a short little post on development

I only have a little time before I need to head back to my home stay for dinner but since the computer was free in the training center I thought I would share some of the interesting facts we learned today in training about El Salvador.
Remittances to El Salvador make up $3.5 billion dollars a year, which is roughly between 17-20% of the GDP. Currently, 30% of the Salvadoran population is living outside El Salvador, mostly in the U.S. About 2.5 million Salvadorans now live in the U.S.
I just wanted to share those numbers to help understand how strongly emigration affects the Salvadoran communities. In my town that I am now staying in for training there are lots of families with grandparents and children and with the parents living in the U.S., which greatly affects family structures. Not to mention the fact that the vast majority of emigrants are male, leaving a very skewed gender breakdown, which has interesting and varied consequences for communities.
As most of you probably know, migration is one of my passions (before Ben started to claim it has "his thing," though I guess he is the genuine immigrant) and I feel so lucky to be in a country like this where the effects of migration are still new and to have the opportunity to learn more about the process.
In general, we had a really interesting day of training today where we talked and learned about development in general and specifically about the Peace Corps' "capacity building" approach. The Peace Corps philosophy has changed many times over the years, but now they insist that we work "bottom up." That all ideas are supposed to come from the community and we are in the business of long-term, sustainable development, which means working with the people, rather than building infrastructure, which can often be more "paternalistic." I am not entirely sure that it's possible, especially in the positions we have as municipal development workers, who will be by nature working in some sort of leadership role, but it was definitely interesting to learn about and got me very, very excited to get out into the community already and be able to work in this field. Particularly, there are two programs in El Salvador I am interested in learning more about, Red Solidaria, which "pays" families to send their children to school (paid for by loans from the Inter-American Development Bank), which reminds me of a program that a professor at Columbia developed in Brazil (Xavier Sala-i-martin) and FoMilenia, the El Salvador chapter of the UN Millenium Development Goals, which just won a major grant to build a highway across the northern, very rural and isolated, part of the country.
OK I must run home to dinner, but I will be posting soon after my trip to San Salvador!