hiking through the countryside

today we went to a meeting in one of the cantones or countryside districts, appropriately named la montaña, or the mountain. It took us 2.5 hours to hike to there because we got lost. It was a beautiful hike, but very hot and if it hadn't been for the hand-held fan that jonathan had bought me i probably would have over-heated (see picture). I can't imagine having to do that hike to get to my home every time I wanted to leave. Here are some pictures from the hike, including the one where we have to stop to ask directions at the only house we can spot for miles.

my favorite chicken

this is the chicken that lives in my house. I've named her Angelina Jolie because like her namesake, she has adopted babies of all different races and colors and is raising them as her own. Unlike the real Angelina, this chicken is not aware these babies aren't actually hers, since the eggs were put in her nest she just assumed she had laid them.

a picture to make my mom happy

though I at first made fun of salvadoran women's habit of walking around with an umbrella in the sun, I have adopted it as it keeps me from getting sunburned every day.

scenes from the school

making tomales

my host family made like 300 tomales

just a quick little addition

I just wanted to add that after writing that post yesterday, I had the most amazing experience. I went to teach the children in the school in the countryside (about an hour walk from the pueblo) computer classes. It was the first time any of the kids in the four different classes I taught (ages 10-16) had touched a computer (well except one). Though the school's computers had been donated back in September (arranged by the previous super-star volunteer), they had no one to teach the students how to use them. The kids were so thrilled and excited to finally be using the computers, their faces kept breaking out into huge smiles as the pushed the power button and moved their mice across the screen. We opened Word (which was one of the hardest parts as they couldn't handle the double click) and they typed their names and then changed the font size, which was very exciting for them. Unlike some other experiences teaching here, where the students are distracted and bored, these kids were so appreciative; their eyes were all eagerly watching me throughout the entire lesson and each of the four classes applauded at the end, it was so cute. It was so special to be experience their wonder and enthusiasm, to see these quotidian machines through their eyes. And after a frustrating week of Peace Corps lows, it made me think "and so this is what the Peace Corps high feels like."

adventures at benihana's

This morning on the walk to the alcaldia (the mayor's office), there seemed to be some sort of a celebration in the central park. There was music, lots of little stands selling clothes and food, and it was packed with people. I remembered that today is the monthly event when Red Solidaria (the program I spoke about in the earlier post) distributes its stipends to the entire municipality. People walk, hitchhike, and drive hours to get here from all the corners of the municipality in order to receive their $15 that they have earned by sending their children to school, attending the workshops and participating in local councils. It's quite the sight.

Anyways, this past week here has been a little strange. The "honeymoon" period of being wide-eyed and excited just to be living in a small pueblo is starting to wear off and I am ready to know what exactly I am going to be doing here.

I think part of the problem is that I just come back from an incredible weekend in San Salvador. Fifteen people from my training group showed up to celebrate a friend's birthday. Even more than I had been before, I was shocked by the modernity and Americanization of San Salvador. We went to go see the movie "Sex and the City" in a mall in San Salvador that is more beautiful and fancy than anything I have experienced in the U.S., it belongs right in downtown Bellevue :). Coming back here was hard, not only because I was sick of pupusas (don't tell the people in my town! I will be ostracized) and missed the Asian food in San Salvador (yes, we found a Benihana's!), but also because it felt strange that even after being in my site a month (!), I still feel like I just got here. When it comes down to it, I don't feel like I've found my place yet. And although I could fill my entire day by working in the schools (in fact the English teacher just left, so I will start teaching more permanently there), there's hardly anything for me to do in the Mayor's Office, where I am supposed to be working. Compounding my frustration with the Mayor's Office is some inter-office drama that I found out about. I can't write about it on this public blog, but basically, some bad shit has gone down and it makes me very uncomfortable to be working in close quarters with some of the people. But part of it is the nature of working in the developing world I think.

The experience of being a new Peace Corps Volunteer is such a strange one. You get placed in this town with no direction whatsoever, basically no training and are left to your own devices to just figure it out. I've never had to deal with anything like this in my life before. At the same time, I am trying to recognize what an opportunity it is to be given responsibility for my own work and decisions. Hopefully with enough perseverance and pushing, things will fall into place eventually. For now, I will continue to structure my weeks around the schools, which are more than eager to have me there. Today for example, I will be teaching computer classes in Spanish (ah the irony of me teaching computer classes!) and Thursday will be teaching English all day and then Friday am going with all the teachers to the beach! So life is OK :). In any case, no matter how frustrated I get here, I still feel right about the decision to be here. It's a challenge, and I am proud to be struggling with it.

One more short little vignette from Benihana's: I went there with Betsy and Linsey, friends of mine from training, and we sat at a hibachi table with 4 Salvadorans - a grandma, her daughter, and their two grandchildren. I remarked to B & L that these Salvadorans looked especially Asian (as many of them do here - my half-filipina friend Stephanie is convinced that there are many long lost Filipinos living here). Well it turned out these Salvadorans were in fact genuinely Asian, the grandma had married a JICA volunteer (the Japanese equivalent to Peace Corps) and her children and grandchildren all had Japanese names and had lived in Japan during the Civil War, a very interesting story. In any case, when they found out we were Peace Corps and didn't have family in San Salvador they instantly invited us for coffee and drove us to their country club by way of their house. We sipped cappuccinos and ate delicious ice cream by the tennis courts with the elite of San Salvador (I spotted quite a few other gringos, probably embassy families). Betsy whispered to me that she felt like little orphan Annie, and I agreed. And they even managed to get us back to the mall in time for the Sex and the City showing.

My point in this story more than anything is just to show how incredibly generous people in this country are. As a follow-up to my article, this is the positive of living in a country were privacy is less valued - people are so open-hearted and ready to welcome you into their lives, with complete trust. The family has already invited us to their beach house, to stay with them whenever we're in San Salvador, and to their family gathering in August. And stories like this happen all the time (for example, the wonderful way Selena's family has taken me in). I am continuously humbled by how kind people have been to us here. It's hard to imagine something like this happening in the U.S. where we jealously guard the privacy of everything from our lunch conversations to our family gatherings.

making pupusas

I am now ready to get married as I have learned how to make pupusas, El Salvador's national dish. These ones are stuffed with cheese and loroco, a type of flower or with ayote, which is like zucchini and were delicious.

Home Alone?

Below is the piece I wrote for the Peace Corps newspaper. Hope you enjoy it! I would love to hear any feedback on it.

Home Alone?
On the gringo’s desire for privacy
By Elian Maritz

As he was leading me to my new house, my counterpart paused to assure me that I would be living with a family. The previous volunteers (a married couple), he explained, had been living in a house by themselves; they had become so lonely that they had left after only a month. As such, my counterpart had made a special effort to make sure that I would not be too solita by finding me a nice old couple to keep me company.

So it was understandable that when I started to hint that I might want to move into a house of my own, I was met by an array of negative reactions. My counterpart worried that no one would take care of me. Friends repeatedly expressed concern that I would be lonely, that men would harass me, that no one would watch out for me. My host mother’s daughter took me aside to tell me that her daughter, who was studying in San Miguel, didn’t live alone, and I should do likewise. Generally, people just seemed to think it was strange; why would a young woman, new to the community, want to live by herself?

The widespread skepticism made me think back to our swearing in day, when Carolina was carefully explaining our strange American need for “privacy” to our counterparts. It didn’t mean we were antisocial, she clarified, it was just part of our cultural differences. “In America,” she exclaimed, “children study in universities far away from their parents, often in differences cities all together!”

It hadn’t really occurred to me how odd this desire for personal space seemed until I watched the laughing faces of the alcaldes in the room. The fact that this trait of ours was so unusual that it necessitated repeated careful explanation and elicited laughter from the Salvadoran listeners took me aback. Where we really so strange? And moreover, if it was so unusual in this country, why did most Peace Corps volunteers continue to go against the grain and live alone?

I will take myself as a test case. As I am writing this (and would rather I were sleeping), my host mother is outside my room watching TV. As the wall does not go all the way up to the ceiling, she and the TV really may as well be in the room with me. On the whole, this culture does not seem to place the same type of value on peace and quiet that we norteamericanos do. It could very well be a matter of upbringing; while we Americans get a room to ourselves almost from the day we are born, here people share rooms (either with siblings, spouses, or children) their entire lives. And the preference for sleeping together doesn’t seem to be purely a matter of financial necessity – there are families in my community with large houses that have spare rooms, yet the children prefer to sleep together.

So why the discrepancy? Some would argue that our Anglo-Protestant heritage in the United States, with ideas such as personal salvation and the individual’s direct relationship with God, favored the empowerment of the individual at the expense of the group. The sociologist Max Weber argued this individualistic outlook (in addition to the value placed on accumulating wealth) was why we were such successful capitalists. But even if you aren’t Anglo-Protestant yourself (which I am not), in America, we are all taught to strive for individual excellence and differentiation. We place a high value on being competitive, a “go-getter,” and being your “own special self.” These merits all require an extremely clear sense of the individual, which is fostered by the strong boundaries we grow up with between others and ourselves. According to many anthropologists, variations in concepts of privacy are one of the defining differences between cultures. Deciding what determines the extent of one’s personal space, the boundaries between the public and private spheres, is the foundation of an individual’s relationship with society.

But beyond our habits of personal space, I think there’s something more to why we Peace Corps volunteers dream of having a little place of our own. For us specifically, privacy is more than just peace and quiet, it is the only opportunity we have to be one hundred percent ourselves for a couple of minutes each day. As we enter a new culture, we necessarily have to hold back or moderate parts of who we are. From the obvious things we have to change, like not drinking and smoking in public or eating pupusas every day, to the more subtle, such as becoming uncomfortably outgoing or developing a new interest in attending Catholic services, being someone new 24 hours a day takes it toll. Learning to divide our personalities between the person that boarded the plane in D.C. and the one that got off the bus in the pueblo is one of the most challenging parts of being a Peace Corps volunteer. Having a door we can shut (literally) between the two worlds empowers us with the ability to control when we play which role, allowing us to de-stress and keep sane. This more than anything, I think, explains why so many of us end up living alone, despite the fact it is so culturally uncommon here. Well, that and the fact that sometimes you just really want to come home and drink a cold beer.

settling in and such things

Hello! sorry it's been so long since I've written. The internet was down in my town (along with all the phone lines) for the past two weeks, so the only times I've had online were brief moments at the internet cafe, not long enough to sit down and write a blog post.
Generally, things are going well here. The rains started, and I have never been so happy to have cloudy weather. Today for example, I am wearing a t-shirt (as opposed to a tank top) and am not sweating! It's wonderful.
I've managed to keep myself busy these past couple weeks, attending various meetings around the community. If I wanted to, I could have zero free time as the two schools seems very anxious to have me there as much time as possible. I've been helping the English teacher at one of the schools with her English, she's very sweet, and have been teaching English classes myself as well. I am not sure if I'll continue with those classes though, as they seem a little pointless. As I only can teach once or twice a week, there's little follow-through, and the students are not accountable for what they do (or don't do) in my class. I am also teaching English classes in the Casa de Cultura, a sort of community center for the youth, which are much more rewarding. The students that come are ones that are more motivated and actually sought me out to solicit classes, so they are a pleasure to teach. Teaching classes in the school is a good way to get integrated into the community though, so I think I will stick around for a bit longer. I will also start teaching computer classes in one of the schools in the countryside outside the town (about an hour's walk away, though I usually manage to find someone who is happy to give me a ride on the back of their pick-up).
The differences between the countryside and the city in my municipality is startling. Though the city is fairly well off, with a lot of remesa (or remittance) money, the countryside is incredibly poor. I have had the opportunity to visit different areas in the countryside the past week with the health clinic and the Red Solidaria program. The Red Solidaria program is the government program to alleviate poverty. It is only in the poorest counties in the nation, one of which is mine. They pay families who qualify between $15-20 a month to send their children to school, bring them for check-ups to the health clinics and to attend various workshops, the one I attended for example was on children's health. I've heard a lot of criticism of the program, most of which stemming from the fact that the families use their $15 to buy pollo campero (the local fast food) and not healthy food for their children or school supplies, which is largely true. Nonetheless, the success of the program lies in the fact that no matter what people do with that money, they really are sending their children to school, to the health clinic and attending all these meetings, which is wonderful. I hope to do some work with them in the future.
So generally, I am managing to fill my time here, though I still feel insecure about what my work will be, I still feel like I am just floating around from place to place without any real responsibilities, which is nice in some ways but also a little frustrating. I just need to keep reminding myself that I'm new, that I have so much more time here and things will work out.
On a personal level, this past weekend was pretty fun. On Thursday, I went to visit another volunteer nearby (about an hour and a half away) to help him put on a play for his school. He runs the Peace Corps theater troupe, called Gringuisimo that puts on play for children with different messages on the environment and other important subjects. We did a musical rendition of "the Lorax" in Spanish and a play on the life of trash, good stuff. It was fun to meet up with other Peace Corps volunteers and spend time speaking English, and hearing about their experiences in their different assignments.
And then on Saturday, I went out to La Union, the department farthest east, for a PC soccer game. We have a fairly informal team (made up of whoever can come that weekend), which travels to one volunteer's site once a month to play against a local team in the community. The community usually gets a real kick out of beating the gringos and for us it's a great excuse to meet up with other volunteers and visit a new part of the country. The game was less fun this time since it was pouring rain and very, very muddy, but I'm still glad I went as it was a good time with the other volunteers.
Also, one last piece of news. I was selected to be the Municipal Development editor for the Peace Corps newspaper! It only comes out 4 times a year and is read by like 200 people, but I am excited about it. We had to submit a piece to get selected, and I think I will post it for you all if you want to read it. I will be going into the capital this week to start editing this next issue, I think it will be a fun project to work on.
Well, my computer is about to die so I should run, but I will be updating more frequently soon!