14:30  8/2

            Wow. We just arrived safely at the camp San Matais at about 12:30 today after an adventurous journey.  For the most part the flights were uneventful and comfortable, especially because I had an aisle seat for both flights. (Boston to Miami, and Miami to Tegucigalpa) The only exception to that was our arrival in Tegucigalpa, which is somewhat dangerous because the mountains are nearby, so the plane comes in sort of on an angle. In addition, the runway is quite short, so the plane has to stop very fast.

            After the flight, we had to pass through immigration baggage claim, customs, and then finally out to our bags. When I say bus, it was really more like a fin, which held all the people (13 students, 5 mentors, 5 doctors). Our bags were stuffed into another, smaller, van and a couple leftover bags and a couple leftover people rode in an SUV up front.

            Unlike in the US, there are not really any road rules, (at least not that people observe) so sometimes people go really slow or fast, just stop in the middle of the road, or go the wrong way when there is a traffic jam. Most cars and trucks are not the 2008 models, so often busses and trucks, like ours, have a hard time going up hills, creating instant traffic jams. After travelling for a bout one hour and fifteen minutes over paved and dirt roads, we finally arrived at our camp.

            The camp is actually surprisingly nice. I am staying in a cabin with 6 other guys (1 doc, 1 mentor, and 4 kids). We have electricity (for a light bulb and a showerhead/water heater) and a bathroom with a toilet that cannot flush toilet paper. Instead, used toilet paper must go in a garbage can, which must be emptied very frequently. Running water for the sink and shower is also a nice touch.

            When we were settled, we had lunch right away, which was roast chicken rice and carrots. There are also homemade corn tortillas at every meal, which are very plain, but nonetheless delicious.

            Now, we are resting in the cabins until 4:30 when we will start to sort and package some medicines. Here is a picture of the floor plan of our cabin:

That’s all for now (must rest)

21:00 8/2

            Ok, here’s a short one. So as it turns out, or meeting at 4:30 was just to play some games and get to know each other. We made some corny sketches of “perfect” things. After that, we had dinner: some kind of steak with rice and potatoes. Don’t worry Mom, I took my meds too. After, we had a short song/prayer thing that I didn’t play in this time because I didn’t have a chance to check out the music, but I will play starting tomorrow.

            Then a bunch of us went to play some pool. The pool table is about the only amusing thing to do at night. However, the table is a bit more slanted than the ones I am used to playing on, so the first night’s game did not go so well. Also complicating the game somewhat: pool cues of varying lengths, weights and qualities.

22:00 8/3

            Today we had some delicious pancakes for breakfast. Yes, much better than the ones dad bought from Perkins. After we ate, Leslie (a mentor) gave us a history lesson about Honduras, then a short Spanish lesson from Sylvia, a doctor who was born in Cuba and whose first language was Spanish. Finally, we got to the meds.

            My first assignment: 15,000 kids vitamins to be sorted into 50 tablet bags and labeled, with some help of course. Next was tums – the generic kind, of course – sorted into bags of 30.  Finally, lunch came and everybody was full from eating Flintstone vitamins – just kidding. We had delicious rolled tortillas stuffed with chicken, veggies and cornmeal. Afterwards, we got back to the meds, and we started on ibuprofen – first liquids for kids, then capsules for adults.

At 3:00, we went to Rincon, a nearby town, for a church service. The church in Rincon had been built by Trinity volunteers in previous years, so it was great to see the results of what they had worked on. They had also come with the medical team in the past, and built a water cistern. The service – while all in Spanish – was very interesting, and afterward, I hung around to talk to some of the parishioners. Because Trinity Church had been coming to this town for a while, they somehow all knew about the Red Sox. So when Alex (a student) told them I was a Yankee fan from New York, they started jeering – IN HONDURAS!

            Right before we left, it started raining hard, so our trip back was delayed for a few minutes. After the rain stopped, it was beautiful but noticeably cooler. When we got back, we worked on liquid Benadryl and cough syrup before playing some pre-dinner pool. Dinner consisted of fried chicken, rice and French fries (that would be, arroz con pollo y papas fritas). After dinner, we read and talked about some songs before playing cards.

            It was really great to talk to some Honduran people about normal things – family, baseball, and friends – because it made us seem like family rather than people coming to do community service. We talked about problems with boyfriends etc, even as they deal with other, more important issues that we can’t really imagine having to deal with. It was a great day – tomorrow’s off to El Pedregal to start building.

22:10 8/5

            Sorry, I missed a day because I was playing guitar late last night. We are making great advances with the technology in the cabin – it has been discovered that turning off all the lights (that would be two bulbs) in the cabin yields slightly hotter shower water temperatures. However, this knowledge is rendered useless in a blackout (like we’ve had the last two nights), and the water is cold as hell.

            On a more significant note, we have worked for two days so far in El Pedregal on the foundation for the sacristy/workroom/bible study room for their small church. The terrain is incredibly rocky, so every two inches is another rock, which must be dug out. We completed all of the digging on Monday, so this morning we started making a frame of rebars to strengthen the concrete. I worked the whole morning cutting half-inch-thick rods into thirty-centimeter-long segments with a hacksaw. The girls then bent them around some nails into squares and rectangles. These were then put around four inch-thick rebars to form cages, like such:

            After lunch, we brought out one of the soccer balls I brought and played soccer for a while. Most of the kids were not there because the school is on vacation since the teachers are at a conference. Since not many kids live very close to the school, they wouldn’t normally be around if school was not in session. The greatest thing was to see the smiles on the faces of the few kids who were hanging around, especially eight-year-old Ronny, who played non-stop as long as the soccer ball was outside the bus.

            Every day before work we took our van/bus vehicle up to El Pedregal. Since the roads are not so well maintained, and mostly unpaved as I mentioned, the trip takes about 45 minutes even though it’s not that far away. In addition, because this is the mountainous region, there is a lot of going up and down very steep grades and often through small streams and rivers. However, yesterday some crews were working on a stretch of road near San Matais and today it was nice and smooth for the first few minute of our trip – like the dirt roads in Vermont. Whenever we pass kids and even some adults on the road, they wave at us and we wave back. Some of the houses are almost on the sides of mountains and that means they have their gardens/farms/corn patches on the side of the mountain also. I can’t imagine how they do real farming like that, but somehow they get by.

            One interesting thing that’s been going on since Sunday is that there is a nationwide strike of all government workers. However, Patti (our liaison to El Pedregal and translator) says this is very normal and happens for about a week every month. Although it is technically nationwide, the gov’t worker are mostly in cites like Tegucigalpa and San Pedro, so there is little evidence of it out here. However, there is a Texaco station on the route between the camp and El Pedregal where we saw some men hanging out. In the cities, there are real protests and they often block off streets without warning. Maria Delcarmen, who works for the diocese and organized the whole trip for us says that it might be harder to get around if it is still going on Friday when we go to stay in Tegucigalpa.

            For the most part, the other people on the trip are really cool. The doctors are area all awesome and I was talking to Sylvia about PTSD for a while. She is a psychiatrist who treats many patients who suffer from PTSD, so it was fascinating to hear her take. Another doctor, Bill is a vascular surgeon at Tufts so his specialty is not needed as much where we are. However, he is a devout Sox fan and a cool guy. More about the mentors and kids tomorrow.

            Also, tomorrow I am going with the medical team to a village I can’t pronounce, but we have to hike to it because the road is so bad the van can’t go up it – only the SUV bringing the medical supplies can take it. Adios.

22:15 8/6

            The name of the town we hiked to today is Jocomico (pronounced ho-ko-me-ko). It is a village of 80-100 families and it is way up on the side of a mountain.

            First, some history. Before five years ago, no doctor or medical team had ever visited their village. Medical teams had come to the area, but since they were driven/required to see as many patients as possible, their first choice was not a small remote village that had to be hiked to. Therefore, the first year that the Trinity group went there in 2003 was the first group of doctors most of them had ever seen. Trinity also raised some money to help them build a school, which is also used as a church. It is now built and in use.

            Ok, back to today. There is a “road” leading up to Jocomico, but it is so steep and poorly/never maintained that only four-wheel-drive SUVs can go up it. Our SUV brought the medical supplies up, while we hiked an hour up from the main road. When we got there, it was (for those who have cable) like a Discovery Channel TV show. All the kids were there waiting and hanging out outside the schoolhouse with their uniforms on.

When we went to set up the doctors’ desks and the pharmacy, all the “macho” boys came in to help us carry the desks from one room from one room to the other. After setting up the pharmacy, Margaret (who’s in charge of the pharmacy) explained where everything was and what stuff went to everyone. All the kids got kids’ vitamins (or infant vitamins) and everyone over 2 got toothpaste, a toothbrush, and abendazole, a tablet for parasites. Luckily, at the beginning when it was craziest there were lots of healthy kids who just needed the basics, but later the families and pregnant women (some as young as 15) started coming in. The infants always needed infant vitamins and sometimes other meds to be mixed on the spot.  The most popular meds were acetaminophen (Tylenol) and ibuprofen (aspirin), but of course, they both come in three different types – adult, child, and infant. Some are chewables, some are drops – every med is just different enough that you have to think about what you’re doing all the time. Most bags have labels that need to be filled in with how many ills to take how many times per day, but the rarer meds need labels made up on the spot – in Spanish of course. Although it seemed crazy most of the morning we only ended up seeing a total of 90 patients.

Maria Delcarmen told us that we should leave by 3 because it might start raining, but no clouds ever showed. If it has started raining, however, it would have been a disaster because most of the path back town is actually a dry creek bed, unless it is raining or has rained in the last day or so. We were lucky this year to have no recent rain, but apparently in past years they weren’t so lucky.

While I have been writing this journal entry, Alex, Mike (a mentor) and I have had an amazing idea for a prank on the girls, and another crazy thing happened too. You must read more to find out. I’ll have the details in the morning.

¡Hasta mañana!

7:20 8/7

            Ok, here’s the idea. – Wait, a little background first. We were playing pool last night, as we do most nights, and at 10 Mike came to break it up and tell us to go back to our cabins. Instead of going straight back, I hung around to talk with Mike, Pia (another mentor) Cara, Caroline, and Maddie. There was a group of people who were staying at the camp too, and they were playing some Meringue and Salsa and dancing. As we were about to go to bed, they called us over and told us to start dancing – so we did. We got some basic lesson for about a half hour and the when the batteries on the guy’s PSP died, we decided it was time to go to bed.

            When Mike and I got back to the cabin, everyone was asleep except for Alex. Alex was writing in his journal and I started on mine. Ok, I’ll pick this up later b/c it’s time for breakfast.

19:40 8/7

            Basically, the plan we came up with was that we were going to put a few chickens in the girls’ cabin. No sooner had we come up with the plan when three girls (Cara, Caroline and Maddie) and Pia came into our cabin. At first, I was convinced they were going to prank us, but it turned out they just wanted to sleep in our cabin. Suspicious eh? Well the reason for all of this was that their cabin was infested with spiders. However, after the effects of large amounts of Benadryl wore off, Pia made the girls go back to their cabin – Continued tomorrow.

8:00 8/8

            So ten this morning we talked with the guy who owns this place and gave him $20 to put a couple chickens in the girls’ cabin. When we got back, they were there with a couple large chicken shits on the floor and a note that said “Pest Control courtesy of Peter, Mike and Alex.”

            As fun as this was, what happened in between these two events was easily the best day of the trip. Even though we got to the worksite late, we made a large batch of mortar that had to be filtered before it was mixed. We used that to start building the walls of the sacristy, and we got about 3 layers of bricks all around. After stopping for lunch, we set up the afternoon’s festivities. They had been a couple days in the planning, and we had everything we needed, the girls put up piñatas in the church and got out pb+j sandwiches, nutrigrain bars, and juice boxed for the kids. Mike and I practiced some songs on the guitar that we were going to play for them, and others set up tables and chairs in the school for drawing.  

            After organizing themselves by size and gender in about 15 seconds, the kids filed in for lunch. (Mike, a former 2^nd grade teacher remarked that if you offered 100 bucks to 20 American kids to line themselves up by gender and size in 15 second they couldn’t do it) The loved it – except for one cute little girl who asked for a jelly-only sandwich, which we didn’t have.  We could see them eyeing the piñatas, but Mike, in his experience, knew to plan these for the end. After lunch, John and I were in charge of group 1, the littlest kids, and we stayed in the church for a bible story from our coordinator in El Pedregal, Patricia. She told the story of Noah’s Ark, and she had the kids pretend to be the different animals from the story. It was a great success, and all the kids loved pretending to go on and off the arc as their favorite animals. Next, we brought the little kids to the school to do some drawing. With crayons and paper, the kids were easily entertained for a half hour. Interestingly, they all had the same idea of what to draw – their houses. So the majority of the drawings were houses with animals and people scattered around them. Next were the games and sports, which were out on the field. It was not so much a grass field as it as it was dirt, but the kids loved playing soccer on it. We started with duck duck goose, but since nobody knew how to say goose in Spanish, we called it cat cat dog, or gato gato perro.  It doesn’t really exist as a game in Honduras, but the groups in past years had thought it to the kids in El Pedregal and apparently most of them remembered it. Then we played some wiffleball or as they call it, bate. For some reason, the kids aren’t really into the running part, just the hitting, so we basically just had a wiffleball homerun derby. After all 3 groups had rotated through all 3 stations, we all headed back to the church to hit the piñatas and eat candy. Here is a map:

            We planned to have 3 piñatas – one for each age group – and that turned out to be a great idea. The little kids we just let hit the piñata as hard as they could ten times each. However, with the middle aged and older kids, we had to blindfold them so the poor piñatas didn’t start hemorrhaging candy too quickly. It all worked out great in the end, and we went home more tired than if we had just made concrete all day.

20:15 8/8

            As fun and rewarding as Thursday was, today was even more amazing. Since this was the last day, the medical team also came to El Pedregal. Most of the group spent the morning making more cement for the walls    and leveling the floor by putting dirt back into the room. Pia, who had brough some fluoride treatments with her, decided that she was going to give them out today in El Pedregal, so she asked me to help her do that. I ended up spending the morning (and into the afternoon) outside the school (se 8/8 8:00 entry for map) giving fluoride treatments to the children. Some of the “macho” boys resisted the brightly colored fluoride trays, but for the most part everyone got their treatments. By the time I had finished, we had given our almost 60 flouride treatments, and the pharmacy was very busy and backed up. Although I had already spend my day with the medical team in Jocomico, Sylvia (the doctor/translator) asked me to help translating the simpler medication to patients who were waiting to receive them. I did that for about 2 hours until the rush slowed, and then along with some of the pharmacists that day, went up to the Church to have some lunch.

By this time it was mid-afternoon and the rest of the group had stopped work on the walls and was preparing and cleaning the church for mass. The mass that day had two purposes: the first was to thank us and wish us a safe trip back, but the second part was that our liason, Patricia had been ordained as an Episcopal minister and she was going to become the new Rector of the church. The bishop of Tegucigalpa, Maria Consuelos was there to do the honors after the regular mass. After that was a little ceremony for us. All the kids lined up in the front of the church, and they took turns handing out small handmade pots with our names on them, along with beautiful Gladiolus flowers. This was really the best moment of all, and Mike gave a tearful thanks to all the Honduras who were so nice to us while we were there. He tried to do it in broken Spanish, but he asked Sylvia to help him translate instead. After saying all our goodbyes and packing up, we got back in the van for the ride to Tegucigalpa.

Because Maria Consuelos had been delayed in getting to El Pedregal, our whole evening program was backed up about a half hour. The traffic we hit on the way into and through the capital did not help either, and one time when we were going up a hill, the van stalled in the middle of traffic and started rolling back. Luckily it started back up quickly, but the rest of our ride was filled with the constant fear of instant engine failure. We also passed through what looked like a cross between an outdoor market and a state fair, during which we were glad to have darkly tinted windows. As we neared the hotel, one of the most amusing sights was a restaurant called Restaurante Charlotte’s and proclaims in both English and Spanish: “The best French-Italian-Honduran-Oriental cuisine with the ambiance of Paris in Tegucigalpa!” How can you beat that?

Finally, we arrived at the Maya Hotel and it was sort of like we had arrived back in the US. There were Americans and Europeans walking around, and everyone, Honduran and otherwise, spoke English. The hotel was like a Marriott or a Hilton - nothing too special but nice all around. However, this is a five star hotel for Honduras, and frankly the transition from poor rural village to luxury hotel was not that easy. We changed and right to a catered farewell dinner with our translators, various people from the diocese, and Marco, the head builder. Afterwards we went into the beautiful pool and then the sauna (but not the hot tub because it wasn’t very warm) – but it was quite a change from what we have been doing the rest of the week.  Ok, we’re leaving kind of early for the flight tomorrow.

00:45 8/10

            I have arrived safely back in Boston after a full day of flying. I started with a nice buffet breakfast and then some early-morning shopping in the Hotel. That continued in Toncontin Airport. Among my purchases was a Honduras national team soccer jersey, which I had been thinking about buying since I got there. Both flights were entirely uneventful, no delays and both aisle seats. We were kind of hoping there would be a delay so we could hand out more– there had been in all the past years – but not this time. After we landed and said goodbyes, Dad and I decided to stay overnight with Pia who lives in Newton. After watching YouTube videos for a couple hours with her three daughters, I am finally in bed.

            I have a couple thanks to give out, first to my trusty spiral bound journal, which has made it back and forth with me. Also, thank you (whoever you are) for reading it and I hope you enjoyed it. That’s all folks.