The New Year

Yes, it's been a long time since I've updated. A big reason why is that the newness of everything is wearing off. The "Wow! I want to tell people about this!" moments are fewer and farther between. Which isn't to say they don't still happen, but there's just not enough of them to motivate me to write that often.

I spent Christmas through New Years Day in San Francisco, visiting friends and family. It was a wonderful trip. I was so glad to see so many of my favorite people in the world. It was hard to come back to Trujillo.

Most of the volunteers from my training group, myself included, have been going through a slump lately. Frustration, difficulties with motivation, loneliness, etc. Apparently this is pretty normal for volunteers at this point in their service, but it sure doesn't make it any easier.

It's becoming harder to overlook the daily frustrations - people not attending meetings, not returning phone calls, not carrying their weight, and so forth. And of course there's the power, water and bread outages.

But there is some hope for an upswing. I've got some promising projects lined up for 2008. My first six months in site were spent just getting to know people and trying to figure out my niche here. Now I have established some priorities and know what I want to work on. My three projects for the new year are:

1) Working with the HIV+ support group leaders to add more structure to the meetings and attract new members. Attendance right now is very low, and many newly diagnosed people living with HIV are not hearing about or attending the meetings.

2) Men's Health training with the naval and army bases outside of Trujillo.

3) HIV prevention workshops with high school kids.

If all goes well, hopefully I'll be busy and content by the time the rains stop in mid-February. If not, then it's going to be a long year.

No Bread, No Water

Bread and Water

There's no bread or water. Apparently there was a run on bread over new years and every store is out. No hamburger buns even.

More importantly, my apartment complex has no water. We ran out of water around the 16th of December. Luckily I was able to use the facilities at Brent's apartment and then I went home for the holidays on the 21st, so it didn't affect me that much. I figured that the water would be back by the time I returned.

When I got home on the 2nd, water came out of the faucets, so I assumed that everything was back to normal. Not so. Two days later, we were out of water again. Apparently the temporary reprieve was because one of my neighbors siphoned water from the tank of another house, but then said tank ran out of water as well.

Not having water for even 24 hours is not fun. First off, dirty dishes pile up and cooking at home is impossible, so you're limited to eating sandwiches or eating out. The former isn't possible since there's no bread in the entire town. The toilet gets pretty stinky even if you're limiting yourself to #1 and doing #2 elsewhere. And since there's no water for showers (or even bucket baths) you tend to get pretty stinky, too.

But this situation reveals a big difference between myself and Hondurans. I sat at home cursing the faulty honduran plumbing and wishing I was back in the States. On the other hand, my neighbors not only rigged the aforementioned siphon, but also dug up the water line for our house the figure out where the problem was. So far the digging hasn't yielded a solution (just a giant hole in our front yard) but at least they're trying.

The Volunteer Empowerment Act

On March 1st of this year, Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT, along with cosponsor Edward Kennedy, D-MA) introduced S.732, The Volunteer Empowerment Act. It is currently under review by the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.

I read about the bill in a recent issue of WorldView magazine (a Peace Corps magazine). Unfortunately there wasn't much information on what the bill actually said. So, I went online and looked it up. And for the first time in my life, I read a piece of legislation from start to finish.

S.732 (summary, full text) is a bill the Peace Corps needs. Most importantly (to me) the bill would:

• Increase Volunteer input. For example, Volunteer input would be included in performance reviews of high-level staff (e.g. APCDs and Country Directors) and Volunteers input would also be sought in evaluating the effectiveness of programs and initiatives.
• Protect Volunteer rights. It would mandate whistleblower protection from administrative separation, and create an appeals process for administrative and medical separations.
• Target experienced Volunteers. The bill mandates an increased focus on recruitment of Volunteers with at least 5 years of professional experience.
• Provide additional funds for 'Third Goal' projects. The 'Third Goal' of Peace Corps - increasing domestic understanding of foreign cultures - will for the first time receive financial support in the form of small grants available to Returned Peace Corps Volunteers (RPCVs) and nonprofit organizations with RPCV board members.
• Increase overall funding of the Peace Corps in order to achieve President Bush's pledge to double the number of volunteers. This, to me, is the most important and by itself makes me support the bill.

Right now the bill is in committee. Most bills don't ever make it out of committee. It would be a shame if that happened to this bill. Here is a list of the members of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. Please, if your senator is on this committee, take a few minutes to write them urging that they act to move this bill forward.

Gubida

Today I was in the office with Kenny and he told me that his cousin Damian was in the hospital. That morning he had been found convulsing and vomiting blood. He had had an attack like this once before, a few months earlier. That time he was taken to Ceiba for a battery of tests and no one could figure out what was wrong. So far, that was the case again. After Damian regained lucidity, the docs couldn't find anything wrong with him.

Kenny told me that most folks thought it was Gubida, the spirit of a relative or ancestor. Apparently, Damian's grandmother had died a while ago, and they had not done any of the traditional ceremonies to appease a dead spirit.

He told me, "If the hospital can't find anything then they will do a baño and a chugú." The baño is a ceremony where a pit is dug and filled with seawater collected at a certain time, then a ceremony is conducted to invite the spirit to bathe. A chugú is a day long ceremony for communicating with spirits. Participants are sometimes possessed by spirits to communicate messages and requests to the living.

I asked Kenny if he thought the problem was medical or spiritual. "I think it's spiritual," he told me. "This isn't the first time that Damian has been possessed, and other relatives of his have dreamed about his [dead] grandmother. If they do the ceremonies hopefully he will be cured."

I found it strange to be having a conversation in which spiritual beliefs were given just as much weight as science and medicine. But it also struck me that Damian was taken to the Hospital first. Only when the doctors there were stumped did people look for supernatural causes and cures. With all the Garifuna that I know well, this has been the case. They believe in both science and spirits. They are two separate but equally valid worlds. When it comes to illness, the general opinion is, "If science and doctors can't cure it, then it must be spiritual."