My life is like, a rollercoaster, baby, baby
When was the last time you hear that song by the Red Hot Chili Peppers?
Remember that Sunday night feeling when you were in high school? It was always a mixed bag. You’d just enjoyed two days, relatively relaxing, doing things of your choosing, and now you had that weight beginning to press down on your shoulders, just a little bit, but growing heavier, the reminder of the responsibilities and work to come in the week ahead. Maybe you have a little homework still undone, and that test is coming up Wednesday, which you still haven’t studied for, but on the bright side there’s a good game of Sunday night football on, and besides, you’re going out to eat pretty soon… maybe you can forget those worries for a few more hours.
Well, that’s kind of where I am tonight, Sunday night in San Marcos. The church bells are ringing, I can hear music and singing, and I just came inside after sitting on my front step eating dates and almonds, enjoying the fading light as I watched the mountains, the palm trees, and the sky all fade into one. I had a great day, hiking out to a waterfall with my friend, Adam, swimming around in natural pools, and eating a makeshift lunch while sitting on a hot rock. But there’s that weight again, Monday is coming, announcing it’s presence in the pit on my stomach.
Now, I generally don’t mind Mondays, rather I usually like them. But the last week was both difficult and draining, which has left me less than psyched for the week to come. Now, this isn’t the first time I’ve felt this way, but this time feels different because I actually have things to do. Normally when I’m not excited about a week it’s because I’m lacking a plan or a course of action, but this week I’ve got tons to do, various commitments that I can’t back out of now-I’m just not excited to do them.
Monday, September 25, 2006
Well that was how I felt last night, when I gave up writing the blog and went to go watch a mediocre game of Sunday Night Football, one of my “I feel like I’m in the U.S.” moments (except that the broadcast is in Spanish). Today I’m feeling a lot more motivated. In contrast to last week, this week has started off on the right foot and greatly improved my mood.
I came into the HDH Office at the stroke of 8 and made up a little map of what I wanted to do for the day. Thusly organized, I decided to drop in on the Monday meeting of Project Prodert because it is for their benefit that I am delivering these workshops on Capitalization, so I figured it would be good to be in the know. Well the meeting lasted two hours, but was great, and they even gave me some good ideas for the next workshop, a few changes that will make it flow a lot smoother.
So now I’ve got my week mapped out, a general battle plan of how to get it all done, and a bit more enthusiasm on my side.
On tap for this week is more “Excel, Computers, and You,” taught by Prof. Schlosser to the ladies of the Cooperative La CICAL. This week we’re going to work on creating our own Cost of Goods sheet, complete with time saving formulas. Wednesday and Thursday I’ll spend up in the mountains of Mercedes, right on the border with El Salvador, giving a workshop on how to make a plan to raise capital in the small rural banks we organize. We’ll talk about old ideas, new ideas, and ways to get it all organized better, plus a little review on how to calculate interest rates over different periods of time and more on how to keep records of loans, etc.
I’ll keep it short this time, but plan to be back next week to let you know how it all went
Adios.
Project Workshop
Yes, the blog has suffered, but again, this time, with reason. For you see, I’ve been out of San Marcos quite a bit lately. First, the series of visits and the family vacation, and now I just got back from a ten day stretch in Tegucigalpa and elsewhere. During the month of August I was in my site less time than I was out of it. I’ll explain.
Every year each project holds an event called “Reconnect.” This serves to get all the volunteers from a specific project together to share ideas, experiences, and actually get to see one another. The business project held it’s reconnect last week in Tegucigalpa, up in the hills in a nice little hotel/conference center. But those of you who are geographically oriented will note that Teguz is a loooooooong way from San Marcos, about 9 hours in bus, so I took this opportunity to do a little visiting while I was out an about.
I spent a day with my former host sister in Tegucigalpa, finally getting to see her house there, I went to Danli for two days and visited my host family, spending one day swimming in a river way out in the eastern countryside of Honduras (beautiful), went to Carnival in Danli, got pickpocketed for my cellphone, and generally enjoyed myself. On Tuesday I headed back towards Teguz to attend our project workshop (Reconnect).
The workshop was held up in Hotel Las Gloriales, perched up in the mountains above Teguz, where all the ambassadors and international workers live. What amazes me is that even in these supposedly affluent areas, the roads peter out into dirt and you never seem to lose site of that 3rd world poverty. It’s been my experience that even in very poor countries, you tend to find areas where you couldn’t tell you’re even in the country. I haven’t found this to be the case with Honduras, at least as far as public areas go. Sure, you see wealthy estates, but these are behind barbed wire fences and guard stations. It seems like Honduras is still enduring the legacy of its history: people come here, say that their being here is going to help the country (ie Banana companies building railroads), but then only develop a small part for themselves, and leave the rest of the country in the same (or worse) condition than before. I asked a coworker about this once, asking why people don’t do anything about this. His answer: “The Honduras people bear it.” How do you change a country’s mentality? Maybe the Peace Corps should think about that.
But back to the project workshop. It was great to see all my fellow volunteers, many of which I hadn’t seen for 4 months. We shared experiences, talked about challenges, and discussed this issues we wanted to see raised at the project workshop. They fed us, gave us beds, and treated us like hotel guests — it was great. Every day we’d start at 8am and finish at 5pm, which was a bit long given the amount of stuff we packed into each day, leaving my head feeling a bit swollen. In the evenings we had music and dancing and one night we even organized a Monopoly tournament, in which I shared the first place prize, taking an early monopoly on Baltic and Mediterranean (for which I gave up Boardwalk), and then expanding into the light blues and Virginia, States, and St. Charles’. The great part is that we got to keep the board games, which are in Spanish, so I’m looking forward to playing with the kids in my town. Mom never lets me forget that Monopoly is how I first learned to read.
The workshop ended well, we formed Task Forces to work in three specific areas: Working with Artisan Groups, Developing Business Themed Games for Kids, and finally a Task Force focused on developing Business Plans for small businesses. I am part of the latter, where I specifically want to focus on the marketing of small businesses and possibly web design as well. I was thinking it might be useful to set up a basic web template that any business could use by simply adding it’s information and filler material. Just a thought, the task force meets again in two months.
The Reconnect workshop thusly finished, I headed out Friday morning, the 1st of September, stopping about 4 hours out of Teguz at my friend Andrea’s site, Pena Blanca. The plan was to crash there one night and continue on to San Pedro Sula, hoping to catch the first weekend of college football, because SPS gets the English feed from a Colorado ABC Station and a New York CBS station. Well, one of the guys I was traveling with ended up getting Dengue, so he had to stay in Pena, but I survived the mosquitos and traveled on to San Pedro. But alas, to my chagrin, neither station carried the USC game, I was forced to watch a mediocre Notre Dame game, interspersed with a few USC highlights in a 50-14 victory over Arkansas. Thusly encouraged by USC’s performace, I returned to good ole San Marcos de Ocotepeque on Sunday, thoroughly exhausted.
Adjusting back to site is never easy, but it seems like it’s getting a little easier each time. It seems like I always have to answer all those annoying questions: “How was your vacation?”, “I thought you had gone back to the United States”, with the response: “Remember, I told you last week that I was leaving and would return this day…” But now things are pretty much back to normal and I’m getting down to work on some projects.
On the forefront is my work with this women’s cooperative, La Cical. We’re computerizing all their paperwork, and I’m trying to teach them how to use Excel and Word, but it’s going to take some time. It’s hard to make people realize that once they learn the system it will save them SO much time. I’m also working with AESMO (an Environmental Preservation group) in translating proposals and creating a website. At Hermandad the work continues, as always, we’re trying to create a system to manage the small groups of farmers they work with, creating forms to evaluate and track their performance, so that we can see what works and what doesn’t.
On top of that, it’s all just the normal day to day stuff: experimenting with cooking new foods, cleaning out the Pila, and keeping my giant house clean. All in a day’s work.
