it`s HOT!

Well we still don`t have a winner from last week`s trivia. That either means no one reads the blog or you could care less about the trivia. I`m going to pretend it`s the latter, and maybe the fact that word got around that winners weren`t receiving their prizes :)

We are at our new site now, there is no internet so we have to take a bus on the weekends to use internet. It`s really hot here, and there is malaria and dengue fever. We are all much more scared of the latter as a few people in the town have recently died from dengue. Not to worry though, we have good medical care here. This town is a lot different from Santa Lucia. The families have never hosted a volunteer and we get a lot more attention and have to deal with more American stereotypes.

Our family is very nice. There is a mother (Maria del Carmen), an older sister with a child (3 yr old), another younger sister (10) , a 17 year old brother, and a 5 year old brother. We will be with them for the next six weeks. I`ll try to put some pics of our new living situation on here next week. It`s been a week of culture shock for some here, but it`s nice because we are really getting down to the nitty gritty in training. On Monday, we split into groups of 5 and spent the morning at schools in different villages near our small town. The kids were very excited to see us. We will be working with them once a week for the next six weeks. Our assignment is to design and impliment some recreational activities for the kids to do (and that teachers could use later), the teachers are already quite busy.

Our assigned school has about 55 kids in two classrooms. There are two teachers, one teaches 1st, 3rd, and 6th grades, and the other teaches 2nd, 4th, and 5th grades- all at the same time. The kids are just grouped according to age and the teacher moves from one age to the next. The communities are very agriculturally oriented, and most the kids and parents work harvesting tomatos in the afternoons.

As my birthday is coming up (yes November is fast in coming), I`m working on a wish list from the states. It will include very expensive things like thai red curry paste, south park dvds, and spices. I see that I missed history- I didn´t see Bonds hit 756. Our new family does have a tv, but it`s always tuned to discovery kids. I know all the spanish cartoon sing a longs!

Interesting Observations from the last week:
- There are no street names (anywhere), and all the roads around our new home look similar, so we`ve had to find a way to remember where we live. Fear not, we`ve got it, go 100 yards past the ice cream shop and take a left at the donkey. Seriously, if the donkey`s not there, it`s hard to get home.
- We have a chicken and a rooster, and they sleep in the tree in the yard- there is a ladder so they can get up.
- After our fourth day, the 3 year old finally spoke to us (well, to Emily, not me). She said "adios momily."
- Our cold water bucket shower is wonderful, because it is really hot.
- All dogs here are really long- somewhere there is a studly and proud weiner dog.

Adios to all and thanks for reading, we miss you. make sure to leave your name when you comment or text message us.

Carlos (kyler) and Emily

Time to move...Again

Scott won last week’s trivia! Congratulations to Brayden, who probably found the answer for him.

This last week has been an eventful one. On Wednesday we went to a large outdoor market in Tegucigalpa (capital) to practice our Spanish and to negotiate a good price. Our host mother gave us a list of things to buy and we had to go buy it at less than the normal “gringo price.” Emily and I did quite wonderful according to our mom. We came back with the correct items (a past volunteer came back with limes when he was supposed to get avocados) and at a good price. Going to the capital also meant FAST FOOD! We had our first McDonald’s, Dunkin Donuts, Pizza Hut, and Quizno’s. McDonald’s is quite high class here. They even walk the food to your table for you.

On Thursday we went on a volunteer visit. That means, we were given directions on a piece of paper and told to find a current volunteer and spend the weekend with them. Emily and I made a two hour journey east toward Nicaragua to the small town of Jacaleapa (don’t even try to pronounce it). There we met up with a female volunteer from Ohio. Like us, her project is Youth Development, so we got to see a little bit of what she does. She actually lives in a “guest house” of the mayor’s family. There aren’t really any restaurants in her town, so we ate lunch at the high school (schools usually have a little comedor with food and stuff). We also got to see her teach an English class to Honduran teachers who will teach English. She trains the teachers in methodology and pronunciation, as well as giving them Peace Corps provided textbooks. The teachers will have to pass the class at 80% to receive their diplomas and become certified. One single mother/teacher was especially dedicated- she travels over an hour to work each way and depending on the rain, sometimes has to wade through a river up to her waist to get there. She works up in the mountains and transportation is sparse, so she stays up there all week and comes down on the weekends, to the city where she “lives” and her daughter goes to school. People like her are the reasons we give the classes.

We left on Saturday because she and a few other volunteers were heading up into the mountains to do a leadership camp for exceptional youth, who will then go back to their respective communities and educate their peers. There wasn’t going to be enough foods or beds so we didn’t make the camp. It was nice to actually visit a volunteer and see the kind of stuff that we may be able to do. It was also nice to see how some of the volunteers live. Even though she lived with the mayor, the water was literally brown (straight from the river- she had a tadpole come out of the faucet once) and we had to take bucket showers. We actually didn’t mind the bucket showers (especially after mixing some hot water from the stove), you can get a pretty good amount of water pressure by dumping a bucket on your head! To flush her toilet, you just dump a bucket of water down the bowl and it does the trick every time.

WARNING: This paragraph is all about contacting us, etc. So if you don’t care, skip it! We got a cell phone last week! It cost us $40 though I later saw the same one for $25. The cell phones here don’t come with plans but instead you just purchase cards when you want more time. Because of competition here, it’s cheaper to call the U.S. than to call your neighbor, but still expensive on a Peace Corps budget. So it’d be wonderful if you could call us! You just have to buy any phone card that works for Central America. A good place to look would be wherever there are large immigrant communities. I think you dial 011-504-9765-4589. Lots of numbers huh? The first three are the country code, the next like an area code, and the last eight are our number. You can also text us but I’m not sure the charges on that. So now you have our address (on side panel à) and our phone number. No excuses! If you’re computer savvy (you’re reading a blog so you must be), then you can send us free text messages from the site www.tigo.hn. Just follow instructions, write the message and put in our phone number.

It’s also a little sad around here, this week we move to a new site for Field Based Training, so we are going to miss our family and the rest of our volunteer that are not in Youth Development. On a high note, our host sister found a tarantula today. Then our mom lit a bunch of paper on fire and they burned it! There was also a big scorpion in our house the other night, we couldn’t get him, so hopefully he likes us.

This week’s trivia: Who is the President of Honduras and what is his party?
Bonus: Who was the last U.S. president to visit Honduras and why?