Lauren's 5th Letter From Honduras

For those of you who are new to Positive Pelham, a friend of mine named Lauren has joined the Peace Corps and is going to be blogging about her experience in Honduras over the coming months. To find out more about Lauren, you can read all of her posts by clicking here. She's a special person doing a very good thing. Here is her fifth post. If you'd like to send her a message, you can use this comment form. Make it a great day!

Disclaimer -- "The following article does not reflect the opinions of the Peace Corps or the US government"

--Lauren's 5th Letter from Honduras--

Hi everyone!

Well I have now been in my new home for almost a month. Things so far have been really great! I really love it here.....everything...the people, the town, my work. I have been spending the last few weeks meeting all my counterparts, learning Spanish, and getting to know my way around the community.

Another volunteer who is in the Protected Areas Management project, Molly, got a site change to my city last week. She has been here for almost a year now. She is great and we have become really good friends! We are going to live together in a month when I move out of my host family's house. She is going to work in promoting ecotourism with Celeque National Park, but she wants to go to Med School when she gets home so we are excited to do some health projects together.

Last week Kate (married, business volunteer living here) and I did our first AIDS workshop together at a colegio (highschool) with 38 students. It went really great! The thing with charlas here are they have to be super dynamic to keep the students attention and keep it interesting. Powerpoint presentations just don't fly here. So I spent a few days making poster boards and a bunch of activities for the kids to do during the workshop. We did skits, condom demonstrations (using a plantain, because I forgot my wooden penis), games to resist peer-pressure to have sex etc. It went over really well and they really learned alot!

This week I helped my counterpart from World Vision run a two-day workshop educating religious leaders from Gracias about HIV/AIDS so they can educate the members of their church....pastors, fathers, nuns, etc. Also, we are fighting to overcome the discrimination and stigmatization people living with HIV/AIDS here often face. It was such a cool workshop. We took 26 of these leaders to San Pedro Sula on Tuesday where we went to visit AIDS patients at a major hospital there. Also, we had a conference with this well-known family here who all are HIV positive (the husband, wife, and 12 year-old daughter).

The father had unprotected sex once when he was 18 and a few years later got married and infected his wife without knowing he had HIV. They later had a daughter and only found out about the disease when the daughter was 6 months old, after it had already been transmited to her. But this family started a foundation called Llaves where they travel around Honduras, the States, and Latin America providing HIV education and fighting for the rights of HIV infected people. Also, we went to a home for orphaned kids who are all HIV positive. That just broke my heart... but they were all so beautiful and sweet and it was so cool to see how happy and hopeful they are. I spent time with a 14 year-old who had just gotten back from the hospital with Tuberculosis, who I could tell was depressed and struggling, but she let me into her heart and it was great getting to see her smile. Wednesday we were able to participate in an AIDS support group and then go to a Maquila (factory) started by a group of people living with HIV. So overall it was a really great experience and I feel really lucky that I was a part of it!

So that's all for now. I am just doing a lot of work with HIV/AIDS right now. I have a meeting tomorrow with the director of the nursing school here to plan what my work will be with them so I am looking forward to that!

Hugs,

Lauren

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P.S. If you haven't signed up for the Positive Pelham newsletter yet, please send a blank email to PositivePelham@gmail.com with the words "Subscribe to the PositivePelham newsletter" in the subject line. I send out an email once a week with a recap of the week's posts. And, I take your privacy very seriously. I only use your email to send you the newsletter. No spam. I promise.

Thanks! - J. Anthony.

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Lauren's 4th Letter from Honduras

For those of you who are new to Positive Pelham, a friend of mine named Lauren has joined the Peace Corps and is going to be blogging about her experience in Honduras over the coming months. To find out more about Lauren, you can read all of her posts by clicking here. She's a special person doing a very good thing. Here is her fourth post. If you'd like to send her a message, you can use this comment form. Make it a great day!

Disclaimer -- "The following article does not reflect the opinions of the Peace Corps or the US government"

--Lauren's Fourth Letter from Honduras--

Hey all!

I know it has been awhile now since I have written...things have been really busy. BUT I am now officially a Peace Corps Volunteer! We went back to our first training site last week for 4 days to get a little more training, get our residency cards etc and then on Thursday was our swearing in ceremony at the US embassy. After the ceremony we all went to the Ambassador's house to swim, play tennis, and celebrate! Well now here come the good part...where I am going to live for 2 years and what I will be doing.....

So my site placement is in the west! It is actually a site that I have wanted from the beginning. It is a moderately sized city with about 15,000 people. It is located in a valley at the foot of Mount Celaque (the highest point in Honduras....some of the best hiking here!) Also there are supposed to be really beautiful Agua Thermales here...which are natural pools flowing from the mountains so I am excited to go there! The temperature here is pretty nice...it gets pretty hot here during the day but the mornings and nights are cool. It is known as a colonial town (colonial churches etc) so it gets a good amount of backpackers and tourists. There are two biliguel schools here so I met some people my age from Spain and the States living here teaching at the school so that is really cool! There is also a married couple from my PC group that is living here with me. Kate is working in the business project and Brody is working in water and sanitation.

I have four counterparts here (people from the community who I am going to work with)....

-World Vision, an NGO working in both HIV prevention and women & child health.
-An adolescent health clinic, which is really rare here..my city has one of the only 2 in Honduras so thats really cool. Teen pregnancy and STDs are a BIG problem here. It is common here for a girl to get pregnant ages (14-16) and you here on the news fairly often of a 10 or 11 year old getting pregnant in the aldeas.
-A nursing school, which is very cool because I have heard here that patients here feel like some of the nurses are not very compassionate and caring in the hospital and that confidentiality can be a problem (which really effects people wanting to come get HIV testing) so I hope to incorporate these things when I teach them about HIV/AIDS and mother/child health.
-CAE, is goverment hospital that is focused only on providing care for people living with HIV or AIDS. I think I am going to run support groups here but we'll see.

So there is a ton of work to be done here and I am going to be kept very busy but I am really excited about what I can potentially do here! I am now a member of La Red, which is a group of the leaders in the city promoting AIDS awareness and prevention and promoting human rights for people living with HIV....so I have already met the people in the city who are going into the schools, nursing schools, jails, and hospitals fighting against HIV/AIDS so that is really cool.

I am living with a family here for the next 2 months and then I get to find my own apartment or house to live in so that will be nice. I am excited to be here and start working but I am stressed about my ability to teach in Spanish and am also going to really miss my friends. I am giving myself the first 2 months to really learn Spanish and get confident with it and to get to know the community and my counterparts....

Hugs!

Lauren

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P.S. If you haven't signed up for the Positive Pelham newsletter yet, please send a blank email to PositivePelham@gmail.com with the words "Subscribe to the PositivePelham newsletter" in the subject line. I send out an email once a week with a recap of the week's posts. And, I take your privacy very seriously. I only use your email to send you the newsletter. No spam. I promise.

Thanks! - J. Anthony.

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Lauren's Third Letter From Honduras

For those of you who are new to Positive Pelham, a friend of mine named Lauren has joined the Peace Corps and is going to be blogging about her experience in Honduras over the coming months. To find out more about Lauren, you can read all of her posts by clicking here. She's a special person doing a very good thing. Here is her third post. If you'd like to send her a message, you can use this comment form. Make it a great day!

Disclaimer -- "The following article does not reflect the opinions of the Peace Corps or the US government"

--Lauren's Third Letter from Honduras--

Hey all,

So earlier I didn't get a chance to send my email with my pictures. This last week in Honduras was Semana Santa. It is the one week during the year where everyone takes vacation from work and relaxes. We had classes up until Wednesday afternoon and then we had the rest of the week off. We weren't allowed to travel outside our site but just having the time to relax was much needed. Being in training and classes 8 hours a day really wears us out... so Semana Santa came at the perfect time during training!

My friend Raphael lives with an amazing family (its the house I had Spanish classes in the first 3 weeks, the mom who gives me eggplant, and I am good friends with the four sons)....well this family has an uncle who lives 10 minutes outside our site...he owns 80% of the land that the US military base is on here so he is doing pretty well..he has a beautiful house with a pool that he invited all of us volunteers to on Wednesday and we went again Sunday for swimming and a barbecue...it was so fun to just lay in hammocks, talk and relax! Thursday I went with my family to a big park a little outside of Tegucigalpa, called Parque Aurora. We brought hammocks and food and just relaxed again. They had a zoo, pool, lake, and playgrounds there for kids. I met my host mom's niece and nephew, Daniela (15) and Alfredo (19) who live in Tegucigalpa.

We became really good friends this week and I am excited because now I have a place to stay when I need to travel to Tegucigalpa..especially considering my $2.00 a day salary won't be able to pay for a hotel! They both speak English so it was good practice for me to be able to learn new words I don't know. On Good Friday in our site and in Comayagua they do this amazing thing called Alfombras (rugs in english)...they make these beautiful paintings of Jesus in the streets using sand, salt, and dyed sawdust...they start making them at 10pm and work all night until Friday morning...they are absolutely beautiful. Then on Friday there is a procession, where people carry Maryand Jesus and reenact the stages of carrying the cross and a crowd follows the procession...in the end they walk over the rugs and ruin them. In Comayagua, people from all over Honduras come, because there are dozens of rugs made all the way down the streets and the procession is bigger...you should definitely look at my pictures of this because it is really amazing! Overa ll, it was a very tranquila (relaxing) week!

The week before we had a lot of activities...including learning how to make mud stoves/ovens and gardens. One of the leading causes of death for children in Honduras is pneumonia and resp. illnesses...primarily caused by people having really bad stoves in their houses with no/poor ventilation...the smoke builds up in the house and the children breath it in all day...so alot of volunteers write grants at their sites to get funding to make stoves for the people in their villages. So we learned how to do that which was really interesting!

This week we are focusing on HIV/AIDS support groups and midwives. We have been learning how to lead support groups in our communities for people living with HIV/AIDS and then on Thursday and Friday we are going to be teaching a group of midwives from local aldeas (usually villages in the mountains that are hard to access and far away from hospitals) on how to deal with emergencies during births....we will be focusing on teaching them how to stop hemorrhaging, which is the leading cause of death here related to births. Saturday they are teaching us how to resuscitate newborns....

Tomorrow or Thursday I have my last interview about my site placement. They had us fill out a form with our preferences..whether we want another volunteer at our site, what we need at our site (internet, elect, etc etc), if we would prefer to work with the ministry of health or an NGO....so our last interview is about what kind of things we want in our site...but to be honest with you, we find out our site in a week and half so I'm pretty sure they pretty much already have our sites picked out for us.

Helmith, our site placement director, pretty much already told me that I will be a first generation health volunteer at my site...which means their may be other volunteers there now (water & sanitation, business, muncipal dev., or youth dev.) but I will be the first health volunteer ever in this community....he wants me to represent Peace Corps well and make a good impression. So we are really anxious to find out our sites....but mostly I am excited...I am ready for training to be over but at the same time I have some of the best friends here I have ever had so I am going to really miss them. Well thats all for now...I'll let you know where I am going to live for 2 years when I find out!

I have posted many pictures on my website so you can look at them there!
laurengreenwald.spaces.live.com

Pura Vida

Lauren

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P.S. If you haven't signed up for the Positive Pelham newsletter yet, please send a blank email to PositivePelham@gmail.com with the words "Subscribe to the PositivePelham newsletter" in the subject line. I send out an email once a week with a recap of the week's posts. And, I take your privacy very seriously. I only use your email to send you the newsletter. No spam. I promise.

Thanks! - J. Anthony.

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Lauren's First Letter From Honduras

For those of you who are new to Positive Pelham, a friend of mine named Lauren has joined the Peace Corps and is going to be blogging about her experience in Honduras over the coming months. To find out more about Lauren, click here to read her introduction from a few weeks ago. She's a special person doing a very good thing. Here is her first post. If you'd like to send her a message, you can use this comment form. Make it a great day!

Disclaimer -- "The following article does not reflect the opinions of the Peace Corps or the US government"

--Lauren's First Letter from Honduras--

Hi Everyone!

Well I have been in Honduras now for almost two weeks. We got snowed in while at pre-staging training in DC and ended up there for a week instead of two days. It was actually really nice to be there for that long because we all got to know each other pretty well during that time and we had time to hangout in Georgetown and DC. There are 51 of us volunteers. I would say 95% are under 30…most being 22-26. We have one 40 year old volunteer and 4 married couples in their 20s. It’s about 60% girls-40% guys. Everyone is really nice and I already have some great friends in my group.

Well we flew into San Pedro Sula a week ago Sunday…that is the first and last time that we will be there since San Pedro Sula is a banned city in Honduras for Peace Corps volunteers (PCV) since it is as dangerous as Colombia. We took a four hour bus ride to a beautiful little town outside the capital, Tegucigalpa.

I am living with the best family! We live in a cute house, with rooms open to an outside patio. I have my own room. I am lucky because they have a washing machine, while the other volunteers have to hand wash their clothes using a “pila” and we have an Electroducha, which is a shower with hot water…which is REALLY nice because this town is in the mountains so it gets really chilly here at night and in the mornings.

Our town is basically a beautiful resort town outside of Teguc so it is probably nothing like where we will be placed after there first 3 months of training…but we are loving it here for now. The locals are used to having Gringas here so it feels very safe. My family has three children…Marcio is 20, Iris is 17, and Jairo is 16....and a bird named Polly. The mom, Sandra is wonderful. She is so sweet and works so hard around the house...her job title is Ama de la Casa..which means Heart of the House =) She cooks me all vegan food which is absolutely amazing!.......By the way Mom and Vida...she got eggplant in Tegus last weekend and made it for me today!!!!! I was so excited!

I get up at 5:00 in the mornings to go running with a few other volunteers. We have classes at our training center from 7:30-4:30 Monday-Friday. We have been placed in Spanish classes based on our language level. I am at Intermedio bajo so I need to go up one more level before I can be sworn in as a PCV in 2 months. I have forgotten pretty much all of my Spanish from my four years off so I am behind most of the volunteers (who studied or lived abroad)…but I’m hoping it will come back pretty quick.

We are put in classes of 3-5 PCV per Spanish teacher so we have a lot of support. We have language classes all morning, then our “moms” walk our lunches to the center everyday….which is so nice. In the afternoons we have other classes about safey & security, honduran culture or specific to our projects. The 51 of us are in 3 different projects…business, water & sanitation, and health. There are 20 of us in the health project. Three of my closest friends are in the health project with me so that’s really nice. We are getting really great training on STIs, AIDS, etc. We had a doctor from USAID come talk to us last week which was really interesting.

After classes and during the weekend we have been exploring, hiking to see the sunrise, sunset, playing futbol (soccer), hiking, going out, studying, hanging out with our families…(Iris, Jairo and I watched the Notebook with Spanish subtitles on my laptop the other night so that was fun!) This weekend I am going with my good friends Kyle, Chris, Regina, and Leah to hike at a National Park. On Sunday my mom is taking Kyle and me to the market and mall in Tegucigalpa. We are all getting cell phones…and it is FREE (no minutes used) to receive calls so I can receive calls from the US easily! Well that’s all for now…I could write all day but I don’t want to bore anyone too much.

Please keep in touch!

En Paz

Lauren

By the way my new name here is Lorena =)

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P.S. If you haven't signed up for the Positive Pelham newsletter yet, please send a blank email to PositivePelham@gmail.com with the words "Subscribe to the PositivePelham newsletter" in the subject line. I send out an email once a week with a recap of the week's posts. And, I take your privacy very seriously. I only use your email to send you the newsletter. No spam. I promise.

Thanks! - J. Anthony.

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