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.