saliendo como indio

Yesterday was the saint's day of saint Guadelupe, the patron saint of Mexico. I'm not entirely sure why, but in my town this is celebrated by dresssing up like an indigenous person and doing a procession around the town. It was pretty fun and the outfits were so sweet, though I have to admit I skipped out on the mass afterwards. The priest in my town is young and super conservative, and I really can't stand what he says a lot of the time. He rails against things like dancing and birth control, this in one of the poorest counties in the country where people regularly have 11 kids and can´t feed them all! Anyways, besides that little rant, I hope you enjoy the pictures! These are the only ones I have with me on my memory stick at the moment, but will add more later...

justin's visit to el salvador

My old friend Justin came to visit over thanksgiving weekend. it was so fun to have him here. He was a great sport about taking the long, crowded, hot bus rides all over the country, though he did remark that it was rather different than flying business class on Virgin Atlantic. Indeed both have their advantages - I'm sure Virgin Atlantic doesn't have a million different fruit vendors offering sliced jicama, watermelon, or jocotes - all for a quarter (or "cora" as they say). In any case, it was great to show him a little of my life here. He saved thanksgiving dinner by bringing pecan pie and pumpkin and pie crusts, which were delicious. The meal was quite a success, with various volunteers bringing their own specialties. Justin also co-facilitated my art class with me. All the little girls fell in love with him and wrote him various love letters as he patiently explained to them the difference between "chino" (which he is not) and "filipino" (which he is). We also managed to squeeze in some time at the beach for surfing and relaxing. All in all, a wonderful 5 days!

san miguel university visit

The weekend before last, I went to San Miguel, the 3rd biggest city in El Salvador, and the main hub of the "oriente," with my friend Cecy and Norma (pictured above). Cecy is my host sister and Norma is probably my closest friend in the town. The purpose of the trip was to visit the university there. Cecy has decided to study tourism and was ready to to register when we got there. Norma has dreams of studying nursing, but unfortunately her parents are not excited of the idea of her continuing her education and will not support her. Lucky for her, she was good friends with the previous volunteer in the site, who has wonderfully agreed to finance her education. The total cost of a private university here runs between $50-100/month, so it actually isn't so much for us coming the U.S., but it is a lot for here. Cecy is able to afford because of the help of a very generous uncle, who lives in the U.S. working and works in a car wash. He is extremely conscientious, however, and has managed to save enough money on a small salary to build a beautiful, big house here, and to pay for his nieces schooling. I love hearing stories about emigrants from this community like him who are truly taking advantage of the opportunity to make a difference in the community and help develop this country.
In any case, I was happy to encourage her to come to San Miguel with us and see the university to get a sense of what it would be like. It was Norma's first night out of our town, away from her family. I took the two of them to the movies too, which was so sweet as neither one had ever been to the movie theater before, even though it's only 3 hours away. It was a really wonderful stay and I am so excited for the two of them to embark on these new adventures and hope the best for them.

gana obama!

History was made on November 4th. Us Peace Corps volunteers in El Salvador celebrated in our own special way with an election watching party at TGIFriday's (yes they have that here!) in the capital. The pictures above are from the event - Betsy and I with our Obama pins, CNN en espanol, excited Peace Corps Volunteers after his win. It was an amazing night that I will remember my whole life. The feeling of hope and excitement as we watched him win Virginia and Ohio, and the beauty and eloquence of his speech. The next morning I woke up early and was reading all the reports and started tearing up, as I thought to myself "I am so proud of my country." It sounds cliche, but it's true. Over a week later, I can still hardly believe it and was incredibly touched to see the recent pictures of the beautiful Obama family on their first White House visit. One of the amazing things about Obama is how he has really managed to connect to so many voters, I feel so personally invested and affected by his win.
As reported on the news, people all across the world were moved by the election of America's first black president. But the funny thing is here in my town, no one even seems to realize he's black. They simply refer to him as "el morenito" (the dark one). McCain is "el viejito" - the old one, haha. People here are generally pro-American and have been throughout the Bush presidency so there wasn't quite the same outpouring of emotion and relief as they had in other countries. Still, they leaned to be more pro-el morenito because they heard he'd be better for immigrants; rumor here is that he will soon grant an amnesty to all illegal immigrants - a rather high expectation that I am not sure will be fulfilled.
The one interesting thing I heard though was a commercial on the radio put out by ARENA, the right-wing party, which talked about how Obama was not a friend of the Latin American left, just in case anyone thought otherwise. Salvadorans are by and large very worried about their relationship with the U.S. and the right-wing party is trying to scare people away from voting left by associating the candidate with Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales and a generally anti-American stance. I guess they wanted to make sure that no one thought that Obama was going to be any more friendly to these leaders than Bush.

mermelada

my host sister and me holding mermelada, my new kitten. She's adorable, but is not giving me much sleep at night because she cries all night begging to be let in to my room. I let her sleep there the first night but then she wet the bed, the little rascal. Last night I waited til she fell asleep on the couch then snuck to bed, but she woke up an hour later and started crying all over again, sigh. She's very adorable though and is playful and cuddly, and so is much fun to have around.

painting in the park - finished product

can you guess which ones i painted and which ones the kids did?

painting in the park - before

one of the projects i did recently was to get together my art class to paint the lamp posts in the park. These lamp posts are routinely painted and repainted each election cycle by each rival political party in ugly partisan colors and covered in papers, resulting in a very unattractive look. Inspired by what I'd seen in other parts of the country, I asked my mayor for paint and with the help of jonathan and my art class, proceeded to paint the posts.
The adventure turned out to be a lot more stressful than I had anticipated. For some reason I hadn't foreseen the problems that 20 little kids running around with oil paint on their hands and brushes could bring. In one of the pictures above you can see the kids sitting on a parked car near the post, this is one example of something which almost gave me a heart-attack, because after that this car had little marks of light blue paint on it where the kids had touched it. Luckily, we got most of it off and disappeared before the owner came back...
In the end though, everything turned out really well and the posts look quite beautiful and it's a nice project that the kids can be proud of and the whole town can enjoy. I'm thinking of continuing with it and painting the posts along the main street to make our town look classy.

some more pictures for my papa

sorry it's been so long since my last post. Jonathan came to visit for two weeks and as we were very busy touring El Salvador, eating Tamales and taking part in the Dia del Niño :). Anyways, here are some pictures to tie you over until my next post. The first is of me and the youth from the Casa de la Cultura putting on a play about the importance of recycling (I made these excellent costumes), the second is of the trees that I made with my art class (each of the students drew a animal, flower, or fruit to paste on the tree) to help decorate for theme of the environment, next is of Jonathan and I adapting to Salvadoran culture. The following one is of Jonathan with some delicious tamales that my friend Juani made for us, and the final picture is of Jonathan dancing with the Temchi. This is pretty funny actually, the Temchi (sp?) is a Salvadoran TV character which is a man dressed up as a woman. Here we have an impersonator who came to the school during a fundraiser which I brought Jonathan to. Of course, she homed in on Jonathan and made him go up and dance with her, to the delight of all the Salvadoran children in the audience. He was quite a good sport about the whole thing, and in the end I was worried that he would run away with her and leave me all alone. All in all, it was a truly wonderful two weeks. My only complaint was that the children in the street all started shouting Jonathan's name instead of mine, which made me a little jealous. It was very sweet though how everyone in the community really took to him and keeps asking about it. The other complaint being of course, that it had to end...

making compost boxes in the school

Today I gave a talk at one of the rural schools about the environment and we made a compost box (with worms!). The kids were so adorable and excited, I wanted to share the pictures with you. There is also a picture of the one of the 800 trees we planted in the community. This particular school planted almost a hundred!

15 de septiembre contd

So last Monday was the 15 of September, El Salvador's independence day. All the schools in the country organize a parade, complete with marching bands and cachiporristas, which are kind of like cheerleaders or baton-twirlers, except they have to wear really short skirts and don't do many fancy tricks (at least not the ones in my town). There are also kids dressed up in a variety of costumes, such as the doctors and nurses below and the valores or values above - from left to right they are justice (the one with the scales), humility, and peace (notice the dove in her hand).
The day is quite a big event, and the week before the students learn about El Salvador's history and also a little about the other Central American countries who share the same independence day.

15 de septiembre

Ms. Casa de la Cultura

So some of you have been asking what it is I actually do here in the Peace Corps, so I thought I'd share one of my important duties, judging the competition for who will be the next Ms. Casa de la Cultura (Ms. Cultural House). The Casa de la Cultura is a community center in town, where I work teaching English and art classes. They had a beauty pageant/fund raiser this past Saturday and I, along with the mayor and treasurer of the town , got to judge. Hope you enjoy the pictures.

just so you don't think i'm too spoiled

The other night, while I was re-reading the 6th Harry Potter and getting nervous about Voldermort and his tricks (I've forgotten everything that happened in the book), I looked up to see a scorpion (pictured above) crawling up my mosquito net, from the inside, meaning that just before he had been in my bed. This not being my first experience with a scorpion, I knew what to do; I ran out, grabbed the poison and killed it. Unfortunately, in the process I inundated my bed with the insect poison and had to spend the night on the couch.

The previous scorpion attack is an even better story, but as I didn't take a picture of it, I never posted about it on my wall. It happened while I was putting make-up on one day. After applying my mascara, I looked in the mirror only to discover, to my horror, I scorpion sitting on my head. I flipped out and started screaming, but no one heard me, so I figured that the best thing to do would be to gently put my head down on the bed and hope the creature crawled off. Luckily it did, but then it hid somewhere in my sheets. My host mom came to the rescue and sprayed insect poison everywhere, in the process killing him, but like this time, forcing me to wash my recently-cleaned sheets. And if any of you have had to wash sheets by hand, you know it's almost as annoying as finding a scorpion on your head.

my two birthdays

First of all, I want to say thank you to all of you who wished me a happy birthday. And to those of you who called, an extra special thank you, it was so wonderful to hear your voices out here.

I was lucky enough to have two birthday celebrations. The first one was in San Salvador last weekend with my PC friends, and was a joint celebration with my friend linsey, a spring chicken who only turned 23, not 24 like us viejitos. The pictures above are from our delicious dinner at Benihana's, the Japanese hibachi grill that is my biggest guilty pleasure in this country, where all 14 of us went for a wonderful dinner. The meal was followed by a night of dancing out in the San Salvador clubs.

My second birthday celebration was held in my site. I woke up and made myself and the grandkids pancakes, then we had a pool party with some of my friends, followed by a delicious ice cream cake. But the highlight of the day came later, my friend Norma organized a BBQ, where we grilled steaks, chorizo and chicken over hot coals, delicious. It was wonderful, except that the BBQ was held right by where the family keeps their cows, who were staring at us in contempt - I kept feeling like I needed to apologize to them. Also, when I was talking about how old I felt, Norma's mom chimed in to mention that when she was 24 she had already had 5 children! Oh man...
By the way, in the pictures are above, the pink shirt I am wearing was a present from my host parent's daughter, Rina, very sweet.

race and language

I'n currently at the local school, doing my weekly penance helping out with their English classes since their teacher is away on a six months (!) training program. Anyways, every week I am constantly shocked by how bad the English language books are and decided that I would share today's lesson with all of you so you could get a sense of what I'm talking about (this is word for word):

----
From Let's Study English and Human Values - 8th Grade the Salvadoran Government's English Textbook
READING MATERIAL:
Human Races

Yesterday morning I was thinking about the different races that exist on our planet. I was reading about this topic yesterday night and I tell you what I have learned about it.

There are three main kinds of people on earth. I am going to write a short paragraph about each one.

White people, or Caucacian: These persons have white skin, blonde, yellow or brown straight hair, thin lips, black, green, blue or brown eyes. They are six or seven feet tall. They live in Europe, part of it, Canada and the United States of America.

Black people or color people: These persons have a black skin, thick lips, black or brown eyes and black, curly hair. They are seven or eight feet tall. They are native from Africa, and they are living all over the world now.

Yellow people: These persons have a kind of yellow skin, thin lips, black and straight hair, and their eyes are shaped in a peculiar way. They come from China. Most of them are short people.

-----

This is from the text book that is used in all Salvadoran government schools! There are so many things wrong about this paragraph I don't even know where to start, but one thing in particular that is amusing is that Latins aren't even included in the "three main kinds of people" on earth. Oh boy...

Well, my break is almost over and I must run back to my last two classes of 50 students in each one!

festival de maiz

Last sunday was the festival de maiz in a neighboring town. I went with the local dance troupe from the casa de la cultura, who performed a traditional salvadoran dance and a modern hip hop one. Above the pictures are of a children's dance troupe from another town, our dance troupe in their traditional outfits, then in their hip hop outfits, and the "reina de maiz," the queen of corn.