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.