Katie: Indulging in San Salvador

On our way to San Salvador I start thinking about cravings I wanted satisfied and there did not seem to be enough time to stuff myself with all. Anyway on the edge of the city there is a store called Hiper Paz basically a Wall Mart with a grocery store (kinda like a Safeway) inside. There were women handing out cheese samples that we ate and while we were there we found dark chocolate Milky Ways. After leaving here we went to Pizza Hut. Pizza not the greatest but very good since it was the first time I have had restaurant pizza in country. Back at the hotel we proceeded to eat our Milky Ways. Off to the office to work… after on the way to the bus we grabbed mocha frapachinos for the bus ride to our hotel. Its time for dinner and we are too full to eat much so we head to a happy hour in a fancy hotel for a beer and free nachos with a lot of other English speaking people… that was strange, not used to hearing that much English outside the PC community. On the way to our hotel we stop at the gas station on the corner and find dark chocolate Milky Ways and of course we eat them, but before we ate those we ate churros (chips). The second day started off with a McDonald’s sausage McSandwich and a mocha. For lunch we decide to give the Argentinean restaurant “Pamas”(near our office) a try. Bien Rico! We each had a ten ounce steak, one chorizo, a grilled potato, veggies, soup, salad, garlic bread, and with this comes 4 different salsas to choose from, lime wedges, and a pickled thing that tasted good but not sure what it was. We also had a very nice glass of red wine with our meal and after we had a delicious cappuccino with desert. I had flan while Jon had tres leches, bien rico! Lunch is the biggest meal here of course. Ok for dinner we had subway and I was disappointed because they were out of chocolate chip cookies how could they J ! I will not be back in San Salvador for at least two months at least I hope. Oh well, we bought more Dark Chocolate Milky Ways on the way home instead J. The last morning we get up early and ate egg croissants and of course coffee at a bakery called San Martin. All in all fine dining experiences this time.

Other things we came a across in San Salvador: Another volunteer told me about a yarn shop with a very nice owner so we went to investigate good stuff and it will work for my knitting group. Yeah! I found baking powder in a couple of stores (Super Selectos & Hiper Paz) but not baking soda? We bought more coffee for our coffee maker, oreos, pancake mix (you do not have to add egg & milk to), mint tea (we are able to get chamomile near our site), granola, sesame oil, sirrachi sauce, vinegar, curry paste, and coconut milk.
San Salvador is not our favorite place because of traffic, safety issues, and polluted air but it has its perks.

Katie: Showering at the public *pila.

Well here goes… I was staying with my host family while taking Spanish classes in San Vicente this past week. When on the first morning my host mom announced the private pila had no water and asked me if I could shower at the one everyone else uses. Ok this pila is next to the kitchen and on main path everyone in the family and frequenters of the **tienda walks by on. At first my brain said no but then because I was feeling very grubby I thought ok, I will be wearing shorts and a tanktop no problem it will be just fine so I said “Si, no hay problema”. Since almost everyone uses open-air pilas to bathe, bathing with clothes to cover you is the norm here. Well then she handed me a slip and said it would be easier to wash ;) so ok I change and start. Soon I have a line of kids waiting for their turn as they all are getting ready for school. Then I look down between the two latrines (about a 2 foot space) and see the teenager and his uncle “working” yeah… ok this is getting awkward as the slip is pegando (sticking) to me so I step back a foot so they can work in private. Meanwhile I have five kids waiting with the boys 5 & 8 looking at me dreamily. When the 5 year old announces that my breast are larger than his moms who by the way is standing in the kitchen and starts giggling with rosy cheeks when our eyes meet and I just say “va (ok)” to the kid and continue about my business as quickly as possible. To top it off one of the men of the family is coming on the trail and so I start frantically trying to unstuck the slip from my legs when I hear (as he was surprised because he was not paying attention) hoh! Of course I cannot bring myself to look in that direction (as my cheeks were turning bright red) so I take the only course I can and just continue very quickly. Anyway the whole time I was laughing hysterically inside and thinking only here would I get so much attention!

*pila: large concrete basin where the people wash dishes, clothes, and bath.
**tienda: local store with the basics.

Katie: Dia de Adultos Mayor

When I went to San Vicente for Spanish classes I was happy to be able to stay with my host family in San Isidro. After 3 buses totaling 5.5 hours I was ready for a rest or I thought so. My host family mom gave me a little lunch, because I had so little during my travel. Of course she remembered all of my favorite foods. We were talking when she started to seem anxious so I asked “que pase?” she then told me we were going to a something and that the bus for Verapaz was ready. I say something because I did not understand part of the sentence. So I ate faster and we went for the bus, yep another bus. When we reach the bus there are only three other people. They are all older so I ask again because my curiosity is peaked and again I gain no new insight except the bus is free. We wait and wait after about a half hour and a handful more people we leave. Upon arriving at the park in Verapaz young girls hand us little papers with numbers and when I ask about this I understand from my host mom that its for a rifa (raffle). Then I promptly tell her if my number is called she is trading numbers with me. Anyway on a platform I see Dia de Adultos Mayor (A day for Older Adults) and sure enough I was surrounded. There were a group of performers (2 men and 1 woman) who could all sing well and gathering from the reactions in the crowd they were humorous too. The mayor and other important people in the community got up to say good things or tell humorous stories. Everyone who came was fed two tamales and hot chocolate the real stuff! My host dad actually got up on stage when prompted by the performers and danced with a young woman. My host mom laughed and said he can’t dance and then laughed again. During one of the rifa breaks they called my number and I frantically gave it to my host mom who said are you sure and I said por seguro (for sure) its yours so she got a prize we were both happy. It seemed to me everyone enjoyed themselves including me.

Where to Start

I promised a few photos... even though these don't have much to do with the following post, here are some from our current home in Las Pilas, partly to show, that yes, it really is cold here! Hmmm, having blogger photo loading issues... I'll try again soon!

That’s true of this particular entry, but also of our current phase in the Peace Corps process. I have been a bit delinquent in this post, not that you might notice, but from where I sit I haven’t been writing much of late. The last entry was on my birthday… and, well I might as well begin right after that…

We had been down in La Palma to use the internet and do our “big town” shopping. As we were on the bus heading back up our crazy steep hill we had reached the main crest, and we were starting on the first little downhill, when the bus lurched forward, and then stopped. There was some murmuring from up front, and then I noticed some smoke coming from the floorboards. Now, switch your thoughts to any of a dozen disaster Hollywood flicks, Inferno, Poseidon Adventure, whatever… (I got to age myself good with those references!). You know how crazy people acted in those films? Well, that’s what the bus turned into in a few short seconds. People started rushing for the exits, and since the smoke was up front, most turned towards the rear exit. Plastered on every face that was heading my way was a look that people have who know at any moment this bus is going to become a huge ball of plasma that will put the Death Star to shame.

Now, usually the buses here are fairly calm and only marginally packed…. not like the famed Chicken Buses of Guatemala. In fact what little livestock does occur on our buses here is remarkably well behaved…. Except… except when said fowl is being used to club everyone who is between you and what thin hope for survival you see in the hazy light of the exit door. It was chaos. It would be funny except for the very real fear those people had. I have to blame Hollywood. Is there a clash action suit out there for people injured by people who are over-reacting to an unrealistic fear instilled by action films and Hollywood’s need to find some effect to justify their budgets? Because people were hurt that day through no fault of the bus. One older woman was pushed out the door, another stumbled in the gutter and wrenched her ankle, there were a number of cuts and things like torn fingernails. I slipped out the door fairly easily, but hey, how many years of football did I play? I started trying to help folks who were exiting, but still trying to avoid breathing too much of the oily smoke. I could hear Katie back inside the bus yelling “Tranquillo, tranquillo!”. In the end everyone made it off the bus, and somehow blowing a head gasket and spilling a bunch of oil on hot engine parts didn’t result in a good ball of flame. You could see the disappointment.

So, after it looked like things were more or less under control. People were attending the injured folks, sometimes in not so good way, but this didn’t seem like the time to try to teach some basic first aid principles. Now we made like the crazy gringos that we are and started walking! It was made all the more amusing by the fact that we had actually purchased more than our usual groceries and were carrying with us two large pillows and an automatic drip coffee maker. The bus broke down in the canton of Rio Chiquito, so we had about 4 kilometers, maybe 5 to walk. It was a nice day, and we made good time, partly because we agreed not to try to explain to anyone what we were doing.

That was on Friday, and for Saturday we had agreed to meet up with another volunteer to hike up a river valley as part of a study he was doing for his masters. This meant getting up early and hopping on the bus to go back down the hill. The one and a half hour trip back down to San Ignacio was uneventful. We planned to walk up the Rio San Ignacio, which is pretty much the river valley our steep crazy road parallels during most of its uphill journey. It would be great to finally get a look at the canyon that we had only seen from way upslope.

It was perfect weather, sunny but not too warm. The hike started uneventfully with the exception of trying to get the GPS devices to work correctly. Normal problems there. Anyway, it was nice to get out and hike up a creek. I kept looking for fish, there aren’t any and I know it, but habits die hard. We were there for geology, so we looked at the rocks a lot. We tried to determine what the base rock layer was, and to see if we could locate the transitions between the base materials. Overall it’s as good as any excuse to hike up a pretty canyon. The idea was that we would hike up the canyon to the upper reaches where there were some good landslides, to take a good look at one or two of those, and then hike up to the road to catch the bus (uphill bus for Katie and I, downhill for the other volunteer).

This all went fine for quite a few hours. It was great to get out and spend some time with another volunteer who has been in country over a year already. Good conversation, and we got to learn things too. Then we ran into the first waterfall. It wasn’t too bad, but it did require some actual climbing, and we did feel the need to watch out for each other. This was just the beginning. Circumnavigating the various falls became gradually harder. This was part of the deception, because it was never that much harder than the last one, and we had already managed that, so why not go on?

Eventually we came to a fairly large waterfall and started looking for ways around it. I had stated up one route that looked feasible until fairly high up it just got too risky. coming back down I found that Katie and the other volunteer had made it up a fairly slick slope. When I tried to follow I found that their previous passage had made it even more eroded and risky so I decided to look for another route. Going to the opposite side of the canyon, I finally backtracked far enough to find a route up and around, only to find that if I dropped back into the canyon above the one fall, there was another right afterwards that was even higher.

We started a yelling conversation back and forth across the canyon. They thought it would be too unsafe to try to come back down their side and join up with me. So we both decided to just start heading up the slope, and look for roads out. Now my side was the side with the main road where our bus runs, but their side went off to some untraveled road. We knew that we should be able to meet up in Rio Chiquito, but weren't sure how far off that would be. The climb out, especially after all of the previous walking was hellish. Katie and York (the other volunteer) ran into a coffee plantation which made their steep walk a bit easier. May side was clearer, and I ended up running into a local guy, who I 'm sure thought we were crazy… but he showed me the local route out to the road. Once there I called Katie and York to find out how they were doing. They had also found help and had made it to a road, but it was not much traveled…and still a long way from Rio Chiquito. We both started our respective hikes uphill. Very uphill, I have new respect for our bus having to travel up and down that road several times each day. You don't really feel how steep the road is until you walk it with tired legs.

To hasten a long story, we did meet up in Rio Chiquito, though they had the much harder walk than I. From there we hired a truck to carry us to Las Pilas aka home. York had to spend the night with us, as all buses downhill had passed long before. The end result was that in the last two days, Katie and I had effectively walked the whole route from San Ignacio to home, what is normally a one and a half hour bus ride. The next morning a whipped up a batch of hot salsa, eggs and hashbrowns to help us recover. Good stuff! Well, part of our goals in coming here were to have more activity in our jobs… that seems to be working out.

45

So, it is not the ultimate answer... rather it is the age I am today. I should probably have some witty or profound thing to say, but hey, this is an on the fly blog entry, versus one that I write up before I am sitting in the internet cafe.

So, for my birthday, Katie and I came down to use the internet, woohoo. We will also eat out and do the weekly shopping here in town. Tomorrow is a bit more interesting, we are joining another volunteer or two to go and hike up San Ignacio creek. He is doing his masters work as part of PC service, and is studying landslides. So, we will be mapping some of the various features as we hike. It should be fun, and good exercise.

Things are all still very good. The one funny thing is that with the weather we have had the last few days, I would swear we were serving our PC time in Nepal, and not El Salvador. It has been bitter cold, and windy. The nights may not compare to my coldest night ever, which was in Nevada, but it has been an exercise in how many layers of clothes, when combined with blankets will let you be both warm, and able to sleep. I promise that the next blog entry will have more pictures. Cheers

The Culture of Housing

I’d have to look back through the old blog entries, but my memory is that I haven’t really talked much about what at this point is are big challenge. We are still looking for a place to call home. Since we moved to our site, we had been living in a very small room that was made acceptable by having access to the school’s cocina (kitchen) and classrooms, so at least we could cook for ourselves and had some space to study and work. With the start of school next week, we needed to change our living arrangements pronto. We had hoped that some more permanent arrangement could be made during that time, but at this point our best option was to move into a “hotel” for a month or two to give ourselves more time to find a good situation.

Currently we live in the Huespedes in Las Pilas. We have a large room, with just enough space to have a small cocina (think camp stove) that we can cook on, and a little table, ect… basically about the minimum space we think we need. It’s nice to finally have some space of our own, and Katie and I even get to sleep in the same bed now! It wouldn’t be the best for a long term situation, we’d still like to have a bit more space for working inside, and some outside space for a garden… overall it would work, except that it is in the wrong community. Las Pilas is only 3 kilometers away from our community, but it means that all of our nearest neighbors, interactions at the tiendas, ect… are with people that we aren’t planning on working with. These more casual interactions are frequently the best time to learn things about the community, what they might need or want, plus the local news, gossip… in short all of the things that we would like to know about our site! So, by being in Las Pilas we are putting ourselves at a disadvantage for being effective PC volunteers.

So, what’s up with El Centro? Why no housing there? Well the basic reason is that; any house that exists in that community is being used by a family, or several. So mostly what might be available to us are rooms. Herein lies our culture clash. The amount of space we think that we need is much greater than they would think we need. Reality is we think that we need a small house, and they really don’t understand why two people would need a house. Now we know that this has been overcome in many other communities because lots of PCVs have their own place. Over the last month though, we have come to realize that really there may not be any house type options here. So if that were really out of the options then we have to start considering rooms. This is where the size thing comes in…because even the smallest of houses space is not the problem, but with rooms it is a different matter.

Hmm, how to explain… some things are definitely cultural differences. There is no doubt that Salvadoreñans would be comfortable with much less space than the average American, and that a sense of privacy in the way we mean it is almost a completely foreign concept. Then you have to add to that concept the fact that we want to be autonomous, as in cook our own food, wash our own clothes, have our own bathroom, ect… Obviously, if we only have a room, we will likely have to share some of these things… at least a bathroom (think latrine, and a place for a bucket-bath), and likely the pila for washing clothes and dishes. So, say we accept that, then there is still the matter of cooking food. Sharing a kitchen is just much much harder, and they know that too. So, when we are trying to point out that a room is too small to cook in, they understand our need to cook, but they don’t really grasp how much space we need to cook. Partly this is because we have mostly men helping us find a place. They just don’t spend any time in the kitchen other than to eat and stay warm by a fire. When we say space, they think the size of a cook stove, they completely forget all of the space for cookware and foodstuff. Not to mention a much harder concept is that we would really like a refrigerator.

See, for the most part they don’t really use a refrigerator here the way we do. Food is mostly always fresh here, because some woman is always at home working on food. Because they don’t have much, they pretty much consume all they have during the day. The idea of making extra and eating it through the week is foreign. But for us volunteers, who will both be working through the day, we really need to think that way. We can’t afford to have one of us staying home and cooking all day every day. We need the refrigerator to help out with that. Plus keeping the veggies fresh, again, here the families are large enough that they just eat a whole head of broccoli in one day so storage is not an issue. Think beans, it takes all day to cook them, so you don’t really want to make just two servings worth.

The last thing I will talk about is work space. None of them (not the men anyway) work out of their house so the idea of having deskspace to write or prepare a charla on is strange. Not to mention that things like books for reference don’t exist, so the idea of having them out on a shelf and available doesn’t click. The need for that kind of space is hard to get across. An offshoot of the workspace idea is that when we were thinking about what kind of place we needed, and how our “jobs” factored into that, we had hoped we would have some outside (porch) space to have smaller meetings on. A place to read books to the kids, some private tutoring in English, ect… If all we have is a room, then we have to invite them into what amounts to our bedroom, and that’s not really acceptable in this culture, not to mention in our own minds.

So, a lot of this was driven by my own need to write some of this out. Still, there is a lot of info on the kinds of cultural differences we are dealing with. Folks here are really trying to be helpful, too helpful at times. If we didn’t like our community so much, we would probably be happy to be looking at living in a nearby community. A lot of our frustrations stem more from the communication difficulties. Being able to work through these conversations in a polite way requires fairly skillful use of the language sometimes, and we still fall well short of that. Poca a poca, is a saying that we use, and hear a lot down here, and it’s true, little by little things will get easier. Cheers for now!

Update: Since I wrote this, it seems that the house that we had hoped for originally is going to have work starting up this next week... so if all goes well we will get a more than ample house, too nice actually, by around March. Things just change around daily, but we are getting used to that.

One Month Mark y Año Nuevo

Well, the new year marked our first month as volunteers. It also marked the end of a very strange adventurous year for us. One year ago today, we still had jobs and a house. We were already well on the way towards leaving, but the first of many more substantial commitments hadn’t occurred yet.

So here we are in El Centro now. These are several views of the local school that we will be working with. It has also been something of a home, since during this vacation period we have done all of our cooking here, and spent quite a bit of time studying in and out of the classrooms as well. School starts in a little over a week, so we will have to be moving. We are not quite sure where yet… probably to nearby Las Pilas, where there is a “hotel” of sorts that has a larger room that we can rent out for a couple of months while a house is completed.

Overall, I would give our first month here a thumbs up. I think we have a very good community to work with, and you really can’t beat the climate. It also feels much safer than much of the rest of El Salvador as well. We have certainly been very healthy, (knock on wood) no real health incidents at all up here, not even upset digestive systems. We still have a lot to work on, the housing being a part, and the language is still a huge struggle (and frustrating too!). But, good first steps have been taken, and we have kept busy and productive for new volunteers.

As far as the entire year goes… I’d have to say it was one of the better ones that I have had (can’t speak for Katie, but I think she enjoyed it to). It’s not just the fact that we weren’t working during most of it (yes, I’m sure that helped), but more that throughout a large portion of it we were actively doing things that we really wanted to do. Previously, we had been spending much more of our time on things we “had” to do, and lived for the short periods of things that we liked to do.

I guess I just feel like we spent most of our year actively pursuing personal goals, and meeting them. Of course all of this led to our being here, and now we have more huge challenges ahead. That’s what’s refreshing, everything about our lives here is a challenge. For those of you who think that we’ve just dropped out and are taking a two year vacation. Try uprooting yourself from a comfortable life and culture, and really go beyond your comfort zone living someplace where you don’t understand the culture, and you can’t even communicate that you don’t understand it. Then add to that that everyone, including yourself, hopes that you will provide some kind of help and support for this community. It’s a lot of pressure… but it is also very satisfying and mostly fun!

Ok, enough of the soul searching. I’ll end by promising that the next entry will have more description of things we are doing and experiencing. Cheers for now!