Adventures in the bosque

Oh heavens, pìctures!! Here I am in the bosque behind me house, with a rock.

Here I am with baby Javier in the house. Suyapa is trying to hide.

Here is my posse!! Alexa, Pamela, Nasaret, Melani, Madeline, Walter, Luis, la bebe. The girlies i nthe red dress, and the one in the front with the white shirt with spots, are my two little host sisters.

My host sister (in red) and two neighbors, playing in the front yard.

Some local vegetation.

Hey dudes, here are some more blog entries, and pictures!! I´m currently in an internet café in San Lorenzo, a biggish city way in the south (in Valle). I´m here, sweating my brains out, visiting a PC volunteer for four days to get a feel for what it´s really like. Like I said, the weather is what hot becomes when it decides to go to college and really make something of itself, but aside from that it´s pretty rad. It´s right by the ocean and the folks are really nice. Anyway, here are some bloggies. Chops requested I put them in order from oldest to newest so they could be read in order, so here that is, for your viewing pleasure. Also, pictures take FOREVER to load here, so I only did a couple.

22 July 2008
Hey, chochachos! It’s Tuesday night, and I’m about to begin working on a paper I have due Thursday regarding HIV/AIDS in Honduras…very sobering data. In all of latinoamerica, Honduras is second only to Haiti in the number of AIDS cases in country. And since the majority (70%) of Honduras is regarded as youth, and almost 50% of Hondurans become sexually active before they’re 18, well…we got our work cut out for us. It’s extremely depressing because in a country of 7.4 million inhabitants, 63,000 are infected with HIV/AIDS (1.8%). The grand majority of these cases are transmitted through (heterosexual) intercourse, and second via mother to baby. Very, very sad.

On a happier note, I went on a short hike tonight after dinner with my gringo buddies Derek and Rob and we found awesome waterfalls!! Actually, I’d seen them before, but from across the gorge (I don’t know what exactly constitutes a gorge geologically (Erika? Paige?) but it sounds more dramatic than valley so Im’a stick with gorge. It also smacks of Rescuers Down Under, but we don’t really need to get into that right now. Anyway, we tramped through shiny green tropical plants, ducked under skinny young pines (as well as several seemingly random cords of barbed wire) until we could hear the water. We clamored down the mountain a bit and hunkered down on some really awesome-smelling moss-covered rocks to watch the water. The falls aren’t anything too spectacular in terms of volume, but since we were so high up they looked quite impressive. Lots of little pools cascading down 50 feet to the next…we reckon we could probably climb down to them if we approached from the other side (not the sheer cliff we were perched on tonight) so maybe I’ll give that a whirl next time I’m out there. The only problem is, the only time we have during the week to hike is in the evenings, which is when all the bugs are out. The mosquitos aren’t actually that bad here, but SOMETHING keeps biting us and leaving tiny bumps with a little red blood-blister-looking dot in the middle. They itch for like two weeks before they go away...not to mention that look frighteningly like what I would imagine the bot-fly looks like (this little guy, or girl I suppose, lays its eggs in your skin. A larvae then hatches and lives in your skin until you discover it and get it out…which is done by suffocating the worm by putting Vaseline over the tiny opening. The worm runs out of breath and comes squirming to the surface in search of air, at which point you grab it with tweezers and pull it out. If this ever happens to me, you can be assured the worm will suffocate by the volume of vomit I will have covered myself in. THIS IS THE GROSSEST THING I CAN IMAGINE. THAT IS ALL).

This weekend was really awesome. After class on Saturday, I headed with some gringos to the nearby town of Valle de Angeles, which is a “cuidad turistico.” This means that every store is laden with Honduran souvenirs, from hippie tunics to machetes (made in El Salvador, of course) to extremely attractive fanny-packs…which I purchased. Anyone who says fanny-packs aren’t the very essence of sexy clearly hasn’t spent enough time around the inherently cool individuals who sport them. Anyway, our plan was to find an internet café to do research, but the incredible freedom of wandering in a real town was too exhilarating and we lost our academic steam. We found a café where some other gringos from our program were having a beer and joined them. It was quite indulgent and I don’t even mind that I had to pay 80 lempiras ($4) for a plate of french fries with avocado and beans. After Valle, we took a bus back to Las Canadas, a little settlement nearish to mine, where a gringa Sara was hosting a mid-afternoon dance party. Her house is beautiful (seriously, it has a fountain in the front yard and a bathroom with higher ceilings than my house) and her host-parents were so nice to host us. We danced to punta, meringue, salsa, Bob Marley, and some Abba. I got to churn the butter for hours! There was so much butter left over, some even got on the mayor.

After the dance/butter fest, Derek, Patrick and I hiked through the woods back up to my colonia, which proved to be quite the short-cut. We had to cross a little water-fall which I delighted in, and promptly exaggerated in girth and force to anyone who wanted to hear about it. I went to bed pretty early that night, and the next morning, my mom, the kids, Patrick and I headed to my host-aunt’s house, which may or may not be a Sunday ritual. Patrick came along ‘cause he’s a veggie and I was going cook my famous fried-tofu lasagna thing. It was a little different because I didn’t have certain ingredients (lasagna noodles, ricotta) but it worked out all right and was extremely tasty anyway. And, since the aunt has internet in her house, I was able to check my e-mail, post a blog, and do all my research for my paper. SCORE. That night, after a harrowing ride home in a mototaxi (basically a three-wheeled motorcycle with a carriage on the back that fits three), Patrick and I went hiking with his awesome three host siblings, Luis, Walter, and Nasaret, plus a cousin whose name I forgot. We rambled until dark, stopping to play a pick-up game of Wadded-Up Raincoat Toss, which had rules that sort of resembled a cross between American football and Ultimate Frisbee.

Guess that’s all for now, amigos. I’ll try to post some pictures soon! Don’t forget you can call me if you want. Also, you can send me text messages FOR FREE from the Tigo website (Tigo is my cellphone provider). You might want to google it, but I think it’s www.tigo.com.hn. The site’s in Spanish, but if you can figure it out, just enter my phone number (9598-7436) and type in your message and I’ll get it! I can’t write back, though.
Paz dudes!

26 July 2008
Hey, chochachos! It’s Saturday night here, about 9:47pm…this is the latest I’ve stayed up in a while (well, since last Wednesday, when I pulled a “Honduran all-nighter” and stayed up till the ghastly hour of 11:23pm working on my HIV/AIDS project). It works out all right though, I basically drink tasty coffee nonstop all day long, so I’m pretty much wired until what I call the Too Much Spanish Equilibrium kicks in and I pass out in my bed in exhaustion. This week was tiring but really fun, I had 7 kinds of adventures and learned a fair amount as well.

I’ve been going through a weird time here, regarding what exactly I want to do. As I’ve mentioned, there are three projects in my Honduras group—Youth Development, Protected Areas Management (PAM), and Municipal Development. This week I sort of had a mini-midlife crisis during which time I recognized that I really wanted to do PAM—it sounds like so much fun, tramping around in the woods, teaching environmental ed, helping farmers improve their techniques in a sustainable way and encouraging productive yet environmentally friendly practices in protected area buffer zones…I talked to the PC people and they said yes, it would be possible to switch. I sat in on a PAM meeting and participated in some activities…but by the end of the day, I was even more confused about what I want/should do…I confess I kind of freaked out in a mild way, which mainly involved trying not to cry—totally weird. But I talked about it with some friends and thought a lot about it, and decided it would be silly to switch groups. Working with kids is what I love and is what I’ve always done and was meant to do. I came down here to help and that is certainly where I can do the most good. My area of expertise is definitely babies and not farming, no matter how much I like running around in the woods. I’m hoping my future site will be in an area where teaching environmental education/care for protected areas is relevant and applicable to the kids lives—but I know that no matter what I’ll be able to do SOMETHING with the kids that involves trees and the reverence thereof. I feel kind of stupid now about almost switching groups—why would I be in anything BUT youth development?—but I blame my brief dabbling in the forbidden fruits of environmental work on culture shock, exhaustion, and too many beans/coffee. Anyway, the PC folks were really nice about the whole thing and everything is back to normal.

I recently discovered (more like learned about) a cool trail that leads from the furthest bus stop up through the mountain to my house! Recently, me and whoever wants to (usually patrick and derek I guess) get off at that stop instead of the one closer to our homes and then hike up. It takes about 45 minutes or so, and it’s really pretty. We wind around lots of little homes, cross a river, and then climb more or less straight up until I get to Santa Rita. One of the things I love about Honduras is that you basically greet every single person you pass with a “Buenas” or “Buenos” and a smile…at least in the campo. If someone is sitting on their porch, you call it out and wave, and they smile and call back. It’s so freakin awesome, it makes me feel connected to everybody even though I’ll probably never see them again. It makes the hike home even that more fun.

Sometimes, if I get home early enough, I’ll drop off my bags and go back out for another hike, usually with a couple gringos and whichever Honduran neighbor kids want to come along (I have a small posse of about 8-10 ninos who seem to appear out of thin air the moment I come home). If I don’t go hiking and stay in, they loiter on the porch or in the yard, and some of them who know Suyapa are often waiting inside on the couch when I come home. The other night when I was working on my AIDS paper and Suyapa and the kids were out of the house, I had about 10 kids outside and three inside, “helping” me with my work. It’s nice because I’m never lonely, but sometimes I need a little space to breath…but when that happens I just tell them I’m meeting up with some gringos to pasear (go out) and they get it. The other night I went on a gringo-only hike and we got to the top of this big mountain and saw the whole valley!! It was incredible. We had some difficulty getting back down, though, we got lost and wandered through a lot of private property, wound up stuck in this narrow chute of barbed wire, only to ford a river and scramble up a ridiculously steep hill…but we’d brought headlamps so even though it was getting dark we all got home alive.

Today we had half-day of class (hooray Saturday!) and then Derek, Patrick, Gabe and I went to Valle de Angeles, the quaint little tourist pueblo nearby. We only get three bucks or so a day, but we haven’t been spending much money lately, so we splurged and went to this little Italian place and got a huge pizza and some beer, followed by ice cream. It was hella indulgent but soooo delicious—I’ve been craving pizza like the sopilotes (vultures that are everywhere here) crave dead horse (like the one in the soccer campo next to my house, which was promptly devoured). After that we decided to try and find this trail we’d read about that leads to some waterfalls, but obviously this plan failed. We hiked up the paved road for like 15 minutes, and headed into the bosque (forest). It never ceases to amaze me how the forests look here…the combo of skinny pines, with their long bright-green needles, nestled in with huge elephant-ear plants, banana trees, and other tropical foliage, is just bizarre. Lots of the trees have crazy vines or moss hanging from them, which only adds to the jungle look, unless you look at the floor and see that familiar red duff that’s all over the mountain forests at home. And, because this is Honduras, there are obviously chickens and roosters and stray dogs and children in the last places you’d expect to see em. We crossed a river (via bridge, for the first time ever…woo lap of luxery!) and labored up an extremely steep mountain, weaving around houses. We finally found one with a bunch of kids outside and asked about the waterfalls. The woman informed us that we were on the wrong side of the river, and did we want to see the gringo child she had? She dragged this incredibly shy four-year-old out of the house, who was indeed complete with white skin, a mop of blonde hair, and blue eyes. He was sucking coca-cola out of a bag, with a straw (lots of beverages, including water, are served in plastic bags here) and waved shyly before ducking back in. We asked her what the deal was, and she said something about how his parents were from the Dominican Republic and she was taking care of him, which made no sense cause he certainly didn’t look Dominican, but whatever. So random. Anyway, we trekked back down, cross the river, and tried the other side. We were tramping along near the river bed when I heard someone shout, “HAYLEY!!! HOLA!!!” I looked over and there were my two host cousins, who’d house I’d visited twice!! It was so random, we were rather lost in the bosque and there appear two Hondurans who I happen to know! I felt extremely popular, like any old Honduran who happened to be out and about might know me. They were on a nature hike with their church group, so many jubilant hugs were exchanged (over a barbed wire fence, unfortunately). ALSO RANDOM. They told us the falls were about two hours up, and since it was 3:30, we decided we didn’t have time, since we had to be home by six. So we hiked up and found some beautiful farm land cleared out, as well as more crazy trees and a mysterious underground water source that sounded exactly like a man-eating cave-panther. We eventually headed back into town and caught a bus going back to our bus stop, and I was indeed home by six.

After dinner tonight, I took all the neighborhood kids out (about 15) to the soccer field (right next to the houses) with my headlamp. The littler ones (my two sisters, for example) were a little nervous with the darkness, but it ended up being a blast. I tried to make everyone sit down and look at the stars (which are obviously mind-blowing out here) but after about 20 seconds they were like “can we get up and play now??” I taught them how to play freeze-tag, which was followed by hide and seek (awesome in pitch-darkness!), followed by red-light-green-light, followed by “Onion”, which is essentially dogpile (they taught me this one), followed by ghost-stories and joke-telling. It was so much fun…we headed in at about 9:00 and the kids were all begging me to go out again tomorrow night. Unfortunately, I can’t, because tomorrow morning I’m leaving for four days to go to my “Volunteer Visit,” where we go off and visit a current volunteer to see what it’s like. I’m going to San Lorenzo, a HUGE (50,000) port city right on the water in the south, in Honduras’ little Pacific outlet (that’s right dudes we got the pacific AND the carribbean!). At first, I was disappointed, because I don’t like the big cities and it’s like 110 degrees there every day. But I changed my mind, because it’ll be a neat chance to see a part of Honduras I probably wouldn’t go to otherwise.

I’m about to pass out dudes. I hope everyone back home is happy and healthy…I really miss you all and I hope to hear from you guys. Love!!
Paz,
Hayley