In Which: Peter Does Some Work

Background Info:

I guess I’ll explain the work situation. As you know, I was in training for about two and a half months. I never really wrote about what we learned, as I was worried it might sound boring, and I had other “cooler” things that I wanted to share. To summarize, besides talking about aspects of volunteer life (such as safety, health, and development philosophy) we also learned about and practiced specific activities that we can do for work in our sites.

Essentially Peace Corps has a variety of manuals and curriculums for programs that we can use and implement in our schools and communities, depending on the needs of our various sites. One of these programs is named Colgate (it sounds cooler pronounced the Spanish way); where there is an entire curriculum we can teach in elementary schools about various topics of dental health. For this we are even supplied a plethora of free toothbrushes and toothpaste for each student in our town. Another big program is TEAM, a.k.a. “Teaching English and Methodology”. With this program there is a curriculum that not only gives English lessons, but also can be used to teach general teaching methodologies. It is designed to be given to teachers, and they are taught in a way that shows them how to conduct a lesson with their elementary school students (including games, activities, etc.). Finally, other programs we learned about include teaching HIV/AIDS awareness, leading sports teams, and activities to promote environmental education.

As I mentioned, Peace Corps gave us a wide variety of training and ideas for things we can do in our sites. Essentially we are encouraged to choose the types of activities and programs based on our own skills, interests, and the needs of the community. We have a lot of freedom in what we ultimately decide to do, but at the end of training I definitely felt confident about getting started with my work.

So what do I do here?

Before arriving in my site, Peace Corps had already worked to find Honduran counterparts for me to work with (in my case, the principals of the high school and elementary schools in my town). With these counterparts my supervisors discussed the purpose and role of a Peace Corps volunteer, explained the type of services I offered, and came up with a tentative work plan for me. I was told that Teupasenti’s main desires for my help included working with advanced students in the high school to teach them leadership skills, working to improve the student government in the elementary schools, and teaching English to the teachers through the TEAM program. Other ideas for work included conducting lessons in a parenting school, getting involved with sports teams, provide general trainings for teachers, as well as some other minor projects. There’s plenty of work to be done.

Upon arriving to my site, I found out that my directors in Peace Corps had already done a great job of choosing counterparts and explaining to them how I can help. They already had a clear idea of what I am going through (in terms of leaving home for two years), and how I can help the needs of their schools and communities. I was able to get involved a little bit here and there without much of a delay.

We were advised in training that it might take a long time for our counterparts to trust us, and we might have to simply spend a lot of time observing classes and community events before we would be able to contribute something of our own. Also, the school year ends in early November, thus we only had a month or so after getting to site to work before their summer vacation started. Whereas I still have plenty to observe and learn about, I was lucky to be given opportunities to do work that interested me almost immediately. Of course I am still trying to integrate myself more and more, and I have a lot more to learn before I can begin some bigger projects, but I feel good about how things have started so far.

Specifically, my work load for the first month or so can be summarized as follows: I met with the student government in one of the elementary schools to give lessons about leadership and plan activities with them, I have been giving TEAM lessons to groups of teachers from both elementary schools, and I also have been working to plan a community service project with the student government of the high school.

With the elementary school student government I didn’t really do much, but I learned more about how they work and have some ideas about what we can do the following year. The biggest thing I did with the students was help them organize how they would run a school-wide assembly one week, though in reality other teachers did most of the work for that. Next year I hope to involve them in larger activities, and I want it to more or less mirror the work I do with the high school group (as detailed in the next section), but on a smaller scale.

As for my TEAM classes, they were more of an informal introduction to the classes I will be teaching the lessons formally in the new school year this February. There is a whole specific process that needs to be followed in order to register teachers for the class through the government, but I decided to skip that for now to show to them I am willing to work. I will simply take care of the administrative aspects during the summer (winter?) break and start fresh the following school year. It has been a lot of fun doing the lessons, and I look forward to continuing them.

Los Presidentes

Finally, there is my project with the high school. This has been by far my most rewarding form of work thus far, and I see a lot of potential for the future concerning what I might be able to do with the group.

I wasn’t told much about what I would be doing with them at first, I was just told to teach them about ‘leadership’. I started to brainstorm informally, and I basically figured that if I wanted them to be learn about leadership, I would have to give them an opportunity or project to act as leaders. I started envisioning teaching the kids to plan and conduct their own community service projects, simultaneously learning how to be a leader and helping with problems in the community. However, I figured I would have to plan substantially with the teachers and principal about what I would specifically be doing with them. I didn’t expect to start as quickly as I did.

For my entire first week in Teupasenti, the high school was on strike. Sadly, this is an extremely common occurrence in all schools in Honduras (though it’s a different topic for a different day). When classes finally resumed, I only met with the principal to informally discuss what I would be doing. It seemed as if I was supposed to already have something concrete planned (though no one told me), so luckily I was able to at least share my informal ideas. I was then told we would meet with other teachers the following day to plan some more specifics about my work. I decided that to prepare for the meeting I would write down some official objectives for my idea, thus being able to sound a little bit more as if I knew what I was doing (though I’m not sure I really did).

So what happened the next day? Well, I showed up for the meeting, and it didn’t quite go as planned. Instead of meeting with teachers to bounce ideas off of them and get their input, I was instead thrown in front of the group of students I was to work with. They are referred to as the ‘Presidentes’, which is more or less the student government of the high school. There was one teacher with them, but she simply introduced me and told me to explain what I was going to be doing with the group.

I hadn’t shared the specifics of my project idea with anyone, so of course I had no idea what anyone would think of it. I decided that if they weren’t going to plan things with me, I would just take the opportunity to do what I wanted to do. Luckily I had written out objectives the night before, and I proceeded to share them with the students. I explained that I hoped to do a project where the students would practice and learn about the merits of volunteerism. I wanted to give them an opportunity to learn about and act as leaders. I wanted them to practice working and making decisions as a group. Finally, I wanted them to help with a problem in the community through the act of fulfilling the previous three objectives. I essentially explained that they were to choose and design their own event and activity. Perhaps they could provide positive activities for their peers by organizing a community soccer tournament. Perhaps they could lead environmental projects, such as a campaign to reduce the staggering amounts of trash littered throughout the entire town. Perhaps it would be something completely different. I wanted them to choose an activity of their own to help with the problem of their choice.

I would also like to mention that I had to explain all of that in Spanish.

The idea took. The teacher approved and the students seemed at least willing to give it a try. I actually had a bit of an adrenaline rush throughout the presentation, as the initial fear of not knowing what I was doing melted away and transformed into confidence and assuredness in the idea. I suddenly felt that I had a clear vision of what I wanted to do and how I could do it. It was a kind of ‘teacher’ moment that I had never really felt before. At least for that day I felt that I was really in the right place, and that I was the man for the job.

As fun as it was to get feel excited about the possibilities of what I could do with a willing group of volunteers, the reality remained that we hadn’t actually accomplished anything yet. I started to plan how my next meeting with the group would go. While I was preparing, I happened to find a manual about planning community service projects with other volunteers in the community; a book I didn’t realize I had with me. I ended up modifying it for my own needs here and there, but overall it gave me some good ideas.

Thus began the project. We met once a week at the high school in the afternoon for a 2-hour meeting. We began by discussing the kinds of problems the community had, such as gang violence, teenage pregnancy, pollution, and drug abuse. We voted as a group to try and do a project that would help with juvenile delinquency in the community (which incorporated many different problems). In other meetings we planned ways of helping with the issue. These included hosting a community cultural event to give youths something positive to do in their free time, hosting a soccer tournament, and organizing lessons that the group could teach to the rest of the high school. They ended up deciding to prepare ‘charlas’ (lessons/lectures) that they would give to the school. Though it might not have been the most exciting type of project, it was important to me that they chose it themselves (instead of me telling them what to do). Also it was the most practical project, as by the time we decided the type of project we would do there were only three weeks left in the school year.

There were many issues throughout the planning process, the greatest of which was punctuality. If a meeting started at 2PM, we typically got started at 2:45PM. There was no consistency in attendance, either. Half of the group would show up one week, and the other half the next. This particularly was a problem, as the work we did in each meeting naturally built on what we had done in the previous week. It was tough to constantly have to spend time bringing other people up to speed.

In the end, however, I feel like it all worked out. We picked a day to give the charlas and a schedule for the groups to reach every class. They were able to research their topics and put together a presentation just in time. I would have liked them to be prepared sooner in order for me to to help them put together a smoother lesson, but they turned out well enough. I tried to give them pointers here and there, but in the end the truth is I didn’t really teach them to plan and implement lessons. The objective of the entire project was more about them voluntarily working as a group of leaders to help with an issue in the community.

Finally, after a month of planning, came the day of the charlas. I was very excited, as there were times I worried it wouldn’t come to pass. I really wanted to complete the project in order to have something to build off of for the following year before the vacation began. Here are some pictures of the students giving their presentations:

They worked throughout the day and into the night (the school closes at 10PM) to give their presentations to almost every class in the school, each lasting roughly 30-45 minutes. They were really excited about the process, and didn’t remotely complain about having to work all day. I actually suggested that they could stop after the morning and afternoon sessions, but they all wanted to continue. They even offered to give the lectures to the sixth graders at the local elementary school the following day, but we decided it was best just to stay with the high school.

Were they the most beautiful lessons ever? No, of course not. But like I said, I didn’t teach them how to create a beautiful lesson, and that wasn’t exactly the objective. Some kids simply read from a paper, but others had all of their information memorized and enthusiastically lectured to the classes. Some even incorporated a bit of multimedia to show a video.

The topics ranged from different kinds of drugs, alcoholism, and the importance of family. Did we drastically reduce the prevalence of these issues in the community? I seriously doubt it. However, perhaps we did get some students to think about the issues. Also, I was asking around with the group during the day, and they seemed to be telling me that they don’t receive Health education that we do in the states, where we learn and talk about issues such as addiction. Overall I felt good about the project because I feel at the least the Presidentes got a chance to learn through their own research, and they were able to practice a leadership role as they got in front of their peers to share their projects.

The school year is over now, and I can begin to start thinking about the new one that is coming in February. I hope to work with a group of students during the break (perhaps planning activities that are more fun/recreational), but if that doesn’t happen then at the least I expect to work with a similar group next year. With more time I hope to tackle some bigger and more meaningful projects. There are a lot of possibilities of things we can accomplish together, but I’ll have to wait and see how it goes.

Time will tell.

Bed Bugs

Not For the Faint of Heart

One thing that I have grown accustomed to in Honduras is the prevalence of excessively large and creepy bugs. I encounter cockroaches more than anything else, which don’t bother me as much as they used to. They usually run around in my bathroom at night, but I’m always expecting them so they never surprise me. I also keep an old running shoe handy, which has found new life as a cockroach killer.

One night, not long after going to sleep, I was lying in bed when I suddenly felt something strange. I couldn’t tell whether I had just imagined feeling something crawl over my face and neck, or if it was just my sheets flapping in the breeze of my fan. I didn’t want to take chances. I launched out of my bed, simultaneously turning on the light switch and spastically brushing all over my body to rid myself of any possible creature. With the light on I looked at my bed, expecting to see a large cockroach perhaps. I still wasn’t sure if I had indeed felt anything, and wouldn’t have been surprised to find nothing. I moved my sheets around, and then turned over my pillow.

And there it was. A giant. Friggin. Ugly. MOTHER-FLIPPIN’ TARANTULA. Holy crap holy crap!!! I definitely let out some sort of cry that wasn’t 100% masculine (but thankfully, as I mentioned in another post, my walls are mostly soundproof). I leapt to grab my trusty shoe, and hesitated for a moment as I poised to strike. I didn’t want to miss, as they can move pretty quickly, and are good at hiding. Finally, I brought the shoe down and with one fell swoop crushed the sucker. I let out a sigh of relief as I saw its corpse lying motionless in my bed. In the process of disposing of the body, I decided to take pictures to prove to the world my horror and triumph:

This was actually my second encounter with a tarantula. The first was about a month earlier, back in Las Cañadas. I was just about to go to bed, when I noticed something strange on the floor on the other side of the room. Again, I let out a not-so-masculine cry as I realized what it was. Unfortunately, the house was not remotely sound proof and everyone could hear me (though they didn’t seem to pay attention to me at first). With a bit of adrenaline flowing through my veins, I carefully grabbed a boot and inched my way towards the tarantula. I planned the motion I would take as I swung down for the kill, and got as close as I could without scaring it away.

Then came the moment of truth. I swung down with all my might, but at the last second it scurried away into the corner of my room, hiding under some shelves. The area of the room was inaccessible without completely overturning all of the furniture, and I didn’t want to create a huge disturbance as everyone was going to bed. There was also a chance that it had crawled under a crack in the wall to the adjacent room, where the rest of the family slept. I let them know what was going on, and they just laughed. It didn’t seem to scare them as much.

Not knowing where the tarantula was, I decided to just go to sleep. It was pure willpower that allowed me to do so. I started to imagine that it would crawl all over me and bite me during the night, but I just told myself it wouldn’t, and that it was probably gone. Somehow it worked, and I slept soundly. There was no sign of it the next morning, and I had survived without being bitten.

The next afternoon I came home and there was a plastic bag on a shelf outside my room with something strange inside. Upon further inspection, I realized it was the corpse of a Tarantula. As it turns out, Gloria had moved the furniture around inside my room to find it as she was cleaning. She remembered where I said it had run off to in my room the night before, and apparently it was still there. She killed it without hesitation, as apparently they don’t scare her at all. Toads bother her, but not tarantulas. Go figure. Like I’ve said a bunch before, I had the best host family during training.

The Real Menace

Though cockroaches and tarantulas are easily the most disgusting and creepy creatures that I have to deal with, by far the most bothersome have in fact been the crickets. Those darn grillos. They’re slightly louder and more annoying sounding than those that could be heard at night back in the States. To make things worse, they hide inside cracks in my door where I can’t quite reach them. They never bothered me at all during training, but they manifested themselves clearly on my first night in Teupasenti.

They wait until the moment when I am just about to fall asleep, and then they start ‘singing’. It’s too loud to ignore, so I begin the hunt. As I mentioned, they hide. I use an old credit card to slide up and down the crack between the door frame and the wall, but most of the time they just crawl deeper inside, out of my reach. The commotion from my attempt causes them to quiet down, so I return to my bed and try to go back to sleep.

Then, as if they are watching me, they begin to screech again as soon I as start to relax and believe that I had scared them away for good. I debate for a moment if it is possible to just ignore them. Perhaps if I try to think about something else, the sound will blend in and it won’t bother me. Mind over matter. I have even tried plugging my ears with balled-up toilet paper. Of course, none of that ever works. I begrudgingly rise again from my bed and walk across the room to find where they are hiding. The whole dance repeats, and there are usually four or five sessions before I can bother them to the point that they stay quiet sufficiently long enough for me to be able to fall asleep. Eventually I started using bug spray to squirt at them in their hiding places in an attempt to scare them away for a longer period of time. It worked most nights, but then I started to worry about how long my bug spray supply would last at the rate I was consuming it.

One night, however, I got lucky. I sprayed into the crack, and out popped a cricket. Squish. Then, to my surprise, another popped out. Squish number two. I peered into the crack and noticed several more. A couple of sprays later and the entire family started to make a run for it. A fatal mistake. One by one, I crushed them all. Big ones, little ones, children, grandparents, cousins… All dead. I must have killed ten in all. Some of you may cry for the sanctity of life, but in that moment I appealed to Utilitarianism. The good I will be able to do for this world with the help of a consistent good night’s sleep will most likely outweigh the contribution that those useless crickets could possibly have made.

I haven’t heard a single cricket in my room since that fateful night, a few weeks ago now.

Coming Next Week(ish):

                                                                                          

It’s not all just fun and games here. I have in fact been doing some work, and in my next post I will write about what has been going on to date on that subject.

Welcome to Paradise

This Sunday I will already have been in my site for a full month, though it feels like I just got here.

Teupasenti, El Paraíso

On my last blog I left off talking about how I had arrived in Teupasenti (Teupa). I slept my first night at my counterpart’s house, but the next night I went to move into the house Peace Corps assigned to me. They did a great job placing me in a home, as I am very comfortable where I am. I have a large room with a comfortable bed, and I even have my own bathroom. There’s actually a functional shower in the bathroom that even sort of has hot water, but it’s not something you can really depend on. I say ‘sort of’ because only one of the six or so streams of water that come out of the showerhead is hot, but it’s hot enough to make it feel comfortable. However, the problem is that the shower doesn’t work every day. The water in the town only works for a few hours a day, if it comes on at all. I was spoiled my first week, but then it only worked one day during the second. The letdown of expecting a hot shower is almost worse than not having one, so now every day I wake up assuming there is no water. The first thing I do after getting out of my bed is check the sink faucet in my bathroom. If there’s water, it’s a lucky day. If not, I just go to the kitchen to start heating up some water on the stove to use for a bucket bath.

Here are some pictures of my room:

If you noticed that it’s really messy, that just means that I’ve gotten very comfortable.

As for the family, they’re all really nice. I live with the grandmother of the family (Lidia), who is laid back and a great host. She also happens to make great coffee, usually at the times when I need it most. Overall I get a lot of privacy. Also, my room happens to be quite sound-resistant. It’s situated in such a spot in the middle of the house that I’m never bothered by noise in the streets (roosters, dogs, motorcycles, etc.). The only problem with this is that it means my room is not well ventilated, but having a fan running while I sleep cures that problem.

The owner of the house is the mother of the family (Maria), who actually lives just around the corner from my house. She cooks my meals for me, so I spend a decent amount of my day over at her house. Though she isn’t always punctual, she definitely goes out of her way to make sure I’m comfortable, and she can cook pretty well. She has teenagers and a five-year-old, all of which are easy to get along with. Both of the older ones, Gerardo and Alexandra, have a good sense of humor and are to fun to hang out with (and are also more entertained by a game of UNO that one would think is possible). The five-year-old girl, Genesis/Paloma/Daniella (I swear everyone in this country has 7 names) is very cute, and calls me Tío Peter.

Finally, one of the more interesting members of the family is Maria’s brother, Gonzalo, known to most as the ‘Mudo’. He was born deaf, but they call him a mute as well (sordomudo) since he has never formally learned to communicate or read. I think we take it for granted in the United States that if someone is born as such, that they will be able to learn sign language and other skills to help with the disability. However, in Honduras, schools that teach sign language are only found in Tegucigalpa, and are definitely not accessible or affordable to the average citizen.

Despite the lack of resources available to him, he has done quite well for himself. He owns and runs his own billiard club in town, and is also a mechanic. It boggles my mind to imagine what that learning process was like for him. I actually have spent a lot of time thinking about him and about what his life must be like. Since he can’t fully communicate, it’s almost as if he’s trapped in his own world. There’s so much we would think that he’s missing, not being able to hear or read, but at the same time there are things that probably aren’t so bad to miss. I think of the Who’s rock opera ‘Tommy’ (the deaf, dumb, and blind pinball champion), especially the song ‘Christmas’: “Tommy doesn’t know what day it is / doesn’t know who Jesus was or what praying is.” Though he’s never been formally taught about God and can’t read the Bible, I’d actually say that perhaps he knows Him better than most. He is always extremely positive, constantly smiling, and likes to try to joke around with you. His spirit and his accomplishments seem to me to be a thing of God.

I also think there are some positives to not being able to hear or read. There are some things in this world that wouldn’t be so bad to not know about. Sure he doesn’t know about Jesus (formally), but at the same time he doesn’t have to hear about war, genocide, or people such as Hitler in this world. He’s free to perceive the world as he wishes- he doesn’t have to let the negativity of others bring him down. He may have never listened to the Beatles, but he’s also never heard cries of pain or declarations of hate. He’s never heard anyone say in words that they love him, but I doubt he needs words to know that is so.

Sometimes I feel like I can relate with him. I wonder if he even knows that I have trouble communicating at times as well, if he even understands the idea that there are different languages in this world. Whatever the case may be, he’s always great to be around. I even went for a run with him one day, which was fun. We’ve tried to go again, but (using his invented sign language) he has been telling me lately that the field is too muddy from all of the rain to go running in. I’m sure we’ll go again soon.

I have too much to write about… I’ll leave the rest for a second (and possibly 3^rd!) post.