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.