Santa Lucia and Training

Hello Everyone! We miss you all!

Congratulations to last week’s trivia winner- Jason Iwasaki! Jason has won a 7 day, 6 night stay here in Honduras with us. Airfare not included! Jason, I’ll send the I.O.U. through email. A shout out to Bernie who was just a few minutes behind Jason. Also, I fixed the comment rules, so now you shouldn’t have to sign up for anything to leave a comment- let me know if there are problems.

Well, Emily and I are here in Santa Lucia and things are going well. Our host family is great, we actually have a little apartment type building above their house. There is a mother, father, 16 year old daughter, and 6 year old boy. But the neighbor is family too and everyone hangs out together. We hang out with the kids as much as possible, they are very helpful in practicing Spanish and we are less afraid of sounding like idiots in front of them. Our father is a construction worker and our mother makes and sells tortillas at the pulperia (small store) next door that her sister owns. She makes about 3,000 tortillas a day! We are also very close to the training center; our walk is about 5 minutes compared to others who have a 25 minute walk. We live on a hill, and we just head through the forest and then catch a trail to the training center. There are a lot of spiders here, and really I’m torn- apparently they eat the mosquitoes, but I really hate spiders. Our family doesn’t have a refrigerator and they use an outdoor wood stove for cooking but the food has been great so far.

The town itself is pretty. It has a lot of hills. So forget those buns of steel videos and just come walk around here for a few days. Like all Central American towns, in the center of town is a park. There are stairs near the park where you can hike up and see the entire town and many miles down into the valley. It is a beautiful view! There is also a green lagoon and basketball court near the town center. I’m still exploring so I’ll update you in due time. Also, I’ll try to get some pictures on here (or to a linked site) so you have a better idea as to our living situation and the town.

We have class everyday from 7:30-4:30 and half days on Saturday. So far we’ve had a lot of introductory type lectures and team building activities. The trainers here are excellent and really know what they’re doing. We had our language interviews today to see what classes we’d be placed in next week. For the interview, you basically just sit down and talk with a teacher in Spanish for about 20 minutes. There are three level at each stage and there are three stages: Novice, Intermediate, and Advanced. There are a few people past advanced, they get to do something else. They make everyone else sick!

Today was the first time we’ve had any free time so we all had planned to meet up for a game of soccer. It was pouring down rain though so I didn’t think anyone would be there. I made the 20 minute walk on my own and low and behold there were 15-20 volunteers there. We all got completely drenched and had a very ugly game of soccer. The field overlooks miles of mountains and valleys and is quite nice.

Our group of trainees has become quite close and we’ve only been together a week. I really can’t stress how impressive these people are. Everyone is very competent, and has the ability to either lead or follow depending on the situation. I’m glad we have 10 more weeks together, but it will be sad when we all split up to go to our sites. We laugh a lot too, they told us that 10 people from the group that just finished their service got married- either to other volunteers or to Honduran nationals. So Emily and I have a game where we try to decide who is going to end up in a relationship together. The guys have pretty good odds here- there are 9 single guys and 29 single girls (10 of us already married). So guys, forget your dating scene, join the Peace Corps and your odds skyrocket. They try to keep us out of trouble by telling us the laws and customs around here. Having a date typically means having a chaperone and meeting the parents, and dating “around” isn’t done. Here’s one for ya, if you get someone under 18 (legal age here) pregnant, you either go jail or marry them- hmmm?

It sounds like most current volunteers here have cell phones and that they are quite affordable. Hopefully, Emily and I will be getting one in the future, we aren’t allowed to travel to the capital during training, so it may be awhile. That means that anyone from the states could call us directly (with a phone card I believe) and obviously that we could call you as well.

So that was really long- congrats to all of you who made it the entire way- real troopers!

This week’s trivia question will test your Google ability:

-Do Malaria and Dengue Fever come from the same mosquitoes, and when do those mosquitoes bite? Buena suerta a todos (good luck to all)!