Pages

Think local. Act global. Learn more about the Peace Corps

Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Our Home Sweet Home in Honduras

We've been at site for over 4mths and are just now posting pics of our house. Oh, well... here they are!


The front porch, complete with a little moat. It comes in handy during the rainy season, believe it or not.


The back.... our landlords love yellow. All of the wood on the first floor is used for our fogon (below)


Our fogon... and the other half of the kitchen below. The fabric for the curtains was given to me by our host mom.




Dining area (Jacob's recent birthday present in the foreground)


Guest bedroom


Our bedroom. Jacob bought the bedspread for me at the local Lencan market. The woman who sold it to him said these types of quilts are traditional Lencan wedding gifts. Love it!


The view from our back porch


Our neighbor. I started feeding him our old bread, and now he comes up to the fence every time he sees me outside expecting to be fed. I have created a monster. The USA canisters can be found all over our backyard and around town. They housed food donations several years back, and now mine hold sage!


And, last but not least, an updated photo of our local waterfall. It will continue to grow in size until about mid-November when the rainy season lets up.

Have a great week everybody!



Saturday, September 24, 2011

Eat Your Weeds

Much of my job entails going out to the surrounding villages, giving a presentation on nutrition and pneumonia and/or diarrhea (as these are the 2 leading causes of preventable infant deaths in the country), and the class follows with a cooking demonstration in one of the women's kitchens. We make everything from soy milk from scratch, soy chorizo, tortillas fortified with green leaves or pureed carrots, and chicken and vegetable soup made with local vegetables brought by the women.... all in a Lencan woman's tiny kitchen with no modern amenities.

During one of my first trips out to an aldea, the women and I were gathering leaves to grind and add to the maseca for tortillas, when someone shouted, "mira, espinaca!"... they found spinach. You couldn't have imagined my delight at hearing the word! Someone has spinach?! So we walk on over to where the women are pulling the leaves, and my heart sinks. "Ummmm.... that's not spinach. That's a weed..." I wanted to say, as they smiled and fervently pulled bunches for lunch. But, I didn't say anything and just watched as they added the leaves to the mixture and we went on with lunch. I figured if 10 mothers were eating the stuff, I wasn't going to die. And, low and behold, I didn't :)

So, being me, I went home and scoured the internet until I found an identical leaf structure and started researching exactly what it was. Turns out, it's what we would call Lambs Quarters, and most people in the US just pull it up like it's a weed. I then went to nutritiondata.com (only go there if you really want to feel bad about eating something unhealthy.... there are always way more calories than you think.... don't do it!) Anyway, I compared the nutritional content to that of what we would call spinach, and it's pretty spot on! So, feel free to eat your weeds! Well, this weed (I read somewhere that it has a large amount of oxalic acid, so in case that's an issue...)

I remembered there being a 4 foot tall stalk of lambs quarters in the backyard when we went to look at the house we are currently renting and instantly got excited. Of course our landlords, who were trying to be very nice, chopped (well... macheted) down our entire back yard right before we moved. They left a few flowers and the huge elephant ears, thankfully. So, I've spent the last three months waiting and hoping more would pop up... and just like a weed, I found 10 sprouting all of the yard.

Yesterday, I cleared out a spot in our yard and transplanted every single one to the new space to cultivate. And, nicely enough, while clearing up the spot, I found 5 small green bean vines!

Lambs Quarters

Green Beans!

Over the last month, while poking around in the yard, I've been finding edibles all over the place. While clearing out some sugar cane (it's taking over the backyard!) I found what the locals call pepinitos, or mini cucumbers. They're growing on the back fence and are the size of a chubby pinky at maturity. We also have swiss chard from the former volunteer living in the house, our sweetsop tree is overloaded with fruit, we're getting 3-5 patastes weekly from our vine, and our plum tree just started producing. We've made some good friends out of neighbors by giving them fruits and veggies from the yard... Neither one of us can stand pataste, and I can only eat so much sweetsop, so it works out for everybody :)

I can't believe the garden I have... and I barely did a thing! To compensate, I've planted pak choi and more swiss chard, garlic, ginger root, lavender and rosemary so far. I hope to plant much more, but Jacob and I are currently working with the local daycare on a vegetable garden, and that's taken up alot of time and energy (will blog about that later).

Anyway, I'll end on a few pics of flowers that just popped up in the yard this week... so nice!



Saturday, September 17, 2011

MARV Meeting in Tela, Honduras

On a side note, we'd like to thank Susan and Hatch for sending us a care package, and Jo and Aaron, too!!! Thanks so much guys, sorry I didn't post pics... it only means we devoured the box of goodies before I could get ahold of the camera :)

Marv, or Married Volunteers is a Worldwide Peace Corps group focusing on the needs of just that, married volunteers (Married coupes only make up about 7% of the volunteers serving). Twice a year, we marrieds get to meet in a location of our choosing for 2 nights and catch up, swap stories, etc... without having to use vacation days or personal leave.

Not that being a married volunteer is that difficult, I actually believe it to be easier. You come to Peace Corps with your best friend, you always have someone to talk to in your native language, and you can always get advice from someone who is not a host country national. Plus, being a woman in a foreign country isn't always easy, so there's the added bonus of a male traveling companion. And, as much as I hate to say it, having a husband in such a machista society seems to make my work more credible... they all assume he did it anyway.

But, regardless, having this meeting semi-annually is helpful. For this trip, we chose Tela on the North Coast... not too shabby, right? Please be aware that the US Government is not funding a get away for couples twice yearly. Yes, they do provide a small stipend to help with traveling to/from the meeting, but it comes no where near the amount of the cost of the trip for each couple. Other volunteers like to give us a hard time about it... we just tell them to get married :)

Tela, Honduras

Anyway, the first thing we all decided to do was jump in the water, a stone's throw from our hotel. The tourism industry in Honduras is still small and according to the locals here, tourism fell even more in 2009 and hasn't fully recovered. So, the beach was rather empty.... nice for us, but not nice for the locals trying to earn a living. There was one other family on the beach that day...


That night we decided to have our official meeting over dinner at Maya Vista... if you ever come to Tela, the restaurant has a great view...

During dinner we all simultaneously discovered that no one at site invites us couples to anything... weddings, fiestas, birthdays, or even lunch. People in all of our sites seem to assume that we have our own daily agendas and can't be bothered. Our single volunteer friends all tell us of the crazy fiestas they've been to, and Jacob and I kept thinking maybe the locals didn't like us too much. But, at least now we hope it's just because we're married, and I need to be at home to cook my husband's breakfast/lunch/dinner/wash his clothes.... you name it.

The next day, Honduras celebrated it's 190th year of independence, so we headed down to the central park to see the Garifuna marching in a parade and several Honduran marching bands from the local area schools.

Next stop was the boardwalk. We had piƱa coladas while watching a group of men play for people on the beach, and later ate pizza at a restaurant (Bella Italia) owned by an Italian woman. It was great! She spoke with us for a little while and told us she moved down here about 13 years ago with her husband. It's a small world when you can have authentic Italian pizza and wine in a little town on the edge of Honduras.

I'm already looking forward to our next meeting in March. It's always great to catch up with other volunteers, but especially nice to see the other married couples who sometimes face the same issues, and more often than not, provide great advice.