La Vida Buena: Adventures in the Peace Corps: Sweet Name

September 12^th, 2011

Alright big news to report, today we found out what our sites are going to be, aka where we will be living and working for the next 2 years. Before I ruined the surprise, I want everyone to know that my site has a sweet name, literally. My site is called Dulce Nombre de Copan which translates exactly to sweet name. My site is in the west of Honduras and is near to the borders of Guatemala, El Salvador, and the Copan Ruins. Dulce Nombre has around 1,100 people, one of those just happens to be another PCV who is a Municipal Development volunteer. She has been in site for a year already so she will be able to help me when I first arrive which will be nice. Dulce Nombre has a climate similar to where I am at now; the average temperature is between 75-85 and lots of rain during the rainy season. It is in the mountains of Honduras and supposed to be a very pretty site. I will be living with a host family for the next two years as well, I will have a host mom, host dad, two host brothers (young I believe), and another new host brother in January. I will have my own room and my own bathroom which will be really nice. I have been told that my host family has a coffee farm so that means that I am going to have to grow to like or at least accept coffee as a part of my life for the next two years. I have also been told that my host dad owns horses but I am not exactly sure about this rumor, I am hopping it is true and I can ride horses around my town. Also, according to a quick google search (the wonders of the internet) I believe there is another American living in my site who is a lay missionary from Philly. I believe that is pretty much all that I know about my site at this time, if you all have any questions please do not hesitate to ask.

Now a little bit about where I am going to be working over the next two years. I have three counterparts (host country nationals who I will be working with). My first counterpart is running an organization that works with students with special needs, which is right up my alley. From what I can tell at this point, I will be working on a lot with this organization because they have very few materials and very little training as well so it is almost a blank slate. They do however want to learn and improve themselves which I am sure will help me and them out tremendously. My next counterpart is working with a primary school (school is named John F. Kennedy, how fitting is that?), with them I will again be working on teacher training as well as T.E.A.M. (teaching English and methodology) to the teachers. The school also has a lot of different activities that I could help out with and so this counterpart will give me lots of different opportunities. My third counterpart is a librarian at the public library in my site, the library is a Riecken library (go here for more information: http://www.riecken.org/). I have an endless supply of things that I can do with this counterpart as well, the library has a youth group that I can work with which I believe will be my main project at the library. Also the library has free wifi so that is just spectacular news, I am officially medium development spoiled. Well like I said if you guys have questions please ask me somehow (email, comment, snail mail, etc.) and I will do my best to answer any and all questions. Really looking forward to finishing up training now and getting to work in my site.

P.S. Dulce Nombre de Copan has a facebook page for those of you on facebook you can look through it and it has some great pictures, I am going to post some of my favorites below.