Update Entry

So, I realize that often when I do get around to writing a blog entry (not too frequent recently, sorry!), they tend to focus on a specific subject, like immigration (one that either is before, or will follow this one). In this case, I am going to try to do a better job of just discussing what we are actually doing with our time down here. Hopefully give you all a better idea of what our lives are like down here…I’m sure it will jump around a lot, but such is life, especially for volunteers down here!

As I write this I am preparing to take a group of young adults from our community to a training provided by the Peace Corps. It is called PDM, which stands for Project Design and Management. Hmm, suspiciously close to Project management…isn’t that what I was trying to get away from, hehe, not really! However, that is more or less what it is about. One of the reasons I would encourage hiring PCVs is this type of experience, which you will never get in University, and it might take several years in the corporate world to get it. Ok, I digress… the idea is to encourage sustainability and self-reliance by giving the local communities training to design and manage their own projects.

In this case, the opportunity came at the last minute, with less then two weeks notice. It requires a commitment of three days down near San Salvador. I didn’t want to miss out (the next one isn’t until March), nor did I want to just have a rag-tag group whose only attribute was that they were available on those days. Well, it turned out different than I thought, but should be good. Because none of our association members could attend (at least not ones that could really benefit from this kind of thing, the folks started thinking outside the norm (rare here), meaning they thought about their sons and daughters. So, I ended up writing the proposal (yeah, still do that too!) for a group of two sons and a daughter from the families of association members. The two muchachos are 17, and the muchacha is 22. I’m really looking forward to spending the next three days with them. This age group has been a difficult one for me to work with and get to know for a variety of reasons. They aren’t in school for the most part, and they aren’t in the association. Mostly they are the “mozos” or workers who do all of the crop work. I just don’t hang out with them much…some of the younger volunteers manage to hang out some, so my age puts me in a different class too.

Anyway, meeting writing, and arranging all of this was what I worked on for the last few days. Last week I also spent some time working with the association members building a “bodega” (warehouse, small) to store the stuff we will feed the worms over time. Also, we were busy turning the worms and product over so that the worms get every last bit of material processed, plus to start the drying process. We should be drying all of the material and start the final process of separating the worms out very soon, which means we will finally have a product to use or sell. This meant that we needed to start filling some of the other pilas so that we could put the worms back to work. So we went and collected “brosa” (humus) from a nearby small scale coffee finca, which has bananas as the overstory, so a lot of what we collected was banana duff. We used this along with “pulpa de café” and “estiercol de vaca” (cow shit) to make a new food house for the worms.
In between all of that I worked on our garden, which is now starting to produce chiles, and planted some cauliflower and more squash. Also I helped a couple of local farmers do some weeding and clearing. I’m starting to get pretty good with a “cuma”, a hand scythe type tool. I’ll put a photo up at some point. One day was taken up with a meeting with a group called CATIE. They are a tri-nation group (El Sal, Guate, and Honduras) that works mainly in the zona alta, and is focused on reduction of chemicals in the environment. Our association is working with them to grow 13 manzanas of cabbage using only “green label” chemicals. They will help to offset some of the costs of conversion and monitoring. These types of meetings can really exhaust you. Regardless of all of your thoughts on how good our Spanish should be at this point, it still takes a lot out of you to have 4 to 5 hours of meetings all in a language that you are still trying to learn. Some interesting side notes on that… it never ceases to amaze me how much better I can understand “educated” Spanish speakers. It is just so much clearer what they are saying (the only ones that are easier are people who are speaking Spanish, but it is their second language). Meanwhile I can follow that meeting with a day in the campo with a bunch of local “uneducated” Spanish speakers, and feel completely stupid and inadequate, because I can barely understand a damn thing!

Another thing that has developed, is that the kids that we live next to have learned that our computer will play DVDs. So, we now have movie afternoons quite frequently…maybe too frequent as I can now sing most of the Dora la Exploradora songs!

Meanwhile Katie has been focused on other things. She has been working on a charla about soils and lombriculture for the school, scholarships, and an environmental group. One of the things the PC tries to impress on you during training is that your charlas need to have activities, and have plenty of drawings with your information, not just a bunch of words on a sheet of paper. Katie has been very good about this and always takes lots of time to draw things to help explain things, or just make the page more interesting. Because of this, at the school she has become quite famous for being a great artist. The other afternoon, when we arrived at school to give our English classes, a young girl approached Katie and asked if she would draw some pictures for her. After we talked to her for awhile, we realized that her mom wanted to embroider three tablecloth type things, and she wanted Katie to draw the pictures for her mom to embroider! So, now Katie has these 3 cloths and she has to draw one with flowers, another with butterflies, and the last of her choice.

The scholarships are something that have been requested from the community since we arrived. Most of the students who could go to university, or sometimes even instituto, don’t due to economic reasons. There are not a lot of scholarship options out there, but thanks to the PC we have found a few. So Katie has been meeting with the students that have an interest and discussing how to go about filling out the applications that she has made copies of. It is hard not to get their hopes up though, we have no idea how many could actually win scholarships… The other thing is most of them probably would never get even this far in the process because they don’t even know how to apply to the universities. Between the cash and the lack of confidence/shyness, most can’t even make it to the university to request an application packet. This again is something we will help out with by trying to arrange a day for those that want to, and we will escort them to the university. I think there is a way that you all can help out if you want. I will find the web address of one of the scholarship organizations and post it here. The way they run things is that people can donate money and list it for a specific Canton, that Canton then has a higher probability of getting a few of the scholarships that they offer. You can donate over their secure website (they are in the US), and the site is in both English and Spanish. It is surprising just how little money can make a difference… ok, that sounded like a commercial for kids in Sudan or somewhere… but really school is pretty cheap here, less than $100 a year for tuition, so a little can go a long way.

With her environmental group she asked them what kinds of things they wanted to do. So far they plan to start their own garden, the boys growing vegetables and the girls growing flowers (hard to get away from the cultural norms), make recycled paper, maybe go camping (they aren’t too sure about that, evidently there are lions up on El Pital…), take some hikes (again, lions could be a worry), and make money to do more things! Today the group met and transplanted some pines that we grew from seed, placing them in bolsas (bags) so they can grow more before planting them about a year from now. They actually really enjoyed it! We need to figure out how to collect seeds from the pines ourselves, these were some seeds we got way back when we went to the agricultural university. Oh, one other idea is to make some artistic baskets using the pine needles, again to make money.

This last Sunday several of the teachers Katie works with were participating in a baptism. Here it is almost always done in a big group because the Padre doesn’t want to be doing the ceremony every week. So, several couples were both the parents of a kid being baptized, as well as god parents (padrinos) of another kid. Here are pictures of both the parents and god parents of the kid who we were there to see. Also, we went the their house afterwards for a big lunch followed by cake.

Since I started writing this a little time has passed and I am back from the PDM workshop, which went really great! The kids seemed to really enjoy it a lot. Their parents have said they did too, so I hope it is true. Soon, our plan is to meet up and practice some of the things we learned. Then we will try to develop a project of our own. I’m really excited about the possibility…but as with all things down here, “vamos a ver”!

Immigration Thoughts

Living down here is probably a bit like living somewhere near the Mexican border in the States, the effects of immigration intrude on your everyday life regardless of what you want to pay attention to. Not a day passes here where you don’t notice kids with one or both parents missing, overhear conversations about people who have left, or have someone mention their brother in the States. Also when meeting new people their first question is where are you from? Followed by I have a cousin in Minnesota, is that close? They always want to talk to you about the States, the weather there, what crops people grow, how close is one place to another… Their geography is shaky at best. It is hard to give an idea of the size of the US. Things are far apart in miles, but close in driving hours, whereas here, the opposite is true. As an example, our 16km down to the pueblo is an hour plus trip. They also really have trouble conceiving of a place where so few people don’t have crops to attend to.

Anyway, back to immigration. Once again I should take the time to point out that these are my opinions and not those of the Peace Corps or my government. Something I am not sure people recognize back in the US is that the folks that go “mojado” and immigrate illegally to the US are for the most part not the dregs of society that could find nothing useful to do down here, and so headed north. Rather, the ones that leave are many times the cream of the crop. They are the ones that would go to university if the opportunity really existed for them. They would be the entrepreneurs, the leaders. It makes sense, to take that kind of risk, leaving behind your family and kids, undertake the burden of over $6,000 to $10,000 dollars of debt (current price that you pay a coyote to get you across…prices are increasing due to our increased border security), you have to really have a strong desire to succeed, and a lot of self confidence.

This is the hidden truth, much of what we get in the US are the same types of people that would demand 6 figure incomes in the US, but we get them for peanuts. Sure, they do not have the education that that 6 figure person did, but from the basic aptitude perspective, they have those attributes that make great workers and employees. Their desire to succeed allows them to work long hours at poor pay, as well as do difficult, uncomfortable, taxing jobs. Growing up someplace where you started working in the fields at 4 gives them an advantage in the US, both by having bodies used to hard work and stress, and by having their social values prize physical labor, rather than thinking it a lower form of work.

I think that in the broader sense this is the truth behind the “success” of the US as a whole. We have always had an immigrant population to provide this type of work force. It is the new blood that makes us stronger, ect… So, if we recognize this fact (and I’m sure plenty don’t really agree), then how do we reconcile this with the opposing force of stronger border security. The fact that we are wallowing in our current immigration reform is probably a reflection of this juxtaposition.

Although I am far removed from the current thoughts on immigration reform in the US, I get the occasional Newsweek, and the papers here always have a section on immigration, but I don’t get them much. However, one thing I had heard at some point was a proposal to allow more immigrants who had a good education in some specialty fields, professionals, ect… To me that seems contrary in the extreme. I mean, some of the counters to the loosening of immigration has always been the “theft of jobs”. Won’t these highly educated immigrants “steal” more jobs than ones with less than a 6th grade education? This is aside from the fact that how many of that “flood of illegals” are these professional types? I mean, how does this type of change help stem the tide? If we are going to do anything useful about immigration we have to look to the problem that we really want to solve. We have to look at who it is that is crossing our southern border, why they are crossing, and decide what we really want to do about it. The first thing is we have to admit that there is a huge demand for these folks. I’m sorry, but it is like any market economy, if the demand wasn’t there, they would not be coming across. I am not talking about the push from their lives in a poor economic state, but rather that the employers in the US want them.

If you want to understand this, it is like most things, follow the money. Look who is getting rich from the status of illegal immigrants. It is not the immigrants. These are the groups that are going to be lobbying against some types of guest worker programs, or anything that would reduce the need for illegal workers (such as some increase in a legal type of immigrant worker). Surprise these people are not making their money on educated, professional immigrants, thus no opposition there!

One group that obviously stands to gain from stricter immigration (including tougher physical barriers) are the “coyotes”. This doesn’t even require peeling off a layer and looking deep. It’s ironic that if the border was easier to cross, to the point where there was no profit margin for the coyotes, you “might” see a reduction in immigration (arguable to be sure, but worth thinking about). Coyotes do more than help people who want to leave get across, and set them up with what might be work, and burdened with several years worth of debt. Like any good business, they market! Surprise again, they convince some folks who on their own might never really make the trip. The harder and more dangerous the journey becomes, the more the coyotes can make. But right now our enforcement methods don’t go after the coyotes at all, or at least rarely. It is not that hard to find out who they are (like I said they have to market). Porque? It’s a bit like fighting drugs going after only the abusers, and the prodcers/farmers, while ignoring the cartels… oh wait, we do that to…and why is that?

Ok, I’ve probably gone far enough with this for now. Least you think that this is some sort of a leftist/socialist touchy feely rant… realize that I am more conflicted than ever down here. The real long term solution to immigration problems such as exist here in El Salvador may be to shut our borders tight, make them stay and solve their own problems. Of course, that would mean the people of the US would have to get up off their a$$es and go to work (real work, go pick some tomatoes, milk some cows, sew clothes, plant trees, and clean hotel rooms… and stop watching powerpoint presentations and reading e-mail, and thinking that you are working) as well as pay fair prices for goods and services instead of thinking that you should get something for nothing.

This is all going to come back and bite me when I run for president in 2016. But, what fun is a rant if I can’t make a few folks mad. Besides, anyone that really knows me knows that I really only think that about 50% of what I say is right about half the time…