book I have read so far in Honduras, and that is not an exaggeration, it is AWESOME), and generally doing a whole lot of nothing. I was discussing with Sid how it was interesting and unusual for me as far as vacations go, because the traditional method in my family for recreation was to try to pack as many meticulously-planned activities into a week as possible and get all stressed out when those plans got screwed up. However, I have to say I really enjoyed myself. Considering that I´ve been fairly busy working on a lot of different things, it was a change of pace I really needed.

Another cool thing was the company we had at Papaya´s Surf Lodge. During my time there, we met and visited with people from no less than eight different countries and four continents. There was a group of three surfers from Victoria, B.C. that had driven down in their truck surfing all along Mexico, there was a group of three Swedish surfers (I guess it is actually a sport there), there was a young couple from the states who taught in Guatemala, there was a group of peace corps volunteer girls from El Salvador (that unfortunately left the day after I arrived), there was one guy from Germany, one guy from Australia, and one guy from Uruguay. We did not lack for interesting conversation. The guy from Uruguay was especially cool and now I´m thinking I would love to visit that country someday. It sounds like a very nice place, kind of similar in climate to western Oregon and northern California actually according to his description.

We all headed back on Monday to Choluteca and spent the night, and then parted to go to our respective sites the next day. I spent the next three days working hard to polish our project proposal to be ready to turn in as a final draft (FINALLY they´re ready to evaluate it for real) and adjusting all the numbers to work on a different timeline since the tentative date for getting money (if it passes) is now August and most trees will have to wait til next May to be planted.

There is more stuff to talk about, namely an environmental festival that we´re going to put on tomorrow, but I just lost my most recent work where I had written about that for the third goddamn time today and I don´t have any more patience for this piece of crap computer. I will be in Choluteca until tomorrow so I´ll try to post again and leave a description of all that, and other recent events.

Gabe

My insect friends

2006-04-02T08:48:00.000-07:00

The day before yesterday I was poking around my bookshelf looking for my next victim (having recently finished Candide, great little book if you like sarcasm) and noticed an ominous black line stuck to the top of Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates. I pulled it out with a sinking feeling and saw that my fears were justified; the termites had built a little termite highway into the book and had destroyed the last 1/4 of it, which basically renders the whole thing useless. I really liked that book. This finally roused my fury up against the termites that have inhabited my house since Day 1 (we fumigated the place, but what do you do to completely evict something that builds tunnels deep into wooden beams?) and pretty much have free rein. There isn´t a whole lot I can do about them so I try to ignore them. Destroying my books, however, is totally unacceptable. I ripped their nest down with a broom and bitched at Isaí for awhile to do something about this like he´s said he would for the last....oh, 7 months? Isaí s usually a man of his word, but he hasn´t made the least effort to fix the roof or get rid of the little wood-eaters. arg.

I co-exist with a whole menagerie of other insects, most of which are a lot more interesting and less damaging. The only ones that might compete with termites in terms of sheer annoyance are the little black fire ants that live in burrows around the walls and floor and are unbelievably aggressive. I´m eventually going to go look for a set of plastic containers for any kind of food that they attack (corn flour, oatmeal, sugar, dried milk, beans, rice, etc).

I´ve also seen a lot of ¨zompopos¨ lately (leaf cutter ants) because there are a couple trees near my house that are dropping a sweet, fragrant fruit that they like even more than leaves. They´ve made a road through my outhouse, but there´s still space for my feet and you have to harass leaf-cutter ants a lot for them to attack. So they don´t bother me, but this year for some reason they´re especially numerous and have destroyed a couple sections of Isaí´s little coffe plantation.

Last week, when I got up in the morning I saw a seething mass of army ants coming from the general direction of my outhouse and stayed to watch them. They spread out and move in a carpet, and it looks like the earth is crawling. Every once in awhile you see some doomed cockroach running to escape and be overwhelmed by the swarming horde. They kept advancing towards my house and I finally realized they were going to get to it, but the only thing I could do at that point was hope they didn´t find anything interesting about my food. They coated the walls for a few minutes but I guess they didn´t find anything else intersting because they left without advancing much beyond the first room.

Another time, also in the morning, Isaí and myself and his two daughters saw a small strike team of army ants infiltrate a burrow of leaf-cutter ants right at the base of Isaí´s porch, and come out carrying all the eggs. They were pursued by leaf-cutter ants, and a battle ensued. The army ants at one point dropped their cargo and retreated back to make a barrier againts the leaf cutter ants, until their pursuers had given up, then they went back and picked up all the eggs and continued on in a perfect line back to their burrow. Army ants are really cool.

Another interesting bug that I´ve seen a lot of around the house is this kind of spider that looks sort of like a crab, moves very fast, and gets pretty big (like hand-sized maybe). For those of you who have seen the latest Harry Potter movie, it is that spider that Defense Against the Dark Arts professor uses to demonstrate the pain curse. The spider in the movie is an enlarged, computer-animated version, but other than its size it absolutely the exact same thing as what I have in my house. Well, real life is creepier than fiction, and the way those things speed across the walls is a lot more creepy than the computerized representation in that movie. I´ve gotten used to em though, they don´t bother me at all and I figure they won´t since they are clearly a predatory spider and apparently smart enough to know that I´m not food. Plus they must keep the cockroaches under control because I´ve seen maybe 2 in the house since I moved in.

The last interesting bug story has to do with something I saw the first day I moved into the house. There were some mud cocoons formed into the corners of the windows, and I pulled one off to open it up. Inside were three or four perfectly square cavities that were absolutely stuffed with spiders. I was perplexed. All different kinds and sizes of spiders; what were they doing in there? Furthermore they seemed to be alive but incapacitated. In a couple of the little cells also was an inert white grub that I didn´t think too much of at first, until it finally occurred to me that the spiders were its food cache. Wicked! According to my friend Josh the entomologist, it is a big wasp that does this. Can you imagine what it would be like if a bigger animal did something like that? Once again, real life is proven to be creepier than fiction.

On the work front, still not much has happened but it looks pretty definte that we are going to send in the project proposal, finally and for good, on Tuesday. We have been pushed back so much waiting for this opportunity that we probably will not have time to start much in the way of tree-planting this year, but there are lots of other activities to do and the project is set to run for two years. We should still be able to work things out but I must admit I am somewhat worried. Isaí however seems totally unconcerned and he has told me he´s ready to work full-time on this project. We´re definitely committed to it.

The most significant thing I have been doing is the math class for the Maestro en Casa program, which has turned out to be pretty rough going. I have 7 students, all girls, and they entered the class so poorly prepared for it that I will be impressed if 4 of them pass. I can only blame the teachers from previous classes that have passed them on when they clearly did not learn the basics, and to some extent myself and the students for not managing to have a line of communication about what they understood and didn´t understand in class. These girls are so completely afraid to ask questions and provide feedback that it´s really a struggle for me to know if they are a). Paying attention or just staring at the board and spacing out, and b). understanding anything coming out of my mouth. If I ask the entire class a question, it is practically guaranteed nobody will answer. If I ask one of them a direct question and even use their name, I´m still lucky to get anything other than a blank stare; I can´t even get them to say ¨I don´t know¨. It´s very frustrating. I have to change my strategy and figure something else out for the next subject (natural sciences) because I can´t handle this and will probably go crazy. It´s like lecturing a pile of rocks.

Hope everyone out there in USA-land is doing well. It´s really, really hot here now.

Gabe

I need Gringos(?)

2006-03-15T10:14:00.000-08:00

Well, it´s been a very long time since my last blog update, and for that I apologize. I have been to town, but with only a spare hour or half-hour here and there which isn´t enough time to write a full entry, and I like to sit down and get everything out at once.

I´ve been kind of lonely again lately (I´m like a yo-yo! Any more changes of mood and you can call me Maya! hehe. Love you sis!) and I feel like maybe it can be attributed to having so little contact with my paisanos (countrymen), or maybe it´s just a yearning for North American culture. I ate at Wendy´s twice yesterday and it didn´t help.... then again, fast food was never really a part of my culture. What I really miss is things like music, and discussing it with my friends, finer foods and wine/beer (don´t get me wrong, I love the plato típico here but but it´s pretty much the same 10 ingredients in absolutely everything). I also miss outdoor and indoor sports/pastimes other than soccer and pool, and probably most of all, connectedness. The lack of options for communication is definitely frustrating - we have radio, two very expensive public telephones that work 50% of the time, and of course good ol´ physical delivery.

These feelings of lacking certain things from home don´t necessarily mean that I have had trouble adapting to the local culture. On the contrary, in terms of relating to the Hondurans I at least feel fairly comfortable. One thing is that, despite all the training we received about adapting to the differences in a strange land, things are not THAT much different here than in the U.S., culturally. No doubt this has a lot to do with the way we´ve been exporting our culture for several decades already through American companies, products, and media. The other reason I think cultural adaptation hasn´t been extremely difficult for me is related to me personally. For one, I have a very respectbable amount of Spanish training under my belt and a certain facility with language (If I have a personal strength, it would probably be communication). The other personal characteristic that has helped me adapt is something that I have sort of known for a long time and recently had more evidence to back up; that I´m a bit of a social chameleon. I tend to change my own behavior and habits more easily to fit my surroundings than other people, I think.

This facet of myself has bothered me in the past, because I´ve always admired the type of principled person who knows what they believe in and sticks to their guns and their ideas despite criticism or the disapproval of others. However, I have found that I don´t have to compromise on too many things that are really important to me to fit in here. What´s happened is that the role I play here is quite different than in the states.... I keep being myself, stationary in my own position, but the space I occupy relative to other people is different because the background has changed.... if that makes any sense?

Relating to all the business that I hinted at, I might have had time to update my blog last week if an unexpected event hadn´t occurred. First, I need to mention that Elsy, the wife of Isaí (my counterpart) found out she was pregnant about a month ago. She still wasn´t really showing or anything, but she was supposed to stay home and rest instead of going out and working like usual, advice which she disregarded.

Last Thursday, I had gone to Agua Fría to work for awhile and wait for Isaí to get back from Siguatepeque on the afternoon bus (he went to sell the last lot of coffee), and he never came so I headed home, did some cooking and reading, and hit the sack at like 9 pm. At 10, Isaí woke me up talking to me through my window. Semi-conscious, the first thing that occurred to me was ¨oh, he got a ride back after all....wonder how the coffee sale went? What´s so important I need to be woken up?¨ Then he told me there was an emergency with Elsy and that we needed to get her into Choluteca right then.... that nigth. Well that got me up in a hurry. Isaí´s not the the kind of dude to exaggerate a serious situation or panic. He told me we needed a car up to the house because Elsy couldn´t make it down to Agua Fría, so I threw some clothes on and took off running for the house of Josélino, the treasurer of the coffee cooperative and great guy (and most importantly, owner of a car). I made the 2 km in about 10 minutes and woke up Joselino, discharging my story in between disculpeme´s and asking if his car was there. It wasn´t; he´d loaned it to some guy a long ways away. I ran down to the next house with a car and molested them for a few minutes, before somebody got up and I again hurriedly explained the situation to the best of my ability, and with the limited knowledge I had. They agreed, took about 10 minutes to get their rears in gear, and we headed up the hill. When we got their Isaí had heard the sound of the vehicle and was walking Elsy down the hill, who was complaining with every step ¨I can´t endure this Isa! careful! No, not there! This way!¨ I took charge of keeping the dog out of their way (very important duty there) and we loaded her into the car. I had been sort of vaguely imagining the worst of what could have happened but I really didn´t have a clue what was up, so I asked Isaí ¨so, uh, is this one of those...?¨

¨Es aborto¨ he said matter-of-factly. ¨She´ll be all right.¨

We got down to the Choluteca hospital by about... I think it was 12:30, and they took Elsy in right away. We ended up having to wait all night there, since we arrived too late and all the safe hotels were closed (and the two girls were with us). I snoozed on a cement sidewalk inside the hospital grounds, Honduran drunk-style, for a couple hours and the next day we all went back up to Agua Fría, minus Elsy. She had to stay a little longer so Isaí came and got her the next day.

Not too many other super interesting things have happened; the friggin´ bank still hasn´t responded with respect to our project but it looks like we are going to present it in Choluteca on Friday in front of all the other projects to be done with the Central American Bank funds and the mayors of 7 municipios present. Woo. Going to do up a nice power point presentation tomorrow. Hopefully this means something is happening.

Today, I am in El Corpus for a meeting with a mining company that is in a bit of a fight with the mayor. Supposedly they discovered a new and very large deposit of gold on their land (Corpus used to be a big gold-mining town, but most of the veins have been exhausted or are no longer profitable), and started taking it out with no permit to start an open-face mining operation. The mayor, (again, supposedly), knowing he couldn´t really stop them, turned the public loose on the mine. Now there are all kinds of people running around in there and Corpus is caught up in old west style gold fever. Kind of wierd since this is such a sleepy little town where nothing much happens. I left early from the meeting because I just couldn´t take it anymore. The thinly veiled greed emanating from both sides of the argument to the rights of that area was just too much for my stomach; the miners with their injured air, sporting huge number of facts and figures about everything they had done for El Corpus and their demonstrating their clear legal right to strip-mine that site, and the people representing the public saying that those scrambling to take what they could get from the mine were doing it solely out of necessity. I think someone even used the word ¨starving.¨ What a load of crap. The people here are poor, but they´re not the ones organizing the public entry into that mine, and they are not starving. You can´t find anyone in Corpus these days who doesn´t have a cell phone.

In the soccer world, I got involved with trying to organize the Agua Fría team, which I played with a few times at the beginning of the year but have neglected because of poor organization.... when the team from El Zapotal had a game already set up and asked me to play for them, that´s what I did. But there are really a fair number of good players in Agua Fría, so we´re going to dedicate some time to getting them playing together regularly. Last Sunday we had our first game (and lost) but it was very, very close. We played a double-header and tied the first 3-3, lost the second 4-3 with the winning goal being scored in the final minute (according to the ref, according to us it was 12 minutes over time).

I´m wondering if I´ll be able to go anywhere for Semana Santa, a big holiday coming up the second week of April, since it appears we will have to absolutely work our tails off to get this project running on time. Maybe a couple days off anyways.

Gabe

Photo contest

2006-03-07T07:55:00.000-08:00

The Peace Corps recently had a photo contest with submissions from volunteers, in categories ranging from humor to ¨my site is better than your site¨. These are some of my favorites. Not much right now in the way of news.... went to a small town´s Feria this weekend, got to see a cockfight. It´s actually pretty exciting, though the way they barb the roosters´ ankles to make them fight is cruel, and the fights usually continue until one is dead.

Still no news on the tree nursery project. We´re waiting to hear anything from the Costa Rican agency evaluating the proposal (they should have contacted us a LONG time ago) and now trying to plan ahead, assuming we will be getting somewhere before April. If not we will have to consider starting next year, which would suck.

Gabe

Shrimp Hunter

2006-03-01T12:22:00.000-08:00

Well, I´m back in Choluteca again, chilling in an internet café while the temperature nears 100 degrees outside. We came into town to try and coordinate some support from the World Food Program with their ¨Alimentos por Trabajo¨ (Food for Work) project, in some areas of our project that had to be cut due to budget considerations. It seemed to go pretty well and I think we can count on at least a little support from these guys. We have also been trying to get a permit to cut a tree down so we can fix my roof and have not been able too.... all these improvements in environmental legislation are coming back around to bite me in the ass, because apparently (did I mention this last week?) the president signed a bill or whatever you´d call it here canceling ALL permits for woodcutting and suspending harvest of all non-registered trees. This is a terrible move for the campesinos, because they absolutely need that wood for house repairs and cooking, whereas the big profiteers in wood harvesting are least affected because they have the land and the money to do plantations or register areas of trees for cutting. It seems to me a good idea applied in a completely senseless way. It´s mind-boggling how out of touch this government can be from its own people.

We´re still waiting to hear back from the Costa Ricans that are supposedly evaluating our rough draft, and now starting to get a little nervous about the time frame. To that end, we´re currently planning to start the project (present it to communities and organize meetings to plan the activities in each village) on March 15, so we can get going on everything instead of waiting until after the money comes. Besides that, however, everything seems to be going quite well and based on the suggestions Alejandrina gave us in Tegucigalpa a couple weeks ago, we now have the proposal in pretty much a finished form.

On Saturday, we had our first day of math class. I am assigned to teach the 9th graders (the highest of the 3 grades in the program) and the subject is essentially algebra. I´ve got a class of 7 girls and no guys, and none of them have a clue about variables or equations so I´m going to have to go somewhat outside of the book´s plan to get them up to speed. The first day went really well though and I have hope that we will get somewhere. I´m certainly more effective at teaching math than English (sorry mom!) even though I was kind of tired from staying up late the night before hunting camarones.

¨Camarones¨, or shrimp, is a big industry here in the south of Honduras. Lots and lots of acres of mangrove swamp have been reclaimed to make shrimp-farming ¨lagunas¨ and, in fact, the mangrove habitat system is in danger of disappearing from the country. These are normal, average - sized saltwater shrimp. Up in the small creeks of Cerro Guanacaure lives a species of freshwater shrimp that is like either a skinny lobster or a horrific mutant crawdad. They get to be like a foot and a half long and people like to go out hunting them at night in the deep, sandy pools with a flashlight and a machete. A couple of my young Honduran friends Alex and Osmaris had been bugging me to go out and try this with them, and so Friday night we did. We were out for about four hours, following the course of one creek down to where it joined with another one, and then following the second creek back up. Almost right away we found a couple crabs, which Alex informed me was good luck. It seems he was right because we were practically tripping over enormous shrimp most of the time. By the time we got back we probably had a few pounds of seafood, which Osmari´s mom made into an excellent soup the next day.

Chopping gigantic shrimp in half was fun, but my favorite part of the whole experience was being out in the forest at night, especially along the creeks because in this dry summertime forest it is a corridor that just teems with life. We saw several nocturnal animals, including an armadillo and what Alex called a ¨perro de agua¨ (water dog). I basically only saw its eyes shining in the flashlight, but based on their size and spacing, the name, and its running movement I think it may have been some sort of otter.

I´m back to playing soccer again after a month and a half hiatus. Our team headed down the hill 5 or 6 kilometers a week and a half ago to play a team called Palo de Agua (water tree or water pole) on a field that was more reminiscent of a volleyball pit in terms of size and soil consistency. I played crappy (pick a fault: the heat, the field, my lack of practice) but whateva. We´re going back to Palo de Agua next Sunday and the week after that also because they´re hosting an 8 team tournament and some pretty excellent teams are supposed to show up. Based on who we are playing in the first round, we are most likely going to lose right away but it´s double elimination so we´d still have a shot at 3rd place. But who knows? Maybe we´ll kick butt all the way.

I´ve been feeling really light of heart lately, and it´s hard to say why exactly. I guess it´s nice to have a pretty good vision now of the projects I will most likely be dedicating most of my time to here, but also I think I have just become thoroughly infected with the pleasure of travel and interaction with other people in the world. I´ve been reading a lot of Newsweek magazines (free subscription from the Peace Corps, I think I´m probably more in touch with world news now than I was in the states) and it seems like all the trends with new technology and successful companies and scientists are moving towards less and less restriction of the flow of information. I´ve commented here on the effect this can have on isolated cultures of assimilation and loss of identity, but more and more I think this trend is fundamentally a good thing. Why? Because it´s much easier to hate and fear other people when you don´t know anything about them. It´s a lot easier to build barriers, slap labels, be a bigot, and start wars when you can define an ¨Us¨ and a ¨Them.¨ What if there was only Us?

I remember dad being surprised at me when I described to him how pessimistic and jaded my generation is. It´s like we´ve become too well-educated and ¨big picture¨. We now know how huge our universe is, how small and ephemeral our lives really are in the large scheme of things, and worst of all, how limited and ignorant we all are. With so much advance in the world of knowledge and world interaction, why are we still blowing each other up in the name of God (the same God, most of the time.... what the hell?) and reverting to embarassingly flawed theories masqeurading as science in our public schools? *cough*KansasBoardofEducation*cough* Based on all current knowledge in physics, it seems to be more or less logistically impossible to travel to other planets as I think we all assumed would happen back in the 1960s. So many other species have had their moment on earth and eventually become extinct, it seems inevitable that we will too.

I mention this by way of contrast to how I have been feeling lately, which is decidedly a turn for the optimistic. A growing perception of this global realization of the power of information sharing has helped, but I think more importantly my attitude has changed because I´ve become so absorbed in my little microcosm here and forgotten to look at the big picture. Life is pretty darn fun as it turns out, if you can forgive yourself for being a dumb, emotionally-unstable creature without much power to make a difference in the ultimate Big Picture and instead sit back and enjoy the ride.

To quote a great song dad sent me: ¨The sad thing is I´m so damn happy¨

edit: Almost forgot, mail received.

2 postcards from Dad (one that says Bellingham, Washington on it and has a few nice pics from the area, 1 that has a photo of him and Daya)
1 long letter from mom
1 Valentine´s day postcard from Grandma and Grandpa
1 Chicago Sun-Times magazine with an article about coffee importers in it
1 box from Amazon.com with 3 books in it: Harry Potter in spanish, an Isabelle Allende book, and 100 Years of Solitute in Spanish.
1 box from Jake and Maggie, who apparently spent $26 to send me beer. I have only two things to say about this:
- You guys obviously know me far too well
- OMG I LOVE YOU

Bak 2 skewl

2006-02-18T10:16:00.000-08:00

Well, happy (Honduran) back to school everyone, classes officially start next Monday, although in the Maestro en Casa program that I´m working with we probably won´t get going for real until the following week due to a lack of textbooks and general organization. I was at a meeting today with the people here in Choluteca who run the program regionally, and it was nice to finally get that contact and feel a little more cemented in what we´re doing and not so much showing up randomly to give classes. Nobody ever really let me in on the overall plan last year and I think maybe they didn´t so much know what it was themselves, but this year there is a schedule of ¨modules¨ that run for about a month a piece between february and november. English is the same length as the other modules, only running for about a month (but with 4 hours solid every saturday) so I will be teaching other subjects as well and probably have help with English from a guy from a nearby village called La Cuchilla (¨The Knife¨) who knows a thing or two. The teachers who do this program are unpaid volunteers too, so it is kind of impressive that we have three committed to work on it with me, even though it is only Saturdays. We are going to need them. This year there are 33 students in 7th grade, 39 in 8th, and 7 in 9th. Should be interesting.

We went to Teguigalpa last Tuesday to turn in the proposal rough draft, which I´ll admit I got a little nervous about because of the amount of work it represented for me and everyone else. It was received with compliments by Alejandrina, the señora from the Central American Bank that reviewed it and sent it on to Costa Rica, where it will get reviewed for reals by the group that has to approve it eventually, and returned with everything that lacks. The 28th is what we´re shooting for to turn in the final copy. If it isn´t finished by then, we´ll have to wait til the next year to start because it will already be too late to build nurseries and get the trees planted in time for them to have enough rainy season in their final spot in the field. (They take about 90 days to be ready to plant, and if that doesn´t happen by September they won´t survive the next dry season).

So we´re going around fixing little things and I´m making some maps and working around the house, taking care of all the things I neglected while we were burning the midnight oil for weeks running on the proposal. I had a couple supposedly slow days Thursday and yesterday, but my luck being how it is.... it seems like things fall in my lap when I am least trying. Thursday I went into Agua Fría just to call Juanita and ask about some notes she took from our meeting with Alejandrina, and on the way back to the house I ran into a group of 8 guys from a rotary club from Tennessee, hanging out in Agua Fría, looking comically out of place and resting a bit before going up to fix a water system in Agua Fría Arriba (the part of Agua Fría farther along the road and up the mountain) that they had donated and installed the previous year. Agua Fría Arriba is so high that they can´t get a gravity-fed water system from a decent spring, so they put in a well with a pump up to a tank high on the hill. The pump had burned out and the pipes were leaking so it didn´t get much use, but I tagged along with them and we fixed it right there, new pump, new pipes, everything ready to go. I turned out to be extremely useful as an interpreter because only one of them spoke any spanish and he did know a thing or two, but lacked practice. Was nice to speak english a little though, and I must confess I have always liked southern dialect (educated redneck that I am) so it was doubly fun.

The next day I didn´t even leave the house and more work walked right up to my doorstep, wearing army fatigues and carrying M-16s (10 of them, to be exact). Apparently, the new president of Honduras has taken immediate action in putting the army to good use as guardabosques (¨forest guards¨) to prevent fires and illegal woodcutting. I visited with the guy coordinating their activities and showed them around Cerro Guanacuare, up to the very top and the paths around my place. The guy from COHDEFOR, which is the Honduran equivalent of the forest service, was considerbly less knowledgeable than the lietenant in charge, who seemed to have a specialty in environmentally-related stuff and was relatively friendly, for an army type. I reckon we will be in contact and they might even be able to help us out with our project, especially with respect to transportation of materials. Another nice benefit is the area is now going to be as secure as a swiss bank having the soldiers around. A real shame they got here just a little too late to dampen the enthusiasm of the guys who robbed Tim. Speaking of which, he is installed now close by in the department of Paraíso and apparently doing fine. Haven´t seen him since he left, but I´d like to go up and visit there sometime. It sounds like a nice part of Honduras.

That´s about all for this week, weather is getting really remarkably hot now and when I get some time off I´m going to try to go to San Marcos de Colon (where I spent thanksgiving) and check out the national park there which is a lot higher (thus cooler) and supposedly has a cloud forest.

Peace,
Gabe

Finishing.... the darn.... proposal

2006-02-11T07:08:00.000-08:00

Well, I planned on updating my blog once I had officially completed the activity that inspired my previous entry´s title, but I just couldn´t wait that long. We got another extension by the bank and now the sucker is due Feb. 15 (rough draft) but it will be more or less complete at that point and we´re just looking for minor corrections. I think after that we only have a couple more days to turn in the final anyhow so we are going to travel to Tegucigalpa on Monday to present it and get feedback. Incidentally, ¨we¨ is myself, Juana María Ponce (Juanita) and Isaí, Betanco. They are they president and vice-president of the coffee cooperative COCAGUAL, respectively.

Over the last week approximately I´ve pretty much been parked in front of COCAGUAL´s shiny new computer crunching data from the community surveys that we did and the costs of various things, analizing everything that we are asking $105,000 for with respect to timeframe because the BCIE will not pay out all the money for the project at once, so we divided it into 4 sections. I really really hope that quantity is ok with them, because it took me over 2 days to analyze all of it. It´s been like pulling teeth getting help from Isaí on this too, which is starting to piss me off because this isn´t my project, it is theirs. Supposedly I am just helping out. Now there is no way they could do this correctly without me, and that´s not being arrogant just stating a fact.... it is probably one of the most complicated works I have had to do. And I know that they are up to their necks in other problems related to the sale of their final Lot of coffee. Apparently Biolatina, the organization that certifies organic production ´round here, screwed up and sent their certification to the Honduran government as being part of a different cooperative so they have had one big headache trying to fix that problem. Still, we need to work on better communication because most of the time I have no idea what they are up to and when I can get some help with the stuff I don´t understand relating to design and logistics of the project and whatnot. I´ve been working 8 to 7 some days and I get frustrated when I reach an impasse and I´m just sitting there stewing wondering what the heck Isaí is doing.

Other than that, I have been up to little else... the other activities being things like hiking around in communities collecting surveys, promoting the project, and things of that nature. Due to Isaí and Juanita´s other obligations, I have been doing most of the work actually writing the proposal myself, and when it is finished it will be about 80% my work. This is kind of cool to think about if it gets approved, because it´s been a big challenge for me (writing in Spanish and everything, although at least 50% of the work is managing numbers) and it´s a fair chunk of change not to mention a big and rather ambitious project (too ambitious if you ask me, but everyone else involved seems to want that, so who am I to argue? I´m just here to help out :P ). Besides some small tweaking, to finish it up I need to make some watershed maps, which I´m getting started on today... going to photocopy some new topo maps that Juanita bought in Choluteca which I am psyched to have.

I have been kind of lonely lately, they say the 6-month mark is typically the most difficult time of service for volunteers and I can understand why now. I´m not really sure of the reason, but it´s just a moment when homesickness pegs you the worst, maybe a transitional stage between feeling as though everything is temporary, an adventure of sorts (which is a very comfortable feeling for me) and adjusting to the new place as an actual home. This I´m probably more adept at than most people also, but it is still difficult. I have been getting around some despite all the work, which helps..... last week I spent a night in Choluteca (I think it was Monday, I guess almost 2 weeks ago now) and went to a ¨circo¨ with some other volunteers. This means Circus, but it wasn´t really much like that..... just some mediocre acrobatics and lot of half-naked dancing women plus three transsexual guys they called ¨sirenas¨ which is considered great entertainment. It´s sort of hard to wrap my mind around how this fits in with their conservative machisto culture, but supposedly the deal is it is only gay if you are the guy on the receiving end of the situation. Being on the other side of the table is like, the most manly thing ever. ooooooooookay.....

I also went to the anual Feria in El Corpus, which, for such a sleepy, deserted town in which nothing ever happens, was pretty awesome. There were tons of fireworks, lots of great things to eat, and big dances three nights running. I was only there for one day but I think I caught some of the best firworks. During the moment in which there were the most people packed into the central square, some guy with a fantastical device over his head barreled into the crowd and everyone ran screaming. What he was wearing was like a big wooden box sprouting wires from all angles that ran to thick, short cardboard tubes attached to the sides of the box. The function became apparent immediately when the tubes started spitting fireworks in all directions as he ran through the crowd, leaning over and charging like a bull, box-first, scattering onlookers left and right. As Dad would say, this was the antithesis of state-sanctioned fireworks... Unsafe and Insane. But so much fun.

From there, not much else to report... I haven´t played soccer in forever which sucks, but I think I´m going to get a game in tomorrow. The weather is getting pretty hot now in the day, but at night it´s still really cool and my morning bucket showers are the coldest they have ever been, as the water coming out of the spring now is only the clear, cold, year-round rivulet that comes from deep inside it the mountain. The weather on the whole is still very excellent in Agua Fría but the trips to Choluteca are a bummer.... well, more so than before. It´s easily 36 celsius every day here now, which is well into the 90s... almost 100 I think.

Last order of business is mail report.... I have now received the following items since my last post:

1 book from mom - La Sombra del Viento (which I have been reading..... VERY slowly)
1 postcard from Dad w/mt Rainier on it
CD player from mom
CDs from Sam

Thank you guys very much for this stuff; having my own music is really a welcome retreat to nostalgia for home when I need it and I´ve been reading that book... really really slowly due to having to look up every fourth word, but I like it so far.

signing out,

Gabe

Finishing the proposal

2006-01-20T06:29:00.000-08:00

Well, here I am sitting in the peace corps office in Tegucigalpa once again. I signed up with Isai for a project design workshop here a couple months ago not knowing the other things we would be embroiled in at this point. That's all waiting for me when I get back to Choluteca later today. For now, I just finished the project workshop.... but without Isai. At 10 pm the night before leaving to go to this thing he wakes me up while walking past my house to tell me he couldn't come because of an emergency thing to do in order to get this 50,000 lbs of coffee sold for the cooperative. I understand how that takes precedence but it still sucked. I had to show up and tell the people here that I had nobody to work on a project with, and really this workshop was for the Hondurans more than the volunteers (7 volunteers came and we each brought a counterpart). But Tim (my closest volunteer neighbor) and a guy from his community came so I mostly worked with them on developing a project of cover crop beans. Overall it was a lot more productive than the Project Workshop thing I had last time in Tegucigalpa with only volunteers. But cold! I found my clothing to actually be inadequate, and this is with long shirts and pants. Had to enjoy it though. It's already starting to get toasty in the south.

I took care of another thing while here in Tegus, which was going to the office of an agency that did a study in my area, looking for information I can use to finish this proposal for a tree nursery/agroforestry project. The Banco Centroamericano gave us 10 extra days to finish, but it probably still won't be enough. I remember when we first started working on this thing we basically sat down and filled in the blanks on the format they gave us. I spent a fair amount of time arguing with Isai about this approach, but he figured we would go out and collect all the really relavent information from the communities in which we were going to work after the money came. This of course was dead wrong (and terrible planning to boot) but he had to learn this for himself when we showed someone from the bank our rough draft and got told exactly what we needed to do. But to this guy's credit he didn't blink and now we're desperately trying to collect data on the communities about land owners and preferred topics of interest (do they want us to work on live barriers more in their zone? Fruit trees? Wood trees? etc). This all has to be ready by next Wednesday. I think it's possible, but the proposal probably won't be very well written because I'll have about two days to do it once we have everything. Still feel no better than 50% that it'll pass, but now we're really getting somewhere.

I also visited an agency here in Tegucigalpa from an information-gathering project called Proyecto Mitigacion de Desastres Naturales (PMDN) that was working on some extensive studies in this area. I found out that they are almost just about to finish them and release them to the public, and these studies, compared to anything done previously, are awesome. They have maps of precipitation, soil use, hydrologic and hydrogeologic studies, critical zones, and lots of recommendations for combatting damage done by drouts and preventing landslides throughout my area. We will definitely be working more with PMDN in the future. Unfortunately they couldn't give me any info to use for the proposal right now because they were still working on rough drafts and hadn't officially released anything yet. However I'm pretty sure it will still help to mention what they are doing and how we can use it in our project.

The meeting with PMDN was really a revalation for me, because I've been spending so much time looking for previous studies in the area. They certainly have been done, but nobody keeps records and there's nothing very comprehensive. I walked around Choluteca for four days last week talking to NGO's and looking for info, with minimal success. The first two days were especially great. I started out in the Alcaldia of Choluteca (this is like the mayor's office but with more stuff) asking who to talk to. They sent me to the Unidad Municipal Ambiental, who sent me to a couple other government agencies and another NGO, who in turn sent me to the Choluteca water organization and yet another NGO. Then the day was over and I had to schedule meetings for the next day, which I spent in much the same way. About 2 pm I ended up in the Alcaldia again, exactly where I started about 28 hours earlier, and finally found the link to PMDN. Hilarious! Based on what they told me I thought I could come back and get the study right there, but then I found out it was in Tegucigalpa since PMDN has no office in Choluteca. But throughout all that I made some good contacts so it wasn't all a failure.

Besides work, the other big news lately is more problems with security. Between Christmas and New Year's, some guys from Tim's community broke into his house by removing tiles from his roof and stole about half his stuff (something like $600 worth) while he was sleeping inside. There's already rumors that they drugged him with opium, but where the hell would some campesinos get that? Besides I can honestly see the same thing happening to me if they did it right, and those of you who know what a deep sleeper I am know this is true. It took me awhile to figure out this had happened, since the peace corps never contacted me or told me anything and in fact they didn't get back to Tim either for more than two weeks because our security officer was on vacation in El Salvador. I realize he needs vacations too, but can't he take them at another time of year? During the two weeks around the holidays there were like 10 incidents. Tis the season to commit crimes.

So now, after not doing shit for 22 days, they are probably going to force Tim to move sites because -gasp- they thieves know he knows that they did it and might seek revenge. Although these people have never committed a violent act against anybody before, and EVERYBODY knows they are thieves (last year they stole somebody's stereo and TV, and when that family went to their house and made some implied threats, they mysteriously got their stuff back the next day). The security guy never once came out to Tim's site to assess if it was dangerous enough to warrant a site change, which to me is inexcusable. Tim doesn't feel threatened, and he's spent five months finally getting to know the community and start projects. Luis Estrada, our project manager actually did come, but apparently the security guy Juan Carlos never talked to him or got his opinion. I live like an hour and a half away, and Juan Carlos wants me to move into a house with a family which I really don't want to do.

Once again, I understand that our security ostensibly is Peace Corp's #1 concern as they always tell us, but nothing about this makes sense. At the same time they're opening up travel for us to San Pedro Sula, which was formerly off-limits because its murder rate is 12 times that of Washington DC, the most dangerous city in the US.

Whatever.

Christmas, New Year´s and stuff

2006-01-09T08:03:00.001-08:00

Wow, it´s been a long time. Chalk it up to about one part negligence and three parts away-from-civilization.

First, mail report.... I got a letter from Daya, a letter from Grandma, a postcard from Dad, and two packages from him also. I had not received any Amazon.com package as of last week, but I haven´t checked my mail yet today.

After I got back from the last time in Tegucigalpa (man, how long ago was that?) I got back to work on this central american bank project thingy and also hanging out and doing very little, as is the custom around here for the days between Christmas and New Year´s. I worked a few days collecting coffee samples to send out to a potential buyers for the cooperative´s coffee, which was almost all harvested and ready to go at that point. I got back on the 17th I think and to be honest I´m not sure exactly how I filled in all the days between then and Christmas. Man that was awhile ago. :P

On Christmas, I hung out in my community, didn´t go anywhere, and attended a service in the Evangelical church. It sucked. We sang like two Christmas songs and some members performed a skit, but it had nothing to do with Christmas. The best part was Don Genio (this guy kicks ass) throwing a firecracker into the aisle in the middle of it. I should mention here that he is a Christian and member of the church, but from what they tell me Christmas used to be a lot crazier around here with tons of firecrackers (but they were banned, too many fingers blown off) and I think he was feeling nostalgic for the good ol´ days. Isaí, my counterpart, stayed home alone and worked in his tomatoes. The relavence of this will be discussed later when we get to what I did for New Year´s. I guess I forgot, also on Christmas afternoon I went and played soccer in a nearby field in a caserío (this is like, so small it´s not even an aldea... just a group of houses) called Tiscagua. The field was like pure rocks. I felt and took a chunk out of my hand in the first few minutes, then wised up and played more carefully. It was fun, and everyone was psyched that the gringo came to their community to play soccer with them. My team, from Agua Fría, was supposed to come but I was the only one who showed up so I played with Tiscagua. We lost, 7-6 I think.

In the following week, I was pretty inactive.... nobody in the community does anything at that time, so there wasn´t much work for me. I came down to Choluteca to buy a bottle of rum for New Year´s and picked up my packages from Dad, then headed back. I attended a meeting with some people that were working on executing a different project of this Central American Bank of Economic Integration thing (a ¨bovine repopulation¨ project, which always struck me as a wierd idea), which I guess was supposed to be a consulting session on how the project was going. I thought we were going to talk about the Natural Resources project that I´ve been working on, but that didn´t happen. Instead they spent a couple hours bitching nonstop about the requirements for the proposal and the Costa Ricans running the project. They also told me our tree nursery project would never pass because the trees will have to be planted on private land (there is literally no public land in the protected area I live in). So I left that meeting a bit discouraged, but we resolved to keep working on the proposal and do our darndest until the bank officially told us it was accepted or rejected.

For New Year´s, I played soccer again in the morning at the good field we normally play at. This time, I wasn´t the only one from the Agua Fría team.... there were two of us! Me and Alex, a young guy who lives very close to me (the two volunteers before me both lived with his mom). We played with a team from a nearby aldea called Zapotal, which is more organized than our Agua Fría team when it comes to finding games and getting players to show up. We´ve already played with them several times before, and they are also a good bunch. Team loyalty really doesn´t exist much, because in order to get a game going you usually just have to throw together whoever shows up. This game in particular, on New Year´s, was a really good one. There were just barely enough people for two teams, but a ton of good players showed up and we were very evenly matched. I fell in the first half and peeled off the scab that was just beginning to heal up from the last game, but someone lent me a wrapping cloth and I was good to go. In the second half, I scored a goal which brings my grand career total up to three. It was a pretty nice one too, I headed it in from a corner kick. The game ended tied 4-4, and I think everyone was pretty satisfied with the result because we didn´t have a shootout. We probably should have won 3-4, but the first half we had a goalie who absolutely sucked. Their goalie scored a goal on us. He kicked it all the way across the field and our goalie ran up to catch it out of the air, then changed his mind, and the ball bounced over his head. Pro.

In the evening of New Year´s, there was supposed to be a big party at Don Genio´s house (he lives very close to me up on the mountain), and all his kids and grandkids and his one great-grandkid were going to come, but a newphew of his got shot in the head by thieves on a bus in Choluteca and he had to go visit him in the hospital. So instead I went and visited Isaí, and he was up working by himself in his tomato patch. The dude sure likes to work. He obviously wasn´t going anywhere so we made some excellent drinks out of rum and fresh-squeezed orange juice and sat around visiting until about 11:30 when we decided it was plenty late enough and gave up. I had told Alex and his older brother who was up visiting from Choluteca I was going to meet them, but I just felt bad for Isaí drinkin´ alone on New Year´s. He doesn´t have an alcohol problem or anything but he definitely needs to socialize once in awhile.

The next day we found out that Don Genio´s newphew had miraculously survived, and his whole big annoying citified family showed up in two cars which we spent a couple hours getting up the road to his house. They all invited me to hang out, and to be fair, they were a very good, if remarkably mouthy bunch. We ate and played ´futbolito´ in his coffee patio with everyone going nuts when the girls scored goals, and generally chilled and had a good time. Don Genio has what I would say is one of the most successful families in the area, with all his kids professionally successful in the cities except for one, and that guy is a the secretary of the coffee cooperative and runs the biggest puplería (general store) in town. That guy (Nerys) and his family here are definitely some of the people that have showed me the most welcome and friendship from the beginning. His son Osmaris was the guy that originally got me to go play football and his wife gives me food pretty much anytime I end up at there place around a meal. It was a great time visiting with his family and also a little sad because it reminded me so much of our family reunions, which of course got me to thinking about all the people I miss back in the states. Still it´s been wonderful having friends like them in the community even if they do have some wierd names (I swear everyone in Don Genio´s family has has a wierd name; one of Osmari´s cousins is named Lesbia and her mom is called Floriselva).

After New Year´s, we sat down and hit it. The cooperative had found a buyer for their coffee, and was in a state of frantically arranging things to get it all gathered together and weighed and sent off. Also, we were somewhat behind on work for the Central American Bank project and at a point where it was becoming difficult to do because everyone was busy with other things and due to the professional nature of the work, it was difficult to accomplish in Agua Fría. So the cooperative bought themselves a computer. They spent 9000 lempiras on it, which is like $500, and sent me down to Choluteca to pick it up (the husband of the cooperative´s president sent it via bus from Tegucigalpa). I also had to buy a surge protecter and a voltage regulator because the electricity around these parts isn´t the most reliable, but we got ´er set up and installed the next day. This is absolutely awesome for me in terms of making my life easier, but I already know it will be necessary to do some classes because almost nobody up here knows how to use the darn thing and obviously I can´t leave the community a year and a half from now with a computer and nobody else that knows how to use it.

I edited what we had of our Central American Bank project proposal that very day and we came down to Corpus to show it to someone from the Bank. She told us that what we heard from those other guys was incorrect; that no proposal would be dismissed out of hand but we needed to demonstrate why the benefit to it was public. So that´s good to hear, but we also found out a crapload of information in it is lacking and we need to work twice as hard between now and when we submit it. We get to show another rough draft the 15th and then the final is due the 25th (this date got pushed back, I guess because enough projects weren´t going to be ready yet on the 15th).

After that, we had to set the tree nursery project aside for a little bit because the cooperative was ready to sell its coffee, which is kind of the most important event of the year for them and requires a week or more of dedicated organizing and planning and physical labor, moving the coffee around. Last Friday, people started bringing it to Agua Fría and we were there weighing the bags, writing receipts for the producers, and getting it ready to send off. That very night two trucks came and I ended up sticking around and helping load it. These are like 125 lb bags (because the coffee still has its inner husk and they will lose about 25 lbs per bag in processing). There were three officially hired workers, one truck driver, and myself loading. Also present were a couple cooperative staff, but not in physical condition to help. It was hard. Various complications ensued and we worked until 1 am and still didn´t get all the coffee loaded, because one of the trucks broke down. I ended up staying with the coffee that was outside, unloaded, to guard it and froze my ass off until 6 am Saturday morning when I finally went home and slept. Let me mention here that the people getting paid for this work make five lempiras per hour. That´s about 20 cents. The next day I got to thinking about the fact that these guys (who I would all consider friends of mine in the community) sometimes buy me sodas and stuff at the pulpería, which cost the equivalent of about 40 cents. I´m going to start buying them sodas I think. For me, buying Coca-Cola is a waste of money but I think it´s considered something of importance socially.

So I pretty much spent Saturday resting, on Sunday I got together with the cooperative president Juana María (¨Juanita¨) and we decided that in order to be able to do this proposal (and indeed, to be able to do the project as well) we needed to shave down its focus. Now we are going to concentrate on a few of the most important watersheds. Today I am in town looking up a lot of the information that we´re missing.

Christmas, New Year´s and stuff

2006-01-09T08:03:00.000-08:00

Security breach!

2005-12-15T14:01:00.000-08:00

Welp, I'm back from the final coffee training event in La Fe. There seems to have been a trend with these things of gradually increasing lameness.... like, IHCAFE started off all nice and planned and organized, and gradually forgot about the project when other things came up. I got to the center a day early due to some misinformation that Lucas Dunnington, my contact with USAID/MIRA, had given me, so I hiked up to a sort-of-nearby aldea called San Luis Planes to visit some other volunteers, a married couple named Kevin and Kathy, that live there. It was a really nice walk (that part of the country is simply gorgeous) and I enjoyed the visit as well. So not a total loss. Then the classes we had yesterday and the day before were like, 50% a repeat of stuff we've had before and 50% new information, and 100% improvised on the spot. It's like they just sent a couple more of their techs down and said "uh, teach the CAFIN group whatever your specialty is". Did somebody actually plan this course out?

So I feel a little disappointed with that, but I still learned some very valuable information in pretty much all the topics I would have liked to except for grafting coffee varieties (and I want to do this in my community). We didn't do coffee nurseries either, but everybody knows how to do that. Well, besides me. :P

The other noteworthy event is that I got my wallet pickpocketed on the bus back from La Fe, or at some point in the journey, I'm not really sure when (hence the title). I discovered its absence when I pulled into the peace corps office in Tegucigalpa this afternoon to pick up my mail and drop something off for Josh. It's damn lucky I decided to stop by here, because I will be able to take care of the necessary steps tomorrow, which is going to Immigration and getting a temporary residence card plus requesting a new one. I didn't have any bank cards or money in the wallet so that is good. I've picked up the habit of carrying money just loose in my front pockets, and I don't even bother bringing my bank card since it's pretty much useless. Apparently what happens when you get things like that stolen is that people buy a crapload of gas with them at a gas station that has credit card pumps, and then sell that gas.

Anyhoo, I was in a pretty crappy mood earlier today but the fact is it could've gone a lot worse (like getting a gun stuck in my face, which has already happened to three people in my training group since August) and the damage is minimal. I also learned an important lesson and I think I'm going to start carrying a "ringer" wallet from now on. I might even use that goofy neck-hanging purse that mom bought when we went to Costa Rica. My faith in humanity was tarnished briefly, but the staff here at the peace corps office is so friendly and helpful, and then I had a great taxi driver who took me to the police station, that I feel better already.

Unless something truly stunning happens I probably won't update again til after some more time back in my site. Love to everybody, and happy holiday season. :)

Politics, Development, and CAFTA

2005-12-10T10:31:00.000-08:00

As the title might lead you to believe, I intend to write a bit more than your average news post in this one. I feel I ought to, because the last post I wrote about CAFTA was done with basic ideas but incomplete information. I feel like now I have a better idea how it might affect myself and this country and that got me thinking about some other things. But first, some background information of events during the last few days.

On the 6th, I had a mandatory ´reconnect´ meeting with my fellow training group volunteers in a conference center type place in the mountains near Tegucigalpa. We were up right next to Parque Nacional La Tigra, which seemed really nice and I would love to go back to some day. The reconnect meeting was mainly to share info with the PAM staff on how things have been going, and also to provide feedback on how they can improve training for the next group based on our suggestions. In the next two days, December 7-8, another event took place in the same location called Project Workshop in which another whole PAM training group was there (they have been working for about a year now instead of just four months) and we all discussed our work, ideas, contacts, etc. Two groups of business volunteers were there as well and on the last day we also spent some time talking with them about how we can collaborate with each other on projects.

Around the middle of the second day, a Honduran lady named Jackeline Foglia, a diplomat of some type, showed up to talk to us about what exactly went down during the CAFTA negotiations and what kinds of things would be most relavent to us. She was very good at English and had a sharp sense of American as well as Honduran culture, which lent her observations and opinions on the treaty a substantial amount of credibility. Here are a couple of the things I said before about CAFTA that were incomplete or erroneous:

I thought the country would be flooded with cheap American food products (especially grains) with tariffs gone, which would wreak economic havoc on the campesinos. Jackeline explained to us that, first of all, each item that needed to be was negotiated specifically, with the representatives of Honduras having to make concessions on certain items (like, for example, rice) that were less important to its economy, but sticking it out to the very last on others (like corn) in which they absolutely could not open up to competition because of its economic and cultural importance. So, in short, corn coming from the states is still taxed. So are many basic foods and some other products that are the most vital to Honduras´s economy. Also, the majority of trade goods between the US and Honduras were already untaxed. We had pretty free trade before and made it more free while setting specific regulations on certain important items.

I also said something along the lines that environmental and labor standards would take a hit. This is not exactly true either, according to Jackeline. The country, as per its part of the agreement in the treaty, will now be forced to abide by the labor and environmental standards it has on the books (and while labor laws still aren´t the greatest, its actual environmental standards are extremely strict). The problem at this moment is, there isn´t hardly any enforcement of those standards. The government can´t afford to. The companies can´t afford to suddenly start adopting those standards either, especially the environmental ones, so they will be given a certain period of time to gradually bring themselves up to speed.

The idea that big american corporate interests pushed this treaty through has a flaw as well. Trade with Honduras accounts for less than either .01% or .1% of the United States economy (I forget which it is, but both those numbers are small.) In the very best case scenario, that might triple. It still isn´t hardly even a blip on our radar. Honduras, on the other hand, depends heavily on the United States to buy the stuff they produce and to invest in their businesses. Their economy in fact would be screwed without us. I´m not saying this is a good thing, but that´s how it is right now. Therefore, they have much more to gain.

Some things still make me uneasy. If Honduras is unable or unwilling to really force adoption of its existing environmental and labor standards, then what? The government is not going to magically become competent and effective enough to do this kind of thing with the signing of the treaty. Supposedly they will be punished if they don´t comply, but I don´t think anybody really wants to do that. Furthermore, the people or organizations that will have to monitor corporations and the system for doing so sounded kind of dodgy to me. Jackeline talked about corporations self-monitoring under the pressure of public opinion and I must admit we snickered at her.

As part of an upcoming strategy to take advantage of the treaty and keep Honduras from getting more left behind by the rest of the world, and helped by the recent debt condonation, there is supposedly a plan in the works to start immediately investing that extra money in some of the most needed areas, including communications (mostly telephone lines) and other necessities of infrastructure, education and technical training, and advanced technology. The timeline for all these improvements, and the point at which the changes of the treaty will supposedly have reached their maximum effect on the country, is 16 years. But in my opinion this is making some extremely optimistic assumptions about the functionality of the government to carry out the steps. For one, I just don´t see how these plans can be realized on a timeline like 16 years when almost the entire government switches every four years. That´s the way the system is here. Government entities (like COHDEFOR, for instance, which is in charge of protected areas) usually fire almost everybody if the ruling political party changes after an election. This is going to happen this year because their was a big swing in power from the Nacionalistas to Liberales with the elections that just took place. I guess I just feel like some basic, vital changes must take place within the government if it is to take advantage of the coming changes, and not be taken advantage OF. Based on past history it is hard to buy this.

So ok, a few more facts and a lot more speculations. How might this affect me? There is in development what Jackeline referred to as ¨La estrategia para la reducciòn de la pobreza¨ which means a strategy to reduce poverty. Some of the extra money from the debt condonation is going to be invested in this and I think it will include such things as better rural health centers and education, better rural communications and infrastructure, and a lot of pushing on the small farmers to increase their technical knowledge and add value to their products. I asked Jackeline if there was included any kind of emphasis on sustainable/organic farming or diversification, and she said yes, so that is good. But there will unavoidably be a move toward urbanization and an economy based more on services than goods, which is where the most developed countries in the world are right now.

Is this bad? In the unplanned, immediate short term, it causes social problems in cities and is hard on small producers. They can´t compete in the global market just selling potatoes anymore. You have to invent a new flavor of potato chips, market it successfully, run your business, etc etc which are things that are, lamentably, far out of reach for the average campesino both economically and culturally. I feel like the most important areas of change in rural areas will be education about new techniques and products in agriculture and a move away from traditional practices so that every square foot of land is as productive as possible in a sustainable way. Another key point is communication. They need to be in active contact with the outside world and its changes. And finally, most important of all in my opinion, is organization. One small organic coffee producer has nothing, nothing whatsoever to offer the world market. 50 small to medium sized organic coffee producers, among which are a few people that have some professional skills, and can make contacts and help them market their product, can find a very nice niche indeed. The spirit and awareness of the power of cooperatives in my area can, I feel, help immensely.

I feel like I finally have a better idea ¨where things are going¨ in terms of development here (well, idealistically anyhow) which helps me think about what needs to be done in order to get there. No doubt I will continue to revise these ideas throughout my service, but the CAFTA talk was really a breakthrough moment for me. Besides the economic concerns, I also got to musing about something that has always bothered me a bit about development in the world and which many other people simply don´t seem to notice. This is what I perceive as a loss of culture associated with growing up to be bigger, faster, richer, and more competetive. In other words, more like the U.S. The more TVs they have here, the more cards and CEOs and malls, the more they will be inundated with our culture. It´s more powerful and insidious than any overt hostilities, that´s for sure. It´s just hard to know what the right thing to do is - help a culture attain the same kinds of things we have, and in the process assimilate themselves into our ideas, or simply leave them alone to their own problems? Which is less moral?

It brings to mind the example of native americans in the United States. I feel fairly confident that the persistent poverty and social problems on reservations are propagated by the ¨island¨ situation that native americans are in, encouraged to dependency and inadequacy by excluding them from the society all around them. But, then, what should we DO? Any decision we make will have to be done, to some extent, parternalistically by us because we´re the only ones with the power to do anything. Maybe they want their native culture and ways. Maybe they just want to have the same opportunities and difficulties as us. Maybe, like everyone else in the world, they´re not exactly sure what they want. Nobody really does, after all.

Getting this abstract usually reminds me of how little such high-minded ideas really mean to me. Real human contacts with people and my own personal interests are more important than that crap. So here I am, enjoying the hell out of myself, learning more than I ever have in my life (the most important reason why the experience has been so fun) and once in awhile (but not too often) questioning myself.

___________________________________

I just got off a bus from Tegucigalpa a couple hours ago. I´m going to go visit another volunteer in this town (San Lorenzo, which is just west of Choluteca) and attend the wedding of a good friend from my site this evening. Tomorow I travel back north, past Teguc, to go to the third and final of this series of coffee training events in La Fe. I´ll be heading back to my site finally the 17th or so of December, around which time I hope to have another update written here (maybe just some basic news stuff). Hope everyone is having a great Christmas. :)

Gabe

Thanksgiving etc

2005-12-03T07:59:00.000-08:00

Like, whoa, been far too long since I updated my blog. Sorry yall, I can´t fully blame it on being busy this time but that was certainly a part. But this update will more than make up for it, oh yes indeed.

I´ve been up to various things since the last posting, but the best part of the time between then and now was Thanksgiving. The volunteers in the south organized a big get-together in the nearby town of San Marcos de Colon, which is a very different place compared to the rest of southern Honduras. It´s clean, the climate is cool because it´s at almost 1000 meters (compared to the low valleys that make up most of the region) and the people there are pretty rich. None of these things really contributed to the experience for me, but I can see why other volunteers like the town so much.

Anyways, we all convened at the house of two older married volunteers, Chuck (a guy working in the same project as me, Protected Areas Management) and Hortensia, who works in Municipal Development. They met during Chuck´s first tour of duty in the Peace Corps in El Salvador, which was way back in like 1974, even before Dad was in Guatemala. They have been living in southernwestern Oregon for the last 20 years or so, and I guess they got bored. Chuck is a cool guy, a Kentucky native and very gregarious. He also works with a organic coffee cooperative, after which the cooperative I work with more or less modeled itself, and has been going to these training events in La Fe as well.

I was the very first guest to arrive, early in the afternoon on the day before Thanksgiving. I brought baker´s chocolate, cinnamon, and vanilla, then I went and bought a crapload of fruit and milk and some sugar with which I made licuados (smoothies) for everybody on the morning of Thanksgiving. The very best mix we discovered was papaya, banana, mandarin orange, and vanilla. Absolutely awesome.

Everyone else besides me either brought a dish or the ingredients to make it on Thanksgiving. We cooked all day up until about 5 pm, and early on there was a crisis about only having one turkey for 30 people, but two more miraculously showed up. With all the other food, it turned out that one large turkey was enough anyhow. We had an awesome quiche, a grits dish that kicked ass, mashed potatoes, gravy, a little cranberry sauce, biscuits, stuffing, candied sweet potatoes, a hot cheesy broccoli dish, and undoubtedly a few other things I´m forgetting. For dessert there was chocolate pecan pie, pumpkin pie, cheesecake type pie made from zipote, a common fruit in the south (this was just amazing) and apple pie. A lot of people also brought wine, which was really nice. I felt bad for not thinking of this. All in all we got ´er done right in terms of food. Besides that it was pretty much a normal peace corps social gathering, everybody enjoying the company of a few gringos for awhile. After Thanksgiving, I have met pretty much all the other volunteers in my region now, and there were actual several from other parts of the country. For example, Josh, one of the other volunteers from my training group that lives near Tegucigalpa, showed up. He did the apple pie, bless his heart.

Many of the visitors stuck around to take a hike up to a waterfall in the mountains nearby, but I had to leave super duper early in the morning the next day (I got up at 3:30 to catch the first bus leaving town for Choluteca) because of a meeting related to a new project I´m working on, which brings me to the next big subject of this blog entry.

The week before Thanksgiving, Isaí asked me to participate in a meeting of this group of people, a ´comission´ apparently, from different parts of my municipality. We were to provide some data for a big project that was coming to the region from the Banco Centroamericano de Integraciòn Econòmica, or BCIE. I guess that would be Central American Bank of Economic Integration. While I was at the last coffee training event in La Fe, they had called together a huge group of people from the municipality and, I suppose, chosen the members for comissions in five different subjects: Health, Infrastructure, Services and something or other, Production, and Natural Resources/Environment. I was meeting with the comission of Natural Resources.

The basic idea of this project, called Active Citizenship Foundation, was to bring a set amount of funds that were provided by the European Union to each of seven municipalities that were around the border of Nicaragua. Each Municipality basically had $500,000 to divide between projects proposed by the five different comissions with their respective themes. After the preliminary meeting I attended with the commision of Natural Resources, there followed a three-day training event in Choluteca for everybody (25 people from each municipality, 7 municipalities) about how to plan a project and write the proposal. Really, most of the time was spent in helping the comissions brainstorm projects by identifying the most important and commonly perceived problems in their area, and then following that with a project that could address such problems. Then we had to meet with all the other comissions from our municipality and prioritize projects and appropriating a reasonable amount of funds to each one prioritized. My comission ended up with just about exactly $100,000 for a project of reforestation and agroforestry.

After that, we had to outline our basic ideas for how to execute the project and present them to one of the techs from BCIE, which was that meeting the day after Thanksgiving. In that moment we also had to encounter an agency to execute the project, because the five community members from all over the municipality who all had their own work would never be able to pull off such a thing. Since three out of the five comission members didn´t show up for that particular meeting, Isaí managed to get the job for his coffee cooperative. The other guy on the comission that actually showed up voted for a different non-governmental organization to do it, which incidentally he´s supposedly also involved with somehow. The BCIE tech asked the mayor of our municipality, who happened to be around, to cast the deciding vote. The mayor also happens to be a coffee producer and member of the cooperative, so he voted for us. I don´t know how one would even begin to untangle the conflicts of interest present, but I do believe that the cooperative is objectively a better choice because it is a local, community organization, and can execute the project a lot more cheaply because of its location and because there are a lot of cooperative members who can be paid less than a certified engineer but nevertheless have all the skills and knowledge necessary to help with the project. And of course, because they´ve got me! And I work for free!

Our plan, as it stands at the moment, is to start by inviting three known community leaders from each of the 16 aldeas of the municipality to a meeting and present the concept and plan of the project there. Those who are interested in participating will go back and present the project to their respective communities, do an inicial survey, and analize the community needs with respect to the area in which the project will work. Then they come back and present us the information, and we plan everything more specifically from there.

The communities that make it that far will be provided with funds for labor, materials, and technical assistance in building tree nurseries in their own communities. They will have to take a pretty fair hand in the management and care of the nurseries, because we´d never be able to reach much of the municipio otherwise. But this is also good because it involves the community in the project.

We want to present it as a multi-faceted natural resources management project, with agroforestry as its central feature, with the purpose of reforesting important watersheds and vulnerable areas, as well as diversifying people´s production by getting them to plant grafted fruit trees and valuable wood trees. According to the plans we´ve made, this will supposedly be going on in various stages until after I leave the area, so I can stop worrying about not having enough to do. Phew! Glad to get that weight off my mind.

More recently, I´ve been spending a lot of time helping the cooperative write up this proposal that they supposedly have to turn in a rough draft of by the 8th of this month. We spent three solid days grinding it out (the motherBLEEPer is 19 pages long) and I came down to El Corpus today to search for some missing information about the population of the municipality. So I guess that brings us to this moment, in which I failed to find such information but supposedly it will be available on Monday. Too bad I will have left by then for the obligatory Peace Corps ¨reconnect¨ meeting, where I go to Tegucigalpa for three days to meet with my superiors and convince them that I´ve been doing something. Somehow I don´t think it will be too difficult.

I don´t know if Uncle Tim reads this blog? But I would love to fax him a copy of our proposal when it´s finished and see what he thinks if he´s got the time to check it out. This will probably be after I get back from my next series of traveling adventures including the reconnect and another coffee training event, until the 16th of December. The final draft of the project is due the 15th of January so there is plenty of time yet.

To finish up with the news, one of the other things I have been doing lately is working with the Patronato (community development organization) of a nearby aldea, San Juan Arriba, to type up a profile of a totally unrelated project that they want to submit to the Embassy of Japan for some funds to bring electricity to their community. I spent like a day and a half with that. I also spent a day helping one of the local teachers review algebra and geometry so she can take a test to pursue more studies at a university, and some other time doing coffee-related stuff with the cooperative. It´s a darn good thing the school year is over, I tell you what.

When I was telling Maya about all this crapola on the phone, she said it makes her feel like she should be doing something more worthwhile with her own life. I of course think that what she is doing is every bit as worthwhile, but this really got me to thinking, not only about her, but about the paradox of development work.

The thing is, my ultimate goal here is to help the community sustainably improve itself, and work on projects that they will continue to be involved in after I leave. This requires that they are capable of managing such projects, and in order for this to happen they first have to think they are capable of it. Unfortunately, it seems that by my mere presence here, people end up getting the idea that they could not do this without my help. Just paternalistically handing out stuff to people as do missionary groups and various NGOs is bad, but doing work for people that they could just as easily do themselves amounts to pretty much the same thing and is in some ways even worse. So I have to try to work alongside the community, but by virtue of whatever abilities I have to share in said subject and the fact that I do everything without pay, people end up getting ideas about their inferiority in those abilities and hence the paradox.

Now I find out that somehow at a distance of 2000 miles, I´m even making my sister feel like her own interests aren´t worthwhile to some extent. I have therefore concluded that the best way to improve the world is to do absolutely as little as possible in my life, forcing people to rely on themselves and create their own self esteem when they realize how superior they are to me. This has the added advantge of relieving me from any work or responsibility, forever. Who knew that making the world a better place could be so easy? ;)

More travels

2005-11-11T08:53:00.000-08:00

I spent another five days traveling this week for the second training event relating to coffee production and commercialization up north from me in the department of Santa Barbara. There isn´t too much interesting news from that, to be honest.... we talked some more about the beneficio process and ecological management of waste products from it (specifically the outer husks that are taken off first, and the ¨honey water¨ that´s left over when they wash off the fruity part around the coffee grain.) We also visited the finca of the guy who won the coffee taster´s cup in Honduras last year to check out his operation. I was expecting a big fancy facility, but actually his setup is simpler than the majority of the people in my community.

He produces very high quality coffee there, and quite a bit of it considering he doesn´t have much land, but doesn´t seem to be making a whole lot of money, which I found interesting. One of the problems is that Honduras has such a bad reputation with the world community for coffee that it´s hard for producers here to market their product as high-quality and get a good price. Another problem is that there are no governmental standards controlling the quality of export-grade coffee, and the exporters, who are rich and big and have more say in the government, don´t have much interest in changing things because they make the same amount of money to commercialize and export low grade coffee as high grade. As with almost every step of the process, it is the little guy that gets screwed.

On the other side of things, the same day we also went to visit the guy that exports the coffee of that producer who won the taster´s cup. He plainly told us that he wasn´t as interested in ¨niche markets¨ as in volume, but he is an exporter with one of the best reputations for quality in the country and seems to take a fair amount of pride in his operation. We toured the facility which was pretty big and impressive, saw some bags of coffee that were heading for Europe, and then visited for awhile about politics. He and the IHCAFE guy fired some shots at each other about where the blame lies for the problems with coffee production in Honduras, which was pretty entertaining.

I stopped and stayed the night in Tegucigalpa on the way back, and met a few other volunteers who were there. Also got to go out to eat at Pizza Hut! This would be average pizza back home, but it is most definitely the best pizza I´ve had in Honduras. The cheese is everything.

I´ve got to get moving now and get ready to head back up to my place for another good while. I will be traveling again the 23-24th for Thanksgiving in San Marcos de Colon, and I think I might not update my blog til then. Take it easy everyone. :)

Aplastado!

2005-11-04T09:50:00.000-08:00

This means ¨smashed¨. In the school system here, it isn´t uncommon for students to not pass final exams and have to retake the test in order to pass onto the next grade. I had to aplastar 18 English students out of my 62, and really it should´ve been a lot more but I passed people down to 60% (D-). I was pretty disappointed with the overall test results since so many people failed. I am trying to figure out why, because I frickin´ handed the test to them on a silver platter, dedicating a fair amount of time in the two classes before to explaining exactly what I was going to put on it and what they would need to study. Based on my best guess, I think the problems most people had fall into the categories of: Didn´t pay attention in class, Didn´t understand and was too timid to ask a question, Didn´t study, and Has no experience whatsoever in test-taking. The people that failed probably mixed and matched a few of these. I stood up on the last day of class, after reviewing all 5 sections I was going to put on the test, and said ¨if anybody doesn´t understand this, ASK ME NOW. If I get a pile of lousy scores on the test, then at least I´ve done my best to help explain this stuff to you.¨ Not a single person raised their hand, but obviously a bunch of people should have. Fighting this kind of thing is going to be annoying, I can tell.

Hurricane Beta messed up the North coast of Honduras, but all we got down here was a couple days of drizzle. Now it´s cleared up again and the weather is beautiful - 70-80 in the day with sun and wind, and 6oish at night.

On Wednesday I went around inspecting some coffee fincas (a finca is like a family farm, but I hesitate to use that word because it conjurs up images of corn, cows, and barns and that´s not what the deal is here). This is work that the coffee cooperative wants me to help them with, and I am somewhat reluctant to do because I have to be ¨Mr. Inspector¨ to all these new producers that I am making friends with. They get kind of embarassed because they haven´t done a damn thing we talked about in the capacitations and with every problem I find, they say they either do it right normally or are about to fix it. This is what keeps me strict, the excuse-making. A couple of the places had in fact started working on improving their beneficios though, so that was cool to see.

Played soccer again on Sunday. We won the first game, then I left and and we lost the second. Har har! Maybe I am good luck. We have a big 4-way tournament coming up on the 13th in which the politicians are going to donate new uniforms to the team that wins. They are chucking free stuff left and right at the moment since it is election time. This is important because even though we´re pretty good, our uniforms are like the suckiest of all the teams in the area.

I´m here in Choluteca right now because I had to go to the bank today before I head off to yet another training event in central Honduras and I wouldn´t have time to do it in the morning before catching the bus. So I did that and now I´m going to tool around town for the rest of the day and leave tomorrow. It´s nice having plenty of time in Choluteca because any other time I come here I´m always in a godawful rush. I may end up spending yet another day in town because it appears I got my messages mixed and the thing starts a day later than I thought. I have to call up to Agua Fría after this and figure that out.

I answered some emails this time and hope I did not miss delivering any information that people wanted. If I am indeed still stuck in Choluteca tomorrow I will check my email again. Maybe somebody wants me to call them?

cheerio,

Gabe