Oddities and ends

Just a few quick observations on Salvadoran culture.

I’m going to watch "Who wants to be a Millionaire El Salvador" tonight with my family. We watched it last week and as a team we successfully answered every question correctly with one exception. They got all the Salvadoran culture questions and I nailed a few of the more general questions. El Salvador’s national currency is also the US dollar, but the maximum that someone can win on the show is $200,000. Now, that is a ton of money here, but why they still call it "Who Wants to be a Millionaire," I have no idea.

Tommy Hilfiger clothes seem to be very popular here. I don’t really have any commentary on that other than that I think it is odd. Same with the Black Eyed Peas and 80's music.

Cell phone etiquette is non-existent. Our Spanish teacher (who is awesome) regularly answers her phone in the middle of class. Staff at the training center also will stop a lecture to pick up a call. So will a school director, a health promoter or just about anyone with a phone. I’ve not yet been able to identify a time when it is not appropriate for a cell phone to ring. Even in the schools, students are told to avoid using cell phones during class, not that they are prohibited.

Trash is everywhere, unfortunately. What is such a naturally beautiful country is overrun by trash in a lot of places because there is no organized trash pick-up for many of the rural areas. People regularly burn their trash here because there is no other option besides letting it sit in the yard, which a lot of it does anyways. A lot of people don’t understand the difference between organic waste and plastic trash. For example, there is trash all over the rural village I live in, and no one really seems to care. However, someone saw me throw an apple core into a field and gave me a weird look. "What if one of the kids saw you throwing trash?" she asked me. I explained that it would decompose and it was okay to throw apples into the field, but she insisted that next time I put my apple core in the trash can so that it could be burned with the other trash. We went through the same song and dance two other times after that and she still doesn’t believe me that it is better to throw fruit cores into a field than it is to burn them.

The methodology in the schools here could use some work. Students do almost nothing other than copy sentences from the blackboard and don’t seem to retain any of it. I taught an English class to a group of students last week who were in their third year of studying the language. We spent 45 minutes trying to learn the alphabet and the majority of the students had a terrible time just doing that. Kids here only spend 5 hours a day in school and they get a 20 minute recess for every 45 minutes in class. Pretty much all of their homework consists of copying things word for word from a textbook or practicing handwriting by writing the same letter over and over again hundreds of times. This is the same for students all the way up to 9th grade. Most kids in my village don’t go to school after 9th grade because they have to travel to go to a high school.