Free food, lies, and a new way to meet your neighbors

Last Thursday we had dinner with the Deputy Director of the Peace Corps and several other volunteers here in Catacamas. She was nice and we talked about a lot of good stuff. We also really enjoyed the free dinner. We finally got our water fixed this past Saturday so it is nice not to have to bring water into the house by buckets. We do not have hot water in the shower and Shannon does not like that but we may get that problem resolved soon. The shower head is also really clogged and hardly any water comes out of it and shoots all over the place but for now it is stuck and can’t be cleaned out until someone comes to fix it. During the time we were using bucket water, Shannon accidentally drank some tadpole water thinking it was a glass of clean water. It actually did have tadpoles swimming around in it, not in the glass but in the bucket. She didn’t get sick, yet. We have been cleaning the house a lot (mainly Shannon, she has spent entire days cleaning) and someday it may actually get painted. Shannon has been frustrated with how slow things have been getting done with the house. The painters were going to come Monday, it is now Wednesday and they came by to look at it today and said they will come tomorrow to start. Shannon got frustrated yesterday when they didn’t come and went and hunted down the owner of the house to talk to him. He said “Hondurans are liars. They say they are going to do things and they don’t do them. You need to have patience because you are not in the US anymore and things don’t work the same here.” That statement coming from a Honduran pretty much sums up the way things work here. And they wonder why the country is not developing. On that note, Kevin was supposed to go on a topographical study for a water system for a small community up in the mountains about a 3 hour mule ride away this morning with two other volunteers. They caught their six o’clock bus out of town and arrived ready to mount their mules only to find out that the people weren’t ready yet. This is the second and maybe last time they have gone through this exact same thing with the same exact community. Only the last time they waited around for 4 hours before someone told them that the community wasn’t ready. We still have cats here. The momma cat had moved one kitten down out of the attic and then back up to a different part but never moved the other one that we could here crying. Kevin finally found a way to get it down on Monday. The mom didn’t want anything to do with it at first so Shannon fed it milk through a dropper and slept with it all night. It is a lot smaller that the other one. The next day the mom took it and put it with its sibling and they both seem to be doing fine now. Tuesday night, Kevin found out a good way to meet neighbors – let one of their dogs bite your leg. While walking back home from dinner and the grocery store with three other volunteers, the dog that lives two houses down from our house started barking at us as we walked by. This seemed normal to Kevin as he has walked by this dog many times before and he didn’t bother trying to move farther away from the dog. The dog then jumped out and bit at him biting his upper leg and putting a hole in his jeans. It wasn’t too bad really and is more like a scratch than a tooth puncture wound but it wasn’t fun and now he has to take antibiotics. Shannon talked to the owners while Kevin was washing his wound out after talking to the Peace Corps medical staff and the dog is up to date on its rabies shots. Plus, as Peace Corps volunteers we all received pre-exposure rabies shots in Honduras and all is hopefully well.

A house of our own

We hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving last week. A lot has happened since our last post. Kevin went with the second year university students from the department he works with, there are only 15 right now, out to Las Marañones (the cashews), a small city just inside the Rio Platano Biosphere. They went out there Wednesday morning and returned Thursday night. He had a lot of fun and practiced Spanish a lot as only one student can speak English. They made a lot of good food and Kevin was on the breakfast crew and squeezed oranges by hand, no juicer whatsoever, until there was enough for everyone and then fried some plantains. His hands were tired after that. The trip out there was on a university bus about two hours on a dirt, very dusty road. The university co-owns a facility with the Honduran Forest Service there that can sleep about 25 people, with a kitchen and solar panels that they built with the help of a grant from an organization in the US. There are no power lines that go that far out. Most of the residents there are descendents of native Pech Indians. Last week, we said goodbye to two more volunteers from our class, both in Kevin’s project. We wish them the best in whatever they end up doing. Kevin is particularly sad as he was going to be working a lot with one of them as he only lived a few kilometers away. While Kevin was with the students on Thanksgiving, Shannon had a nice Thanksgiving meal with other gringos in Catacamas. She at least brought back some apple crisp for him to eat. Saturday, we went to Juticalpa, about an hour bus ride away to have a Thanksgiving dinner with about 25 other people there. We had Turkey, green beans, mashed potatoes, fruit salad, regular salad, rolls, chili, gravy and then we had desert with pumpkin pie, sweet potato pie, apple pie, apple crisp and pumpkin cheesecake. It was a great meal and we all made sure to overeat. Sunday was the primary elections here in Honduras. One of the people running had apparently been disqualified from running, we don’t really know why but they put another name on the ballot that the people knew if you voted for him, you were really voting for the other guy, who ended up winning. Really weird, and we don’t know why or how this works. Now we have another year of obnoxious billboards, commercials and our least favorite, cars driving around with speakers promoting the candidates (usually at 5:30 AM). And for some bigger news, we moved into our own house Monday night and have been staying there since. On Friday we had bought a mattress and stove with our move in allowance form Peace Corps and paid for it, expecting to have it delivered on Monday. Then we find out that the people who were living there are leaving the stove and refrigerator for us to use. We went back to the store and could not get a refund so we were forced to buy a tv and dvd player and some other things we needed like a fan and some plastic stools to sit on. We also had previously bought a slightly used refrigerator too which we are going to try to sell to another volunteer. The previous tenants also left some chairs, an entertainment center to put our tv on, some shelves and place to put our clothes but right now there is a broken pipe and no running water. That is supposed to get fixed by tomorrow, keep your fingers crossed. We do have running water outside and in our pila, the traditional way to store water here, but we have been spoiled the last two months with warm, running water in our shower and to revert back to cold bucket baths is not fun. At first we thought we had rats in the space between the roof and ceiling but now we hear at least one kitten crying and there is a cat that hangs around our house, so apparently we have cats in our attic. Shannon wants a kitten now. This Thursday we are going to have dinner with a couple of people from Peace Corps Headquarters in Washington D.C. who are coming to visit Honduras and they are sending them out to our part of the country as they have never visited this part before. The second in command of Peace Corps, the Deputy Director, and the Special Assistant to the Chief of Staff are coming so that should be an interesting dinner.

Culture Differences

As we are sure you can imagine there are a lot of cultural differences between Honduras and the U.S. Some of them are really awesome, and some of them drive us crazy! We thought we would talk about some of them today so you can get a feel for Honduras and life here. One of the cultural differences that we really like is the closeness of neighborhoods. Since most people live in the same city, and many even the same neighborhood their whole lives, the neighborhoods are very close knit. Everyone knows everyone else and they look after each other. When someone needs help, there are lots of people there offering support, and things are safer because everyone is keeping an eye out. This is really nice for us, especially since we live in one of the oldest neighborhoods and everyone is very close. In the U.S. we did not know our neighbors and it is nice to be part of a tightly-knit community. One of the differences that is hard to get used to is the slow pace. Most people do things very slowly, especially walk, and they are also late to EVERYTHING. It is really frustrating when you are at a training, class at a school, or any type of meeting, and people show up an hour late. Another big difference is the way people use cell phones. Most people here have cell phones and they never turn them off. They ring in meetings, classes, even church AND they always get answered in the meeting, class, or church. At first this really bothered us, but then we started asking around and were told that one of the main reasons people answer their cell phones everywhere and do not put them on silent is due to the fact that it does not cost you anything to receive a call but if you miss it and have to call someone back, you have to pay. This made a lot more sense to us and although it is still annoying to hear cell phones ringing and people talking on them in meetings and such, at least we understand part of the rationale behind it. There are also a lot of catcalls (piropos as they are called here). This is impossible to get used to and drives Shannon crazy all of the time. Last week an 8-year-old yelled at her! Kevin gets some too which is also funny. An interesting note is that if we are together, we both still get them. Some men call Kevin their brother-in-law implying that they are going to marry Shannon. We just keep hoping that as people get more used to us the piropos will die down. That’s just a few of the cultural differences that we have noticed, there are, of course, a lot more…perhaps we will write about them in a future blog.

Another slow week

Another slow week last week. For being the rainy season, it hasn't rained since November 1 here, thats over 2 weeks and the dust is starting to pile up around the town. We hopefully found a place to live starting December 1. There is a house across the street from our host family that is going to be vacant and we already know the owner. The only thing to do now is hope that the people actually move out in time for us to move in. It will be so easy to move our stuff there and we already know all of the neighbors. The people that live there are actually the daughter and her family of the lady that owns it and on Sunday we went with our host family out to their new house and swam in the pool and bar-b-qued, which was nice. There are three new, nice houses there, all family, that share the pool and it is a very nice place.

Our first (and hopefully last) robbery

Yesterday we were talking about how our week had been pretty boring and then, last night, we were robbed…not so boring. We had gone to dinner with one of the other volunteers in our site and were walking home at about 8:15. A group of three high school age boys walked past us and then eventually turned around and started following us. We were joking around that they were probably going to rob us and steal our crappy phones. For some reason Shannon took her phone out of her purse and put it in the waistband of her skirt (just in case) and we continued to walk. We turned a corner and they followed us. At this point we were pretty sure they were planning to rob us and we hurried because we could see a pulperia with a lot of people ahead. The boys saw it too and one ran up and grabbed Shannon’s purse. She of course tried to fight him for it and then he said something to one of his friends who reached into his waistband like he had a weapon. At this point we realized that it was not worth it and Shannon let go of her purse. They then told the other volunteer to give them her purse and they also took the bags with our leftover Chinese food and ran off. We went home and called the Peace Corps and they contacted the police who went out to look for the boys (not very likely that they would find them but we did see them driving around). Luckily Shannon only had five Lempiras (about 30 cents) and her water bottle in her purse (she is really sad about her water bottle and her NRA sticker). The other volunteer was not so lucky and her phone, ID, and debit card were all in her purse along with a couple of dollars. Luckily nobody got hurt and we all laughed about getting robbed by 15-year-olds who stole our Chinese food. Now we will be more careful and only take what we need and not walk down dark streets…it was bound to happen sometime, hopefully this will be the first and last time!

Hurricane Paloma

Not much exciting has happened this week. We both had our Peace Corps project managers come out for a site visit. They both went well and we got a free dinner out of it so that is always good. People here, Hondurans as well as others, are happy that Obama will be the next president. Kevin was supposed to go with the university kids out to the east on the edge of the Biosphere but because Hurricane Paloma was hanging around there yesterday and the day before, they decided not to go but now Paloma is heading toward Cuba so it probably would have been ok. They will go next Friday though. By the way Paloma means dove or pigeon. Most of you back in the States had a time change, we did not so now we are the same as the Central Time Zone, two hours ahead of California. We really didnt have any rain all week, which was nice, but some places are already getting pretty dusty in Catacamas.

Dia de los Muertos

Yesterday was Día de los Muertos. It is the first Sunday of November, and a day where everyone goes to the cemetery to clean and decorate the graves. We went to all three of the cemeteries in Catacamas with our family and it was very interesting. There were so many people at each cemetery and there were people outside the cemeteries selling flowers and food. Some people bring food with them and eat in the cemetery but our host mom said that she does not like to eat in the cemetery so we ate later. Most of the graves were covered in flowers or wreaths and the air smelled of flowers. It was really fascinating watching everyone honor their families and friends. We went to the graves of our host grandma who just died, our host mother’s husband (who we found out today died three years ago because his blood sugar got too low and he fainted and cracked open his head), and our host mother’s sister and her husband. The cemeteries were very different; the oldest having mostly above ground tombs was much smaller and unorganized. The newest, and biggest, was composed mostly of below ground graves which were somewhat organized and there were a lot less weeds. We thoroughly enjoyed this cultural event that was totally different than anything we do in the U.S.