Well I'm back in the United States. The post before this one, as I look back on it, was supremely down and depressing. I tried to bring it up and express my recovery from the difficult times but don't know if I achieved it. I think I can do a better job this time.
Although I start out with the sad news that Peace Corps Honduras has been shut down for the time being and I, along with the majority of my fellow PCHN groups will not be returning to our well-established lives in the country that we gave blood sweat and tears too (and I mean that literally...) I will end with positive notes that will assuredly put smiles on my sparse readers' faces.
I don't know how much we volunteers can tell the general public but considering the announcement to pull us out has been in the papers for more than a month I think I can at least tell you that due to violence levels in the country with the highest murder rate in the world (yes that's Honduras) the gringos are out until further notice. There were 4 'classes' in-country at the time. My group 16 was the oldest followed by 17, 18, and 19. We 16ers had about 5 months left in our service and the consensus is that we really wanted to be in Honduras come May, 2012. The fact is that leaving the Peace Corps, mentally, takes a bit of time; it's a process. We didn't have a lot of time to undergo that process as we were told 3 weeks before pull out that... we were getting pulled out. However as hard as it was to leave, I'm of the firm belief that we are all safer in the States than we would be in Honduras and leaving would have been hard no matter when it happened.
I felt safe in my little town in the mountains. This is coming from a guy who, as my last dark post mentions, was robbed blind of all my 'nice things' only months earlier. I felt safe. So it's hard to convince yourself that Washington was justified in taking me away but they made a very convincing argument in our last few days in the country with meetings about how dangerous the country really is. The danger is in travelling and as much as we all love our sites you had to leave every now and then for some reason.
The hardest thing to get over for most of us, if I may speak for us, and I can because this is my blog and I can say what I want, is the relative abandonment of our friends, family, towns, and projects. We all come for varying reasons but I'd like to say that, on the whole, we all come to 'do good'. Well there we all are in various degrees and steps of doing that good when we were cut short. The administration of the PC will tell us, as well as anyone else on the outside, that we should focus on what we have already done. Well that's true. However development work is a seemingly infinite thing. It's a curse as well as a gift. A gift because it means people will continue to work for and with the poor forever which is as it should be; but a curse because if at any point in your life of development work you stop, whether by choice or not, you can't help but feel like you've left something unfinished. In most cases you have.
In my case I was just coming out of a huge funk (like HUGE) when one day I woke up feeling like a real go-getter. I was tired of feeling like a loser and decided to make myself a winner for a change. I woke up and gathered all my weapons of development work (pen, pencil, notebook, calendar, boots, collared-t with NGO symbol on the sleeve) and marched into the mayor's office and demanded to give my time for free! So I arranged to give computer classes, beginner and advanced, to high-school students. I also called my fellow volunteer in town to see if he wanted to try to utilize a big stack of teaching-English-to-English-teachers manuals. Turns out he had been pretty bored as well so he said YES to that. We met several times with administrators and it looked good. Dates were set. Boards were notified. Teachers were signed up. Computer labs were booked in advance. All was set. I was a productive volunteer again. I hadn't felt involved in the community since I had the fallout with the coffee co-operative (if I didn't write about that in the last post... well that's what happened, we fell out of contact with each other). Now I was walking tall. Felt like I could save the world again. I went to my friend's house who started the bi-lingual school in town and asked what I could do for him. I focused on finding him children's books in English for his students.
(click on the picture to read the bilingual school's sign)
There I was conquering and getting a haircut when my girlfriend calls me and tells me I better check my email because we've got some bad news. I call my site mate and we head to the nearest internet cafe. My stomach sank. My skin crawled. I could feel it in the roots of my teeth. As I write this I go through small percentages of the exact same feelings all over again. It was sickening. We went to lunch together and couldn't get much of a normal conversation assembled.
I was two days away from a nice island christmas vacation and now I had to start thinking about 2 hundred million thousand things. I won't go into the depths of all of them but: school loans coming back to get me, job markets, friends here, friends in the states, my girlfriend, weather in the states, culture in the states, family here, family there, lack of a drivers license and of course leaving all the things I had just started to get underway here in my site. I was shaky for two days until I got on my bus headed to Roatan for Christmas... we had a half-serious joke that Washington became the Grinch... ruining christmas for most of us.
As I pulled out of my bus station headed for the islands I nearly broke down crying. It's a feeling that only another volunteer would know. As a volunteer you feel a little like a caretaker while in your town. Nurturing and raising it to be a grown-up. I felt like I was leaving it helpless.
Christmas was nice. I think it was my first Christmas away from my family... ever maybe? Yeah ever. But I was with a family which is the most important thing. That's where you need to be. Also there's something about water, ocean water, that helps your mind deal with stuff. So after my time on the islands I came back to Colinas with a calm drive to tie ends which were loose and flapping all over the place. I went back to the co-operative in my last week in Honduras and documented the advances they had made since I had last been there (4 months earlier) and they were happy to see me which felt great. They were such a huge part of my life it killed me to be on non-speaking terms with a lot of them. It was like a bad break up. But I became the bigger of the two of us and went up there and shook hands. I interviewed Arnold the manager and Gardo the president to help me with my graduate thesis which I would have to finish in the states. They invited me up to the coffee farms, my favorite thing to do in all of Honduras and I got to see the renovated coffee facility in San Jose de Colon. Beautiful. Coffee was my life for a year and a half. The dirt, the tree, the farmer, the worker, the seed, the fruit, the bean, the drink, all of it; I can't explain thoroughly enough how deep it hurt to be cut out of that for a while and conversely I can't explain thoroughly enough how deep it warmed to be included in it again.
In this way I managed to bring, in an amazingly short amount of time, closure to my service. Things felt unfinished yes, but as I already described that is how it goes in development work. Your job is never done. On a side note I have received two emails in the last two weeks from interested roasters in the US that want to pursue Direct Trade contracts with farmers from COCASJOL and the reason they want to do that is because of me and I have no problem taking 100% credit for that. My thesis is on direct trade and how to establish it from the grassroots level and it seemed like pure theory. That is until it became a reality. It is possible to connect the poorest person in the world who has zero business knowledge zero English and zero market knowledge and get them working directly with a first class cafe in the States or Europe and I've proven it. I wish the very best for that co-operative in Colinas, SB. It would make my life to see a bag of their coffee on a shelf somewhere in the US.
After 4 days of meetings and goodbyes in the nation's capital we, all 150 of us volunteers, went our separate ways. Damn it was hard. The only people in the world who knew exactly what I'm talking about are now scattered around the nation. I'm back State Side and I have to collect myself and move forward.
I went from a place where life was slow and simple to a place like this:
Look at how many THINGS there are in this picture!
At Buffalo Wild Wings there are usually around 4,240 televisions. There is music coming from every single corner. There are over 24 beers on tap. There is customer service. People are talking about 58 different things while touching all over their phones and pads. At the place I went to drink a beer in Colinas there was 1 tv. It had soccer on it, pirated movies, or spanish soap operas. There was no music. There were 4 tables and if I sat at one I would be looked at until I left but I hardly noticed it by the end of my time there. There were 5 things to eat and 3 beers to drink from bottles you had to clean off with your shirt before touching with your mouth. It was lit by fluorescent lights and I knew everyone in the place whenever I was in the place and if I didn't it's because they didn't belong... not me.
I am writing my thesis and it is putting a nice little mental ribbon on my time in Honduras because it is all about my favorite thing I did while I was there: working with coffee producers.
When I am done I will have an MBA from a respectable international business school and I will be ready to find a job. I hope to find one doing what I love which I feel I don't need to explain to any greater extent. If I can't find one right away I hope to substitute teach spanish because I really want to hold on to it porque este idioma me ha metido como una flecha, onda y bien pegada.
I will end my last blog entry, as I do with every blog entry, with a few choice pictures
Chris and me with the family of a great restaurant in town
Oracio. The oldest sweetest man in Colinas. Suckin on an orange right outside my house
The big iconic catholic church
Jose Adan. Potable water entrepreneur and a great friend
Laying out wet coffee to dry. My last day at the co-operative
While interviewing the owner of a local store (who happened to be a coffee farm owner) a white faced Capuchin bounced around and wound up with his tail on my face. He later urinated on my shoulder. He was awesome.
The warmest most wonderful family in all of Honduras. My host family and their new granddaughter Camila
My favorite meal ever. China (pronounced "cheenah") was always happy to have me. She ran a "buffet" which consisted of 3 warming trays full of beans, eggs, rice, fried chicken, potatoes and usually something special. She insisted on being in this picture which is pretty rare for a Honduran woman.
Herazmo. Wood worker and English addict. He would leave any conversation or group he was in to come talk to the gringos in English. A good friend and I wish him the best of luck in Roatan where he was supposedly off to find work.
Colinas
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