Accion de Gracias

Let's go in chronological order...I passed my mid service medical exams this week with flying colors, except I apparently have an intestinal parasite that Peace Corps will not treat because ¨we have tried to treat it before and it doesn't go away.¨ Ummm...?

Thanksgiving was lots of fun. Peace Corps has a program where volunteers can sign up for Thanksgiving dinner with families who work for the U.S. Embassy, who usually have the money/resources/hired help to cook an actual Thanksgiving dinner...turkey, cranberry sauce, stuffing, pumpkin pie, the works. Much better than the chicken and $7 cranberry juice we had last year.

I went with two other volunteers to an amazing family. The husband had been a Peace Corps volunteer in Honduras, and the wife is South African and had just got back from a trip to Bangladesh on Tuesday, so we had plenty to talk about! They had a gorgeous high rise penthouse apartment that I will post pictures of, and had invited Salvadoran friends too, all very nice people. We stayed there until about 2 a.m. drinking, dancing and smoking hookah (they had spent a lot of time in the Middle East).

Next week I head to a beautiful lake in the crater of a volcano for three days for an English workshop with two teachers from my school. And in two weeks exactly I come HOME for three weeks of vacation! Life is good!A view of San Salvador from the penthouse apartment
Where we spent a lot of the night...

I also want to post some pictures of the damage done to my site by Hurricane Ida, in stark contrast to the prosperity seen here. It seems a little incongruous, but that is exactly how I felt on Thanksgiving. When asked what I was thankful for at the dinner table, I said I was thankful for the chance to be in a beautiful apartment eating a huge delicious meal, but for the first time I actually felt guilty about it as well. Even though the family we visited had lived in poorer conditions before, I still found it hard to reconcile their wealth with what I see in my village every day. Our Thanksgiving family deserved every privilege they had. I just wish that everyone else who deserves those priveleges could also have them.

Shutting up now...

A landslide on the way to my village
More landslide destruction
Actually in my village...more to come on Facebook.

Paz y amor.

I live in San Salvador

So I'm back in the city again for another week...mid-service medical evaluations Monday-Wednesday plus work to do for our Peace Corps theater group, a mysterious meeting with our Country Director (am I in trouble? No one will tell me!) a Thanksgiving dinner with a U.S. Embassy family and a project development training.

My life has gone pretty much back to normal -- I am helping a little bit with relief work, but for once I feel like the mayor's office and the NGOs that work in my municipality have stuff under control. All I've done so far is help to organize a census of damaged houses, crops etc. and be present at a lot of the aid distribution events. Other than that, I'm still involved in the same projects as before: wood-saving stoves, trainings and aid for the health dispensary, English teacher training, etc.

The purpose of this post was to upload more photos of landslides in my site, but my USB drive has a virus that is making that impossible. Will try to fix this.

Paz y amor.

No longer displaced

After being stuck out of my site for a week following Hurricane Ida, I finally set out for home Friday with a couple of days' supply of food and water for myself, and 16 pounds of corn flour and candles for my host family, who were running out of food.

Riding the bus to my site was quite an experience. The closer we got, the more landslides could be seen along the road, and we often had to stop and wait for machines that were clearing away mud to make space for us to pass.

Then we got to the bridge to my pueblo, which had been completely washed away. I was told the buses only went to that point, after which people were crossing the broken bridge on foot and walking about an hour to my village. When we arrived, a crew was repairing the bridge, and I prepared to get off the bus...but it kept going. We were going to cross! Everyone on the bus got excited, until the bus got stuck in a rut in the middle of the bridge. Back and forth, back and forth it moved, on the bridge which was basically still unsupported mud, and which curved so that it looked like the bus might plunge off it any minute.

The Salvadorans around me laughed and made little expressions of surprise, but I was panicking. I could feel all the blood rushing to my face and was literally biting my nails. Then the bus stopped trying to move and I was one of the first people off it.

I started the hike to my village carrying all that food and barely made it a half a mile before a truck from my community passed and the people offered me a ride. Thank God! As we were heading home, we saw the same bus...it had eventually crossed the bridge, which was fully fixed later that day.

As soon as I got home, I was pulled into food distribution efforts. An hour later, the electricity came back (while I was cleaning my fridge of the green slime that had built up during the week) and that night water started running again. The villagers had been told they might have to wait two more weeks for any of that to happen. But the day the gringa came back, everything started working again.

This proved a horrible coincidence for me, as our municipality is still suffering massive consequences -- about a thousand families lost their crops and 65 families were displaced and need new houses -- and people in my village are now looking at me to save them. One of my friends apparently told his mother, "At least Alia lives here. She'll take care of us." Which is a HUGE responsibility for someone who just came to teach classes, plant trees and conduct community cleanups.

Many of you have asked how you can help. I am waiting to hear about funding from USAID and at least one other NGO, but if that doesn't come through, I will set up a private fund and send instructions on how to donate. I'll keep you posted.

Here is the bus stuck on the bridge.
More photos to come, of the little landslides all over my municipality...

Paz y amor.

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.