Brigades and Pancakes

So, it is Wednesday morning, 1030 and 81F here in La Unión. It has been like this the past two weeks or so, low to mid 80s during the day, low to mid 70s at night, very pleasant and nicer weather than I’ve been hearing about back in DC. I am enjoying town, becoming comfortable here. The medical brigade that came last week was helpful in that process.

When I say medical brigade, I don’t mean anything military, it is just a group of (usually) gringos that comes for a few days to do medical work. Ours had 2 Honduran doctors, a Honduran dentist, and a US pediatric nurse practitioner, and a half dozen assorted others to see humans, and a vet team for animals. Sam worked with the vet team and wrote about it in her blog post. I stayed in the church where the human medical team set up, and spent most of my time translating medication instructions. Patients came in and went to “triage”, or registration, where they got a form that served as their chart and had their name, blood pressure and chief complaint written on it. Then they waited for one of the doctors to become available, and after the doctor saw them, if they were prescribed any medications they came to the pharmacy, which is where I was for three days. Cindy, the team leader, worked the pharmacy with two others to fill the scripts, and then I gave the medications to the patients and explained what they were for and when to use it. It was certainly the most intensive, and important to get correct, uses of my Spanish yet. It was very helpful though, in that I was using basically the same language over and over, and the repetition was great. I was able to handle most everything, and only had to go get help to understand a question a few times, and most of those it appeared that the patient had a mental issue, and it wasn’t me not able to understand, they really didn’t make sense. I think I did really well with my Spanish for only being in country 3.5 months!

I also explained the cell phone system here to them, and set them up with a phone so they could call home. This particular brigade tries to come to Honduras every year, so they are going to be able to use the phone on their next trip. We also introduced them to baleadas, which they had somehow not had yet. They had gone to a grocery store in La Ceiba before coming to La Unión and had several US style meals. They invited Sam and I to eat with them, and we really enjoyed the food. Pancakes with syrup, spaghetti with a meat sauce that wasn’t baloney, pan-fried chicken breast (no bones!) and toast with butter were some highlights. Don’t get me wrong, I like Honduran food, but a taste of home and the variety was delightful.

The brigade was in La Unión and saw patients on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. These were full days of work from 0800-1800, which is not the standard day here. Let me briefly cover the rest of the week. Wednesday, the brigade left but we hung out with them most of the morning. We stopped by the centro de salud, where they were finishing installing a new dentist chair in the front room. I guess we had misunderstood the previous week as it seems we are going to get a full time dentist here, who is very needed. (The dentist with the brigade didn’t do fillings, if teeth were rotted they got pulled. In three days the dentist pulled around 120 teeth, mostly from children.) In the afternoon, we went to a meeting of escuela para padres y madres, which is kind of like a PTA, and gave a brief charlita about VIH/SIDA (HIV/AIDS) to 25 parents. Sam did a great job facilitating and I filled in with the technical health information.

Thursday, I went to the centro in the morning. There are two health promoters that only work in the morning on a malaria and dengue campaign, and I went with them to a house that had a pit in their backyard that has the dankest most mosquito ridden water I have ever seen. We took some samples of the water to show the doctor and use in charlas, and then put abate (larvacide) in the water to eliminate it as a mosquito source. After that, we sat around the centro and talked about things. Water cooler chat stuff, great Spanish practice but not really work. Sam had finally met one of her counterparts, and we went to the next door municipality of Yocon to meet some people. After lunch and a meeting, we were back home after 2 hours and done for the day.

Friday, I went to the centro again in the morning and made a plan for the next week. Then in the afternoon Dario, the fulltime health promoter, drove me out to the municipal cremetorio, or landfill/trash burning field/pit that is about a mile outside town. There is no collection though, so many people just burn their trash outside their house in town. After that, we climbed a hill at one end of town to get a view down on town, and that was my work Friday. Sam and I then went to Rosario (another town about 10km away) with Letty, my counterpart at the centro, to visit her family there for a bit, and after we got home Sam and I had dinner and watched Hancock and Charlie St Cloud. This was a busy and full day! (You can click on any of the pictures for larger sizes of them.)

Picture of the trash pit, yes it is smoldering.

View of La Unión from halfway up a mountain.

Saturday, we did laundry, read (I started and finished We Are All The Same, by Jim Wooten), had lunch out (fried chicken), and found Sam two pairs of jeans.

So there was a week in the life of me as a Peace Corps Honduras Volunteer. It was a busy one! A lot of current volunteers have told us not to get frustrated if we don’t do any work for the first month or so, but it turned out we don’t have to worry about that! In addition to all that, this Monday I was on the radio to talk about diarrhea for 30 minutes, gave a brief charlita to the waiting room at the centro about the same on Tuesday, and think I will be on the radio again this afternoon to talk about malaria.

I’ve had busy days and I’ve had slow days, and my money is on busy days being more common. That is good, because there are not a lot of things to occupy free time here in La Unión outside of soccer. We will be reading a lot, and you can look at our Books page to see how much and what we are reading.

I suppose that two pages of text is plenty for one post, I’ll try to post shorter and more often.


-Jeff

Tl;dr: A medical team came to town, we helped them translate. The rest of the week was not as busy, but still full. I had a 30 minute radio show about diarrhea. I’m going to try and post shorter and more often.

The real work begins

This week turned out to be an extremely productive one for us.  About our second day here when we were going around with Jeff's counterpart Leti and meeting people in the community, she took us to meet her pastor, Mauricio.  Pretty much the first thing he said after "Mucho Gusto" was, are you going to help with the brigade?  And we were like, "What brigade?"  So that's how we found out that there was going to be a group of gringos here for a medical brigade starting on the 28th.  So, we hung around this weekend, in the hopes of doing some real work. 

The brigade arrived on Saturday night late, so we didn't meet them until Sunday morning.  We were walking up the street and they just kinda looked at us and said "You guys must speak English!" and, of course, we did.  It was all downhill from there.  It turns out that the brigade of a dentist, 2 doctors, 2 nurse practitioners, several other health-related professionals and a veterinary team was here having a clinic for people in Pastor Mauricio's church.  We quickly discovered that 3 bilingual people in their group of 20 wasn't going to be enough and offered our services. 

I went out with the veterinary team to the campo to help vaccinate dogs, cats, horses and pigs against rabies and treat their intestinal worms.  The first day I went with them I was the only bilingual speaker (we had a guy from the community with us helping, but he only speaks spanish).  I got to know some parts of the town I hadn't seen before, and some of the little towns around here.  The other two days we went up into aldeas of our neighboring municipality of Yocon to small towns where Pastor Mauricio knows the preachers.

Team leader holding a 22-day-old baby

Piñatas that were brought for the local children

Reading about Jesus in English and Spanish before piñatas

Panorama of the church set up as a clinic

Cool view from the edge of town

Boys with piñatas

Sorry I don't have any pictures of the work with animals.  It seemed like a bad idea to take pictures when I was covered in manure and pig.  Maybe the team will email me some (*hint hint, wink wink*).  I had a really fun time, and learned all about vaccinating animals, including how to hold down pigs.  It turns out (i just learned) that I incorrectly told them the anti-worm medication was for fleas, but all the same it won't hurt the animals and will get rid of their intestinal parasites.  Oh well.  It was a great experience for us to practice spanish and to get to know the members of our community.

As an added bonus we made some super awesome friends who did their best to leave us with everything they could.  It was like Christmas all over again!  We are very lucky to have met them, and the timing couldn't have been better.  I don't think we'll ever be able to come up with a big enough way to say thanks for treating us like family.  It means a lot. (Many volunteers are lucky enough to be close to people who are about to end their service and get a lot of hand-me-down things to furnish a house with.  Peace Corps gives us L5000 for moving out, but that's about enough to buy a decent bed and a table.  Unfortunately, we are 3 hours from the closest volunteer, and not anywhere close to anyone who could pass stuff our way--so it makes even more difference to us!).  Jeff will post sometime about his experience training as a bilingual pharmacist some other time :)

Cheers,
Sam

Week 2

Well, it’s nearing the end of our second week here at site, and I still only know one of my official counterparts.  Unfortunately, it’s the most informal one that doesn’t actually have paid staff.  They have an office in someone’s house that is never opened.  So, still waiting for work.  I’ve been hanging out with Jeff a lot at the Centro de Salud and trying to help him get things started with his work there, but I don’t want to do that too much—I don’t want them to create expectations of having me around all the time. 

The woman who came to pick me up on counterpart day isn’t actually one of my counterparts.  She works for the ICF (institucion de Conservacion Forestal), which all of my counterpart agencies work with directly and indirectly.  She’s the one who introduced me to the counterpart I do know, and is working on the other in her spare time.  

Our host mom is the assistant principal at the Colegio (high school), and it looks like we'll be able to start doing work there pretty soon, but as many of you know teaching is NOT what I like to do.  Vamos a ver.

We are trying not to spend all day in our house, but since we don’t really have work it’s kind of hard.  We got some disheartening news this week—Peace Corps Honduras has decided to close the sites in eastern Olancho (that’s our department).  This means that six people will be relocated, several of them are friends of ours from the volunteer visit.  We are still waiting to hear what this means for us.  As much as we like this site, we’d rather move now than be relocated in 8 months.  Also, one of the things I liked most about this particular site was the network of volunteers that exists in Olancho, and now half of that is gone--including our friends from Santa Maria de Real.

In Site

Day 3 in Site

So we are now in La Unión, Olancho, our home for the next two years. Today we met the staff at the colegio (high school), watched the school soccer team play against another school, and attended a fashion show/fiesta – all at the colegio. I had planned to meet people at the Centro de Salud but the jeffe Dr (boss man) wasn’t in today and my counterpart RN was way busy picking up the slack. I shall try again tomorrow. A big success we had today was meeting a local small business owner who studied in the States and volunteered his truck if we ever need it! Knowing people with vehicles seems to be an important thing here where we are a 3+ hour bus ride from the nearest full grocery store.
On the plan for tomorrow is to meet the mayor and the local police, and sometime this week travel the 3+ hours to Juticalpa to use an ATM, since the agente in La Unión left. I’m not sure exactly what was said about why they left, but I heard something about mismanagement and 100,000 lempiras, which is a huge chunk of change here!

We have a tiny room, the smallest room that Sam and I have ever shared, but the rest of the house is pretty big. It will be a challenge to keep our things organized in our room, especially since we have no place to store or hang our clothes. Suitcase living for two months, alright! Our host mom is really nice and helping to introduce us to people around town. She is well known and well respected as the Vice Principal at the colegio.

La Unión seems like a bigger town, it is definitely bigger than Villa San Antonio and Yuscarón, but much further from a big city. Our modem works here, but it only runs on GPRS. Gmail refuses to load on it, so I’m not quite sure how or if I will be able to use email here, but Facebook loads, albeit slowly. Send me messages through FB and I should be checking that daily. Still don’t have a very good feel for the town, having only been here since noon on Saturday, but I have seen three different cows being harassed by dogs in the street. Additionally, yesterday we were at a restaurant watching the Olimpia-Motagua soccer game, which happened to be the championship game of the season, when Motagua scored. A guy standing near the door stepped outside, pointed his pistola in the air, and emptied the clip. Olancho has a reputation as the “Wild West” of Honduras, and I am beginning to see why.

Vamos a ver que va a pasar.


Addition: It is now Saturday, a week after we arrived. Our Claro modem on GPRS refuses to load any google thing requiring a login, and I don’t know why. But we are now using a borrowed Tigo modem which gets EDGE here and lets me login to Blogger.

Time Spent in San Antonio

Sorry it's been awhile, I've been busy! Villa San Antonio is rather hot, but I've adjusted. I never thought I would want to put on long pants in the upper 70s, but that feels rather chilly now.

The health group is getting settled here. Comayagua is only a 25 minute bus ride away, and we've taken to going there on the weekends to have some change of scenery. Last saturday a group of us took the 1000 bus (at 1030) and spent the better part of the day in Comayagua. We ran into another group of aspirantes and some of us went to La Colonia, which is a decently stocked American style grocery store, got some lunch and had a picnic in the parque central in Comayagua. I had a baguette and ham and grape juice, and it was delicious. We sat in the shade watching the world go by with the occasional creeper walking to about 10 feet away, stare at us for a few minutes, then shuffle on. Not that different from any major city around the world, life goes on.

Sunday, I went on a trip with my family to a river in Otoro de Jesus in the department of Intibuca. It was about an hour by car. We left just before 8am and drove first to Siguatepeque where my host uncle and his family lives. (Siguatepeque is notable as the halfway point between Teguz and San Pedro Sula, a major transit route in Honduras, and most of the buses stop there for a break.) I met the whole family. They have two boys that are 9 and 11, I think. We played a bit of basketball in their yard, which was a nice break from soccer all the time. After a bit we all piled into two cars and drove to the river.

The river was gorgeous. Clear water, shade trees alongside it, a picnic area, it was delightful. They had built a wall in the river out of large river stones and used a bit of concrete across the top to make a walking path as well has help them stay in place. The water was able to flow through the rocks under the concrete, but it was enough of a dam to make a deeper pool than was there before. Beside the river amoung the trees was a picnic site. Concrete slab with cover, wooden bench and grill. We did carne asada on the grill, and had rice, beans, chismol and tortillas. Nomnomnom.
Unfortunately, the sun is strong here in Honduras. I currently have shoulders that are lobster red and are hurt just by wearing a shirt. It sucks. A lot. I had a difficult time sleeping last night. It will get better! Eventually.

Training is continuing, at times very slowly. My Spanish continues to improve, poco a poco. I am now ranked at Intermediate Low, and need to reach Intermediate Mid to be able to swear in in May. I know I can make that, but my goal is Intermediate High. I know I can do it, I just need to spend time studying the past preterit and past indicative, or whatever the two past tenses are called. Today in training we covered the reporting tool that we will use to record and report our activities. It didn´t take nearly enough time, so we covered ¨games to play with kids without much equipment¨ It turned into our class playing soccer for an hour, which was fun. The rest of the week we are going to learn the Ya Te Diste Cuenta initiative, which is a teenage sex education class, and on Saturday I get to go back to Yuscaran to visit Sam again.

Busy busy busy! Updates should be more frequent when I am with Sam, as she has the computer.

Regards
Jeff

Volunteer Visit

Jeff and I were out of town this week visiting two awesome volunteers in the field.  We were lucky enough to go to the same place, where there are already a health and business volunteer so we can see what they do and what the typical pcv actually does.  We visited Sarah and Julian in Santa Maria de Real just outside of Catacamas, Olancho.  I have to admit I was a bit terrified of this volunteer visit.  It was 104 degrees F in Olancho last week, and I was a bit concerned that I wouldn't find common interest with Julian's work.

Lucky for us it rained like hell the night before we arrived and managed to only be about 98 degrees F during the hottest parts of the day.  I got extremely lucky and Julian ended up doing work on a recycling project which is super awesome.  He has one of the best counterparts in Peace Corps, and we spent several hours working on designing signs to put up at local pulperias for recycling collection.  A pulperia is like a convenience store, except they are everywhere.  There are tiny ones in people's houses, huge ones with their own buildings, everywhere.  And people go to them all the time.  It's not like you go there for an emergency stick of butter of something--people depend on the pulperia.

Anyway, we had a super time, and we got to meet a bunch of volunteers from Olancho, mostly in Catacamas.  We also got some new books and games and, get this, cloth napkins/pot holders from a volunteer who is COS-ing.  (close of service)  Anyway, Sarah and Julian were totally awesome, gave us a bed to sleep in, fed us, and showed us all around.  We loved Olancho and despite the safety situation there we felt safe with integrated volunteers.  I don't think I would mind being placed there (so long as no one expects me to do anything but nap between 11 and 2 when it is too hot to do anything.)


XOXOXOX
Sam

from last saturday:

I know I should be writing something about my Honduras experience, but today, instead, I am going to write about basketball.  I did not get to watch any of VCU's previous tournament games, but I watched today's game.  I couldn't be prouder of my school and of the whole community of VCU basketball.  We played strong and hard, and while there can always be improvements, I am full of joy for them to have gotten so far.  I'm sad that today's game meant one of the mid-major teams had to go home, and Monday I will root for Butler.  But today, I'm proud to be a ram.