Volunteer Visit, Day 4

Explaining the rules of the dinamica Elephant, Rabbit, Giraffe.  In Spanish of course.

Considering it was a big class of high school teenagers, they participated well.

Stacie drinking water from a bag. 

In the restaurant Cebolla's

Chris and Stacie.

Our first baleadas!  Traditional Honduran meal.

A small, cramped street in Santa Barbara.

On Wednesday, we had to leave the house at 7am to walk to the colegio for Stacie’s Joven a Joven class.  In the class before, the students had done an activity to determine which career would best suit them.  In this session, we taught them how find the three main functions for any given career, along with the skills and personal characteristics needed to be successful.  We did a couple of dinamicas with these students, which was a lot more difficult since they were high school teenagers who did not want to be in class.  I had to lead one of the dinamicas since it was my idea, and it was hard to work through the students’ laughter and snide comments, but I managed.  That activity made me realize I will not be ready to do any projects in a high school for about a year, until my Spanish is a lot better than it is right now.

At 12, we planned to take the bus to Santa Barbara and spend the rest of the afternoon there and stay the night on Milo’s floor.  In between El Nispero and the town of Santa Barbara, we stopped at another volunteer’s site to meet her.  We only had an hour to spend with Caitlin because the bus from her site leaves at 2, but it was nice to meet one more PC volunteer.  When we got to Santa Barbara, we went right to Cebolla’s for lunch.  This restaurant is known for the best baleadas, which is a Honduras meal.  Usually in Honduras they eat small corn tortillas, but baleadas are made with large flour tortillas like we eat in the States.  A tortilla is stuffed with beans, mantequilla, queso, and avocado- very delicious and fattening.  After lunch we walked around the little city, looking in different stores and sitting in the central park.  It started to rain so we went back to Cebolla’s to sit and have coffee and study Spanish flashcards.  Stacie had to take the 5:00 bus back to her town, and Milo wasn’t going to be home until 6:30, so Chris and I sat in the restaurant doing homework and talking with the owners. 

We were planning to take the 7am bus back to Tegucigalpa the next morning, so we just had a relaxing early night in.  Unfortunately, my stomach had been hurting more and more all day, and I was up sick all that night.  The trip back was miserable the next day and I went to sleep right when I got home at noon.  When I woke up at 5:30 on Thursday evening, I was still so sick that my host-grandmother made me call the PC medical emergency number.  They took me to a hospital about 10 minutes away in the next town over, and I had to stay there overnight.  The doctors think it was food poisoning; whatever it is has left me weak and nauseous.  The hospital is a not-for-profit hospital and in the morning while I waited to be released, I talked with two young American girls who are going to volunteer there for the next 9 months.  They just arrived a week ago, so we exchanged emails and next weekend I am going to show them around the town and help them get oriented.  At least something positive came from my first Honduran hospital experience!