La Laguna

I´ve been in my site a little more than a month and a half.. definitely been a rollercoaster of ups and downs. Every week I am becoming more and more comfortable in La Laguna. I´ve made the community leaders my counterparts, and have started a youth group and a girl´s soccer team. The youth group has proved a great way to facilitate community integration. Through the kids I have been able to gain confianza, or trust, with parents and adults who may have otherwise remained a little skeptical. We have led an environmental campaign to clean the one street in La Laguna, clean the cemetary, had several fundraisers in an effort to raise money. We had a big party with a portable disco machine that has its own solar panel (complete with 2 disco balls) last Saturday night. Our girl´s soccer team has been training for weeks now and we played Ashley´s team in San Marcos, losing 2 to 0, challenged them to a rematch the following Sunday and won 2 to 0. -San Marcos is the slightly larger rural town a few miles south and Ashley is the volunteer placed there from my training class, a Youth Development volunteer. I´ve been teaching english classes once a week, not my ideal job but there is a high demand for English so another easily achieved community integration tool.

La Laguna is also home to a fairly substantial Mennonite colony, unique to Honduras and our area specifically. It´s pretty bizarre to me. So Mennonites are like Amish but can drive cars and use the internet. In this way they are less stuck in the dark ages, but they have an impressive focus on missionary ¨Spreading the Word to the Natives¨ mentality. There are two gringo families from Missouri that live in La Laguna. I´ve visited with them a few times, and are very nice but largely keep to themselves. They don´t participate in the community and prohibit their Mennonite followers from doing the same. Thus, out of my 500 person community about half is mennonite, leaving about 250 to work with in my projects, such as the youth group and girl´s soccer team. However, the white Mennonites refuse to teach their followers English even though the Honduran Mennonites have been asking for years. I have an impressive Mennonite showing in my English classes.

The neighborhood I am trying to move into in the next month is actually a largely Mennonite neighborhood. I chose it for several reasons, first of all it has the only available vacant house.. and by house it´s a small cinderblock box, of which the cold sterility vaguely resembles something from an insane asylum, haha. No, it´s nice, it already has concrete floors, and a little toilet INSIDE - definite luxury. The tin roof is fairly new, so no leaks, and the wooden windows and doors all have metal latches for locks. I cannot express how excited I am to finally live on my own.. I think about it about 25 times every day, no WAY more. As much as I have enjoyed my host families, and it´s been a great to really get to know the culture, etc etc I have lived with 5 different families for the past 4.5 months and I am HELLA ready for some personal peace and quiet!!! Going from no rules for 4 years in college living with girls my age to living with conservative, loud, rooster owning, baby bearing, church loving, spanish speaking families was definitely an adjustment of which I am glad to be on the tail end. That said, the Honduran Mennonites are some of the nicest people ever. And the neighbohood is completely safe, set away from any other people who may drink, have parties or guns, that sort of thing.

All in all, im adjusting and life is good. We get a few days off for Thanksgiving so I am going to visit some buddies in Olancho, should help ward off homesickness and will provide a much needed step back from my site. And, on the food side the mandarin trees are bearing tons of fruit so i eat about 6 mandarins every day. SO delicious. IF any of you want to send a package, send candy and gum, nasty. good, whatever as long as it´s American. haha, no but seriously kind of. Email me and I will give you my address, or call my mom, or it´s on facebook.
Carmencho