play and such

I don’t think anyone is going to hire me to be in his or her next blockbuster, but our project with the play went pretty well this week. The gringos played the following parts: 2 trees, 1 bird, 1 river (ME!) and the guitar player. The kids played trees, the person who cut down the trees, a couple of humans who littered and devastated the environment in the forest, and the smallest kid played the monkey!
The entire morning turned out much different than we had originally thought though. As it was explained originally, the mayor’s office would invite people from all over the town to have a little kick-off celebration for the environmental campaign. However, a non-governmental organization (NGO) actually ended up sponsoring facilitating the event and the mayor’s office provided the equipment. The main event was to be the movie, and we performed our play beforehand. However, our play turned out to be the highlight, as the NGO that came in to “teach” about global warming decided to show Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” to a bunch of 8-12 year olds (not the audience we were expecting), and then tried to have a formal discussion about the dangers of destroying the environment. The Al Gore movie is a truly educational experience and informative as all get out, however, you can’t show a detailed slideshow lecture in movie form discussing the effects of global warming when the kids have never even heard of the concept. I was surprised that an organization like this one would try to present such an important topic in such an age inappropriate way, since they knew beforehand that they would be presenting this topic to 8-12 year olds. All and all though, it was a great experience working with the kids, and we will continue going to the meetings until we go to our permanent sites…Speaking of our permanent sites, we find out very soon where our new homes will be...it’s like Christmas! (minus the presents, good food, regular running water and electricity)

sink or swim time baby.

This has been an event filled week, starting with my English class, the death of my room rat, learning how to “dance”, and a mini-earthquake tremor episode. The assumption here is that if you speak English, then you would make a good English teacher, a bold assumption I thought. Teaching the class reminded me of my first day of driving on Waters Road (a curvy road with ditches on either side) with my Pops. I was wildly apprehensive about driving A. over 20 mph outside the ‘hood and B. about driving on a real road with real ditches, and James Hackett tells to that it’s “sink or swim
time baby”. So to make a short story entirely too long, I taught the colors and parts of the body to a class of 23 fifth graders, who were a lot of fun and tried particularly hard to pronounce “purple”, but it just wasn’t happening for them. The teachers at the school a lot of confidence in the gringos, but I managed to stay afloat…we had a good time.
Next mini story from my week is the Mouse story. I have/had a mouse-rat that lives/lived in my room. I’d named him Randy and Randy only squeaks at night, much like the crowing roosters, who choose the most inconvenient hours to make their animal noises. The only time I had ever seen the true animosity between cat and mouse was in cartoons, but now I know that they are born enemies. Our house cat (who subsequently doesn’t have a name, they just call him Cat), caught Randy, who turned out to be a tiny mouse, and then kind of just played around with him for fun. My host mother called me over to see Cat killing Randy, and I happened to have my camera handy, so I’ve included it for your viewing pleasure.
Next mini-story/disaster for the week….Last Friday, we had a dance class, which turned out to be fairly tragic for most of the gringos in the group, as there are few people who have any sort of rhythm whatsoever. However, I snapped a few pictures of the calamity that the teachers had the unfortunate duty to instruct. Apparently, when we are out of training and into our permanent sites (T-minus 3 weeks), and are invited to various social events, we may have to dance at some point (eeeek!)
As well, there were earth tremors that lasted about 30 seconds earlier last week…. I was sufficiently freaked out that my body was moving and I wasn’t the one responsible for it. My host mom told me that El Salvador has about 4 major natural disasters a century. Which for a country the size of Delaware, the amount of devastation the people experience is just crazy. There are over 180 volcanoes here and they get hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes, floods…no blizzards (oh how I long to not be sweating for more than 5 minutes). During those few seconds of the tremors, I was convinced that the volcano I live beside was going to erupt and we were going to be the Pompeii of 2008. After my host mother convinced me that the volcano was, in fact, not erupting, I had already convinced myself that there was going to be another earthquake… however, there were 2 major earthquakes in January 2001 and February 2001, so hopefully we’ll stay natural disaster free for a little while. This country’s got a hard time building, because when it takes 2 steps forward, nature knocks it 3 steps back.
Again, I apologize for how I’ve haphazardly strung my week’s events together… but to wrap up, this week we will be putting on a play in front of the town with our youth group in order to kick off the Environmental Campaign. I will be playing the River… Apparently I’m a teacher and an actress in this amazing country.

kids, projects, and trash

Just a mini-death trap adventure this week, class, our town project and a massive earache. I asked my momma to come down so she could put the drops in my ear, but she didn’t really think it was as urgent as I did. Though she and Pops have promised to come down in something “serious” happens. I still contend my ongoing ear infection is a “serious” struggle. Aside from my minor aches and pains, we have been getting our town project going here in the training community (we are here for another month). We ended up making contact with a great teacher who organizes a youth group that meets twice a week. (Side note: our contact is the English teacher at the local school, however, he’s never formally studied English, nor can he speak it. He is the newest teacher at the school, ie “low man on the totem pole”, and got stuck with the subject. The government provides no English training and gives the public schools $25 per student, per year… basically these teachers here are making miracles) For our time in the training communities, we had to implement a mini-project that is taking place in a few weeks. The kids and the gringos (any white person here is automatically a gringo, any Asian person is Chinese or a chino, any slightly overweight person is fatty or gordito… these people get right to the point) will be putting on a play with the kids about the environment as well as doing a Cleaning Campaign around our town. The mayor’s office is hosting an Environmental Campaign (which will last a few months), which kicks off with our play and a movie to follow. This is a great initiative by the mayor’s office, as it is a topic that deserves some attention. Just for example, when someone is done with their ice cream, Coke, or napkin they will simply throw it on the ground, be it the street, the park or the beach. Trash collection wasn’t even required by the government until last year (now, every municipality is required to have their trash collected by hiring a private service..$$$$). Not to get too pedantic, but the environment is a growing concern for many people, and since going green seems to be the new black and is becoming a very sexy initiative around the world, many small towns are catching the fever and implementing some very cool and creative campaigns for environmental consciousness.

On a lighter note (my mini death trap adventure) I did have to cross another bridge o’er a river this week, when the other gringos in my town and I went to the river with our youth group this Saturday. I’ve included some photos of my town and of our adventure (Cultural Side Bar: Many many people do not smile in photos here, they will smile before and after and will have had the best day of their lives, but do not smile for the camera…. Haven’t gotten the “why” part figured out yet). Thanks for all the great emails! I like to hear what is happening with everyone back home!LIOB chicas.

I’ll try to recap my mini adventure from the past 4 days…keep in mind that we are a few weeks in-country, and Peace Corps sends you on a little voyage to go visit another volunteer. So together with my $20 (spread out over various parts of my backpack/body in case I get robbed), and a few bus route numbers, I start out from my lovely home here into the Western part of the country. 3 busses, 1 pickup truck and 5.5 hours later, I arrive at my destination, a little town in the Western part of the country and the 5th poorest municipality in El Salvador. The volunteer I was visiting was under the impression that we were to have a “campo” experience, and I was under the impression I would be staying with her, but I was wrong. So after visiting and meeting the mayor of the town, we start off to the countryside, where I’d be staying. So when I say countryside, I really mean death trap. For example, after we started our hike to the site, we curved off the beaten path, into the woods (where I could’ve never re-navigated), shimmied between lots of barbed wire posts, we passed cattle and fruit trees and then, there was a fairly rapid river ahead, but I was sure that we would be arriving at the house before the river, but I was wrong. Ahead of me, I saw a tree/log bridge that I was to cross before we got to the house. Talk about having a tough commute to work…eeek…but I am still around to write about it, so it was an experience to be sure.
The deathtrap commute isn’t even that interesting compared to my surroundings upon reaching my destination. I arrived to meet the lady of the house, a very corpulent, loud, interesting woman who was busy readying the crops that she sold at the market, which included swinging a very large knife while chatting me up (I was trying my best to understand, but lots of people lack proper dental hygiene here, and she was missing more than a few teeth, making it all the more difficult). The lady of the house was surrounded by 5 dogs, 50 or 60 chickens and 2 roosters, 5 other birds (who apparently sung beautifully, but I didn’t think they were singing so sweetly at 4 in the morning), 6 parakeets and a ton of vegetation and flowers and they gave me a tour of the all of the crops behind the house. I ate everything straight from the tree, and apparently grapes not only grow on vines, but on trees as well. I felt like I was such a country girl, but I don’t think they thought I was, even a little bit. When we got back from my tour, a chicken peed on my foot. For all of my brilliant city friends back there in the states, a chicken doesn’t start a nice flow of pee like you and I, but it all comes out in one quick, huge squirt, which makes it exceedingly difficult to actually move one’s foot. The house itself was divided into 2 rooms, with the kitchen and facilities all outside, and I slept in one of the rooms with 4 other girls, who were incredible. I can’t imagine someone in the US opening up their house for a night to a stranger who barely speaks the language and people here do it all the time for FREE, without a second thought. The people here are incredibly hospitable and generally fun to be around. El Salvador gets an especially bad reputation in the States because of the massive gang activity, just as we get a bad rep around the world for some badly handled US policies, but it’s so important to recognize the good, amazing people over the rest of the craziness.
After spending the following day and night with the volunteer and attending my first Quincineera party that evening (when I girl turns 15 here, there is a HUGE celebration, complete with a mass and her own personal lecture from the priest, and an awesome party afterwards) and seeing my first giant scorpion on the toilet, I left the following morning to meet my family at their daughter’s ranch, which was beautiful. I got to make pupusas (the famous food here), which are tortillas with myriad ingredients inside, naughty talk….so so good. They have an actual verb here, “tortillar” or to make tortillas, which is a lot more difficult in practice than in theory, I’m not domestically inclined in the first place, so you can imagine how beautiful my pupusa was. I’m totally and completely exhausted, which is the norm for me here…it’s a great way to feel every day, mainly because it’s the only way I can sleep through the roosters at 3 am.