The Beginning

I have decided to start a little blog. However, even the word blog turns me off from starting one, maybe I can say online thoughts. I thnk I am better with calling it that. I feel at times some blogs or online journals can be full of self adoration and laudation, and full of ego; however, even with this being said, I still find myself intently reading these collections written by friends and enjoying of hearing what they are doing with their life. I hope in my online thoughts throughout the summer I will be able to share a different culture.

To begin, some of you may not know what I am doing this summer, especially some family members and definitely most of my friends have no idea. Not that I even care too much to share to be honest, but nonetheless I have been working for the past year and a half in Cincinnati. I have been volunteer after work many hours after work getting involved in the community and building relationships with the agencies across the city that deal with inner city issues. I found that even though I spent much time after work volunteering, I still had the urge to dedicate more time to service work. So I decided to apply to Amigos de Las Americas because it is a relatively short term project (2.5 months) and I figured I still had a chance to maintain my job, although that was not certain at the time I decided however, a fact which I was fine with.

After getting accepted, I was able to keep my job because of my great, fair and supportive manager who understands my desire to do activities outside of work. For that I have been extremely lucky as with my great coworkers who allow me to enjoy my time at the office. Nonetheless I am in Honduras now at the beginning stages of the project where I will be supervising volunteers who come down from America and they will be living in pairs in small rural communities outside La Paz, Honduras. They will be teaching health and environment issues in the community with the help of a Honduran youth counterpart in the rural community to help build leadership skills for both the North American and Latin American volunteers in an aim to help the sustainability of our projects after the departure of the US volunteers. They will also work on a small community based initiative in the village to build something that the leaders in the community find to be beneficial to the entire village. My role will be to support the project and the volunteers ensuring that everything is able to be completed smoothly, including making sure any materials required are available by working with a local NGO and ensuring the emotional and physical healthy of the volunteers are not a hindrance to the project.

I think that is a good description of what is going on this summer, I will try to write an update soon on the villages and the country of Honduras in general.

For your reading pleasure, I was driving around Honduras with fellow supervisors and we saw a cop and my instinctual reaction towards police in foreign developing countries is to avert my eyes and continue driving lest I want an inquisition on the story of my life leading in bribe to the gentlemen there for our protection. Nonetheless, due to these sentiments we were all elated after we drove right by the cop without him saying a word to us because he was turning looking the other direction. We continued forward in glee knowing we escaped yet another potential problem we would have had to deal with. As we continue forward we drive up a bridge and start sarcastically second guessing the purpose of the cop’s position and even gleefully conjecture the funny possibility that the bridge we just started driving on is ending and as we are laughing in unison about this farfetched possibility, I slam on the brakes because I realize, we were actually driving on a bridge that was ending! My coworker begins to yell and wakes up the third passenger in the back as we realized the real purpose of the cop. Instead of paying attention to cars driving into disaster, he was minding his own business as we nearly killed ourselves, and to make the matter even better, on the second bridge that all the cars were driving on, there was an open truck full of army men pointing and laughing at the situation we found ourselves in. Very shortly after, we also began laughing at what turned out to be a close encounter!