Dia de Independencia

(Ed. note: Two posts the same day, so don´t miss the one that I placed before this one!)

So, after all of these wordy blog entries, it’s time for one that is mostly handled by pictures. Luckly we just had a very photographic event to help me out. September 15th is the Dia de Independencia in El Salvador, and in fact for all of Central America. Here it is a big community event, taking weeks of preparation, with most of the work falling on the school who plans and manages the activities, but also reaps the results in terms of monetary gains. In fact this event is where the money to cover all of the costs for the computers will come from.

About a month ahead of time school changes around a bit to accommodate the new activity of learning and practicing marching, with a few also learning to play drums or trumpets. This is a big event, and I will just let the photos tell the story of how it unfolds on the big day.

The rest of this will just be comments on the photos, with the exception that I will explain the whole candidata to queen thing in a bit more detail.

Here is how the parade starts out, with the twirlers.

Then comes the trumpets and drums.

Then the Flags.

Then lots of marchers, arranged by classes.

This is a look at the parade coming down ¨main street¨. Thought you might like to see how that looks.

Here is looking the other way down the street as the parade passes by.

More marching. These guys have bands on them, not sure what it meant, but they had a higher rank.

These girls were the younger twirler types. I took photos of them in the parade, but this one taken after shows them better.

There is a lot of makeup prep before the whole thing. This is one of the twirlers getting ready.

This is another of the dancing type groups slotted in between different classes. They have on what is considered the more traditional outfits for dancing. The girl in front there, is the youngest daughter of the family we live with, Carina.

These are some of our instituto friends, in not so traditional outfits.

After the parade everyone comes to the school to buy and eat lots of food. Katie was busy selling her fudge, even at 20 cents a piece (very expensive), she sold it all!

A satisfied chocolate lover after visiting Katie´s stand.

This is one of the other events. A ¨correos de cinta¨. Here the guys ride horses and try to lance a leather strap help up by the posts and string.

Here is, I think, a successful capture!

When they make a capture, it will have a number on it. That number corresponds to some young girl like this one who is what is called a ¨madrina¨and she gives a small present to the rider. If it is an older girl, and she is cute, she might be coerced into a kiss.

Another aspect of this kind of event, is that you have to have a queen! Here are two of the ¨candidatas¨. We were ¨padrinos¨to the one in front, which is my counterparts daughter. This means we gave her money, and sold votes (5 cents per vote) for her over the previous 2 weeks.

Katie with the winner and queen, our candidata, Ana!

Ana with her brother and sister. This is one of the families that we visit and spend time with.

Here is the last picture, one of me eating an elote loco. A rather disgusting mix of corn on the cob covered with mayo, ketchup, creama, cheese...maybe more, but that´s all I remember right now. This, and the one above of Katie also shows how we are dressed most of the time around our site. No T-shirts and shorts here! Hope you enjoyed all of the photos! It takes too much time to do this often though, so don´t come to expect it :-)

The Great Circle

Two of the things us volunteers ask ourselves while serving, are; what useful skills am I gaining during my time here, and what skills did I bring down here with me? In slightly different words it’s; how can I really help my community, and, how is this time preparing me for my future? These questions are much more popular with the younger set…just out of university, still trying to figure out what they want to do, ect… For me it takes a different form. I am constantly amazed at how frequently some skill from my “diverse” past becomes useful and needed down here! Who would have thought that a “teacher/biologist/firefighter/construction monitor/environmental consultant/project manager/gardener/park maintenance worker/painter/cook/film editor/who-knows-what-else… is such great preparation for a Peace Corp Volunteer?

Take the other day. I was down in the garden doing some clearing with my cuma, when I realized it needed some sharpening. So I pulled out the “lima” (file) I had recently bought and tried to find a comfortable position to sharpen it in. Turns out there isn’t a really comfortable position for this tool. However, those hundreds of hours of tool sharpening while working as a Hotshot, sure did come in handy! I’m sure it would have flummoxed those recent grad type volunteers, good thing I spent those 7 season fighting fires!

Later that same day I needed to write my part of a solicitation for funds to operate a camp/workshop for youth. I had volunteered to write up information about the communities that we were taking the youth from. Surprise, this is just like writing up all of those background sections of environmental assessments! Even more so because two of the three communities were ones I knew pretty much nothing about. Having written numerous descriptions of places I had never actually been to or seen while preparing environmental documents, this didn’t phase me in the slightest.

A few weeks ago, the association that I work with on the worm compost project had to give a report on the project in order to secure funding for the second phase of the project. This had to be done in front of a panel of donors, and an audience of peers. The format was basically an interview, with us explaining how great we are, that we have the proven abilities to perform the next phase of the project, and why we deserve being funded again. Sound familiar consultant types? Sure, the only thing we were lacking, which I unfortunately decided to remedy, was a good powerpoint presentation!

In reality Peace Corps volunteers are mostly put into a situation where they are expected to be “expertos” in some thing or another, and of course they are not. In my particular program for instance, you would think I might be somewhat proficient in “Agro-Forestry”. Well, I do have some forestry background, but really, does any of it apply to the tropics? I also have a bit more agricultural background then a lot of the younger set these days… because I at least grew up in rural communities that were agricultural. Also, while I was growing up, California was more known for Ag, than for tech. Still, what do I really know about agriculture? Not much. So, what do us volunteers bring to the table so to speak?

This issue came up while I was participating in a review of our Program Plan. We are getting ready to write up the new plan for the next 5 years, and brought together a group of current volunteers to review, and advise. One of the first things to come up is that the current program is largely technical, and that the volunteers simply don’t have the technical backgrounds to really run with the program. Not only that, but in the country there are plenty of “tecnicos” who do have these skills, and work with many of the communities that we are in.

We decided to do something that is quintessential PC, we used a community diagnostic tool, called a FODA (at least in Spanish speaking counties) to look at our own program. This stands for Forteleza, Oportunidades, Debilidades, y Amenaza, or in English, Strengths, Opportunities, Weaknesses, and Threats. Without going into a lot of boring detail, one of the interesting things to come out of it was that we did think that the volunteers brought a lot of very valuable skills to their communities, but that they lay more in the realm of cultural strengths of the US. Meaning things like ability to organize, knowing how to find and absorb new information, intuitive knowledge of business and money, and social networking skills. Most of the successful volunteers were really making use of one or more of these kinds of skills, rather than the hard-core technical knowledge.

To bring this entry back around towards where it started, I’m not going to go into the planning process in great detail, the important thing is that as critical as some of us wanted to be, we really did find some great strengths that volunteers bring to their communities, they just may not be the ones that people who come to change the world expect. They all work much more slowly, and mostly through constant exposure to another way of thinking.

To close, I will also point out that here I am down in El Salvador, yet again working on plans and planning. We were even making vision statements, and talking about SMART goals! What’s the lesson here? Maybe something like; no matter if you “run away” from, or decide to drastically change your life, your past will always come back to influence your present and future. It is not a bad thing, far from it… but you should take this into account as you make decisions.

Oh, and to put an even sharper point on this… at this moment, Katie is down in San Salvador, working on computers! Anyone remember her love for this activity! She is pulling hard drives, cleaning keyboards, reformatting disks, and installing new programs, woo hoo! It is all to help get some computers for her school up here in El Centro, but still a bit ironic! Even better will be when next school year (school here starts in January) we are both called on to teach classes on computers. Heh! Good times!

Plan on Planning

(Ed.Note: The Photos are just to enjoy, and not in support of the rambling text)

Hmm, trying to be better at posting more frequent blog entries isn’t always easy… I know that I’m going to be at a ciber café tomorrow, thus, I’m going to try to write a blog entry now to post tomorrow, but as of this second, don’t really have a topic. Ok, well, the reason we will be down in “the big city” of La Palma tomorrow is to finalize preparation on a solicitude to get some funds to run a short camp/workshop. Katie and I are working with two other volunteers in the local area to put together the proposal, and will also end up running the camp/workshop sometime in December, assuming we get funded.

The “campamento” is called Thinking Outside the Box. We are going to focus on 13 to 16 year olds, taking them out of their respective communities (each volunteer to take 5 kids from their community), and having a 3 day, 2 night “camp” with them. Sounds fun huh?! The focus of the activities during the camp are on analytical, and creative thinking. This is lacking in any current Salvadorean school curriculum.

As part of our preparation for this, we gave a survey to a number of school kids in our communities. The focus of the survey was their future. Questions were things like; how long do you plan to go to school, what do you want to do when you grow up, where do you see yourself in 10 years, and what are your dreams? I think that the thing that struck all of us after we gave the survey was just how difficult these questions were for our kids! They really struggled to come up with any answers. The boys tended to be worse than the girls, and regardless of all of our promptings and help, we still often had to write “does not know”.

With many of them it was just obvious that they had not ever thought about it. Some of this is definitely cultural. Something that we don’t recognize about ourselves as US citizens (hard not to say Americans, but hey, guess what, Americans includes everyone on not one, but two continents!), is that we are trained to spend a lot of time thinking about the future. We do lots of less desirable things because of some future goal (retirement, mowing lawns to get an Xbox 360, ect…), this is part of our culture. We are always planning! We plan our vacations, we plan for college, we plan weddings, kids, and our afternoon. This is not the way the whole rest of the world works, certainly not here in El Salvador. One of the things that most frustrates our volunteers down here is the lack of planning. Here, everything just happens. It goes hand in hand with the whole sense of time thing…people from the US talk about things like “wasting” time, that is simply not possible down here. Without plans, how can time be wasted?

It may sound like I’m saying that planning is good, and therefore the lack of planning here is a weakness… to a point I am… but I’d like to throw this out as an example of a cultural difference that we should question of ourselves… is planning good for us? For years now I have struggled with friends on the concept of “planning” trips. I used to get questions about if I made reservations for all of my “hotels” during my travels, or for various excursions? My answers of “no” frequently scared and confused people. How could you arrive in Sydney Australia, so far from home, and not know where you would stay that first night? That lack of planning scares us. Many people have told me flat out that they just couldn’t do that! I’d just like to throw out that this might be a strong cultural weakness on our part.

As any good battle general knows, plans are really great things…until the actual battle starts, and then you’d better adapt, or die. I can smell a great analogy here with the whole Iraq war concept… In Bush’s mind he had a plan for how things would go, and when things started changing on him, he never really adapted. This confidence and reliance on plans is a cultural fault. The same has always been true during my travels. Some of my (probably most) best experiences during trips have not, and could not have been planned. Things like shearing sheep on a ranch in western Australia, or seeing Jerusalem (we never even planned on entering Israel and spent over 2 weeks there), going to Tikal the first time… tons of examples here of great unplanned things.

Anyway, the point is not that plans are bad, but rather that over-reliance on plans could be a bad thing. Lack of plans is not a great thing either, the folks down here do need to start making and understanding the concepts of planning. But the real strength of a person shows when their plans don’t work… how do they adapt? This is what really makes good generals, coaches, and leaders. Can they think on their feet, do they listen and take advice? Can they make a new plan?

For us, that is the way things seem… you just go from one plan, to the next. The whole idea of contingencies is about always having a plan. What does this mean for us? Well for one thing it always means that we are comparing where we “are”, compared to “The Plan”. This can give us good feedback, we are doing well, or guilt when we aren’t measuring up to our plan. I’d put out there that our culture of planning also follows to a culture of guilt… hmmm, haven’t thought all of this through completely, just going with it for now… But what I’m saying is something like… we are walking down the road, “planning” on going to Don Jorge’s, but Niña Esmerelda invites us in, and the next thing you know we have a coffee cup in our hand and are discussing her family. Now, if you are a typical person from the US, you start to feel guilty because of your plans! You can’t really enjoy the conversation, because you are thinking about how you should leave soon. If you are from a “less planny” society, you get to really appreciate the time with Niña Esmerelda, no guilt, just enjoying life.

I think this might be what I am getting at. Enjoy life! To do this, I think, you need to let go of plans, at least a little bit. This will get rid of your guilt and expectations, and allow you to just live. Try it. This all might, might, be some of the reason that the people down here, regardless of circumstance, seem to be happier than most folks back home.

Ok, well, I have wondered a bit far afield from where I started…or have I? Regardless, this is as far as I am going to take this for now. The most important thing I’d like to get across, is that so called cross cultural differences, are just that differences! There is no better or worse about them. Our instant reaction upon encountering them is to think, “that’s stupid, why do they do it like us”. When instead we should take the opportunity to ask ourselves why we do “X” that way? The answer, if we really look, might surprise us and give us some new insights on our society. Cheers!