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”!