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!