Saturday June 23, 2007

I went to a baile today. A.k.a a dance. It was at the school and held by the 9th grade in order to raise money for their graduation. The last time i went to a baile at the school was last year not to long after i first came to live in the town i am currently in, and thinking back i realized how much has changed. I remembered how awkward i felt that day and thought about how much more comfortable i am with people now after almost a year here. But i have to say that even still, there might be very few things that make me more uncomfortable than a baile, especially in my town, and especially the beginning of the baile. Picture that it is 2:30 in the afternoon. The music for the dance started almost 2 hrs ago but people are just now starting to show up. People, young and old, are in their best clothes with more gel in their hair than you would ever imagine was possible without it running down their faces in the heat just standing around the empty tile floor of the outside common area. Who will be the first to get out there? I looked on and thought that whoever it would be i just want to go give them a pat on the back or something. I almost feel bad that bailes make me uncomfortable. I feel like i should get out there, quitar the pena, stop being shy, and dance with people, build friendships through shared experiences, or... something like that, and im sure the gringa trying to dance would be pretty entertaining as well, but i just don't see it happening any time soon. I like bailes for the sake of those who enjoy them, but something just makes my skin crawl and makes me laugh at the same time (not at anyone, just because it helps me handle the skin crawling feeling), maybe it is the slight resemblance of a middle school or high school dance complete with bolos (drunks) who break it down like no one else, and semi creepy grandpas looking on. After a while everyone was having a good time and watching became less painful but then comes the “game” of watching people but at the same time avoiding, at all costs, eye contact with anyone male and over 12. After a little while longer, i left and spent the rest of the afternoon hanging out with kids on my porch, looking at maps, drawing pictures of flags of Africa, and making rock candy. Rereading this just now i dont know whether to laugh or cry... :)

Tuesday July 3, 2007

Today was the last teacher day celebration. Though, that is what i thought about the last one before this one after we had had 3 more before that. Teacher day should really be called Teacher Days here, ya cant stop at just one. I think there was teacher day in the states too right? But people didnt actually celebrate it did they? I have to say that i found it refreshing, nice, that they recognize their teachers here. Of course after a day of celebration, dancing, and what i think the mayer's office hoped would be drunkenness by the amount vodka bottles placed at the tables, a(nother) day off work for the “holiday” of teacher day, a day for the teachers of the school in my town to go to a water park together, a day for the 5th, 6th, and 7th grade to celebrate the teachers with “artistic” presentations and lunch, and yet another day for the 8th and 9th grades to do the same thing, all held on school days, all with out actual school (aka classes) being involved in the day, my western-bread sense of efficiency started to feel it was all a little excessive. Though, i have to say, at the loss of a little more of the kids' education here, i quite enjoyed myself on a number of these days. Last Wednesday was the celebration of the 5th through 7th graders which was probably one of the more entertaining days i have had here. As is typical in any kind of Salvadorian acto (act, presentation, celebration, something of that sort) there was lots of reading of inspirational or touching quotes about how important the honorees are in a low, monotone voice, shaking it of 12 year old girls dancing up a storm, and raffles. Intermixed within these were some games that made teachers look like they were kissing each other and dramas where the kids acted out a song while it played. These didn't seem to have any relation to teacher day, seeing as one was of two girls fighting over a boy complete with hair pulling and water-in-the-face throwing, and one where the 7th grade boy who sometimes says inappropriate things to me outside my house at night dressed up in drag (complete with black trash bag hair, boobs, and a broom) and sang too, while simotaniously shooing away, one of the other boys, who actually played a boy (oh, both of which were also done at the fathers day celebration the next day). Both strangely out of place and strangely entertaining. Of course, i realized that i might be the only one who sees the strangeness or irony in some of the “acts” picked by the kids to do, when one girl introduced the next act by saying something really nice about all the teachers, like how important they were and how this day was to celebrate them and how they made this presentation especially for the teachers and then finally how she wanted to introduce the next act with a big round of applause, titled “The Pain of Your Presence.” Of course the title was just the name of the song they had chosen to shake their butts to, but it was undeniably funny. I started laughing. No one else even cracked a smile. Nothing. No one thought a thing about it. Sometimes i have to wonder WHERE AM I? Maybe they were just dreaming about lunch. Today was a similar celebration put on by the 8th and 9th grades. Some things were exactly the same. Though they did have an older boy come out in a suit coat 5 sizes too big and a black eye and dance around some of the girls, with an astonishing resemblance of one of the bolos (drunk guys) who busted out some pretty fabulous break dancing moves at the last baile. He was later introduced as a famous international “conejo” (rabbit) and i think was doing a comedy routine. I cant honestly say i fully understood any of his jokes but his demeanor was good, and i was impressed by the creativity i must say, and glad the black eye washed off.

im working on posting some more photos on flickr.com....the name is aturbitt at flickr.com, maybe you can figure out how to find them if your interested?

i am not entirely sure anyone will ever read this because i am sure that the few people who checked my blog before have now stopped due to my incredible lack of consistency and dedication to it, but nevertheless i have decided to give it another go and try to create a little window into the past few weeks/months and, as well, follow up with a sincere attempt to at least write one blog a month from now on to sum things up. So April...it started of with semana santa, or holy week, where there is no school, but there are a variety of church services and processions, at least in the catholic church, not much seemed to be different on the evangelical side of things. I started off the week long break by heading out west with some other volunteers to go on a hike. I actually just read one of the other girls blogs and she explains it much better than i would so i am going to include her words here...thanks Erin!!

¨in early April I had the opportunity to travel to the western part of the country to Bosque Imposible, a natural forest of reserved land. Every month a few volunteers organize full moon hikes, where PCVs have the option to travel to another volunteer´s site or nearby to hike either during the day or at night during the full moon. The Bosque Imposible trip was a day-long guided tour, a hike in the forest following a river from start to finish. We were told it wasn´t for the feint of heart and also that everything we brought with us, including ourselves, would get soaking wet, so I was curious and opted to go. About 30 volunteers showed up and we started with an hour long pick up ride into the forest to the point where the hike officially starts. We walked downhill through coffee fincas for a while, then found ourselves at the start of what appeared to be not much more than a babbling brook. From that point on we followed the river as it grew wider and stronger. At times you could hop across from rock to rock, other times make your way across the bank or rock wall along the side. And then at other times, there was no choice but to jump into the water and wade or swim to the next point of land. At first the jumps were smaller - 2m, 3m - and the only real shock was jumping into icy water. The third jump was different - the guide broke ahead of us and perched waiting at what appeared to be a cliff ledge. To see it clearly, you had to scale down a slick rock wall until you were right at the point of jumping - no turning back. I was jumpy but decided to just go for it, so four or five volunteers in I followed suite and shimmied down to the ledge. I remember standing straight up and looking down at a 9m drop into a deep pool of dark water, rock walls shooting up on all sides save a bank where the river continued. The guide, who appeared to be cool as a cucumber, simply told me to make sure I jumped far enough out because too close there were rocks directly below. I must have looked at him in panic, because he put a hand on my shoulder and told me to just jump. So, I did. I remember in that split second I was airborne thinking, I didn´t jump out far enough, I´m about to die. But of course I didn´t - I landed in the water, swam to the bank and watched my fellow volunteers battle their inner voices of caution and eventually whoop as they dropped into the water. Some people were harnessed down, but everyone made it. When we reached the largest waterfall - some 85ft tall - we scaled down the side and eventually came to an optional 10m jump. Many of us did that one too - for some reason after that terrifying 9m drop, anything seemed do-able. We finished the hike with an hour inclined walk back to the trucks. We were wet, muddy from the hike, and eventually soaking through from a sudden downpour that wouldn´t let up, huffing and puffing and working already-sore muscles. The truck ride back in the bed was miserable - quite possibly one of the 3 times I´ve been really cold in this country, prickly goosebumps and all. But despite the physical discomfort it felt good - the bruises and sore muscles signifying a challenge I´d just overcome despite myself. We finished off that day heading to a location of naturally-heated thermal pools. Our hiking guide also happened to own a local bar, so he brought along coolers of beer and walked from pool to pool selling them to us. I´m trying to remember a time when I felt physically better in my life than that night – sore body submerged in hot water, an icy cold beer in my hand, toads croaking, music playing, good company all around.¨

Yeah, it was pretty chill. So then the next morning i headed back to my site, because the next day i had planned with the 9th grade class to go visit the nearby lake, Lago de Apastepeque. The idea started out as a desire to do another hike, but the last (which was also the first time) i set up a hike for the kids from the school that wanted to go, i ended up close to tears for various reasons, so, for this hike at least, we modified it to a 9th grade activity and in planning with them it turned into more of an outing than an actual hike. Still good, and i figured it would be a good way to have some more time to hang out with the 9th grade and get to know them better as i was beginning to teach a “how to plan my life” class with them which will cover things from communication, to self esteem, to planning for the future, to sex ed. Well as things tend to turn out, the people you think will come don’t and people you didn’t plan on coming come, but hey, there were people who showed up to go so i was happy. It ended up being a nice day, and, if you just imagine away all of the trash lying around the banks, the lake was actually quite beautiful.

The next day i was off to visit the school director and one of the teachers in their homes (non of the teachers live in the canton; they all travel in on the bus a little less than an hour both ways). It was defiantly nice to just hang out with them and their families, experience a different environment, and build closer relationships with them while hanging out outside of the school. Nina Idalia (the 8th grade/social studies teacher) lives in a small pueblo (which in a number of ways is much different from the more rural canton that i live in) and it was interesting to see some of the traditions done in her town that aren’t done in the more rural parts. Things like the “rugs,” or giant pictures created in the roads with sand and colored saw dust. One night we also joined in on the procession where almost the whole town (or the Catholics there) comes out and walk along the streets stopping at particular houses with alters set up out front decorated with pictures, candles, cut up tissue paper, towels with pictures of saints on them, etc. to pray before continuing the walk. After a few stops I realized that we were doing the stations of the cross, only instead of following the walls of the church like catholic churches back home, pictures were put at each house to represent the different stations.

The next day, Saturday morning, i left to head to San Vicente, the city in my area, to meet a man from my town who was going to take me to the airport to pick up my friend Erica and her Dad who were coming to visit from the States. Though they said it was a little bit difficult getting through everything without being able to speak Spanish, they made it in, on time and everything. We loaded their bags and ourselves into the back of the pickup and were off to my site where we spent the next day and a half hanging out and doing the tour of the canton. Sunday, their second day here, was Easter, a little bit different. To most people it’s really just another day. You should see the kids’ faces when I tell them that in the States the “conejo de pascua” comes to kids’ houses and hides eggs and candy. It’s a mixture of amazement....candy? And confusion...why would a rabbit hid eggs? The chickens already do that when they lay the eggs in all their random places. Poor Erica and her dad spent the day tramping along in the sun listening to me talk about them in Spanish and finished it off with a fine Easter dinner of papusas! (similar to a corn tortilla filled with cheese and beans...the Salvadorian food). As it turned out they didn’t like the mangos, Salvadorian hot chocolate, or papusas that much, which I’m going to be honest, i can’t understand. Those might be 3 of the best things El Salvador has to offer! You know, aside from the fabulous people and the volcanoes and all. I mean ok, the mangos I will let slide, some people don’t like mangos, but papusas? How do you not like papusas?! But don’t worry, they didn’t completely starve. There were still plenty of granola bars and grilled cheese to go around. Monday we headed out on the bus to the beach, El Tunco to be exact, which translates as “the pig,” though it is actually a pretty chill beach with not to many pigs running around. It is a great surfing spot which means the waves are already a bit bigger than back home on the east coast, but they were absolutely HUGE when we were there. I don’t really know how to explain how far they came up it if you’ve never been there, but there was some kind of phenomenon going on which was in the papers, though it is rare that I see a paper, and they were GINORMOUS. Which made swimming without face planting in the sand about impossible, but they were pretty cool to see nonetheless. The next day we left for Suchitoto, a little “touristy” town on a gorgeous lake. Afterwards we bussed back to my site, grabbed their bags, and bussed to San Salvador for the night before taxiing to the airport to say goodbye. It was great to have them here but unfortunate that I ended the trip puking in the poor taxi mans car (though I did have a bag) and needless to say, I was a little out of it. Instead of going back to my site I just went straight back to the capitol with the super nice taxi man where I began a week long stay by myself, which consisted mainly of bad TV and horrible sleep interspersed with frequent blood letting to check platelets or something of that nature. In the end the blood tests did in fact prove what the nurse had expected all along, that I had the dengue, given by mosquitoes and otherwise known as break bone fever, because that’s what it feels like is going on. Luckily though, I did not have it as bad as some people have, nor did I have the hemorrhagic kind where blood comes out your eyes and ears. Also luckily, I starting feeling better just in time for swearing in of the new group of volunteers and swearing in of volunteers means a party. The next morning I was released by the nurse and, with a little bit of struggle, began the readjustment process to being back in my site after being gone for so long. That next week was hard mentally, but, for the most part, I found things to do which helped, and at the end of the week was rewarded with a visit from Anna, another PCV and her sister who was visiting form the states. Went to my first evangelical revival the next day where a church group came down from Virginia. It was the second time I have heard someone preach in English in almost a year. The people were kind and passionate and the whole thing was very interesting and gave me a lot to think about.

The next week, no school for the first two days then Friday we went on an excursion (kinda like a fieldtrip but for whoever wants to go, not just students, to raise money for a school activity) to the zoo and a place where there are pools. The zoo was a bit depressing and, despite swimming for so much of my life, I just can’t seem to get into the swimming places as much as many Salvadorians do, but i ended up really enjoying the day just getting to be around so many families from my town together. In some ways, it can be a little overwhelming to be around so many people from my town together because there are little clicks sometimes and imp always thinking about who I’ve talked to and hung out with and who I haven’t, though I’m sure they do not care as much as I think about it. But at the end of the day I went home feeling really good about it and reminded of just how many really cool people there are here in this town. It hit me in the morning as we were all getting ready to board the 3 buses that we took to get there. I looked around and everywhere I looked I just thought, “Oh they are so great” “she is so sweet” “those are the cutes most fun kids” “no they are” ....I’m explaining it bad, but basically I just kept thinking how cool these people are. I know all of them, but i would look at someone and think they are so great, I wish I knew them better. And everywhere I looked I just kept thinking the same thing about so many different people. It was cool to see and I felt really fortunate to be granted the moment to really feel the value of people, and not simply just to know it but to feel it and really know it. The next 2 days, the weekend, I just spent reading some great books and hanging out with some really cool people. Just sitting around talking. I am just amazed sometimes at how much i enjoy just hanging out like it is here. Time just feels so different. Things that would be awkward in the states like sitting having nothing to say with someone you don’t know all that well are not here. And on some level for me at least, the Spanish creates a curtain, which to some extent makes awkward not as awkward along with making every other emotion, not so much... not so strong. But it is not just the Spanish.

Which brings me finally to this week where i have been in the school until yesterday afternoon when i went in to the training center to hear a man from the Millennium Challenge Corporation talk about the $461 million dollar, 5 year northern transitional highway project that the US gov is funding here. Afterwards, I went to visit my host family from training which is just fabulous. Though i have only been back maybe 4 nights since training, every time i go back i feel closer to the kids and the women then when I lived there, and i realize how different and much more comfortable in the country i feel now than during training.

So its Thursday, I’m back in my site, and its mothers day here, which here means a day off school and work. Tomorrow i will go to the school and work on getting some embassy donated books back to my site and work on a project to hopefully get some students and i planting some trees in time for the rainy season. Then Saturday it’s off to the capital to celebrate some May bdays and hit up an English speaking church Sunday morning. So there’s a recap of the last month or so. Nothing too deep, but it’s an over view of my activities if nothing else. As you can see the work level was down for a while but maybe things are picking up, work related and otherwise....I’m gonna hope we are on some kind of upswing...yup...we have to be....upswing.

Thursday February 1

so i guess ive been thinking a little bit about how great some things are here that are so easy for me to take for granted, mainly the little kids. There are just some absolutely beautiful kids here with the most amazing smiles. I im finding that i am always very attracted to the ones who are caked in dirt climbing everything in sight including me. When it comes to classes or projects or doing anything semi formal, entertaining, or educational with a group of kids i am at a complete loss and completely incapable, but just hanging out and playing in the dirt that i can do. But it isn't because of anything that has to do with me, kids are just awesome here, they are everywhere i suppose, but i just know i didn't like them so much in the states. There is just nothing better then walking down the street or walking into school and having a group of little girls run up to you saying your name haha....its the little things that get us by i suppose. Maybe it has to do with their being less distractions or the fact that people are so welcoming and friendly for the most part, but they get a kick out of the simplest things. There is this little 5 yr old boy, a brother of the girl that just died, and all i have to do is look at him and he just cracks up, there are so many kids like that. I'm doing a horrible job of explaining it and maybe kids are really like this everywhere and i just wasn't in a place to see it as much in the states as far as not being around kids near as much and also just not taking the time to hang out with them, but man they make me feel like its worth it just to be here and hang out with them.

Monday February 5, 2007

I got back this morning from the capitol where i hung out last night to watch the super bowl, which surprisingly i throughly enjoyed. I guess all those times pretending to be interested football payed off or maybe it was just being out of the states that makes good 'ol American football a bit more appealing. Ok but in all honestly i had no idea that Sunday was the super bowl until the day before. I'm going to blame the lack of media access i have in rural el sal, yup, that was it. So i actually left my site Friday morning to head up to chaletanongo in the mountains where it was soooo cold. Yup, the rumors really are true, there are a very few places in El Salvador that can actually be described as cold. I suppose it is probably nothing compared to what is going on in Ohio right now where kids are getting out of school because it is too cold to wait at the bus stop (why didnt that happen when i was a kid? Or did it?) but it was still cold. I slept with 4 thick blankets that night with a sweatshirt, pants, socks, and a hat (almost none of which i have worn to bed since Ive been here) and was still a little cold; it was almost like i was back in our old house in oxford where you could feel the wind blow through the closed window in the winter. So we went up Friday but the fun began Saturday. This girl Maria, being the awesome volunteer that she is, set up a break dancing workshop for the kids in her site where a group of guys that she had meet who are incredibly talented dancers came up and taught the kids and the 20 or 30 some of us other volunteers who came up how to break dance. There were some frustrating surprises or unexpected things that came up for her on the logistics side of things which is unfortunately not uncommon, but she handled it well and everything turned out great once it got started. Then at night they had a bit of a variety show with people from her site, other volunteers, and these guys doing different dances from different countries. The money raised from the 50 cent entrance fee went towards computers for the school and the whole day was pretty much really darn impressive. I cant do it justice to write about here, but it was just an awesome day to see and to be able to be a part off, the guys who came out and put on the workshop were awesome and the kids loooved it. It was just a really cool opportunity for them and for us to see as well. Moral of the story, im thankful for awesome volunteers who inspire me to want to take the chance and try to do fun things that might be a little big and scary but also a lot of fun with my community, and, of course, i need to learn to break dance.

Tuesday February 6, 2007

I spent most of the day at the school today and i was thinking towards the end of the day that it felt like a busy productive day and then i looked at what i had done and most of it amounted to making signs out of paper to hang from the celling in the “library” that say things like “save the silence please” and “respect the books.” Oh what a productive day in el Salvador. So i suppose i have sufficiently adjusted to the slower pace of life. They do say though that often the biggest things we can do happen on a smaller scale, at a personal level, and in that respect i did have a bit of a break through today. Yesterday after soccer practice i was playing with a girl and a few guys had come down around the field, one being a boy of maybe 17 that never ceases to tell me how pretty i am in the creepiest manner possible....i will just never get fully used to things like that, but i suppose i don't really want to either. But so this time instead of trying to ignore it, i turned to him and told him that he doesn't need to say things like that, that it is very disrespectful to me, and i don't want to hear things like that again. Well all the norms were blatantly apparent when he, in response, said “but your a female and im a male and it is natural [for him to say things like that catcall style]. Calmly, i explained that though it is frequent here it is not in fact “natural” and i find it very disrespectful. Well, though he proceeded to call me his girlfriend throughout the rest of the conversation, i passed him and a few other guys today and he said nothing. Nothing! We will see how long it lasts, but in my little world that is what we would call a breakthrough. So tomorrow i am heading in to the capitol to say goodbye to a girl from my training group who ET'ed (early terminated) a bit ago and is heading home this week. I'm going to miss her but im happy for her that she feels good about the decision and what comes next for her though it is not all planned out. It has me thinking a little bit about how close i came to leaving. I'm glad im still here because i know this is where i need to be right now and i think it is a good sign that i am not thinking so much now about what life will be like when i go home as i did in the beginning, but i wonder if i am changing, i wonder what things i will notice afterwards that i could never notice right now. I realized today after a quick phone conversation with another volunteer that when Salvadorians ask me in Spanish how i am i almost allllways say “well” or “very well” but when people ask me in English it is a very iffy “im doing alright.” They are very different answers, but when i say them i fully mean them both just as much, but I haven't figured out exactly what that means yet.

And some more....

Tuesday January 16, 2007

So Sunday i went to this hang out/meeting thing with some other volunteers and a few staff to talk about volunteer mental health and what kind of things we could do to try to help the situation of mental health. Well later that day i realized that maybe a reason that my mental health isnt far worse is because i haven't yet tried to do a large amount of work here.

So yesterday was the first attempt at starting a girls soccer team in my canton. It ended up ok and we will try again today to have practice and if girls show up and the boys dont take over the field hopefully we will play. I had told some girls that we were going to play and they said that they would tell others. Of course they all say they will come but you can never really believe that, which just stinks because i want to believe people still. So i was walking to the field in the afternoon and i see this little boy who hangs out at one of the girls houses who was going to help me to get the word out. Well he tells me that she says she doesnt want to go because no one is going to come. So i proceed to walk to the cancha (field) complaining in my head about how ridiculous it is that so many girls want to play futbol but say they have no one to organize a team so then someone does try to organize it and they dont want to go because they dont want to be one of the only ones there. so no one comes and then there is no team, i was frustrated that people feel shame about going to something when they aren't completely sure what it will be like and who will be there, but that they have no shame about saying that they will be somewhere and help out and just not showing. It was all the things that making working in el Salvador so hard that i have heard so much about but on such a small scale and i hadn't even gotten to the cancha yet, but i felt so hopeless and almost ready to just give up on the whole idea. So i am frustrated and also know that it is probably silly to be frustrated over this, and i hate la pena (the shyness) but i understand it way too much and have no idea how to conquer it aside from just realizing how ridiculous it is sometimes and being willing to do something about it and that feels rare here. and then i keep trying to tell myself to have a little faith in people, whether they deserve it or not or whether there past actions are in their favor or not is irrelevant, then i go visit a house on the way and realize that the only other girl that i thought for sure would be there went into town and want around. I think i expected not many people to show up this first time, i expected anyone who did show up to be late, but it was just really frustrating when it happened, and i realized that of course most volunteers go crazy and that i would be no different. Thank goodness for younger kids who like to play futbol. Evalin, who i wrote about the other day was my savior. She would play with me and maybe more people would come, maybe they wouldn't. So we played and more kids showed up. Not so much the older girls that this was supposed to be intended for, but what can ya do. About an hour in one girl showed up, then two more. It was a slow start but at least someone eventually came and we can try to build off that.

Friday January 19

so its Friday the last day of the first week of school, if you can really call it that. The first day was a “welcome”day were kids came and just hung out, then Tuesday was a day off to celebrate the signing of the peace accords, and the rest of the week some of the kids came and there were kinda classes. Why i felt a hint of surprise in the fact that half or more of the kids don't show up in the beginning of the school year i am just not sure. When you think about it it makes sense, just like everything else that makes absolutely no sense apart from the fact that that is just the way it is and the way it has been in the past and is therefore accepted. People around the school say that more students will come next week, but we will see what more means because i have also been told a number of times that late February is a good time to start projects in the school because then maybe all of the kids will be coming on a semi-regular basis, you know when they feel like coming of course. The reasons for missing the first month of school have ranged around them just not being ready or not having the money right now to buy notebooks and other supplies to just not wanting to go, sometimes because “other people aren't going to go in the beginning so I'll go later too” (humm sounds familiar, a little like my first attempt at soccer practice.) And believe it or not this brings me to one of the reasons i have a hard time writing a blog about life here right now, because there are all these absurdities that i find myself on one hand trying to forget are absurd because i don't want to compare life here too much to the states or how i grew up and because there is a little pride in me that thinks i should know better and these things should not shock me anymore, and on the other hand believes that they really are absurd because there is a school and teachers and it just does not seem ok for a 7 yr old not to go to school simply because they don't want to. So i think about things like this a lot, the things that in theory seem so clear, but i know they aren't, the things that seem so easy to fix, but i know they aren't, the things that could make such a big difference in what peoples lives look like, but they just seem so big to change. Things like parents not letting there kids decide whether they want to go to kindergarten or if they are going to drop out of fourth grade simply because they get bored in school, but rather teaching the importance of education through encouragement as well as sending kids to school. Or how maybe its not the best idea to beat your daughter for having a boyfriend so that she leaves and goes to live with her boyfriend. Or if your 16 year old son wants his 13 year old girlfriend to drop out of school and move in with him and he still lives in your house maybe you shouldn't just go along with that plan. I had a conversation with one of the kindergarten teachers about some of this stuff yesterday which started when she asked if there are girls getting pregnant when they are 13 and 14 where I'm from. It was good to talk about how some of these things just aren't right with a Salvadorian woman who thinks that they aren't right either to reassure me and to be reminded that just because thats the way it is and its the way things have been doesn't mean its the way they should always be. I think sometimes i have a hard time with that, wanting big things to change, and wondering if I'm wrong for it. I find myself asking 'why is it so important for some of these kids to go to school?' and more often then i might want to admit struggling to believe in a good answer because i find myself putting myself in their place and seeing that i might be exactly the same way doing exactly the same things so easily giving up the same opportunities for what comes easier and more comfortably right now. And haven't i done just the same so many times but with different things, different opportunities? But there are the good stories too. The girl i meet on the bus who is in university for accounting but wants to study English more after she graduates because so many of the computer programs are in English and she wants to work with computers; the kid today with that smirk that makes you wonder what hes plotting but who stayed after when all the others had gone home to help us start a compost pile, and the kindergarten teacher i talked to who told me a bit about her story about how her dad wasn't around and her mom died when she was 6 and how she lived with her grandmother and they were very poor and how she grew up during the war in northern Morazan which was one of the hottest places for guerrilla activity. There were strings of days when they wouldn't leave the house because if they did they would be shot at, but she wanted to be a teacher. so every day she could, she would trek through the back country, often without shoes she told me, to get to school because she had to go to school to be a teacher.

Sunday January 28

I got back to my site around noon today from visiting another volunteers site, hanging out with her and some other PC folks, and doing a little dancing at the baile during her town's fiestas, oh and how could i possibly forget to mention running for our lives from firework shooting bulls. This was my first experience with the torritos, but apparently they are well known and widely loved or hated. Basically it begins with streets packed with people for the fiestas which is kinda like a carnival with imported rides, greasy food and a night or two designated to big bailes, or for those english speakers, dances. Then 5-10, or however many your town decides to pay for, guys put over their heads these metal/wire bull (like the animal) shaped figures that have some contraption in them that shoots fireworks in all sorts of random unpredictable directions. Then these guys, with the bulls on their head, run through the crowded streets, fire shooting out from all directions, aiming the bulls and also many of the fireworks at people while the people try to run out of the way with not much place to go....only in el salvador. Ok thats probably not true, but needless to say it was a little different then the experiences i have had with fireworks on the fourth of july. Supposedly people don't get really hurt all that often, but man, i realized that i was really scared when i grabbed the mans arm next to me in a death grip and even when i realized that i had no idea who he was i still couldn't get myself to let go. We all did, though, make it back in one piece and it ended up being a pretty good night. Unfortunately though, i came back today to some really sad news. A ten year old girl named jessica drowned in a pool on saturday and they were going to bury her this afternoon. I went to the house where her body was and was there for a few hours until more people showed up to view the body and pay their respects to the family while a group played music. Then a group of kids with flowers went in front followed by a pickup truck with the coffin and the rest of us walked behind as we made our way to the cemetery a little ways outside of town. Last week Jessica came with another girl, Rosio, to buy from the store next to me and for a little while they sat on my porch and talked to me. Well actually Rosio talked to me. Though i had seen and talked to jessica a number of times, she would always smile but was usually very shy. Especially this day; if she wanted to say something she would whisper it to Rosio right in front of me and then Rosio would say in out loud for her. It was like this the whole time, she wouldn't hardly say a word to me, but then i saw her the next night and she was so different. She was talking up a storm, straight to me with no pena at all, it was amazing and so fun to talk to her. It was so sad to think about her not being around, to sit next to her mom and know that for once it wouldn't matter if i knew how to speak Spanish or not because there were just no words to say, but at the cemetery is where it really hit me. They had just put the coffin in the ground and her dad, who i had never meet, was in front of me watching the men shoveling dirt into the hole. He turned around for a minuet and we made eye contact, but then he just kept looking at me. I was staring him right in the eyes, but i kept wondering if maybe he was really looking at someone else. Then he started walking towards me, it felt so slow, when he got right in front of me he just looked at me and said, “she was my girl.” my eyes just got so sad and i think i tried to mumble something about how i knew (that she was his daughter which i had just found out that day) and how sorry i was and how beautiful she was inside and out. There weren't tears in his eyes, but they were so filled with pain, and he said something to the effect of “yes she was soo caring, but you know when God wants to take her to be with him it is the best time.” You know Ive heard a decent amount of ridicule of religion in peoples' lives here because it often leads to fatalism, they idea of just saying that whatever God wants to happen will happen and taking the responsibility of people out of it, but my goodness it has to be so much more than that when a father who is currently burying is only little girl walks over to me, a girl not from here who he has never met, looks me in the eyes and tells me, essentially, that he trusts God and God's timing to be perfect. And then to tries to comfort me by telling me that she came home that day after hanging out with Rosio and I on my porch and talked about me and told him all about it. My eyes welled up and my heart just hurt. I am just so privileged to be allowed to be even a small part of the lives of these people. To be allowed to spend time with them and laugh with them and feel even a small part of someones pain sometimes, to kick around a beat up ball with kids in the street, to be something so different here with all of the privileges and the hassles that come with it, and if nothing else, smile at kids, say hi in the street, ask them their opinion. I hope to do a little more than that in these two years, but mostly right now i hope to see more what a privilege and honor and an opportunity it is for us to be a part of the lives of other people, wherever we are, and to have influence on them, good, bad, big, or small, by how we treat them and the other people around us. I hope to learn more how to just experience life, to just live, with people and how to have true compassion. I hope to learn more just how precious people are and how to treat them as such. These, and im sure many others, are just a few of the things that the people here are teaching me in such a subtle way that i don't often feel like i am learning, but hopefully this is another one of those cases when feelings aren't always the most reliable things.

Just a few thoughts i have had over the past few days/weeks. Some of it's a bit random and scattered, but sometimes its just easier to spit out whatever runs into my head and if I don’t I might not end up writing anything at all. So here it goes….

Some day before January 11

For the most part i have gotten used to the dogs barking and chickens doing whatever they do that makes a lot of noise but this dog just will not stop right now and its driving me crazy. I saw my first live scorpion in my site tonight. It was in my house. I doused it with bugspray because i felt to bad to smash it with my shoe. I ended up smashing it anyway in the end. I hear scorpions really hurt. My first friend here to leave for the states leaves tomorrow. We weren't that good of friends yet, but i had high hopes. Its strange. I felt like i was used to the idea of men and boys leaving their pregnant wives and girlfriends and mothers leaving there children to be raised by grandparents as soon as they stop breast feeding to look for a better life in the states and just the overwhelming number of people altogether that left their lives behind here to go up north, but she is the first person ive really known before she leaves. This dog really needs to stop barking. I really need to remember how to have thoughts worth having. I made a pretty darn good dinner tonight. An egg, cheese and some bread, and half a platano. It was the closest ive gotten to making plantains like the salvadorians do. A guy not much older then me gave me a pumpkin today. At least it looks kinda like a pumpkin. I thought it was an odd gift and im not sure if ive ever really even talked to the guy, but somehow that didnt hit me and i thought it completely normal until i walked in my door lugging a big pumpkin. Is there a really good chance that i am going to be absolutely brain dead and unable to hold an intelligent conversation by the time i leave peace corps? Was i ever able to have intelligent conversations? Maybe if most of my conversations here didn't consist of pointing out the obvious. But no that probably wouldn't make that big a difference. How many times have i actually said to people “so your buying stuff?” as they walk into the store or “so your washing your clothes?” as they are washing their clothes and thought it a completely worthwhile thing to say? Lets just forget i asked that question. I promise somehow it sounds less ridiculous in Spanish. I know a lot gets lost in translation, but sometimes i like to directly translate things in my head just because it makes me laugh to think about saying to someone in English some of the things i say or hear in Spanish. I know its not a fair translation, but it never hurts to have another thing to smile about. A friend of mine visited for a little while in the end of December. I went and hung out with this older woman the other day and she asked me if he had left then she proceeded to say “Hes so white!! hes so pink!! hes so tall!!” All true statements, but made me laugh. School starts back up on Monday. I wonder what grade i would have stopped going to school at if i could just stop going to school whenever i wanted and it made no difference to my parents or whoever was raising me. I wonder how many kids just wont show up to school this year. I wonder if I'll ever be able to put any of this into words or if I'll ever find reason enough to do so. With all of the absurdities, with all of the frustrations i have with the way things are handled when someone gets hit by a car or trampled by a horse, with all of the unsureness i have about what in the world I'm doing here and who the heck I'm turning into, with all of the loneliness i see played out in all the wrong ways in the lives of volunteers and Salvadorians alike, with all of the contradictions of being in a place that seems so utterly alone sometimes at the time where i am seeing the most how much people are just made to live life with other people and how much i am seeing, as well as am perfectly sure i do not see, how much we sometimes play life without really living, whatever that means anyway, with everything i don't know and how way to settled i am with some of it, with all of the things i hope someone one day drags out of me and with all of the middle ground feelings that make me want to puke, i don't know if I've ever smiled more than i do here. And it's for no other reason, but that there are people to smile at. There always were. I just suppose that the way people return smiles here makes you think smiling is a perfectly normal thing to do.

January 11

I got a package from my family today. I was worried it wouldn't come because it had been a while but now that i have it I'm even more glad that i do. I had asked my brother to make me some CDs and he actually did and they are pretty decent even. I never realized how much country music could make me miss home. It makes me think of driving on the back country roads to Harrison with the sun and the clouds and the windows down. I miss driving. I miss driving and having a place to sing as loud as i want.

Friday January 12

I had starbucks coffee this morning for the first time in at least 7 months (my momma sent it to me). I liked starbucks enough in the States but i really couldn't tell the difference between it and any other kind of coffee and i have gotten quite accustomed to Cafe Listo (the instant stuff) but i have to say it was pretty darn good. I also had a pretty good lunch today too (I talk about food a lot in these things don't i?) chicken, rice, salad, and tortillas. Not original, but good nonetheless. And it was probably even better because i went and hung out with a girl/woman (the Spanish language does it best with the word muchacha i think. i don't know what to call her in English. Shes only 24 but has two kids and i just feel like she is so much older. Shes a woman but that just feels to old to say.... and this is all besides the point). So anyway i went to her house and just hung out for a few hours and it was just a good afternoon. She is just awesome. I have known her for a while but i don't see her that much and have never really hung out with her and it was just really nice to sit on the couch and watch tv and hang out with her daughter and pretend like i was helping her make lunch (by the time i leave here im gonna be able to make a mean tortilla and if im lucky they will be round). So i tried to think of her and how maybe we could be good friends when i found out this afternoon that my new favorite person and my best recent hope for a good friend is leaving to move back to the nearest city. Her name is Silvia and she is 18 and had been living in the city working in an older womans house when her mom passed a way a few weeks ago and she came back here to take care of her younger brother and two sisters. I had known the younger three a little bit from school, but had never really talked to her until i went to there house during the days after her moms death when people go to the house to pray. Instead of going in i sat outside and talked to her and her sisters and the kids playing outside. Her and her brothers and sisters are all just amazing people. The youngest, Evalin, is my hero. In a country, town, place where pena (or painful shyness) is everywhere she can walk down to the futbol field and buy something without someone going with her, she invites me to come visit in the afternoons and play futbol with them, and when the older boys take over the field she will play with them. I think thats one of the things i really like about Sylvia too she is just outgoing and talkative and it makes me not so intimidated by her like i am by a lot of the people closer to my age who are a lot harder to talk to and make me feel so uncool sometimes, i feel like im back in college as a young life leader. But so anyway for the past few weeks i've gone down there a number of times in the afternoon to hang out and play with them and the other kids and it has become my favorite part of the day and though there will always be kids to still play, i'm defiantly really sad that Silvia wont be around. I'm finally starting to realize how fortunate i am as a PC volunteer to have the opportunity to live life with people in a way that we just don't so much in the States.

Super awesome and beautiful kids that play with me sometimes.

One of the boys that is over all the time taking water to the trees behind the house for the older woman i live next to.

Family portrait... a bit of a challenge to get some smiles for pictures but well worth it.

a few girls from my community hanging out on the rocks watching the futbol game. if you look close you can see the soccer field in the distance as well as some of the cows grazing around it.

ok so this kid i dont even know but this picture just makes me crack up everytime i look at it so i hope it does the same for you. i was taking pictures of kids and he kept saying "take picture" in spanish of course but would come rigggght up to the camera for me to do it. ok maybe not that funny to you, but trust me it was

The house i half lived in when i first got to my community,,,, kinda far away but you get a basic idea of typical houses

Some ruins of a community that was coverd by a volcanic explosion... this is an old house, the raised portions on the left are supposedly beds i think

i have no time and forget the names of these places but will add them later, but another archaeological site that has suffered emensly under an attempt at preservation, you can see the blue tarp, and hay that cover the piramid that was before covered in cement to protect it, but it didnt work and chunks are falling off.

A mural up in perquin

another house preserved by volcanic ash

Preparing for our little halloween celebration with some sandia jack-o-lanterns and an attempt at watermelon fresco (you cant go to wrong with watermelon but i think ill still leave the fresco to the salvadorians)

Two of one of my counterparts four girls. It was a little tough to get them to smile for the picture (people here tend to take their pictures very seriously) but well worth it

Some young boys playing in the surf at the beach in El Cuco

And sunset in El Cuco, for now living only a few hours away from the beach i definatly need to start going more

And... Melisa (my host sis during training) and I after swearing in!

Handstands on top of the volcano we climbed. There is a military base up there which is where the cement comes in but it meant the trees were cleared away and we were in the clouds and could see so much of the country, and we could wear a longsleeve shirt for the first time in a long time.

This is my melisa, my host sister during training at her quinsenara (sp?) or her 15th birthday, or her wedding as i called it. The only thing it was missing was the groom.

This above is all of us after we swore in as real official volunteers and next to it is the bus we rented for our beach/island trip during training, just a typical bus in el salvador, complete with snakeskin print on the front and a picture of the virgin mary on the side.

These are two girls who live in my site now they were playing catchypora (again i should know how to spell that but i dont, but catchypora is like the school band and girls who dance with batons) way to cute and creative and the picture doesnt do them justice.

ok so its been a long long time since i have written i know, i just cant seem to find the ganas to write when i get the chance and if i do i have such a problem knowing where to start or what to say or how to say it. i just have a hard time sometimes putting things into words in general and i think i am only getting worse at it as i live here where deep or stimulating conversations are shall we say lacking and much of the little convos i have are in spanish and about the weather or some other obvious feature of daily life anyway. So i had a friend in Africa the other day send me a top 10 list of the things he had been thinking about lately as a summary of how things were going. i thought it was a great idea and while i will not be including my own top ten list in this entry i thought i would just try to write some of the random thoughts that have been going on in my head lately, maybe it will give some kind of small picture of life here.

so I´ve recently moved into a differnt house and resorted again to wearing bug spray. There is something about being covered in big red bumps that itch like crazy that promotes the use of the stuff, but more so, i find my self in hopes that the 99.something % DEET might some how take the itch away more than what it is actually supposed to do, which is postpone the accrewment of more big red welts. The spray is warm and slippery feeling like spray on dry oil or something and feels like death and the smell and the sneezing that come after remind me that that is what it is, liquid death. i just hope it is for the mosquetos before mine.

El Salvador is like a paraleel univers. Everything here feels surreal. i find it the most in things people say. even when i understand part, or even most of it there is always that question of how much i{ve missed. the good thing is that i give people the benifit of the doubt quite a bit, always assuming that maybe i just didnt understand or laughing off the things that i did understand and if were said in english i might not be too happy about. i guess it almost feels like words arent really said or meant sometimes.

I just had beef soup. The soup part was good, the vegitable too. My dad would be so surprized by the kindss of meat i even let touch the food i eat these days. Right in the middle of my soup there was a huge, im taking huge, chunck of animal. tissue still attached to bone, huge chunck of broken bone, and some other kind of bone, it looked like brains or something, but the bone didnt look like part of the skull.

a good part about living in a house where bats fly in is that they can fly out the same way.

The other day i partook in my first ¨recuerdo¨buying experience. It was just as dreadful as i always dreamed it would be. i just couldnt keep a straight face when the two 15ish year old girls i was with suggested i buy a plastic winnie the pooh clock for the 23 year old guy i am accompaning to his 9th grade graduation as a graduation present. it would have been fine if i had just laughed a little, i laugh at a lot of things ( and trust me, the laughing didnt stop there. it continued with the suggestion of, among other things, a stuffed teddy bear and the most hanious wall picture i have seen in a long time, if you lived here that might say a lot more) but i think the self conciousness with which i have been so plagued here dropped for a moment and with it i dropped one of those ¨are you serious?!¨ faces, although of course i knew that they were, amongst the very difficult to control laughter. the end result was a mostly black picture frame with a little graduation cap and something along the lines of ¨you did it!¨ in spanish and a little stuffed animal frog with a graduation cap. both graduation themed, and therefore, i felt, somehow overrid the cheesiness i could not excape.

(recuerdo- pretty much any little thing you can give as a present as something to ¨¨remember by¨; for my old host sisters 15 birthday that was more like a wedding she got a plethera of clocks, statues, lamps, stuffed animals, ect that could be concidered recuerdos)

I found my new favorate meal the other day as well. Pan arabe (kinda like pita bread), tomateos, onion and guajada (this kind of cheese they make here), and then though they dont really compliment each other, a latte ´en polvo¨(powdered, por ejemplo the ever present powdered milk, powdered juice, powdered coffee and other powered food stuffs) with chocolate mint flavoring that my momma just sent me. Not exactly the same as a nonfat, decaf, white chocolate mocha with pepperment surpe from starbucks but it tasted just similar enough to remind me of late night studing at starbucks on highstreet with the white christmas lights twinkling off the snow of the emptied streets of oxford. and, for the next two years, it will have to do.

Comments or common themes made by some girls as they looked at my pictures from home :

My dad and matt have really pretty eyes (they are blue). I look prettier with make up. why dont i wear pants here if i wore them in the states? (answer; because its too freaking hot here and i would sweat so much i would never be able to peel them back off). the outback of australia is very red. My friend Alec ( for those of you who know him) is bien guapo (good looking) and Taylor looks like Barbie (which really means he looks like Ken.

Also the same day i went with the two girls, carolina and Eloisa to get Eloisas hair cut. As we sat waiting for Eloisa to get her $2 hair cut i wondered what the girls would think about the $200 and up cut and color salon appointments that are so common back home. i thought, if i ever did decide to get my hair cut while here, i would have a hard time going back to paying the $15 for a trim at my dads barbar that i had become accustomed to in the states. And then i saw why it was $2. My fists clenched, my chest tightened, i got a little hot and all the memories of when i was younger, of agonizing over the 2 inches i would get cut off, how i would remain tense the whole 30 minuets in the chair, and then tediously inspect the back of my head to decide if it was too short, and if the trainned eye could tell i got my hair cut (which might only mean it was all the same length now) then it usually was. All of these memories came flooding back as she hacked away at Elo´s long beautiful hair for no more than 4 mins and was done. Eloisa sat calm, but i was tense enough for the both of us and had to remind my self that it was just hair and i had inface chopped all mine off not to long ago, and that it was her hair and if she wasnt terror stricken in the chair than maybe neither should i be. and besides, a $2 haircut sure makes a lot more since then paying $60 for a hair cut i probably wouldnt like all that much anyway. to give credit where credit is due, the end result was infact not horrible and Eloisa was still beautiful and that woman earned her $2 but i think for at least a little while longer i will be saving my dollars for fresco and pan dulce.

(this might be the most entertaining for my parents who saw me through my intense fear while growing up of getting too much hair cut off and my lil brother who now seems to in some way share that fear)

Things are still going well here in The Savior, which is good, but its a strange mix of becoming more comfortable in my site and still everything being differnt. Things are differnt here then what life was like in the states, but throughout my whole time here it has always felt strange to me that it hasnt felt more strange being here. Being in site and speaking spanish more has helped with learning, but this week i have noticed that the more comfortable i get with being here and with being with people sometimes i forget which language i am speaking, or should be. You would think that speaking spanish all the time it would become more normal, but ive found myself randomly speaking spanglish to people or responding in english, like this morning when i said good morning instead of buenos dias (the good thing is, i think sometimes people just think i am tryng to speak spanish and mess up, so they smile and nod anyway hah) maybe it is all of the english books i have been reading. I am enjoying having some time to read and while it was never something i thought much about during training i think i want to do something to promote reading. Books arent really big here, people are always making comments about me reading because it is differnt so i have started reading some of the resourse books they have at teh school from the ministry of education and never read and trying to convince the kids that croud around that they are really interesting. It mad me so sad today, i asked some 3rd and 4th grade girls what subjects they liked in school, they all said language, because math was just numbers and was borring. When i asked if they liked science or sociales (like social studies and history) they said no because in those classes the teacher just reads things and they have to write what she says. i know not everyone would agree, but i got soo sad because those are the best subjects! Science especially, it is the subject you can do the most with to make learning fun and all it was to them was dictation. I have a growing appreciation every day for the schools that i got to attend and for the struggle of the schools here. But there are somethings that are great about them. last friday the sept 15 was independence day. The school has a band just for this day and a good amount of the town came out to watch they school in a parade down the street to the school with the band and girls dancing. of course i came out to watch as well,,, well i ended up being in the front of the parade and sitting at the table of honor right next to the chief of police with the most important people in the community for the program that they did, which was a bit strange, but thats el salvador, they are the most hospitable people and the school directora is great about involving me in things. tomorrow i will be having a talk with the 5th through 9th grade to try to work out something that i can do with some of them during the school break (like summer break in the states) from mid nov to mid jan, so we will see how that goes. i started thinking the other day about it getting colder (with it being time for fall back in ohio and all) and then i realized its never getting colder here. i guess it has felt normal mas o menos up untill now with it being summer in the states and though it is ¨winter¨ here the 90 degree weather makes me feel like summer back home. But i had a thought the other day that i never thought i would have : i might actualy miss cold weather.

so its getting close to the end of my second week. It is strange to me that mornings are harder then nights here (at home if anything was wrong at night i always felt better in the morning) but over all things are getting better and it has been really good to meet a lot of great people here. last weekend i went with a mother and her 2 daughters and a few other kids to the ¨salto¨which is a big pool of water with a waterfall running into it pretty close to right behind where i am living. It is absolutely beautiful but a little sad because the water is pretty cloudy because women often wash clothes there. but you can climb up on the rocks around the waterfall and jump off because the water gets pretty deep. The rocks almost look fake and there are trees all around and i feel very fortunate to live so close by. Yesterday i went to the school in the morning and sat in on the first grade class. man, it just got me thinking a lot about the education available here, and how hard i think it would be to be a teacher here, and just education in general, and left me with a lot of thoughts that i dont have conclusions to but will maybe save for another time or place. After school i went home with a young girl from the school to hang out with her family and then after went with her to visit and meet some of the other families in the area. People are so nice and welcoming in general here. They invite you in, give you a chair to sit in within the first 20 seconds and often food or drink as well and will spend hours talking to you or if there isnt much to talk about, then just sitting on the porch with you. It is differnt where in the states i feel like respect for people often seems to mean respect for their time and not taking up to much of it but here it means spending time with people even if you arent doing much of anything at all. I think this kind of atmosphere will be good for me but there are things about it that i havent quite figured out yet (big surprize,,,there is a lot i havent figured out yet) things like when to leave and when to stay and how say that you are going to leave, as well as the conflict i feel about how many people there are to meet and get to know and not knowing how often i should visit people i have meet or when to go visit people i dont know instead. But those are just minor details and i meet some really great people yesterday, one of which was a woman named Flor who told me i knew a lot of spanish ....i about got up and hugged her it was the most amazing thing i think anyone has said to me here hah. this morning i went with Ilsi, the girl i live with (she is my age, 22, and i live with her, her husband, her 5 yr old son, and her husbands parents) to take breakfast to Abelito (her husband) who was out watching the cows. It took about an hour round trip through the milpa (fields of corn) and monte (or something like that, it is basiclly trees or brush like you might find in a forest) she does this almost every day, and her in her skirt and flipflops could sidstep all of the mud and climb through barbed wire fences very gracefully. i on the other hand, just kept doing little things that would make her laugh and laugh, like step directly in mud, fall through the barbed wire, get a furry caterpiller attached to me whos hair went through my pants to sting me, and get attacked by a mound of killer ants( ok it might just have been one very big ant, but it bit me 3 or 4 times on the foot and it felt like a mound of them). Like my daddy says, its an adventure, and it is true here, even the little things like delivering breakfast.

So its been about a week here in my site now. I have been switching when i go to the school everyday, one day in the morning and one in the afternoon and have mostly just been observing differnt grades and hanging out with kids during recess. Preschool through 4th grade go to school in the morning from 7:30 to 12 and 5th through 9th are in the afternoon from 1 to 5. Yesterday they only had 2 classes for half an hour each and then had football (soccer for those stateside) games the rest of the afternoon and today, with it being the first day of september, there was a presentation all morning with the flag and national anthem and teachers dressed up in long skirts doing traditional dances to celebrate el salvadors independence day on which is on the 15th. I was sitting here in the computer lab a bit later when a girl very kindly brought me a snack. It just so happened to be one of these ¨crazy corns¨(i think thats what it is called in spanish) that we always used to be amazed that people really liked when i was back in my training community with a few other trainees. It is basiclly corn on the cob on a stick then smothered in mayonnaise, ketchup, mustered, ¨salsa negra¨(some kind of black ketchup type thing) and something that looks like parmesan cheese....I guess you gotta try everything once! speaking of food and concidering that i have had some ups and downs this week, on an exciting positive note, i am starting to like and maybe even crave tortillas!! this is very exciting. i have also aquired a taste for warm sweet milk, even with cerial. I like it here, it is beautiful, the people are so kind and the students soo welcoming, i am slowly learning spanish from second graders and trying to remember names, it has stormed every night lately which is nice to fall asleep to and makes me think i will miss it during the dry season, but things are still hard, i suppose they often will be, im just struggling to learn not want to run away from it and to appreciate being immersed in a culture as much as i could admire it from afar.

so i wrote another blog last week when i was sick in the capitol ( im much better now)but it was having some trouble attaching so maybe i will try again later, but for now here is a quick update... like i said i was sick in the capitol all week, i started feeling aweful the first full day in my site so now i am starting again. i got back to my site saturday, yesterday was my first full day adn today is my first day at teh school. this morning i hung out in the second grade class room adn just observed which is what i will be doing for a while in all the different grades. during recess i was sitting with some young girls and a horse came running through the playground.. always interesting. this afternoon i think i will go visit my other counterpart (a woman who lives here) and then spend the afternoon orgainizing some things and maybe studying a little bit of spanish!! the fun never stops:)

well here is the update... first for last weekend. Saturday we visited some mayan ruins which if you have seen any other ruins, arent much to look at but for me who has not (dispite the study of archaeology) and loves that stuff it was great. faithful to my inability to ever remember names, i do not know the names of the places we visited, but one was a villiage that was covered in ash by a volcano (the pompe of central america or something liek that) and another was some temples or pyramids i dont really know what to call them. It was a little hard because the guide we were supposed to have who speaks english wasnt there so i didnt understand much but it was interesting nontheless. I love history, prehistory, anthropology, geology, all that stuff, but there is something about it that makes me sad sometimes. there was something about being there that made me sad. i think it is the stories that i like about those kinds of subjects. that is the conclusioin i have come to anyway. I am lucky to have amazing parents who read to me aaa lot when i was young and i couldnt get enough of stories then either, anything i have an interest in always seems to come back to stories. i guess it is just so interesting or mysterious or something, that there are so many stories about the lives of so many people that we will never know, it makes me wonder, and then kind of makes me sad a little but i havent yet figured out exactly why.

sunday we climbed a volcano, chechongtepec to be exact.. or something liek that. It took me and the people i was with a little over 4 hours to get to the top we hung out there for lunch and then took the 3.something hour slide down. it was pretty amazing but i was definatly very glad about 75 % of the way up that i reallllllllly like nature and that i like hiking and therefore had extra motivation to compensate for my very out-of-shapeness. a friend of mine just told me she thinks it was about 7,000 feet in elevation, i dont know how many feet we hiked inorder to say how steep it was but lets just say... it was very steep. i had a salvadorian moment as well on the top of the volcano. we were talking a picture and i "chch"ed one of the other girls. "chch"is what people say to get someones attention here, its kinda liek "psttt" but used more frequently. It is one of those words or phrases that i cant imagine my self saying because it is just not normal and as much as i want to adapt to some of the culture or language stuff it just feels like i am trying to hard or something, i dont know hah. but there i was "chch`ing" to get erins attention and i didnt even notice. That along with my conjugating verbs into the preterete in my sleep make me think i am adjusting more then i know. For real though, the spanish dreams thing is aweful, i hope it counts as studing and that i get a lot better with these verb tenses because of it. The past two nights i have dreamed in spanish, i have things going through my head all the time, words, verbs, trying to figure out what i would say to differnt people and how... and i have no control of it.... alll night long. its not even liek sleeping it is liek studying spanish for 8 hours and calling it rest,,, i wake up more tired then i went to bed. but enough about my ranting and raving about spanish. on the upside of espanol i talked to my counterpart on the phone today. a counterpart is the person in the community that you are assigned to to help you get adjusted and to work with if you so choose. my counterpart is the directora of a school in my cantone. i had to call her to confirm our meeting time adn place for when they pick me up on monday when i will go and spend 4 days in the cantone i will spend the next two years in. She seemed super nice and she knew who i was as soon as i said hola. i dont know if i can express enough how intimidating it can be to call somone in a foriegn language. Half the time talking to people in the flesh i rely so much on facial expressions or their pauses to know if i can laugh, smile, and nod or if they are asking me a question that i therefore need to respond to, and therefore need to ask them to repete. but on the phone you dotn have any of that. no reading the lips or expressions, but i did have plenty of the awkward pauses where i didnt know if i should say audios or say "bien, voy a ver el lunes!" (good, i will see you monday!) one more time in hopes that she would direct me to the end of the convo because i had run out of things to say. But all in all it went well and it will be good to go see the town and to meet Ana (my counterpart). i just have a taller (workshop) on gender with some highschool girls and a visit to the capital for one of the other trainees bdays inbetween now and then!

so yesterday i found out where i will be living for the next two years. Its a little cantone called san jaciento in apostapece in the department of san vicente. so as it turns out a will be moving a grand 20 mins or so away from where i now am. ok ,, i just tried to write about my feelings and reactions about finding out sites but i cant, i just cant do it, sometimes i feel like i just dont know how to talk anymore and like i get soo used to not saying anything that i run out of things to even wish i could say. Basically site assignments went well, people seem happy for the most part. i dont know much about my town but will update after i visit next week. its time to go to a soccer game so maybe i will write more later

ok lets see, what has happened since last time i wrote? well classes as usual. we have a new spanish teacher now and she is working us which is good for me. Maria and i went to talk to an NGO the other day called intravida and i understood almost everything he said! it was a pretty big day. im learning, though some people are definatly easier to understand than others. on the days that we have spanish class the second part of the day is usually saved for "community contact´" which is where we choose where we would like to go and what to do in order to get to know the community or investigate some institution or area of life here. we have done things like go talk to the alcaldesa(the mayor) about the festivals coming up, we sat in on a computer class at the school, we went and ate pan dulce(sweetbread) and talked to a women who works at a bakery whom we met because she sometimes rides in the back of marias host dads pickup with us when we go to san vicente, and today we went to sit in on a class at a private school in san vicente to see how differnt it was from the public school. the cost per month for a student goes from $8 to about $18 a month depending on the grade but was surprizingly not much different than a public school in the way of teachers or the way the school looked. However, there was a big difference in the number of students 10 to 15 in a class as opposed to maybe 40ish in the public classes. it was interesting and encouraging also to hear that though it was an evangelicos school there were evangelicas as well as catholic children who attended and the classes that were taught focused to God and love. I have a hard time with denominations sometimes because it tends to split the church and i just dont think that is what Jesus wanted. i have only been here a month and a half but some of the things i hear and see make things seem so divided between catolicos and evangelicos sometimes. its always good to see places where that isnt the case.

On another note, we went to the beach last weekend which was absolutely fabulous. we went to some little island off Costa del Sol. i dont remember the name of where we went, my host gma always makes fun of me because i never know the names of anywhere i go. It was so nice to just sit in a hammock over looking the ocean and just be there. i dont think ive ever realized, or ever felt, how comforting the beach is for me. ive always liked the beach and i remembered all of the family vacations to ocean grove when i was younger, the christmas´s and the fouth¨s of july at the beach. there was something about just being able to lay there and look at the water and have it smell like salt, like the beach,,,it was just very familar i guess. comforting. like the ocean, no matter where you are or what coast¨you are on, still smells like the ocean. we had to walk about 10 min to get to the other side of the island where the open ocean and the waves were. the first morning we went, the beach was empty except for a man and his two young boys riding there horses, galloping across the beach, one of them carrying a machete, i felt liek i was in a movie. i like those moments.

Man i am so bad at this blogging stuff, its been a while but ill try to step it up. so we just got back from field based training yesterday. fbt is where a group of us trainees (4 of us in this case) a spanish teacher and a staff person went to the site of a volunteer for 4 days. we lived with families and worked with her and the people in her community. we gave charlas (taught class basiclly) in the schools, painted a room, talked with people from the local government and a womans group and took a hike and played games with the voluneers youth group. the charlas were challenging but a learning experience. It is hard sometimes not to feel completely incapable because of my lack of language skills and i ended up thinking a lot about what it will be like when i get to my own site and done have anyone else to explain things to me in english afterward. at the same time i am sure i will learn a lot more being on my own and while i will miss a lot i will learn a lot as well. the last night we were there a few of us sat around and talked to a woman who Bree, our staff person, was staying with, about the war. The war is a subject i know very little about but am very interested in and while it was good to be able to be there and watch her and hear her tell the stories, most of what i know about what she said came from it being told to me in english afterward. This woman who is now a teacher with a family and young kids and a seemingly very normal life joined the guerillas when she was 14 years old in `86 and fought all the way through the war. She had the most crazy stories about things that happened to her, the things that she did adn the way she fought, about her training, about the attrocities committed, her friends who were killed, the things she did, and the way that the war affected peoples lives. what stuck out to me the most while she was talking though, was the ease with which she seemed to be able to talk about the things she saw and did. She was a fabulous story teller, very animated, but it almost seemed like she was telling someone elses story, like she was a completely different person, and in a lot of ways i suppose she was. it was just unbelieveable to imagine this completely normal woman, at such a young age had lived the life she had and could talk about it so easily and almost unemotionally. i look forward to being able to talk to people about the war and about their lives now and being able to have a decent conversation about real things and have a knowledge base of the history of el salvador as well as the language for that to be possible. i dont know right now exactly how feeling like i am not able to really get to know people here is going to affect my time in my site but i know i will have an extreem appreciation for people willing to be patient with me and work with me. site placement interviews are coming up next week, which is where we tell our apcd(staff) what kinds of things we would liek in a site and what kind of work we might be interested in doing. right now i am very unsure(surprise surpirse), i know a few things i might not be crazy about, one of which is teaching english (the one thing i am guaranteed to be asked to do ahah) but i suppose with this as with everything else i will just have to wait and see.

So while all of the coffee here is in powder form because they export all the good stuff, at least you will be happy to know that there is not a decrease of salt in my diet here, which those of you who have eaten with me know is a pretty important thing. Amazingly though there might even be too much salt and i am highly thinking of cutting it out of my diet after i leave the host family i´m with, however this will probably never happen. this is my segway into the topic of food and daily life here in el salvador. the past few days i have noticed that i am beginning to adjust more then i thought i needed adjusting, I have started sleeping better and having much more of an appetite, not that i was sleeping or eating poorly before, but instead of the getting up around 2 and 3 and every other hour to the musical talents of gallos and gallienas (chickens and roosters)and caballos(horses) and vacas(cows) and mucho chuchus (random dogs that are everywhere) (or something like that), i have been sleeping in until a good 5:30 am!! which is great because i go to bed around 8:30 and get plenty of sleep. we have a latrine and the house next door has a shower they let me use, then i change and eat breakfast and read a bit before jumping in the back of a pickup to head to class at the training center in the San vicente or going to one of the other trainees houses for spanish class. ok soo about food....my favorate meal and a very common one is refried beans, bread, and scrambled eggs mixed with what i just recently realized were cut up green beans. yup eggs and greenbeans..its better then you might think. other things we eat are chicken, tortillas, chicken in tortillas, soup (yes the temperature is often in the low 90´s when we have this meal) some fruit (which i am looking forward to eating more of) lots of eggs, mystery meat, etc. im eating alright, looking forward to being able to cook for myself and have lots of little meals instead of 3 main ones but my host family is great and sometimes it is nice to have one less thing to think about. well time to head back to training but one final thought... so i was walking to the house im staying at the other day and the huge volcano that is usually in front of me was covered with a huge white mass of clouds so that you couldnt see it at all. i thought for a second it was kinda liek i was in ohio! then i laughed and looked around adn remembered that this was nothing like ohio...its funny how easily you can adapt to new places and how much you can miss home at the same time

ok ,, real first disclaimer...anything i write here does not reflect the oppinions or thoughts of peace corps in anyway and are completely my own.

So i have no resorted to posting a blog, yes i gave in, so now people can choose to read my rambling thoughts as opposed to having their inbox unwillingly subjected to them. My few disclaimers are really requests that you will forgive my misspellings mistypings and possible randomness (there is so much pressure when you only have about 2 hours to use the computer a week)

So anyway, the title of todays thoughts come from something that came into my head the other day while standing under a cold shower, which i am still not used to, after being here for 2 weeks already. I realized that i have never lived on my own in the states, college doesnt count, and i remembered how last year when i was determined i didnt want to do the peace corps, my only other reasonable idea was that i would move somewhere out west, i dont know where, and i didnt know what i would do but i figured i would figure it out and i would just live. Well then i got smart and as much as i felt the dream i realized that i didnt know how to live on my own and there was no way that i could actually go across the county and figure it all out by myself. Then, while standing in the shower, i thought, ^so what exactly made me think that if i couldnt do that out west that it would be a good idea to go try to live on my own with no job or place to live in a forign country where eveone speaks a language that i infact, do not speak?^,,,, and better yet, why hadnt the ironicness of this decision ever occured to me before?! well regaurdless, here i am in spanish speaking el salvador where in just a few days i will get my first taste of what it might be like to have to travel and live and survive completely on my own here. These days will be called ^emersion days^ and they will scare me, and hopefully also be very good for me and provide more motivation to hit the spanish books. Right now i am living with a host family in a host community called tepetitan right outside of the city of san vicente and this along with the emersion days are part of the integration process set up by peace corps. Training which we are on our thrid week of with 7 more to go is going well and i have enjoyed it and especially the people. the people include the other people going through training with me, the staff and my host family. I live with a grandma, haydee, and her 14 yr old granddaughter named melisa in a cement brick room that is divided with a curtain behind which are two beds where melisa and i sleep and ^mama haydee^ sleeps in the hamock strung across the other part of the room. then there is a house next door and a little one room house in the back where two kids of haydees and their kids live and a latrine and a little room with a kitchen all with in bigger walls that form a sort of compound i guess. it is simple and i like it that way. melissas parents are in the states as about 40% of salvadorians are... everyone has family there... i just cant image what that would be like, she hasnt seen her parents in roughly 7 or 8 years. What is veryexciting though is that her quincenara or 15th bday is coming up and her parents are coming to visit fo 2 weeks!!!!! so great! ok and so this quincenera.... 15 is liek 16 in some parts of the us for my bro mikey (and anyone else who has seen the sweet sixteen show on mtv) quincenaras are liek that but salvadorian style,,, actaully they are probably more liek weddings. i saw pitures of my host cousins the other day and she wore a long puffy frilly white dress, it was at a church her dad walked her down the isle, she had brides maids and grooms men (not actaully called that but they sure looked liek it) flowers, a ring barror and a flowergirl, they get pictures taken, throw a big party after and get lots of presents...its a wedding. But so this one should be interesting. Melissa got her invitations yesterday and they are the most elaborate invitations i have ever seen, so im excited. she says she is not, she just wants the money haha. (the plus side of that convo is that for her she will infact get a lot of money, and for me... i understood enough in spanish to ask her if she was excited and make sense of her responce haha ) well gotta run back to training but write more later!