Catch Up
Two months ago, I felt bad about not updating my blog, so I wrote out a short update and for some reason never put it up on the page. I’ve included it below and will offer a few reflections and an update afterward.
August 19, 2007
Ah, the long days of summer… Well, actually, the days are not noticeably longer here at all (We’re at 14 degrees latitude, after all) and they call this time of year the Rainy Season, not summer, because it rains on and off until October. But still, today it’s hot and dry and has the feel of a lazy August Sunday.
A quick update from San Marcos:
The CICAL women’s cooperative is still puttering along. The corn harvest is coming in so the floor has been piled high with little ears of corn which they husk, cook, and jar to make their most popular product, Baby Corn. I dropped in this week and grabbed 100 ears to husk – it is not easy work. Not that it’s hard, either, but it takes a long time to do, I think I hammered out the batch in about an hour or so though.
Coffee also looms large in my thoughts these days. I spend a lot of time with my friend Jorge, a producer as well as a toaster of fine Honduran coffee. We’ve been working on a website lately to help promote his coffee locally and perhaps someday abroad as well. For the time being, the target is towards retail shops like Café Americano, the Honduran equivalent of Starbucks. They buy his coffee already toasted and packaged to serve to their clients.
This coming week I’m heading off to a three day seminar with my fellow business volunteers that we call “Reconnect.” I did this last year with the people from my group and the group before me. This year we’re the old group and we’ll be making presentations to the new group showing what we’ve worked on and giving them ideas and materials for their own projects. I’ve been assigned web design, which is interesting to me, but a hard topic to present. Those who are technologically challenged simply won’t be interested, but what I’m going to try to do is present some tools, tricks, and places to learn more about web design for those truly interested. I also plan to discuss some of the problems with using web pages in Honduras and maybe we can discuss when they are even appropriate.
So that’s what on tap for the end of August. I’m also looking into starting a group with the local high school, as I’d like to do some work with young people before I leave in April. 8 months… Time sure flies.
October 12, 2007
Wow, time sure does fly…. Two months. As for the CICAL, they produced over 200 boxes of baby corn, a pretty good production. The cost of production came out pretty high, but not significantly higher than last year. We got the website up, although it’s lacking some information. You can check it out at cafeplayon.com. Reconnect was good; I gave a well received presentation on how to go about creating a website and getting it running. As for working with the high school, I took on an intern to work with the women’s cooperative, which I’ll discuss later on. My newest idea is to form a group of students to undertake a business project during summer break. What better way to use your time off than to earn a little money (and understand a little more about business in the mean time).
So what else am I up to? Well, the past month I was working pretty closely with the women’s coop again, this time with a high school student. Our work started out strong, but I feel like he became a bit discouraged with the project because of the level of excitement and participation by the women in the Coop. What can I say; Vegetables just aren’t that exciting… So the experience with the Intern wasn’t all I was hoping for. The next thing I’m thinking about with the CICAL is trying to help them improve their sales in outside markets (regional markets). We made a sales trip last June and it was successful, but they haven’t followed up on it, so we’ll see where that leads…
I’ve also been slightly involved in a project to remodel the local kids’ park in town. This is a project spearheaded by one of the town elders who people don’t take too seriously anymore, so it’s a bit tricky. What interests me about the project is the idea of creating a structure to take care of a public space like a park. So often what happens is that a park like this is built with a one time grant and then it quite rapidly deteriorates. Why can’t a community group form to administer limited funds and oversee basic maintenance and improvement? I’m foraying into this question…
What I’m hoping shapes up to be my next major project is something that doesn’t completely focus on business. We call it El Concurso del Barrio mas Limpio and it’s a competition between neighborhoods to see which can clean up its act best. We want to get each neighborhood thinking about keeping it’s streets trash free (a notable problem), public spaces nicely maintained, trash separated into recyclable and non recyclable, and get people enthused about involved in their community. The idea is to form a panel of judges, enroll the different neighborhoods, help them with ideas on how to get people involved and what to do, inspect their progress, and finally award a cash prize that will go towards a project of the neighborhood’s choosing (i.e. fix up a street, put in a small park, fix a pipe, add drainage). We’re fishing for funding to pay for the overhead costs (paper, diplomas, etc) and the prize money. We’ve got $500 and are aiming for about $1500.
On the small scale, I’m always fixing technological problems at Hermandad and this week I’m working with the accountant for the Employee’s Coop helping her set up a system to track employee contributions to their mandatory savings plan. I’d like to educate the 100 or so employees on what this plan does for them as well, so that they actually know it exists and understand how it works.
As for post Peace Corps, I think about that more often these days. I didn’t expect to know what I wanted to do upon finishing when I came in and I can’t say I have more of an idea now as it’s getting close. Well, perhaps a little more of an idea, but not much… My friend Adam (a previous resident of San Marcos) is planning to come down around April and we’re going to do some traveling. He wants to go to Cuba, which I’m interested in, but I’d also like to do more of Guatemala and Mexico or even head south to Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama. Other dreams are Columbia, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Peru.
As for coming back to the States, I might have a job in Seattle for a few months in the summer working with College students doing summer service projects or I might go earn a bit of money doing SAT tutoring on the East Coast. There are a lot of Peace Corps fellowship programs that I could take advantage of, but in what areas? International development? Economics of emerging economies? Foreign Service? See my problem? Yeah, lots of possibilities…
So that’s the Peter update for October… tune in next month when Peter discusses birthdays and hitting the quarter century mark while living in Honduras.
