Welcome to San Augustin

So I have taken some new pictures of my new site and they are on the web. It is real quiet here, but real beautiful at the same time. Being up in the mountains is very cool and we don’t have much malaria or dengue problems here. But we do have the Chagas bug, which I encourage you to read up on. They predominately live in houses made of adobe (lots of those here), so I definitely don’t want be living in one of those. I’m at a lost in how I can help here as there isn’t really a lot of infrastructure here. When visiting another volunteer, I ran into an ex-volunteer (RPCV – returned peace corps volunteer) and she said that she was surprised that another Business Volunteer was placed in San Augustine as the other volunteer worked primarily with the municipality. She thought that they would place a Municipal Development volunteer here and I can see why – there doesn’t appear to be much business here that I can support. Business opportunities for where I am are not much as the majority live off their earnings from coffee and the women primarily stay at home to wash, cook, clean, and take care of the kids (everyone hand washes clothes of the entire family, and the kids get out of school at 1). It may, however, be a different story in the neighboring towns – they don’t earn as much as the people that I’m around. I may have to trek all the way to the other areas to see how I can help then in income generating ideas. But it will primarily revolve around farming, or raising livestock. Also, I hope to see how I can help the schools out there – there is only one teacher per town (I use that word very loosely – its more like a neighborhood that is far away), one class room, and the teacher teaches all from 1-6^th grade. After, the kids generally join their parents in the field to work. The kids in my town (or urban area) are a bit more fortunate – they get to go to school until the 9^th grade, and then they can take a bus to either Dulce Nombre (the closest neighboring town) or Santa Rosa (the biggest city in Copan) to continue their education.

My primary counterpart is the municipality of San Augustine, but right now I’m working a lot with the school as I’m still trying to find out how I can help in the muni. The school here has a computer room with 24 computers (16 set up as they don’t have enough tables at the moment). I’m organizing the room so it can accommodate more computers and tables (the 16 they had set up were on the perimeter of the room, with not enough outlets for all), setting up a restricted account for the students (lots of the computers there was no admin log in, so anyone would be able to install/uninstall anything they wanted), and installing Microsoft Office, a Spanish typing program, and Rosetta Stone (so they can practice English) on all of them. I hope to find other programs as well, or educational games, so that can help the students get accustomed to using computers. I also plan on teaching Word and Excel classes to the student and teachers as well. Other future plans are to set up a network (there is a server, router etc. and wireless adaptors on 16 of the computers), to teach volleyball (they have nets and balls), basketball (may need help from you guys in the states to get some new basket balls) as well as baseball. One thing that sucked is that after the other volunteer left, no one else continued his work with the baseball team. My plan to circumvent that is to form sports clubs like they have in schools in Asia. The older, more experienced students can teach the newer younger students (while the basics are covered in physical education). Hopefully this will be more of a sustainable model. But the other problem is that adult supervision will be needed. I have some willing people from the municipality, but I hope that other adults, especially the parents, will start taking more of an interest in the lives of the students.

Down the line include HIV/AIDS presentations, business simulation, health presentations, and I especially would like to start a gardening club as well. Considering that the majority of these kids are coming from families that work with growing coffee, they should know the science behind it. Also it would be healthy to diversify their diet and eat more vegetables. Not to sound ungrateful (having lived away from home for about 12 years that a home-cooked meal is always appreciated) but I really can’t stand to eat corn tortilla, beans and eggs any longer. I really want to start cooking for myself, and once I do I definitely want to start holding cooking classes for those who are interested. Other preoccupations right now is that I need to start looking for a house to live in – I’m allowed to move out on the 15^th of July and definitely look forward to that. The first thing I plan to buy aside from a bed is an electroducha – the heated showerhead. Cold showers do not make me happy. But that being said, I’ve never taken quicker showers in my life. I usually stand in front of the water and count to 10, almost hyperventilating from the anticipation, then I jump in and get wet in 10 seconds, turn the water off, lather up, then turn the water on and rinse off in 20 seconds. To be fair, the second time is not as bad. But the first 10 seconds while I pump myself up to jump into the frigid water? Not good times. Electroducha may even be the first thing I buy. Screw it, I can sleep on the floor – I’ll have a nice warm shower to wash myself off after.

But I think I may need help from anyone that is willing – I need to start looking for companies or organizations that my be willing to donate items to the school here in Honduras. Basketballs, books (in Spanish), equipment for their rarely used laboratory, perhaps even games as well. I’ll try to flesh out more ideas, but if anyone has a good contact for any of the above that would definitely be helpful. I also need to learn about the coffee industry, to find out how I can increase the incomes of the coffee producing people here. They don’t really grow their plants according to best practice – they just do what their parents, and their parents’ parents have been doing in the past. Anyone with info on that would be helpful as well – I’ll be looking on the internet once I visit someplace that has it as well.

To leave on an amusing note, I received a phone call one day from a random Honduran. He said that he was watching my son as we spoke and that if I didn’t want anything to happen to him, that I was to send him money. Now these phone scams are becoming more and more popular in Honduras – people call random numbers and try to scare them into sending money. Tracking those numbers down don’t help as people are mugged here very frequently for both their money and their cell phones. As such people get new numbers all the time. For me, I’m just surprised that the scammer didn’t try to tailor his scam to me, a non-Spanish speaker. I didn’t understand what he was trying to say, so I handed the phone to a municipal worker here, who then gave it to someone else laughing, and then eventually to the police officer that is stationed here which is when the scammer hung up. I’m sad that I didn’t get a chance to find out more about my son....

new final mailing address

on the side bar, but here it is:

Stephen Ahn

Apartado Postal 1800

Santa Rosa De Copan

Honduras, America Central

Volunteer at last!!

I haven’t been able to update in a while because my site has no internet! I live in a small town of about 2,000 people. The roads are all made of dirt, there are pigs and chicken running around, and there is no market to buy food (closest things are pulperias). The closest big city is a two hour bus ride away in Santa Rosa where they have more stuff. But the only bus leaves my site at 7am and leaves Santa Rosa at 3pm, so not too flexible. I will be working with the town government as well as the school. The school is tiny – 1st to 9th grade, and each grade is only one classroom. I definitely find the benefit of replacing a volunteer – the people here accept me more readily so integration should not be too hard. They go out of their way to make me comfortable and are more trusting of me. My host family was recommended by the outgoing volunteer and they are nice – the dad is only 3 years older than me and they have two kids – one 9 and one 3 ½. The mom is a teacher and the dad owns a coffee farm. This whole town exists because of coffee – about 20% of the families here own coffee farms and the rest work as manual laborers. I need to figure out how I can improve what goes on here – the owners of the coffee farms work from October to May, which is coffee season, and then they just chill until it starts again. It may sound nice but it creates a mentality of doing nothing for about four months. The manual laborers as well – they prefer to work three days a week and then they don’t do anything for the other four days. I think one of the first things I need to do is to help change the mentality. I see what makes Americans different; perhaps what makes them so successful - it’s the mentality of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and that you can be whatever you want to be. For me it seems that here people are kind of resigned to their fate. I think that trying to change that mentality is going to be my first step. Also, for a small town, there isn’t a sense of community. I feel that everyone kind of does their own thing, which is a real shame. Another project I’m thinking of are events to bring everyone together on a semi-regular basis; for example, bingo night or movie night, or even a party or dance. Since my town is a dry town (no alcohol sold – sad, yes), they shouldn’t get too rowdy. Plus, everyone has a gun.
My second group to work with is the school. Interesting thing about school here – it starts at 8am and ends at 1pm. I don’t recall school being so short for me, but I could be wrong. I really hope to improve the educational system here – not for all of Honduras, but for my town at least. They have a computer center but no one knows how to really use computers. When I met with the teachers, I asked what they hoped I would help with – they said English, computers, physical education, health, and sports. I said that I didn’t have a problem with this, but that I would need the teachers to commit to spend extra hours to learn and to teach the students as well. When I said this and asked who would be willing to spend time, no one raised their hands. The director then suggested I start with physical education first. This kind of raised the issue of the sustainability of our work. If I do all the work now, who would continue when I leave? That is another issue I have to tackle – doing the work for them for two years and then leaving will not solve any of their issues. But I’m glad I’m thinking about this now instead of a year and a half from now.
In other news, I’ve been to Santa Rosa (the big city) 3 times in two weeks. I was kind of tired of it for a while. Fun story – the second time I went to Santa Rosa with the people at my municipality, we were driving back around 7pm. The road to our town is up a long windy dirt road. It was dark and about 20 minutes outside of town we saw a car blocking the road, and people with flashlights in the hill above and below. We were told before of stories how bandits would block the road to stop cars and would rob them at gunpoint. The municipal worker waited for 5 minutes to see what was happening and then started to drive in reverse at high speed. He said it was not worth the risk – we had ladies in the car, and they tried to call the one policeman in the town. It turned out that he had left that afternoon which didn’t help with the mood. We did a J turn and then hightailed it back to Santa Rosa to sleep in a hotel. I called the Peace Corps to tell them of the situation as well (policy). I was told we made the right decision – better safe than sorry.
The next morning we drove back up to our town once again, and who do we see? The same car from the previous night. It turns out that they were deer hunters, and we traded a few laughs. They said they were signaling with the light to drive past them, but who in their right mind would take that gamble? Good times all in all.
Today (6/4) I went with the kids from the school to a field, where they ran around playing games and soccer. One person actually had a football (American), so I taught them to play football. Needless to say it was really fun, but I forgot to take sunblock. My face hurts.
I posted picture from the last week at Peace Corps training along with our swearing in (now we are formal
Peace Corps volunteers, not peace corps trainees). I’ll post pictures of my new site next time.