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.
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