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!