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.