| Lauren Greenwal... 的个人资料Lauren's Travels!照片日志列表 |  工具  帮助 |
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Lauren's Travels!** Post comments here...I would love to hear from you!! (Please copy and paste this website into your browser): http://positivepelham.blogspot.com/2007/02/laurens-travels-begin.html 8月4日 Hola A TodosHi all!
Well it has been a few months since I last sent out a group email… Things here are really great! I moved into my house at the beginning of July and am living with another volunteer, Molly. We get along great and I couldn’t ask for a better friend or roommate.
I spent the first three months in site getting to know the community and practice my Spanish…..but now things are really taking off work wise. Me and Kate (business volunteer) have been giving HIV charlas to the colegio (high school students) and have trained all of the 7th and 9th graders at one high school….Also, something big with Peace Corps is the idea of sustainability so our project manager really encourages doing TOT’s (Training of Trainers) which is basically a 3 days workshop, where the 1st day you do all the HIV activities with them (4 hours), then the 2nd day they get into groups and make all of the materials, and the 3rd day the groups replicate the 4 hour training to another group. So…I organized a big HIV TOT with half the nursing students here (37) and I had two other volunteers come in to help me with it. Somehow it all came together and the nursing students did such a great job teaching high school students! It reaffirmed my belief in sustainability and my work here because I was able to see HIV trained nurses who would later be able to teach HIV prevention classes in their communities! It was actually really exciting! I have planned another one for the end of this month with the other half of nursing students so I hope that one goes well too! I also just did my first 3 hour nutrition workshop with all the nursing students yesterday...it was my first charla alone in Spanish and it really went great! The students are so cute...I love teaching them.
I have so many ideas going through my head of projects I want to do here it gets kind of overwhelming. I am doing a Men’s Health workshop with 28 policemen next week (a more men focused program really emphasizing fidelity and condom use) and then I am teaching nutrition during pregnancy to a group of pregnant teenagers in 2 weeks. There is a big school for teachers here and what I would really love to do is plan an HIV TOT with them so that they have the training to later teach their students and also do a Men’s Health TOT at the jail…..but I know I need to have patience and do one project at a time. I am super excited because next week me, Molly, and Kate are starting Encargada de Mi Vida (In Charge of My Life) which is a 16 week program with 5th graders teaching them about morals, values, self esteem, AIDs, sexuality, reproductive health etc. I am excited to be doing it with Molly and Kate!
So that’s all about my work here…
I have been reading a lot during my down time and have formed a habit that I love…going up to the local restaurant/hotel that overlooks the city and drinking coffee and reading. Its become quite a priority during my days here =) … Anyway nothing more to report. Life is great here! I miss everyone and hope everything is going good there! I would love to hear from you! Let me know how things are there! Hugs! Lauren 5月31日 My First Few Weeks...Hi everyone! Well I have now been in my new home for almost a month. Things so far have been really great! I really love it here.....everything...the people, the town, my work. I have been spending the last few weeks meeting all my counterparts, learning Spanish, and getting to know my way around the community. Another volunteer who is in the Protected Areas Management project, Molly, got a site change to my city last week. She has been here for almost a year now. She is great and we have become really good friends! We are going to live together in a month when I move out of my host family´s house. She is going to work in promoting ecotourism with Celeque National Park, but she wants to go to Med School when she gets home so we are excited to do some health projects together. Last week Kate (married, business volunteer living in here) and I did our first AIDS workshop together at a colegio (highschool) with 38 students. It went really great! The thing with ¨charlas¨here are they have to be super dynamic to keep the students attention and keep it interesting. Powerpoint presentations just don´t fly here. So I spent a few days making poster boards and a bunch of activities for the kids to do during the workshop. We did skits, condom demonstrations (using a plantain, because I forgot my wooden penis), games to resist peer-pressure to have sex etc. It went over really well and they really learned alot! This week I helped my counterpart from World Vision run a two day workshop educating religious leaders from Gracias about HIV/AIDS so they can educate the members of their church....pastors, fathers, nuns, etc. Also, we are fighting to overcome the discrimination and stigmatization people living with HIV/AIDS here often face. It was such a cool workshop. We took 26 of these leaders to San Pedro Sula on Tuesday where we went to visit AIDS patients at a major hospital there. Also, we had a conference with this well-known family here who all are HIV positive (the husband, wife, and 12 year old daughter). The father had unprotected sex once when he was 18 and a few years later got married and infected his wife without knowing he had HIV. They later had a daughter and only found out about the disease when the daughter was 6 months old, after it had already been transmited to her. But this family started a foundation called Llaves where they travel around Honduras, the States, and Latin America providing HIV education and fighting for the rights of HIV infected people. Also, we went to a home for orphaned kids who are all HIV positive. That just broke my heart...but they were all so beautiful and sweet and it was so cool to see how happy and hopeful they are. I spend time with a 14 year old who had just gotten back from the hospital with Tuberculosis, who I could tell was depressed and struggling, but she let me into her heart and it was great getting to see her smile. Wednesday we were able to participate in an AIDS support group and then go to a Maquila (factory) started by a group of people living with HIV. So overall it was a really great experience and I feel really lucky that I was a part of it! So that´s all for now. I am just doing a lot of work with HIV/AIDS right now. I have a meeting tomorrow with the director of the nursing school here to plan what my work will be with them so I am looking forward to that! Lauren 5月8日 Official Peace Corp VolunteerHey alll!
I know it has been awhile now since I have written...things have been really busy. BUT I am now officially a Peace Corps Volunteer! We went back to our first training site last week for 4 days to get a little more training, get our residency cards etc and then on Thursday was our swearing in ceremony at the US embassy. After the ceremony we all went to the Ambassador´s house to swim, play tennis, and celebrate! Well now here come the good part...where I am going to live for 2 years and what I will be doing.....
So my site placement is in the west! It is actually a site that I have wanted from the beginning. It is a moderately sized city with about 15,000 people. It is located in a valley at the foot of Mount Celaque (the highest point in Honduras....some of the best hiking here!) Also there are suppose to be really beautiful Agua Thermales here...which are natural pools flowing from the mountains so I am excited to go there! The temperature here is pretty nice...it gets pretty hot here during the day but the mornings and nights are cool. It is known as a colonial town (colonial churches etc) so it gets a good amount of backpackers and tourists. There are two biliguel schools here so I met some people my age from Spain and the States living here teaching at the school so that is really cool! There is also a married couple from my PC group that is living here with me. Kate is working in the business project and Brody is working in water and sanitation.
I have four counterparts here (people from the community who I am going to work with)....
-World Vision, an NGO working in both HIV prevention and women & child health.
-An adolescent health clinic, which is really rare here..my city has one of the only 2 in Honduras so thats really cool. Teen pregnancy and STDs are a BIG problem here. It is common here for a girl to get pregnant ages (14-16) and you here on the news fairly often of a 10 or 11 year old getting pregnant in the aldeas.
-A nursing school, which is very cool because I have heard here that the nurses are not really taught the caring and compassionate aspect of nursing here and also confidentiality is nonexistent (which really effects people wanting to come get HIV testing) so I hope to incorporate these things when I teach them about HIV/AIDS and mother/child health.
-CAE, is goverment hospital that is focused only on providing care for people living with HIV or AIDS. I think I am going to run support groups here but we´ll see.
So there is a ton of work to be done here and I am going to be kept very busy but I am really excited about what I can potentially do here! I am now a member of La Red, which is a group of the leaders in the city promoting AIDS awareness and prevention and promoting human rights for people living with HIV....so I have already met the people in the city who are going into the schools, nursing schools, jails, and hospitals fighting against HIV/AIDS so that is really cool.
I am living with a family here for the next 2 months and then I get to find my own apartment or house to live in so that will be nice. I am excited to be here and start working but I am stressed about my ability to teach in Spanish and am also going to really miss my friends. I am giving myself the first 2 months to really learn Spanish and get confident with it and to get to know the community and my counterparts....
Hugs!
Lauren 4月11日 Semana SantaHey all, So earlier I didn't get a chance to send my email with my pictures. This last week in Honduras was Semana Santa. It is the one week during the year where everyone takes vacation from work and relaxes. We had classes up until Wednesday afternoon and then we had the rest of the week off. We weren't allowed to travel outside our site but just having the time to relax was much needed. Being in training and classes 8 hours a day really wears us out...so Semana Santa came at the perfect time during training! My friend Raphael lives with an amazing family (its the house I had Spanish classes in the first 3 weeks, the mom who gives me eggplant, and I am good friends with the four sons)....well this family has an uncle who lives 10 minutes outside our site...he owns 80% of the land that the US military base is on here so he is doing pretty well..he has a beautiful house with a pool that he invited all of us volunteers to on Wednesday and we went again Sunday for swimming and a barbecue...it was so fun to just lay in hammocks, talk and relax! Thursday I went with my family to a big park a little outside of Tegucigalpa, called Parque Aurora. We brought hammocks and food and just relaxed again. They had a zoo, pool, lake, and playgrounds there for kids. I met my host mom's niece and nephew, Daniela (15) and Alfredo (19) who live in Tegucigalpa. We became really good friends this week and I am excited because now I have a place to stay wh en I need to travel to Tegucigalpa..especially considering my $2.00 a day salary won't be able to pay for a hotel! They both speak English so it was good practice for me to be able to learn new words I don't know. On Good Friday in our site and in Comayagua they do this amazing thing called Alfombras (rugs in english)...they make these beautiful paintings of Jesus in the streets using sand, salt, and dyed sawdust...they start making them at 10pm and work all night until Friday morning...they are absolutely beautiful. Then on Friday there is a procession, where people carry Maryand Jesus and reenact the stages of carrying the cross and a crowd follows the procession...in the end they walk over the rugs and ruin them. In Comayagua, people from all over Honduras come, because there are dozens of rugs made all the way down the streets and the procession is bigger...you should definitely look at my pictures of this because it is really amazing! Overa ll, it was a very tranquila (relaxing) week! The week before we had a lot of activities...including learning how to make mud stoves/ovens and gardens. One of the leading causes of death for children in Honduras is pneumonia and resp. illnesses...primarily caused by people having really bad stoves in their houses with no/poor ventilation...the smoke builds up in the house and the children breath it in all day...so alot of volunteers write grants at their sites to get funding to make stoves for the people in their villages. So we learned how to do that which was really interesting! This week we are focusing on HIV/AIDS support groups and midwives. We have been learning how to lead support groups in our communities for people living with HIV/AIDS and then on Thursday and Friday we are going to be teaching a group of midwives from local aldeas (usually villages in the mountains that are hard to access and far away from hospitals) on how to deal with emergencies during births....we will be focusing on teaching them how to stop hemorrhaging, which is the leading cause of death here related to births. Saturday they are teaching us how to resuscitate newborns.... Tomorrow or Thursday I have my last interview about my site placement. They had us fill out a form with our preferences..whether we want another volunteer at our site, what we need at our site (internet, elect, etc etc), if we would prefer to work with the ministry of health or an NGO....so our last interview is about what kind of things we want in our site...but to be honest with you, we find out our site in a week and half so I'm pretty sure they pretty much already have our sites picked out for us. Helmith, our site placement director, pretty much already told me that I will be a first generation health volunteer at my site...which means their may be other volunteers there now (water & sanitation, business, muncipal dev., or youth dev.) but I will be the first health volunteer ever in this community....he wants me to represent Peace Corps well and make a good impression. So we are really anxious to find out our sites....but mostly I am excited...I am ready for training to be over but at the same time I have some of the best friends here I have ever had so I am going to really miss them. Well thats all for now...I'll let you know where I am going to live for 2 years when I find out! I have posted many pictures on my website so you can look at them there! laurengreenwald.spaces.live.com Pura Vida Lauren 3月20日 Honduras March 20, 2007Hello everyone! Sorry it has been awhile since I have written….they keep us pretty busy during training. We just finished four weeks of training in the town outside of Teguc. They have taught us about HIV/AIDS, STIs, nutrition/malnutrition, latrines, breast feeding, and diarrhea/respiratory diseases in children. A lot was a repeat from nursing school…but it’s always good to have refresher classes….especially considering causes and treatments differ so much in other countries. We also had our second language interview last week…I moved up past the level needed in order to be sworn in as a PCV! So at least that pressure is off….but I still have a long way to go. Language is definitely the most frustrating part about being here. The language classes we have are really good but it’s been really hard for me to stay focused in a classroom setting from 7:30-4:30 everyday…actually more like impossible. I feel like I have ADD =). But…only seven more weeks of training. Part of me can’t wait until training is over, but then I know I am really going to miss my friends when we get moved to our individual sites. Two weekends ago we all went on volunteer visits to spend 3 days with current PCVs. I went to a town in the East to visit a Youth Development Volunteer, who has been in Honduras since June. She was really sweet and we had a lot in common, so we had a great time together. I went with her to give charlas (basically interactive lectures) to students at a primary school. She teaches business classes, English classes, art classes, and has a health club. It was a really great opportunity to hear what it is like to be a PCV and what to expect! Another interesting thing that happened was Friday I started to break out in an allergic rash and when I woke up on Saturday it was all over my arms and legs, even after taking Benydrl the night before. So the doctors had me go to the hospital in Tegucigalpa…where they gave me an IV with Solumedrol (steroid)…which helped the rash a little, but I still have it on my arms and left hand. So we’re not really sure what it is from…if it does not go away in the next few days the PC Dr. is going to send me to a dermatologist in Teguc. Well Sunday we had to say goodbye to our amazing families because we left for field-based training. This is when the 51 of us split into our three projects (health, business, and water and sanitation) and go to different cities where we get more field-specific, hands-on training. The 20 of us on the health team are in a bigger city now, sort of in the valley of some mountains. I was really nervous about my new family; because my family was so great before…this new one had a lot to live up to! But my family here is wonderful too! Our city is pretty nice….4 internet cafes, hiking, hot springs for swimming, even a gym. And my family has a really nice house. My parents have four grown children, who all have children. They live in a compound with 3 houses so I am constantly surrounded by my little friends! Ruth and Victor are 6, Roberto is 7, Daniel and David are 8, Sara is 11, and Fernanda is 12. Ruth is my best friend here! She helped me unpack and we play doctor, take pictures, and dance to Shakira! I have a big room with a TV with 70 channels (including HBO & Showtime!) and my own bathroom…which feels so bizarre considering I was expecting no TV for 2 years. My family has a washing machine too! The only thing is they don’t have an electroducha (warm shower) so you have to boil water and then pour it into a bucket and take a bucket shower…but I actually really like it. My family has cows, horses, and a coffee fica (farm) in the mountains. This is funny…my sister Melissa’s (29) boyfriend’s family owns an….EGGPLANT farm!! How bizarre is that considering my obsession =) It is typically all exported to the US but they are going to get some for me! My mom has been amazing too about the vegan stuff. So far I have been really lucky. Well tomorrow we start language classes and we are having a charla about "In Charge of My life"…which will teach us how to run Youth support/leadership groups in our communities so that should be interesting. Sorry I don’t have much more interesting to say considering we spend all day in classes but hopefully after training my emails will get better =) Miss you all and I hope everyone is doing well! Con Amor Lorena |
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