Homeward bound

This morning I managed to talk to my host mother on the phone -- a sister had taken her cell phone to a city with electricity and charged it, as there is still no electricity or running water in my entire municipality. The municipality is still cut off from vehicular transport, houses have washed away, they are drinking water that's basically mud and running out of food. They can leave the village walking and go to where food is sold, but that doesn't help them much, as at least two-thirds of my community are subsistence farmers and have never actually bought large quantities of food. They have always eaten the corn, beans, chickens, eggs and fruits from their own farms. And all those crops have been ruined by the hurricane.

I cannot write this post without shaking. We hear about poor people or disaster victims starving all the time, but these are people I know, whom I have lived with as family for a year.

Tomorrow morning I am leaving for my village and bringing enough food and water for a couple of days, including food for my host family. I'm mostly going to "assess the situation" -- to see exactly where and what kind of help is needed. Apparently some helicopters arrived with food yesterday, but did not bring that much. Most of the relief supplies are going to places that are even harder hit than mine.

So that's my life, and the lives of the damnificados, so different from just a week ago.

Paz y amor.

Damnificados

That is the Spanish word for "victims" -- specifically, I believe, referring to people who have lost their houses -- but I think the English cognate damned is actually more accurate. Aside from the death count which I last heard was 144, about 13,000 Salvadorans have lost their homes due to Hurricane Ida, which caused devastating floods and landslides Saturday and Sunday.

I am still evacuated in San Salvador, and the more I find out about my community, the worse the news gets. There is still no vehicular access, as both roads to my site are collapsed. In my municipality, 300 houses have been damaged or destroyed. There is no electricity or worse, water, or telephone connections. About 180 people have been evacuated from their houses and are living in schools. Four people died in a landslide in a village neighboring mine.

As I cannot communicate with my community, I don't know how badly people are suffering. Most people have stores of water that last a few days at least if water doesn't run. But if roads don't open soon and water systems aren't fixed, the situation could get much worse.

That's why some Peace Corps staff and former volunteers have set up a disaster relief fund. To donate to it, go to aidelsalvador.org. Much of the money will probably go to communities worse off than mine, but even that would be worthwhile. We are also waiting to hear whether we can get USAID money for relief efforts, which we would join them in implementing. And I might set up my own fund if what we get proves insufficient.

Not to be idle here in San Salvador, today a bunch of displaced volunteers helped TV stations and NGOs receive, sort and load food, clothes etc. to the victims. We bought them a bunch of soap.

My second year in the Peace Corps might turn into a disaster relief job rather than a small-scale community development job. Right now all my previous projects -- classes, gardens, community clean-ups, educational skits -- barely seem important next to the weight of what happened this weekend.

Paz y amor.

I am safe

from the widespread mudslides and flooding that have killed more than 120 people in El Salvador since Saturday. Here is the Washington Post story. I was at my group's one-year anniversary party in another part of the country when the hardest rains/destruction hit, although my community is in the part of the country most affected by the hurricane. I was ordered to come to San Salvador, the capital, which is safe and unaffected, and am being put up here until it is safe to return to my community. Three people have died in my town and many more in nearby towns. I don't think there were any mudslides in my community, just a lot of flooding. The storm is pretty much over and I will be able to go home once the roads are open. I will report more information when I have it; obviously am pressed for time right now.

Paz y amor.

Fin del año

Final exams ended last week and my frantic work at school is drawing to a close. From now until mid-January my life will be much more chill. I'm looking forward to much more time for non-school projects (wood-saving stove construction por fin, work with my village health dispensary and some youth group stuff, I hope) and probably more time spent reading in the hammock watching DVDs...I just hope I don't get bored! But I'm also coming home for three weeks from mid-December until right after the new year. Purchasing tickets today!

In other news, I planned a Halloween party with my youth group for Halloween, which was cancelled due to a last-minute Mass that everyone attended instead. I wasn't even surprised. That's pretty much the story of my life in El Salvador -- my projects being hijacked by the Catholic Church.

So we have postponed the Halloween party for today, November 4th, and the mood has of course already passed, but we'll see if people show.

Monday was also the Day of the Dead in El Salvador. I wrote about this last year -- how the Salvadorans go to put brightly colored paper flowers on the graves of their dead relatives, and some even repaint the graves and picnic on them and little kids usually end up breaking the crosses off, etc. I went with my host family to enflorar the graves of my host grandmother and three of my host mother's children -- two who died as babies and the schoolteacher who died in 2001 saving her students during the devastating earthquake. It's actually a happy occasion, not a solemn one; everyone was laughing and joking. My family is so huge that they didn't even recognize some of the names in the family plot.

Photo uploader isn't working today. Just as well, as there are some good ones I forgot to put on the USB...next time!

Paz y amor.

Don't you mean Mexico?

After more than a year in El Salvador, my laptop has died. It is refusing to turn on. Needless to say, I made several phone calls to tech support, and needless to say they were not helpful. But the worst part was not that they couldn't get my computer to work. The worst part was that none of the three agents I talked to knew what or where El Salvador is.

Seriously???

Every time I mentioned that I was in El Salvador, I was asked if I didn't mean a different country. "Oh, isn't that in Spain/Mexico/Texas?" I wasn't even polite to these people. I laughed in their faces (earpieces?) and said "No. It is a COUNTRY."

"Is that in South America?"

"CENTRAL AMERICA." "Jesus Christ," I even added, semi-under my breath, the third time I was asked to clarify. Which is funny because El Salvador means the Savior and therefore refers to Jesus Christ. But I wasn't trying to explain the origins of the name. I was trying to explain that this person was an idiot.

One woman (not the one I said "Jesus Christ" too) actually got offended and said bitingly, "Sorry. I'm not familiar with it." Wow, what a great comeback. "Sorry, I am embarassingly ignorant."

I understand that El Salvador is a small country that isn't in the news much. But am I too outraged here? I mean, it is close to the United States, there are a lot of Salvadoran immigrants in America, and shouldn't anyone with a high school education know at least which continent any given country is on?

Anyway. I brought the computer into the capital today and left it at a workshop. Keep your fingers crossed!

Paz y amor.

Becas becas becas

The school year is coming to an end, which means it's time to start prodding kids to apply for scholarships (becas) for next year...I just came back from San Salvador to turn in some applications for scholarships funded by a Peace Corps committee. But my leading candidate for a university scholarship just plain didn't do her application. I was a bit surprised, but I have witnessed an attitude towards education here that is cavalier at best. At home, it seems like so many people go to college without really caring about it because it's what's expected of them. So it shouldn't be so surprising that some kids here don't care to go to college -- except they're being offered a chance at a scholarship, and in my village the kids are so poor and a university education would do wonders for their future. They understand this, or at least they've been told it enough and can parrot it ("Quiero estudiar para salir adelante"/"I want to study to get ahead") but when it comes time to fill out the forms that would give them that shot? Nah.

At least two girls in the 9th grade filled out forms for high school scholarships. Keep your fingers crossed for them!

Paz y amor.

Off Probation

My readers (all both of them) might remember a couple of posts I wrote last month in which I stated that things were going badly here and I was thinking of coming home. Well, at that time, I had put myself on one-month probation. I told myself that if things didn't get better in a month, I would make a final decision. That month is over today, but I've realized for a while (a week maybe?) that I really don't want to leave yet.

To defend myself, it wasn't just run-of-the-mill problems that made me want to leave. Sure, I'm bothered sometimes by my living conditions, some of the people in my site, and an overall lack of productivity. But I was in a serious relationship, and that gave me kind of a support system to deal with all the things I don't like about Peace Corps. I started wanting to leave when that relationship ended. I was experiencing everything anyone experiences during a painful breakup, plus I was bored and lonely in a rural village with way too much time to think about everything that was bad in my life.

That's all I'll say about that. This isn't someone's angsty high school LiveJournal, after all.

Luckily, some really good things have happened this month. And they are:

• The field trip I wrote about
• I solicited for some equipment for our health dispensario, and the grant was approved, thanks to Kids to Kids, an organization that donates money to benefit kids around the world. As part of this project, I'll be giving interactive basic health lessons to kids, plus our dispensario gets a fence, a nebulizer for all the respiratory infections we have, and a stove to make healthy food for visitors and events. Plus, I have been working with my community counterpart to present information we received from a Peace Corps health training to the volunteer promoters in my village.
• We started Saturday computer classes, which I supervise and three of my university friends (who are scholarship students doing this for service hours) teach.
• It's scholarship application season, and I've been working on getting three girls from my community high school or university scholarships.
• It looks like we might be able to start building eco-friendly stoves soon (wait till I start hitting all you gringos up for money!)
• I have officially taken over the Peace Corps travelling theater group, which keeps me busy with one of my greatest loves.
• We are FINALLY doing a trash and recycling campaign at school, with long-term plans to keep collecting bottles and cans, which we can sell to raise funds that we never have enough of.
• I found Raid Casa y Jardin in the supermarket, which I have successfully used to destroy the ants and crickets (yes, crickets) that were infesting my house. The crickets in particular were holed up in a hollow part of the window shutter right over my bed, and I couldn't sleep for a week straight. Until I poisoned them to death, with no regrets.
  
• I'm coming home for Christmas and the New Year if it's the last thing I do on this earth.

Paz y amor.