On 2-2-12, I gave up my pride, and let my brother take the name Walter for his newborn son. Walter's birth is just one more thing I've missed being away from home, but it felt a bit more distant knowing that I could have been home if I would have gone with the rest of Peace Corps Honduras. But in January I wasn’t ready to leave yet, and I wanted a few more months of closure here in Ocotepeque.

January 16th I found myself alone in a luxurious hotel in downtown Tegucigalpa.

I watched out the window as the buses hauled my once fellow Peace Corps volunteers to the airport. I packed my backpack, raided the piles of dejected belongings that had put suitcases over the 50# limit. And with a grocery bag full of Oreos, fruit, chocolate, a few books, and a cheesy gift clock, I took off to Las Cañadas to visit the host family where I lived when I first arrived to Honduras. On the bus ride there, I kid you not, as I reflected on all the great times spent with such great friends who were now on their ways home, the song All By Myself came on the stereo (old classics like that seem to exude from every bus, bar, and restaurant). Few people here understood they lyrics, nor understood that that was exactly how I felt.

But I'm not exaxtly All By Myself. I made it to Las Cañadas and found my way back to the house where I’d lived for a month. It was hardly recognizable because they’d built another house on top of the first house—a second floor.

Luisa, my old host sister took my stuff and we went up to take a tour of the second floor, and she showed me the Internét Gratis that they now offered by stealing Wi-fi from the neighbors. I stayed a night and when I left the next morning they were all begging me to stay longer. But I wanted to visit the second host family where we had our field-based training, so I moved on.

When I arrived in La Cuesta, hanging out with my "host cousins" I realized that I was basically following my Peace Corps timeline all over again. Only this time, after a night with Isaí and Glenda, where I’d lived for two months, I also trekked a few hours up the mountain to visit doña Angela.

Doña Angela is like the old black lady stereotype from any movie that takes place between 1850 to 1950 in the south (only she's hispanic, and skinny). Her constant stories and exclamations have more range than a choir, and it seems like she approves every detail with a long vocal sigh, as if she were saying ‘you don’t say,’or ‘would you look at that.’ She still takes care of one of her past husbands, though he’s a drunk and sold every bit of his land out from under her feet. She has a def, mute daughter from the same man, but she treats her daughter so normally, that you can hardly tell she’s def or mute. She also cuts hair for all the needy in town, after she gets home from picking coffee. She fed me 3 meals and 2 snacks (plantains, coffee, and sweet breads) for each of the 4 days I was there. And in the evening, somewhere between everything else, she sits in an old worn out chair in front of her house, surrounded by her gardens, and watches the boys of the community play soccer and reads the Biblía Latinoamerica.

Doña Angela lives in San Andres. Because the community is an hour and a half rough ride from anywhere, it seem s at least 25 years behind the times. You still get crew cuts with scissors (not a clippers), there’s no cell phone reception so everyone shares the community landline, and bedtime is at 8:30 because by 4:30 everyone is starting to move again. Doña Angela told me that’s because the water (which is frigid), is the warmest just before sunrise. If you can’t imagine it yet, imagine a bowl in the mountains with two creeks that cross either side. In the middle there’s a flat area where they have a large soccer field. The houses, which have lots of amazing 60-to-70-year-old woodwork surround the soccer field and work up the bowl forming a stadium feeling. If you climb the far side of the bowl, you crest a ridge and look to the north where you see sweeping valleys of pine trees. “The farthest ridge you can see back there, the one with the cell phone towers on top, that’s in the department of Las Minas de Yoro.” They told me. I hung out for long enough so that my coffee-picking earnings would pay my food and my bus tickets back home.

Finishing a my trip, my abbreviated Peace Corps experience, I took the long bus ride to Ocotepeque. Only, this time, when I walked up to the hill to my house, everybody knew me and I knew them. We really miss you when you’re not around a few of my friends told me. And then they gasped when I told them of my trip. They’d never been farther than 4 hours north of here, and some of them less than that.

Now I’ve been back for a while. I’m getting used to not having Camila and Aimee to hang out with every time I go down the mountain. I’m also getting used to living without PC rules; I can ride motorcycles now, and I don’t have to send a text message to tell them if I’m not going to be in my site. I also don’t get paid. So I’ll coast for a bit on the money I’ve saved (out of the $315/mo. I was getting paid), and be coming home March 19th. Until then, I’ve got a few weeks of camping and bird surveying to do, a statistics workshop to teach, and several goodbyes.

Meaning, for everyone back home, I’ll see you soon.

Peace Corps to pull out of Honduras

I’ve described this previously, but I doubt anyone remembers. Leading up to Christmas in Honduras we celebrated every day a tradition called the Posadas. Posada means inn or lodging, and it’s the word used around Christmas because Mary and Joseph were given posada to stay in the stable. Every night someone hosts the posada at their home and we go to their house as a group. Once everyone’s arrived, half the group goes inside, and the remainder stays outside along with two children dressed as Mary and Joseph (Somewhat historically inaccurate, but they have a white dress for a Mary costume, and a cowboy hat, a wooden hook—the type used for working fields with a machete—and a hollowed squash which is the traditional water vessel for Honduran farmers). The door is shut and those outside knock on the door to start the posada. Usually it’s not cool for the men to be too involved (apart from those who play instruments or are church deacons), so Mary and Joseph stand on the doorstep with a half-ring of women standing behind them some holding tightly to the ears of their kids so they don’t misbehave, and then a scattering of men in the back standing with their arms crossed waiting to see if any other guy will go ahead and participate. (I’ve done experiments and sometimes if I take two steps forward, the whole group of guys starts moving. Sometimes I take one and a half just to psyche em out, and it gets about half of them, but then they pull one of those balancing acts like a child at the edge of a pool who got pushed, but is trying not to fall in. Usually they stand awkwardly in the space between the men and women, and look over their shoulder nervously to see if anyone else noticed.) After a conversation of song between the people outside (pleading, “knock, knock”) and the people inside (asking, “who’s there?”) the doors are opened for Mary and Joseph and everyone enters singing a song about peregrinos which, naturally, makes me think of Peregrine Falcons. I didn’t think to care what it really meant till the other day; it’s loosely translated: weary traveler. A passage of scripture leading up to the birth of Jesus is read, a few church deacons preach their interpretation, prayers of Simeon, Mary, Joseph and Sweet Baby Jesus are read. And we’re all invited to sit and stay for coffee and cake, tamales, or pastels.

In one of the recent posadas at Don Oscar’s house, I entered (as a foreigner, I can still be cool and go in as long as it’s only about ¾ of the times, otherwise I stay outside and help represent the wall flowers) and sat on a bench near the door. Manuelito, a 8-year-old Honduran version of Buzz from Home Alone, sat his tiny body down and looked up at me with his huge head and funny gap-toothed smile and continued a discussion he’d apparently been having outside, “Right Jesse, this year you’re going to teach us classes of English since I’m in fourth grade now?!”

This was right after I’d received news that PC Honduras is pulling us out in early January (their school year starts in February). I just choked up and half-lied, “tal vez si.” Instead of si Dios quiere, I was thinking, “Parece que Dios no lo quiera.”

Saying goodbye after a short-notice warning that we’re leaving has been difficult. It took me nearly a week to bring it up to my former host family, because every time I tried, I worried I’d lose it, and lost ganas to speak.

So I’ve been realizing lately that I’m not ready to leave yet, and wont be in three weeks. I’d already made plans to spend a week birdwatching with one of the top bird experts in Honduras for late February in a work he’s doing to finish what will be one of the best Bird Guides for Honduras and Central America. I’d committed myself to teach a statistics introduction course to the only biology university program in Honduras because they currently don’t get a single lecture on statistics (it sounds boring, but I was actually pretty excited for it. AND the stats course includes paid lodging and transportation, so I could just fly out right afterwards.

So for those who’ve gotten excited that I’m coming home early, I’m sorry. I’m going to take cash in lieu of my plane ticket home in mid-January, and I’m going to live off the money I’ve saved here in Honduras until late March. But still, I’ll see you MUCH sooner than I was planning!

Love you all.

SeptOctoNovember Fest

September passed rather quickly full of holidays. Fellow volunteers celebrated being in our sites for a year, There was the 190th anniversary of Honduran Independence (15 de Septiembre), Día de los Niños (Kid’s Day) September 10th, along with flag day, armed forces day, Fería de San Francisco, and all the other holidays that are crunched into this time of year.

One of my favorite traditional events thus far is the Carrera de Cinta. This is a horse competition. To begin, 15-20 cintas (metal rings sewn to a leather strap, which forms a loop with a button closure) are hung on a line strung across the street about 8’ off the ground. The riders all line up about 60 feet down the road from the line and wait for the announcer to call their names, “Juan Luis Ortega Nuñes y su caballo Fuego de Satanás!” Then one at a time, they gallop toward the line leaning forward on their horse, eyes lined up behind a small palito, or a pencil if they’re novices, at one of the small keychain-sized rings. At the line they thrust their hand forward at the ring, and point their palito toward the sky, and to score they must joust the ring, and pull the cinta off the line. The difficulty is not only to be accurate, but also to keep the ring from shooting off the palito, which often happens when the unsnapped button flings the ring off the line.

For Día de los Niños we had dances and skits in the school, and for a grand finale a “carrera de cinta.” The boys, 1st-6th graders brought their own old-fashioned stick horses, complete with authentic names and orneriness, and ran past a line with their horses between their legs. The girls, true to the tradition, dressed up as reinas and tied handkerchiefs to the arms of those who scored rings. A few VERY authentic actresses gave their riders timid kisses on the cheek along with their prize bandana.

In October we had our mid-term medical appointments in Tegucigalpa. I was a bit scared to go to a dentist here, but to be honest, that was the nicest dentist office I’d ever visited—complete with a flatscreen to show me HUGE images of my own teeth or watch cooking shows while the dentist cleaned food from my teeth. Other than discovering that I’m still alive and kicking, I got to go see Lion King 3D and eat some semi-American food at Fridays. A few days after getting back from Tegucigalpa, a dear friend from the University of Montana, Ari, came to visit me. She had served in Peace Corps Peru, and it was great to hang out and compare experiences.

Also in October was the communities official Mass where Padre Walter came and 3 children had their baptism ceremonies. (Pictured at right is my host brother Carlos Roberto ready to be baptized.)

And wow, November is passing already. Thanksgiving I spent at the clausura of the school. School has been on break since early November, but the official send-off was Thursday where the kids got their report sheets and we broke a piñata and played some games at the school. The day after was a graduation for the 6th graders (keep in mind that here, graduating from 6th grade is about as big as graduating from high school in the U.S. Some may go on to study in high school, but many don’t have enough money and will just go out and work now. That’s why a 12-year-old here sometimes has a community role of a 18-year-old in the U.S.) So it was a very formal presentation complete with speeches and an elaborate lunch of roasted chicken, rice, chismol, a salad, and, as always, several glasses of refresco (in this case orange pop).

And now, aside from finishing up signing people up for an improved wood-burning cook stove project we’re doing here in our municipality, it’s coffee-picking season, and I’m going to go see if I can break some personal records.

I'll put more pictures on FB sometime this afternoon.

Since I've last written...the same loaf of white bread still hasn't gone moldy. Scary

Adapting to la luz. Now in my house I have laptop speakers, a fridge, an electric percolator, lights and an electro ducha (small hot-water-heater/shower head). So, since getting electricity, my life has changed drastically. I had mentioned earlier, that it seemed only my life was changing. However, now that some time has gone by, everyone's lives are changing. It seemed to pass by weekends. One weekend everyone brought up fridges, the next blenders, the next TV's with DVD players, and now, just about every afternoon, my neighbor who used to sit and crochet on her patio, watches trashy telenovelas (soap operas). And as sad as I was to see the old way living come to pass, it's really a great thing to see the people here allowed into the 21st century.

I've almost been in Sinacar for a year, and I feel like none of the projects I've worked on have come to fruition. However, the little things are what I came to the Peace Corps for, and I feel like I have been richly rewarded. For instance, I wanted to feel like I was living as a part of a community in a foreign place, not just traveling through as a tourist. Now, I know every person's name in a 1 mile diameter from my house, when I go to San Marcos to get groceries, I know and am recognized by my favorite markets and shops, and the neighbors randomly drop in to say hi. Those are the things I'll value most when I leave. Those, and the exciting times shared with other volunteers which seem to be hyper-bonding times because we are so starved for English conversation and humor.

My latest work has been a lot of teaching in the school (math, Spanish, crafts, and natural sciences). I am beginning to give more frequent cooking lessons (women here, and I, love learning how to make leavened breads, pancakes, peeksa = pizza, and cookies). And always in demand is teaching English, both to a group of police and beginning tomorrow, to a young group of guarda bosques (the equivalent would be a park ranger/game warden). The police want to graduate from a continued learning program so that they can graduate to higher pay scales, and the guardas want to learn basic English phrases so they can accommodate tourists in the visitor center. I honestly have lost much hope in anyone learning English from English classes because the classes are not frequent enough and the students don't spend enough time memorizing vocabulary in their homes. However, they love the classes, and I figure that, if nothing else, it might help to develop their linguistic skills.

Again, the biggest rewards are not the projects themselves, but little things like: showing a community that a man can cook; teaching English, in Spanish after only being here a year; or seeing first graders' reading skills improve.

I've molested some of you to pass out a shameless flyer to your churches. The community is building a new church here that will double as a community center. They are about ¾ of the way through with construction, and ran short on funds to seal the bricks with gypsum and put ceramic tiles down for flooring. The Peace Corps is not really about giving handouts, but since the community is already well-invested in this building and it'd be an opportunity for those who like to give to have nearly 100% of their donation go to the said cause, I figured I'd throw a line out. It'd be cool to give them something because 1) it'd show them that people from the US care for them (they idolize the US here), and 2) the money would probably come from ecumenical sources and it'd be a neat way to elucidate the ridiculousness of the Catholic/Protestant divide that exists in this country.

Random:

At a recent meeting with the padres de la familia (a parent-teacher conference), I proposed an idea I had to teach some card games to the kids during their free time. I wanted to teach Speed, King's Corner, Concentration, etc... But when I proposed the idea, it got silent, a few people looked outright disgusted, and finally someone spoke up, “I don't know about this, maybe if it were with different cards, but certainly not if they have Kings, Queens, and Jacks like the kind they use for gambling!”

I started having some crazy dreams, almost nightmares. I sat for one afternoon trying to think of the root of these dreams. Was it something I was eating before going to bed? Something I was worried about? An insecurity? Well, last night I finished the last episode of the first season of Dexter, and I found myself scared of the dark when I went out to the bathroom afterward. I now blame Dexter Morgan.

Sometimes I feel so far from home, until I send a random email, a request for a recipe or a short hello, and that very day I get a reply. Suddenly I feel like it is a connected world. However, when I called Eli for his birthday, I talked for two minutes to a distracted birthday boy, and then got, “Um, Jesse, I'll talk to you later; I have a really big present to open.” And the truth arises; I am far from home.

Ants invade everything in Honduras. Last week I took apart my laptop subwoofer to see why it was crackling and when I opened the back plate, the whole thing erupted with my least favorite, a clearish-red jumping ant (I think that's the scientific name anyway) scurrying trying to hide their eggs. They chose to make their nest in the hollow between the cone of the speaker and the magnet.

And, if you know me, I'm still getting a kick out of myself. The other day, I got someone so good I couldn't keep a straight face. A fellow volunteer, Carly and I were walking out of a mini-super market with a few items including a new brand of Honduran hot sauce I found. A small pickup slowly passed and worked it's way up the water-damaged gravelly road, and the people riding in the box had much time to stare at the gringos. After making eye contact, I casually pulled the bottle of hot sauce out, pretended to unscrew the cap and lifted the whole bottle to my mouth and guzzled as if it were a Coke. Shocked, they nudged and looked to one another to make sure they'd all seen what was happening. When one girl pointed at me, clearly appalled; I lost it.

Last but not least. In a recent meeting with random farmers, their wives and a few daughters, I forwarded a text message in reply to “Hola como sta?” that I got from a 16-year-old flirt who was also in the meeting. The text message said, “Tell me something, do you like me? Sorry to ask, but I notice you're always looking at me. You give me lots of attention. I just wanted to say that I don't think it will never work out...” I wish you could have seen her squirming in her chair reading that message. Even more funny, she quit reading before reading to the end, “it will never work out, even though you're on me all the time, I'm only your cell phone!”

Oh, and before signing out, I want to send a special thanks to Trennda and Liz for the incredible care packages. I use the travel towel all the time now, I relished the sweets, and I'm wearing my new FBI shirt as I type. You can't imagine how miraculously a care package can help quench one's thirst for home (and at the same time ignite a small longing to embrace what you miss as home).

(At Left: Camila and I on a recent "business trip" to Esquipulas, Guatemala where we saw the Basilica and the famous Christo Negro.)

Bueno, vaya baya vaya pues, nos miremos, cheque baya.(rough translation: okay bye).

Will the end affect their means?

I finished my Examen de Ingles this morning and copied it to a jump drive while finishing my coffee (I make coffee in a pot, so it's 'cowboy coffee,' but I add 1/3 of the cup whole milk, which I buy from my neighbors for $.25/20 oz.). I gave the students a take-home version of their test to study, and today is the due date. I wanted to give them a chance to ask questions before their test on Wednesday. However, I never heard the typical foolery as the kids walked by my house to the school this morning, and I never heard the moto del profe (the hum of his motorcycle is our schoolbell). Apparently, school was cancelled today.

I live in a farming community, and now that we're in the rainy season, every male in my community milks the cows, eats breakfast, and then leaves the house around 7:30 with a machete, a hoe and a pick to go weed their coffee plantations or dig canals to direct the draining water. This is relevant because it means for me, that my morning plans have been cancelled, and everyone's working for the day, so I have until 3:00 PM before I can do much of anything in my community.

Some have asked how to report on how life changes with the recent coming of electricity to this small community. Life for most people has not changed drastically, but rather, it is only slowly changing. Life for me has changed drastically, because I was once used to having electricity. I come home, and even though I only have a 25 kbps internet connection through a USB modem, I immediately check facebook, hotmail, gmail, and the BBC World News. I can now pass hours organizing photos, music and old files on my computer, without worrying about battery life. I leave my cell phone on all night, just because it's easier than having to turn it on again the next morning. I read later into the night because I'm not so worried about my eyesight being ruined. And I constantly brainstorm ways in which I'll be able to get my refrigerator up the mountain (Xiah, a retired Peace Corps Volunteer, left me a knee-high refrigerator when she left).

For other people life's begun to change too, they listen to music more often now, and aren't worried about using their cell phones for playing games or listening to music, because the batteries are rechargeable. People who have TV's have gatherings to watch the newest illegally copied DVD that they bought from town, but most still can't justify sitting for more than 1 hour, and often excuse themselves during the climax of a movie. I have had one instance where someone invited me into their house, and when we ran out of things to say, instead of sitting in silence like we used to, they turned on the TV to watch telenovelas.

But mostly, we still sit around in the afternoons on the patio talking and peeling blades of grass in the awkward silences. Candle sales are surely down, as are battery sales since nobody uses flashlights anymore. In fact, most houses are lit without flashlights all through the night since, as of now, the meters have not been installed, so there is no financial motive to turn out the lights.
Electricity is certainly one of the necessary services in the modern world, but since the people here have gone for so long without it, their initial use, for the most part, is very practical. They use it for: phones, lights, hair clippers, music, and an occasional TV show.

And God saw that the light was good. --Genesis 1:4

The Peace Corps offers one of the best vacation policies I've had in any job (just not a salary for travel!). Besides practically being on vacation for a job, I get 2 days per month that I can save up and use how I want. A few weeks ago, I was euphorically dragging heavy cables through coffee plantations, across drainages, over hedges, and under an intensive heat. Euphorically because 1) the very cables that were a present burden would be a future blessing, and 2) I was one day away from heading back to the U.S.

I remained very content during a 5-hour, sweaty bus ride, a sleepless night in a hotel without AC, and a 3 ½ hour flight to Houston. And upon arrival to the U.S, my patriotism was soaring like our national bird. Then I hit customs, ha ha.

Anyway, I won't write about my trip because this blog is for those who live in the US and want to know what my small part of Honduras is all about; HOWEVER, Nate and Emily's wedding in Hawaii was unforgettable, being back in Dickinson to see my sobrinos, family and friends made it hard to leave again, and I'll sure miss my Jeep.

It was a bit tough leaving, especially to arrive in sweltering heat in San Pedro Sula to stay at the same hotel withouth AC. I instantly was hit with the realities of my life in Honduras: you can't flush your toilet paper, you get used to being sweaty all the time, you walk a lot, you keep your few possessions close, and you go a long time between accessing your Facebook!

But I was genuinely content to make it back “home,” to my cooler mountain town, to unpack all my stuff, and see that at least the neighbors already had electricity. Sadly, they waited to do my house because they didn't want to intrude while I was gone--I swear I wouldn't have minded!

I did go through some remorse for the first day or so away from the U.S. again, but in the first week since being back:
-I hiked to an undeveloped waterfall with a group of other volunteers, and then we went for a dip in a beautiful blue lagoon

-I was interrupted from digging a curb (to keep water out of my house), in order to show 11-year-old Leonardo how to butcher and prepare a domestic rabbit (everyone LOVED my cooking!)

-I ate a whole pound of mamones, tropical grapes, or whatever you call these wonderful fruits that are in season now

-I helped herd an escapee pig back to its corral (it was eventually carried back, SCREAMING, by it's two ears an it's tail)

-I tried to convince the school president to release the house wren fledgelings that she'd captured AND...

-I finished wiring my house! I cannot explain the feeling of gratefulness that comes to me just walking back and forth between rooms in my house looking at the lights, even when it's light outside. After months of living with only a solar panel to charge my phone, I still feel rushed to use the electricity before the clouds come out.

<---- doesn't my house look content now?

Not yet a rainy day

(Old news: The last pictures I put up on Facebook were with a connection too slow to add descriptions. The student elections were to form a student government which will help organize all the festivities of the schoolyear as well as see to complaints of other students. The other photos were of processing sugar cane. This process takes almost a whole day, and because all the kids knew to come to dip wooden spoons in the foam so they could lick the cachasa, it was a very festive event.)

Today while brushing my teeth, washing my towel or washing dishes (I can't remember which), I noticed a straight, branchless palo (tree) that I hadn't seen before through the gap in the bricks in front of my pila. There is another that stands above my neighbor's house that I now see out the window while lying in my hammock.

On Saturday, May 7th, as we wrapped up an amazing Mother's Day celebration at the school, I was eager to leave the lunch to find the source of gritando (barks, yips, whoops and hollaring learned by Honduran men sometime in boyhood used to celebrate or emphasize someone's foolishness--a direct ) from outside. However, I had a few invitations yet to extend to women who might want to enter our newly forming group that will soon be selling canned vegetables in the markets of towns down the mountain.

After finishing a large plate of fried chicken, cabbage and potato salad, tortillas and rice, and cleaning the walls of mother's day decor, I snuck out while some were still chatting to see where all the men were from the community; I could still hear them whooping nearby. What I saw nearly silohetted by a sinking afternoon sun was strikingly like the statue to Iwo Jima. Over 20 men were gathered in a tight band lifting a pole high over their heads, and after a few minutes when it fell into an 8' deep hole, the shouts erupted again. I helped lift poles for the remainder of the afternoon, and what we accomplished was to give the appearance of a town that almost has electricity. So that's the big news in Sinacar; they say by the end of the month, there will be streetlights in a town that's never had electricity apart from solar panels, alternators, gas-powered generators, and batteries. I'm worried Peace Corps won't feel so much like camping anymore.

This season in my part of Honduras the Cucunachinas (sp? june bugs) are hatching like crazy and each evening you hear sounds like rain on the zinc roofs. Subsequently, each morning you feel somthing like autumn leaves beneath your flip-flops, as their lifespan appears to be one night. The warblers and many raptors have migrated north now; so I suppose you're all enjoying new signs of Spring back home. It's still summer here, and has been since I arrived apart from a brief spell in Nov-Dec that kinda felt like fall. However, this is the dry season, and sometime in May the rain normally falls, so I expect that shortly I will pull the rubber boots out of the corner. I suspect that when it's pouring rain here and 70 degrees and sunny back in North Dakota, my friends and family will finally have a one up on the weather! At least I will still have mangoes, platanos, bananas and a wonderful neighborhood of friends here to not become over nostalgic!

I'll try to write more faithfully; especially once I have an outlet!

The absurdities of age and I.Q.

One of the biggest religious epiphanies in my time since entering the Peace Corps is that everything, even my understanding of age is based upon a U.S. norm. I noticed it at first shockingly as I saw 12-14 year old girls pregnant in a small town just outside of Tegucigalpa. The next shock was during a school enrollment census, while copying names and ID numbers of parents, I learned the ages of some of my community members (their birth year is part of their ID number). One gray-haired and almost hobbling man, I discovered, was born only a few years before my Dad. (Is my Dad that old?) And since then continually observing parents, who seem older than me, but have birth years later in the 1980's than mine. So I've realized that even age and our simplest views are constructed based upong where we live.

Yesterday while walking back from planting a school garden a half hour or so up the mountain, I was not very surprised when the profesor (who always points out attractive girls asking, "how about her?") asked me if I noticed that beautiful, skinny babe (I don't really know an appropriate translation for the word he used, jodida). He was talking about Edina, a 17-year-old! I mentioned that dating such a young girl would pose legal problems for a U.S. citizen, but he dismissed this, "Who would ever know?" And for his credit, he's not a chauvanistic pig, it's just the local view on age. A marriage between a 30-year-old man and a 16-year-old girl is a practical bond that happens here because by 30, a man has established himself with land, a house, and likely a car, and by 16, a girl has completed all the education she'll probalby complete, and is in her adult stage of life.

And while planting that garden, I also realized that the kids, though at education levels 3-4 years behind U.S. standards, already know how to construct plant beds for starting lettuce plants on the side of ridiculously steep slopes. They also knew the germination and production times for raddishes, green beans, lettuce, squash and mustard greens. Most of us in the U.S. don't learn to plant a garden until well into our 30's, or even later in more urban areas.

Life is different here. Boys graduate 6th grade when they're 12 years old (if their parents think school is worth the time), they begin working in the fields full time, they build your own shack and start to develop it into a house, and if they're lucky, they marry and move into it before turning 18. In the U.S. an 18-year-old is still in high school! In the U.S. we'd still have four years of college before we think about settling down. But the structure of our education system really affects our view of maturity. We consider a person not mature enough to drink until they're 21, but here, by 21 you can be president of the city council, father of 5 kids, owner of your own house and farmland, and by all means fully independent.

And I think people physically age differently too. By 50 years old, most men in my community look to be in their 70's. However, those who live to their 70's are agile old farts who still carry 100 lb. bags of coffee on their backs and walk a few miles a day to and from their farmlands. And certainly a 20-year old girl with two kids has physically matured faster.

Also, although I feel incredibly smart at meetings where everone, in order to read a handout outlining their budget, has to read slowly and outloud to make sense of the words on a page; I feel incredibly stupid when standing in the back of a truck trying to figure out how we're going to fasten 3 15-foot pvc pipes to a pickup without a rack and up comes Pedro with a short piece of rubber from a bike innertube, a wire flag and a few green palm branches and tightens things as if he had a ratchet strap. I may be resourceful with Google, but he's resourceful in his pickup box. And so, though a 13-year-old boy may have learned the vast majority of what he needs to know to produce a coffee crop, I find myself enlightening 75-year-olds by showing them that the U.S. and Canada share a border, or that plants 'inhale' carbon dioxide and 'exhale' oxygen.

As such, with so many interesting variations of correlations between age and types of intelligence, I have realized that perhaps, though still shocking and apalling to me, I can understand why it's not weird for so many 16-year-olds to be pregnant by a husband who's lived twice as long.

A monkey I saw on a recent trip to the north coast.


my new home!

“I look to the sea. Reflectoins in the waves spike my memory—some happy some sad. I think of childhood friends and the dreams we had. We lived happily forever, so the story goes, but somehow we missed out on the pot of gold, but we'll try best that we can to carry on.”

After months of living in a country where I “sailed away on an open course full of urgency,” I've found myself during quiet nights in my house reflecting on the life I've left behind. Perhaps because I read Garrison Keilor's Lake Wobegon Days, or perhaps it was seeing my sister's album of Christmas pictures on Facebook, but the past few weeks I've lived full of reminiscing. And unlike the song's lyrics, I don't think I ever missed out on any pot of gold.

When I was five, or so, I prayed to God, tested God, to design a rainbow with it's end in my backyard, so that I could find the pot of gold. I remember sometime later when disappointingly, I remembered my prayer and realized it hadn't been answered. But over the years as I have relived those wonderful years of my childhood, I think I've realized where God hid my treasure.

And so, living here in Honduras, thousands of miles and hundreds of degrees (Fahrenheit) from where I grew up, I catch myself (while watching kids poke at frogs or prove their “adulthood” by eating raddish greens) remembering yellow minnow buckets full of critters, puckered cheeks full of rhubarb, and nan king cherries.

Boyhood is somewhat different here. It's more like what I imagine boyhood was like for my dad. The 3 and 4-year-olds get up at 5AM to go milk the cows with their dads because “they're men.” Six to 12-year-olds despise 5AM. And by 16, they're helping to build the neighbor's house, planting their own plots of land. Most familys here don't have outhouses, nor snow to walk through to get to the outhouses, but like my dad's family, the kids here will someday remember when they got their first TV, computer, lights, etc...

Children here are more respectful than kids in the U.S. because they have to salute their elders--especially Godfathers and grandfathers whom they salute with both palms placed together in a praying position. The elders usually bend down to clasp both of their own hands around the child's, and in so doing, give their blessing. However, I may have caught the tail end of that tradition, as several families no longer participate.

And the poor little girls in this machismo culture, they practically think it's funny when I say hi to them, or make eye contact, or pay any attention to them. They're just girls. But that too is changing, and hopefully the women's groups that seem to be forming here will help to speed their women's liberation movement. I never thought I'd care about “women's lib,” it used to bug me how adamant people were about such stuff, but after a step back in time, I've realized how suppressing life can be for a female when they are only expected to cook tortillas. And not that I'd even look down on having separate rolls (working man/domestic wife) except that I've realized that, at least here, all the intelligence rests in the heads of women (for guys it's not cool to do well in school, so they don't, learn). As such, it's as frustrating as can be to go to meetings without secretaries who can write or treasurers who can keep the books; meanwhile there are women in this community who've went to high school for accounting, women here who can write, legibly!

But adulthood will be different for this crop of kids who race bike inner-tubes down the road with forked twigs, the kids who come to church with burns on their faces from New Years' Eve fireworks, and the kids who know how to “gritar” (shout out or howl) as if to prove they were still very much alive. Their kids will have TV, and likely Facebook.

Some things I wish would never come here. At least personally, I think I'd trade electricity for the views of the night sky you get here. (Only I wish my laptop had a 30-hour battery instead of 6.) And although I don't mind candles, I sure hope I am not ruining my vision squinting so often in the near darkness! TV will really change people here too. They're probably not going to listen to Radio America much more after TV arrives. And the kids will probably start listening to Regaton instead of Ranchero.

But perhaps also they'll learn to speak more grammatically correctly, and perhaps they'll learn where Canada or Europe is. Perhaps they'll see that not all Americans are white! Some of the perceptions from so close to the U.S, living where many men have worked for a few years in the U.S., are so far off. I guess that's why one goal of the Peace Corps is to encourage cultural exchange. I guess maybe it's even sadder how we in the U.S. have just as many misconceptions of a country so nearby, and we have Google!

The coffee is quite ripe for the picking here and now. The prices are good these days, up to 6500 Lempiras for a large carga (over $1.50/lb), and everyone seems to be sporting new jeans and button-up American Eagle shirts. All the kids are constantly eating 'churros' or small 10 cent bags of chips sold out of 'truchas' (the front windows of someone's house who sells snacks and laundry soap). It's easy for me to get rides down the mountain, because they can only carry 8-10 bags of coffee in the backs of their toyota or nissan trucks, and that leaves room for a couple people.

Christmas was fun here. I sat outside on a friend's patio and stared at a campfire while eating macatamales (a combination of white corn meal, beans, peppers, onions, and pork rolled up in a corn husk or banana leaf and boiled) and drinking Tecate. We walked to the church where “they celebrate until at least midnight,” but they were already leaving at 9:20. Christmas day we rested, spending much time in hammocks, reading, and picking radishes. I wasn't too homesick, because it felt like the beginning of August. New Year's was less fun because nobody did anything. I did enjoy the rest, but for the first time in years I couldn't keep awake till midnight. Of course, my real holiday comes on the 15^th when my parents arrive to visit.

I hope (especially you who've read this far!) had a marvellous Christmas filled with family traditions and food, oh the foods of Christmas! I hope you got kissed at midnight on New Years and are still holding to your list of resolutions. But mostly, I hope you didn't take for granted those immaculate lists of top stories, top photos and top people of the decade. I got a short list, in Spanish of course, from a newspaper here, and I suddenly missed MSN, New York Times and NPR.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Here are a few pictures to show the people I'm working with, the beautiful resources I'm helping to conserve, and some of the negative effects of making a living.

So up until now—a paragraph summary: I arrived in Houston, TX late on June 20th for a briefing with 57 other volunteers who were headed to Honduras. One the 22nd, we flew to Tegucigalpa and moved in with host families near Valle de Angeles, about 30 minutes from Tegus. We received language, security, and health classes for a month before dividing into training for each of our three projects. We in Protected Areas Management went to La Cuesta, a small two-road town northeast of Comayagua (the original capital of Honduras), where we lived with a second host family and trained on watershed management (building latrines to trap fecal matter, reducing agrochemicals, planting grasses and trees that reduce erosion and filter contaminants), forest management (reforestation ideas, improved wood-cooking stoves to reduce use of firewood, and fire regimes), as well as waste management. After two months, we returned to our first host families near Valle de Angeles where we had a final week of lectures on crime, disease, depression and other threats we may encounter. We also had our final language interviews to assure we could communicate on our own. To close training, at the US Embassy we swore in to service (became actual volunteers), the same day we met with our job counterparts who'd traveled to meet us. The following day we traveled with our counterparts to our respective sites where we'd be working for the next two years.

Now, I'm in Sinacar, trying to figure out what it is exactly a volunteer is supposed to be doing. After the school year let out, I have been spending much of my time doing manual labor in the coffee and bean fields. This is not a sustainable effort, but it helps to build confidence with the community and to understand what practices the farmers are using.

The big news, I am now living solo in my own rented house (I'll put up photos next time). The host family where I was living uses their house for de-kerneling corn, and storing beans, so they had hinted since I moved in that after my first two months there was an empty house nearby (PC volunteers have to live with a host family for the first two months in their sites to encourage integration). And empty it was. I borrowed a bed, a dresser, a few plastic patio tables, three plastic patio chairs, and a broom when I first moved in. And now after going in on a gas stove and a few shelves, I can survive pretty well. Not to mention, the other volunteers who donated a hammock, a solar shower, a few boxes of mac and cheese, tea, among other goodies.

I think the solar panel that my mom sent me has arrived in the PC office, so when I get that, hopefully I will have more time on my cpu to write emails and blog updates. Until then, peace out.

Settling in...

It's been over a month now that I've been living in my tiny, lightless community in the mountains of western Honduras. I bought myself a cowboy hat and tall rubber boots to fight the sun on sunny days and the mud on rainy days, but I still don't really fit in with all the campesino coffee farmers.

Sincacar is a pueblo that lies mostly on a finger ridge stretching down from the mountains in the Guisayote Protected Area. Houses rise off the ridge in clusters and it reminds me of the plates on the back of a stegasaurus toy of my 3-year-old host brother. Only the sides of the ridge are a patchwork of corn and bean patches, and all different aged coffee fincas (the older fincas are beneath the shade of Guamo and Trumpet trees, the younger fincas are naked so that the sun can quicken the growth of new trees). I've visited most of the homes now, after helping with a census of all the homes that have children for next year's school year, and about 1/3 are fairly clean and well-kept, and 2/3 are plain adobe or mud homes with rusting tin roofs and crudely formed cooking stoves that use too much firewood. But the quality of life is phenomenal. Families spend 4-6 hours together every evening, community meetings being a form of entertainment, draw people from all sides of the mountain, and the rest of the time is passed with playing cards and a crude form of Rummy. I'd prefer spades or Pinochle, but it takes me a while to teach new games, and they prefer to stick to their traditional "Con Quien."

In the beginning, other than spending lots of time visiting with as many people as possible, I'm spending lots of my time in the school. The students and parents want me to teach English, so I am, but because most of the 1-3rd graders can only read bits and pieces of Spanish, I'm sneakily spending 3/4 of my time working with Spanish. And while I teach words and phrases in English to the 4-6th graders, I'm learning lots of new vocabulary, including, as you could imagine, the local street words. As my Spanish improves I plan to do more and more teaching of natural sciences, and hopefully I can implement the environmental education curriculum that has been developed for HN.

I also plan on working with local NGO's who are located in cities down the mountain, to try to be a ambassador between the community and NGO's. I think there is a big disconnect in the ideas of each. I also think the NGO's have the funds that might help to accomplish projects that could really help: irrigation, construction of more efficient, improved stoves, etc...

I am sorry if I've been slow to keep in touch, I think that's the toughest part of living without electricity, the batteries in my cpu and cell phone are always dead. I'll hopefully be better able to keep in touch if I get the mini solar panel my mom has sent, and possibly a wireless modem from a local phone company.

Love and miss you all!

Two weeks in my new site as an official volunteer

Well, I'm now a sworn-in, official Peace Corps volunteer. I've fully accustomed myself to the local culture, language and food (see the Honduran Whopper Value Meal below). Okay, so just kidding, I haven't mastered Spanish yet, am still finding funny new things about the culture here, and definitely miss food from the states, but I'm officially in my site where I'll live for the next two years (see preview below)



After a brief introduction to my counterpart, Jauncho (a park ranger who lives in the pueblo where I'll be living for the next two years), a brief despedida (goodbye celebration), and a short night of sleep, I took the 10 hour journey from Tegucigalpa to my site in Ocotepeque. Ocotepeque is a department of Honduras in the far west bordering Guatemala and El Salvador. The region is very mountainous, and I am living in a 250-person pueblo without electricity (one of two of all the 57 trainees) at a chilly ~1,500 meters in elevation. If you read my last blog entry, and remember, areas above 1,800 meters are classified as protected areas in Honduras to protect the upper watersheds, so I am very near a beautiful protected area called Güisayote. My community is a small farming community working primarily with coffee, corn, and varios fruits. And I've been assigned here to help with natural resource management, environmental education, and income generation (the three goals of the Protected Areas Management project here in Honduras). This means that I'll probably 1) help Juancho begin to collect permanent records of the species that exist in Güisayote and make maps in ArcGIS (a mapping program), 2) teach kids and adults about the importance of biodiversity, the negative impacts of some of the agrochemicals used here, etc... and 3) see if I can help to organize a cooperative to serve as a micro-bank or to give more leverage with the bodegas that purchase the coffee.

Peace Corps has a policy that we live with a host family our first two months in site to make sure we do note seclude ourselves, and to assure integration in the community. I've been placed with a wonderful, yet timid, family of three. Roberto, Berta and a 3-year-old Carlitos. The house is a nice, simple house with tile floors, cement walls, and a zinc roof, but beautiful flower gardens on all sides that make it seem like a mansion. Not to mention the modest view overlooking the valley below and the town of San Francisco de Valle. It's awesome at night to look down from a pueblo without lights onto a town filled with lights.

And since everyone asks, it's actually not any different living without electricity. The only thing that's tough is not having a refrigerator, and not being able to charge my cell phone. Otherwise, life's normal as ever. We eat by candlelight, hang out and talk for a few hours after eating, I read by headlamp until I fall asleep, and it's light when I wake up. And since I have a 6-8 hour battery on my netbook, I can even listen to music or watch videos if I'm bored. Rough huh?
My second day in site we had a 9AM meeting in Portillo, a pueblo across the mountain (the pueblo in the photo above). My counterpart met me at 6AM, and informed me we could walk. We plodded muddy trails in a climb of over 2,100 feet up the mountain, at a pace to make it in time for our 9AM meeting (I think we arrived 15 minutes late, but ½ hour early Honduran time—that's right, I fit right in here). But how fantastic was the hike. First of all, it was almost cold at parts, a feeling I had been missing, and especially beneath the cloudy fog that covered the mountain I felt exhilarated. And secondly, the forests here are amazing. Areas that were completely cleared for corn farming up until not more than 8 years ago, when the area was designated as a protected area, already have trees more than 30 feet tall, and vegetation that'd take 50 years to grow in the U.S. Not to mention the forests that are older that have monstrous trees, beautiful waterfalls, fern plants that look like trees, and bountiful wildlife. It was a great preview of where I'll be working.

So certainly I have to laugh at many things to keep myself from missing my family too much, I hope you'll enjoy a few of these:

Because I can change fonts in Word or align a column in Excel I'm considered a computer wiz here.

To practice my Español with my 3-year-old host brother I was trying to explain the circle of life using his plastic set of African animal toys. Suddenly, by the disgusted look on Carlitos' face I realized I must not know how to say “No, the lion can't ride in the car with the billy goat,” (it was an Ibex, but how do you explain that in 3-year-old Spanish), “because the lion will eat the billy goat.” And then he abrubptly injected, “Noooo...son juguetes!” (Noo...they're just toys!). Silly me!

Carlitos also has an uncle and a grandpa named Carlitos (Carlitos to Carlos is the equivalent of Charlie to Charles), and none of them can use Carlos because there are six other Carlos' in the family. So most people here have two first names and to last names, but most of their second first names are Roberto, Juan, or well, that's all just Roberto or Juan, so there still exists much overlap, and you either have to memorize three of the four names for each person to identify them, OR learn their nickname, which will be something like Chepe, Chevo, Mincho or just Che. It's hillarious to me when they ask my name and I say, slowly and clearly, “Jesse,” and they have to ask two or three more times before they settle for Jose.

People dress pretty nicely here for their state of poverty, and on Sunday for church, appropriate attire for men is your nicest dress shoes/boots, new jeans, a button-up shirt, gelled hair, AND your machete in a fancy leather sash.

After walking two days in the valley of the shadow of death with feverish muscle aches, nausea and a host mom trying to convince me that I needed to eat MORE twice refried beans and MORE hot whole milk with sugar, I found a deleriously fun way to cheer myself up. Don't tell anyone, but beneath the defening raindrops on the zinc, sheetmetal rooftop, I got a random urge to belt out Van Morrison's Brown- Eyed Girl to one of the princesses on the Disney fleece my host family gave to me. I think they can add that to the list of Healthy Ways to Relieve Stress. One day when I'm back in the states I'll say to myself, “Do you remember when, you used to sing...”

And definitely the funny little hamburgers.

More pictures on facebook.....

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2509972&id=15938884&l=08b07e03c9

And a few more pictures to make sure you know I'm having fun!

Even One of our campesino friends who taught us about the watersheds and the disconnect between the people who live in the mountains and the people in the cities below who use the drainages from the mountains.

At left: Even in Honduras they have no hunting signs!

Below: my luxurious home in La Cuesta for Field Based Training.

Update from the past two months!

Already I have two tortilla-filled months without hot showers in this relatively untraveled paradise called Honduras. I have ached for home often, knowing that all the Kolars were together for a reunion over the fourth, missing all my families birthdays in July and August, and thinking about the smell of sweet clover soaked by a brief August thunderstorm. However, I have not had a chance to be bored enough to think too much.
Training
These first two months have been a small scale representing the two years I will spend in my actual volunteer site after training is completed. And that's exactly how field based training is set up. When we moved to La Cuesta, a ~2,000 person town outside of Comayagua, we were assigned with tasks to get to know the community. For example, we drew a map of the community including amenities, services and resources; we walked around the community with a list of tree names and asked people to help us find the trees on our list; and we walked around giving small interviews on topics such as the cultural perspective of using fertilizer from a composting latrine (an outhouse above two large vats that fill with feces, ash, sawdust, and other organic matter to create sterile compost). Now I know the difference between a acacia, mango and indio desnudo (naked indian - named for the smooth red bark) trees, as well as the ballpark price for constructing a latrine. Latrines are important in the coffee fincas (farms) here because in order to meet criteria to sell to large exporters, coffee farmers usually have to show that they're not just going to the bathroom in their fincas – a tradition for farmers even in the U.S. It also helps to prevent water contamination for the cities who live at lower elevations, since much of the fresh water in Honduras is surface water.
For training we continue to work in three groups: environmental education, income generation and natural resource management, representative of the goals of the Protected Areas Management project, on small-scale projects here in the community. I am in the environmental education group, and after our first community meeting, we found that there is a large consensus that litter is a leading concern here. So, we have given a class in the high school on the types of garbage and how they decompose at different rates (paper: a few months, a shoe: 30-50 years, plastic: indefinitely, glass: only shatters and does not decompose). We have planned a second talk on reasons for not burning certain types of trash (inhaling fumes from burning plastics, styrofoams, etc... can cause lung diseases and asthma), and not throwing batteries, paint and such in the garbage piles because there are enough heavy metals in batteries to contaminate hundreds to thousands of liters of water, which is horrible for the pregnant mothers and toddlers who drink the water that runs off from the town up the mountain. However, we don't think that talk will happen because the teachers in Honduras have been on strike for a few weeks with no promising end in sight. We are going to try to hold one more meeting with the health center because much of their garbage should be considered bio-hazardous, and we think it'd be beneficial for them to dig a mini-landfill that could be lined and covered. Otherwise, the garbage that is collected goes to a large, open-air dump in Comayagua.
We've also been receiving hours of informative information on forestry, environmental education, watershed management, biodiversity management, ecotourism, coffee farming, ect... as well as our daily Spanish classes. The Peace Corps recognizes 10 stages of speaking Spanish, three levels (low, medium and high) for novice, intermediate and advanced, and a superior/native stage. I am happy that I've reached the minimum requirement for Honduras (Intermediate-mid: I can hold basic conversations, respond directly to questions, describe events in the past, present and future, and use basic transitions to add some fluency to narrations); however, I still have a long way to go in order to increase my comprehension and to speak more naturally using pronouns, hypothetical topics, with increased vocabulary.
Adventure
We've also had amazing field trips during training. We just returned from a two-day trip to visit a volunteer, Gabriel, in the Rio Negro National Protected Area. We stayed in tents in a local guide's yard and ate amazing food while there. The guide, Avilio gave us a tour of his organic, shade-grown coffee finca. We also visited a women's group that makes impressively stylish purses and jewelry out of recycled bags from chips, magazines, etc... On the second day, after a morning of good coffee and extraordinary bird-watching opportunities, we took off for a trailhead where six students who have been studying English with Gabriel led us up through the cloud forest to an amazing waterfall. They had ~15 stations where they stopped and gave us information over the history of the land, trees, birds, and wildlife in the park, ALL IN ENGLISH! It was the first time they'd led trips in English, and although not perfect, they had very impressive speaking abilities, and did a wonderful job.
We also toured the historical district of Comayagua, the original capital of Honduras. We visited a cathedral that seemed to transport us straight to Spain, and we climbed the bell tower to see the machinery of the 2nd oldest working clock in the world. We also went to a cultural museum of anthropology in a house that used to house the president. They had fossils of giant sloths that stood over 20 feet tall, pottery and beads from Lencan and Mayan tribes, as well as rusted colt revolvers from much later in history.
We've also toured a local experiment station/nursery, participated in a Peace Corps olympics (soccer, ultimate frisbee, sack races, three-legged races, and water balloon toss, all on a muddy field) with ~75 other serving volunteers. Last Tuesday we had a laid-back culture swap day where we danced Shakira's Waka Waka as well as the electric slide, and had a watermelon-seed-spitting contest. Last weekend, my neighboring trainee Ruth and I went with her host brothers and sisters on a hike up the mountain to a spring, and then we followed a beautiful stream down the mountain back to La Cuesta. I think we might pack lunches tomorrow and do the same hike over with a few other people.
Oh, and I'll post another link for pictures in a second!