Public Health Brigade

Before our public health brigade officially began, we make the 3 hour rocky bus ride to Zuzurlar to meet the families we would be working with. On a normal day, the ride would be an hour and a half, but since the rock "bridge" we had to cross was flooded over and some of the rocks had been displaced by the rain, we had to forgo the short cut and learn to hold our pee.

Attempting to cross the river.

The community was quiet - minus the 2 little boys we came across shouting and throwing sharp rocks at each other with incredible precision. The community already had their own church and primary school (which consisted of 2 classrooms) and the Architecture Brigade was in the midst of building a secondary school. This was a huge deal because students that want to attend secondary school currently have to take the public bus for hours to reach Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras. Students usually are only able to make the trip once a week, and must study on their own the rest of the time.

Our first glimpse of the town of Zuzurlar.

Our projects in Zuzurlar consisted of building a latrine, stove, pila (essentially a large cement block that holds clean water), and cement floors for 2 houses. It was exciting meeting the 2 families - there were a lot of questions asked to get to know the families. What I liked most about the program is that we would be building the projects with the families. As opposed to swooping in with our American ideals and building something for someone else, we were working together with people we were getting to know to building something together.

We split up into 2 groups - one working at each home. My group worked on the home of Daniel and Nancy, newlyweds who had saved enough money to be able to move into a home of their own. The ot
her group worked with a couple with 4 children. During construction, Nancy would boil us organic coffee and Daniel, his little brother, and his brother's friend worked with us on their home.

Photo on left: Daniel and Nancy

Starting from the left with the girl with the green shirt and going clock-wise is Becca, Daniel's brother, Rachel, Vishan, Angelique, and Daniel mixing cement.

With the help of a couple of amazing and very patient masons we finished construction on day 3. The last day we were in the community consisted of the "despedida" or "farewell". We had lunch together and shared our thoughts about the last few days of construction. It was really exciting to see the finished products and that they worked!