Lauren's Peace Corps Experience in Honduras

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed and experiences described in this travelogue are mine personally. Nothing written here should be interpreted as official or unofficial Peace Corps literature or as sanctioned by the Peace Corps or the U.S. government. I have chosen to write about my experience online in order to update family and friends; I am earning no money whatsoever from this endeavor. Please do not copy or forward any of these contents without my permission.

Friday, March 18, 2005

The big day....nerves and other rantings!

Well today is the big day where they announce our sites!! It is now 12:40 and they are planning to announce them at 4 pm. Ahhhh! I can't wait. This whole week has been agonizingly slow from the suspense of waiting for today to arrive. I just wrote up a whole post about the week and the torture of waiting, and I lost it. Argghhh. So I am sorry but this post will be short and not as good. But anyway, I wanted to share with you my torment and excitement. After the site announcements they have some sort of secret celebration planned....we were told to tell our families we would be back long after dinner and to bring our bathing suits...hmmm. Too bad it is raining! Oh well I have a feeling that after they give us our fat folders full of information about our sites that we won't care about much else. I don't know how I am going to physically and mentally get through they next few hours :)

I might not be able to get back onto a computer for a couple days because I am leaving to go back to Siguat tomorrow. But I will try to share the site information with you as soon as I can!

This week has been busy but slow from all the suspense. Tuesday morning we gave our last charla of training to a 5th grade class in a small aldea, or town, outside of Santa Cruz. The kids in the aldea were much different than the city kids...much much more shy, not as easy to get involved, timid about responding to questions. So it made for a more challenging charla, which lasted 4 hours. Any kind of abstract question or acitivity was beyond their prior experience. By the second half we had gotten some of them out of their shells and we stuck in more activities to get them moving, and it worked better. It was a good learning experience.

Wednesday I went to another aldea with half the group and learning about the baby weighing system in Honduras. Mothers brought their babies to the community volunteer who records the baby's weights every month. Since they started the process in the aldea a few years ago, the malnutrition rates have gone down in the community. If the baby has lost weight or stayed the same weight, the Honduran volunteer is supposed to sit down with them and give them advice on how to help their child gain wait. The babies were adorable and the mothers were very nice and curious about us. As always in Honduras, there were a ton of kids around, and we played some games with them.

Thursday I made a Estufa Lorena, or a Estufa Mejorada, which is basically a better stove. We went to a preselected house and the 5 of us with the help of a current PCV who does this as her secondary project, made a stove with an oven underneath out of mostly mud, some bricks, and an iron sheet for the stove top. We got pretty muddy. If an American freshly arrived to Honduras saw it they would see a very primitive apparatus that looks poor and dirty. But to me it was a beautiful thing. The stoves will help the families a lot because before, smoke was released directly into the house and contributed to the really high rates of respiratory infections and asthma here, as well as they used a lot of firewood. These release the smoke outside of the house and also use less wood. It only took 3 hours to make! I will send pictures of it :)

Ok well it is time to go to Tech class and wait in suspense for my site announcement. Wish me luck!! Ahhh!

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