Honduras goes to the Mundial

Last week we experienced a very dramatic event in the history of Honduras. After the U.S. beat Honduras in soccer over the weekend, Honduras had to beat El Salvador, in San Salvador, and the U.S. had to beat or tie Costa Rica in order for Honduras to be one of the 32 teams that will participate in the World Cup in South Africa next summer. We watched the Honduras game on a big screen tv in a lively bar here in Santa Rosa. The U.S. game was also on a separate tv in typical sports bar set-up. When the U.S. gave up two early goals and fell behind, the atmosphere got pretty subdued. But Honduras played well enough and held on to a 1-0 lead. When the U.S. started playing better in the second half, things picked up considerably. The U.S. finally scored at about the 60 minute mark and then kept putting on the pressure. Finally in the last few seconds of the last minute of extra time, the U.S. scored the tying goal and things went abosulutely crazy. In the bar, everyone was jumping and screaming and throwing beer for about thirty minutes. That we had beaten Honduras and hurt their chances four days earlier was completely forgotten. All gringos were now very warmly embraced by everyone there for having made this miracle possible. For the first time in 28 years, and the seond time ever, Honduras was going to get to play in the largest sporting event in the world.

When we went outside, the celebration was just getting starting. Every car and truck in town was soon stuck in a massive traffic jam around the centro, full of cheering, happy people. For better than two hours, in this town on the far edge of the country, people yelled, honked and thanked us exuberantly. This same kind of response, or more so, apparently occurred everywhere in the country. The current president declared a national day of celebration for the next day, although no one seemed to take advantage of it except in Tegus, where they welcomed back the players. Everyone else seemed eager to go to work so they could talk about what had happened. It is still the main story in the newspapers, at least in the sports section, everyday.

Several days ago the Honduran educational channel asked a tele-poll question about what was the most important news event of the year. Winning the right to go to the World Cup beat the removal and ouster of the president by about 82% to 18% as the most significant event of the year thus far. That this political event, where the president was removed from the presidential residence in his pajamas and flown to Costa Rica by the military, and which has cost the country billions in frozen foreign assistance, resulted in the cancellation of all visas to the U.S. and other places, and ostracized Honduras from the world community, is a distant second to a football game only helps to explain the importance of football here. People are still quite happy about this event.

On the political front, it does not appear from the public news reports that the talks between the current admistration and the representatives of the former president are making much progress. There have been a few sporadic actions recently, such as the destruction of a large electric transmission tower in San Pedro Sula and a bomb in a bathroom at a Tegus mall (which is now off-limits for Peace Corps volunteers, although our group of newbies is still not permitted to travel overnight anyway). We still do not sense much overt tension in our location, but more people have recently been expressing some of their underlying apprehension. So far the campaigns are still going forward for the national election scheduled for the end of next month and everyone is waiting to see how that will come out.

We continue to meet people and to get some introductions into the programs that we will likely be working with and we have gotten some opportunities to take some interesting day trips in this area. Although our limited Spanish still makes much of our efforts feel like we are participating in take-your-child-to-work day, our counterparts seem to have more patience than we do and continue to accept the fact that we will need much more time before we are able to really do much that is productive in any professional manner. So it goes.

Santa Rosa de Copán - first impressions

We are starting to settle into our new lifestyle here in Santa Rosa. This is a very comfortable, vibrant community that is much more urban than Bisbee. Much of the town, including the parts that we live and work in, is located on a hilltop. The streets are narrow, cobblestoned, and frequently steep. The houses and buildings are generally close to the edge of the street or sidewalk, and mostly of an indeterminate age, within the past hundred years or so. Santa Rosa does not have especially grand colonial architecture, but it is all interesting and there is some form of historic district regulation which keeps a similar tone to things in the business district. We are still enjoying just walking around and discovering new and unexpected things - little grocery stores or pulperias on every block, several larger grocery stores, stores selling plasma tvs and motorcyles, small resturants tucked away here and there, montones of places with internet access and more. But when they are closed up, there are very few signs on the building fronts and the streets, so it can be very difficult to find a location that you thought that you remembered after hours, as all the building fronts still seem very similar to us.

This is a much more tranquil and safer community than the larger cities in Honduras. There are generally a lot of people out walking on the narrow sidewalks, with a density of pedestrians that you would have to go to a large eastern city to find in the states. There are also a ton of NGO´s from all over the world here. A couple have pulled out due to the political situation and posturing back at home, but there are people working here from Japan, Germany, Ireland, Colombia and the U.S. Because it a nice, comfortable town, it has been an attractive site in which to locate NGO´s and service workers, including Peace Corps. This is not the image of Peace Corps life that we expected, but on the other hand, it seems like a comfortable place to live and work and nothing about Peace Corps so far has really been what we expected.

We are still just settling in with work. We spent our first week mostly in offices here, getting acquainted with the programs. We did make one trip to a small town about three hours away - much of the distance and about half of the time was on paved roads, and the rest on a pretty tough dirt track. This gave us a little more appreciation for where we are not living right now, but we expect to be doing more in similar areas. The country is beautiful and very rugged. We also participated with a Habitat building project yesterday and got a good start on digging a foundation for a new home.

Lack of Spanish continues to be our largest frustration, but we are making slow progress. It was a tough night here last night when the U.S. beat Honduras in a World Cup qualifying match, although it was a very good game. The importance of soccer here cannot be exaggerated. Honduras must win on Wednesday to qualify for South Africa. (The U.S. qualified last night.) There are some signs that the political discussions fostered by the OAS are making some progress and they are continuing. It would be a good thing if there is at least enough progress so that the elections at the end of November can be recognized and they can try for a new start from that point. But everything is peaceful here and we are in good health.

We have rented a post office box here and would love to receive a postcard or two! Apdo. Postal 1779, Santa Rosa de Copán, C.P. 040101, Honduras, Central America.

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.