I just got back from my volunteer visit a few hours ago (I’m writing this post on Thursday night), and I am so tired! Bus travel is exhausting!
We left from Las Cañadas on Sunday morning around 7:15. I traveled with Emily and Deandra, two other trainees from my group. Deandra was going with me to visit Melissa, a current youth development volunteer in Concepción de María; and Emily was going to visit Ashley, the volunteer who lives in Namasigue. Once we got into Tegucigalpa, we took a taxi to the bus station and then took the three-hour bus ride to Choluteca, a fairly large city southeast of Tegucigalpa.
Ashley’s site, Namasigue, is only 30-40 minutes outside of Choluteca, so she met us at the bus terminal. We walked to Wendy’s for lunch (definitely a nice change from beans and tortillas), stopped by the grocery store to pick up some food, and then got on another bus to Concepción de María (another 3 hours or so). By the time we got to our destination it was getting dark and we were pretty tired. However, the feria was going on in the town, so there were lots of things going on. We met Melissa, the volunteer that Deandra and I were visiting, and Laura, a health volunteer who lives in Triunfo (about an hour and a half away from Melissa). After a dinner of tacos (Mexican food is so hard to find that Ashley had her parents send her taco seasoning in the mail), we headed out to the feria.
While we were walking through the feria, we got a taste of what it is like to be a volunteer in a small site (the town has about 1,000 people). Melissa was super friendly, and greeted and talked to everyone that we passed. Everyone in her town knows her and she, amazingly, knows almost everyone’s names. The feria had some sketchy carnival rides, including a ferris wheel that was a little rickety and went at 3 times the speed of a normal ferris wheel (which made it also 3 times more fun!). There was also a merry-go-round that was pushed by hand by one of the workers, rather than having a motor that makes it go around. Throughout the night, we rode the ferris wheel twice, played some games, and went into the town hall to the dance, where a band that looked and danced like the Honduran version of the Backstreet Boys was performing. We had a great time and didn’t get back home until around 12:30. Melissa lives in a great little house. It kind of made me jealous because Peace Corps Honduras recently changed the rules so that, starting with my group (H-19), we are required to live with host families the whole time. It’s kind of a bummer that I’ll never get to have my own place like Melissa does, but it’s definitely safer to be living with a family, so it’s a trade-off.
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| Feria rides |
Early Monday morning, Emily, Ashley, and Laura left. Some kids from Melissa’s Joven a Joven (vocational training) class at the high school came over to prepare yucca with chismol for the cultural show that was happening that day in the center of town, another event for the feria. I helped the kids peel the yucca and chop up the onions, peppers, and tomatoes to make the chismol. I got to practice my Spanish with them, and we talked about our favorite movies. Once the food was done, we brought it over to the cultural show. All of the different organizations and schools from the area had little booths with typical foods and crafts. Before the show started, they called Melissa up to sit at the front table with all of the important people from the town. It was really cool to see how respected and loved she is in her community. The show had dancers, skits, singers, and a marching band. After the show, we hung out at Melissa’s house for awhile. In the evening, we went back out to the feria, which was much less busy than the night before. We sat and ate pupusas at one of the food stands. Then, Melissa took us to a restaurant that had a little room on the third floor with karaoke. Although none of us wanted to sing into the microphone, we flipped through a lot of the songs (all in Spanish) and attempted to sing some of them. They had the song from Titanic, in both Spanish and English, and we ended up singing that a few times. A few other people showed up to sing, and we hung out and sang along, before heading back and going to bed.
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| Deandra, Melissa, Me at Karaoke |
Tuesday, we headed out to the library to help Melissa plan and prepare for her upcoming classes. The library was a small building with maybe 4 or 5 shelves of books and some tables and chairs. We prepared for a sex ed. lesson that we were going to teach with Laura in Triunfo on Wednesday, but plans ended up changing so we didn’t get to do it after all. We went back to the house for lunch. The other trainee that was with us had some health issues, so she stayed home and napped, and I headed back to the library with Melissa. The kids got out of school early in the afternoon, and a bunch of them came into the library. I sat and read with some of them, and then Melissa did a spontaneous story hour and gave them paper and colored pencils to color with, just to keep them occupied so she could get some work done. Later on in the evening, we headed out and ended up sitting and talking with some neighbors for a couple of hours. They were super nice and invited us to come back and visit again. Melissa said that her best advice for integrating into your community is doing just what we did on Tuesday night, spending time just hanging out and talking to people. It will definitely take the courage to step outside my comfort zone, but it is obvious how well integrated she is into her community, so I will definitely take her advice!
Wednesday we left super early because we had to go back into Choluteca to stop at the hospital and get medicine (don’t worry it wasn’t for me, I’m still healthy!). After running that errand, we hung out in a café for awhile, then met up with Emily and Ashley again to have lunch at Pizza Hut. After lunch, we stopped again at the grocery store and the 5 of us (Me, Deandra, Melissa, Ashley, and Emily), headed to Ashley’s house in Namasigue, which seemed to be about the same size as Melissa’s site, although we didn’t get a chance to walk around too much. Once we got there, we made rice krispy treats (with cornflakes though, because there weren’t any rice krispies at the grocery store), and helped Ashley prepare some of her materials for her classes. In order to give Deandra and I the experience of helping with a project (Melissa’s projects were put on hold for the week because of the feria), she called the kindergarten teacher and made plans to do a dental hygiene lesson in the morning, so that we could go and help with it before we had to leave. Before bed, we moved all of the mattresses into Ashley’s living room and watched a couple of episodes of Modern Family on her computer.
This morning, we went to the kinder at 9:00 to do a quick lesson with the kids. The topic of the lesson was knowing the difference between foods that are good for your teeth and foods that are bad for your teeth. Afterwards, we hung out some more, then took the long trip back home (first to Choluteca, then the long bus ride to Tegucigalpa, then another shorter trip to Las Cañadas).
The volunteer visit turned out to be a great experience. I got to see what it looks like to be a happy, successful volunteer. I got to ask Melissa a million questions about life as a volunteer, we had some fun at the feria, and we got to help facilitate a lesson with Ashley. I learned a lot about how to become a part of your community, the importance of being friendly, open, and interested in everyone and everything that’s going on. One thing I didn’t expect was to become friends with the volunteers so quickly. I could definitely see myself going back and visiting Ashley and Melissa, and hopefully I’ll be placed at a site close enough that I’ll be able to.
We’re officially more than halfway done with training, and I can’t believe it! It was great to have a change of pace during the volunteer visit and not be so busy all the time, but tomorrow it’s back to regular training until we’re sworn in on September 22nd!
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