Field Based Training

Yesterday was the Ides of April. It was also my 23rd birthday, a cumpleaños I share with Guy Fawkes, Thomas Jefferson, Butch Cassidy, Thomas Darcy McGee and Samuel Beckett. Good company, I think. My Water & Sanitation crew got me a delicious cake; special thanks to La Doppia for pulling that together. I even danced, which was a bit of a feat because I broke my toe.

On Friday I became the first casualty of my wave of Peace Corps. Having worked hard & late the last three days in a row, we took most of the day off and went to a newrby swimming hole. It was a lovely Honduran afternoon; breezy and sunny and warm. There was a some deep water and high rocks (can you see where this story is headed?) so I scouted the water and decided to jump. It would have been perfectly safe... except I jumped a bit farther than I intended. A submerged rock gave me a kiss on the foot. When I emerged from the water, I had a purple pinkie toe cocked at an interesting angle. The Gecko lent me some alcohol and medical tape to clean myself up. That evening a doctor in Tegucigalpa confirmed the fracture, and told me to keep taping it for the next three weeks.

The moral of that story: ... Ok, to be honest, it´s really fun to jump off rocks into water. If I were to do it over again, I would (just a few feet in the other direction). I can get around fine, albeit with a zombie´s gait. The only real loss is that I couldn´t play soccer yesterday, although I still made it out to watch my team. I have been playing on my host brother´s local team. They compete on a dusty field about half an hour outside of town. Like so many Honduran fields it is alongside a hill (for a decent spectator´s view) with a gorgeous mountain vista in every direction; just over the barbed wire & bushes, that is. There is one league for all ages. Younger and older players are disperesed thoughout the teams. They play rough, fast and skillful soccer. It is a really effective way to meet people in the community and I enjoy it immensely.

I spent the last week working out in the sun. We learned how to pour concrete and do some basic masonry, and then set to work building pour-flush latrines and pilas, which are storage basins for potable water. I used the trailer hitch on a Land Cruiser to bend rebar into horseshoe anchors for the chicken-wire lining of the latrine’s stone foundation. Then I jumped in the pit to hammer them into the hard clay, with scenes of “There Will Be Blood” dancing through my head.

When I left home I never imagined that I’d be missing construction equipment. A concrete mixer would have made our lives much easier, and out work more efficient. I spent much of my time mixing the concrete with a shovel, transporting it by shovel, applying it by shovel, and tamping it with the same. It makes a gas-powered automatic tamper seem as luxurious as a Bentley.

“I feel so primitive,” El Barbaro said to me. He looked the part too, as he pounded pitch (horse crap) with a wooden post. This was a week ago. We were mixing mortar for a brick, mud and steel oven we were helping a local bakery build. It came out quite well. Building things for people, by hand, is immensely satisfying (although not especially sustainable in the long run). And as annoying as the lack of certain tools (such as a level) can be, there’s a romanticism to it that’s not lost to me. I’ve cleared beds for seedlings at a tree nursery with an adze. Last Thursday, I was laying bricks for a pila with Juandrea and Cyber Alex. There were only two trowels, so I was laying mortar with a machete. We were working quickly, because there was a brisk wind bringing dark clouds flashing with electricity towards us across the mountains. Then, as the last bricks were being laid, the rain hit. It felt fantastic. We covered everything with corrugated aluminum and piled sweaty, stinking and satisfied into the back of the Land Cruiser headed back towards Sabanagrande, cold beer and dry clothes.

We get more equipment in water & sanitation than volunteers in other sectors do. We have Abney levels, teodolitos, GPS and total stations for doing topographical studies. Then we plug our topo data into a slick Excel spreadsheet to figure out if a gravity water system is feasible given the volume of water, a reasonable growth rate over a 20 year life span, friction losses in the tubes, and a host of other factors. We also have GIS software, AutoCAD, and EPANET at our disposal to design & present water systems. A reliable laptop is a necessity. In the field, I usually carry a pocket multi-tool, a sharp navaja, and a permenant marker on me; they get used practically every day. I need to buy a decent machete. A donkey too.

Our work naturally overlaps with the other Peace Corps project areas, specifically Health, Youth Development, Municipial Development, and Environment. To practice these competencies, as well as our Spanish, we´ve been working on Charlas. They are participatory presentations, sort of like live infomercials on various topics. Last week I taught a group of school children about sanitation, hygine, excreta-related disease and how latrines protect watersheds and the people who live in them. The previous week, I helped lead a 4 hour workshop on AIDS and sexual health with older students in a tech school. I get nervous in front of people when I have to talk in Spanish, because it´s hard to improvise; it seems I can only work the grammatical part of my brain or the imaginative part, but not both simultaneously. It´s coming along with practice though, and the student participants have been really enthusiastic.

In a week I should know the site where I´ll be assigned for my two year service.

Immigration Party.

It´s easy to find a person or a group entertaining at certain bright points. You know, the highlights people like to talk about in their week: parties, going out for the weekend, possibly holidays. Thus, to really measure of how fun and interesting a person or group may be it´s best to observe them in a drier, humorless setting; someplace impersonal, soul-less.

An immigration office at 7 a.m. on a Saturday should suffice.

It was a blast. We water & sanitation volunteers had not seen the Health volunteers in three weeks, and the Business crew only briefly two weeks before. People were animated, boisterous even, hugging and slapping hands and telling all kinds of stories. One volunteer´s family takes him to the cockfights every Sunday. Another enumerated the finer points of teaching condom use to highschool students. Many had gone to the beaches in the south. Others have been dealing with chisme, the wildfire gossip that can get truly epic in and between the small towns.

For example, one volunteer had to change host families because the father was getting deported from the US back to Honduras. I know this because a volunteer in my Spanish class was told it BY A COMPLETE STRANGER parked by the highway. These towns are two to three hours apart on the highway, and the fellow in question had no affiliation to the Peace Corps. Talk about being in the public eye.

Hence, I shall reiterate, everything here is my personal & recreational opinion and NOTHING MAY BE TAKEN TO REPRESENT PEACE CORPS POLICY. Also, I am not from New York City, I am not a spy, and I cannot get you a visa.

I think that the reason we were so chipper so early, besides the mid-FBT (Field Based Training) reunion, is most definately the fact that we had all arrived by bus. The typical Honduran bus is tricked out like a upper-middle class suburban wankster´s Honda Civic. All the drivers personalize their buses with flame decals, Jesuchristo Vive in barbed-wire font, and the logos of either the Transformers (Decpticons or Autobots) or the Thundercats (Thundercats HO!) They usually have all the windows blacked out, with shiny chrome hubcaps (I´ve even seen cheap spinners) and surprisingly nice sound systems that blast spanish reggaeton and/or disco. This morning we got The Night Belongs to Us (approximately 6:40 a.m.) It´s Raining Men, and as we rolled up Superfreak.

Welcome to a typical commute into Tegucigalpa.

The other common mode of transportation is the venerable jálon, which starts with a whistle and a wave and ends with the traveller jumping out of the back of a pickup truck, graciously thanking the driver, and apprecaiting how friendly and laid-back most people are here. Barreling down a dirt road piled in the bed of a rusty Datsun pickup with a few of my Peace Corps compañeros, with the warm sun on my face and the wind whipping through my hair, I remember thinking I love this country.

I have a guardian angel in my bedroom. He´s got leathery-beige lizard skin and the wicked grin of the Guy Fawkes masks in V for Vendetta. More importantly, he keeps the mosquitos and roaches (the bane of my existence in Santa Lucia) at bay. This is a good thing, as one of my Spanish class companeros was laid out for five days last week with the dreaded Dengue. I would trade that for a dapper gecko buddy and day of the week, especially since he chirps like a little bird.

Last week was Holy Week, or Semana Santa, and so we got five days off to celebrate with our host families. This consisted of much hanging out, eating and walking around Sabanagrande. One night I did Tequila shots with my host brother and his friends... at the mayor´s house. This was quite an occasion, as I generally would not allow myself to be seen drinking more than two or three beers in public; ¨moderation¨and ¨drinking¨ are unrelated concepts here. Other days I went out for walks and coffee with Peace Corps people. There was a live reenactment of crucifixion (no lambs of god were harmed in the production) and a procession over a portrait of Jesus made of painted sawdust. It struck me as being similar to Tibetan Buddhist mandalas, not only in the materials and methods but also in the creation-destruction-rebirth meaning. Then we went to the beach in Choluteca, which is two hours south of Sabanagrande on the Pacific coast. The black sand was excruciatingly hot (Choluteca beaches are not as nice as those in neighboring Valle or on the North coast), but the plump Tilapia I washed down with a few cold beers was fantastic. Fish is generally served as a whole fish here -head to tail- which makes for a much more visceral dining experience.

Last week I implored people to send there love, but neglected to provide an address. So without further delay, here ´tis:

Voluntario del Cuerpo de Paz
Andrew Savoy-Burke
Apartado Postal 3158
Tegucigalpa, D.C. 11102
Honduras, Central America

Central America. Ain´t that just nifty?

So it begins...

It's not even six in the morning, and I'm awake, dressed and now undressed again. There's chilly air sweeping down the Honduran mountainside and in under the bathroom door, making me a bit friskier than I should be at that hour. I'm looking apprehensively at a little pink bowl floating in a big plastic bucket sitting on tile beneath a shower than may never have worked. The air reminds me why humanity invented pants, and I think “Is this for real?” I dawdled for about half a minute, then dumped a pink-bowl of water over my head. It was as deliciously warm, like a fresh bath. It was like that because my host mother was up an hour before me, heating my bathwater.

That was a month ago. I've been in Honduras for a whole month. Three weeks in Santa Lucia, almost a week now in Sabanagrande, plus visits to Tegucigalpa and Choluteca. From what I´ve seen and heard thus far, this is a land of glaring contradictions. I have encountered nothing but generosity, helpful strangers, and extreme kindness... and everyone tells me to watch my back at all times. People are surprisingly open and very friendly, yet very socially conservative. Yet that´s a big generalization for a county that, although small, is incredibly diverse.

It's deceptively beautiful here. In Santa Lucia there's a little coffee shop where you can sit in the evenings looking out at the golden sunlight reflected off the thousands of corrugated-steel roofs on the mountainsides of Tegucigalpa, and watch distant ridges disappear in the fading light. There's a football field we played on twice a week with postcard vistas in three directions. Sabanagrande has a lovely park in front of a gracefully worn colonial church. Old guys in white cowboy hats pass on horseback at all hours of the day.

However, the difference between postcard scenes and the real life they conceal is readily apparent. Most of the horses and dogs -that freely roam the strets- are showing a lot of ribs. Corrugated steel roofing is widespread, but not because it's an ideal material for this sun-baked climate. Most people stay off the streets at night, i.e. later than 9 p.m., for security. Also, I'm getting sick of fishing soccer balls out of rusty barbed- and razor-wire. Fresh razor-wire is the white picket fence of Honduras; then barbed wire, then broken glass set atop stone & mortar walls. Between the fences, the machetes and the policia toting armas automaticas, this country's well prepared for the Zombie apocalypse. George Romero take note.

Speaking of apocalyptic waves of filthy vermin, I had a three-week dirty war against the cucarachas of Santa Lucia. The first one I saw was on my floor, next to my shoe. I tried to stomp him, but he scurried away behind my shelving unit. That night, I woke up to a fluttering object RIGHT IN MY FACE! I swatted it across the room, heard it smack against the wall... then an ominous scuttering sound, a low pitched buzzing, impact with the closed window above my head, and then the bastard was on my pillow. I sprang up, flipped on the light, and killed the interloper with a well-aimed shoe as he fled across my wall.

It was on.

If you've never seen a roach, imagine a two-or-three inch long shiny brown matchbox car that has six prickly legs and a long pair of antennae. They're devilishly quick, and have mastered every way in which life on earth has learned to defy gravity. They're faster than my wrath, but only sometimes. I've killed six so far. Once, I came home and saw two antennae sticking out of my water pitcher and thought good god, is it cute? No; there's no humanizing a faceless insect enemy. So I pitched it outside and killed it. Why not show some mercy? A few days before, I woke up and put my bare right foot into a boot so I could go out for my drying laundry... spastic madness ensued, and my hefty Spanish dictionary will never be the same.

One of the few creatures that you're likely to encounter that's scrappier than a cockroach is the seasoned Peace Corps volunteer. To the lowly trainee they're confident, competent, weather-beaten and wise. They've also got a species of feisty-quirkiness that comes from giving all their personal oddities time to ferment. To begin our metamorphosis, we spent three weeks hiking up steep cobbled streets at sunrise to the mist-shrouded training center, a veritable Kung Fu temple specializing in community development and assorted vaccinations. Granted, the way of the Peace Corps is a path of avoidance: avoid dogs, hitchhiking, muggings, highway robbery, burglary, piracy, dengue, malaria, scurvy, and excessive drunkenness. Lots of useful information, but only so much of which is usable in a sleepy commuter & tourist town like Santa Lucia. And so, after three weeks, we packed up and headed off to Field Based Training in Sabanagrande, which is where I’m at right now.

I have a lot going through my head these days. There are the siren songs of certain interests & interesting ideas from university –as well as from afterwards– that want more of my time. Also, there is the whole idea of : what it really means; is it a legitimate field of study, and possibly vocation? To what extent are its ideals substantial, or are they marketing for a (fun & profitable) racket? These are things I would like to be thinking about, but right now life revolves around improving my Spanish and learning how to build water systems. As I get a firmer grasp of both, I hope to meander further down these roads less traveled. The personal essays and anecdotes of others have been profoundly helpful to me in the last three years, and in intend to return the favor. That´s not the real reason I´m finally getting this blog-party started though. My real motivation’s more personal.

I miss you. You know who you are. Any love you send is much appreciated. I will return the favor with interesting & entertaining anecdotes.

[Big Stupid Grin]