We have now been in Honduras for a week and are starting to settle into our host families and our new communities. We spent our first few days in a residential centre doing some training for our project and then headed to Villa de San Antonio where we are going to spend the next 10 weeks carrying out our project. Here is a quick summary of what we’ve been up to!
The journey
The idea of leaving your life for three months is a strange one - before I even left, I knew I’d come back to missed memes, new songs on the radio, different adverts on the tube and plenty other more personal things having changed!
1) Expect to be called ‘Negra/Negro or Negrita/Negrito’
While I’m sure you've kept up to date with every blog, Tweet and Facebook update, by now you might be wondering what exactly we do at school every day. Working a 42-hour week, you could probably argue that our plates are pretty full. The majority of us are in bed by nine o'clock and I think that level of fatigue speaks for itself. You've read about our adjustment to Honduran life with our new families, our involvement in school events and the lessons we are learning relentlessly. Now for the important bit: how are we making our time here count?
When you imagine Latin America, what comes to mind? Heat, beautiful scenery and great music and dancing in colourful parades definitely paint the perfect Honduran images and, being here at just the right time, we’re lucky enough to experience an integral part of culture in this part of the world. This is ‘feria’ week and is far detached from the regular hot, sticky, sleepy afternoons in La Villa with which we have become familiar and while hot and sticky it remains, this small town is given new life with dazzling and flamboyant events over several days.
This week we helped our school celebrate an all-day open event filled with various fun activities for our own students, as well as those attending nearby schools. The recreovias is a government-led initiative to reclaim public spaces for children, as part of a larger violence prevention scheme. Its stated aim is to 'provide families, children, and youth with safe and free access to public spaces, where they can share with each other' in order to 'promote values, discipline, and a healthy lifestyle for citizens through culture, art, and sport'.
The current projects in Honduras are focused on school development, one school in Villa de San Antonio and the second in more rural San Benito (my school). We are the first cycle of three. In London, we were told that being part of the initial cycle may feel like a slow progression, and that we may not see the impact we are having but the groundwork we are doing is vital for the following cycles. As the weeks roll on, it is obvious to all us volunteers how true this statement is.
5 June marks World Environment Day, but here in Honduras Day of the Tree is celebrated on 30 May, and the two naturally go hand in hand quite nicely. Lately, our team here in Honduras, has had the environment around us on the mind quite a bit, especially with these occasions coming up.
After being selected as an ICS volunteer and once the fundraising target was smashed, the common question which dominated mine and most other volunteers’ thoughts was, ‘What on Earth do I pack?’. Honduras is a country I knew very little about. My minimal understanding of this exotic country included knowing it was in Central America, the climate is hot and humid, the nationals speak Spanish and there may not be the same comforts that I am conditioned to living with. So what are the essentials to pack?
