Magic School Bus

The buses down here are wild. To give you an idea, they are beat up old school buses from the USA cerca 1990. But these buses aren't bright yellow. They paint all sorts of crazy birds, beasts and words on the buses. The ones I've ridden have had everything from Jesus Christ on the cross to a big red swastica above the front door, but most of them are green or blue and Catholic themed, and they're definitely interesting to look at.

Aside from the appearance, I'm pretty sure they were designed for 1st-6th graders so you can imagine how well I fit on them. Since I've here, I've seen a total of two Salvadorans over 6 feet tall and one was a woman wearing heels so that doesn't really count. If I'm lucky enough to get a seat, my knees are in my chest or I sit diagonally. I say if I'm lucky enough because an open seat is a rarity on a Salvadoran bus. Most of the time every seat is full, plus the aisle is filled with another 30 or so people.

I went to church in the city with my house mom last week and I was standing in the open door next to the cobrador, holding on with one hand as we went down the highway at about 50 mph. Who is the cobrador? He's the guy who walks through the crowd of people crammed into the aisle, collecting bus fare from everyone while performing magical acts of aerobics to fit between everyone as he slides through. What I mean by aerobics is really just shoving his stomach into everyone and pushing his way through. Somehow all of the cobradors are overweight despite the fact that they have to defy the laws of physics to squeeze through everyone to walk up and down the aisle collecting bus fare.

Along with the cobrador, vendors get on and walk through the overcrowded aisle at most of the main stops, trying to sell anything from mangos to gum to natural herbal medicine while trudging through the crowd. If you were to follow my path walking through the aisle of the bus, it would be something like this: Step onto bus, sidestep old man with machette, squeeze past cobrador and wonder why you can't pay him as you get on, wiggle past stomach of cobrador (thought you were done with him for now), raise arms and poke one leg past group of kids, grab seat to pull yourself the rest of the way through crowd of kids, rub butt against woman holding a week's worth groceries and crotch against seat, inching past her... and congratulations, I'm now standing in the third row of the bus under the emergency exit door in the roof, the only place on the bus I can stand up straight. Crowds like this are bait for thieves, and one of my fellow volunteers was pick-pocketed her first week here.

Now this may sound miserable, and some days it is, but it's also exhilarating because it's so full of life and action and risk. Chaos can be fun sometimes.

Quinceñera

This past weekend was quite the event. It was my host sister’s quinceñera, which is a big party to celebrate a girl’s 15th birthday. This is a huge deal here in El Salvador, as it is in most Latin American countries. The night before, my host mom and several other women from the community stayed up all night cooking the 80 something chickens that were served at lunch for the 200 something people who attended.

Now these were not chickens bought in a store frozen and then thawed. These were chickens that had been raised either in the homes of family members or on a farm nearby. And they were most definitely still alive when the night began. All 80 had to be killed, plucked and cooked between Friday evening and Saturday morning.

There were a number of people killing the chickens by hand, then hanging them upside down and slitting their throats to drain the blood out. After that, they would be dipped into near boiling water and their feathers plucked. Then they would be cut down to prepare for cooking.

One of my main goals down here has been to integrate into the community as much as possible,

so basically I am trying to do everything that my host family does to learn the culture and gain respect.

In this case, that meant breaking the necks of some chickens and ripping their feathers out afterwards. The first chicken I killed took a few tries. I wasn’t sure exactly how to do it and my host mom had to give me some pointers. (She was in charge of slitting their throats after they were dead and draining the blood out, and thus was walking around with a bright red butcher’s knife and blood dripping off of her hands.)

After I finally snapped the neck of the first chicken, quite a few people gathered around to watch the gringo trying something new. I really wanted to make sure I did it right the second time with everyone watching. First, I grabbed the chicken by his feet and turned it upside down. I let it flap its wings for a few seconds until it calmed down. Next, I placed my hand on its neck just below the skull and snapped my hand down as hard as I could. Apparently it was a bit too hard, as I ripped the head off completely and blood squirted all over my jeans, shoes and a lot of the people around me. I looked up to see several pairs of eyes wide open, and a few seconds later everyone started cracking up. A few minutes later someone wiped a bit of blood off of my forehead that I had missed. We spent the rest of the night ripping feathers out and getting the birds ready to be cooked.

The quinceñera was an all day event on Saturday and consisted of mass in the late morning, followed by a huge lunch and dancing all afternoon and into the night. It was a great time and I met several other volunteers who had lived with families in the area previously and were invited back for the party. It was quite a weekend and I’m grateful to the family for including me in such a special event in their lives. My host sister got a lot of gifts and seemed to really have a great time. The kids were all dressed up and impressed everyone with the choreographed dances they had been practicing for weeks. Lucy Vanessa (my host sister) has a job alongside going to school and doing a ton of work in the house, so it was nice to see her have a day to forget about all her obligations and just be a teenager.

Getting my feet wet

So I’ve been here in El Salvador for just over a week now and there is much more to say than I’ll have time for in the half hour I have here at the cyber cafe before I have to catch a bus. I’m living with a host family in a small rural village about 30 minutes by bus from where I am typing right now. The city I’m in at the moment has about 70,000 people and it is where the Peace Corps training office for El Salvador is located. I come here once or twice a week for formal sessions with our entire group of 36 trainees, but most of the time I am in the rural village where myself and four other trainees live. I’m living with the Rodriguez family, which consists of Margoth, the abuela (or grandma), her husband Tules, their daughter Carmen, and Carmen’s three children who are 11, 13 and 15. The family is incredibly friendly, generous and welcoming.

I wish I could go into more detail everything but I’m just going to try to get some interesting details and anecdotes for time’s sake.

Some basic details about my life:

The house I live in has 4 closed rooms and a kitchen. It is made out of cinder blocks and the living room-dining room is covered above but open on the sides. Clothes are washed by hand, food is cooked over a fogon (don’t know the english word, but has a few burners and is heated by wood collected from the area), and bathing is done using a bucket. There is running water, but only in two places called pilas, which are large cement tubs. One is always full and is used to wash clothes, dishes, etc. The other is filled once a day and the water is used for bathing. It is hard to understand for someone who has never used it, but we don’t put anything into the pilas. You use a bucket to scoop out the water you need. For example, when I wash my body, I use a plastic bucket and scoop water out and dump it over myself as many times as I need to in order to get all the soap off.

Meals often consist of beans, avocados, tortillas and cheese. Often it is accompanied by a hot chocolate type drink or incredibly sweet coffee. Unfortunately none of the good coffee grown here stays in country. It is all sold and exported and the people here drink instant coffee. Que lastima.

I get up at about 6 every morning and go to bed by 10. That doesn’t mean I get 8 hours of sleep. It’s more like 6 hours thanks to the constant noise of dogs fighting, roosters crowing, pigs oinking and cows mooing. Like I said, it is rural where I live.

My mornings are entirely occupied by Spanish classes from 8 until 12, then lunch with the family, and in the afternoon it’s off to meet community leaders and brainstorm social service projects, talk with youth groups, or come here to the city in San Vicente for official Peace Corps business.

There are a lot of things I hope to accomplish while I’m here, but for now I’m just learning what I need to know to be able to get it done. My Spanish is coming along well but I have a long way to go before. I am building relationships in the community and gaining some trust, but I will be off to my permanent site in less than two months. It will be a different rural village. This village is just for training purposes so that I will be prepared for the real thing in several weeks. They have had many volunteers here before and are accustomed to our gringo eccentricities. The village I will be staying in for the full two years after my training ends may not have ever worked with a Peace Corps volunteer before.

So what exactly will I be doing you might be wondering? My official title once I finish training will be Rural Health Facilitator. I will be teaching communities how to prevent and dercrease common health problems that debilitate many communities. One in every five children born here dies before the age of five. Diseases caused by mosquitoes and other way nastier insects are pandemic. Reproductive health education is almost non existent (possibly even worse than abstinence only education, haha). My main focus will be educating communities about how to prevent and decrease these and many other common health problems.

The cause closest to my heart however is working with the youth here in El Salvador, and especially the young boys. There are few men from 20 to 50 years old in El Salvador compared to the number of women. Manyof the men who are young enough to work leave the country because of the lack of employment opportunities. They get to the States by whatever means they can so that they can work and send money back home to El Salvador. This money is a huge percentage of the El Salvadoran economy and a lot of the families would not be able to survive without it. So what does this have to do with the youth? These kids grow up without fathers for most of their lives and often don’t have any role models to look up to. Gangs are a huge problem in the country and are the reason this is one of the most dangerous countries in the world. Many people are killed by gangs everyday here and countless others are robbed, assaulted, etc. Combine the lack of father figures with the lack of employment opportunities and a lot of promising young boys turn to gangs for a way to make money and gain acceptance with other men. I hope my efforts here can do make an impact in whatever community I end up in for my two years of service to help prevent that to an extent.

Enough serious stuff for today. I’m incredibly busy during these 2 months of training and probably won’t have enough time to write here again for a while, so I’ll leave you with some quick stories from my time here so far.

This weekend my host sister is having a quincenera party (very big deal here, the only birthdays that really matter are 1 and 15) and I’ll be at a party at the house I’m living at with hundreds of people from the community. Great time to meet even more people.

My host mom thinks it is funny that I insist on washing my own clothes. Gender equality is a laughable idea for people here. Not that women are looked down on, but there are strictly defined gender roles that are not normally altered. She asked me to give her my dirty clothes after I’d been here a few days, but I insisted that she teach me how to wash them instead. Washing clothes by hand isn’t terribly hard, but it certainly isn’t a walk in the park either and she ended up rewashing one pair of my pants today because they weren’t clean enough in her opinion. Next week I am going to have her teach me how to cook. That will have the women of the village talking for sure.

Out of the 36 of us here, about 10 have already been sick with diarrhea, vomiting or both. Our training director promised that it will happen to each and every one of us at some point. Our bodies are not accustomed to many of the bacteria here that the locals have developed immunity to. Also, the sanitation leaves much to be desired. Many of the latrines here are basically just holes in the ground and waste can seep through the ground and into water supplies. Also, the illnesses caused by mosquitoes, chinches, etc almost always include vomiting and diarrhea. Hope none of you are about to eat dinner.

I’m sure that at some point I will be sick, get robbed, or whatever but I don’t waste even a second of time worrying about any of that. I¨m smart and capable and I know to give up my stuff instead of getting stabbed, how to take care of myself and get help if necessary when I’m sick, and can find whatever I need to deal with whatever situation I come across. There’s no time to worry when there is so much to do.

I’ll try to post some pictures later but I haven’t even gotten my camera out yet. There is a volcano right by where I’m living and some incredible views of the mountains and the open space all around. The stars at night are incredible thanks to the lack of city lights. And the medicine we take to prevent malaria has a known side effect of lucid dreams which I’ve been lucky enough to experience.

I’ve only been here a week but it has been such a rich experience that it feels like it’s been months. I really love life down here and I am working my ass off every day to learn Spanish and get ready to make a real difference in the community I end up in after training.

Last night in Lawrence

Free State Brewery, hanging out with lifelong friends, double checking things that have already been triple checked, anxious energy, anticipation, and just enough uncertainty to feel not entirely sure this is all going to happen.

It's been a great 19 years in Lawrence and I think this town will always feel like home to an extent. It won't ever be the same again after tonight though. After almost two decades here, I have memories associated with everywhere and everything. Two years and three months is a lot of time for things to change, and a lot of the people who make this place feel like home might not be around when I get back. Either way, I don't think I'll ever be back here permanently. All good things must end.

In my freshman dorm I would wake up to Anish's alarm, find him fast asleep on the bunk below and proceed to spend the next several minutes deciphering mumblings that blended the leftovers of his dreams with his attempts to respond to my urging that he get up for class.

I'm at a point in my life right now sort of like Anish was on those mornings during the fall of 2004 on the 7th floor of Oliver Hall.

I'm hanging on to this last bit of normalcy I have here in Kansas but I can feel it slipping away, fading from my vision as I reach up to rub the sand out of my eyes and take in my new surroundings.

I'm ready to get up, but I anticipate I'll still be thinking about this dream for most of the morning.