August and September Projects

My sitemate Annie and I began to work together in August, when we visited a nearby town to give a talk about HIV. The town was extremely small--only 35 houses total--but were very welcoming. About 15 people attended the talk, but about 50 showed up at a later workshop, which is awesome. Here is me on the walk from the town to the road where we got the bus.

Later, Annie was wrapping up a health orientation class at the Estancia. At the closing celebration, the students performed a play about the stigma surrounding people who have HIV and the misconceptions about HIV transmission. It was really cute and definitely showed a lot about what the students had learned in the course. Here is the doctor examining the patient who will later be diagnosed with AIDS. The makeshift hat is because the patient has had a fever and is cold.

It's not a project, but in September the students and teachers had a birthday celebration for me, complete with a Barney pinata!

Ciudad de las Colinas, City of the Hills

Danli is nicknamed Ciudad de las Colinas because it lies in a valley among many hills. Here is a picture of Danli and several pictures of the Laguna de San Julian, a man-made lake outside the city which I had the pleasure of visiting in August with some friends.

In the morning, horses came right up to where we were waiting for our ride.

The Fundraiser is Over!

Here are the stands. 7 schools attended, 6 singers/groups performed from 6 of the schools.


The Estancia kids were presented.


The winning group (1 singer with 4 dancers) did an encore at the end and the kids from their school crowded the stage. It was adorable. Please note the decorations. These took about a week to make!

The last few days leading up to the fundraiser were very trying but the actual event was fun and a success. The kids who attended loved it, and I think our students had a great time too. I'm still not sure what the final money count is (actually I think we need to go to schools and collect some of it...) but I think we earned less than we had hoped. Many factors contributed to this, including a teacher strike, but way too much was done last-minute. I learned a lot by collaborating for an event like this. I am not sure that I would do it again, unless a lot of factors were to change.

At this point in time, I feel that the Estancia does not have enough support in the community. In order to carry out the fundraiser, we split up work among a handful of people that could have easily been split up into committees of parents and teachers in another kind of school. Our donors are not very involved and I think a lot of them do not know how the project is run, exactly where their money goes, and exactly why were are so desparate for it. We need more donors, and I think we need more supportive donors, but it is hard to raise interest in the project with such a limited staff. I want to help educate the donors, but that would be another great big project. Any new ideas we have and want to carry out makes more work for us, and we are already stretched very thin. I say "we," but I am talking more about my coworkers than myself.

On Friday in a meeting my Peace Corps project manager was giving us a pep-talk and was saying that we really need to think long-term about how we are affecting these children's lives in order to stay motivated. In that moment I realized that I have been prepared for this--I know that I may not be here to see the results of my work. I have chosen to work really hard for two years in the hope that I can make a difference. This cannot be said of my coworkers. They clearly know their job is hard--this much is shared among us. The big difference is that I am "giving up" (some might say) two years of my life to do this, but some of them have already been working hard at this same project for four years, with not much sign of improvement. Needless to say, the motivation is not always there for all of us all the time, and I think I need to be more aware that just like I have my downs, my coworkers are going to have them too. Given such a group, pulling off events like the one we had last week was a challenge, and not one I am motivated to try again anytime soon.

Trees for the Future

http://www.plant-trees.org/projects/honduras.htm

Trees for the Future was started by a Peace Corps Volunteer in the 80's. My host sister from Santa Lucia just informed me that it existed, and right here in Honduras! Almost all the volunteers listed on the Honduras part of the webpage were in my training class but live very far away so I have seen them rarely (if at all) since training, so it was nice to get a little picture into what they are doing.

Don't worry I am not going to try to reel you all into donating, but it seems like a pretty cool organization that people should know about. I hope that reading the page about the project in Honduras can give you a better idea than I could about the country's ecological troubles.

Updates will come next week about the singing contest. As of this moment, we have 635 students attending to watch their classmates compete. These tickets are worth about 6,000 lempiras. The goal is to raise 10,000 lempiras, equal to a little over $500.

One Year in Honduras

1 Year In-Country

It's so hard to believe that I've been in Honduras for a year now and in Danli for almost 10 months. The time has flown by. Instead of thinking about what I should have done differently—that I should have done more, for example, in my first year, I am trying to look at my time optimistically. I still have a year and two months to accomplish all that I hoped to accomplish here, including another school year. In a few months I will have to write a one-year report detailing my accomplishments so for now I'll save listing them.

Here are some of the things I hope to accomplish at the Estancia in my second year:
-A library of donated books has been constructed and organized. Students have started to check-out books during recess but I would like to start an after-school story hour in order to promote a love of reading and encourage the students to check-out books.
-Continue my English class with the upper grades and instill in the students a love of language learning; promote higher education.
-Conduct tutoring sessions as needed and have an after-school homework club.
-Read with students one-on-one and have some start journal writing.

Aside from the Estancia I would still like to start the English class for teachers in Danli. I have put a lot of work into developing the 2^nd manual for the program and hope to be involved in a conference for teachers and volunteers participating in the program. I could be more effective, however, if I were actually teaching the course and could use that experience to improve the manuals and the program.

In my personal life I would like to read more and watch less TV. I have been a little better about reading the news online and reading the international Newsweeks that I receive every few months. I still feel somewhat disconnected, however, to things that are going on in the US. A lot of my peers are talking about how hard it will be to get a job when we go back, but I am hoping that my degrees and my experience here will help me. Right now I'm reading a book on communication in the classrroom, and I hope that I can learn strategies to improve my interaction with the students at the Estancia and prepare me for situations I might encounter later in my teaching caree.