Anna in Honduras: April 2007

*A note on the pictures...you may want to click on them to enlarge because the way they show up on the page cuts some of them off

Just finished a pretty exciting weekend…went to Comayagua on Saturday afternoon. Three friends and I took our first trip without family members. I played tour guide because I had been to the town last weekend. We didn’t do a whole lot but it was still a nice getaway from La Paz. Saturday night I hung out with my host family for a while then met up with some other aspirantes. We started out at a restaurant close by …the owner speaks English and encourages us to go there and hang out, so we do.

(We're actually a lot happier than we appear to be. We were trying not to smile for the camera, and apparently we took it a little too far. These are a couple other health volunteers here in La Paz with me.)

After a while, we went to the house of a Peace Corps volunteer whose site is actually in La Paz. He is here doing work in municipal development and has a super nice house (A lot of volunteers say that a person’s project impacts his/her living situation quite a bit. I’ve heard that business and municipal development volunteers, and the Water and Sanitation engineers enjoy a higher standard than those of us in health and youth development while the Protected Areas management volunteers get sites with the least amenities.) Anyway, after enjoying that for a while, a group of us headed to one of the discos that are here in town. We were all pretty tired, but it was a great time.
Sunday morning I met up with some friends and headed to the cockfight. Later in the afternoon, we went over to another trainee’s house to watch a movie. The father of his host family is American, and he lives in a house nicer than I ever have in the States. They have hot water (with pressure!!), TVs, computer with internet, a treadmill, etc. It felt a little bit like I was back in the States (except that the house seems a bit like a compound, as it is surrounded by giant cement walls with barbed wire on top).
I also forgot to mention that my family has set up a giant swimming pool in our backyard area for Semana Santa (Holy Week). Because we haven’t had water here in about a week, my family paid some guy with a water truck to come over and fill up the pool for only 400 Lemps. I think my house will be pretty festive this week. The whole country is basically on vacation…today I had about 15-20 people at my house just swimming and drinking beers. It should be fun once I can join them (Peace Corps only gives us vacation days on Thursday and Friday). A tradition during Semana Santa is the creation of alfombras, which are giant designs made with colored sawdust made in the streets. People work all night to make them, then in the morning religious processions walk through the streets and ruin them. A friend of mine asked if I wanted to help in the process of making them, so I’m hoping to get some good pictures. On Friday, I think a group of us are going to a lake sort of thing nearby (it’s called aguas thermales, but I’m hoping this isn’t the case because hot springs are the last thing I would want in this weather), where there apparently are jet skis, big rafts, and other fun stuff to rent. It should also be a good time, but if Hondurans drive jet skis similar to they way they drive cars, it could also be quite challenging as well. Here are some more details of a couple things:

-Pelea de Gallos…
…AKA cock-fighting. Yesterday my friends and I decided to witness this aspect of Honduran culture. The basics: We heard about it through the grapevine from some people in the community. Around 10:30, men start gathering at the cock-fighting ring, where all the roosters are housed in cages. Beer is sold, and the entire event is an all-day activity. It cost 50 lempira to get in (one day’s wages!!). I showed up with another girl friend of mine, and we were 2 of 5 girls that were crowded around the ring with about 60-75 Honduran men. It was SO hot, and everyone was packed in tightly around the little ring. Of course everyone is sweating, which mixes with the odor of blood, beer, and cigarettes to create a lovely atmosphere. The roosters are fitted with hook/blade sort of things that are put on their feet to aid in their fighting. Some owners also put Vaseline on the birds’ backs, so that it will smear into the other birds’ eyes. They are also fed a special diet that supposedly makes them meaner but I’m not sure what that entails. I’ve also heard that some people put poison on the hooks of their roosters to speed up the process, although all the fights I watched, the hooks were cleaned with alcohol before the fight. The actual fight: Each owner holds his bird, and they start out with 3 in the ring. They test them in pairs to see which 2 of the 3 seem to have the most animosity towards each other. After this is decided, the two chosen birds are set down in the ring and it begins. It appeared that most birds get in about 1 minute or so of pretty intense wing-flapping/pecking type of fighting, and they start losing a lot of blood and get disoriented. The rounds are 20 seconds long, and in between the rounds, it got really interested. Each owner would pick up his bird, put its head in his mouth, and suck the blood out of the rooster’s mouth so that it wouldn’t asphyxiate…basically it looked like they were giving it mouth-to-mouth. The fight lasts until the beak of the losing bird hits the ground, so it basically has to die. The 1st fight I saw was very fast, about 20 seconds. One of the roosters got the other with his hook, and he was out. It appears that the owners have a pretty special bond with the animals (they must…after sucking blood out of its mouth!!), because once their bird dies, they kiss them. The cock-fights are a pretty ‘manly’ event. There were no Honduran women there, and the men seemed pretty amused that we showed up. They get really into the fights, yelling and betting on their favorite rooster. Most of them were very nice, and gave us a play-by-play of what was going on. We left pretty early on, which I think helped us avoid dealing with a big crowd of curious men after they had gotten a few beers in them. Needless to say, it was quite the experience. I would probably do it again, although I would try to pick a day not quite so hot.

-Baby-weighing
Malnourishment is a huge problem with children under 5 here in Honduras. One of the biggest problems is that kids get diarrhea and are unable to get any nourishment from the food they are eating. There are also a lot of beliefs here that do a lot more harm than good. One is that mothers shouldn’t give babies anything (breast-milk, any sort of food, etc) when they have diarrhea. Problems with hygiene also create a cycle of diarrhea and the resulting illnesses. The government counteracts this problem is with a project called AINc. The program utilizes nurses that go to the rural areas and weigh babies once a month. They track the weight on graphs that use a lot of visuals so the mothers can understand. If it appears that the babies are not making enough progress in weight gain, the nurses provide counseling to the mothers and try to figure out what’s causing the problems. We were trained on how to use the scales (it was a lot of fun) as well as how to provide counseling if we found there were problems with the kids. This is a useful skill to have as health volunteers, because nurses aren’t always able to get to the more rural areas for the baby-weighing program. The place we went to (called an aldea, which is like a tiny town outlying a large city) was about a 40 minute drive up a mountain. We travel in Peace Corps-owned Land Cruisers, so we probably looked like a small battalion entering the village. On the way back down, one of the Land Cruiser’s brakes stopped functioning (it was a STEEP mountain and there was some issue with lack of engine breaking…I didn’t really understand) but they managed not to fly off a cliff by using the e-brake.