Dear taxi drivers in Teguz,
I just got out of a taxi. I don't want another taxi. If I did, I would not be getting out of this one. Stop bombarding me.
Dear Rooster,
SHUT UP. For the love of god. It is 2am.
Dear host family,
French fries are not the same food group as sandwich bread. When I have amoebic dysentery and ask for pan sandwich, please do not bring me papas fritas.
Dear dog shrouded in fleas,
I pity you, but get away from me. You are probably covered in excrement.
Dear kid on bicycle,
Are you trying to swerve and kill me? Because I'm trying to get out of your way.
Dear construction workers who piropo (cat call) me as I walk by,
You are lucky my Spanish isn't good enough to give you a piece of my mind. Lucky.
Dear Hondurans,
You put a pound of sugar on all of your food, yet put salt on fruit? It doesn't make sense.
Dear Rat,
You are dead to me for eating my chocolate. I hope it kills you and you rot in rat hell.
Dear whoever drives down my street at 5am blasting reggaeton over a megaphone,
Seriously? I mean, really. SERIOUSLY?
Dear cows,
You are large and slow. Get out from in front of our car.
Dear mutton-chopped, afroed, mustached campesino in oversized camo shirt, rain boots, sombrero, and tassled machete sheath,
You are awesome. The world needs more of you.
Thursday, July 28, 2011
Thursday, July 21, 2011
Un cumpleaños, 3 pizzas, y la fumigación
Today was my host dad's birthday. I had always been a little jealous of my friends who talked about host family birthdays, so I was excited to experience my first.
I've had a very busy week, working 2 days with Plan in their La Esperanza office (reminded me a lot of office days in SF, with the cooler temperatures, fast(er) internet, and a coffee maker). The director and I are working on a new savings curriculum for youth, and I'm very excited about it! I've also been going to nearby municipalities several times a week, so when I had the opportunity to take a lazy day today, I enjoyed it!
About mid afternoon, my host mom and sister summoned me to help make pizzas for the birthday. I was scared at first because Hondurans typically use ketchup as their pasta/pizza sauce, but my family knows what they're doing, and it turned out to be delicious. We had a lot of fun making the dough and sauce, and even stuffed the crust with quesillo!
All of a sudden, we heard a horrid noise and my host mom goes ¨vienen los fumigadores!¨ ... which translates to ¨the fumigators are coming!¨ Yes, here in Honduras (or at least my town) there are people that go around with what look like giant fiery leaf blowers, spraying each house with pesticide to kill the mosquitos. (Picture someone barreling into your house without warning and spraying the whole thing with a fire extinguisher.) They'd done it to the municipal building last Friday while I was there, so I knew what to expect... and I knew we needed to flee!
My Spanish suddenly got very good, as my host mom and I went into a panic. We crammed the finished pizzas back into the oven on top of each other, put away all the plates and utensils, grabbed the cake, and ran outside. I also darted back into my room to bag up all of my food and throw it under a sheet. Between the panic and the smoke, it felt like we were fleeing a fire.
Flash forward 20 minutes, and we're all sitting outside, eating pizza and cake and drinking fresco as disgusting smoke billows out of the house. Totally normal, except we have to cover our faces and sprint every time we need something from inside. I guess that's what people do here... they improvise! My host dad didn't seem to care. I suppose his birthday gift was a reduced risk of getting malaria or dengue.
I've had a very busy week, working 2 days with Plan in their La Esperanza office (reminded me a lot of office days in SF, with the cooler temperatures, fast(er) internet, and a coffee maker). The director and I are working on a new savings curriculum for youth, and I'm very excited about it! I've also been going to nearby municipalities several times a week, so when I had the opportunity to take a lazy day today, I enjoyed it!
About mid afternoon, my host mom and sister summoned me to help make pizzas for the birthday. I was scared at first because Hondurans typically use ketchup as their pasta/pizza sauce, but my family knows what they're doing, and it turned out to be delicious. We had a lot of fun making the dough and sauce, and even stuffed the crust with quesillo!
All of a sudden, we heard a horrid noise and my host mom goes ¨vienen los fumigadores!¨ ... which translates to ¨the fumigators are coming!¨ Yes, here in Honduras (or at least my town) there are people that go around with what look like giant fiery leaf blowers, spraying each house with pesticide to kill the mosquitos. (Picture someone barreling into your house without warning and spraying the whole thing with a fire extinguisher.) They'd done it to the municipal building last Friday while I was there, so I knew what to expect... and I knew we needed to flee!
My Spanish suddenly got very good, as my host mom and I went into a panic. We crammed the finished pizzas back into the oven on top of each other, put away all the plates and utensils, grabbed the cake, and ran outside. I also darted back into my room to bag up all of my food and throw it under a sheet. Between the panic and the smoke, it felt like we were fleeing a fire.
Flash forward 20 minutes, and we're all sitting outside, eating pizza and cake and drinking fresco as disgusting smoke billows out of the house. Totally normal, except we have to cover our faces and sprint every time we need something from inside. I guess that's what people do here... they improvise! My host dad didn't seem to care. I suppose his birthday gift was a reduced risk of getting malaria or dengue.
Monday, July 11, 2011
El Agua Sucia
I realize I haven't done much to describe my standard of living here, so I want to devote a quick blog to it.
You may have seen the recent ¨Live Like a PCV Challenge¨ site, so I will say that every volunteer's experience is different, and a lot of the worst-case-scenarios don't apply to me since I'm in a larger community. For example, I have regular internet and am within 30 minutes of a giant supermarket that has just about every food I could want. I baked Nestle Tollhouse Chocolate Dream cookies last night, after looking up the recipe online. Pretty posh in a lot of ways.
With that said, here are the realities of life in my site:
- Food: Living with a host family means eating their food, which means pounds and pounds of sugar. On everything. No one drinks water, just a ton of soda and super-sugary juices, and then coffee loaded with sugar. Then there's mantequilla, which is basically a combo of butter and sour cream that you squeeze out of a pouch. Fry up the beans with a stick of manteca (crisco, basically), then slather them with mantequilla. Then fry up some plantains and douse them in mantequilla. Yum!
(I will follow this by saying that I really like the non-fried food here, especially the plato tipico of beans, egg, plantains, cheese, and avocado with corn tortillas. I'd just prefer it without the pound of mantequilla.)
- Bathroom: Cold showers, every day. We don't always have running water in the evenings, so I often have to take bucket baths (using a larger bucket of stored water and then a smaller pail to pour it over yourself). Might sound awful, but they are easy to get used to and actually save a lot of water.
Also no flushing toilet paper. It's placed in a trash can next to the toilet. When there's no water, you can flush the toilet manually using a bucket.
- Bugs: Mosquitos, biting ants, cockroaches, and these stupid winged creatures that divebomb me and my computer screen (my host family in Yuscaran called them palominos, no clue what their actual name is). I have a mosquito net over my bed, which keeps most of the flying creatures away from me at night.
- Animals: Geckos abound (they chirp). I have been lucky enough not to encounter a scorpion yet, but did see a mouse in my room the other day, as well as a fairly large frog. The streets and yards are full of farm animals, which crow and bark and yelp at all hours of the day. Hello, insomnia.
- Security: I am not allowed to leave my house after 8pm, and advised not to do much after dark. Being a woman in this country is more difficult because of the machismo in the culture, and crime in Honduras is no joke. My town is very safe by day, but most people stay in at night, especially women.
- Alcohol: Women in Honduras don't drink, except in big cities where it is more liberal. As a result, I don't drink in my site.
- Religion: I go to church every Sunday that I'm in town. It's amazing, but people really do respect me more for it.
- Water: As you can guess from my amoeba episode, it's not good, certainly not drinkable. We have running water most of the time, but during the dry season it stops between 7 and 8 every night and comes back around 3am. Now that it's rainy season, we have water more hours of the day, but it's less predictable and a pretty consistent brown color. I am lucky enough to have access to a washing machine, but even that won't get my white clothes clean. I gave up trying.
So, I suppose to conclude, if you want to take an Andrea-specific Peace Corps challenge, put a pound of sugar on all of your food (except fruit, which takes salt instead), fry everything in a tub of butter, don't leave your house after 8, don't drink, go to church, tie a rooster to the foot of your bed, and bathe in cold, dirty water. However, you are allowed to gchat all day and bake cookies. It's really not that bad, I promise!
You may have seen the recent ¨Live Like a PCV Challenge¨ site, so I will say that every volunteer's experience is different, and a lot of the worst-case-scenarios don't apply to me since I'm in a larger community. For example, I have regular internet and am within 30 minutes of a giant supermarket that has just about every food I could want. I baked Nestle Tollhouse Chocolate Dream cookies last night, after looking up the recipe online. Pretty posh in a lot of ways.
With that said, here are the realities of life in my site:
- Food: Living with a host family means eating their food, which means pounds and pounds of sugar. On everything. No one drinks water, just a ton of soda and super-sugary juices, and then coffee loaded with sugar. Then there's mantequilla, which is basically a combo of butter and sour cream that you squeeze out of a pouch. Fry up the beans with a stick of manteca (crisco, basically), then slather them with mantequilla. Then fry up some plantains and douse them in mantequilla. Yum!
(I will follow this by saying that I really like the non-fried food here, especially the plato tipico of beans, egg, plantains, cheese, and avocado with corn tortillas. I'd just prefer it without the pound of mantequilla.)
- Bathroom: Cold showers, every day. We don't always have running water in the evenings, so I often have to take bucket baths (using a larger bucket of stored water and then a smaller pail to pour it over yourself). Might sound awful, but they are easy to get used to and actually save a lot of water.
Also no flushing toilet paper. It's placed in a trash can next to the toilet. When there's no water, you can flush the toilet manually using a bucket.
- Bugs: Mosquitos, biting ants, cockroaches, and these stupid winged creatures that divebomb me and my computer screen (my host family in Yuscaran called them palominos, no clue what their actual name is). I have a mosquito net over my bed, which keeps most of the flying creatures away from me at night.
- Animals: Geckos abound (they chirp). I have been lucky enough not to encounter a scorpion yet, but did see a mouse in my room the other day, as well as a fairly large frog. The streets and yards are full of farm animals, which crow and bark and yelp at all hours of the day. Hello, insomnia.
- Security: I am not allowed to leave my house after 8pm, and advised not to do much after dark. Being a woman in this country is more difficult because of the machismo in the culture, and crime in Honduras is no joke. My town is very safe by day, but most people stay in at night, especially women.
- Alcohol: Women in Honduras don't drink, except in big cities where it is more liberal. As a result, I don't drink in my site.
- Religion: I go to church every Sunday that I'm in town. It's amazing, but people really do respect me more for it.
- Electricity: My site is way better than Yuscaran in this respect, but every once in a while we do hear the dreaded phrase ¨se fue la luz.¨ The outages usually don't last more than a couple hours.
- Water: As you can guess from my amoeba episode, it's not good, certainly not drinkable. We have running water most of the time, but during the dry season it stops between 7 and 8 every night and comes back around 3am. Now that it's rainy season, we have water more hours of the day, but it's less predictable and a pretty consistent brown color. I am lucky enough to have access to a washing machine, but even that won't get my white clothes clean. I gave up trying.
So, I suppose to conclude, if you want to take an Andrea-specific Peace Corps challenge, put a pound of sugar on all of your food (except fruit, which takes salt instead), fry everything in a tub of butter, don't leave your house after 8, don't drink, go to church, tie a rooster to the foot of your bed, and bathe in cold, dirty water. However, you are allowed to gchat all day and bake cookies. It's really not that bad, I promise!
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
Amigos
I don't want to gloss over the past few weeks here, but I also don't want to post a novel. So let's see if I can keep this interesting!
The 2 performances that I mentioned in the last post were outrageous. The first was at a culture night, and Tricia and I helped accompany the chorus in a traditional song. No video, unfortunately.
The following week I got to spend 3 days in Tegucigalpa for a Volunteer Advisory Council (VAC) meeting, where one representative from each training group meets with the country director and staff to discuss PC policy. It was really interesting, especially in light of the recent budget cuts (thanks, Congress) and the restructuring that will be happening in PC Honduras. Our group is the last business project group, and the next training class that comes this month is only 15 people.
These trips to Teguz are especially fun because there are always volunteers passing through, and we can enjoy supermarkets, malls, and good food. The highlights of the trip for me were bagels, crepes and Irish coffee, and semi-sweet chocolate chips (you can find milk chocolate chips at most supermarkets, but semi-sweet are hard to find).
The night we got back from Teguz, Tricia and I had our final chorus rehearsal to prepare for the Día de Estudiante performance the following morning. We'd practiced the songs quite a bit, but were shocked to find out 12 hours before the event that we would also be performing 2 dances: the twist, and a traditional Lencan dance. Panic! For the traditional dance, we were a couple. I was the man.
If nothing else, my time in Peace Corps will completely kill my shyness/inhibition. I thought the TV interviews and piano playing were embarrassing... try dressing up as a man with a painted-on fake beard and dancing in front of an entire high school of students!
After that ridiculousness, things settled down a little. This weekend was a mushroom and wine festival in La Esperanza, which was a fun time. The wine was really gross, but the chorros (mushrooms) were good. La Esperanza is up in the mountains, so it is significantly cooler than my town (which has been even hotter than usual this week) and I always love going there!
Our town is now home to 3 volunteers from Amigos de las Americas, which is an organization that sends high school and college students to Latin American to volunteer for the summer. We took the volunteers under our wing a little bit, but they are doing pretty well on their own! Totally overshadowing us in some ways. Yesterday they organized a 4th of July gathering and made mac and cheese and funfetti cake. We invited the UNC students who are here for the summer and the bilingual school staff, and it wound up being a great time! When I applied to Peace Corps I never imagined spending the 4th of July with 10 other gringos that live in my site... but no complaints!
The 2 performances that I mentioned in the last post were outrageous. The first was at a culture night, and Tricia and I helped accompany the chorus in a traditional song. No video, unfortunately.
The following week I got to spend 3 days in Tegucigalpa for a Volunteer Advisory Council (VAC) meeting, where one representative from each training group meets with the country director and staff to discuss PC policy. It was really interesting, especially in light of the recent budget cuts (thanks, Congress) and the restructuring that will be happening in PC Honduras. Our group is the last business project group, and the next training class that comes this month is only 15 people.
These trips to Teguz are especially fun because there are always volunteers passing through, and we can enjoy supermarkets, malls, and good food. The highlights of the trip for me were bagels, crepes and Irish coffee, and semi-sweet chocolate chips (you can find milk chocolate chips at most supermarkets, but semi-sweet are hard to find).
The night we got back from Teguz, Tricia and I had our final chorus rehearsal to prepare for the Día de Estudiante performance the following morning. We'd practiced the songs quite a bit, but were shocked to find out 12 hours before the event that we would also be performing 2 dances: the twist, and a traditional Lencan dance. Panic! For the traditional dance, we were a couple. I was the man.
If nothing else, my time in Peace Corps will completely kill my shyness/inhibition. I thought the TV interviews and piano playing were embarrassing... try dressing up as a man with a painted-on fake beard and dancing in front of an entire high school of students!
After that ridiculousness, things settled down a little. This weekend was a mushroom and wine festival in La Esperanza, which was a fun time. The wine was really gross, but the chorros (mushrooms) were good. La Esperanza is up in the mountains, so it is significantly cooler than my town (which has been even hotter than usual this week) and I always love going there!
Our town is now home to 3 volunteers from Amigos de las Americas, which is an organization that sends high school and college students to Latin American to volunteer for the summer. We took the volunteers under our wing a little bit, but they are doing pretty well on their own! Totally overshadowing us in some ways. Yesterday they organized a 4th of July gathering and made mac and cheese and funfetti cake. We invited the UNC students who are here for the summer and the bilingual school staff, and it wound up being a great time! When I applied to Peace Corps I never imagined spending the 4th of July with 10 other gringos that live in my site... but no complaints!
Pictures
Wanted to post that I changed the privacy settings on my pictures. I have been trying to be careful to not list identifiable information on my blog and on Picasa because they are open to all of the web. However, I found a way to make all of my pictures ¨unlisted¨ without being totally impossible to get to. I posted the link on Facebook, and if you can't get to it, just email me or comment and I will send to you!
On a similar note, my stats are showing views from some strange countries, so if you happen to be in Turkmenistan and look at my blog, let me know so I'm not weirded out by the randomness.
Here are some pictures that I can't take credit for, but were taken by my sitemate, Tricia!
Phonetic Spanish version of the Star Spangled Banner that the kids used. LOVE IT.
Our Japanese JIKA volunteer, Hiromi (not pictured), taught us how to make sushi at the colegio.
Hanging out with some students during the Feria de Salud.
This doesn't really have to do with my Peace Corps experience, it's just a super cute bunny.
On a similar note, my stats are showing views from some strange countries, so if you happen to be in Turkmenistan and look at my blog, let me know so I'm not weirded out by the randomness.
Here are some pictures that I can't take credit for, but were taken by my sitemate, Tricia!
Phonetic Spanish version of the Star Spangled Banner that the kids used. LOVE IT.
Our Japanese JIKA volunteer, Hiromi (not pictured), taught us how to make sushi at the colegio.
Hanging out with some students during the Feria de Salud.
This doesn't really have to do with my Peace Corps experience, it's just a super cute bunny.
Finally, a video of my arch nemesis in all of the world, Rooster. He hangs out outside my window crowing at all hours of the day. If my host family killed him and served the meat to me, I would eat it despite being vegetarian.
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