Two boys at ProNiño's home for boys share their 4-H work with Emily Pitts.
New Perspectives Emerge from Honduran Immersion Tour
Emily Pitts couldn't flip through her Spanish phrase book fast enough.
Her Honduran host rattled off a few more questions and then followed with a simple "vamos." Pitts didn't need a translation for "let's go." The phrase started her off on four days of following Maribel Garcia around Santa Lucia.
"I don't speak Spanish, so it was hard to get started," she said. "I didn't understand what the lady I stayed with did for a living. I thought she worked at home. The next morning, I got up for breakfast. There were so many people coming and going, and then I realized she ran a diner out of her kitchen. Her food was so delicious. I've been missing it."
Pitts, a Web designer for the University of Georgia College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, was on a trip that landed her alone in a country where she didn't know the language or the customs. After four days, the immersion experience was over, and she toured the rest of Honduras with 15 other Cooperative Extension and public service and outreach faculty members.
"By the end of two weeks, people were sending me out to ask questions, simply because I took the risk" to learn Spanish, she said.
Extension employees traveled
Honduras from July 7 to July 21
to learn how they could better
understand Latino clientele in
Georgia and better communicate
and work with them. After
staying in Santa Lucia, they
visited Tegucigalpa to view urban
development issues, Zamorano
to study tropical and organic
agriculture, Copan to learn about
regional history, Tela to see the
botanical gardens and Progreso
to volunteer at ProNiño, a boys'
home.
The group hikes 6,500 feet through Zamorano University's biological reserve.
What the 16 learned was different for each person.
"Since I support Extension at the state level, I can now bring a new perspective to projects for outreach and extension efforts," Pitts said.
"For me, it was looking at agriculture and seeing what I could bring back," said Clarke County Extension agent Amanda Tedrow. "We're hoping to start community gardens in Hispanic communities in Athens."
She also enjoyed learning more about organic farming at Zamorano.
Pitts noticed the closeness the Hondurans showed: "It seemed like more people were willing to participate in each others' lives. The situation puts them so close to each other that it requires people to work together." In Santa Lucia, a farmer from down the mountain would drop off vegetables at Garcia's diner. Her customers' leftover food would go into a slop bucket for someone else's pigs.
Life can be hard for farmers in Honduras. They work "a hillside or a mountainside and move rocks manually and are using a hoe," Tedrow said.
Pitts was impressed that "people actually use their land. Almost everybody I saw had a banana or papaya tree in their yards."
Back in Georgia, she has found herself paying more attention to what is going on in Latin America.
"Doing something like this allows you to see people as more multidimensional than just here to do a job," she said, "with so much more rich life history that they may not be able to bring here.
"For this tour, we had every need
provided for us. We had food, shelter,
good health and other basic needs as
well as luxuries like money and items
brought from the U.S. This is not a simple
reality for many immigrants, regardless
of how they arrive. Not only is there a
language barrier but also a daily struggle
to make ends meet."