Christmas in the Campo

Good things come in small packages!!

This Christmas found me in the mountains, making tamales, horseback riding, learning to make hammocks, and most of all relaxing! While being away from my family in the states can be especially hard at Christmas, this year I felt ¨in casa,¨ at home, celebrating with Benicia´s family in Las Peñitas. After a 2 hour bus ride up the mountain and a 30 minute ride on horseback, we made it to Las Peñitas, a small ridge-side town of 15 homes.

Finishing up the tamales around noon! (Still in my pajamas :) )

Most Hondurans celebrate Christmas the evening of the 24th. Celebrations range from dinner with family, to religious services, to dances... nearly all of which stretch into the wee hours of the morning and include LOTS of firecrackers. The 25th is spent sleeping in, relaxing with family in the house, and eating lots and lots of tamales. In order to prepare, I was up and cooking tamales with Benicia at 6:00am the 24th! By noon, we had made nearly 100 tamales, some of which we would eat, but most of which she would swap with family and neighbors.

**Tamales are essentially the savory Honduran equivalent of our Christmas cookie: you make a ton, and eat a lot of dough in the process... you end up giving away or swapping the majority of what you make... and they are gone within a few days :)**

The evening of the 24th I attended a ¨Posada,¨ which is a reenactment of Mary and Joseph´s search for room. A group of us stood outside a home and sang while another group sang back from within. We sang back and forth until they finally let us in. The rest of the night was spent in the church, singing and playing games until nearly midnight.

Making adobe bricks to rebuild a portion of the house. This morning they made 100 bricks!

Bricks sitting on the ledge of the mountainside to dry. Each brick takes approximately 3 days to dry.

Normally, Hondurans rest the 25th, but not the Aguilares... Benicia was up at 2:30am making tortillas, and the boys were up at 3:30 pouring adobe to make bricks to remodel the house. (I was up at 7:00am and stayed in my pajamas until noon :) )

Weaving on my own! (Yes, I am in my pajamas again :) )

Having asked ahead of time, I spent the morning of the 25th receiving my first lesson in hammock making. I have to say... they should charge a lot more for their hammocks- It is A LOT of work! I was amazed at the intricacies of the process: from winding the thread (from one ply to two), to setting the loom, and the actual weaving. I spent about two hours learning to weave and wove less than a 20th of the hammock! Professional hammock weaving is definitely not in my future; however, it was a great way to pass the morning, outside, talking with family, and my appreciation for the suspended, all-purpose bed/chair/couch/crib has only increased! :)

Today, I woke at 2:30am to eat a tamale and drink coffee before heading down the mountain with my flashlight to catch the 4:00am bus back to Orocuina. I was sad to go but excited for adventures to come and looking forward to going back!

MERRY CHRISTMAS ALL! and HAPPY NEW YEARS! In love, Amanda

Celebrating the Holidays Catracho Style!

This is my second Christmas here in Honduras, and I have to say that I STILL miss snow!! That being said... I have had an absolutely amazing start to the holiday season. Like many other Central American countries, the holidays start early in Honduras. Most major non profits, including the Association, began vacations the 17th and will not return to work until at least the 3rd!

For the Association, this meant that we began celebrating la Navidad the 2nd of December with Secret Santa... and I have to say, I made out like a bandit!! With a new top, bag, and wallet, I am ready to start dressing Catracha. (The women are also excited that I have been wearing tighter pants lately... very ¨Catracha¨ :) ) In addition to our team gift exchanges, we had a reunion of all of the volunteers that work with us in the nutrion, natural medicine, and Hesperian proyects. They all traveled to Orocuina from their prospective communities to complete a year end evaluation, have lunch, and receive a small token of thanks from the Association.

Outside of the Association, I have been lucky to celebrate the holidays with various friends! Jen, my friend, and the Peace Corps member here, hosted a great Christmas party filled with mint chocolate martinis, pin the nose on Rudolf, and the oh-so-loved White Elephant!

I most recently celebrated Christmas with my neighbors, Maria Jose and Alejandra, by baking sugar cookies! While I forgot food coloring, we improvised with red juice from hibiscus flowers :) which made for a super yummy frosting- hibiscus sugar cookies--- Martha Stewart eat your heart out!

Christmas has also made it upstairs to my tree house! Maria Jose and Alejandra helped me cut out snow flakes, and Miguel gifted me his tree. It is literally the perfect tree in that I can pick it up and carry it around with me.... which I tend to do... meaning Christmas is never more than an arms reach away! This year I will head back to Las Peñitas to celebrate Christmas with Benicia´s family. While I am excited to make tamales and sing Christmas carols in Spanish, a part of my heart will be in snowy Wisconsin, windy Chicago, and all those places loved ones are.

Feliz Navidad~Joyeux Noel~Milad Majid~Frohliche Weihnachten~Sawadee Pee Mai

Merry Christmas!

Choosing the Right Travel Companion

One of the first things we often do when considering a trip to someplace new is pick up a travel guide. Stop by a Barnes and Noble or Half Price Books, and you´ll find walls of travel books, each with their own take on your particular country or continent of choice. I arrived in Honduras with two travel guides: one on Honduras and another on Central America, I have somehow accumulated nearly 10 travel guides on Central America!!!

This evening I sat down with a glass of wine (!!!) and decided to tackle my mountain of travel books in attempts to plan a trip to El Salvador for my quickly approaching 28th birthday! I won´t bore you with all the details (I´d rather post pictures after), but I will share a few thoughts on the most common travel books that are currently gracing my shelves, in hopes that it may help in your future Central American travel investigations!

Fodors: A five-star travel guide aimed at audiences who are looking to enjoy the luxurious and more exclusive ammenties of Central America. Suggested hotels tend to focus on high-end chains at the expense of ignoring smaller, locally-owned establishments. They do; however, do a nice job of covering key tourist and historical attractions within each city.

Lonely Planet: Coveres the tried and true backpacker havens as well as a few of the more well known upscale digs. This book is a great first reference, but tends to be a bit out of date, making this backpacker wonder when the last time they sent anyone to the countries they are writing about. THAT being said, Lonely Planet has a great website were people can post updates and meet others traveling in the area! Well worth checking out!


Frommers: Currently my travel guide of choice (and that is not just because it is the one I came with), it provides a great mix of economical backpacking dorms and upper scale hotels as well as a great mix of eateries and activities to provide a well rounded lay of the land. While there are not as many cultural side notes as some of the other travel books, the space is taken up with additional things to do and places to visit.


Let´s Go: A great, quirky travel book that continues to surprise me with random hostels and out of the way, hidden gems that are only found by people taking the time to thoroughly explore a city and its people. Their Central American book is almost exclusively written by students and young adults who are tend to be a bit more open to experiencing the culture beyond tourist attractions in the areas they write about. Lots of side tracks make it a fun, if meandering, read!

Facilitating Change

The past few months have found me taking a larger leadership role in the groups and Association, facilitating workshops and organizing trainings. I love this type of work as it lets me work in a variety of settings, meet new people, and help them realize goals for improving their communties. I have recently had the chance to lead workshops on health promotion messaging, computation, decision making, and elaboration of proposals. Because the workshops tend to be varied, I often find myself researching topics before sharing them with the women. I then work with them to find practical ways to apply this knowledge to their every day life--- by far my FAVORITE part!

Facilitating finds me working in all sorts of settings: from offices, to computer labs, to porches, to homes. This workshop was a training on how to write proposals that was held in the president´s home in Triunfo, Honduras. Thirteen women from 5 communities came to learn how to create grant proposals to advance their groups´particular projects. We covered a lot of ground in 5 hours and with the help of a few¨dynamicas¨ like ¨Simon Says¨ and yoga (!) people stayed involved and engaged till the end.

An Experiment in Women´s Rights

This past week found me, along with 4 other team members, in Tegucigalpa, participating in a poignant experiment in how women are viewed here in Honduras. A group of local non profits teamed up with United Nations to place 12 larger than life ¨wooden women¨ throughout the capital for 3 weeks to see how they would be treated.

The results were a visual confirmation of the machismo that is so deeply engrained in this culture. While many of the installations were filled with feminist messages solidarity and strength, many were written over with hate speech and vulgar drawings.

All of the installations were brought back to the capital as part of a larger campaign against violence towards women. After displaying the dolls, teams of artists began to work to restore and transform the statues into symbols of strength and creativity.

Being a woman in Honduras is hard. It is difficult/nearly impossible to walk down the street and not receive some kind of cat call or tssssst... anywhere. While many of the males who do the cat calling have yet to grow facial hair, too many are old enough to know better and often even have children with them... I have personally been told on various occassions that I need to be careful not to look ¨too pretty,¨ and, for the first time in my life, had to stop what I was doing and leave for fear of a male (GROSS!).

Women are expected to be quiet and submissive- example: even in the most progressive of families, the wife will eat after the husband or at a different table after serving him.

Most of you know that this does NOT jive with me :) I cook, you clean... you cook, I clean... I quickly learned that I would not make a very good Honduran wife!

Fortunately, I have the education and financial independence to be self suffucient, whereas most women here enter or stay in abusive and adulterous relationships as a survival mechanism (for lack of resources or fear of retaliation).

The majority of our campaigning right now focuses exclusively on women´s rights and trials for perpetrators, but I hope that one day we will be able to address the real issues of respect, understanding, and communication that support healthier cultures free of forced roles, assumption and judgement.

House Guests

As I have had the pleasure of traveling a lot lately, I am always surprised at what I find when I come home. The Monday after returning from Nicaragua, I returned to a small ecosystem growing in dishes I had ¨innocently¨ left in the sink before I left... lesson learned! Normally, I return to find ants, spiders, and the (very) occassional roach vying to take over the temporarily vacated premises, but recently I came home to find a house guest of a different sort. I met ¨Freddy¨ a little over a week ago when he greeted me from my shower floor. After a short dance, Freddy obligingly allowed me to shower in peace, while patiently waiting outside the bathroom to reoccupy his cool ¨poolside¨ oasis when I was finished. We played this game for days, until Freddy decided to claim his territory... While he made quite the statment all puffed up after this photo, I gently removed Freddy from his post and set him outside. I have yet to see Freddy again, and I hope he has found a new, mas ¨tranquilo¨, oasis. :)

Viva Nica! A weekend in Nicaragua!

I feel like my trip here has truly come full circle. This weekend I made a trip to visit some friends in Managua, Nicaragua, where I lived and volunteered, before coming to Honduras. We all said that we couldn´t believe it had been a whole year and wondered why we didn´t get together sooner :) It was a great girls weekend filled with good food, dancing, hiking, swimming, and lots of laughing!

The first part of my trip consisted of a full day of traveling from Orocuina to Managua. After two school/mini bus rides and quite possibly more hours waiting for the bus than sitting on one, I finally decided to suck it up and got on one of the big ¨comfy¨ Ticabuses that make international trips. While these air conditioned, refreshment serving buses are little more expensive, it was worth not having to wait for two hours for a 20 minute chicken bus ride!

The first night in, we had a great dinner with lots of old friends from the gardening projects, new volunteers and new friends! (It was great to see what everyone is up to these days, and to hear about all the amazing changes that have taken place!)

The next day we headed over to the neighborhood community center to watch Chelsea and Kate dance. While I still think that Honduras´punta involves more hip shaking, I LOVED the Palo de Mayo, and the girls were beautiful! During the concert, I also got to hear my first Christmas songs!! While I love Orocuina, cultural events is something I really miss and took for granted back home. After the dance, we hopped on a bus to Somoto where we spent the next two nights at a friends´ beautiful, beach like home. In the morning we filled up with rosquillas and coffee and headed for Cañon Somoto where we hiked, boated, and eventually swam our way inside of an enormous canyon cut away by Central America´s longest river: El Rio Coco. My favorite part, by far, was swimming inside the cavernous canyon... which even included some mild cliff diving :) We are definitely headed back soon! Enjoy the pictures below!

Giving Gracias

As Thanksgiving is not a Honduran holiday, this year I´ve learned that the act of giving thanks does not require turkey, cranberries, or pumpkin pie... (even though they make giving thanks muuuuuch more enjoyable :) ) All I really needed this year were people that I care about!

After a full day of working, which included marching in the square against domestic violence and co-facilitating a county wide meeting on fuel efficient stoves, I cooked a ¨Thanksgivingesque¨ dinner for Benicia and I. I was a little bummed about the nontraditionally ¨small crowd,¨ but just when I finished cooking and realized we had waaaay too much food, two friends showed up! I was thankful for the company and the chance to share my culture... which was a hit! (Mom would be proud.) While I cooked, I talked to friends and family in the states, all of whom were there in spirit!

It was a low key but memorable Thanksgiving! Gracias!

When the food was made, we also practiced the oh-so-famous US tradition of eating in front of the TV :)

I am super thankful for friends and family. Thank you all for the phone calls, emails, facebook messages, letters and packages! It means the world to me to stay connected with you all!

I want to send a special thank you to my cousins Ellen and Myles for the AWESOME drawings they have sent! I have hung them on my wall of home, along with my cousin Emily´s wedding announcement, that she sent to Honduras. Congratulations Emily!!! My wall is slowly expanding, and I am looking forward to sending out another batch of mail soon! :)

Taking it to the Streets

Marching with the women, we even picked up some highschoolers along the way!

This week the I joined more than 250 members of the Association and various Women´s Networks in marching against Femicide, the ¨unjust killing of women due to their gender.¨ Femicide is problem that has increased in the last ten years and has taken more than 1500 Honduran women this year.

Our rep being interviewed by the press while AMDV leads the march

To protest this increasingly alarming trend, and to honor National Women´s Day (on Thanksgiving... quite appropriate!), we took to the streets, and literally took them over! With banners, posters, and signs, we took over a 1 mile stretch of the major Pan American highway connecting Honduras and Nicaragua. Our march finished at a large hotel, where we held a conference with various representatives working in the area of domestic violence and justice. Among attendees were police officers, government officials, and the municipal judge overseeing domestic violence. Reporters and the press were there in full force to capture the day, as well as this amatuer photographer!

It was nearly 90 degrees out, but women came prepared and stuck it out

A strong message, sent with love

Celebrating a Year in Honduras!

It recently hit me that I have been in Honduras for a full year! It is both amazing and natural to think that I have been here for 12 months, which is why I have decided to stay in Honduras, working with AMDV and CASEP for another year! I was honored when the women asked me to stay, and I am excited to begin my new role as an ¨internal capacity development specialist!¨

To celebrate a year in Honduras, I wanted to share some of my favorite memories that, for lack of time, never made it onto the blog. I hope you enjoy!

One of the last homes we weatherized with plastic and new aluminum roofing before the rainy season

Taking a break while climbing into a local waterfall. We packed tamales and brownies for after the swim :)

Swimming under the waterfall!

Watching Honduras in the World Cup

Riding to work in the mountains

Making home visits in the nutrition program

Celebrating Honduran Independence Day

Playing ¨Doctora¨

Attending an agricultural exchange. On the table: the harvest. On the floor: ducks.

A typical walk to work during the rainy season

Chicken Noodle Soup for the Traveler´s Soul

One of the things that many people who travel abroad don´t always talk about is how difficult it can be to come back home. What is often called ¨reverse culture shock¨ is something that many international travelers feel realizing how ¨different home looks¨ after experiencing a different way of life. Having had the luxury of visiting the states three times in the past year (!), I have had my share of culture shock... but I am often surprised that it affects me both coming and going...

I thought I´d share an informal journal entry penned on the airplane ride from Miami to San Pedro Sula, Honduras:

¨It seems like each trip back and forth becomes a bit less difficult, the emotions slightly less raw... however, transversing across continents and worlds has yet to become easy. There is still a feeling of hesitation, to give up the way of living (Honduran or US) that has become so comfortable, mixed in with a sense of anticipation- nervousness and excitement for what awaits. I have felt both joy and fear, happiness and saddness, but what continually amazes me and allows me to keep up this pinball adventure is the ever present feeling of relief when I touch down. Honduras or the US, it doesn´t matter... what matters is knowing that I am connecting with people that I care about and that care about me... the rest, I know, will work itself out...¨

These feelings were immediately confirmed upon arriving at my Honduran hotel. It was late, and I was hungry... everything was closed, but the hotel attendant opened up the restaurant to heat water and make me a ramen chicken noodle soup. If home is where the heart is, I am happy to be home...

Reconnecting and Representing at APHA

This past week I had the pleasure of representing AMDV at the American Public Health Association conference in Denver, Colorado. It was an amazing whirlwind tour with just five full days in the US, but I tried to make the most of every minute and came away with great new ideas, contacts, and renewed motivation for the work that I am doing here in Honduras. This was my third time attending the APHA conference, and I am continually amazed by the number of people that come from all of the world to share the work they are doing. An estimated 10,000 people attended this year´s conference whose theme was Social Justice. In addition to connecting with and learning from this year´s attendees, I was also able to share some of the work that I am currently doing with an amazing organization called the Hesperian Foundation. (check them out: http://www.hesperian.org/ ) Based out of California, this inspiring nonprofit developed and published what has become the ¨Health Bible¨ of Peace Corps volunteers, ¨Where There is No Doctor,¨ along with various other materials on improving community and individual health in a way that is understandable at a 4th grade reading level. I am currently assisting the organization move their materials to a digital platform that will allow users to create tailored health materials, specific to the distinct needs of their communities. It has been a great opportunity that has allowed me to both learn and teach skills in computer literacy, website navigation, and health material construction (ie. how do you write a ¨catchy¨ health message that people will listen to???) I was able to present on this process and am excited to continue to work with the Hesperian Foundation to realize its mission of co-creating accessible and practical health materials to support health as a human right.

(Personally, I think everyone needs ¨Where There is No Doctor,¨ especially as many of us US citizens are without insurance, and therefore, without doctor. I am amazed that this is not already standardized text in international development or health classes. Check them out!!)