Finally PCVs

After being held over in Miami, traveling to the Dominican Republic for three weeks, going back to Miami for a week, finally reaching Honduras and our training site in Cantarranas, and then being held up again for another week while we waited for things to settle down in Tegus, we are now officially Peace Corps Volunteers. For the first time since we left home on June 28th, the same day the Honduran government changed, we were not impacted by Mr. Zelaya this week. We´ve had a couple of toques de queda during the evening hours, but there seem to be serious negotiations headed by the OAS going on now and there´s hope that something might be worked out. In any event, there is no sign of political unrest on the streets right now.

We all went to the U.S Embassy on Wednesday, only about a block from the Brazillian Embassy where Mr. Zelaya is still located, and had a very nice swearing-in ceremony. The U.S.Embassy has a typical fortress-like appearance on the outside, but also has a very verdant courtyard with a fountain, trees and lush plants behind the walls. We were hosted by the Ambassador and had a very moving ceremony, with several inspirational speeches about what lies ahead. We were joined by our respective counterparts, from towns and programs all over the country. Earlier that morning was our first opportunity to meet them and to get some preliminary ideas about what we might really be doing.

This was a graduation-like experience with the same feeling that we are now going to another stage. We are all ready to move on, finally, but there was also the bittersweet feeling of leaving people with whom you had experienced a lot of strong emotions over the past few months. Here are a few pictures of the event and of our fellow PCV´s -- all of Honduras 15 with the ambassador, the two of us, and our Municipal Development group. There is also a photo of Santa Lucia, a little town near the Peace Corps training center.

Thursday morning we drove to Santa Rosa de Copán with two of the people from one of our programs. It was a beautiful drive of about 8 hours, through a lot of very green mountains. We were very fortunate to have had a ride and to have avoided the nightmare of trying to put all of our stuff, which is even more massive now with all of our training materials, on several different public buses. We are happy to be here. It is an attractive, vibrant community with lots more commerce than we are used to in Southern Arizona. More to follow.

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.

Two more weeks of FBT

That´s two weeks since our last post, and also two more weeks planned here in Cantarranas. The Peace Corps is rife with acronyms, like "FBT" for "field-based training." So are other foreign-service organizations, judging by the visits we´ve had from USAID and other agencies.

Part of FBT is TDA, or "trainee-directed activities." In small groups we are supposed to find ways to help the local municipality or other organizations. It is not easy given our time constraints (and those language barriers still). We think we have made some small progress helping city hall with a computer question. Honduran municipalities use a specialized software program to track various financial matters. We have been able to provide some additional flexibility to staff here by determining how they could export data from that program to an Excel spreadsheet.

Last night we attended a "cabildo abierto," or town hall meeting. Not a bad turnout -- perhaps 50 people. Many of the issues were very familiar -- roads, garbage, sewers, schools, dangerous drivers. No noise complaints, though there is noise here all hours of the day and night -- dogs, roosters, car horns, music, loudspeakers, machinery.

We had been warned repeatedly that it would be unheard of if we were ever to schedule a meeting here without providing food. Sure enough, about ninety minutes into the meeting staff came around with trays of Pepsi and sandwiches. Something to consider back at home.

Our routine of Spanish classes and training sessions has been varied by a few excursions, most recently to a cigar factory. If our town is noisier than what we are accustomed to, the factory was far quieter -- thanks to the fact that it really is all done by hand. There were hundreds of people sorting and drying tobacco leaves at one end of the factory, aging and packing cigars at the other -- and, at the center of it all, rolling the "puros." Eighty percent will be exported to the States and virtually all the rest to Europe. Except in that factory I have seen very little smoking here.

In a couple more weeks we expect to return to the Peace Corps´ central Honduran training facility for our final two weeks of training. From there we will travel to the sites where we will be spending the next two years. The locations are still kept top secret (from us, that is). We´ll try to blog once more before we leave here.

Singing Frogs

Life here in Cantarranas - Singing Frogs - is muy tranquilo. This is a pleasant, comfortable town, only a little more than an hour away from the capital, but operating at a much different pace. We have a nice view of the main street into town from our balcony and on any given morning we will see a few cars and trucks, but also an equal number of horses and burros, an ox cart and a few mototaxis -- a three-wheeled rickshaw with a motorcycle engine. There will also be a regular schedule of American school buses, with the names of elementary schools still on them, which are the main form of intercity transportation. But there is never so much traffic that we have any difficulty walking up or down the cobblestone street or standing in the middle of it and talking for a few minutes (Elizabeth carrying her sombrilla for shade).

Cantarranas is in the foothills, below the nearby higher peaks. It is warm, but usually not too hot. We are getting rains every few days, but not too much. It is an agricultural area, with lots of corn fields on very steep hillsides, but a good amount of natural vegetation, as well. There are fruit and avocado trees, some large cactuses, but also something like Spanish moss that grows on the larger trees and the power lines. It all seems very alive.

We spend our week days in Spanish classes, in groups of four, in the morning and in technical training in the afternoons. Thus far we have been learning about access to government, local government organization, a few youth citizenship programs and emergency response. One of our roles may be to assist citizen groups in exercising their rights under the Honduran open meeting and public record laws, which exist, but are not widely known. It remains to be seen how well that will be received at City Hall. We are progressing in Spanish poco a poco. But improvement is not the same as being able to readily converse. We still have a long way to go, but Elizabeth does now have a favorite telenovela that she can mostly understand -- Amor Comprado.

Our zen activity for the weekend is washing our clothes at the pila, using the lavadero. This is a large cistern of water beside a built-in cement washboard. It works very well for cleaning, although it can be rough on delicates. Elizabeth finds it to be very calming. We are thinking of building one when we get back to Bisbee.

We remain in good health and continue to try to be open to all of the new experiences. Que le vaya bien.

Toto, I don't think we're in the Dominican Republic any more

We have finally made it to Honduras after 4 weeks of trying. We were struck by the beauty of the place as soon as we landed. We are only a few kilometers out of Tegucigalpa but it is very rural, mountainous, and green. It's also much cooler and pretty wet. We are headed out to our "Field Based Training" site tomorrow where we will start to focus on our assigned project of "Municipal Development." We also continue with our intensive Spanish classes. Our training site is a bit further from the capital but we think it will be topographically similar. There are lots of steep hills covered with an interesting variety of vegetation and it all seems very fertile. We are in a very comfortable home where we will return in September for a couple of weeks. Tomorrow we will meet a new family who will be our hosts until then. Peace Corps continues to take very good care of us.

Our new site won't have Internet access. We'll see in a couple of weeks if we can arrange some weekend travel to a town with an Internet cafe.