Dress Success

I don't really have any news to report since 2 days ago. My life is not very big right now. The ant invasion in my house has calmed down slightly.

We swear in the new group of environmental volunteers on Friday and I had nothing to wear, so I went dress shopping. I knew the clothing store people would try to rip me off as soon as they saw my blue eyes, and so they did. For some reason that still really offends me. Even on the bus ride to the city, the fare collectors sometimes try to shortchange me. Just a nickel or so, but I always notice and call them out on it. It's just a nickel, people, it's not even worth dishonesty! And it's not that they're bad at math. They know exactly what they're doing.

After arguing with the bus fare collector and some people at a clothing store, I was tired of people trying to extort me. Luckily, I went to a big chain store with fixed prices and found a dress, jewelry and make-up for $8.50 total! Sometimes I complain about living in a Third World country, but you gotta love Third World prices.

Before you yell at me, these were not sweatshop prices. This stuff was imported from the States. I have no idea why it was so cheap but I'm not complaining. Plus, I ran into some of my host family while I was shopping there. I officially shop where the Salvadorans shop, and that makes me assimilated or whatever.

You can yell at me, however, for laughing at these Flight of the Conchords lyrics every time they come up on my iTunes (shout outs to my brother for giving me the CD):

They're turning kids into slaves just to make cheaper sneakers
But what's the real cost, cause the sneakers don't seem that much cheaper
Why are we still paying so much for sneakers when you got little kid slaves making them
What are your overheads?

Paz y amor.

Ants Marching

Ants are ruining my life. This week my house has been overrun with them, and I spend a good deal of time cursing at them, stomping on them, getting bitten by them, or taking a broom and sweeping them away when there are too many to kill all at once.

These are not ants like the ones in Washington. The ants I'm used to climb along your skin in a friendly, ticklish manner and are kind of cute. But Salvadoran ants are tiny and mean. They bite, and bite hard, causing itchy boils that pop and are just generally gross.

Why the sudden infestation? No clue. It might have something to do with my boyfriend visiting all week, meaning twice as many crumbs on the floor etc. After the first few days of Ant Hell, it became a catastrophe whenever a Cheerio or a grain of sugar wound up on the floor. Immediate ant party. I don't understand how married couples in the Peace Corps manage to live together and keep a clean house.

Despite the ants, having my boyfriend here was a Good Thing. Time passes so much faster when you have someone to constantly spend it with...

Current community activities include classes on species competition and habitat destruction for 7th to 9th graders, applying for a grant to get some things for the rundown health dispensary, getting some school computers fixed and of course the everlasting ecofriendly stove project.

Paz y amor!

Down with expectations

Yesterday, I went to a Salvadoran wedding and today I went to a birthday party. Both those things sound pretty awesome, but, as is often the case with events completely out of one's own culture, they were less fun in real life. I also went to a two hour missionary meeting yesterday. I thought that would be horrible, but it was actually fun. Go figure.

Don't get me wrong, there were good things about the wedding and party. Yesterday's bride was a sweet girl and a friend of mine in the community, and she was beautiful and the food was good. Although it would have been better without the dead bugs in my rice and Fresca. The wedding also entailed sitting through an hour of Mass (never fun) and sitting bored at a table afterwards because you don't feel like dancing although creepy old men keep asking you to. And of course there was no alcohol in sight to make the awkwardness go away. So I left as early as possible without being rude.

Then came the missionary meeting, which I had already said I would not attend due to the wedding. But when I got home early from the wedding, to my house which is unfortunately right next door to the church, I was roped into going. Background: a missionary group has taken over our Saturday youth group meetings this month, focusing them entirely on Catholocism and making them even more awkward for me. The worst part, I thought beforehand, is that instead of just tuning out of the Bible talk, I would actually have to participate in the missionary meetings because they had filled them with games and activities. I had horrible visions of being called on to explain what God means to me, why social liberals are going to hell, etc. But fortunately I just had to clap along to some religious songs, play some nonreligious games and explain why drugs are bad. There was a group that had to explain why abortion is bad. Luckily I was not assigned to it. Then we had soda and sweet bread. I got a piece with another dead bug attached. Is this some kind of a cruel joke?

That brings us to the birthday party today. It was for Suzanne, the previous volunteer who is here visiting, and a lot of other kids who were born in August. A lot of it was just sitting around waiting for things to happen...for the people to show up with the food, for things to be served, for the dancing to start or stop, etc. Those were the awkward patches, but most of the guests were members of my host family, so at least I knew everyone and it was fun overall.

Replacing a volunteer is hard when, as in my community, that volunteer is constantly praised and the new volunteer (me) is frequently compared to the previous one. But having Suzanne here has been nice because she's made me realize I'm not a horrible person for hating dances or not being able to spend a whole day with Salvadorans without getting bored or annoyed. Because it turns out so many of our problems and frustrations are the same.

Here are some wedding pictures:I didn't catch the kiss, my camera's shutter speed is too unreliable...this is just before. The bride's name is Alba and the girl is Carlos.
The first dance, complete with confetti

And here are some birthday photos...Suzanne and the kids, one of whom is a piñata.
Mmm cake.

Paz y amor!

The slacking continues

Yesterday I was supposed to go to school and reprogram all the projects (tangerine tree nursery, field trip to agricultural university) that I couldn't do because school was, and extracurricula activities are still, suspended due to the swine flu pandemic here. I also needed to plan for a fuel-efficient stove project meeting this Friday and get the mayor's office started on publicizing scholarships for high school and college students.

But I was invited on a trip to the beach. So I went.

Sometimes Peace Corps is awesome. That would never fly at an American job...

The beach was great, it was clean, almost empty and also had a pretty cool water park attached to it. We ate seafood for lunch at a good (but expensive) food place. It was fun to be like a tourist and made me look forward to vacationing in other parts of Central America (Guate and Nica in 2010!) But I also realized that part of the reason I like El Salvador so much is that I live here, and I'm not just on vacation. The beach was great, but I can dive into the waves and eat shrimp on a deck with bamboo and palm fronds anywhere in Latin America. What makes El Salvador unique is the experience of living in a "real" non-touristy Salvadoran community and integrating into their daily lives.

Beach pics when they are sent to me (the batteries in my camera died, boo.)

Paz y amor.

Pueblos Vivos 2009

All this month, El Salvador is having a tourism campaign/competition involving 56 towns/districts. One of them, Santa Maria Ostuma, is mine. The way it works is, Salvadorans are supposed to visit these places and vote for their favorite one. But even though the country is so small, only the rich can really travel farther than their own department. So I don't think my tiny town has a shot in hell of winning. But the mayor thinks different. She's had banners saying "VOTE FOR SANTA MARIA OSTUMA" hung as far as half an hour away and is holding festivals every Sunday until the competition ends-- yesterday was the Corn Festival, next Sunday is Dance, another one is Culture and I don't know what else is coming up. But that's kind of cheating in my opinion, because it's not like we normally would have had these events...

Either way, it should make my life a little more interesting.

In other news, the volunteer who used to be in my site comes to visit for a week starting today. It should be fun to get her perspective on things that have happened since she left...

Also, our Saturday youth group meetings have been taken over this month by missionaries who are making the meetings 2 hours long and EVEN MORE about Jesus. I can barely even stand our normal 45-minute sermons. I wish there were Unitarians in El Salvador...

Paz y amor.

Agostinas

Well, the first week of August is wrapping up, and with that my vacation. Pretty much the whole country had off this week, and I used the time to visit my boyfriend for a couple of days and then my friend Meredith at the beach where she lives. Yes, lives. She is in the Peace Corps, but she lucked out and got to live in a beachside mansion with a pool and some pretty sweet cooking equipment, so a bunch of us headed over there for a good time. Although her house is huge and nice, her community jokes that the people who built it were drunk, because there are some pretty important oversights. The stairwell floats in midair without surrounding walls or railings, making us all afraid we would fall off, especially in wet sandals after a few drinks. And there are no lights in the bathroom, lots of leaky spots when it rains, etc.

Mer thinks the Salvadorans, newly rich from American money, saw a picture of a nice house in a magazine and tried to reproduce it without really knowing how. Given what I know about remesa (remittance) Salvadorans, I wouldn't be surprised. In general, I would never complain about a house like hers, but I was happy to get home after a week, clean my house, wash my clothes and get my life back in order.

Both of those trips also involved long bus rides, and the ride back from my boyfriend's site contains a good stretch down a steep mountain. I started to feel nauseous during that and, 8 hours later, threw up upon arriving to my house. Buses here drive crazily and roads are really rocky, so bus sickness is common. Another added cost of vacation, I suppose.

School starts again tomorrow, as does a visit from the previous volunteer in my site. Back to the grind.

Here are some pictures from last week when we made atol (that corn drink) with the Peace Corps trainee.
Even the boys helped shuck...Once more with Dana, the trainee who made me nostalgic for last SeptemberStraining boiled corn juice

That's all for now. Paz y amor! And DC, I read about your "heat wave." Enjoy your little taste of my life, only now imagine it without air conditioning.

Immersion Day Hostess

With my own Immersion Days as a trainee fresh in my mind, I signed up to host an Environmental Ed volunteer-in-training for a weekend to give her a taste of volunteer life. It's really made me realize how far I've come since I arrived here last September -- how I've learned my way around, become able to predict what Salvadorans will do and how they will feel, and grown more patient, laid-back and accepting of the difficulty of life here.

We did have our youth group activity yesterday, and it took all day. In the morning we hiked to the river to pick corn, and hiked back in stifling heat. Then the youth group kids came over in the pouring rain and shucked all the corn on my porch -- total chaos. Then we broke in to the church (the guy with the key didn't show up) and made a sweet drink from the corn with cinnamon and sugar. We also boiled some -- mmm fresh corn on the cob. We didn't finish all this until 6 p.m. As the trainee, Dana, pointed out, it's strange to think that we could spend all day making corn on the cob and a pot of corn juice. But that's life here.

Now we're grocery shopping in the city and this afternoon we're going back to my site to pick fruit and have a youth group meeting.

I took tons of fun pictures of Corn Day yesterday but forgot to load them on my memory stick. Next time!

Paz y amor.