Well I arrived back from my volunteer visit on Thursday; I survived four days without electricity just fine (take that Benjamin and Jobro). I also got to experience another round of public transportation here in Honduras, meaning I got to spend hours on end in school buses that I do not fit in. I also got to experience the life of a volunteer and really make some connections to what I am learning here in training. Hopefully I will continue to make connections and I will be able to use these things as a volunteer. A little background on the trip, everyone in the group is sent to spend some time with volunteers who have been here for a year. We left Sunday morning and arrived back here Thursday, the sites are all around Honduras meaning the sites are very different. Some went to large sites, basically cities, while other went to medium sites and other went to very small sites. I think everyone really enjoyed their time and (most importantly) learned a lot too.
I went to San Marcos and I actually got to go with another PST who happens to be my neighbor, named Ryan. San Marcos is about a four hour journey by public transit. I estimate that in the states this distance could be covered in around an hour and a half maybe. We first had to head into Tegus and from there take a taxi to the place where the buses left for our site. We then got on a bus and headed for Guaimaca which is the biggest city next to San Marcos, it was around a two and a half hour bus ride. During the ride the lady sitting next to me actually feel asleep on my shoulder as I was halfway leaning out of my seat into the aisle, not sure how she accomplished that but needless to say it was a very funny situation. When we arrived at Guaimaca I was amazed at how many bicycles there were, the running joke in Guaimaca is that there are more bicycles than people and I would believe it. Once in Guaimaca we got another bus that took us to San Marcos, the drive to San Marcos took around an hour and it was a curvy dirt rode up a mountain. When we finally arrived we meet our volunteer named Andrew AKA Andres to the townspeople, he gave us a quick tour of the town, when I say quick it was about a minute long and we still saw everything. San Marcos is a very tiny town, around 500 people MAYBE, set in the mountains where most of the people work as coffee farmers.
So during out visit we basically followed around Andrew and saw what he did from day to day, which is working with the local schools. With the local schools he has some different programs such as a reading program, a dental hygiene program, and English teaching to the teachers program. Throughout our visit we also got the chance to work with the townspeople and co-facilitate these programs. It really was a very rewarding experience. After our work in the late afternoon, we would play a lot of soccer with the local kids and the local men, I still have some of the skills but my body is not anywhere close to being in shape at this moment. After the end of our visit we again made our journey back to our houses and once everyone arrived back we got a chance to talk about everyone’s visits. It was really cool to see how much freedom that we are given in our sites, a nice metaphor for the situation is that training is similar to high school. We have scheduled activities basically all day and we go to classes, have lots of supports, and lots of guidance. Once we become volunteers we are in college, meaning that we can pursue the topics and programs that we want to do and we have a lot more freedom.
With that freedom you can obviously do whatever you feel your community needs, now obviously I do not know my community yet but I do have a few ideas that I would like to pursue at this moment. My first idea, unsurprisingly, is about children with special needs. I would like to have the opportunity to train teachers in working with students with special needs as well as work with the students myself. This is an area of huge need here in Honduras and sadly I have heard numerous stories of students with special needs who are locked in their houses or even abandoned. Another idea that I have is working with students and encouraging them to dream big, I have already discussed how I feel this is a problem in the Honduran culture. My last idea is an offshoot of an idea that Andrew has been thinking about that he refers to as Baby College. Now the idea has to do with teaching parents how to be good parents by giving them the resources, information, and tools of a good parent. In talking with parents here so far, many of them want to be good parents but they just do not know how to do that, they have simply run out of ideas.
So these are the projects that I have been thinking about at this time, I am sure that these projects will all change and evolve like any idea does. The programs that I eventually end up conducting will have a lot to do with my site as well. We talk a lot about conducting community assessments and we also talk a lot about working with the community together. In other words, if I want to do a program about teaching English but no one in the community wants to learn English then that program is basically worthless, even if English can be incredibly valuable to the community. In order to make drastic behavioral changes in the lives of people there are two people involved, the changer and the change agent. We as PCV’s are change agents while the people of our community our changers. The changer must not only want to make that change but they also must believe in the method of change, most of the time these changes take a long time for a person and an even longer amount of time for a town. It can take an eternity for entire cultures to change. While this can be a depressing thought for a PCV since we are only in site for two years, we can take solace in the fact that we will be planting a seed in the people of our site, while we may not see that seed bloom or even see it grow, the seed has been planted and just as sure as the sun rises that seed will eventually bloom and the lives of these people will be changed for the better.
P.S. New pictures:
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150339178772359.399395.593887358&l=a771934fb1&type=1
