Allí no menos

Allí no máscito…so what did you do for christmas, I got to listen to scary stories about death and listen to fireworks until I finally fell asleep, after writing a report I have been procrastinating for a week…good time up on the mountain…on the bright side of things I got to eat some pretty kick ass tamales, as an old custom here is to make tamales this time of year…its funny how Christmas hasn’t really felt like Christmas at all. I don’t know if it is the lack of gift giving, maybe the fact that I walk out my front door to a nice green patch of grass that I recently cut with my machete, or the fact that I spent Christmas away from my family and friends for the first time. The funniest part of it is that although there are some things I miss (spending time with family, friends, and the food which is usually pretty awesome this time of year), I really haven’t missed the whole consumer part of Christmas that I don’t have to deal with or see hear considering the only things they sell in my village are coke and a few necessary food products (beans, rice, eggs, etc.) Recently I got to go and participate in a bird count with one of Peace Corps business partner type NGO’s. it was very educational and a whole lot of fun, and now whenever I am anywhere and I see a bird I watch it until I can’t see it and I only wish I had some binoculars and the ability to distinguish it. Some of the birds we saw were really amazing, and all of a sudden I am interested in birds, it’s funny how a little event can do that to someone…we’ll see how long it lasts J Recenlty I finished up the first job type thing that we had been working on for the past couple months, and now it is just sit and wait to see if anything happens. We can only hope! I have been living in my house now for almost a month and I am liking it a lot. Although I will not deny that living with the family for the first 2 months was a great experience and esentiall in my integration process here in the community. In Fact I still go and eat frequently in my host parents house, because the food is delicious, they are my neighbor, and sometimes I am lazy and do not like to cook. I still am in the process of getting rid of my bad habit of cooking more than I can eat, without refrigeration it leads to much waste or me looking for someone who wants to try the “weird” food that the gringo just made. Recently I have been cooking a lot of potatoes considering I keep getting given them. The other day I was given a whole stem of bananas which I hung up in my bodega, and they just started ripining, and considering there are probably 150-200 bananas on the stem I am in the process of eat and giving away a lot of bananas. It is amazing that there’s so much banana here and yet the people here rarely eat banana. Anyway the coffee season is coming into heat and lots of people are starting to show up to work. I am not really sure where this is gonna leave me, but pretty soon I am going to learn how to pick, and I could have some long days ahead of me. I hope everyone has a happy new year at home and try and check out some of the photos I am gonna put online today if I have the time.

December here I come!!!

Oh yeah 2 months down, only 22 left to go J, So I have sort of started to work now, I mean I guess it all depends on your point of view when you ask or define work…I have recently turned in a proposal for a reforestation project with Trees for the Future, which I am hoping to undertake sometime next year with my community and the school. Also we are in process to ask for a middle school to be brought to our community. I am not really sure if we are going to accomplish the latter, but it never hurts to try. I have also been to meetings in the other surrounding communities and have told them I will support them in the projects they are doing where I can, however in reality I have very few resources as Peace Corps Volunteer. In reality my job is less focused on the actual work I do as a volunteer and more on the cultural exchange I have with the people in the community. This doesn’t mean I am just going to walk around talking about differences and drinking coffee with people, but I will be doing this a lot.

I played soccer again last weekend; I got to wait for about 3 hours of discussion and confusion before we finally played. Of course we lost, the team I played for in very poorly organized, it was fun either which way, and I could barely walk the next day, but that was probably more because I had to walk 40 minutes to and from the soccer game, and in a hurry after the game up the hill from the neighboring village to get to a meeting I had called. In the end I got to the meeting, absolutely wasted, but it went well and we completed the stuff I needed us to do to turn in the application for the reforestation project.

This weekend I think I am going to move into my own little shack/house. We did some work to put glass windows and metal bars on the windows, and also to install a sink inside the house. I am only waiting on going and getting the furniture that is waiting for me in a neighboring village. I got really lucky that past volunteers left me a whole bunch of stuff, the only furniture I have had to buy is a bed, and since the past volunteers in my area were couple the bed frame I was left is queen, so I bought a nice queen size bed for 2300 lempiras (125 dollars). I really like my host family and will come and eat with them all the time even when I move out, but it is a step that I need to take and now my friends are going to be able to come and visit me and have a place to stay!

The coffee season is on the verge, they are already picking, but just a few beans a day, pretty soon it will be mayhem and people will be picking left right and center. I am going to go out one of these days and see what it is like to pick coffee for a day; it should be an interesting experience.

I had a great thanksgiving with some friends in a town called Las Vegas (unfortunately there was no gambling). We had turkey, and stuffing, and mashed potato, and sweet potato, and cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie…in fact the food was all very typical of a thanksgiving in the states. I am going to spend Christmas here in my community, supposedly they don’t do all that much, but I am going to stay anyway and then venture off to celebrate the New Year with some of my fellow PCVs.

Bueno, that’s all I got for now…I am probably leaving out a lot, but it’s hard to include everything…all I know is that I haven’t fallen off the mule yet!!! More to come on that… J

Tristan

And then it got cold

So when you think of Central America what is one of the first things that comes to mind, for me it was nice warm weather…and guess what I got, freezing cold weather with lots of rain and lots of mud. I almost didn’t bring my beanie, I almost didn’t bring my winter gloves, whoa I am so glad that I brought them both now! It is hard to work in such cold weather, personally I just want to stay in bed all day, but I can only do that every other day unfortunately J

In about 3 weeks I am going to finally be moving into my own house, I am paying 8 months of rent in advance so they fix the house up a bit and give it some real windows as opposed to wooden ones. Also they are going to make me a sink. The house is really small, its basically 1 room separated into 2 small rooms, and then the bathroom which is also minute. It is not so bad though, I wouldn’t have cared so much about the wooden windows if there was electricity here, but seeing as there is not I like to let light into the house as much as possible and the wooden windows just aren’t good for that.

I went to a Halloween party last weekend and dressed up like a churro bag (which is the potato chip bag that you see everywhere on the streets). The get together was probably the best thing I have done for myself since I got to site…life was getting stressful, lonely and boring here, but I got to spend time, talk and hear about other peoples experiences and it helped me to realize I am not the only one living and experiencing this change in life. It was all really enlightening and stress relieving for me, in fact I think they should make a little getaway like that MANDATORY for all volunteers about a month into site. That way they don’t get too stressed out/depressed and decided to terminate their Peace Corps service early, which is quite frankly not uncommon. Now that I am back in site I feel rejuvenated and really ready to start working again.

Right now I am working on a variety of different projects, the schools are letting out, however I might try to open up a community center/library type place 3 days a week in the school to give kids a chance to have access to books and a safe environment to play/draw/write/read, or whatever. I still need to talk about this with the school director however to see if she is on board. Also I am probably going to be working with Trees for the future and try and bring from trees or seeds into site to build a nursery and seed beds so we can plant trees in the area/take part in reforestation here in the protected area that is Mount Santa Barbara. Apart from these things I am working with different groups and going to different meetings from time to time to offer support and pretty soon I am going to start working on an environmental education plan for next year.

I miss everyone at home, however I have a really GREAT friend base here in Honduras of other volunteers and people in my community that make me feel good and are always willing to talk and help. I am not really sure what I am going to do for thanksgiving, however I think I would be very very lucky if I got to eat a nice cooked pumpkin pie with turkey, stuffing and a nice cranberry sauce. That’s all I got for now, keep in touch…

Tristan

Por Fin

Whoa sometimes I wonder what I am doing in Honduras…in fact not just sometimes J right now we are in the rainy season and where I am living it rains and rains, everyday it’s like one of the very few things that will never let someone down…except that’s exactly what it does because it practically floods the soccer field, or even worse it rains almost everyday in the later afternoon, which is the time of the day when we go to the field to play, so consequently I am not getting to play much soccer, which really sucks, cause I love the exercise and its great fun playing and getting to know people through the games…

So in training we learned how to make artesanias, which are like trinkets sort of, gifts but with local material, in my case we learned how to make things out of potato chip bags, which are found everywhere because people just throw their trash on the ground after they are done with it. I am currently working on making some different things with my collected trash and actually decided to make my Halloween costume out of trash; it’s going to be good I have spent quite a bit of my free time on it…

It kind of sucks the time of year they lets us free on our communities because in about 1 month my whole area is going to be entering into the coffee harvest which last 3-4 months and nothing will get done in the area except coffee picking, which basically means I am going to have a good 3 months to do basically nothing, hang out and think about what I will be able to do in February when school starts again and then around April I will be able to start doing work with the members of the community…they have some reasons for this, to give us time to settle in and make out Spanish better, but quite frankly I have very little patience to wait 3 or 4 months to start doing projects, and what makes the situation worse is that in like 3 weeks the school let out, so I will not even be able to work in the schools…basically the next 3 months in site will be very boring, but I will be moving into my own house in 1 month and I will be able to spend some time fixing it up, making it how I want it, and then I might try and do some mini-projects. Also in this time I will be making some trips around the country to visit other sites and volunteers to get some better ideas on how to successfully run a project, where to look for funds to do different types of projects, etc…but all in all I got some long and boring days ahead of me J

The weather here currently makes it hard to do stuff as well, for instance when it pours hard with rain, which is does almost everyday its hard to even go out into the community and talk with people, because you can’t hear each other when talking because all the roofs here are tin, and when it pours its like elephants are jumping up and down, it is that loud, makes it tough…I bought a machete a couple a of weeks ago and its nice and sharp now and ready to work, I also bought rubber boots so I can play in the mud…in fact I go out and help out on my host dads farm about once or twice a week, he has cows so I get to haul the manure and help prepare their feast of grass and corn stalks everyday, its dirty work, but its kind of fun, and they milk the cows everyday which makes for fresh milk just about everyday in some shape, mostly a type of cheese my host mom makes which is delicious, but even better is the oatmeal I get for breakfast almost every morning with the fresh cow milk…good stuff…I love the food here, even though it’s the same a lot, beans, eggs, tortillas, rice…I love it, every now and then we eat meat, but rarely because of no electricity/no refrigeration, there is no way to store the food.

Slowly I am buying little household items which will “furnish” my house when I move in next month…it’s funny because I almost can’t spend money in my site because there is simply nothing here to spend money on, except for maybe a coke, or a bag of chips from time to time. The fruit here is amazing, fresh oranges, limes, bananas, plantains, guava, and a whole bunch of other fruit and produce. My soon to be house has an orange and lime tree, and my host dad’s farm has tons of bananas and oranges, so I foresee lots of fruit intake during my service here.

This is really my first blog blog, only 4 months in country and one month in site to get it out, but such is life,

Again

So i have deiced to start using this thing again because i think i can behave myself on here and not say things that will make people mad...that said i am gonna try and post updates every couple weeks to let everyone know about how i am learning to milk cows, ride a mule, play soccer in the local league, eat tortillas, beans, eggs and rice for almost every single meal...so far i am surviving it, and enjoying my time...hasta pronto

Mountain man

I recently found out i am probably going to get to live in the mountains for the next 2 years, and because we are not allowed to own cars or motorbikes, and if you get a push bike you have to wear a helmet, which is like against the culture and you basically outkast yoursef doing, I might have to invest my funds in buying and learning to ride a horse as my mode of transportation for bringing food and other necessary supplies into my community so I can eat and clean!!! good times :)

Puchica

I made it here, and am now in Santa Lucia, if you want to get more in depth stuff send me your email address and i will include you in my bulk emails, as i do not intend to post too much to the blog...email me at: golfstar55@yahoo.com

Tristan

Just to be official and get it started!

Nothing written on this site should be interpreted as official or unofficial Peace Corps literature or as sanctioned by the Peace Corps or the U.S. government. I wrote it, it's my opinion, mood, idea, etc.