one year in and none the wiser

Here's the latest piece I wrote for El Camino, the Peace Corps newsletter, which I'm now editor of. Thought you might enjoy it!
---

The first time I saw a scorpion, I screamed like a little girl. I was in middle of brushing my hair, and looked into the mirror to see the creature’s evil eyes staring back at me from the top of my head, its tail poised high and ready to strike. When no one came to my rescue, I took a deep breath and made myself pull it together, laid my head on my bed and prayed to God that it would crawl off. After five minutes, it did, and I ran to get my host mom to help kill it.
The second time I saw a scorpion, I only whimpered to myself as I slowly crawled out of bed and inched away to get the venom, which I used to thoroughly douse my sleeping space until the insect was unequivocally dead, at which point I fell asleep on the couch, far away from the departed enemy.
By the third time, I reacted like a campesina. Reaching for my venom without a second though, I killed the pest before it had time to blink and then swept it outside with a broom.
As I saw my latest scorpion, it got me thinking about all the little quirks of living in El Salvador and the strangeness of getting used to things I could never have predicted. These days, my mouth waters when I smell fresh quesadilla baking in my host mother’s oven and I crave frijoles y tortillas, even if I have spaghetti in the fridge. My group has just passed our astonishing one-year mark, meaning that for the first time, perennial events are not a surprise, but a return. This time, Semana Santa is no mystery, but a recurring holiday. So this year, when they burn Judas in my community, I will understand that Judas, does not mean Jew, as I thought last year. Though those kids wearing Halloween masks, running from house to house are indeed impersonating the evil Jews who reject Christ, even if they have no idea what a Jew is. As my town slips into the bone-scorching heat of April and May, I will have the rains of invierno to look forward to, not that they offer much respite, but at least the countryside will regain its green glow.
One of the nicest things to become accustomed to is the ease with which we can slip into Spanish now. Though in many ways my Spanish is really not what it should be, my mouth can now form the words before my brain translates them. I even find myself occasionally translating back from Spanish to English when talking to other PCVs (saying the nonexistent word “capacitation” where we would have once used the word “training” is a favorite Spanish-ism of Peace Corps Volunteers). Other signs of our thorough adaptation is our instant reactions of “permiso” when trying to get by someone (even though it’s another English speaker we’re trying to pass), or instinctively putting the toilet paper in the basket (even if it’s at the Sheraton, whose plumbing can handle the extra volume).
But one of the strange things is that no matter how long I’m here, I always still look as if I walked across the border this morning. Sure, all my clothes may have been bought locally and 99% of my body mass may now be made from pupusas, but my light coloring marks me as a gringa before I can even open my mouth to say buenas to someone. And though the cobrador is just trying to be helpful when he offers to point me to my next stop, or the fruit seller is just curious where she asks me if I speak Spanish, some part of me feels frustrated that they can’t don’t think that I look even a little guanaca now.
As much as I pride myself in finally being able to prattle off the names of all the bichos in the park or the exotic fruits in the mercado, I am surprised by how much of a foreigner I still feel in my site. This isn’t to say that I don’t have friendships here or don’t feel comfortable in my role as a Peace Corps volunteer. What I mean, is that as much as I care for my site and the people, I (and I think they) will always see me as an outsider. As much as I love trying to understand and learn about their outlook on the world, I am still fundamentally starting from a far different perspective, one that is inaccessible to them. At times, this barrier seems insignificant, at other times, insurmountable. When I feel frustrated with it, I try and remind myself that this experience of being the “other,” is one of the most important lessons I will learn as a Peace Corps volunteer. By removing ourselves from our cultural comfort-zone, we can better understand where we come from. By living as the perpetual outsider, we can better understand who we are.
Every circle we traveled through, we have to readjust ourselves and our surroundings to create harmony in our lives. The challenge here is especially hard because our communities are used to emigrants, not immigrants, and our backgrounds are so divergent. But it precisely because of the difficulty of this experience that makes it so worthwhile. While I cannot share many parts of myself with my friends in site, I learn so much from them. And for now, I can at least sleep easy knowing that I can calmly kill any scorpions that cross my path.
One year in… One to go!

Earth Day 2009!

To celebrate Earth Day in my community (a place where people do not take very good care of the earth...), I organized a parade with the school. In addition to creating banners with pro-earth slogans, we had a competition to see which grade could make the best dress out of garbage that they collected. Before the competition, the mayor and future mayor spoke, in addition to someone from the Ministry of the Environment. The results were absolutely wonderful, I was so impressed with the creativity they children put in. Here are a few examples of the results and photos from the day. And in case you're interested, the winner is the girl with the blue eyes and the umbrella, though it was very close call!

jewelry making workshop

One of the recent activities I organized was a jewelry making workshop for the women in my community. It was really successful and we're hoping to follow it up with another one too and to form a group of artisan jewelry makers. Young women came from far away, including my friend Cristina, who brought her baby and her 8 year old little sister to take care of the baby while she made the jewelry (see above).

fiestas patronales! part 2

(read the post below first)
One of the many pilgrims to my town was my host mom from training, Nina Juanita! It was so wonderful to see her, she is such an amazing person. I was so touched because she introduced me to her friends as her "hija," or daughter :). She just came back from five months in the U.S., where she went to visit her son who is living illegally in Houston. When he picked her up from the airport, he told her he had a "surprise" waiting for her at home. When she got there there was a new woman holding a 3 month old baby girl - his wife and daughter! Of course, like almost all Salvadorans in the U.S., he had married a fellow Salvadoran. She spent the rest of her visit being the baby's nanny, but she sounded quite happy about it. It was great to reconnect with Juanita, and I felt proud to her show her my adopted community and the life I had built in El Salvador.

fiestas patronales!

So after almost a year in my site, I finally experienced our "fiestas patronales," which are the patron saint festivals. Every town has a patron saint, ours is the Virgin of Dolores, whose week is the week before Semana Santa (holy week).
Our patron saint festivals are a really big deal because the town is a pilgrimage site, and people come from all over the country (and even Guatemala and Honduras) to ask favors of the virgin. As the pictures above show, they wait for hours in lines to enter the church and pass in front of the virgin. The town changes completely in this week, and is full of a million food stands and really old rides (like the ferris wheel above) that are probably condemned in the U.S. and are now brought down to El Salvador to use in these festivals. They are terrifying to go on, not because the ride itself is scary, but because it really could fall apart at any minute. The whole thing is quite the event and it's amazing to see the town transform like this, and then just ask quickly all the vendors disappear and we are back to being the sleepy, little town in a forgotten corner of the country.