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in the United States. And therefore closing this blog out. I could continue to blog about the American things that are surprising/hard to adjust to, but then this blog would last the rest of my life.

Thanks for reading!

Paz y amor.

Despedidas

Left the village this morning for good. And it was a surreal experience.


First of all, since last Friday I have had 4 (4!) goodbye parties. One with the school, one with the community, one with the youth group and one with a random family who wanted to feed me pupusas. By this morning, I was all farewelled out, plus I was EXHAUSTED from barely having slept all week. My last week in site was burning hot and water became scarce all over the village, and I was so dehydrated that I found it hard to sleep. This made me actually kind of happy to leave my site for San Salvador, for a few days if not for good.


So this morning when I left some of the host family came to see me off. Even the dogs I adore came up to me and let me pet them (did they know?) Contrary to many volunteers, I left with dry eyes. I think I was too tired to comprehend what was going on.


My friend with a truck took me to San Salvador with all my suitcases, after a nice final lunch of shrimp on the beach. Now I'm in the capital enjoying air conditioning and wireless Internet. It's weird to think that I'm going home Saturday for good and not just for a two-week vacation.


So now I'm writing the list. The list that all Peace Corps volunteers write. And mine is probably the same as everybody else's. But here it is.


Things I will miss about El Salvador

• Hammocks
• Living my life surrounded by natural beauty
• Living my life outside
• Eating fruit off trees
• Being fed and cared for by random neighbors
• Not being glued to TV and the Internet
• Having time to read for hours
• Reggaeton and bachata music
• Volunteer working hours (i.e. being able to ditch work and have fun whenever I want
• Random people who know my name and hug me in the streets
• Pupusas, tamales de elote, fried plantains, red beans and even tortillas
• Working with cute children
• Dedicating my life to helping others

Things I will not miss about El Salvador

• Streets covered in animal poop
• General dirtiness
• Having to watch everything I eat and drink for contamination
• Lack of cultural value for education
• Lack of cultural value for hard work
• Handout mentality
• Scarcity of water
• Lack of convenient transportation
• Lack of discipline at home and in the schools that turns kids into rude little criminals
• Cultural acceptance of bad or unjust situations (instead of the drive to change things)

In general, I think the good outweighs the bad.

Here are some pictures from my goodbye parties:

"Thank you Alia for having shared two years. Welcome Rebecca."

These kids gave me a sweet wooden pineapple with a picture of the school inside.

A band showed up at my community goodbye party and played music while everyone watched this slideshow of pictures from the past two years.

Paz y amor.

Perquín y pescado

Just got back from a few days in Perquín, which was an ill-timed trip considering how much I have to do to wrap up my service...but was actually a good idea, as I didn't want to leave El Salvador without seeing this place, famous for its natural beauty and civil war history.

Tropical Storm whatever-it's-called-this-time (we had two in one week and I've stopped tracking names, since we've had like 15 since April) prevented us from hiking much, but we visited El Mozote, a neighborhood where 1,000 people were massacred during the war, and the civil war museum in town. We did climb a small (and slippery!) hill dotted with bomb holes, and the top afforded us a pretty good view of the surrounding hills and even parts of Honduras.

I can't believe I only have two weeks left. Sometimes I'm sad about it, but usually something happens to cheer me up about leaving before I get too down. For example, this morning my host family left a basket of fish in the shower. Thanks, fam, for lessening my close-of-service regrets.

Pictures from Perquín:

The wall comemmorating the El Mozote victims

American anti-war propaganda (the US government was funding and training the Salvadoran army, which committed atrocities such as the El Mozote massacre)
From the top of Cerro Perquín

Paz y amor.

Passing the torch

My replacement volunteer arrived at my site two days ago. She is living with a family that I and the school director set her up with. Her name is Rebecca. She is a redhead so she will probably get more catcalls than me. Thank God.

Having the new volunteer in my site reminds me of when I came two years ago. The first day, she looked as overwhelmed as I felt then. And seeing the world through her eyes has made me realize how much my Spanish has improved and how much I've integrated into the community. Every time we passed someone on the street, I knew that person's name, who they were related to and some other bits of information. I remember going through the same thing two years ago, with Suzanne giving me everyone's life story, and thinking I would never learn as much about these people as she had.

Rebecca seems to love our site. As she should, because it is beautiful. Even compared to the rest of El Salvador. And her host mom is giving her fresh squeezed orange juice every day, which I don't even get.

Funny, I complain about my site a lot, but having Rebecca here makes me like it more. People who I stopped talking to very often have grown warm and interested again. I get invited to events and told to bring the new gringa.

This is my last full week in my site. I will be travelling nearly all of next week, then back and forth to San Salvador doing administrative stuff.

Sometimes I think about packing, or getting rid of my stuff, or my goodbye party...and every time, I decide to ignore these things until the last possible moment, because I just can't get my head around it.

Paz y amor.

Atrapada

...in San Vicente, once more due to heavy rains.

"What had happened was" (PG County so soon!) I went into San Vicente to talk to the trainees about "moving in and getting around," as they swear in tomorrow and come to their sites Friday. Including my replacement, so I will have a compañera in my site for a month! Sweet.

Anyway, during our discussion it started to pour rain and the river in Guadalupe, a town my bus would pass through, rose to dangerous levels and no one could get through there. So I am stuck in a hotel in San Vicente without even a toothbrush to my name.

At least our bridge hasn't collapsed (hopefully?)

I am still shocked by news I've received that yet another one of our university scholarship girls is preggers. We as Peace Corps volunteers talk about family planning to these girls, but in one ear and out the other, I guess?

The job search continues and is making me anxious. So is the mouse in my house. I went to buy mouse poison and this is what transpired:

ME: Do you have mouse poison?
STORE MAN: Here it is (handing me a small bag).
ME: How do you use it?
MAN: It's granulated. Put it where the mouse is hiding, mix it with some food, like a banana or something.
ME: But I don't know where the mouse is right now.
MAN: Right now? The poor little mouse is sleeping, dreaming of the delicious poisoned food you are about to give him.

Not a very good poison salesman. And yes, I did feel horrible after this exchange.

Paz y amor.

What a week

Rural village life here in El Salvador is generally isolated and peaceful, but this week's national emergency changed all that.

It started early in the week, when gang members, angered by a new anti-gang law, started posting flyers all over the country threatening to burn buses if they operated Wednesday through Friday. Few Salvadorans can afford cars and most depend on an extensive bus network that goes even into very rural areas. And gang crimes here are usually perpetrated on buses.

Anyway, this caused a 72-hour shutdown of the buses, making it impossible for much of the country to get to work or other necessary destinations. Of course my town's water pump broke during this strike, and the people from the water company were too scared to come fix it. Even though they come in company vehicles, people were scared that the gang threats would extend to any large vehicle, or even the passenger-laden pickup trucks that sometimes substitute for buses. Anyway, our water was out and I couldn't leave to go buy water or shower and do laundry in the capital. Thanks gangs.

Usually gang members board buses, rob all the people and bus's fare money from that day, and then evacuate the bus and burn it. The anti-gang law was proposed after a bus was burned in July with all the people still in it and the gang members posted to shoot escapers. 17 people were killed and more were wounded. That I did not blog about because I didn't want everyone worried about me. It happened at night in one of the most dangerous parts of the country, so there's no chance I or any other Peace Corps volunteer would have been in that situation. The only reason I'm writing about it now is that it's mentioned in that BBC link. Thanks BBC.

Still. I can't believe there wasn't already a law making it a crime to be a gang member. And when I think of this week I'm kind of glad my service is almost over!

In that vein, I finally wrapped up the stove project with a clausura meeting, complete with a huge cake. Glad that's out of my hair! I couldn't take pictures, though, because I was too busy actually running the meeting. Just one more project to finish, which will happen Thursday. And the new volunteer gets here the day after that!

Paz y amor.

Deme, deme

Readers of this blog are probably sick by now of me complaining about "handout mentality" -- villagers coming up to me and demanding money and things they feel I am obligated to give them because I am from the United States.

Well, yesterday I was kind of forced to go to church, and the priest, whom I normally don't like because he's so oppressive, actually gave a sermon against that!

He said he saw people arriving at the mayor's office and demanding (not asking for) money for bus fare, etc., and it made him sick. "Let's not get used to acting that way," he said.

THANK GOD! (No pun intended.) I now like the priest again.

In other news, the comedor, like a cafeteria-style restaurant, in my town was robbed at gunpoint at about 1 p.m. last week. Luckily no one was there eating at the time, only the owners. But don't be scared for me, as now there is a permanent police presence in the town (there wasn't before.) It's sad that it took something like this for the police to do their jobs, though.

Paz y amor.

This is the end...

I'm in San Salvador wrapping up three days of required medical appointments for Close of Service. I'm realizing I will be spending very little time in the village until I leave in October. We are constantly going to San Salvador for final interviews and administrative stuff, my job search brings me into town a lot to use the cyber cafes, and we are also planning some trips to the places we've always meant to go for the past two years, but have never got around to it.

In a way it's kind of nice -- I like leaving the village, meeting up with gringo friends, using the Internet. After two years I guess I haven't gone completely native! I have kind of been waiting for this part of my service, the part where I stop working and do whatever I want for a couple of months until I leave. There are still some projects to finish up in my site, but most of that will get done in the next two weeks.

I am medically fine and I guess it's time to go back to the village. Paz y amor.

Alia returns from El Salvador in need of a job!

After two years in the Peace Corps in El Salvador, I am coming home October 16. My immediate destination is my mother's house near D.C., but after that, I plan to move to wherever I get a job.

That's where you journalist friends and professors come in. I've started looking for jobs on the Internet but wondered if you have any leads -- contacts, job bank recommendations or postings you've seen that you could pass on? I'm already trolling through the UMD j-school's job bank as well as journalismjobs.com, but of course more resources are always welcome.

I've pretty much decided against looking in newspapers because of the job insecurity there. I am looking more at nonprofit journalism -- publications from organizations with focuses I like/have experience in. Examples are the environment, education (I was an environmental education volunteer here, so I mostly taught environmental classes and did projects in a school) and diversity, international or Latin American issues.

But I'm also not too picky. I know the economy is terrible and beggars can't be choosers. I might have to resort to office work at Peace Corps HQ in DC for awhile, and any journalism job would be better than that.

Even if you've got no job tips advice for me, let's meet up if you're ever in the DC area!

See you in October!

Paz y amor.

Wrapping it up

Our close of service conference is this Wednesday through Friday. I can't believe how fast it's come! At the conference I will pick my flight date and let you all know when I have it.

Ideally, we're not supposed to be doing much work after our COS conference, just preparing to go home. I was planning to have all my project finished by then, but of course my community has been dragging its feet/not doing anything at all to finish these projects with me, so I will probably still have to work on the school vegetable nursery, the health dispensary and the stove projects.

A new volunteer is coming to replace me in mid-September and I'll probably also be orienting him/her for about a month before I leave. But I will have a lot more time for departure preparations, online job searching, and most importantly, in-country travel and fun.

We are apparently in the middle of another tropical storm. I can't remember many days since May when we have NOT been in the middle of a tropical storm. I washed my clothes Tuesday and they are still not dry. I am wearing damp jeans.

Coming home to my mother's dryer is so close...

Here are some pictures from Nicaragua!At the border. Later a bee landed on the lip of that Fresca can and I almost drank it, but Will grabbed the can on its way to my mouth and the bee fell in and drowned. I had been really happy to find a Fresca and was disappointed that I couldn't drink it. I believe I actually said, "I hate Nicaragua!"That dark blob on the branch is a monkey!We couldn't go to the top of the Volcán Concepción on the Isla de Ometepe because it had already spewed smoke 13 times this year. This is Will, our hiking guide and a German girl named Marian at the highest point we could go to. The water in the distance is Lake Managua.Volcán ConcepciónThe silhouette of the revolutionary Augusto C. Sandino where he was shot by a firing squad overlooking Managua in 1934 (not 1956 as I recently said -- that was the dictator Somoza, sorry). I can't believe that in all the material I've read about Sandino, no one ever mentioned he was 50 feet tall.Some 6,000-year-old human, deer and raccoon footprints were found in the mud near Lake Managua.

Paz y amor.

How transportation compromised my vacation

So I'm back in El Salvador and it's good to be home. This vacation really left me with the impression that El Salvador is not set up for tourism at all, even compared to Nicaragua, which is not exactly what most people would call a hot tourist destination. But there was one problem with the second half of our trip, and that was transportation.

First, we needed to take a ferry to the (gorgeous!) Isla de Ometepe, which ended up leaving earlier than we were told it would, so we had to wait for the next one. That delay, plus rainy weather, cancelled our beach trip that day. The volcano hike the next day was wonderful but exhausting because at the last minute our guide decided to take us on a cow path down the mountain, which was a difficult 4-hour descent, instead of the normal way. But all the resulting soreness was worth it for the beautiful views.

When it came time to leave the island, the ferry we were going to take had broken, so we had to wait another two hours, completely ruining the chances of getting to the Masaya volcano early enough to hike it. Instead we spent a relaxing night in Granada, watched the new Karate Kid and ate at a really nice restaurant that served amazing chicken parmesan.

The next day we went to Managua, where we saw some really cool things, including a huge silhouette of Agosto Sandino where he was killed by a firing squad, some human and animal footprints from 6,000 years ago, and a lot of old animal bones (mastodons and the like) at the national museum.

Yesterday we finally left Nicaragua on a 2:30 a.m. bus, which broke down on the border with Honduras. They tried to fix the bus for about 3 hours before calling for another bus to pick us all up, which took another four hours. Luckily we were stranded next to a restaurant and a bar, and by the time the new bus came to pick us up, I had made friends with some Mexicans who used to live in Silver Spring and spoke perfect English, I was a more experienced pool player and rather tipsy.

We finally got to San Salvador at about 9 p.m., where we ate some pizza and immediately fell asleep. I'm finally on my way back home now. It'll be hard to go back to village life after this awesome vacation!

Paz y amor.

Nicaragua!

Although I've been living in El Salvador for the past two years, I never really felt like a traveller...until now.

That's because I've mostly been living and working in the same village and only taking the occasional weekend trip to other places in the country, which are usually just my friends' places or San Salvador.

I forgot how much I loved hostel-hopping and sightseeing until this week, vacationing in Nicaragua with a friend.

So far we have spent one very sketchy night in Managua, toured the colonial cities of León and Granada, and have gone "volcano surfing" -- which is where you climb a volcano and ride a board down the steep gravelly slope. Fortunately we were sitting down. It's more like "volcano sledding."

Today we are on a beautiful island in Lake Managua and tomorrow we are climbing a really big volcano on this island...but we can't go all the way to the top because it's too active right now. Should I be scared?

The rest of our trip will involve a night hike on a volcano where you can actually see the lava and go through caves, and then a trip back to Managua where we might actually get the chance to do some sightseeing -- first priority is seeing the silhouette of Sandino where he was shot to death by a firing squad in 1956.

Can't do Nicaragua photos for you right now, and unfortunately both of us had our camera batteries die during volcano surfing, so there are no pics of that anyway. Watch this space!

Paz y amor.

Just when I thought

that I had a few free days to devote myself entirely to the care and maintenance of our school vegetable garden, I caught a monster cold and spent the past few days curled up in bed, alternately sweating and shivering.

To be fair, I probably got this cold from working in the garden during a tropical storm, heedless of the rain.

But it's hard to stay healthy when even your blankets and sheets are constantly damp from all the moisture in the air and mold is even growing on the walls of your house and it NEVER STOPS RAINING.

This rainy season has been one of the wettest in recent years, even according to the Salvies. And my site is one of the rainiest in all of El Salvador.

It turns out there will be a new volunteer in my site but he/she (probably she) will not be able to live in my house because the host family wants to open a store in that house. So now I have to find a new house for this person. I have a few leads. Hopefully these houses don't also turn into small ponds every time it rains.

So now I only have a couple of afternoons to work on this garden project, and then Wednesday I go to Nicaragua. I feel guilty for not getting more work done, but what could I do? I was sick.

Maybe the next volunteer will be more productive. I can practically hear the villagers thinking that every time they ask when "the new one" is going to arrive. Maybe she will be nicer, maybe she will give things away for free and not expect us to do so much work. Well, maybe.

I can't believe how little time we have left...

Paz y amor.

So that's were all our old hand grenades went...

... to Mexico.

After the 4th of July, I realized something: I've only got about 3 months left in country. I had been pushing happily along, not realizing my departure was nearing, until a bunch of newer volunteers at our 4th-of-July party kept coming up to me with comments like, "Wow, you're going home soon!"

"No I'm not!" I kept saying, before pausing to think. "Holy shit, I am!"

It's true. In 11 days I leave for a 11-day Nicaragua vacation, then a week after I get back is our Close of Service conference, and after that I spend two months not working much and planning to come home. (Hard core job search!) So even though I don't leave until October, I'm wrapping up projects now. It's a strange feeling.

Earlier this month, we finally got around to planting cucumber and radish seeds with the school. If everything goes right, they should be ready for harvest in a few weeks. But thanks to heavy rains and foraging goats, their chances of survival are low.
Planting cucumbersPlanting radishes

Paz y amor.

Happy 3rd of July!

Even in El Salvador, the 4th of July is a big deal...for Peace Corps Volunteers, that is. We celebrated on Saturday, though, so we could have a soccer tournament between each volunteer program...Rural Health, as always, won, and my program, Sustainable Agriculture/Environmental Education, tied for 2nd place with Youth Development. Sound dorky enough for you?

Quote of the game, after a YD volunteer was bowled over: "And Carl's up! He will live to develop youth another day!"

After the game, there was a party at the Sheraton (which is a really ritzy hotel here) hosted by a society of American expats, and then another much less expensive one at the San Sal hostel that is basically the Peace Corps hangout. There were hamburgers, hot dogs and even a chocolate cake (very rare here!) with an American flag on it, which said "Happy Birthday America," and to which we sang the national anthem before we ate.

All in all, of course, a very good weekend.AG/EE 2008-2010 girls!
The guys. Except Will, who managed to be excluded from every picture.

Pepinos y rábanos

It looks like my school is finally pulling through and I might be a successful volunteer after all! My school principal and some people from CENTA, the government agency for agricultural technology, finally agreed to teach a bunch of my kids how to plant radishes and cucumbers. Thank God. This is something my principal has been expecting me to handle, but of course I know nothing about planting vegetables, although as an environmental education volunteer I supposedly should. The activity is on Wednesday and if all goes well we will have a successful project! And if not, at least I did everything I could do to start a school garden and cannot be accused of shirking my duties as an environmental educator.

Two hurricanes, Alex and some other one, just finished dumping a ton of rain on El Salvador and I am officially sick of the rainy season. Yes, two hurricanes AT THE SAME TIME. The storms ruined Pineapplefest, which I had been looking forward to all year. Water doesn't leak onto my bed, but even my sheets and blankets are damp from so much moisture in the air.
At least this is panning out to be a fun month. Tomorrow we have an Independence Day soccer tournament and several parties in San Salvador. Then at the end of the month I head to Nicaragua with a friend. Then my brother might come visit in August (maybe?) and a few days after he leaves we have our Close of Service conference and I will officially stop all major work and prepare to come home, probably in October.
I definitely have enough work to keep me busy until then, as we're still building stoves and trying to finish this project with the health dispensary.
In other news, the kid I wrote about, Luis, who was studying dentistry and lost his scholarship, went illegally to the United States last week. We had actually given him another chance with the scholarship, so he could have stayed here and studied, but the opportunity came to go mojado and he took it. It's sad to think he could have been a dentist here but instead will probably work construction or something there. I hope everything works out for him and that maybe I can meet him up in the States.

Here's a pic of the feria I went to with the interim ambassador...guess which one he is...


This is the biggest pineapple ever, at our Feria de la Piña one week later.
Paz y amor.

Feliz Día del Maestro

Today is teachers' day, which means that schools are closed. I really do applaud the thought -- give hard-working, undervalued teachers a day off -- but in all honesty, most teachers here cancel classes por gusto (whenever they feel like it) anyway, so this holiday is really just hurting the students even more. My particular school has turned the holiday into "teachers' three days," never mind the random holiday they took last week, so you get the picture...

Sunday was the Feria Agropecuaria Robert Blau, the agricultural festival named after the interim U.S. ambassador (Obama hasn't appointed a new one since his inauguration) in a town near mine. This town, San Pedro Nonualco, has had Peace Corps volunteers since 1962, the year after Kennedy founded the Peace Corps. Of course El Salvador didn't have volunteers from 1980-1992 during the civil war, but barring that, there has always been a volunteer in San Pedro. So the morning of the fair was taken up with speeches about how much Peace Corps and the United States government in general has benefitted San Pedro. Normally I get annoyed when people here idealize the United States, because they're often far off the mark, but this was nice because the Peace Corps has actually made visible improvements in San Pedro. But the speeches were also a reminder that tangible improvement takes decades of work, not just a couple of years.

Anyway. The downside of not having internet on my own computer is that sometimes I forget to bring my camera memory card to the cyber café. So I'll try to get some pictures of the festival for you guys Saturday?

Paz y amor.

Fotos por fin

Finally received my long-lost camera back from a friend, whose house I left it at! So I have some theater group fotos for you.

Our environmental skit in cool, beautiful and artistic La Palma went very well. Since then I have been making some headway on a lombriculture project with the school, but I have resigned myself to only doing it with a few grades because school is interrupted so frequently here for things like soccer games, and the teachers take the day off whenever they feel like it, which is a lot of the time. So a school system that already faces a devastated lack of resources is worsened by laziness.

Tomorrow I am going to a fruit festival in the nearby town of San Pedro Nonualco. The fair is named after the U.S. Ambassador (my Peace Corps boss, who is from San Pedro, had a hand in that). So I and three other volunteers from the area get to go hang out with the ambassador all day and eat delicious fruit. Not bad!
"La Vida de Basura" in San Vicente"El Lorax" in the village of El Tejar"La Vida de Basura" in La Palma

Paz y amor.

Scholarship stories

Everyone thinks they know why it's hard for youth in this country to succeed. They don't have money to go to the university. Give them money, a scholarship, problem solved.

Except not.

Take these stories from my community:

Luis started studying dentistry at the national university on a scholarship that is supposed to pay for tuition, transportation and materials. But dentristry is an expensive major to have, and his textbooks are more costly than those of the other students, plus the university makes him buy his own dentistry equipment, which costs upward of $1,000. The scholarship doesn't pay for all that, so Luis doesn't have the materials he needs. Nor does he have family in San Salvador, like the other students, to stay with, so he gets up every morning at 3 a.m. to travel to the university from the village, and doesn't return until about 6 p.m. His eyes are always bloodshot; he never sleeps. He's taking hard courses at the university, courses like chemistry, which he was never introduced to in the useless village schools. Luis lives with a family that's not his and does housework for them to pick up a little extra cash. But he and the family start to fight and the personal issues distract him, bring his grades down. Finally, he loses the scholarship.

Veronica gets a scholarship to study at a private university, and is thinking of studying business administration, or maybe getting a teaching certificate. She has always been one of the most motivated youth in the village, but her mother doesn't let her stay active with the youth group and wants her to maintain the household and take care of her younger siblings rather than continue her education. Vero starts at the university nevertheless, but there is a problem with her birth certificate; someone screwed up and the last names are incorrect. Vero is told she will have to pay hundreds of dollars for a lawyer to fix it, money her family doesn't have. They can have it done for a notary for much less, but that will take 9 months. So Vero drops out, planning to start again next year after the notary fixes her birth certificate. But because of the clerical error, she can't work either, so she hangs around the village with nothing to do but spend time with her boyfriend. In about a month she is pregnant.

It takes so much more than $1,000 or $1,500 a year for these deserving kids to succeed. What they need are universities that are more willing to reach out and help students with no financial resources. What they need are elementary and high schools that prepare them better, demand more from them. What they need are supportive families and a culture that holds education in higher regard. But they don't have that, and Peace Corps volunteers and scholarship donors can't give that to them. I wish we could.

Paz y amor.

Vindicated?

For most of my 19 months in site (19 months!) I have frequently complained about laziness, disorganization and a generally terrible work ethic in my village, even among the teachers and principal at the school, where I am assigned to do the majority of my work.

A couple of months ago, the time came to decide whether my site should get a replacement volunteer, someone to take over my work after I leave. I was undecided, because my experience overall has been a positive one, but I did not think a site that was so unwilling to collaborate deserved a new volunteer when there are plenty of sites where that volunteer could be more sucessful.

In the end, I solicited for a replacement, thinking that the problems in my site exist all over the country and I probably was just being overly sensitive, overly critical.

So yesterday my boss came to visit me and my school director, who is my official counterpart, and my director forgot about the meeting and went to another town. This did not surprise me but it infuriated my boss, who I don't think ever understood the extent of my problems in site when I explained it to him the first few times. Now my site might not get a new volunteer after all because it's finally become clear to him how hard it is to accomplish anything in that environment, which he said was in fact worse than many of the other places he had visited.

I have the same mixed feelings about this that I described before -- I love my site and think anyone could live happily there. They would just have to resign themselves to not getting much done and dealing with the community's expectations that the volunteer is supposed to give handouts and do projects without any help or investment from them. The lifestyle is fun and the people are friendly and nice; the work part sucks.

My boss and I also discussed an aspect of Salvadoran culture we see quite often: Salvadorans don't often honor meetings and commitments, and they make no apologies for it. My director never once told us he was sorry for missing the meeting; he just explained that he was called to another meeting and had forgotten about ours. When I set up the meeting with him in the first place, I had to explain to him that he was making a firm commitment to that date and time, and even then he kept saying, "If I can, if nothing else comes up." He tells me all the time that he is committed to working with the Peace Corps and will do everything possible to get a replacement volunteer. But if those things include attending a short but mandatory and important meeting, forget about it.

The same thing happened after the stove project meetings. People showed up at my house and explained why they couldn't go to the meeting, explanations that were usually ridiculous, like having to run an errand that they could have done at another time. Sometimes they said they just forgot, but they didn't see that as something to feel bad about or apologize for. And then they wanted all the information and materials that I had given out at the meeting, and I had to go over everything over and over again for the irresponsible people who showed up at my house in droves.

When my boss brought this up to the teachers (he had to; I as the gringa didn't want to be the one to criticize their culture, but he's Salvadoran so he can get away with it) they just shrugged and said, Asì somos (that's the way we are.) I don't believe in blaming poor people for their own poverty, but when people aren't willing to invest even a little bit of their time, I don't feel the need to go to great lengths trying to help them.

So there might not be another volunteer in San Josè Carrizal. And the more I think about it, the more I'm okay with that.

Paz y amor.

Hurricanes and other drama

Yes, hurricane Agatha hit here and the bridge out of my town washed out yet again. In a situation similar to Hurricane Ida, no one could leave my town to go sell their fruit or buy food and other necessary items, and the stores in our town were running out of stock because they couldn't go get things from the big city or have merchandise delivered...

I personally ran out of food and water very fast because the hurricane hit the day I was planning on going grocery shopping. So I basically already had nothing anyway. I spent a couple of days begging my host family to feed me and feeling bad because they were running out of food too.

When Hurricane Ida hit, I wasn't in my site and therefore couldn't go back to it. I spent a cushy all-expenses-paid week in San Salvador. This time I was in my village and couldn't get out of it. It had been raining nonstop all week, but I knew something worse was afoot when I woke up in the middle of the night Saturday and my house was flooded wall to wall.

Nothing important was damaged, and this time families in my village didn't lose their crops to landslides either. So we have that to be thankful for. And I finally managed to get a ride to the supermarket in a pickup truck that was skinny enough to cross the half-washed-away bridge.

I did manage to leave my site again Wednesday on the only bus that doesn't have to cross that bridge. Since then, I have been in the eastern part of the country directing and performing in environmental and sexual health skits. It's been super fun but this computer doesn't have a memory card reader so I can't put up pictures for you. Next time!

Paz y amor.

Buses and worms and stoves, oh my

Yesterday at about 1:3o p.m. I took a bus from San Salvador to Santa Maria Ostuma, my pueblo, from where my village is a 20-30 minute hike.

At 6:30 p.m. another bus left from San Sal to Ostuma. Somewhere along the way, some gang members got on the bus and killed the cobrador, the guy who walks around collecting money, calling out stops, helping people get on and off, etc. They probably killed him in order to take all the money the bus had collected that day. Of course the bus was full of people who witnessed the cobrador being shot.

Of course none of the buses between Ostuma and San Sal are running today. The drivers and cobradors are afraid. Passengers are afraid.

This incident actually doesn't make me feel any less safe because I always travel in bright daylight and shootings like this always happen at night. Plus no passengers were harmed. Cobradors get killed all over the country; this didn't even make the news. But I wonder what it was like for the people on the bus yesterday. How many gang members were there? Could they tell what was about to happen or did it go really fast? What did the cobrador do after he was shot? I'm assuming the bus headed for the nearest hospital. But did the cobrador die first? Did the passengers see him die?

Thank God my village is really tranquilo. The big excitement there is all the stoves I'm building. We're finishing up this week. The project has taken over my life. Every afternoon we build 3-5 stoves. It's really fun actually, and the people are really grateful and give us food, and we talk about all the village news. Most of the families that signed up for stoves I didn't know very well, but now I see them on the street and remember who they are, where they live, etc. Which is nice although I only have 5 months left for this information to be useful.

4 stoves being made at once
The recipients, pleased despite their stern faces.

Some kittens. Just because.

The unfortunate thing is that building all these stoves has left me basically no time to work on the lombriculture project I was planning with the school. I was hoping to have given all my worms away by now because I'm getting sick of the big box of earthworms in my house. But I haven't had the chance, so I've been feeding these worms for weeks. Luckily one stove family gave me a bunch of bananas that rotted before I could eat them all. My worms are going to have a lot of potassium...

It's cool, breezy and rainy these days. I love it. Also the Peace Corps med office gave me vitamins with appetite enhancers and now I eat like a pig.

Paz y amor.

Some things never change

A year and a half into my service, I thought I was finally done complaining about the something-for-nothing handout mentality my villagers seem to have, especially when it comes to me. They had learned how I feel, I supposed -- the requests for money and pretty much any material possession they see me with had long since stopped.

There are two big exceptions. One is the schoolteachers, who should know better since I have repeatedly told them I make exactly as much money as they do. But whenever we try to do a school project, they insist I donate all the necessary materials (construction paper for every child, costumes for class skits, many large sheets of poster paper) even though those are things the school or the children can easily provide for themselves. They have actually called me stingy to my face when I refuse to spend my personal monthly stipend on materials for the school.

The other exception, which I am currently living daily, is with the stove project (Suzanne, if you are reading this, I bet some of these stories will sound familiar!) Ever since the materials to build the stoves arrived, and especially since the meeting Tuesday where I started giving them out, people have been dropping by my house in droves asking me for a stove, even though they never came to any of the multiple meetings we had to sign up for the project. When I tell them we only have enough materials for the people who actually came to one of four meetings we had (not too much to ask!), they sometimes get upset. One woman actually yelled at me while I was in the middle of giving out materials to families who were actually responsible enough to attend one meeting. I was talking to the responsible families, and this angry old woman kept interrupting, screaming and grabbing my arm, saying, "I thought I was going to be able to get something out of you while you were here!" and insisting she deserved a stove because more than a year ago she loaned me a document which I immediately copied and returned to her (??) I literally had to fight back the urge to slap her in the face.

I have actually told people: these stoves are not giveaways. They are going to people who actually collaborated by attending meetings and providing some materials. But these people seem to think, even as my service ends and I have spent nearly two years trying to teach them otherwise, that my role here is to just show up and start handing crap out to everyone who comes to my house.

It's weeks like this that I'm actually happy I only have 5 months left.

Paz y amor.

Girls Leading Our World

That was the name of the camp we did this weekend, and it was a good time. A bunch of volunteers brought 13- to 16-year-old girls to the same place we always have camps -- a bunch of cabins on a beautiful lake in the crater of a volcano. I brought three girls from my community.
The overall theme of the camp was leadership and teaching the girls life skills they would need -- including sex ed, which was even more awkward and hilarious than middle school sex ed in the States. There were also really good presentations on money management, domestic violence, goal setting, resume and job interviewing skills, etc. etc. I led a session about keeping a journal, some teamwork games, some roleplays about sex and relationship issues, and some more roleplays about combating traditional gender prejudice to get an education and a job.

And of course, we had time to swim in the lake!

Some camp pictures...The girls from my community playing one of the teamwork games
The journaling session
Gabi and Fatima slogging through the mud at the bottom of the lake

I'm glad the camp is over so I can take a breath -- I got home yesterday just in time for dinner and immediately passed out, considering my girls kept waking me up at 5 a.m. I will NOT miss the early-to-rise culture here! But I can't take too deep a breath -- tomorrow we finally start building the eco-friendly stoves, and I'm trying to juggle a school vegetable garden project on top of that.

Paz y amor!

And on to the next thing

Earth Day is over, for which oh, be joyful. Our performance of The Lorax went well despite some last-minute setbacks. Such as three of our Salvadoran child actors not showing up until the last minute, while I was frantically trying to recruit shy replacements from the crowd. Talk about a panic attack!

But no major disasters occurred, the students did their dramas and songs, and I gave out prizes for the winners of our recycling contest and our Earth Day drawing contest. Done!

But I don't get to rest just yet...today I have to run all over the village again in a last-ditch attempt to sign teenage girls up for our leadership camp next month, since today is the deadline and I only have one confirmed girl.

So I'm kicking myself off the computer now. Paz y amor!

A MENOS QUE...

So our Earth Day celebration is tomorrow and I can't wait for it to be over! But things are finally coming together and it looks like we should have a lot of good plays to present, including the all-volunteer production of El Lorax I mentioned.

I'm exhausted and busy as hell these days and don't even have weekends free to chill or go run errands, because after Earth Day we have a girls' leadership camp to deal with, and of course the stove project is still going. We're also going to start our school vegetable gardens. Etc, etc, etc...

At least the world map is finally finished. Varnish and all! Pictures to come.

It has also been really hot! Teetering on the edge of the rainy season is the worst, because we get the heat and the extreme humidity without the cool rain. I can't wait for the rainy season to come for real (it should happen in a week or so.)

Paz y amor.

Dia de la Tierra

Earth Day's coming up. Ever worked in retail during the holiday season, or at a newspaper during some kind of emergency? I have done both things and I feel the same way now.

For Earth Day, I suggested to my school director that I bring my Peace Corps theater group to perform The Lorax (which we are doing and which I am super excited for! I am the Once-ler.) Then they told me that they wanted 7th, 8th and 9th grade to do environmental dramas as well. I said great, picked out themes for each class's drama, gave the teachers information sheets about their topic and talked to the kids. But I made it clear at our Earth Day meeting that the teachers would be in charge of writing and rehearsing the plays with their students as well as costumes, etc.

So then of course my director demanded that I spend every day this week in school working on these four skits with the kids, when I have a pile of other things to do and really can only be there POSSIBLY one day. When I told him that, he kept insisting and hinting that I wasn't doing enough for them. Meaning, I wasn't doing their job along with my own.

I'm not even surprised by this kind of stuff anymore. We'll see what happens on Earth Day...

The world map is almost finished...I just have to slap the varnish on it so it doesn't fall off the wall! Then I will post a pic of it. But in the meantime, here are some pics of spring break...

The clock tower in San Vicente, destroyed in the 2001 earthquake and just recently repaired.

El Cuco BeachA bunch of apparently starving cows in my friend Nick's village that just stood there staring at each other for a REALLY LONG TIME.

Paz y amor.

What?!

Have I really not blogged in almost a month??? Me, who used to blog once or twice a week??? This blows my mind.

Well, at least I haven't written for a good reason -- I've been super busy! The world map is almost finished and I am constantly covered in paint. The troubles with getting it painted were puro El Salvador -- even though it's still the dry season, it rained several days last week, causing everyone to freak out and think it would rain this weekend. I wanted to find out for sure by seeing a weather forecast, but I have to ride the bus into town for the Internet or a newspaper, and the bus had broken down for days. So I decided not to take the chance, and we didn't paint on Saturday. But then it didn't rain Friday or Saturday and everyone decided the brief rainy period was over (apparently it often rains for about a week a month before the rainy season actually starts). So some of the youth group told me they would help me paint starting bright and early Sunday.

Of course they showed up and basically did nothing -- just ate ice cream and complained about how hot it was while I painted with some random guy who walked in off the street to help us. We all went home for lunch and they never came back, leaving me to paint most of the afternoon by myself. The youth leader did finally come back near the end of the day to help me finish up, though, and without all of their help this project would have taken much longer. I still have some finishing touches to do. All in all, it was a good birthday (yes, I spent my 24th birthday painting a map on a school and went home happy.)

Other things going on: still buying materials for the stove project, planning an Earth Day celebration in the school, preparing for a girls' leadership camp, generally falling apart with so much work to do!

Thank God I took some time out for a good spring break vacation. The first few days of it I spent drawing the map, of course, but after that I went to the beach, visited friends and hung out in the capital.

I was going to put up pictures of this vacation but this computer freaks out whenever I try. Maybe next time, at a different cyber cafe?

Paz y amor.

Fiestas patronales, round 2 (or 4)

Well, the weeklong festival honoring the patron saint of my village, San Jose (Saint Joseph) ended last night at God knows what hour, and I am officially sleep deprived. Wait, you say, weren't you just celebrating fiestas patronales in late January/early February? Well, yes, but that was for the whole municipality, whose patroness is the Virgin Mary.

If you count the festivities last year, this is my fourth and last turn through fiestas patronales. And it was the most fun, because now I know more people and have closer relationships with people in the community. It used to be that I would force myself to spend long stretches of time with Salvadorans. Now I do it willingly and happily.

The other result of a long time in country is that I no longer feel guilty about skipping the events I'm not interested in, like the hours-long prayers and Masses in honor of San Jose, in favor of the ones I am interested in, like riding Ferris wheels and attending dances. Probably because by now I know that my friends in the community don't care that I never go to Mass, and I don't care for anyone who would judge me about it. And I'm OK with that and no longer fear being ostracized from the community for it.

Also, on Monday I was finally the victim of a robbery that actually screwed me over a little. While getting off a crowded bus, someone snuck my wallet out of my bookbag. Luckily this was done right in front of my bank, so I immediately went in and cancelled my card. I did lose $50 in cash, though, and my driver's license. About a year ago, when $40 was taken from my house, I was crying and furious. This time I just shrugged it off. Maybe I've become more acostumbrada, but it's also because I knew this time I was in a dangerous city (containing the only nearby bank and supermarket, so I have no choice but to frequent it.) My region is getting worse when it comes to crime -- when I called the Peace Corps safety officer to report the incident, she was like, "You again?" But I still always feel safe in my village and nearby area (the robbery last year was inevitable because I had stupidly left my wallet by an open window, and even then the robber kindly took the cash and left me the wallet with all the bank and ID cards.) As an added benefit, when I turn in the police report to Peace Corps, they will reimburse me 80 percent of the money stolen.

We continue buying materials for the stove project and wrapping up the recycling contest. Last week's environmental camp was a smashing success despite the fact that one of my kids vomited the whole way home due to eating a ton and then spending hours on the bus. I was terrified his mom would be enraged that I brought him back from camp sick as a dog, but she basically laughed it off. They're used to vomiting here.

Here's a picture of the kids I brought to the camp, plus my 22-year-old host sister Sonia, who I brought to help me supervise said kids (the one to the far right is the one who got sick). No, Salvadorans don't smile in pictures. I don't have many other good pictures of the camp, even though it was on a crater lake, because my camera ran out of batteries :( Rechargables are flaky!

Paz y amor.

The reckoning has, in fact, come

And I am busier than I have ever been in El Salvador, with the aforementioned projects. The environmental camp is coming up this weekend and I'm super excited, despite having pretty much no time to prepare for it. I still have to prepare my activities for the camp, finish arranging transportation and snacks, turn in paperwork, etc. etc. If this were still January, I would have had everything arranged weeks ago, but it is March and I am SWAMPED! Unexpected things keep popping up to take up even more of my time, like a visit to my site from some Peace Corps/Nicaragua officials and my Regional Leader (a 3rd-year volunteer who's like a coordinator for the rest of us in our region.)

Hopefully, after I get through this camp and the environmental drawing contest hosted by the U.S. Embassy (the deadline is a week after the camp) I will have time to breathe...but then, I am still working on the world map, which has to be finished before the rains come in April/May. With all this going on, I tried to push the stove project back -- after all, that has no time frame attached to it -- but my community members won't have it. I guess they feel they've waited too long for the stoves already. So some of them are buying materials without me this week.


Two days ago, I went to my friend Gabi's site to give their community a presentation about the stoves we build. Because bus schedules are crazy, we ended up in the area hours before the demonstration was scheduled to start. So I went to visit the family I lived with during training, as they're nearby. I was a bit nervous about this because I was with my stove counterpart, whom I don't particularly like. But as I found out, if you want to get a Salvadoran woman to talk with you freely and openly, bring another Salvadoran woman to the conversation. My training host mom and my stove counterpart got along famously, despite my counterpart taking potshots at me whenever she could (about what I eat, who in the community I talk to, etc. etc.) But she talked a lot about the political rivalries of our village, and who is on what side...I always noticed that certain people (my counterpart and my host family, my host family and our neighbors) didn't like each other, but I didn't really know why. And now I know it's because my host family supports the current mayor and priest (who basically work together) while a bunch of others hate the mayor and support the opposition.

We finally distributed the corn and beans that my friend Megan's community donated to us. More than 51 families benefited from the donations.

Paz y amor.

A reckoning is gonna come

...for these last posts where I've been complaining that I haven't been doing anything. The money for the stove project just came in, the materials for the world map project will come any day, we're still in the middle of our recycling competition and our corn and beans distribution project, I'm way behind on my part of organizing the environmental camp, and it's time to look ahead to other camps, a vegetable-planting project, etc. etc.

It's nice to be busy and to start every day with a long list of things to do, but some of these things are time-sensitive and have to be finished soon, so now it's crunch time. Which is why I spent January trying to start work on all of these projects, but my community just wasn't having it. It's kind of annoying being pressed for time now when I was just so bored and trying to avoid everything piling up all at once...

Time to run off and hand out corn and beans!

Paz y amor.

Alia Gets Robbed By MS-13

SCENE: On a bus on the way to San Salvador. ALIA dozes in a seat, unable to really sleep because of the blaring regueton music.

The bus stops and lets on a clean-cut, well-dressed GANG MEMBER, who immediately sits down next to ALIA. The following dialouge is all Spanish.

GANG MEMBER (speaking slowly and quickly, rather indecipherable over the music): I am from MS-13...mumble mumble give me money...mumble mumble kiss.

ALIA (prepared to do anything but not really understanding): What?

GANG MEMBER (no longer mentioning gangs or money): I am going to kiss you. Like you're my girlfriend.

ALIA (now convinced she is hearing wrong): Huh? (turns to look with terrified dinner-plate eyes at the COBRADOR, the guy who collects money on the bus. COBRADOR comes over.)

COBRADOR: Is everything all right here? Is he making you uncomfortable?

ALIA (ascertaining that GANG MEMBER has no gun but unsure about a knife. Consciously keeping the same terrified gaze as a hint): Um...no...everything's fine.

COBRADOR: Ok, then! (leaves.)

GANG MEMBER: I'm getting off the bus in Comalapa.

(ALIA is silent, pretending not to understand Spanish.)

GANG MEMBER: Hey, if you take the Autopista highway, you could get to San Salvador faster.

(ALIA, confused at the random travel advice, is still silent.)

GANG MEMBER: Ok, give me a dollar.

ALIA (looking confused): I don't understand.

GANG MEMBER: MONEY!

(ALIA pulls a dollar out of her bookbag and hands it to GANG MEMBER).

GANG MEMBER (grabs Alia's boobs): MORE!

(ALIA'S HERO, a random man sitting behind her, stands up suddenly and pulls a knife, which he holds to GANG MEMBER's back.)

ALIA'S HERO: This guy is a gang member! He's trying to take money from this girl! Get him off the bus!

(ALL THE PASSENGERS explode into exclamations, screams, a woman starts crying. ALIA just kind of blinks. It's pretty early in the morning. GANG MEMBER is escorted off the bus and can be seen boarding another bus.)

ALIA: Hey, he's getting on that bus! Shouldn't they be warned? Call the police?

(EVERYONE shrugs.)

Pretty much the best gang robbery story I've heard, much less experienced.

In other news, another Peace Corps volunteer and her community members came today with corn and beans for my village. We gave them breakfast, oranges and pineapples, and fun was had by all. I'll be excited to sort and donate the food to needy families, if I can keep the village council guy from just giving it to his friends.

Also we are having a community cleanup tomorrow, for which the mayor's office said they would donate face masks, as the dust in our village is making everyone sick. But today they pretended they knew nothing about that promise and the whole thing looks about ready to fall apart, because the principal doesn't want to do the cleanup, which we have planned forever, without the masks. So I'm off to yell at people now. Seriously, I'm sick of this kind of thing.

Paz y amor.

Valentine's Day and food giveaway

Like every other country in the world with an economy, El Salvador celebrates Valentine's Day. When I first got here, I was happy to find out V-day was called "Dia del amor y la amistad" -- Love And Friendship Day. I always had a problem with Valentine's Day in the States, whether or not I was single, because it commercializes love and is just another excuse to make Hallmark some money. But Friendship Day sounds promising, and cheap too. You don't have to buy your friends things on Friendship Day, I reasoned, you just have to hang out with them.

But my host aunt soured me on Valentine's Day, even here. Some background: I am renting a house that she will inherit, but technically it's not even hers yet and I pay the money to her mother. She, however, has decided that this means she can use my porch whenever she feels like it. On Dia de los Muertos (November 1) she woke me up at 5:30 a.m. to hawk flowers from my porch, and I was super pissed but said nothing because I figured it was just one day out of the year. That day, she at least asked permission, although she knew very well I couldn't stand there and tell her no, even if I was actually bothered by her screeching "FLORES!" right outside before the sun even rose. Which of course I was.

So imagine my surprise when I came home on Saturday to find a Valentine's Day store operating from my porch. "I invaded your space!" my host aunt said brightly, with a big smile. This was even worse than November because a) I hate Valentine's Day commercialization and b) it is much hotter now than it was in November, and I had to stay in my hot house with the metal roof instead of lying in my cool hammock on the porch. In an attempt to cool down, I opened all the windows in my house, which meant that everyone who came to buy anything also stared at me reading, or listening to music, or whatever. And the stuff she was selling was pure crap, and all the writing was English too, which made me mad that Love and Friendship Day is losing its honorability to American commercialization. The Alia's Porch Valentine's Day store lasted for two days straight. And she didn't even ask this time.

Here in El Salvador, there is no concept of renters' rights. Other volunteers have similar stories -- their landlords enter their houses and steal things, or decide to hold church services there while the volunteer is away, or throw random parties in the house while the volunteer is home. We (rightfully, dammit!) have the idea that because we are paying a good deal of money to live in these houses, we have a right to the space even though the place isn't legally ours. For some reason, though, Salvadorans don't see it that way.

In happier news, my community is getting a big donation of corn and beans from another volunteer's community! For Peace Corps volunteers, giveaway projects are always tricky because one a volunteer does one, they are forever branded as a rich American who will give anything away for the asking, and the Peace Corps gets a reputation as a giveaway organization, even though we're really supposed to work with community leaders on projects and are basically prohibited from bringing in money or things without a certain amount of community investment. But this project is Salvadorans donating to other Salvadorans, which makes it special (and amazing!) My volunteer friend was approached by community members who said they wanted to donate to Hurricane Ida victims, and they wanted her help raising money and identifying a needy community. In the end, my community was picked, and I will spend a few happy days this week organizing a corn and beans giveaway!

Paz y amor.

Fijese que

I might have already written a post about this, but it's been dominating my life lately so I'll talk about it again. It is pretty much impossible to get work done in a community where everyone keeps coming up with excuses not to do anything at all. I realized lately that for every project I do here, I basically have to do all the work myself, when I'm supposed to be working WITH the community. Sometimes I can't even do something myself because I need help from someone else in the form of transport, financial aid, etc., and they say they'll help but every day they say, "Let's do it tomorrow." I've even gotten frustrated and put my foot down, saying, "But you always say tomorrow/next week/etc," and still they find a way to put things off. It's like they're trying to make my life miserable.

A Peace Corps higher-up from Nicaragua is coming to visit my community soon to talk about "non-formal environmental education" -- that is, environmental education that doesn't take place in schools. My boss picked my community for her to come see because we have a youth group and a committee for the wood-saving stove project, which would both be examples of non-formal education if either of them actually organized or did work. My boss knows that neither of these groups are actually functional, but they are possibly the best he's got. I think other environmental education volunteers have the same problems with community organization as I do, since we are assigned to schools and not communities. But it is still impossible to get anything done at the school without the support of outside members of the community, which I do not have, or the support of the principal, which I don't really have either. My principal doesn't outright veto my projects, but he makes it very difficult for me to do anything by never being around and never providing the help he says he will.

So this director from Nicaragua will probably come and no one from my community will come to the meeting, or maybe like two people will and they won't really be able to talk about the projects we've worked on because we've barely been able to do anything. Can't wait!

Hopefully I will feel more positive the next time I write...

Paz y amor.

Crime and publishment

I'm at a ciber cafe in the city of Zacatecoluca and it was a bitch to get here! I came to go to the bank and run some errands, and the buses are running off schedule because the main route that goes to Zacate from the capital is on strike, which affects every other bus that goes to Zacate as they try to pick up the slack, I guess.

The reason for the strike? One of the bus drivers was recently killed by gang members. Bus drivers and cobradores (men who walk up and down the aisles collecting money) have really dangerous jobs because they often get extorted for all the money collected on the bus that day. Every now and then one of them gets killed and the rest of them strike to protest the violence.

Another one of my current plans has been derailed by violence: the theater group I run was going to perform in another volunteer's site this week, but that has been postponed because there was just a mass shooting there which killed 7 people.

To reassure everyone that I am not in danger, I never ride the bus at night which is when all the gang activity goes down, and the previously-mentioned massacre seems to be gang-on-gang violence that occurred by a river far away from anyone's house. Peace Corps is good about taking care of our security needs.

Finally...do you all remember the blog post I wrote after Michael Jackson died? Well, that was published in the Peace Corps/El Salvador newsletter, and then one of the higher-ups from Peace Corps/Costa Rica came for a visit and brought the newsletter back to show the volunteers that edit the Costa Rica newsletter. They ended up emailing me for permission to reprint the Michael Jackson article. I'm a famous international journalist after all!

Paz y amor.

Picking up the pace

February is here and thank GOD it looks like I finally have stuff to do. I'm just about to leave San Salvador after a meeting we had to plan a GLOW (Girls Leading Our World) camp. I'm really excited for this camp, as it will teach teenage girls about leadership, goal setting and even some much-needed sex ed.

Now that the school is less busy with uniforms and back-to-school administrative stuff, I have more of an opportunity to do work there as well. And fiestas patronales are finally over, which means other people are finally willing to get some work done as well.

Here's a picture I took at one of the entradas during our fiestas patronales...it was at my school director's house, which he totally did up.

Here is a really cool rock at Playa Tunco, where we went to say goodbye to one of our group members (I've been bad with photos lately, sorry)

Paz y amor.

Many parties and still no running water

Just got back from Playa Tunco, one of the most famous beaches in El Salvador. There we had a goodbye party for one of our group who is going home early because his wife (who was also here with him but is already back in the States) is pregnant! Of course everyone is sad to see this awesome couple go, but of all the reasons to leave Peace Corps early, that has to be one of the best.

Tunco is a really cool beach. We couldn't go out too far into the water, though, because the current is crazy strong. It's really popular for Peace Corps volunteers and tourists and we ran into one of my friends there who is an ex-volunteer. Unlike American beaches, Tunco lets you drink on the sand all day, and at night there was a bonfire and a drum circle.

I also got to shower twice, which was a huge relief since there is still no water in my site. Earlier this week my host family told me the big water pump for the entire municipality had broken completely that the utility will have to install an entirely new one, which they say will take a month. So I have a long month ahead of me, probably full of leaving site to shower and wash clothes in San Salvador, at nearby volunteers' houses or even at my boss's country house, conveniently located near my village. The latter option might be awkward but it's actually the most convenient for me...

My town is in the middle of our patron saint festival. Thursday night a friend from a nearby site came and we went to an alborada, where they set off fireworks and teenagers run around inside toritos, which are shaped like bulls and spray fireworks into the crowd, which screams and runs. Some sparks actually burned my neck and face during the alborada, and I got pushed around a lot, but there's no permanent damage.

I wanted to upload some pictures of the fiestas patronales, but this computer won't have it. Maybe next time.

Paz y amor.

No cae agua

Every so often, a pipe or the town water pump breaks and no one in the village has running water for a few days. It's usually not that big a deal because water doesn't run 24/7 anyway and everyone has big cisterns to store lots of water for the times when it's not running. But this time we've gone a week without water and I finally had to escape to San Salvador just to take a shower (I am not publishing how long it's been since my last shower.)

I'm also spending the day organizing props for the Peace Corps/El Salvador theater group that I'm in charge of. Which makes me happy because at least it's one productive thing I've done in a long time. This has been a very boring month. I planned to hit the ground running on a bunch of new projects as soon as I got back from vacation, but everything I'm working on has been pushed back to February, as I might have mentioned earlier. So much for trying to space projects out. If all this stuff does actually happen in February, my head just might explode.

Yesterday my boss came to my site and met with me for our routine one-year site visit. Peace Corps volunteers enjoy a stunning lack of supervision, which is mostly fun, but I realized yesterday that I really do need to interact with my boss sometimes. It was nice to get recommendations about problems I'm having in my site and to put things in perspective -- I complained of boredom and my community's lack of willingness to work and was comforted (I guess) by his reassurance that this is par for the course. At least I personally am not doing anything wrong.

I will conclude with Emily's gem of a quote (for more gems, see my Facebook or just talk to the girl):
"i can't believe conan put a horse in a mink snuggie when there are places without running water
i am disullusioned now"

Paz y amor.

Temblores y teatro

Right before I started writing this post, I felt a strong tremor here in San Pedro Nonualco, El Salvador. It always starts the same way, with the ground moving slowly, slightly, almost undetectably, like when you're lying in a hammock and you're not even sure whether it's still swinging.

Then it started to get stronger and everyone started looking up and around. With one final jerk, it ended.

As soon as it was over, we turned on the news and found out that the tremor registered 5.8 on the Richter scale in Guatemala near the border of El Salvador. As far as I know there's been no damage, but this literally just happened and any damage might not have been reported.

El Salvador has always been prone to earthquakes, including two huge ones in 2001 that devastated the entire region I live in. As if the memory of those quakes isn't terrifying enough, what happened in Haiti six days ago is all over the news here too. One tremor and people get really paranoid. And I have to say I feel the same way.

The other day some people in my village formed an emergency committee to coordinate rescue efforts whenever a disaster happens. I live next door to the community center where the meeting was happening, walked into it and thus was sworn in as a member of the committee. It was formed as a reaction not only to the earthquake in Haiti but to the disaster we suffered in November as a result of Hurricane Ida. Of course I think the emergency committee is a good idea, but we're mostly forming it because no one wants to form a permanent legal village council, which I have been pushing since I got here and which would be proactive rather than reactive. It's typical of my site to write off work and organization until it's necessary for some temporary goal.

In terms of post-Ida aid, what my village really needs is food donations, but those are actually being provided for the next three months by an NGO here. I'll be meeting with some people hopefully this week to see if there's anything more I can do, but I don't want to start my own private fund if the NGOs are giving us everything we need.

In other news, the theater group I run is kicking it into high gear with educational performances scheduled throughout the country in the next three months. Which makes me feel like I'm actually doing something worthwhile here, because projects in my site keep getting pushed back. I'm playing the waiting game with the three major projects I'm working on right now: a community clean-up with the school, the fuel-efficient stove project and another project where we paint a map of the world on one of the school's exterior walls.

Miss everyone at home. Paz y amor!

I'm COLD!!!

And I'm in El Salvador!

How is this happening???

Everyone says that October and November are the coldest months in El Salvador, but it's Jan. 7 and I'm colder than I've ever been in my site. There must be some kind of cold front coming through. I just read in The Washington Post that things might get icy even in the South today, and temperatures in Iowa are supposed to hit -52 (!!!) so we must be sharing the same winds or something...

I should really stop being such a baby, because I'm guessing the temps this morning were in the 50s. Not the -50s.

In other news, being back is good and I'm starting a lot of fun new projects (notably the stove one). The work year has already started for teachers and classes start next week, so I should be getting busy pretty soon. It does feel weird to not be constantly talking to friends and not to have plans every night, and my sleep schedule is STILL off...at home I went to bed at like 2 a.m. every night and usually slept until 11, so I'm having trouble getting up really early and as a result I've been exhausted 24/7 since I got back.

Miss you all! Paz y amor!

Adios America, otra vez

These past three weeks at home have been nothing short of magical. I head back to El Salvador at 3:30 a.m. tomorrow, leaving from Reagan National Airport, which is a HUGE deja vu...our training group flew into ES for the first time from National at 3 a.m. more than 15 months ago.

There were so many great things about this vacation: seeing all my friends, going out in D.C., hanging out at home with TV and Internet in 18 inches of snow. And it's really put my experiences in the Peace Corps in perspective. Sometimes it's really tough, but I will come back to America in November that much stronger, and I will always my have fantastic friends here, and hopefully a job that I love.

At the end of my last trip to the States, I didn't want to go back to El Salvador. Thankfully, I don't feel that way now. I'm really excited to go back and finish up a million projects I've been planning. While I've been here, the Peace Corps approved my rather expensive proposal to build 50 fuel-efficient stoves in my community! I'm super stoked about that especially. But I am dreading the relative loneliness of the Peace Corps. The hardest thing about being there is no longer the dirt and bugs and lack of amenities. The hardest thing is not being surrounded daily by good friends.

We'll see what happens. I've also been compiling a list in my mind of things I found strange upon returning to America:

• EVERYONE has an iPhone or a BlackBerry now. When I left, only rich and important people had them. Now I wouldn't be surprised to see a homeless guy on the street with one.
• I used to be a guru of pop culture knowledge. Now I don't know what any of these TV shows or who any of these pop stars are. The most ridiculous one is Justin Bieber, the latest in a long line of prepubescent boy singers I thought were girls the first time I heard them on the radio.
• Speaking of the radio, I sometimes complain about the lack of variety in the Salvadoran radio repertoire...but America is much worse. I swear it's worse even than when I left. The local top 40 station (Hot 99.5, for you DC natives) literally plays the same 5 songs over and over.
• THINGS COST SO MUCH! The money I spend on a coffee or a beer could feed me for a whole day in El Salvador.
• A ton of new restaraunts opened up in DC.
• Almost everyone I know is now engaged or married. WTF.

And a few things that were surprisingly the same...

• I remembered how to drive and how to get everywhere in DC and Maryland.
• I fell very quickly into my old news-junkie ways and was discussing news, the funny articles of the day and media industry gossip as soon as I got home.
• The people I worked with at the college paper still get together and gossip endlessly...thank God! Same with my high school friends.
• I apparently cannot go home for a single break without hanging out at the Barnes & Noble where I used to work. I actually tried to avoid it this time and ended up there three times.

My next post will be from El Salvador! Paz y amor!