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!
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