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.