Transitions

My one month break at home came and went in a blur. After over two years away, one month at home was kind of a tease. Once again I boarded a plane and left the States for the Peace Corps, although this time for a one-year extension in Honduras. I was less than thrilled that the Peace Corps insisted on booking my flight at 5:30 AM. I was in Honduras by noon.

The Protected Areas Management program specialist picked me up at the airport and bought me a baleada, a flour tortilla filled with refried beans, cheese, egg and drizzled with mantequilla, a sauce similar to sour cream. She told me there wasn't anything more typical of Honduran food than the baleada. I liked it. Less than a week later I realized that baleadas or some version there of are pretty much all that Hondurans eat. Sometimes they mix it up with corn tortillas.
Pretty much upon landing the PC staff whisked me away to the office to commence my own personal training. Admittedly, the one-on-one training was kind of intense compared to my experience in Peru. Doing participatory activities when you are the sole participant is not exactly a ball of fun. Also, going it alone was far more difficult than I imagined it would be. On day two, I cried in the office bathroom.

After a week in the office, I was sent off to shadow a fellow environment volunteer for 10 days. Her site is located in the buffer zone near the Parque Nacional Azul Meámbar and has beautiful views of Lago Yojoa, the largest natural lake in Honduras. We passed the time visiting various places and organizations in the area. On my second day there we actually made the trip to La Esperanza, a larger town about 1.5 hours away, for the annual potato festival. It struck me as being a bit ironic since I just came from Peru, the home of the potato.

We also visited the lake which is really beautiful and surrounded by hills and two national parks - Parque Nacional Azul Meámbar and Parque Nacional Santa Barbara. Through a connection of the volunteer's we also went to visit a nearby lead and zinc mine. We ended up meeting the owner (a Canadian) and the second-in-command (a Chilean), who met each other in Peru at a mine in Ancash. We were invited up into the lounge of the mine's admin staff and I felt like I had stepped back into the 1950s -- picture foreign engineers with their fancy wives drinking wine and cocktails. Of course, the people who actually work the mine live below in shacks while the admin staff lives in a gated community with a pool and hot water and the owner makes $55,000 a month. The mine does do a lot of social work and the workers are well compensated compared to most Hondurans; however, there is something very telling about the blatant disparity in wealth.

On the weekend we went to visit a Honduran friend of the volunteer's who lives in San Pedro Sula, the largest city in Honduras. Hot and crowded, there isn't much to recommend about San Pedro. We paid a requisite visit to City Mall, a super fancy mall which looks silly in juxtaposition to the urban squalor of San Pedro. San Pedro and the highway leading to San Pedro from the south are among the most dangerous areas of Honduras due to intense gang activity related to the cocaine trade. Nonetheless, the search for opportunity and jobs brings people from all over the country.

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Unexpectedly, the transition from Peru to Honduras has been really hard for me. I know no one. The culture is very different while still maintaining certain similarities, which perhaps makes it more disorienting. The official language is still Spanish but very different nonetheless. The language here is more formal which makes me uncomfortable--they even use the formal Usted form here with children. In Peru I obtained a certain comfort level which is now gone. When it comes down to it, I'm homesick. But I'm homesick for Peru. I'm sad that I'm not there. I'm sad that I won't live there again. I miss it. I miss the people, the food, the weather, the market, the bus rides, the moto-taxis. I miss it all. I even miss Lima which is saying something.

During the first two weeks, I found myself constantly comparing Honduras to Peru. It was even difficult to find beauty in the verdant, rolling hills of Honduras because I kept comparing them to the stark peaks of the Andes. Finally, however, I realized that I could cherish and miss Peru without directly comparing it to Honduras. Personally I think the transition hit me hard because I felt guilty about moving on so quickly, about leaving Peru behind and going someplace new, about leaving. When I think about my little host-brother it still brings tears to my eyes, but there is no way to tell him that.

I'm finally starting to feel a little more settled. Taking the bus back to my host-family's house no longer makes me extremely nervous. Also, they finally gave me information about my new site so I can at least picture where I'll be for the next year. My new site is a small, mountainside community of 350 people called El Sauce (Willow). It's located in the buffer zone of the Parque Nacional Santa Bárbara, a national park which harbors cloud forests, subtropical wet forests and highland pine forests. It is also home to Santa Barbara Mountain, which at 9,000 ft. is the second highest mountain in Honduras and, also, the only high-altitude limestone mountain in Central America. The community has expressed interest in the following areas: latrines, environmental education, chicken coops, eco-tourism and household gardens.

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If you are interested in finding my site on a map, here's how: Look first for Lago Yojoa, the big lake between Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula. The National Park Santa Barbara is located on the NW side of the lake, and my site is on the northern side of the park. On a good map you should be able to find a town called San Luis Planes which is my district capital and fairly close to my site. If you can locate Peña Blanca and the town of Santa Barbara, San Luis Planes is pretty much directly in the middle of those two towns.