Greetings from San Francisco

Hello from San Francisco del Valle, our home. We are now official Peace Corps volunteers, our swearing in ceremony was held at the U.S. Embassy (9/27/07). There was a lot of media there and I (Kyler) was on national television telling where I was from, where I would be living, and what I would be doing. There was a picture of a bunch of us in the national paper the next day, half of Emily’s body made it, but I didn’t make it at all. After the ceremony we went to the ambassador’s house for an afternoon of fun that included swimming, volleyball, basketball, and tennis courts. It was a really fun way to spend our last few hours together before we all had to split up and go to our respective sites.

I want to talk a little about what we are going to be doing for the next couple years, now that we have a pretty good idea. Emily and I have different counterparts but we can work with each other on projects depending how busy we each are. Emily will be working mainly with the organization World Vision, you may have heard of it, it is an organization that works worldwide to help underprivileged children. She will be working mainly in the very small communities (aldeas) around our community. I will be working with three counterparts, the local grade school, the mayor’s office, and the District Office of Education for our “county.”

The local grade school is a wonderful and well run school, we’ve already seen the band (4^th-6^th grades) play at a few different community functions and they also have a “dancing club” that does traditional Honduran dances during festivals and celebrations. As far as the work we’ll be doing there, it is a little early to tell, right now we’re getting to know the students and teachers and then we’ll do a needs assessment. Their school year ends in November, though, and starts again in February.

I am sure of one project I will be doing with the grade school, a baseball team. There are volunteers all over the country that have teams, and every year there are regional tournaments and then a national tournament in the capital city. Baseball is just now growing as a sport here and Peace Corps likes it because of the teamwork it uses, there are no leagues except for in the two largest cities, so anyone else that is playing, is playing with Peace Corps. My team will be new, so none of the kids have ever played before, that should be an interesting first practice! The kids can be 8-12 years old and you have to have girls on the team.

With the District Office I will be doing a training of teachers to teach English classes in the public schools. I will be working with 4^th, 5^th, and 6^th grade teachers, teaching them the curriculum then observing them teach it to their students and helping them with problems that arise. After we have a better understanding of the needs of the local teachers, we can give other trainings on different subjects.

With the mayor’s office, I can create youth clubs or organizations, or deal with any youth needs that are present in the community. Yeah, pretty vague at this point, but I haven’t had a chance to talk with him yet because we’ve been having the town festival for the last week. They set up everything in the park and there are all sorts of events going on everyday. I think they crown a new king and queen of something everyday- coffee, the town, the festival, etc. There is also a small ferris wheel (25 ft high). A “carnie” stands at the bottom and spins it by hand! There have foosball, a version of roulette, games where you shoot the thing on the wall to win a prize, and lots of candy and french fries for sale.

We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us, but we also have to remember that things move at a different pace here.