Violence and changes in PC El Salvador

Watching CNN today I saw a rare reference to Central America scrolling across the bottom of the screen. "Peace Corps scales back in Central America amid raging violence."

I wasn't surprised by the content, but did not expect to see this news get quite so much coverage.

El Salvador has been a really violent place for a long time. I have rarely felt threatened or unsafe during my 23 months in the country, but it would be foolish to deny that it is a dangerous place. Recently, my adopted home received the infamous title of 'Most Violent' in the world. Below is an excerpt from an article published a few months ago.

"El Salvador is the most violent country in the world with 60 deaths per 100.000 of population.

From 2004 to 2009 more people died in violent conditions in El Salvador than in Iraq, the second most violent country in the world, followed by Jamaica."

Foreigners are rarely targeted, and despite the high level of violence, most of my colleagues in Peace Corps have never been victim of anything worse than a robbery. There have been some more serious incidents, however, and a volunteer was shot in Honduras while riding a bus this month. This has led Peace Corps to temporarily evacuate the volunteers in Honduras and cancel the new groups of trainees who were scheduled to arrive in El Salvador and Guatemala in January. Here is a link to an article in the New York Times about the situation.

Like I said, I am not in any danger personally and do not feel unsafe in El Salvador. This will probably not affect my service. As I was originally scheduled to end my service on the 30th of March, the only likely change for me is that I might be coming home about a month before I originally expected, as the staff here is considering allowing more flexibility in our departure dates due to the security situation. Hopefully Peace Corps will find a way to continue working in Central America and, more importantly, that El Salvador and Central America will find a way to end the violence that plagues the region.

What's next?

Independence Day is coming up, on September 15, with parades and all that good stuff to celebrate. I have been all over the country lately-  for training at the beach with the rest of my group, another HIV workshop in San Vicente, and meetings in San Salvador.

In my site I'm getting started on a mural project at the school and working with a youth group doing leadership and gender equity activities mixed in with a bit of soccer here and there. These two projects are going to take up a lot of my last 6 months in site. Along with the camps and other things I have going on around the rest of the country, I will be happy if I am able to finish up everything I have planned before my COS (close of service) next March.



A new group of volunteers comes to El Salvador every 6 months, and my group is now the next scheduled to leave. Six months is quite a while, but time can fly when you are busy and that will definitely be the case for me until March.

Our scholarship committee WYD is throwing a halloween costume party to raise funds this year, and we will be awarding the next round of scholarships before the end of the year.

Being on the scholarship committee and working with the HIV prevention initiative have been two of the most successful parts of my time as a volunteer here. They have both been positive ways to collaborate with other volunteers and see more direct and big-impact results than some of the smaller-scale projects I do in my site. We have literally trained thousands of Salvadoran young men and women on HIV prevention through the workshops, and because of WYD, 25 people who wouldn't be able to otherwise are attending school. I definitely feel good about my service knowing that I have been a part of both of these projects in addition to the work I do in my site.


I realized the other day when I was in the capital that I know San Salvador better than I know Kansas City. And it's not even close.

I get a lot of questions about what my plans are for when I get back. Here is my short list of things to do when I get back: USA road trip, Brooke's graduation in May, write a book, get a job.

The Usulután curse

As USA vacation looms closer, I'm thinking more and more about life back home. I have more going on, work-wise, socially, really just about in every aspect of my life down here, than ever before (which is logical, the longer you spend somewhere, the more ways you find to make yourself effective, the more connections you have, etc) but I am anxious to visit the States nonetheless. I found myself dreaming about going to a bar with a random assortment of friends from various periods of my life and being astonished that the bar was charging $5 for drinks. "That's half of my money for the day!" I exclaimed to the bartender.

........

The Usulután curse continues. In my training group, four of us were sent here to the department of Usulután. The other three have already changed sites, two for security reasons and one, well, I'm not sure exactly why, but she changed sites too. In the newest group of volunteers here in Usu, one of the girls has already gone home for good, also for security reasons. Usulután is one of the hottest, dirtiest and most dangerous parts of the country. And it is not a particularly safe country to begin with.

.........

Luis, aka Viejo Lin, was crying on the stairs at Niña Blanca's house the other day as I was sitting on the patio. He cries a lot. The other kids are bigger than him, but he is confrontational and gets into a lot of fights, almost always losing. His family life is rough. His dad is not around nor in touch, his mom is an alcoholic, and he is really, really poor. Like dirt floor, not enough money to eat, rats chewing his clothes poor. Being considered poor in El Palmital is a level of poor unimaginable to most Americans. The richest people here would be below the poverty line in the USA. Like many of the poorer people in the village, he lives in a sheet-metal shack, infested by rodents, insects, and a lot of other nasty things, and his family's most valuable possession is a small, beat-up television and the antenna on top that gets signal from a few local channels. The electricity for the TV and one light-bulb comes form an extension cord running out of the window of a somewhat better-off neighbor.

Luis can be a sweet kid, but he is tough to deal with at times. He's missed out on learning a lot of things because of the instability of his situation at home. He doesn't respect anyone or anything unless it serves him, he likes to steal, and he always wants to fight. In the moment, it can be hard to feel sorry for a kid that behaves like that. It's easy to cast him off, avoid him, or lament his behavior. But there are times, like him sitting on the steps alone, crying quietly, that make you realize that it isn't his fault. No one at his house does anything to show that they care for him, except for his older brother protecting him at times. His mom doesn't give him enough to eat. She uses most of the little money gets a hold of on alcohol. No one washes his clothes for him. He doesn't get help on his homework, and might be repeating 3rd grade after this year. Luis probably won't graduate high school. Even if he did, his most likely future job will be long, hard hours working in corn or bean fields at $4 a day, or maybe an occasional job doing handy work for a slightly better rate. In short, things might not ever get much better for Luis. I was thinking about these things there on the patio, listening to him cry, the same kid I have seen cry dozens, if not hundreds, of times in just over a year. But he wasn't crying because of how hard his future might be. He wasn't crying because he was born in a broken country without opportunities for a person from his background. Nor because of the gang violence that may take his life to an even darker place someday. It was because someone had picked on him, kicked, punched, or pushed him, and he wasn't strong enough to fight back. How can a skinny little poor kid with an empty belly push back against everything that holds him down in this country? The sad thing is that I don't know if there is an answer to that question, and I doubt that anyone else has one either. Life isn't fair, and it can be heartbreaking to see what that really means sometimes.

Weekend Camp

This past weekend was the annual WYD camp for scholarship winners. I want to thank everyone again who donated to the fund this year. The money that you gave helped us fund the scholarships for the 25 students as well as the costs for running the camp. Everyone showed up Friday afternoon and we were busy doing something just about every waking minute until late morning Sunday when we all said went out separate ways at the end of the camp.

The camp taught leadership skills, self esteem, goal setting, gender equality, HIV prevention and safe sex, money management and a number of other topics. Each of us on the committee prepared a few of the lessons and tried to do make them exciting and interesting.

Semana santa

Parts of my experience here are exceptional, but like life anywhere, the majority of it is routine, mundane and rather boring at times. So here's to an un-profound blog post.

Rainy season is starting again. In the States, a leaky roof is unbearable, grounds to denounce a landlord, a newsworthy event. In rural El Salvador, a leaky roof is a reason to move your bed. The question here when it rains isn't even ¨Did your roof leak?¨ It's ¨Did you get wet?¨ Of course it leaks. The important information is whether it leaks so much that you are unable to avoid getting wet while you are indoors.

We are no longer allowed to go to our office in the capital without a specific appointment or prior permission. Neither are we allowed to take buses to get there when we do have an appointment. It seems counterintuitive to me to limit access to the Peace Corps office for volunteers, who, I had always assumed, were the reason the office existed in the first place. It also seems unreasonable to me to require us to pay for taxis to and from (though they will cover the costs in some occasions) when most of us already struggle to get by on the meager living allowance we are afforded. I, however, do not make the decisions (despite how much I would like to) and will just have to get used to the changes. I acknowledge the fact that what Peace Corps is doing is likely in our best interests, but that doesn't change the fact that it is frustrating and restrictive. I'll also admit that I am entirely desensitized to the violence in this country and it does not seem remarkable or even particularly noteworthy to me that a 16 year old was shot in the head just a couple blocks from the office. I know that sounds callous and illogical, but the murder rate here is about 20 times higher than in NYC and after so many times it's just another story on the news when one gang member kills another. Obviously my reaction would be different if I knew the victim, but a person only has so much empathy to go around. About 10 people get killed a day here in a country the size of Massachusetts.

.....

I am sick of Evangelicals. Before coming here, I read that 90% of the population was Catholic. That must be the figure from about 2000 or earlier, because the Evangelical population is significant and quickly growing. I am tolerant of religious views, and respect everyone's right to their own beliefs. I am not so tolerant, however, of people promoting ignorance and hate at the top of their lungs on buses or with sound systems for the whole neighborhood to hear. Here's the gist of how it goes: A self-proclaimed preacher will board a bus and stand at the front. He will excuse himself for the noise and the bother, and then launch into a sermon at the top of his lungs for all to hear. They usually last from 15 to 45 minutes and the preacher will often ask for donations at the end of the sermon, though some pride themselves on the fact that they do not ask for money. The sermons differ slightly in style and message, but the same main points are almost always addressed; I was once a sinner and now I am saved; the bible is sacred, but most people don't interpret it right; science is the work of the devil and evolution is nonsense; government officials are unholy false prophets; homosexuals are the worst of the worst; kids these days are way worse than before; the world is about to end, repent now.

I don't want this to be interpreted as an anti-religious rant. I believe in God and think that the Bible has some great messages, despite its flaws and contradictions. What I have a problem with is hypocrisy, selective morality, and exceptionally loud and intrusive means of promoting this message that Evangelicals in El Salvador practice. If science is the work of the devil, then don’t take antibiotics next time you have an infection. If you are going to pick on homosexuals, then why don’t you give the bus driver a hard time for operating this route on Sundays. And really dude, I just don’t want to hear your ridiculous, uninformed opinion on all of this. You can barely read, so don’t tell me you are some expert at interpreting the Bible. You’re just copying the exact sermon that you heard everybody else give and putting your own little spin on the charismatic elements. And the world is not ending this year, next year, or the one after that; but you probably already know that. It’s a pretty slick recruiting tool, though.

.....

Our WYD scholarship camp is coming up at the end of the month. The 25 kids (20 girls and 5 guys) to whom we awarded scholarships this year will be attending a weekend camp at a lake on the other side of the country. Some of the topic covered will be leadership, self-esteem, how to get a job after graduation, sex education and self-defense. I want to thank everyone who donated to the fund this year! I had more people donate in my name than anyone else on the committee, and as a group we raised almost three times as much money as the previous year. We are hoping to do a 2nd camp this year and give out significantly more scholarships in the coming year because of the increase in fundraising.

.....

The week leading up to Easter is called "Semana Santa" here and everyone is on vacation. Most people don’t have jobs anyways, but the kids are all home from school and most everything in the cities is closed as well.

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The group of 8th and 9th graders I have been training to be HIV prevention facilitators has completed their initial group of workshops and is ready to start teaching other kids. First, we are going to do a workshop at our school here in El Palmital. Next, we will visit other schools in the area to reproduce the workshop and hopefully I will be able to win a grant of some sort to fund a trip to a lake or beach for a combination workshop-excursion at some point.

.....

I recently took over as one of the Security Wardens for Peace Corps El Salvador. In case of an emergency or national disaster, I am in charge of contacting the volunteers in my region to let them know what steps PC wants them to take to stay safe. Also, if someone is incommunicado during a disaster and the staff is too busy tracking down other people, I get to play Superman and go rescue them. The coolest part, in my opinion, will be doing visits to other volunteers’sites with a PC staff member to assess the security situation in their area. I am looking forward to getting to know other poor, remote parts of the country that I would never visit otherwise. It’s a kind of anti-tourism. Visiting the places that have little or no appeal other than to a development worker. It will also be a good opportunity to get to know some other volunteers a little better, and I’ll have some idea of where they are at in the one-in-a-million chance that I have to go rescue them someday.

That’s all I’ve got for today.

¿What's up with that backwards S?

Up and down, up and down, the roller coaster of Peace Corps continually wows me, makes my stomach drop (quite literally), jerks me around in a way-too-small seat and inspires love and hate towards my life, my experience, the organization, and quite possibly the entire universe, with my feelings shifting as quickly as one minute to the next at times.

Thursday: Up early, hop on a bus, catch another, wait for another, deal with a surprisingly docile bolo accompanied by his young son, and eventually wind up in a hotel in San Francisco Gotera, Morazán where "nadie habla con el patrón." I manage to read about 80 pages on the bus and finished Palace Walk, a great book about a Muslim family in Cairo set in the 19teens. I'm surprised at how easy this trip was. Comfort and confidence goes a long way. I am the first volunteer to get to Gotera for a Gender and HIV prevention workshop and soccer tournament, so I wander around the market to familiarize myself with my surroundings and find a pool hall where I have a couple beers before going back to the hotel to see if the other guys have made it in yet.

Friday: Arrive at the mayor's office at 8am, where the first part of the workshop is taking place. The morning’s theme is Gender, what it means in any given culture to be a man or a woman (aside from the differences in plumbing) and how these expectations can help or hurt us. This was with a men’s only group of trained HIV prevention facilitators, about half American and half Salvadoran. Really interesting discussions. The activities themselves were interesting, but I found it especially intriguing during lunch when we discussed how our actions don’t always meet our ideals. Cultural expectations are an odd beast. Even when we know what we are doing is wrong, it is easy to give in to temptations, whether they come from wanting to please ourselves or from trying to live up to what we perceive as how we are supposed to act. We spend the afternoon going over the agenda for the tournament and running through some of the activities. I catch a few minutes of the Jayhawks victory over Richmond in the hotel.

Saturday: The workshop takes up the whole morning and the tournament all afternoon. The teams are 15-30ish year old men, and to be eligible to play soccer they have to pass through 7 stations teaching about HIV, condom use, etc. At my station we focus on which behaviors can transmit HIV and which cannot. The behaviors are: Sharing a toothbrush, unprotected sex, blood transfusions, childbirth from an HIV positive mother, getting a tattoo, getting a vaccine, kissing, and sharing silverwear. Do you know for sure which transmit HIV and which don’t? We get back to the hotel in the evening worn out and sun-burnt. After showering up, a meeting at a pizza parlor reanimates us for a bit, but before 10 we are back at the hotel, though we have to bang on the door for about 5 minutes before someone opens up the gate and lets us in.

Sunday: Trip to Perquin, stronghold of the guerilla force during the civil war of the 80’s. We see bomb craters, trenches, underground caves, the site of a makeshift hospital, and talk with former guerilla fighters. A free ride to and from Perquin, along with the satisfaction of a successful weekend of work, and I feel great. The feeling doesn’t last for too long, as I am violently ill by midnight. Hating life, hating water and its tendency to harbour parasites, despising the toilet that keeps calling me and the toilet paper that keeps irritating me. The suffering is short-lived. I sleep most of Monday, restrict myself to whole grain granola bars and apples, and start to feel better by the end of the day. Good news, I am recovering quicker from these types of things than before. Bad news, all these recurrent cases of amoebic parasites might actually be one long case of drug-resistant parasites. If that is the case, medicine will have to be brought in from another country as it is not available here in El Salvador.

Tuesday: I wake up well-rested, feeling in good health. I spend most of the day at the Peace Corps office planning for the WYD scholarship camp at the end of April. I eat Subway in the evening (no staple in my sandwich this time) and head to the national stadium with Jared, another volunteer, to meet our girlfriends for a match between El Salvador and Jamaica. I’m not a big soccer fan, but I’ll put it in the same category as baseball; painfully boring on TV, but enjoyable in person. The fans were rowdy, throwing bags of water, taunting the other team, and the game was full of goals. We lost 3-2, and the jersey that I bought from a street-vendor on the way into the stadium has a backwards S in El Salvador (should have looked that over a little better) but it was one of the best dates I’ve been on in a while. A girl’s being able to enjoy herself at a sporting event is a big plus in my book. My girlfriend is pretty awesome. We go hear some live music and hang out for a bit after the game.

Wednesday: Back to Usulután I go. It feels like I’ve been gone more than I’ve been home this month. Between my mid-service medical exams, a couple out-of-site soccer tournaments/workshops, a meeting with the scholarship committee, getting sick, and the trip to Perquin, I have spent a lot of days and nights away from my community. I’ve still been able to get some work done there, too, but I have been out of my site more than I would like. I am upset to hear that Gabbie, a neighboring volunteer who has been in country 6 months longer than I have, might not be granted the extension of her service (to stay in her site and work for a 3rd year) that she is requesting. I don’t want this to be taken the wrong way; I am proud to be a part of Peace Corps and I understand that they are dealing with tough budget problems- but I feel that it is important to say that it would be a big disservice to Peace Corps El Salvador as well as to her community for her extension request to be denied. I don’t know the details of the reasoning behind-the-scenes, and I think it is still possible that she will be granted the extension, but I’ve collaborated with her enough to know that she is doing excellent work in her site (murals, reforestation project, HIV prevention, etc. etc. etc.) and selfishly I hope to have her close by for a while longer so that we can continue doing projects together.

I love my life here in El Salvador. Sometimes I am frustrated with the bureaucracy of Peace Corps, the persistence of the parasites in my stomach, the attitudes and behaviors that just won’t change, but these little things that bother me just make the successes, the good times, and the never-ending surprises that much more enjoyable. Every once in a while I realize how lucky I am, how blessed I am, and how good I have it, and it makes it all worth it.

A nudge in the right direction

If it weren't for my mom, I'd probably be sitting in a cubicle right now in Kansas City, arguing with a customer about whether or not he deserves a free replacement part for his Garmin. I'd be browsing the same pages online for the hundredth time this week, counting the hours, then the minutes, and finally punching out, driven close to insanity by another monotonous day in corporate America but retaining enough mental functioning to realize how miserable I was.

I had turned in my application for Peace Corps but hadn't completed my medical evaluation. My mom encouraged me to finish it up, to keep my options open. Insurance didn't cover everything that the medical evaluation required, and she loaned me money to pay for what was leftover. Without her encouragement, I probably never would have finished the application process. Once the invitation came, I was thinking it over but wasn't sure. She advised me to give it a chance, that it could be a once-in a lifetime opportunity, that I might not be able to do something like this 10 years down the road. I gave it a shot, here I am, and I couldn't be happier with my decision.

So thanks, Mom! I love you!

The smell of burnt plastic in the air

The smell of smoke creeps up my nose and I roll over, ignoring chickens crowing, a neighbor hammering and the set of speakers blasting the same bachata song for the 9th straight day. My phone is in the other room but I'm guessing it to be about 6:45 a.m. The smoke, like the hour, has its particular flavor, unique to life here in the campo. Plastic bags, leaves, branches, and a piece of paper here and there, all blending together for a particularly pungent and carcinogen-full cloud of smoke that wafts through the neighborhood a few times a day. Mix in a hearty portion of the dry season's endemic dust and you've got a sneeze or sinus infection around the corner with every breath.

The familiarity of the sounds and smells, along with the white noise of the fan buzzing back and forth and a bit of extra dreariness due to mixing Guatemalan rum in with my Pineapple/Coconut soda after dinner last night, and I fall back asleep for a few more minutes. A bassline thumping through the air wakes me again and I roll over and and reach out to wrap my arms around Krysia, but she went home yesterday afternoon and all I find is a lumpy, lightweight pillow.

Indifference is hard to cure. The discarded plastic bags and bottles have been piling up for years. Some are plain, black bags. Others once contained chips, pastries, or other junk food. Most of the bottles are from soda, anywhere from 12 oz to 3 liters, but there are also bottles that once held medicine and a million other things. In a world without a trash truck, people are used to the sight. Even in just a year I've already gotten accustomed. The partially buried bags stuck in the dry, cracked earth still look ugly to me, but they don't stick out to me like they used to. A barbed-wire fence is certain to have at least a few plastic bags stuck to it. People who grew up surrounded by litter aren't as bothered by it.

It's not easy to make people care. Getting people to show up is still the biggest challenge I face with my work here. Whether it is an English class, a soccer tournament, or a youth group meeting, I remind everyone as many times as I can and consider it a success if half of the people show up. In the first 6 weeks, my English class went from 15 students to 12, then to 8, 7, 5 and now down to 2. I'll admit I'm not an expert at teaching English, but you can't say you gave it much of a shot if you only showed up twice in an attempt to learn a foreign language. And a lot of the people who quit after a week were the ones who pestered me for a year to teach them English. Maybe they thought I was going to teach them the whole language in the first class.

It is frustrating always wondering how many people will show up, how late they will be if they do show up, and whether they come next time. Punctuality is important to me, and it's a habit. Just like being at least a half hour late to everything is a habit for Salvadorans. The two students who have kept at it with English classes are making decent progress, and they are usually no more than 15 minutes late; a good sign that they care. It's not worth dwelling on who isn't there or what time we finally get started, but sometimes I do anyways. I've learned to adjust my expectations and work with what I have, but I don't want to lower them too far for fear of ending up indifferent.

Torneo

The 2nd soccer tournament we’ve done was on Saturday. It was a triangular between my team and two other schools, plus a game between a group of female Peace Corps volunteers and a women’s team from my cantón.

My school lost our first game, 2-0, and tied the second game, 0-0. So we ended the day without scoring a goal, but everything went pretty well other than that. I had help from a bunch of other volunteers, plus two health promoters and a guy from an HIV prevention organization called PASMO. We divided the teams up into groups and did dinámicas with HIV education aspects. I led one where the girls would take penalty kicks and answer questions related to the virus. Mya and Gabbie, two other volunteers, worked with girls on how to respond to pressure to have sex, and Kristina had the girls play a game teaching them how the virus attacks the immune system. Esther debunked common myths about HIV at her station. The girls participating rotated from one station to the next every 12 minutes until they had visited them all.

Our boss, Carlos, brought the new group to see the tournament and get a feel for what work is like as a Peace Corps volunteer. They consist of 10 girls and 2 guys, hence the ease of putting together a team to play the women from my cantón. They didn’t have any experience playing together (or, in some cases, playing at all) but put up a good effort and scored a goal against what was pretty much an all-star team of the best female soccer players I know. It ended up 7-1, so it wasn’t really a close game, but the Peace Corps girls were good sports and didn’t seem to mind too much.

Besides the HIV education, girls tournaments are important for a few other reasons. Daughters have a lot more responsibilities than sons in most families here. They have to cook, wash the clothes by hand, clean the house, etc., often while their brothers get to go play soccer or hang out with their friends. It can be hard to get the team to practice because their parents often don’t let them leave the house. The guys usually can come and go without asking. Gender is a weird thing here. Coming from a different background, it isn’t always easy for me to understand how restrictive it can be at times. Like a lot of cultures, men work in the fields and at other outdoor jobs. Women typically stay at home. However, this gets thrown off balance in a country where the economy is at a point where there is almost no work available. Without jobs available, men are idle and sometimes women are forced into the outdoor jobs in the few times work can be found to supplement the family income. It almost never works the other way though; I have yet to see a man taking over the household duties. Sometimes the women don’t even allow it. I tried washing dishes after my first meal with Niña Blanca’s family and she told me that it wasn’t normal for men to wash dishes and that I should leave them.

I like promoting girls tournaments because a lot of them wouldn’t have a chance to play otherwise. There are already plenty of opportunities for guys to play soccer here, so it makes sense to focus on what is lacking instead of trying to compete with all the other leagues and tournaments that are already out there for guys.

There was some infighting on my team. They had just as much talent as San Dionisio, the team they lost to, but they got frustrated and started blaming each other after they gave up a goal and didn’t play well afterwards. The second game was a little better. I gave them a speech after the first game about sticking together and being positive, which they seemed to mostly ignore at the time but they were a bit better about not yelling at each other during the second game. They tied with El Delirio, 0-0. They had lost to that team the last time they played, so it was an improvement at least.

We’ll need to practice more often if we want to start beating those teams. That means I’m in for a lot of door-to-door work trying to convince parents to let their girls leave the house for a couple hours on Saturday.

Changing the world?

It's strange when something that was once odd, foreign, and unknown suddenly feels familiar. Lately when I walk by a little store on the side of the road, and think to myself, "I haven't been here in a while" it hits me that I have been in this country for almost a year, and the exhilarating sensation of being in a new environment has worn off.

The new group flew in yesterday and will be touring my site in a little over a week. It has me thinking back to holding my nose with one hand and wiping with the other in my host family’s latrine in San Vicente. The latrine at my house here is not as offensive. I think of the time, only a few weeks after arriving, when we toured a public hospital and I saw a woman defecating into a bedpan in an open room with a dozen other patients nearby, too distracted by their own ailments to pay any notice. It was shocking to see someone who, on one hand, had no privacy, and on the other, had no one to help her. The worst of both worlds. I remember when I walked into the school with other trainees from my host community and saw absolute mayhem, kids running everywhere, shouting, doing anything but learning. And it wasn't recess. My school is a little bit better, but not much. I remember thinking, "How do I change this?"

The answer is, you don't. Things like that are out of reach. I don't know what the answer is to underfunded hospitals and schools, teachers who don't care and kids who haven't been taught to respect authority, but I know it's not me.

I’ve learned to accept that my role here isn’t to change the world, or even the little world that rural Salvadorans know. I’m here to help them learn things that they can use to change their own lives. I’m here to teach the kids that they can make goals, that their lives are something to work at and not just a fate to accept. They don’t have to have kids at 16. I’m here to show people that by changing small habits, they can be healthier, and happier. I’m here to teach English to whoever wants to show up and learn a few words every Wednesday afternoon. Maybe they won’t remember any of it after I’m gone. It’s not just about learning English; it’s about having the guts to try something new, something hard. I’m here to give people tools to improve their lives. I’m here to be a friend, a mentor, to kids whose parents aren’t alive or around. I’m here to be me, imperfect as I am, and give what I can to people who need and want a hand.

11 months y fichitas

I’m coming up on a year here in El Salvador. As you can tell from the sporadic tone of my blogs, it has been an experience that has been alternately fulfilling and frustrating, enjoyable and miserable. On the whole it has certainly been positive, and I am happy to be here and looking forward to another year and a few months in my village.

Recently, I moved out of my host family’s house and into my own place a few hundred meters away, in caserio Montaña Hermosa. A caserio is sort of like a neighborhood in the village, and El Palmital has 9 caserios. Montaña Hermosa is one of the smallest and probably the poorest. My house is one of the nicest houses in the caserio and is not what most Americans would call luxury living. Though I am the only one paying rent ($20 a month) I have bats, rats, ants, tarantulas and birds as roommates. I haven’t found any scorpions yet but I’m not ruling it out as a possibility. I also get visits from chickens and pigs, but they just loiter in the front yard, as you can see in my "Cribs" home tour.

Some new challenges that living "on my own" has brought are: carrying water in plastic barrels on my shoulder one by one to fill my pila when I need to bathe, wash dishes, or wash clothes; sweeping the endless amounts of dust, bugs, and sugarcane ash that accumulate in my house every day; also, cooking for myself takes a lot of time.

The benefits, thus far: being able to host guests; eating healthier; having privacy; being able to decline guests (in other words, tell them I am busy and to come back another time); playing my own music; going to bed whenever the hell I feel like it (waking up is still determined by amount of noise neighbors, chickens, and dogs decide to make between 4 and 6 a.m.

Work has been slow since the school has been on vacation. I did a dental health campaign in my caserio and some HIV prevention with teenagers. I also am now teaching a weekly English class to whoever shows up at the casa communal (sort of like a public meeting space) and sadly, I am the only person using the casa communal for any reason whatsoever at this point. I had 15 students my first class and 7 in my second. The dropoff was largely due to a former pro soccer player turned Evangelical pastor who was visiting the village to give a sermon the same afternoon.

Now let’s delve a bit more into that. I try to be open-minded about religion, and anything that relates to a decision someone wants to make regarding their personal life, but I have a hard time with Evangelicism. The sermons are pure fire and brimstone, guttural yelling and apocalyptic ranting. After English class ended, I was in my hammock, listening to The Rolling Stones and drinking tea, and I couldn’t help myself from laughing at how ridiculous this guy was. He would be yelling at the top of his lungs about prostitution or cocaine or something that had next to nothing to do with life in a village in El Salvador, and then just burst into a full-fledged yell and hold it for about 5 seconds. Imagine Howard Dean’s BYAHHH mixed with someone doing death metal vocals and more than a hint of crazy in the voice and you’ve got a pretty good idea of what this guy was doing every two or three minutes to emphasize the dangers of some particularly devious sin.

This interesting take on Christianity has a strong effect on people, negative and positive. Lucho, previously mentioned for his love of English cuss words and having multiple teenage girlfriends at the same time, accepted* the Evangelical Jesus at this sermon, as did his older brother Mario, who works at a bank and is married to Rosita, the owner of the pupuseria in town.

*I don’t know exactly what all "accepting" entails but it involves publicly joining the Evangelical church at one of these sermons.

Anyway, Rosita is Catholic in theory but not really in practice, and she is pissed enough at Mario for "accepting" that she moved into her sister’s house (a whole two houses and 200 meters away) and took the kids. She also seems to be pissed at me because I jokingly told her employee at the store/pupuseria that Rosita might fire her for going to the sermon (maybe it was a wee bit early to go there). Anyways, I think it was a huge overreaction on her part, moving out and taking the kids. I doubt the separation or either of the brothers’commitment to Evangelicism will last more than two weeks, but who knows.

My girlfriend disagreed with me on this, saying that Mario should have asked her before accepting publicly, and more importantly, that she had a right to leave him because of the changes it implies in their lives. Women in the Evangelical church are required to dress like Laura Ingalls Wilder from Little House on the Prairie. Dancing is prohibited, along with a bunch of other rules I don’t really keep up with. Rosita dresses in a style I would call "Latina spice" and is not big on letting other people tell her what to do, so I can see how this would be a bit of a conflict.

After hearing my girlfriend’s point of view and remembering how crazy this pastor sounded, I can’t really blame her for moving out.

The new group of Rural Health volunteers arrives in country in less than a week and will be visiting my site at the end of the month, after they have spent all of 10 days in El Salvador. They are coming to see a girls’soccer tournament I am organizing with HIV prevention and education lessons, similar to the tournament I did a couple months ago. The new group is 10 girls and 2 guys, which is part of the reason I’m just doing a girls tournament this time. I also organized for them plus a few other Peace Corps volunteers to play a game against the women’s team from my village.

That’s all for now. Time to go get some lunch.

Also, here is a link to a blog documenting the 1o most important events in El Salvador this year.