You can visit a country and get all sorts of different experiences from it - you can visit the famous touristy places and buy souvenirs, you can go hiking up the highest mountain, and you can explore the streets of an old town. But what ICS can offer is a rare experience: to get under the skin of a culture and learn about it from the inside; the bits that the guide books don’t teach you.
Alejandra Sophia Rivera is a Progressio ICS national volunteer. She is 26 years old. Born with Spastic Diplegia Cerebral Palsy, this has not been an obstacle for her to achieve her goals and objectives. Sophia graduated with honours from high school with a business qualification, and currently she is in her second year of a Law Degree, at Universidad Cristiana Evangélica Nuevo Milenio, in Catacamas, Olancho. At the end of her first year, she was awarded the top student in her class.
Living in Honduras for ten weeks would open the eyes of any average UK consumer. Coming from a country where all foods are available, no matter the season, magically appearing on supermarket shelves in pristine condition, attractively packaged to keep it so, we could be forgiven for thinking that this abundance is reflected worldwide. However, in Honduras the situation is very different, and I have quickly become much more mindful about what I purchase and consume.
So up until now I have been all about the monitoring and evaluating of our project, but not this week! This week I get to talk about my experience working at the school fairs, more specifically at the science station. Our focus is on drug abuse, and this is because drug abuse is a very real problem for the city of Catacamas. It is widespread, and young people often drop out of school prematurely due to drugs. We will go to 12 different schools in our 10 week cycle, and teach students about the risks of drugs and what they can do to succeed in school.
This week I’ve decided to write a different type of blog. I interviewed the host family that I’m staying with and wanted to gain an insight to their perspective on the educational system and security in Honduras.
The difficulties of living in a country where you can’t understand what anyone is saying
This week has been exciting. We have run our first anti-drug fair in the local schools. We have all been working hard preparing, and it has paid off, we ran two successful fairs. The focus of these fairs was good study habits. We prepared interesting and engaging activities to teach good study habits followed by games designed to test their knowledge on what they had learnt. The children were aged 6-11, which required us to adjust the material that we were presenting to make it relatable and understandable to each age group.
This week the whole team has been hard at work making progress on the running track, and we’re nearly finished. We’ve been weeding the ground and shoveling tonnes of gravel around the track. The patients have also been getting involved in helping; we wouldn’t have been able to get all this work done without them. It’s been great working together with the patients, it’s given us a good opportunity to get to know them. With their help it won’t be long until the running track is finished.
There was a power cut on the first night I arrived in Honduras. It did not come as a complete surprise, because as I travelled through the sprawling capital of Tegucigalpa I was immediately struck by the power lines. In England where there would be a single cable here there are at least five tangled, knotted wires hanging perilously from one post.
The last week has been incredible, filled with new experiences and opportunities to learn more about Predisan, Progressio’s partner organisation here in Catacamas. We have also learnt about some of the Honduran culture along the way too. Predisan are a Christian organisation which offer holistic healthcare services and operate in many regions across Honduras in lots of different facilities. One of these facilities, CEREPA, is based in Catacamas and is a rehabilitation centre which offers treatments for addiction. This is where Team Catacamas will work from for the next nine weeks.
