Wow...PC training is Intensiana Jones

Our Protected Areas Management field based training is in full swing. In between giving presentations, visiting farms, planting trees, and going for hikes, I've been trying to study Spanish. I'm ashamed to admit I now have a favorite telenovela. It's called Soy Tu Duena (I'm your owner)...A girl sings "Soy tu duena," and then a whip cracks across the screen. Hahaha.

Anyhows, the highlight from my past two weeks:

I rode up to the mountains last weekend with the family of another PCT here. Her family had a coffee farm in the mountains up above our town. We rode up the mountain in their old pickup, which was shedding bits of the frame all the way up. The largest chunk of metal we pulled off was about the size of a futbol :) We finally made it up to their farm, which was an undefined patch of land that ran all the way up the the top of one mountain. Most coffee farmers live in the mountains so they can take care of the land, but since this family lives so far away, most of the coffee bushes were being shaded out by grass. We chopped down some of the grass, machete style, and then hacked down some ripe bananas to take home. When we made it back to the truck, which was parked at the closest campesinos house, the front tire was flat. The campesino family made us some delicious hand picked, hand roasted coffee while we changed the tire. Two of the guys living there started playing some ranchero music on little guitars. I tried to dance to it but everyone laughed at me. On our way back down the mountain, a huge storm broke right over us. We were instantly soaked. The road turned into a river. I was afraid we were going to slide off the mountain, but the truck did fine. The second we got ahead of the storm, the family decided it was a good idea to hop out of the truck and collect all the firewood we could find in the adjacent field. The field had just been burned, so all my clothes got covered with charcoal. At the bottom of the field was a pile of wood, neatly stacked, and probably waiting for the owner to come back and get it. But the family decided that was the easiest wood to get to, so they took some of that too. At this time the storm had caught up to us, so we hopped back in the truck and made it back to town right at the time it really started to rain (sideways).  All in all, a day well spent :)

That's all I've got time to recount right now.

Cheers!

Ruth

Up Up and Away!

We are leaving the main training center tomorrow and heading off to a little aldea where us PAMers will have field based training. I´m going to be moving in with a new family. I haven´t met them yet but I heard there are five kids, two adults, and a little store all inside the house. Goodbye quiet life. I´m hoping that I´ll be so innundated with Spanish that my language skills will shoot through the roof! (or at least bump up a little bit)

This past week I traveled four hours north to the booming metropolis of Santa Barabara. After watching the final world cup game projected on the wall of a sketchy bar, I rode out to the campo with a real-life PCV. Her site was a bit bigger than most PAM sights, maybe 1-2,000 people living in the community. Some of the houses had running water and occational electricity, but the outlying houses were a little more simple. We visited a few families that didn´t have latrines and took pictures of their houses to put in a grant proposal that the PCV is working on.

We also brought some powered formula to a baby that was dying of malnutrition. The baby was 40 days old and seriously underweight. His legs looked like toothpicks, his stomach was sunken in, and his skin was a greyish color. While we were feeding the baby the formula, he stopped moving suddenly, and I thought he had died. Fortunately, we were able to get him to come back around. The situation was interesting and very sad. The mom is 40 years old, and isn´t producing any milk to feed the baby. They said they didn´t have any money to buy formula, but they had a huge stereo system in their house. With my level of Spanish, I definitely could have misinterpreted the situation, but the volunteer told me that the mom seemed totally unconcerned about the health of the baby. She already has four other children, and maybe keeping this new baby alive wasn´t a priority. Hope he makes it.

The volunteer and I talked a lot about the projects she has tried to start. She´s working on a trash collection service, since most of the trash goes into the river or is burned right now. In the next few months they will be starting a monthly collection service to take the trash into nearby Santa Barbara. The basurero is just an open air dump, but the community has decided it´s better to haul the trash their than to keep disperse it in the air and the water.

Okay, that´s all for the moment. Hope you all are doing well.

Cheers,

Ruth

Pictures...as promised

 

Some sweet butterflies in La Tigra

 

Part of the garden at my homestay families house. That´s our little bathroom in the back.

 The view from our porch. Nice green hillsides. That´s a papaya plant in the foreground, but it´s a male, so no fruit from him.

 My homestay sister. When she´s not running around like crazy, she picks flowers for me.

 San Juancito. The enterance to La Tigra is through this town and up that misty hillside. It doesn´t look that steep here, but it´s just an illusion.

 Everyone in my project, Protected Areas Management, was stoked to see this sign. We just learned about the Zona Nucleo, which is the no impact zone above 1800 m. Everything above 1800 m in Honduras is declared cloud forest and under some sort of protection. Of course, there were still some houses up here and the forest was only about 30 years old. This area is the watershed for Teguz and the surrounding towns, so now it´s under stronger protection.

 Hillside houses up the valley from San Juancito. Yup, that´s a maize field above and below the house. There are some banana trees right above the house which appear to function as a barrier to erosion (keeping the house on the hillside and not in the valley bottom)

 A farmer planting maize. This is just a little down the valley from that last picture. Pretty tough work.

 We had a pretty major storm yesterday. The walls at the training center have holes in them so water can move from one level down to the next without breaking down the wall. 

Okay, that´s a brief summary of life in Honduras. I´m heading out tomorrow for a town four hours north of here. I´m going to be staying with a PAM volunteer for a few days to see what PC life is like first hand. I think she does quite a bit of environmental ed work with her community. I´ve been trying to think about all the possibilities for PAM work here in Honduras. Most people in my project end up in the aldeas (small villages) working on environemntal ed, latrine construction, improved stoves, hillside farming, erosion control, forest management, women´s groups, etc. Everything pretty much depends on the community you get placed in and what they want to accomplish. A few PAM volunteers have the opportunity to work on larger scale NGO networking and park managment, but those placements are pretty rare and sound extremely challenging. Right now I´m just trying to focus on my Spanish, which seriously needs some help. I feel like I´m getting worse, which is impossible, right? It´s tough cuz we go from Spanish at our homes to English in training. It´s hard to keep making the switch back and forth, but I´d better get used to it becuase that won´t be changing any time soon. 

Highlight of the week: Us PAMers built a small garden the other day. I found some black rasberries right next to our plot too! And I learned that we can buy horses at our sight! Burros are a bit cheaper, but pretty slow at carrying me up mountains.

Hasta luego!

Segunda Semana (sorry all for the uncreative titles)

Hola todos! I just got back from a trip to La Tigra National Park, where the access is limited, the trees are small, and the hike to the enterance takes over an hour. Luckily the guard gave us the resident discount, and we only had to pay one dollar to get in (the foriegner fee is 10 times that much). We hiked up to the first mirador where we could hear the singing and preaching of the local church all the way from the bottom of the valley. We were in the area for around five hours, and the church service was still going on when we left. Whew.

Life in Zarabanda is good. Peace Corps training involves a lot of sitting on uncomfy chairs and listening to presentations. One week to go till field based training starts. About 20 of us will be moving to a rural village to do some hillside farming and protected areas managment training. Unfortunately, I´ll have to descend out of the mountains for it, which means adios to my beloved pine trees and hello to some sweltering heat.

Yesterday´s adventures included some market negotiations in Tegucigalpa, in which I procured a used pair of running shoes and my very own cell phone! Why the hell did I leave my tenis shoes in Colorado?

I haven´t had time to upload any pics yet and internet access is super super limited. As is maybe half an hour every Sunday. But when I do, you can all see some sweet pics of contour farming, misty mountains, and the killer view out my front window :)

Thats all for now!