Meeting AMIGOS: Preston Palm

After landing in Tegucigalpa, all the Honduran AMIGO volunteers were bussed to this mountain retreat in the city of La Paz. La Paz is both a district and a city in Honduras. A district is the equivalent to a state in the US. In La Paz we had a 3-day long briefing session to review the basics we had learned in chapter training. We learned important lessons about health and safety, cultural sensitivity, and AMIGOS protocol. After the three days were up, we were assigned routes and partners. A route was basically defined as all the volunteers assigned to a single supervisor who would visit the volunteers in community once a week. (I am the guy in the white shirt in the upper right hanging of the arch.)


This was my route. The ten of us were assigned to Megan (the woman standing to the right with her thumbs up). At 19 years old, Megan was not much older than the rest of us. She was fun to hang out with when she came to visit us in community, but she also kept up with our progress and provided us with the resources
we needed to finish our projects.


These were my partners: Emily Gao (left) and Sarah Goldman (right). We were assigned to Santiago-Puringla a small community in the district of La Paz. We were all from very different backgrounds and parts of the country. Sarah was from a private girls’ school in Connecticut and Emily was from a public school in California. We learned a lot from each other and became great friends.