El Salvador!

So sorry I never posted till now...I've been in El Salvador since Sept. 16 and this is the first day I've had a good stretch of time in an internet cafe! Of course, too much has happened to write about it all, so I'll just give you a brief outline. We flew into the capital of San Salvador and were immediately fed Pizza Hut, and we were all starving because they don't feed you on planes anymore. After that we went to the nearby city of San Vicente, where the Peace Corps training center is. For two days we stayed in a hotel and ate tons of traditional food three times a day at a nearby restaurant. First horror story of the Peace Corps: when I got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, I unknowingly decapitated a lizard. We found it dead on the floor in the morning.

After that, we went to meet our host families. I'm one of four volunteers in the rural community of Las Cañas, about a 20-minute bus ride from San Vicente. We all meet at one volunteer's house for Spanish classes in the morning (very easy for me with my Spanish minor) and to work on community projects in the afternoon. All the ag-for/environmental ed volunteers are supposed to do an environmental project with the community youth group. But since there's no group in Cañas, we have to form our own, which is much more time-consuming. Our first meeting is on Monday; we invited 54 youth hoping at least 10 would show. Otherwise we'll just have to eat all the cookies and soda ourselves. So I guess failure wouldn't be so bad.

Speaking of food, we get far too much of it. The girl you all know who lived off of granola bars and coffee is now eating three full meals a day. We're literally forced to because our Salvadoran host mothers will cry if we turn food down. So far it's been delicious. All you pupusa lovers are probably green with envy. Every day I also eat delicious mixtures of beans, rice, tortilla and egg. It's so starch-heavy that I will probably gain weight, contrary to what you would think about a girl in a Third World country.

You will want to know how my host family is. I love them. The father, Don Felipe, has a brother who lives in Langley Park, two minutes away from my college apartment. It's a small world after all. The mother's name is Doña Lorena and they have a 17-year-old girl and two sons; one aged 13 and one 4 and adorable. They're nice and funny and laid-back and I'm glad I came here knowing Spanish because I love to just sit on the porch (in a hammock!) and talk to them.

Here's Doña Lorena on the porch of our house:


It's not all R&R here, though. The rest part has been severely hampered by the roosters that start crowing at literally 2 a.m. and the ant bites that wake me up in the middle of the night feeling like my feet are on fire. We've also had a lot of fun work trips. Today we visited a volunteer at a nearby site and helped him plant vetiver grass to slow erosion. Yesterday I helped Don Felipe dig an irrigation ditch. We've also visited the elementary school in Cañas to observe how Salvadoran public schools work. The kids here only go to school for half a day, and a lot of them don't even do that -- they stay home and help their parents out instead, since there are no truancy laws.

This country is so green and beautiful it's hard to imagine it has any environmental problems. It's the rainy season now and it pours every day, but that ends in November.

There's only been one major drawback to my service so far, and that's my job description. I soon came to realize that while I actually like planting things, I don't think I'm qualified to have the more technical agroforestry position that I've been pushed into. When I was first invited I was under the impression that I would be doing some field work but my primary task would be environmental education in schools. Last week I found out that's not the case -- that's a different kind of volunteer, a fact which had not been made clear to me or several other trainees. And just today I found out that it would be "very hard" to switch. I have a meeting with my director about it Tuesday. Keep your fingers crossed for me because I really don't want to be given a job I can't do. I'd hate to let a whole community down and I wouldn't be happy here, and who knows how long my service will last if that's the case?

More updates soon (a week or two?) but drop me a line and tell me about your lives! No cell phone yet, but I've put my mailing address on facebook. You'll see it if you're my friend.

Paz y amor! More pics when my friends aren't rushing me out of the Net cafe :)