Erin Miller

I have been hanging out in La Esperanza the past couple of weeks and I have some stories to tell. The first weekend post-Costa Rica trip I went on a hike with my host family to a neighboring town, Yamaranguila. The five year old walked for 3 hours with minimal complaints, though I did end up carrying her backpack, which she had insisted on bringing. We got some great views, good mangoes, and got to see the biggest cactus ever in a pine forest.

Host family hiking to Yamaranguila


the biggest cactus ever in a pine forest
The second weekend in town I spent Saturday night on top of the shrine to the virgin mary drinking beer and looking out at the city with my fellow ex-patriots. Then I had an amazing Sunday enjoying life in La Esperanza. I slept in (until about 8:30) then got up and read my book in the shade, drinking more of the strong Honduran coffee than I should probably ingest on a regular basis. My host family invited me out to lunch with them at one of the best restaurants in La Esperanza and I got to spend a couple of hours enjoying amazing food and the fact that I could comfortably sit at a table around which everyone was speaking Spanish, and actually understand what was going on. After lunch we went to Yamaranguila a second time, this time to celebrate a 15 a’os birthday party (the Hispanic version of our sweet 16). The birthday girl was living at a home for girls in the woods outside of Yamaranguila. Someone had reported to my host dad that the girl and her sister were being neglected (they were two children out of 18). So my host dad had taken them in his jeep out to this home opened by some missionaries and soon after completed the paper-work with their family to get their custody transferred to the home. Both girls seemed happy and healthy, and it was nice to get a small window into a story with such a happy ending. The home that was opened by the missionaries is a a really cool project and is helping some of Honduras’s most needy girls. They are looking for volunteers, particularly English teacher-types and doctors or nurses. They have a school and a medical clinic on site. They can provide room and board for single woman or married couples. It is a religious organization so there is a bit of praising God and thanking Jesus, but as long as that is something that you are alright with, it would be a great volunteer opportunity. I spent the evening emailing my boyfriend and eating a brownie at the Internet caf’. That’s right, brownies, in La Esperanza. A north American woman (bless her soul) cooks deserts for the caf’. After seeing all of us North Americans in the caf’, she made a batch of brownies, knowing we would love it, and we do. When I walked into the caf’ the grandma behind the counter kept telling me, “We have brown, we have brown.” I was only confused for a second. Afterward I went and drank a couple of beers at the home of one of the English teachers in town and marveled at on of the best Honduran Sundays.
My work at the hospital continues to go well and I have added some pictures of some of my educational work at the Albergue to my post asking for donations. You can see the pictures by going here. I have also taken a few days the last couple of weeks to go up to the construction sites in the hills of the western highlands of Honduras, just to do some physical labor. So that at the end of the morning I can look down at a pile of dirt or mud, a stack of bricks, or a row of logs and know that I helped move it. This morning was one of the hardest days of work so far. We spent three and a half hours moving logs from where they were being cut and shaped at the bottom of a hill to the top of the hill where the house is being built. The work was well worth it though. It is one of the daughter’s birthday today and in her honor, the family had slaughtered one of its bulls. We got to eat some of the meat for lunch. It was some of the best meat I have ever had and that is coming from a semi-vegetarian. There was something about eating the meat of an animal as its upside down corpse dripped blood onto the dirt floor of the house, it was an interesting cultural experience. The family who’s house we worked on today is currently living in one of the most run-down and cramped houses I have seen, complete with a dirt floor and a leaky roof, and it was terrific to be able to help them out. I did feel a bit guilty about eating meat with children around with the red hair and swollen bellies of kwashiorkor, but it was also impossible to refuse. We rode down the mountain in the back of Pablo’s truck. Pablo’s truck probably deserves an entry of its own, but the bed is as leaky as the family’s roof and it has basically no shocks, back-fires constantly, and still makes the trip. It is also from Colorado, or at least that is what I have extrapolated from the bumper sticker.

the old house

five people sleep here

five people live here

Carrying wood up a mountain

the new house

the bull

Pablo’s truck

KBPI Rocks the Rockies
I have gone through a period of homesickness this past week. I see some things here and wonder if things can ever get better, if volunteers could ever do enough, or if they ever do anything at all. I went on a run this week (my first since I have been here and I am still sore from it). I saw a woman gathering firewood to cook dinner with her three kids running naked from the waist down on the path behind her. I looked over and waived and smiled. She smiled back and it took my oxygen-deprived brain (La Esperanza is at a slightly higher elevation than Denver) to realize that something was wrong. She had two black eyes, one new than the other, and one side of her face was too swollen to smile through. I slowed my pace and gradually came to a stop. I figured I would at least go introduce myself and ask how she was. Then I saw a man emerging from the bushes beside me. He was walking quickly towards me, menacing, and with a machete on his built. I shook my head and with a pang of guilt kept running.
And then there was a woman in one of the rooms where women wait after giving birth. She had some sort of complication and began to bleed profusely. The woman had been taken out of the room but blood still laid soaking through her blankets and the hospital mattress and covered the floor of the room that five woman were still using to recover. Hospital staff walked through the mess and took a snack break.
The laboratory only takes samples between 6:30 and 7:30am. When people arrive late, even when they have traveled up to 5 hours on a bus to get there, they are often turned away and told to come back the next day.
But then, when I was taking a moment of zen this week to sit in the sun and drink some coffee, some health volunteers came by the house and shouted up at me, “Do you have any children under five at the house?” I explained that they had already been vaccinated and they thanked me and continued on their way. This week was the national campaign of vaccination. Every child under five was required to report to one of the many vaccine stations around town for vaccination. Police are known to come looking for the parents of some children who fall behind on their vaccinations. I had tried to help out with the vaccine campaign earlier in the week, and I did give a couple of doses of oral polio, but in the end, there were already sufficient numbers of Honduran volunteers, and that makes me feel like maybe Honduras will be able to pull its way, at least partly, out of this mess.