Tuesday 18 August 2015

My first taste of Honduras

On the plane, London - Miami
where we could later catch
the plane to San Pedro Sula
I have now been in Honduras for a total of two weeks and I am loving it! The scenery is so beautiful. When I typed in Honduras or La Union into Google it only came up with dirt tracks and some rather dull scenery but the mountains here are breathtaking and the land is covered in lots of lush forestry. It seems like a very relaxing place, quite the opposite to the tone portrayed in the media. The journey here though was completely different and has highly stressful. Terminal five was shut down in Heathrow airport and quite a few of the Project Trust volunteers still had their luggage stuck in London when they arrived in Honduras! As a result it had to be sent to each of the individual projects, taking 2-3 days. Luckily everyone had packed some spare pairs of underwear in their hand luggage so it wasn't the end of the world! Getting to our actual project from Honduras was quite relaxing though. We stopped off at the airport, had a typical american fried chicken dish with fries (which we got advised to eat so there would be no upset stomachs for the bus journey!). Then after that we hoped onto the mini bus and had a short journey into San Pedro Sula where we got to our hotel. It was quite a nice hotel, and even had a swimming pool, but all of us were so tired from the journey we couldn't bare the thought of doing any exercise!

Training in Gracias 


The Project Trust Life Abundant Teachers
The next day we headed off to the town of Gracias which was about three hours away. We stayed in small rooms, one between two and spent our first few days there. One of the best things about the place we were staying in was the hammocks outside our rooms- they were so relaxing to lay in. The purpose of going to Gracias for this amount of time was so that we could meet the American teachers who were also helping out at the Vida Abundante schools near the area. After a quick introduction we headed out to the school in Gracias to start our teacher training which consisted of several different workshops lead by experienced teachers in the area. It was very useful and provided us with a good insight to what teaching would be like and the main differences about Honduran/Western cultures.

Arriving at La Union 


The journey to la Union provided us with some fantastic scenery as we spent most of the journey travelling in the back of a pick up truck! It gave us an amazing opportunity to see all the forests, small villages and coffee plantations but it also gave us some very stiff muscles the next day- the journey was so bumpy and lasted about 3 hours! When we got there we got introduced to our Host Ana, her husband and her seven year old daughter. They were all very nice and provided us with a very warm welcome. Ana also showed us around our accommodation, an annex at the bottom of her garden which the family had built themselves. It's a very nice place to live, the washing up bowl is directly by the window so when me and my partner Maia are washing up we have a superb view to look at!
Some of the fantastic views!

After a day of settling in we spent the next week at the school helping teachers with their displays and setting up our own. We also did a lot of planning lessons and it did our Spanish a lot of good to communicate with the Honduran teachers. In the evenings we met up with the American teachers and often did things like watching films together and eating pizza. There is also a small café in the town called Café Zazzo which sells such good ice cream. It also is one of the only public places apart from the school which has wifi so many of the teachers use it to mark work ect. One of the things me and Maia have enjoyed most in our project is cooking our own food. There are so many fresh fruit and vegetables to buy and the tortillas we can use can make really tasty and quick meals. We're quite lucky about living with a host family as they're so nice and Ana often gives us advice and ideas about what to cook and eat. The scariest part of the project was without doubt the 13th of August- Results day!! Maia and I had to stay over the American teachers house to receive them due to the fact that we had no wifi and due to the time difference we had to stay up to two in the morning to receive them. But luckily all the waiting paid off and we both got into uni:) So we had some celebrational pancakes in the morning to celebrate!

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