Nueva San Diego and more

Sorry about the lack of updates! I can’t believe I haven’t written anything since Easter. I’m going to try to just give a quick overview of the things we’ve done since then, but we’ll see how quick this will actually be.

We’ll start with Earth Day. The earlier Passionist Volunteers here in Talanga began celebrating Earth Day to raise awareness about the environment, which is often not one of the biggest concerns in this country, but pollution is definitely a huge problem. We continued the tradition of celebrating, but on a slightly smaller scale than usual. We decided this year to focus our attention on one, if not the, poorest community in Talanga, Nueva San Diego.  I don’t know how to put this nicely, but this community is literally full of trash. We didn’t know the extent of it until we arrived that day with our trash bags and plastic gloves, but we were immediately overwhelmed.  The people can’t be blamed completely for this problem, because it’s more an issue of them being un-educated about trash disposal, and the town government doesn’t provide any means of doing it- there’s no curbside trash pick-up and only one big dumpster in the community for collection, making it a lot easier to just throw all your trash on the ground or burn it… also not the greatest plan. But, we enlisted the help of a kindergarten class in the community, and recruited anyone we could find on the streets- which was actually quite a few children and adults because there’s a number of kids in this community that don’t have the money to go to school- but we started cleaning around their new community center and soccer field, and eventually moved down to the town’s larger stadium to clean all around the outside and inside.  It was a big task, especially with our small numbers since the kids from the neighborhood school weren’t allowed to help as we had planned. It was a hot and frustrating day seeing as we never though we’d make any difference in the huge amounts of trash there, but in the end we had filled two large dumpsters with all the things we had picked up, and we learned to come to terms with the fact that doing that little something was better than nothing. We also hoped that by having people in the community help us with the arduous task of picking up all the trash by hand, we would teach them not to use the ground as a trashcan, but littering here is second nature. We bought bags of water for everyone that was helping out, and we actually witnessed on more than one occasion, kids throwing the empty water bag on the ground, while holding a bag filled with trash they had just picked up off the ground in their other hand.  Definitely a little frustrating for us, but we tried to do some teaching at the same time.

In mid-May, we celebrated Mother’s Day here on the same day it’s celebrated back home. We actually spent the day again in Nueva San Diego, after being invited by the community leaders to a large celebration they were putting on.  Raffles are a huge thing here, and they were raffling off a number of Mother’s Day baskets, filled with food, household items, and some other things that we donated. (We had some shoes and make-up that we received as donations, and we also received 5 boxes filled with pantyhose on our latest trip to San Pedro, and had no idea how we would ever use so many pantyhose… but luckily they went to many mothers of this community, happy to receive anything on that day.) Anyway, they treated us as the guests of honor when we arrived, which made us feel kind of awkward, but they insisted we sit up on the stage in front of the crowd.  They had a number of skits, songs and dances put on by the kids of their community. Personally, we would call them risqué- dancing and small outfits that no mother would want to see her daughter wearing in front of a crowd of people- let alone as a Mother’s Day gift… but we have learned in the past 10 months that the culture is different here. But either way, we had fun and enjoyed seeing how big of a deal Mother’s Day is here.

May was also a big month for me because my dad and my sisters came to visit marking the first time I’ve seen anyone in my family for 10 months! We met up on the island of Roatán and spent 4 days hanging out on the beach, eating good food, and snorkeling. I also, more than my family, loved soaking in the air conditioning of our hotel room, watching TV, flushing the toilet and showering… seriously.  We spent one night at Lago Yojoa visiting the waterfall, eating more delicious food and kayaking on the beautiful lake, and then headed more south to Talanga. I had a great time, and from what I hear, they did too.

Other than that, I can't believe June is already here and 10 months of my time in Honduras have passed by already. Yes, I am coming back soon- I think July 31st but haven't gotten my flight information yet. And no, I have no idea where I'm living or working when I return, but I'm going to wait to figure that out when I get back. Leaving here isn't going to be easy, that's for sure, but I think if I stayed for 1 year or 2 or 5, it would be equally as hard. There's something about life here, and the people, the culture, everything- that's completely incomparable to life in the U.S.  Maybe I'll try to explain better in a future post, but for now, I'm off to enjoy my final weeks here...