I’ve been back in the states for just over a week now, and really I should have posted this earlier but I got lazy. Lazy lazy. Also intimidated by the task of writing a post about Honduras. Everyone who has ever come back from volunteering in the third-world, comes back with this “it changed my life” response to the questions, “how was it?!”. I’m going to tell you a little about what we actually did in Honduras, and a little bit of my experience, but to even attempt to explain to you the effect this trip had on me I feel like it would take away from how much it really meant. It didn’t change my life, I’m still living in the first-world, driving a car, taking 5-7 minute showers, buying unnecessary items for my life, eating more food than I need to survive, taking many things for granted, etc. But it allowed me to experience things first-hand I’d only been able to read about before in say..the World News section of the newspaper. It made me aware. It gave me moments. Moments that I will describe later.
Honduras is like any other land…it’s beautiful and ugly. It’s amazing for good and bad reasons. The people are polite, some are also rude. It’s like any other place, it just happens to be a third-world and everyone speaks Spanish, almost exclusively.
Cows and horses and children roam the roads, most of which (at least the ones we commuted on) are unpaved, bumpy dirt roads. Dogs are not pets, most of them are strays and malnourished and sick (sadly). There’s no garbage disposal system, so people burn their trash. The smell of burning trash is distinct and unpleasant and I’m doubtful of any benefits it has to the environment and the people. Grasshoppers are huge, maybe 2 fingers wide and 6 inches (or more) long, and they fly. Sometimes kids will talk to you, and even after you tell them you don’t understand (no entiendo) and sorry, you don’t speak Spanish (lo siento, no hablo espanol), they will continue to talk to you and ask you questions and giggle.
The first week was Medical Brigades, there were about 40 of us from Chapman. Each night, at the compound that housed Global Brigades (groups of people in rooms filled with bunkbeds – camp style), we would sort meds. Sort meds into “antibiotics”, “vitamins”, “topicals”, “heart/high-blood pressure”, etc. And each morning, we would drive about 2 hours into a different village, set up a clinic at an elementary school and see over 400 patients a day. The clinic was triage (take in the patients, take their blood pressure, ask them if they’re already taking medications, ask them what their symptoms are, etc.), doctors (talk to the patient, prescribe meds), pharmacy (patients would hand brigaders their prescription and students would be running around in the pharmacy gathering all the meds they needed and then going outside, calling the patient and explaining to them how to take the meds). Aside from the doctors station (we had 4 doctors with us, 3 of whom we brought from the U.S.) it was all Chapman GMB students working in and running the other stations.
The 2nd week was Water Brigades. Every day we drove 2 hours to the same rural mountain village to work on their water piping system. We spent our days digging trench (50cm deep), laying down PVC pipe, and covering trench. I don’t know how to describe the physical demands of this kind of labor. Imagine the summer heat in a tropical place, imagine breaking a sweat within 5 minutes and having flies and other insects attracted to the sweat. And you know where you sweat? your armpits, your neck, your face, your hairline, the bends of your elbows and knees, and also yes, your crotchal area. So the insects are mostly flying around those areas. But you have to keep pick-axing and shoveling. And then sometimes you’ll strike your shovel into an ant civilization, and you will watch as millions of tiny little ants become furious and starts running around and suddenly the trenching stops, and you must figure out how you’re going to deal with this ant civilization. Usually the only solution is to dig it up/shovel it was quickly as possible and toss it as far away from the trench as possible. But no matter what, angry ants will usually find their way into your sneakers and on your legs and you will feel their sting. You will feel their sting and you will wonder, are all Honduran ants fire ants? And you will not know the answer. During this week, we were stationed mainly at this one house in the village, where all the trenching tools were housed, and where we’d go to eat our lunches that were brought from the compound. On the last day of trenching, the women at this house brewed coffee from their home-grown coffee beans. I have only in the recent years, surprising since I was born and raised in Seattle, come to enjoy the taste of coffee. Black coffee. This fresh, home-grown, home-brewed Honduran mountain countryside cup of coffee was…like sipping nirvana. Delicious.
This coffee sipping moment…this was one of the moments I spoke of earlier. There were a lot of “moments” on this trip. Some moments I wanted to last forever. Some moments I knew I probably would never experience again. Moments that just made me smile and think how amazing it was that not two weeks prior, I was bumbling about in the southern California smog talking to fellow film students and suddenly here I am playing soccer with Chapman pre-med students and Honduran kids on a soccer field in the mountains of rural Honduras. Are you serious, life? How did this happen? How did I get here? What did I do right? And thank you. There were moments where I caught myself thinking about how unique the moment was that I would forget to savor it. There were moments where I just wanted to come home because I was so over being eaten alive by bugs, having to spray layers and layers of bug spray on my skin and often accidentally inhaling it (the taste of bug spray is grotesque), I missed being able to open my mouth in the shower, I missed being able to speak English to stranger. There were also moments where I wanted to stay longer (possibly forever?) than these 2 weeks, because something about not having a cell phone or internet access, it makes the interaction with the people in your immediate presence to…solid. And going back to the U.S. would mean getting back on the grid of electronic social interconnectedness, which you know is kind of disconnecting in a way. Also there were moments I wanted to stay longer because sometimes you really come to love people who may not know you, who may not know who you are. You come to love Carlos (our GMB leater) and you come to love Jorge (our GWB land cruiser captain). They don’t know who you are, and you come to love them. Because you’re all there knowing why you’re there, and maybe that’s enough to want to stay. In Honduras, I had a distinct purpose. Help set up clinic, help distribute meds, help dig trench, help teach the kids about in-home sanitation. Help doesn’t mean…going to Honduras and helping them. The way I’m using “help” I mean, co-setup clinic, co-distribute meds, co-dig trench… “help” is the word that links my efforts to the efforts of all the other brigaders on this trip. I had a distinct purpose in Honduras. Back in the U.S., I have what sometimes feels like too many purposes and other times, no legitimate purpose.
So in a nutshell of nutshells, that’s how my trip was. And now…some photos (I only shot on film with the Canon AE-1, because I knew given my clumsiness, bringing my dSLR would’ve been a trainwreck)
To see the little Honduras video on YouTube, go HERE
Dogs can’t hear the shapes and densities of the sound that make up the words that make up the language spoken between people (this is not a fact, this is an assumption I just made). So when people hear “sit”, dogs probably hear maybe a muffled version of that..? I don’t know. I’m just guessing based on that universal guideline that discourages people from naming their dogs with names that rhyme with “sit” and/or one-syllable names because a lot of commands are one-syllable.
