Toque de queda

It has been an interesting week here in Honduras. On Monday former President Zelaya arrived in Tegucigalpa after having crossed the border surreptiously. His first public appearance was from within the Brazilian embassy. It is still not clear to us exactly how he got there, but Hugo Chavez has claimed to have been in touch with him during his trip through the mountains and across the border. This led to some demonstrations near the Brazilian embassy, which is also very near the U.S. embassy and the Peace Corps office, and an immediate response from the current government. A nation-wide curfew(toque de queda)was declared at 4 P.M. on Monday afternoon. This caused all of our training staff to have to leave our training site in a rush that afternoon in order to get back to Tegus, where most of them live. The toque de queda remained in effect all day and night Tuesday, which was a strange day, sort of like being at home and waiting for a hurricane to arrive. Very little actually happened. There were a few demonstrations in Tegus, but nothing at all in our area. People here just went out in front of their houses and talked about what was going on, watched the news on tv, and waited. Tuesday night there was some vandalism at a few stores in a couple of the larger cities, as people began to feel the pressure of the curfew or just took advantage of the situation. In any event, we were very safe and secure at all times where we were. On Wednesday, the toque de queda was lifted from mid morning until early evening. Since that time, it has only been imposed at night, starting later and ending earlier each day so far. The demonstrations in Tegus have not been very large and from our very limited perspective, there is no sign of any widespread uprising. We are in a very comfortable situation with our local family, with plenty of food, water, power and shelter, and except for changes in our scheduling, we have not felt any direct impacts from the political situation.

This has altered our actual swearing in as PC Volunteers again. Until Monday, we were scheduled to have been sworn in on Friday at the U.S. embassy, and to have traveled with one of our counterparts to Santa Rosa de Copán today. The uncertainty of the situation caused all this to change. Si Diós quiere, we will finally become official PCV`s and travel to our site sometime next week.

Meanwhile all is well. We have both achieved the required level of Spanish proficiency, although this is still not sufficient to really do all that we think we will need to do. But we continue to make progress. We are also very much looking forward to the next chapter of this experience. It has been a strange adventure thus far. We left Bisbee on the same day that Zelaya left Tegus in June and this event has had a major impact on us since that time. We continue to live in interesting times, both for us and for this country.

Santa Rosa de Copán - our site

We are going to be living in Santa Rosa de Copán for the next two years. By all accounts, this will be a very lovely and comfortable place to live. It is a city of about 30,000 in Western Honduras, close to Copán Ruinas and near the Guatemalan border. It is located up in the mountains, with a cooler climate, coffee farms and cigars hand-rolled from the tobacco grown near here. We will let you know more after we get there, next week.

We will be working with two NGO's. One of them, Hábitat para la Humanidad, is the same organization that you are familiar with at home. They have built a lot of homes here and periodically host work crews from the U.S. We will be working on community development projects with the client community and may also help coordinate the activities of the visiting work crews. Our other counterpart is more of an unknown to us at this point. It is an umbrella organization made up of a number of programs that seem to be doing good work on community development, governmental access, economic development and environmental issues. They seem to be very open to our working on whatever may interest us, so we will have a lot to explore. Right now our main limitation continues to be Spanish, but we continue to make steady progress. We do not feel ready to really be of much help with a lot of this work yet, but remain hopeful that we are going to get to that point.

We will likely be working with programs that get us out into the countryside regularly -- a beautiful, mountainous area with little development -- but also allows us to return to a pretty comfortable environment most every night. It will not be the classic Peace Corps "mud hut" lifestyle, but it seems like one that we will be able to enjoy for the next couple of years.

We will be officially sworn in a Peace Corps volunteers next Friday and will travel with one of our counterparts to our new home next Saturday. We will live with another host family for a couple of months once we get there, but will have a home of our own after that. Much more to follow when we get there and see where we really are.

Nearing the end of FBT

We are nearing the end of our field based training here in Cantarranas, which is a good thing because we are all pretty exhausted by this process. Next week we will rejoin the other groups - Youth Development and Protected Area Management - back at our original training center, up in the mountains. We will also finally get our work site asignments for the next two years. This has been a topic of much speculation for weeks now. We have had a few hints, but next week we will finally learn where we are going, what our projects will be, and what agencies we will be working with for the next two years. To a significant degree, our future will be revealed, although it will certainly be quite different than what we expect.

By all accounts from the volunteers we have met here, training will be worst part of our experience. We definitely have had some ups and some low periods, but at this point it looks like we will make it. On some level, we have been a little disappointed by some of this training process. They have tried to cover too many topics and to give us too many experiences for us to get much in any real depth. We have also not made the progress in Spanish that we had optimistically hoped for. But we have learned quite a lot about Honduras, its local governmental processes, and the issues that they are confronting. We also have made significant improvements in our ability to communicate in Spanish, although we are by no means fluent at this point. We would be able to function quite well now as tourists, and we hope to continue to make improvements to the point that we can really communicate before too long.

We have had a few opportunities to travel in our area and continue to be impressed by how beautiful this country really is. It has also been a very comfortable place for us to live thus far. We are looking forward to what comes next.

Que les vaya bien.