free texting to us

Go to www.tigo.com.hn and click on the box that says envia tus mensajes desde la web. Enter the info and only use the last 8 digits of the phone number. keep me up to date on football too, especially the big Fresno State game on monday if you can. thanks

1 more week apart

Shannon and I have one more week apart for training and then we will be back togther for the remainer of our service. I am staying with Shannon and her family this weekend, so that is nice. We basically found out that we will be living in Catacamas, Honduras for our 2 years. It is a good size city kind of away from most of the rest of the volunteers but we are excited for the opportunities there. We will have several counterparts to work with and I will have one person from my project close enough to work with so that is cool. This week, one more person left to go back to the US so we wish her the best. We still have 49 of our original 51 volunteers, which is pretty good. 3 more weeks of training and we all go off to our sites. on our way to use the internet today we saw a boy peeing in the middle of the street and by street I mean dirt road, but it was pretty nice. Really not too uncommon here. There is only one paved street here in Talanga and it is only paved halfway. most of the people are nice though, we do get the gringo yells and the girls get other comments as well. The food is basically beans, rice, corn tortillas, eggs. I eat a lot of fried plantains and eggs as well but they use a lot of oil to cook things and everything has salt in it. There are two kinds of standard cheeses here, salty and saltier. The salty isnt too bad but the saltier is pretty salty. They use a ton of sugar as well but the sodas taste so much better with real sugar instead of corn syrup, at least in my opinion. I definately drink more soda here than I did back home. Shannon went to a pool, had a talent show and wrote a play in Spanish. That was the highlight of her week. I helped make a little nursery at the local school, learned about making Tilapia ponds and visited coffee farms this week along with learning Spanish or at least trying. Once we get to our site, I might have internet in my office, that´s right, I will have an office, and can communicate with everyone more. Looking forward to that.

Immigracion and Puppies!

So this past week has been very busy. I got sick AGAIN and had to go to a specialist in tegucigalpa. It turned out to be absolutely nothing but I got to stay in a hotel with hot water, watch the Olympics in English, eat fabulous food, and use the internet for free so it was a nice vacation. Hopefully I am done getting sick, I think it is either all of the grease that my mom uses (even though I told her the doctor told me not to eat greasy food), or the malaria medicine. We also had our first volunteer return to the US (we miss you Monica!), which was sad but it was also nice because we were together in Tegucigalpa and did not have to get lost on our own!

We all went to immigracion this past weekend and spent forever there getting our visas and ID cards. We got to get pizza and donuts afterwards and that was fabulous. It´s funny how much we appreciate simple things like pizza now! We also went to the US Catholic volunteers´ house for dinner and had spaghetti, salad, and garlic bread. After eating so much greasy comida tipica spaghetti tasted so good.

Yesterday the power was out most of the day and night so there was not a lot to do. However, my family´s pregnant dog decided it would be a good time to give birth. It was an awesome experience, bonding with my dad and brother while watching the dog give birth in the candlelight. I had never seen an animal give birth before and it was very interesting. She knew exactly what to do and what to eat...crazy. She had seven puppies but one was either born dead or died sometime last night. We went to bed because we thought she had finished giving birth and then this morning there was one dead puppy and one more live one so I guess she was not done. Now I have cute little babies to play with!

We have been spending a lot of time in the local schools and that is always interesting. Last Friday I went to a classroom with four grades in it. I guess two of the teachers had not come to work so all of the grades were together. Needless to say, not much work got done that day. Public schools generally only have four to five hours of class per day and much of that is spent at recess, not to mention all of the days lost due to teacher strikes which are fairly common. It is very sad because most of the kids really want to learn and get extremely excited when we come to do activities and teach them new things. Hopefully we can make a difference in some of their lives.

Address

Just wanted to post our address. I am always sad that I never get any mail and then I realized that I did not give my address to anyone so nobody could write. So here it is:

Shannon and Kevin Parkinson
Voluntario de Cuerpo de Paz
Apartado Postal #3158
Tegucigalpa, Honduras

We expect lots of letters!;)

Visit to El Ocotal

I got to visit Kevin this weekend in El Ocotal! It was great to see him and meet his family but his site has absolutely nothing! It is beautiful but up on a hill in the middle of nowhere. There is a pool down the hill from him so we spent the day yesterday and today with friends at the pool, it was a nice break from training. His family extremely nice but really difficult to understand so it is hard for him. My family is almost never home so I hang out by myself a lot. We had our second language interviews last week and we both moved up so that is good. I am now past the level I need to not get sent home and Kev only has one more step so that is nice (Elizabeth moved up quite a bit too so she was really excited). We are finally starting to go to schools and work with them so that is really nice. We are in groups of four (Michael is in my group and got to break up his first fight), and it is nice to have all different Spanish levels. Kevin got to help build a pila and a latrine and is now working on a presentation with a teacher so he is excited to be out doing things and not sitting in a classroom all day. I finally had to go to the doctor last week and it was actually not a horrible experience. I did not get hooked up to an IV or have any blood drawn so I was super stoked. I got a lot of medications (I have no idea what he would only say they were for my stomach) but I felt so much better afterwards. Now I am healthy again and back to eating ice cream on a daily basis. I also run most mornings (at 5:30 who would have thunk it), and that is really nice. So far so good and only 3 more weeks of FBT until we can go back to our awesome family in Zarabanda!

FBT Week 1

So we are in Field Based Training now and we are seperated. I am in a fairly large town with lots of stores and 3 internet cafes! Kev´s town is extremely small with only 28 houses and he does not even have electricity or indoor plumbing! Neither of our houses are as nice as our first one but they could be worse. Kev has 6 kids and 2 grandkids in his family so hopefully his Spanish is improving. We will be at these sites for the next 5 weeks and training has become more intense. A lot of it is in Spanish so hopefully our Spanish will improve too. I think it has already been helpful being seperated because we cannot talk to each other in English every night. My host mother is a political activist and that has already been interesting. The first night she took me to the liberal party headquarters where there were tons of people all wearing red and yelling ¨viva al partido liberal¨. We also went to the national persons registry which was open until 2 AM because it was the last day for people to get IDs in order to be able to vote in the internal elections in November. People are very into politics here, last night every local station had only political programs on. The day we arrived at FBT the community had planned a welcome party for us but it did not happen due to politics and clashing ideals. Very interesting. I have a host sister who is 9 and loves to talk to me...good for my Spanish. I also have 2 host brothers who are 15 and 19 and rarely around. My host dad is a truck driver and only lives with us on the weekends. They are a nice family so far and haven´t made me eat meat (although my mom looked at me like I was an alien when I told her I was a vegitarian). Meat is a luxory here so people do not understand that someone would choose not to eat it. I´ve been a little sick to my stomach the past few days but I think I am getting better... I was able to go running today with some other girls in my project and that was fabulous! It was so nice to exercise. Tonight we have more training until 8 PM...we are learning all about violence in Spanish so that should be interesting.