3.9.08 Volunteer Visit to Santa Barbara

Last week [Sunday through Wednesday] I went to Santa Barbara to visit another health volunteer. SB is about 4 hours northwest of here and whew it is hot!! It is the capital of the department so it’s a decent size with most things one would need. My volunteer was named Allison and she was part of my group except last year…so she has been in country for 1 year and at her site for about 10 months. She mainly works with an organization that helps put water filters in houses in low income neighborhoods outside SB but she also does Men’s Health Trainings and Workshops. It was interesting to see what the ‘real life’ of a volunteer looks like. She lives in the same apartment complex as Water & Sanitation volunteer so they see each other a lot, cook together etc. I got to have some really delicious homemade pizza and cake while there, which was such a treat!!

We spent one of the mornings at a workshop that was given by Jovenes Sin Fronteras, which is a group that was started by a PCV. It’s an HIV Prevention/Education group of youth, they give charlas on HIV/AIDS and other topics such a sexual abuse, machismo, etc. It’s a really cool organization, they are in 15 different communities around Honduras which is amazing. It was inspiring to see the idea of a PCV put into action and functioning well. That afternoon, a local doctor drove us to an aldea [outlying low income village] about an hour outside of SB. The organization had installed filters in a majority of the houses and we were going there to distribute de-parasiting pills to those who had filters in their houses. Ideally, they were all drinking filtered water so they wouldn’t get reinfected. It was definitely an experience there…the kids were so skinny, it really broke my heart to see so many of them like that. I know this is a poor country and I knew that before I came here…but something about those children really affected me. It sounds so naïve, but I wanted to take them all home with me and feed them and bathe them and take them to a dentist. They were all so sweet and grateful for us coming, I felt good about that. As I bit my lip trying not to cry, I realized that I could –never- ET [early termination] no matter how sad, lonely or homesick I get. I need to be here…to see those kinds of things, to realize how blessed and privileged I am as a human being, and to try and help some of those people and hopefully make a difference. I think its interesting how people always talk about ‘selfless’ PCV’s are but really…I think it’s a mutually beneficial experience. And as I always say in Spanish class…”yo creo que cuando una persona puede verse desde los ojos de otra cultura y otra manera, es una experience muy fuerte y bien importante. Creo que es algo que todos deberian hacer una vez en la vida”