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.