Gratitude List

September 6^th, 2011

            Could it be? A third blog post in a row, I guess I am just en fuego down here in Honduras right now. Alright real quick, just want to make a comment on my numerous spelling and grammatical errors that I am sure I have made throughout my blogs. Before I came to Honduras I was not the best speller though I never claimed to be, I feel like my grammar was pretty good. However since I have come to Honduras and begun learning Spanish I have noticed that my English is noticeably starting to slip, and I know it is only going to get worse too because we have talked with many volunteers and they have trouble talking to us in English at times and forget some pretty simple words. So I have that to look forward to haha. Anyways, this is not an excuse for my dreaded spelling and grammar but more of an explanation. So, you have my word that I am really going to start to proofread my blogs better so that I can get my thoughts and ideas across more clearly.
            Alright with that out of the way, today we had the opportunity to give a presentation on HIV/AIDS to a group of high schools kids. Here is an interesting fact about HIV/AIDS, there are 27,700 reported cases of HIV/AIDS here in Honduras and that is the number of people who know they have it. That number is more than all of the other countries of Central America combined, so it is pretty easy to see that HIV/AIDS is a serious problem here. Not only is it a problem here but worldwide 33 million people have HIV/AIDS  which is the population of Honduras four times over plus some, again that is only the number of reported cases. The presentation went really well and it was very interesting to see how many myths there are out there about HIV/AIDS and STDs. It felt really good to get a chance to correct these misconceptions and to be able to teach these kids things that could very well save their lives one day.
            I presented with two other volunteers and we gave our talk to a group of 10 boys and 1 girl (poor her, but she was a good sport about everything). One of our students spoke English, we began talking to him and we found out he was an  amazing young man. He was 22 years old, same age as me (I never would have guessed it though as he looked to be around 18), and he had lived in Dallas for 14 years of his life. His whole family still lives in the states and he came back to take care of his Grandma who lives here because she just got her foot amputated. So, he is going to this school to learn how to work with and carve wood so that when he returns to the states he will be able to go to work at his uncle’s woodshop and can make a good living. It amazed me how nonchalant he was about having to come back here and care for his Grandma; he obviously cares about her greatly and knows that the right thing to do is not always the easy thing to do. What strikes me as so interesting is that he was blessed with an opportunity that many other Hondurans do not receive. Yet, his opportunities compared to the opportunities that we receive as Americans is no contest, it is simply stunning how many opportunities we receive as Americans and even more stunning how little we take advantage of all of these opportunities.
            In the afternoon we had the opportunity to meet two persons who are living with HIV/AIDS today, they both contracted because of no fault of their own, and instead they both received HIV/AIDS from their mothers. These two amazing young ladies had no hard feelings and were very positive about their lives; I think they were both amazing examples of how to remain optimistic even when faced with an incredibly hard obstacle in their life. I think it is very easy to get down about things in your life that are not going well, and I think that everyone is guilty of it at one time or another but it is important to always remember how much God blesses us with and how much we can actually be thankful for. As a human race I do not think we are as grateful as we should be, I have begun writing down 5 things that I can be thankful for everyday and I have noticed that it has helped me be more grateful for everything that God has blessed me with. This is an activity that is so easy to do every night and takes almost no time at all but the benefits of this activity are enormous. If you feel so moved to begin your own Gratitude List (as I call mine) I think that you will find that you really enjoy the activity and maybe, just maybe you will even be more grateful for the things that you have and that in itself, is simply something to be grateful for.   

True Happiness

September 6^th, 2011

            Going for back to back posts which I believe has not been done in the history of this blog; I guess I just want to reward my loyal readers as I have lately gotten a lot of very positive feedback. So I want to start off by saying thank you all who read this, it really does mean a lot to me that I am able to communicate my thoughts and ideas with such a wife audience and that that audience enjoys (I think…) what I have to say. I was just telling someone the other day that having this blog is really a great way to gather your thoughts about this experience while at the same time being able to update friends, family, and perspective Peace Corps volunteers alike. The blog really is a great format for this experience that I am blessed to be going through. So a couple days ago when I was reading “The Power of Kindness,” (finished it the other day and like I said, would highly recommend it). Anyways, there is a section in there in which Ferrucci discusses is discussing service and he tells a story of an old man who receives a message from an angel of God, the angel tells the man that he will meet God tomorrow. So the man goes about his day the next day, he helps a women carry a heavy load, he helps a young boy whose kite was stuck in the tree, and he helps a lost man find his way. When he gets home he is a little disappointed because he thinks that he did not meet God, at that moment he receives another message from the angel of God telling him that he did meet Him. He was the women who needed help with her load, He was the young boy with the kite, and He was the lost man who needed directions. The moral of the story is to treat everyone you meet as though they are God because the fact is that God is a part of every one of us.
            While I feel that this is a great story and the moral definitely rings true, I cannot help but question why the human condition needs the extra incentive to treat people nicely. It seems that if God was not a part of every man then we would not have the same incentive to treat everyone we meet as the part of God that we know they are. I feel like this is a sad commentary on human beings as it seems that we do not have it within us to be kind to our fellow brother and sisters for the simple fact that they are our brothers and sisters. I am not sure if I am currently making sense but stick with me here if you can. If God was not a part of every single one of us, would the respect from one human being to another diminish? I believe it would, because we would be missing a huge part of what makes us human, the part of Christ that is inside of every one of us. That part of us is the purest part of who we are, and I think this part is different for each and every one of us, it shows itself in the gifts that we have been blessed with. This pure part of us is exposed to the world when we find our passion and begin following the plan that God has for us. When a teacher begins teaching, a doctor (or PA, or PT I’ve got your back Megs and Jobro) begins healing, or any other assorted passions begin to take fruit, at that moment, when we have given up of ourselves for God’s plans is when we truly find happiness.       

Human Development

September 5^th, 2011

             Happy Labor Day to all in the states, hope you are enjoying your weekend and the last bit of summer. I had a pretty exciting weekend here, on Friday we had another make shift movie night in which we borrow the projector and play a movie onto a wall. We attempted to watch the movie “Bridesmaids,” I say attempted because about thirty minutes in it began to rain… a lot. I’m talking probably the most rain I have seen come down in a 30 minute period in my life, the rain kept knocking the power out so the movie was unable to finish up but the girls decided to turn it into a makeshift dance party instead, after showing off my fabulous dance moves (I have actually learned a couple of Latin dances while here and I feel like I am actually okay at them surprisingly) for a few minutes and then returned back to my house. I needed to rest up for the busy weekend that included two birthday parties and a day of helping to clean up at the local school. The two birthday parties were actually two other volunteers who oddly enough had their birthdays on consecutive days, so we were able to experience the birthday party Honduran style. Honduran birthday parties are not all that different but they do have a full meal, cake, and usually some party games (the party today also had the added bonus of gift bags).

            In between all of this partying we also were able to get a little community service in as well. The local school was having a cleanup day at their school and they extended an invite to us seeing as how we are able bodied individuals who like to help. We were told to show up at 8 o’clock as this was the starting time, we have long been told that things here in Honduras do not start on time and so many of us showed up knowing full well that we would be waiting for 10-20 minutes. Well we waited for about 45 minutes and still no one showed up, I pasted the time by picking the weeds amongst the plants in the garden a skill that I did not know I had but now realize I have picked up after years of watching my Dad do the same thing. So thanks Dad for teaching me such a useful and handy skill! After this long period of waiting some of the other volunteers got tired of waiting and left, soon after they left the lady in charge showed up which just goes to show you that you should always go that extra mile even if it is something as small as five more minutes. Once the lady showed up she immediately put us to work and I was handed a machete and told to chop off some branches of a nearby tree. I am telling you right now, if you ever want to feel like a man go out in your backyard with a machete and start chopping branches, it is a good feeling. I even climbed up into the tree with the machete and chopped some branches (Don’t worry Mom I was very careful, I promise!) at that point I thought the tree was good but the lady kept pointing to other branches saying that they were ugly. When I got done with the tree I will admit that it looked better but I do feel like it may have been a little bit too trimmed, o well.
            After we worked for a little while longer, the lady in charge of the event came over to us and started talking to us, we found out that she had lived in the states for 23 years and she spoke good English. She told us about the challenges that she has as head of the parents organization at the school. A little bit of background on this lady, she lived in Miami where she met her husband and they had a kid. Her husband is the son of two English parents and did not speak any Spanish when they met, she did not speak any English when they met and she learned English from a dictionary (How, I have no idea). Her son, according to her, looks just like Vin Disel, a fact that she kept telling me and told me she had to show me a picture of him which unfortunately she did not.
           So after hearing much about this women’s life she began to talk about how she is the head of the parents association at the school and she does not have any children at the school. She told us how much trouble she has with getting parents to participate, a fact that was illustrated by only two parents showing up to the cleanup day and leaving after an hour of “work.” Her take on the situation is that many of the people of the community feel as though they are poor and that they cannot help out in any way, a far too common excuse that I feel is used the world over. For some reason, people do not really seem to understand that you do not have to have any money to help serve your fellow brother and sister. Her theory on this troubling problem, and I would tend to agree with at this point, is that the Honduran people (and for that matter most of Latin America) have come to the point where they expect to be given things. For so many years now people have been coming to Latin America and providing support and aid to these people only they have been providing the wrong type of support and aid. In providing mostly monetary support to these people for so many years they have actually done the opposite of their intent and actually hurt the people more than they have helped.
          So much of world aid in the past was done with the theory of give them money, that is all they need. The fact of the matter is that more than anything these people need education; I know it is cliché but give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. It is scary how well that applies to development work and even scarier to think about how little it is actually applied to the field of development. Why is it that people find it so hard to give up their time and services in today’s world and would rather give up some money instead? It seems almost paradoxical since we live in such a materialist and commercial driven world but it seems that time is more important than money. Until we begin to realize as a world community that we cannot solve development issues by throwing money at it, just like almost all problems are never fixed by throwing money at it. We need to realize that the real way to do development work is by becoming part of the community, education the community, and most importantly helping the community help themselves. In any given community, there are so many untapped resources, all it takes is someone who can point these people in the right direction, and most importantly show them that they can in fact develop their own community, using their own resources, and their own people. Human development is just that, development of humans, not of buildings or physical structures and until begin to put money into developing humans I am afraid that we will continue to deal with many of the same issues that we are dealing with today.     

P.S. new pictures:

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150339178772359.399395.593887358&l=a771934fb1&type=1