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My Address!!!

So, I finally made it to the post office.  Which is really just some lady´s house, but now you can send me stuff if you want.  According to her, packages and letters can be sent to:

Sarah Stockmann: Cuerpo de Paz
Calle Principal, Barrio Guadalupe
Sulaco, Yoro
Honduras, Centroamerica

So, if you´d like to send a letter or something, I´d love it!

Adventuring

This weekend, I got to leave my site for the first time to see some more of the department and meet some of the other volunteers.  It was definitely an adventure, and I had a really great time.  Some of the other volunteers wanted to throw me a welcome party, so we all met in El Negrito, one of the other municipalities in the department of Yoro.  In the beginning, the transportation was a little iffy.  I live with a family that has a car, so they are pretty much clueless when it comes to the buses.  I tried to ask around, but I didn’t really get good information from anyone.  So, I ended up leaving really early on Friday, just in case. 

            There is a really bad spot in the road out of Sulaco that’s basically a big canyon with a huge pipe.  It’s not really a river, but it’s just a big huge hole.  Because it’s been raining a bunch, the whole thing’s been muddy and eroded, and the buses are not able to pass through in this spot.  When I went to wait for the bus, I ended up with some ladies who were headed to the same place as me, who had been waiting for a bus since 4 a.m.   We were able to find someone with a pickup truck that was headed in our direction, so I decided to jump in with them and head out of my site.  With the transportation system here, and the situations with the roads, sometimes a jalón (hitchhiking) is the only way to get from one place to the next.  So, we got in the truck, and it was able to pass the bad spot in the road, even though the buses couldn’t.  I made it to the place where I needed to catch another bus to get to El Negrito.  After about an hour and a half in the jalón and an hour and a half on the bus, I made it to El Negrito.  I caught a mototaxi to the house where Nancy, a municipal development volunteer, lives.  Because I left so early, I ended up getting there before noon.  I hung out with Nancy for awhile and some other volunteers came too.  One more from Yoro and 2 from the North Coast.  We also had a “couch surfer” with us, who is traveling from Mexico down to South America and had already been traveling for 6 months.  Friday night, we went out to dinner and sang some karaoke before coming home and going to bed.

            Saturday morning, the plan was to go to a waterfall to hang out.  We found some rides to meet up with 2 more volunteers, bought some snacks, and then we headed towards the waterfall.  The road to the waterfall went across a couple of rivers, which are pretty treacherous due to the amount of rain that we’ve had.  However, Hondurans seem to have no fear, because they all were crossing it anyway in buses and pickup trucks.  We made it across the rivers and to the waterfall by the late morning.  The waterfall was really beautiful and the water was really clear.  We ate our snacks, hung out, and went swimming.  Surprisingly enough, this was my first time swimming at all since being here in Honduras.  I had a great time.  On our way out, it started to rain, which made us pretty miserable.  We made it to a pulpería to rest a little and get out of the rain, and then we kept walking.  We weren’t able to find rides easily, so we walked a LOT.  The rain had slowed down, but eventually it started back up again.  We made it back to Nancy’s in the early evening, soaking wet.  After warm showers and cooking some food, we headed over to Brent’s house, another volunteer that’s in the same site as Nancy.  A lot of sites, like mine, only have one volunteer, but there are some that have more than one.  At Brad’s we had my official “welcome party.”  It was great to talk to other volunteers and get to know what everyone’s experiences have been like.  We stayed up really late, and then I slept back at Nancy’s.

Walking across the small river)

truck crossing the bigger river.  unfortunately it was going in the opposite direction, however we ended up finding a ride

made it to the waterfall at last!

Lauren and I in the water

On the way back

            Sunday morning, we went out for baleadas for breakfast (huge flour tortillas filled with queso, mantequilla, and refried beans) and hung out in el Negrito.  Around noonish, I started heading back to my site with D, another youth development volunteer who lives in the municipality next to mine, and Alden, who lives in Yoro, which is the nearest bigger city to me.  We made it really far before it started to rain again (did I mention it has been raining a lot?!).  We waited for a bus, and, miraculously, a bus to Sulaco went by after only about 20 minutes of waiting.  D got on the bus with me, and Alden kept waiting because he was headed in a different direction.  D got off the bus, and then we made it to the same bad spot in the road that the buses can’t pass through.  There were lots of cars stopped on both side and a bunch of people standing around hanging out.  We had to all get off the bus and cross the muddy bridge-ish thing on foot.  After I got across, a bunch of people in pickup trucks decided to try to get across.  It was really scary and they slid a bunch, but lots of them ended up making it across.  While I was waiting, a truck pulled up with about 20 people in the back, including a team of soccer players coming back from a game.  Every time a truck got stuck, the whole group of guys would help push it out and then cheer like crazy.  It was scary to watch, but fun at the same time.  And a ton of people were just standing around watching, no one seemed in much of a hurry to get home, everyone was being entertained by the people trying to get across.  Eventually I saw a truck that was leaving so I caught a ride with them.  Finally, muddy, wet, and exhausted, I made it back home around 5:30 or so. 

            It was a great weekend.  I now know more about the surrounding area of where I live, the transportation, and made some new friends that live pretty close.  Most of the other volunteers from my group (actually, everyone except for me and Peter—us huskies are pretty independent :-) have at least one other person from our group that went to the same department as them.  There are 2 volunteers in Copan, 2 in Ocotepeque, 3 in Choluteca, 3 in Francisco Morazán, 3 in Santa Barbara, Peter in El Paraíso, and me in Yoro.  So, it’s nice to finally know some more people who are living close.  I definitely plan on hanging out with them once I’m able to leave my site a little more.  Back to another week of work!  Miss everyone lots! 

Slow and steady...

I´ve been here for two weeks, and there have been ups and downs.  Right now I´m sitting at the internet cafe, which is definitely going to be important for me in my two years here.  Although it isn´t always open when it says it will be (At least 3 of the times I´ve tried to come, it´s been closed), the internet´s pretty fast, and IT´S AIR CONDITIONED!  Which is super awesome because it´s really hot here, and technically we´re still in the´´winter,´´ which really just means that it rains sometimes.  Apparently in the summer it doesn´t rain at all and it´s just really hot.

Things are still going pretty slow, but there are a few highlights that have kept me going:

• Every time I walk anywhere, kids are constantly calling out my name and saying hello to me.  Sometimes I´m not sure whether they actually know me, or if they think I´m the volunteer that just left a few months ago (her name was Sarah also), but it´s helped me to start to feel like a part of the community.  It also is refreshing, because the other people who say things to me while I´m walking down the street are usually creepy guys who yell, ´´I love you,´´ at me. It´s really refreshing to hear the kids yelling my name and saying hello when I´m walking around town.
• Things at the elementary school are going well.  When I did my master´s year internship in Hartford, I worked with the reading teacher to do reading interventions in small groups.  The schools here have classes that are way bigger than class sizes in the U.S., barely any resources, and they spend very little time in actual classes.  I´ve screened a bunch of kids and I had my first few reading groups last week.  The kids really enjoy it-- in fact, kids that know how to read are claiming they can´t, just so they can work with me.
• The other part of my work at the primary school is to teach English to the 5th and 6th graders.  Because the school year´s almost over (It´s done at the end of November, and then the next school year starts up at the beginning of February), I´m going to help out these two grades until the end of the school year.  Then, starting in February, I´ll be teaching a TEAM (Teaching English and Methodology) class to all of the teachers at the school and helping them to implement the English lessons at the school with their students.  In this way, the project will be more sustainable because I´ll be equipping the teachers with the skills to keep teaching English even after I complete my two years here.
• Another highlight for me has been the baseball team, which actually really surprised me.  The coach is awesome and great with the kids, and I have a lot of fun at the practices.  We´ve had 2 so far.  At the first practice, it started pouring rain as soon as it was about to start.  We played a game with a soccer ball to warm up, and then it started raining even harder.  We waited it out, and then it slowed down.  Some of the boys went to go get the equipment, and they forgot to grab the separate bag of baseballs.  So, we couldn´t really play with just gloves and bats.  Instead, we played almost kickball...I say almost, because we were hitting the soccer ball with a bat and then running around the bases, ankle-deep in mud.  We got super dirty, but it was a LOT of fun.  In our second practice, a lot more girls showed up, which is something I´m excited about.  A bunch of the girls from the primary school have decided to give baseball a try, because they know I´ll be there.  It´s hard though, because as much as I´d love to have tons of kids get involved, we really have limited resources.  We have about 15 baseball gloves, 7 baseballs, some catcher´s equipment, a few mini wiffle balls, 2 or 3 bats, and that´s about it.  I´m hoping to find a way to get us some more stuff so that we can expand and give more kids a chance to play.

As I´m sitting here typing this in the internet cafe, all of the teachers in the entire municipality are in a meeting to decide what action they are going to take in the upcoming weeks.  There are a bunch of teachers at the high school level that haven´t been paid throughout this whole school year.  Honduran teachers are notorious for going on strike, and I´m keeping my fingers crossed that they don´t.  The only counterpart that I have that´s not a school is the baseball team, and that can only keep me occupied a few hours a week.  Let´s hope I don´t have to worry about that.

Also, a lot of people have been asking me about sending snail-mail.  Although most of the people here say that a post office does exist in this town, no one seems to be able to tell me anything about it or where it is located.  I´m going to keep trying to figure it out, and hopefully I can get you an address soon.  I´d love for people to send me pictures and things to hang up in my room.  In trying to fit everything in my 2 suitcases, I decided not to bring any of that sentimental stuff, which I now wish I had.  I have pictures in my computer, but it´s just not the same.

Miss you all, and enjoy the cool fall weather that I´m sure you´re having.  Take some pictures of the pretty New England trees for me!