Perth - Gracias 2010/11: Canada World Youth Adventure V

Men in the aldea cutting sugar cane

I've really gotten behind.  3 whole weeks have passed since I last wrote!  Ok, so I realize that 3 weeks isn't THAT much time, but as I learned in India (for example), a whole lot can happen/change/completely flip over in just 3 weeks.First and foremost, I've arrived safely in Honduras!!  Our whole group made it to both the beautiful camp we did our orientation at (close to Lake Yojoa) and Gracias, our host community, intact and unscathed.
So I guess I should give a bit of an update about Juan Carlos and my trip to Montreal for the first ever CWY Learning Forum!  It was a very interesting week for both of us.  When we got on the bus at Carleton Place to head for Montreal it felt so strange to be leaving our host community and to be on a bus full of people that I didn't know.  Not to say that I knew everyone in Perth, but I suppose, living on the farm, seeing the same 3 people everyday for almost 3 months and getting to know intimately, my new Honduran/Canadian family. . .and then leaving them all behind to be out on my own for a week felt very very strange.
When we got to Montreal we checked in to our hotel and set off to find some Indian food (since Juan Carlos had never tried it before).  Since neither of us know Montreal very well, we weren't having much luck. . .BUT!  one of the men we asked for directions was so excited that Juan Carlos also spoke Spanish that he offered to buy us dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant close by!  He was really nice and was from Barcelona.  It was a great introduction to our week in the big city.
The first day of the forum was organized and run by the Ottawa/Kenya exchange (yes I realize it's a city and a country, and I feel weird about that too. I don't know the name of the city in Kenya the youth are exchanging with, but the name of the organization is Kenvo).  The day consisted of 3 workshops centered around youth empowerment and were led by youth from the Ottawa/Kenvo exchange.  It was very well run and led to very interesting discussions and conclusions about youth engagement, youth's relationship to organizations, and resources available to youth.  We had a talent show that night by the youth for the international partners of CWY and CWY employees, including the president of the organization.
The second day was essentially the same workshops, led by youth, but for the international partners.  All of the youth that had been there the first day left (except for 10 of us) and were replaced by 90 presidents, and program managers from all of the international organizations that partner with Canada World Youth.  It was very interesting to see the different opinions that the "adults" had compared to the "youth" and how diminished we felt the youth voice became, in actual numbers and also in seeming importance, especially considering the conference's aim was to promote youth empowerment.
The following days focused on different topics, and knowledge sharing between organizations.  The first day focused on Environment and Health, then Gender Equity and the last day was for coming to some conclusions and ended with a public cocktail party and "youth panel discussion".  I won't go into too many details about the rest of the forum and my opinions, although I'm very open to discussing them further.  However, I felt that the real purpose of the forum was much more to give Canada World Youth a more recognized name, keep international partners happy and actually put faces to names for a lot of people.  CWY has undergone a lot of changes in the past year due to government pressure and threats of funding cuts and so they've had to reform some of their aims.  I think the forum probably had a lot more to do with that than youth empowerment, but it was still a very interesting event to be a part of!
After the learning forum, Juan Carlos, our project supervisor and I got on the train to Toronto and left for Honduras the next day with our group!
We arrived in Honduras, after a stop over in El Salvador (which looks beautiful from the sky!) around 9pm on the 30th.  We stayed overnight in a hotel in San Pedro Sula and then bused to our orientation camp. The camp was in a beautiful forested (jungled?) area in the mountains with waterfalls and lots of greenery.  We were pretty busy having group discussions and official orientation stuff but we also had enough time to go swimming in the waterfalls and go on a few hikes, which was really nice.

Waterfall at orientation

Swimming in the waterfall!

View from the camp

Then on the 6th (?) I think, we headed out on a bus to Gracias!  It was a pretty long bus ride!  When we finally got to Gracias we were all pretty tired but excited to meet our new host families and spend our first night together!
Gaby and my host family are Dilcia and Carlos Mazier with their 3 kids Karla, Nicole and Tato (whose real name Eduardo!).  They are really nice and a great host family for us.  They also have a lot of animals. . .2 dogs, 2 parrots and another bird, 5 rabbits a rooster (who wakes us up every morning at 5:30 -__-) and a Watusa!  Gaby and I now share the same room in the back of the house too and only have access to cold showers. . .which isn't amazing, but it's ok!  Unfortunately I haven't been able to acquire a bike yet so I've been running instead.  There are hot springs and lots of mountains in Gracias so we've been running to the hot springs (about 6km away) and back as a group on the weekends.

Traditional dancing performed by the local children

We decided as a group at the beginning of the Honduras phase to split up some counterpart pairs for work project purposes.  Gaby and I decided that it was more important for us both to be doing work that we were really interested in than to work together, so we ended up splitting up for our work projects.  I¨m now working at Colosuca which is a development organization that works in the five municipalities surrounding Gracias and is working to help the municipalities both achieve the Millenium Development Goals and to encourage tourism in the area.  I´m now working with Luz Dariela who is another participant in the program and it´s pretty cool to get to know someone else a little better and in a different setting, though sometimes I miss Gaby at work

Colosuca building

For now I think I will leave it at that since this update is already getting very long. . .We´ve also had 2 more interesting EADs and I´ve learned a bit about Colosuca and am continuing to learn about politics and it´s relationship to development work. . .which is always very interesting to me but I will leave that until next update!

Street scene: Gracias

Dusk in Gracias

Parque Central

Street scene: Gracias

Castillo in Gracias

Perth - Gracias 2010/11: Canada World Youth Adventure IV

Lanark: Country roads, take me home!

We're already at the end of the Canadian phase of our program!!!  We still have another week in Canada, but due to some unexpected events, I probably won't have time to send another update before heading out to Honduras on October 30th!So, without further ado, I will try to sum up the last incredibly eventful 3 weeks of my life!  It looks like this update will be full of web videos!

Gaby's first frost

Firstly is probably thanksgiving.  Happy belated Thanksgiving!!!  My family (including my brother) all came down to Perth for Thanksgiving and celebrated it with my counter-part, host family and their parents and kids as well!  It was really great!  It was also very well timed.  The night before Thanksgiving we were making pumpkin pies and playing board games and not really paying very much attention to the temperature outside.  When we woke up in the morning we realized that we had gotten our first real frost!!  Gaby was VERY excited when my Dad came to pick us up for breakfast to see the frost!  We didn't get a chance to return to the farm until after we had met up with everyone and had our pot-luck Thanksgiving dinner in town. . .but when we got back, we realized that the frost had killed everything!!  Although I know it is the natural cycle, it was quite sad to see the crops we had worked so hard on for the past 2 months, dead.  The true meaning of Thanksgiving was a lot more clear and real to me this year.  Giving thanks for the year's harvest, that so much, for a relatively short period of time, was sown from the land. . .and now to enter into the cold, fallow winter.
The next week we had our EAD led by Erin and Gaby (another Gaby!).  They had us focus on toxins and harmful substances contained in everyday things that we use.  They presented "The Story of Stuff", to give us a quick outline of the impact a consumerist lifestyle has on our health, human rights, the environment, etc.  It's a very interesting video that I saw a few years ago but was very good to revisit.  I highly recommend it! 
Following their EAD we had an interview for a learning forum in Montreal and then went to a meeting in Perth for a "transition town" initiative.  First I will talk about the interviews.
Canada World Youth redesigned the way they run their programs due to threats of funding cuts last year.  Now, all of the programs that CWY does are 5 year programs where the youth change each year, but the exchange destinations remain the same.  As a part of this, CWY, along with it's many partners have decided to hold Learning Forums as well.  This year will be the first Learning Forum in Montreal where youth from many different groups participating across Canada, with their many counter-parts from around the globe will all meet together to discuss the learning that is going on in the program and youth involvement. The good news was that our group needed to be represented at the forum, the bad news was that only 2 out of 18 of us could be funded!  So we had to have interviews for the forum.  Our group is full of amazing individuals and really, anyone would be fully capable of representing our group at the forum, but in the end Juan Carlos and myself were chosen as the representatives!!!!! :D  So, I will be heading off to Montreal tomorrow until the morning of the 29th (the day before we leave for Honduras!!) for the forum.  I'm really looking forward to it! :D

stop climate change clothesline!

So onto transition towns!  The idea of a transition town is to create a tight community that is committed to curbing their use of non-renewable resources (namely oil, gas, coal) and investing more in their community!  Here is a very informative video about it!  Judging by the number of people who came out to the meeting, it looks like they might be able to get this idea up and at least walking pretty soon in Perth!

Then on 10/10/10 we, along with 7343 groups in 188 countries, participated in a public action for stopping climate change.  The action was organized by Erin in our group as a part of her work placement and 350.org.  Our action involved painting t-shirts with messages about stopping climate change and hanging them up on a clothesline to promote the idea of air-drying your clothes to cut down on both energy usage and expenses.  We did the activity at the farmer's market in Perth and it was very well received.  We got our pictures in the Perth Courier, EMC and there was an interview done for one of the local radio stations as well!

10/10/10 clothesline for 350.org international event

The following week Annabelle and Dyana did their EAD focusing on indigenous people.  They brought in a very interesting guest, Ben Powless, to talk to us about some of his experiences as an activist for indigenous rights.  We also had a visit from Shalak, a Montreal artist who taught us more about art as a means of expression and tool for social change.  She let us experiment with some spray paint, caps and wooden boards that she prepared for us and taught us how to make sweet graffiti letters!


That pretty much brings us to this week where we have been doing our debriefing of the Canadian phase of the program.  This week we've been talking a lot about power and privilege in our group, stereotyping and what to expect in Honduras, etc.  We watched this TED talk which was extremely interesting, about the dangers of the "single story".

Shalak's workshop

Fall in Perth!

Tonight, finally, we had our Thank you dinner for the Perth Community.  It was a Hallowe'en, potluck, costume party and it went AMAZINGLY.  We started off the evening with an activity where different tables were given different numbers of coupons to determine how many helpings of food they could get.  Some tables had 4 coupons each while other tables had only 1 coupon each.  We made the guests believe that there was no option for more food and no possibility of getting more than their coupons' worth.  This obviously created some frustrations and anger, to the point where a few guest yelled at us for our unfairness.  When everyone was sitting again with their various portions of food we read the "if the world were a village of 100 people" statistics.  Everyone immediately understood what we were getting at.  Since our program is focused on Food Security and that is interconnected with access to food, we decided to incorporate that activity into our Thank you dinner to facilitate discussion about the issue.  It went very well.  Following that, we had the typical sentimental Thank yous, gifts, awards, presentation, weeping, laughing, singing, dancing AND SNOW!!!!!!!  Yes, we just had our first snow here in Perth this evening!  All of the Honduran participants were SO excited!!!!!  It was really the perfect ending to phase one of the program.
So tomorrow I will be saying a goodbye to my host family/work placement and the wonderful community of Perth to head off to Montreal for the learning forum and this time next week I will be just a day away from HONDURAS!!!!!!!!!!!

Canada World Youth REPRESENT!

Wish me luck!  I will try to send more updates if possible from there too!
AND  if you, or anyone you know is interested in doing a CWY program, APPLY!!!!!  You must be a youth (between the ages of 17-24)!! Application deadline for next year is December!