The First 6 Months
Danli, El Paraiso
We began our adventure with Pure Water in Danli in the South of Honduras close to the border with Nicaragua. Danli was the birthplace of Pure Water for the World's filter project here in Honduras. We we off to learn from the best.
Something I realized all too quickly was that I should have started reviewing my Spanish a month before I even arrived! The moment we boarded the plane from New York, Spanish became the only way to communicate.
We settled in for a mere two weeks trying to learn as much as we can during this time. We were slightly set back by my baggage never making it to Honduras and then finding out the next day when we had to go back that there was a Teacher's Union strike and they had taken over the highway to the Airport. It was a good way to introduce us to this country that is to be our home for the next year.
We had been busy nearly every day in Danli trying to learn as many different facets of the project as possible. That is until David Stanley, Operations Manager came and swept us off on a cross country trip to get to know all the ongoing projects in country.
Trujillo
Our first stop on our 3rd week in country was to Trujillo, the first place of Spanish settlement discovered by Christopher Columbus. This was the site of Amy and Owen Reese, the prodigious origional volunteers of Pure Water. Our time was too short with them. During our stay there we got to visit some of the Garifuna (West African decendants) and Peche (indiginous) communities and even to possibly the best Rotary Party ever.
Santa Rosa de Aguan was one community that we were lucky enough to visit. Many people here in Honduras have heard about it because of the devastation that was caused to it by Hurricane Mitch in the late 90's. This village was basically inundated and even today, years later, the streets are still non-existant and the sand levels are high up against houses. But what struck us even more was the contrast between this community and what we had known in Danli. Compared to the Philippines, I do admit, it was nice to see diversity again! Garifunas are the descendants of a slave ship wreck survivors which arrived from West Africa. Many of their traditions have remained in tact throughout the years, including a form of ancestor worship, dugu. During our visit, they were performing the dugu, the feast of the dead but we weren't wearing a red bandanna so could not enter. After staying only a few short days it was already time to head off to the other sites.
Santa Barbara
We arrived in Santa Barbara to find a project that had basically been on hold for nearly a year. The project had been started and really only got the chance to install one community. The local Rotary club had been performing every aspect of the project on their own whenever they could find the time. They were not interested in having assistance from Pure Water at that time. When we arrived they began to realize that they weren't able to perform the tasks required in the time needed and relented to allowing us to hire staff to work exclusively on the project. We had the good fortunte to find Ninette, who an extremely bright, energetic and tenacious empolyee. It took a few tries to find her, we luckily had the help of the local Peace Corps Volunteers to make their recommendations. During this time we were also looking for a new Country Director. When we first made arrangments to come to Honduras, I certainly did not expect to be hiring staff! Considering this is not my language or country, I was a bit overwhelmed but for the 4 positions which we have personally helped fill I think we did very well indeed.
MAMUCA and Rotary- La Ceiba
We spent the majority of our first 5 months attending meetings and trying to coordinate the many different parties involved in making this project work. MAMUCA is essentially a government organization comprised of 5 neighboring municipalities to combine resources to do development projects. They were to set up the filter workshop which will manufacture for both the MAMUCA project and the Rotary project. We also worked with them to identify communties which are in need of filters. Our Rotary club has been very involved with the entire start up process, even down to helping us find a place to live. Unfortuantely, the first three months were mostly made up of meetings and not a great deal of community interaction. We spent a lot of time working with the 14 staff members of the filter workshop to train them. Finding a truck proved to be a great deal more challenging than we imagined and took some time, the Rotarians were there every step of the way.
By nearly our 6 month mark, we were searching for and hiring our own staff. Enelida and Keyla had been recommended highly to us and proved to be the right match for our project. After having the car and staff in place, we were finally ready to put some filters in houses! All of the planning and meetings finally paid off at the end of January, almost exactly our 6 month mark when we did our first installations in the community of El Recreo!
