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.