There are so many things I could never have seen myself doing before living in El Salvador. Things like riding a horse like a true vaquero or becoming so deadly with a slingshot, killing my dinner with my own hands or working those two hands in the fields until they’re bloodied nubs. I could never have seen myself teaching proper breastfeeding techniques to young mothers and doing it all in Spanish. And I most certainly did not think that one day I’d be revolutionizing how an entire community defecates, but because I live in a community where 60% of families lack something as simple as a hole to dump in, mierda has recently become my expertise. In early April, at the end of the holy week, we began our very first infrastructure project: dry-compost latrines.

A big part of me had always been reluctant to begin an infrastructure project at all. The bureaucracy involved, the threat is poses to true grassroots sustainability, the handling of major funds all seemed overwhelming to me and my community. I can barely convince my town council to show up to bi-monthly meetings, so how would they go about tackling a major project requiring several trainings, thousands of dollars, hard labor and the even more elusive concepts of accountability and transparency? The hardest part of the project was seeing past the imminent failure that hangs over a volunteer’s head like a curse and mustering every last ounce of optimism I had to take on this project. If we fail, it would simply look like I failed and there goes my gringo reputation I’ve worked so hard to maintain. If we succeed, it would be a huge learning opportunity and confidence booster for the entire community. I decided that my community WILL learn how to write a formal grant proposal; they WILL learn how to open their own bank account and manage their own books; they WILL oversee their first project phase by phase; and they WILL learn how to operate like the responsible local government they should be. ¡Si se puede!

The town council whipped itself into shape quickly once they realized the size of the project, the seriousness of it all, the opportunity involved. Naturally there was a lot of nagging on my part, lots of stern talks about how damaging it is to show up hours late to important meetings but overall they worked exceptionally hard at pulling themselves together. Our grant was submitted to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and was accepted – my town was so proud of themselves, and rightfully so! Now we were ready for the grunt work.

The first step was selecting the latrine beneficiaries…who would be the lucky winner of a brand new letrina abonera? We decided to go with the biggest families, assuming that more family members means more poop, which means more contamination. So five of my community’s biggest families were chosen for a total of 65 individual beneficiaries. We’re talkin’ big families here! To qualify for a latrine, each family would have to demonstrate their commitment to the project and its goals by attending a series of trainings that would cover relevant topics like proper family hygiene and disease prevention. The highlight of the five session training was the latrine relay race in which families would compete against each other in a mad dash to fake-poop, fake-wipe, stir up the fake-poo with ash, put down the toilet seat of course, and wash their hands. It was hilarious watching family elders run over to a latrine seat and pretend to dump and it surely reinforced the widely held belief that gringos are absolutely crazy.

Next I’d have to convince the families that a dry-compost latrine was better than a regular pit latrine, and this was no easy task. You see, a pit latrine is easy, straight forward and very simple to use. It requires little construction as it’s literally a hole in the ground. The problem with pit latrines though is that they are major sources of contamination. Pit latrines flood and overflow in the wet season, taint water sources with infectious bacteria and are breeding dens for roaches, worms, flies and everything else that is nasty. And once a family fills the hole, all that mess is left to rot inside the earth and foul nearby crops and water tables for years to come while a new whole is dug and filled up. Pit latrines are evil, I’d teach them. The alternative is a dry-compost latrine….good, beautiful dry-compost latrine. Jesus used a dry-compost latrine, I’d teach them. This type of latrine is much more technical but a million times healthier. They’re built above ground, are sealed so that waste does not touch or spoil the earth, and the families waste can be treated to undergo a fascinating fermentation process that yields loads of a free organic fertilizer year-round. Once we all got past the idea of having to stir our poo once a week and sprinkling it on our crops, we decided that the good, beautiful dry-compost latrines are the only way to go.

We began as soon as our money was in the bank. Since nobody really knew how to build one of these strange new latrines, myself included, we hired a few masons from a neighboring village. With over a hundred dry-compost latrines under their tool belts, Mito and Jorge were ideal helpers. In exchange for their expertise, we’d pay them, I’d house them, and the beneficiaries would feed them for the month or so of construction since they’d be unable to travel the four hour roundtrip back to their own village every day. New roomies, yay!

Mito went with me to buy materials and make sure I didn’t get ripped off too badly by the crooked hardware store owners. I’ve gotta say, it was empowering riding into town on a huge flatbed loaded with thousands of dollars of bricks and cement – I felt like a knight on a white horse as everyone poured into the streets to see me thunder through town, but worried at the same time that it might mislead my town to think that this money was mine. And that’s exactly what they thought. For the duration of the project and even now people stop me to ask if that money came from my pocket. If not my pocket, then my dad must have bought it for me, right? A few were even brazen enough to ask me to build them entire houses with my gringo money. Ironic, because I was especially poor that month. I remember living on less than a dollar a day for the last two weeks of April and being so thankful when I finally made it to May alive. Así es la vida.

Construction began, and Mito and Jorge turned out to be much more like slave drivers than friendly helpers. Since they were staying with me in my house, they’d have me up before sunrise each day. No breakfast, because that would take away from work. We’d haul, hammer, lift and sweat until noon when they’d allow a quick lunch, only enough time to eat, and then it was back to work. Normally it’s customary to stop work around two-ish when the sun is most brutal but Mito and Jorge would drive us through the heat of the day until the sun was long gone from the sky. We’d eat a humble dinner in the dark and then it was right to bed. There was no point in bathing, no time and no energy. This was my routine for thirty consecutive days. The sadists wouldn’t even break on Sunday, and even the hardworking townspeople thought this to be extreme. In place of Sunday mass, Mito would recite verse from the top of his head and go on about the evils of regaeton music and disrespectful children.

I do no exaggerate when I say that I have never worked so hard in my life. I remember collapsing in my bed every night too tired to even dream. My hands were worn so raw I couldn’t even hold a warm tortilla at dinner. I did it though. I kept up with the beat of Mito’s psycho drumming and kept a smile on my face the whole time. I took them by surprise working alongside them like that, blistering my hands and sweating so hard. It was my personal mission to prove to them and my community that gringos are hard workers too. A few times someone would see me walking to a construction site at dawn, pickax in hand and five day old dirt streaked across my face and they’d say, Antoni! You can work?! And then they’d see me hauling hundred-pound sacks of cement up the side of the mountain and they’d say, Dios mio, you can work! That’s right. I can work, damnit.

We were all relieved to see the project come to an end after a month of such terrible labor. It was hard on all of us, the masons, myself, and the families who were obligated to help as well. It was worth it though, well worth it. The families were thrilled to put those humiliating days of pooping in their bushes behind them. They were genuinely proud of their good, beautiful dry-compost latrines, proud to be among the first families to lead the rest of the community towards a healthier, safer place to live. I was proud too. It’s been incredible, the things I’ve learned in El Salvador. I realize just how much I hadn’t known about this place, Latin America, or life in general before coming here. And since every day is a learning experience, I have a lot more to look forward to my last ten months here.

It’s Tuesday night, a little after seven. I write as I eat my dinner – oatmeal – out of a pot. No sugar, because I don’t have any. Just plain boiled oats. It’s all I have in my house, besides a few chili packets and some Lemon Heads sent by Ashley. If the ceramic figurine of a little black boy playing a marching band bass drum she also sent me was made of chocolate, I’d stir him up in my boiled oats and eat him. It’s only half my fault that my stomach is empty right now. I was in the pueblo today and bought a dozen eggs, a pound of black beans, and enough vegetables to last the rest of the week, but a series of unexpected events caused me to lose them all.

It was 11:30am, so I was standing on a street corner under the Salvo sun, bags of wilting vegetables at my feet, waiting for the one and only pick-up truck from my village to swing by and carry me the two hours back to my house. I had been waiting some time, cursing the humidity and barrage of street vendors trying to push their junk on me when finally at 12:30 the truck pulls around. I wedged myself into a crack between a couple of elderly women and we began our swerving stop-and-go out of the marketplace. We weren’t even halfway out of the mess of vegetable stands and panhandlers when the driver pulls over and stops the engine. He crosses the street to a little shop, orders two beers and has himself a seat. Damnit, I thought. We’re gonna be here a while.

This is typical. I rarely just get to hop in the back of that rusted little pick-up truck and get driven straight home. Most of the time we have to cruise around town and make one stop after the other while the driver piles loads of horse feed, rolls of barbed wire, sacks of cement or whatever else he needs that day into the cramped truck bed. We passengers groan as we are pushed onto one other’s sweaty laps, into the creases of each other’s armpits, in between tangles of legs to make room for it all. But today there was no loading of cargo, just waiting under that ruthless sun. Were we waiting for someone?

Forty minutes snail by and I am becoming indignant. I poke my head out of the wall of damp bodies surrounding me and catch a glimpse of our driver. He’s finished a third cerveza and is now taking nips off a bottle of white rum. Jesus. My teeth are clenched and I concentrate on taking deep breathes. The toddler next to me begins to cry. I can feel my skin burning, melanoma wrapping its tentacles around my neck and the steady trickle of a stranger’s sweat down my scorched arm. If we do not move soon I will go mad.I calm myself enough to turn to the little lady next to me and in the politest way I know how, I ask her what the hell we are doing here. Her answer comes out in a slow mush of words, something about the President and helicopter. I ask her to repeat herself many times, each time understanding less and less until I just decide she’s senile. I can feel myself being overcome by impatience so I claw my way out of the truck bed and ask our driver, who smells like malty beer. “El presidente hombre, he’s here blockin the traffic man.” Excuse me, what? Did you just say the president of El Salvador is down the street? “Si hombre, he’s up there talkin and makin the traffic.” I whip around and turn to an entire truck load of people for confirmation, “The President is HERE?,” I yell. Slowly, very slowly they all nod and motion with their heads that the President of El Salvador is just up the road. I hail a passing motor-taxi, hop in and shout, “TAKE ME TO THE PRESIDENT!!!”

The driver’s name turns out to be Henry, and all he wants to do is talk to the gringo, but all the gringo can manage to say is “TAKE ME TO THE PRESIDENT!!!” And I don’t just say it, I scream it. We whiz through town, weave our way in and out of crowds of loitering people, the traffic jam caused by Antonio Saca and suddenly I am overcome by the fervor of a Latin-American revolution. “I WANT TO SEE THE PRESIDENT!!!,” I yell. Somewhere along the cab ride I manage to infect Henry with this revolutionary spirit I’m feeling and I can tell he’s doing everything he knows how to get me to the cluster of white tents shading Tony Saca and his team. When we arrive at the tents, Henry refuses to take any money from me and says he’s just excited for me to meet his President. I am going to meet the President!

I make a mad dash for Saca’s tent. I don’t stop to consider the possibility of a Salvadoran Secret Service or how a police beating might feel, I just rush the tent until I can see him, the President of El Salvador. It appears any talking has just ended and now he’s making his way through the crowd, shaking hands and stopping for pictures. The crowd has whipped itself into such a frenzy that nobody notices when I throw my body into the wall of Saca supporters and shove my hand out to where Tony can shake it, one white hand in a mad sea of waving brown ones. I can see him clearly now, he’s only ten hands away from mine! As he gets closer there is a sharp change in the mood under that tent, from excited to panicked and the crowd becomes uncontrollable. The men behind me scamper right over me like mad dogs and I’m taken to the ground, my little white hand sucked back in without Tony Saca shaking it. Then, from the bottom of a Salvadoran dog pile I can hear roars of cheering, the sound of a helicopter engine, and a few seconds later it’s all over.

I wandered away from the tents feeling dejected and not really knowing where I was. I loitered around a mob of TV crews interviewing bystanders thinking that they’d probably like to hear what a gringo has to say about all this, but they had no interest in me. I hitchhiked back home. Three hours and four pick-up truck rides later I was there. Each time I’d climb into the bed of a new truck I’d tell them all about how close I was to shaking Tony Saca’s hand and how I was so excited I left my vegetables behind, can you imagine that?! Nobody I encountered on my trip home was intrigued by this, nobody, because really it was just another day in El Salvador.

I never intended to blog so infrequently, really I didn’t. The thing about El Salvador is that time often escapes you; or rather it simply doesn’t exist. Not in the campo anyway. A few minutes implies hours, a day means a week and anything beyond that is thought to be so abstract that it’s just not thought of at all. It’s been an incredible challenge, getting used to living in a place where time means nothing. The upside to not writing for five months at a time is that when I finally do, I’m almost certain to have something to talk about. And I do. Plenty in fact.

I believe my last entry was written right after I switched my site. That was in November. I spent the rest of that month going house to house, introducing myself as the new gringo and conducting a diagnostic health census. My community only has ninety-six houses but nearly seven hundred people. It might seem like working from sun up to sun down visiting houses with a quick health survey could be done in a few days, maybe a week, but no. Not in the campo anyway. Some visits might last ten minutes, but not many. This is how a typical house visit goes:

Me (in the middle of the survey): So how many cases of diarrhea would you say your family has a year?

The Salvo: I do not know, usted. Umm, uhhh…have you ever castrated a pig before?

Me: No.

The Salvo: ¡Vamos! Let’s go castrate a pig!

And if it’s not castrating a pig, it’s milking a goat or hunting for river crabs by moonlight or gathering mangos. This is how a routine house visit becomes an all-day adventure. This is also how you make friends and earn the trust you will need to be a successful volunteer. You see, here you make friends before you do business. No friends, no trust, no business. The most important part of my work is earning trust. It’s where all my energy goes. The connection made is well worth the effort, even if it means getting a little pig’s blood on my hands. Quite different from the American way, where you work work work and only if you’re lucky do you find someone you can tolerate enough to call a friend.

I learned quite a bit from the results of my health census. I learned that only half of the community has a method of properly disposing human excrement and that the other half is left to poop just about anywhere they can find enough privacy. I learned about a laundry list of health problems that stem from smoke inhalation in the home. I learned that only twenty-percent of my community has water, which is heavily contaminated, what with all the feces floating around here. I learned that only a handful of women know what a pap smear is and that almost none of them have heard of a breast self-exam. I learned that only three people in my entire community know of more than one way that the HIV virus could be transmitted. I learned that only one-third of children in my community are registered in school, and only half of that one-third actually goes. I learned that the majority of Salvadoran youth don’t know how to respond to questions about their future because they have never been asked before. I learned that the adult literacy rate is only sixty percent and the average level of education for adults is the fourth grade. I learned that the average family subsists on $7 a day and that families here are very big. I learned that nearly everyone interviewed wants to make their future better, safer, healthier but they just don’t know how.

We got right to work. In December I invited an amazing NGO called Stove Team International to my site for a community demonstration of ecocinas, or eco-friendly stoves. Why stoves? Ninety-percent of families in my site cook their meals on an open fire. These fires burn in small adobe enclosures, blackened from near-constant use. Women and children who are exposed to the thick black smoke suffer from premature cataracts and year-round upper respiratory infections. URI’s are the leading cause of death in children under five in El Salvador and each year throughout the country, several hundred children will suffer from severe burns directly related to their open-fire stoves. The amount of wood a family consumes for cooking contributes heavily to a highly deforested El Salvador, which is one of the most deforested countries in the northern hemisphere next to Haiti. With the help of Stove Team International, we were able to purchase twenty-three ecocina stoves to directly benefit well over one hundred individuals and mitigate the negative impact stoves have on one’s health and local forests. Our goal is to provide every family with an alternative to their open-fire stoves, naturally. To help with this effort, the non-profit Cops 4 Causes has offered to extend its philanthropic hand and purchase some of the $40 stoves in conjunction with a much needed family planning course called Escuela de Padres, to be taught by me. The course will be mandatory in order to receive a stove at no cost and will include topics that most affect rural Salvadorans like family nutrition, basic hygiene, alternatives to corporal punishment, domestic violence and immigration issues, substance abuse, women’s health, STD education and how to talk to kids about sex. Check out Cops 4 Causes and Stove Team International to see how you can make someone’s life a hell of a lot better for just $40.

In February we began to wrestle with our contaminated water problem and invited the incredible non-profit Living Waters for the World to give a presentation to the community. I think we were all surprised when the CEO of the organization flew all the way out from Mississippi to visit us. Amazing! Their goal is to donate water purification systems to communities in need and train them on how to operate and maintain them with the hope that they will be self-sufficient in three year’s time. The project also holds the possibility of a small income generation project and secure employment for community members. Again, amazing! Of course my town loves the idea and it sounds easy enough, they’ll even fly in from the States and help us build it. But it’s never that easy. Not in the campo anyway. Because my community suffers from a serious water shortage, we’d have to dig a new well to have enough drinking water and water for household chores for the entire community. And digging wells can be pricey, like $4,000 pricey. Until we find some funds, this project is on hold indefinitely although the search for a generous donor will continue.

After quite a few town meetings dealing with our water problem, I headed to the beautiful and fresco mountains of Juayua, where a fellow volunteer invited a group up to help out with and HIV/AIDS training she organized for local health promoters and youth. Even though our audience would consist primarily of working health professionals, you would be absolutely shocked at how many misconceptions they hold about the disease, very dangerous misconceptions. The brilliant Dr. Cedillos of Hospital Rosales, the largest public hospital and only AIDS treatment center in the country, came to speak. So did Maria del Carmen, an HIV+ patient who tells one incredibly sad, very impressionable story about how she contracted the virus from her now late husband and the many challenges she’s faced living positive in El Salvador. What I think makes her presentation so effective is that she was invited to help out with the entire workshop, the games, serving refreshments, while the rest of our participants had no idea she’s positive. Her talk comes last. Everyone who talked to her throughout the day, hugged her or touched her hand during the games or drank the coffee she poured is wide-eyed and somber. It’s hard to find a dry eye in the place by the time she’s finished. Then we spent the rest of the day cliff-diving in the turquoise water of the Juayua waterfalls.

In late February I finally started teaching English. Previously I had been very opposed to the idea. If I wanted to teach English, I could be living it up, hopping karaoke bars in Korea with Laura and earning a salary for it. But so many kids would ask me, every time they saw me that I just couldn’t avoid it any longer. I gave in. I’m glad I did too, because we all have a lot of fun every Tuesday and Thursday at five. I’ve also noticed quite a bit of personal growth in my students. I wasted no time in teaching them the absolute essentials: My teacher is handsome, my teacher is smart, my teach is funny, he has pretty eyes, and the like. Next week we’ll begin translating our first song, which I let them decide on as a class. And what American song did they vote for, unanimously might I add? Total Eclipse of the Heart by Bonnie Tyler. Very strange.March came, and while the last few months of the dry season sucked every last bit of life from the Earth, we began our adventure with dry-compost latrines. I never imagined that the bulk of my work would one day be mierda, but that’s what it’s come to and I’m alright with it. It’s important. And who knew it could be kind of interesting too? I’ve introduced my community to a decomposition process that would allow them to convert their number two into organic fertilizer that can be used on their corn and bean crops. Sounds delish, right? As you can imagine it took a little selling but in the end it was decided that the community will pursue its first sanitation project by way of dry-compost latrines. We purchased enough materials to help out five families initially, a total of over sixty individuals, from a grant awarded to us by the wonderful USAID. Construction for the five latrines should take about a month and will include one-on-one family health and hygiene training. Five down, forty-five to go and a little more than $20,000 to look for. ¡Hijole!

And that brings us to April. Right now it’s Domingo de Ramas, or Palm Sunday in English. This marks the beginning of Semana Santa, one of the largest Latin American celebrations from the Mexican boarder all the way down to the tip of Chile. It’s a week of religious rituals, church masses, sweet bread and relaxation. The entire country of El Salvador shuts down for it, public transportation nearly stops altogether and the week of festivities culminates to a day at the river on Sabado de Gloria and Domingo de la Resurrección. I tend to stay away from all the religion, mostly because I don’t understand the chants and don’t know the words to any of their songs. I plan to spend the week down at the mighty Rio Lempa in a pair of cut-off shorts playing soccer on a sand bank littered with cow patties – my idea of a perfect vacation. Then on the 13th it’s back to latrine work where my life will once again be consumed by poop.

It’s been a long time, I know. That means I’ve been busy. While summer came and went in California, so did the wet season in El Salvador. But unlike California, there was no intermediary between summer and winter that eased you from the heat to the cold – the season change here felt unfriendly. One day it rained as it always had, and then one day it just stopped. Overnight the earth had transformed completely from a tropical paradise to a fiery dustbowl with not a cloud in the sky. The day before it happened, Old Man Joaquin told me it was the last rain of the season. I dismissed his declaration, he was much more drunk than usual but to my amazement, he was right. We’re now in the second month of the dry season and I miss the rain like I would miss summer back home. Just about the same time the earth dried did I leave my assigned site for a new one. Exactly why I left is a rather long story spanning across six frustrating months of failure, so let’s just say I filed for irreconcilable differences and leave it at that. Now in my new site, only forty minutes up a dusty road from my old community, I realize leaving was the best decision I could have made for the sake of my work and personal sanity, although it was a difficult one to make. Just when I felt like I was finally fitting in, that the overwhelming novelty of being a celebrity-gringo was finally wearing off I have to start back at the very beginning. So here I am, in a new strange place with strange people, all eyes on me. You know I just love it.

My new site is amazing. I remember first arriving to my old site and swearing that it was the most beautiful place I had ever seen, but I digress now that I’m in my new community. The place is remote, the kind of place I had envisioned for myself before I ever left America and my dreams of living abroad ran wild somewhere in far away jungles. I’m an hour and twenty minutes from the nearest pueblo, high up in a small mountain town that has been swallowed up by a forest of trees deemed magical by the Mayans who once lived where I live now. Every day I watch the sun rise and set against a sea of mountains that overlap one another as far as I can see, fading from the color of a living forest to a green so pale it will eventually become one with the sky. It’s beautiful in a way I have never experienced beautiful.I no longer have my own house, which is both bitter and sweet I suppose. I left my bat-infested adobe castle for a much smaller house and a family of five. I had my reservations about living with a family but now that I’m here, I’m learning to get along just fine. I have my own room in a two-toned purple house made of brick, which is more than enough space considering everything I own can fit comfortably into two suitcases. I had to laugh when I saw I’d be living in a house painted exactly how Laura had painted her room when we lived in an attic in downtown San Diego. I can’t think of a fitting word to describe the type of person that would paint their walls in two tones of purple, just know that it wouldn’t be completely flattering. Anyway, the house it comfortable and has all the amenities I could have hoped for: a flushing toilet, electricity, and ten of every barnyard animal you can think of.In the move I’ve managed to inherit two new host brothers and a host sister, all of whom have done a great job at making me feel very welcome. When I lived alone I was often bored and sometimes lonely but realize that will never happen as long as I live here. These kids are fascinated with everything I do and it’s rare if they let me out of their site for too long. As long as my bedroom door is open, there is at least one child staring at me – I’m sure it just kills them to not watch me sleep. They’re entertaining and well-mannered enough to enjoy more than dislike and they help pass any free time quickly. This evening we all played with fireworks in the front yard and it was fun watching them throw live fuses at baby chicks or each other. When the children ran out of explosives, I taught them how to make snow angels in the dirt. It was a precious moment. Tomorrow will be Sunday, and after having to endure mass they promised to take me horseback riding. Or rather, they’ll ride the strong, beautiful horses and think it’s funny to stick me on the donkey again. My host mother is a nice, god-fearing woman whose sole peculiarity is a strange obsession with WWE’s Smackdown. That’s right, World Wrestling Entertainment. Every Tuesday at 7pm she closes her bible and comes to my room – “Don Anthony, time for Smackdown…TIME FOR SMACKDOWN!” – and for the next hour, the true sadist in her is unleashed. She knows everything about every wrestler and appears to have been following the happenings of the wrestling world for quite some time now. The anticipation in the house has been building for some wrestling event called Survivor Series, where the Undertaker has challenged The Red Monster to something called a casket match. Sounds catholic enough, right?

The past few months have warped all sense of time and I find it difficult to imagine myself in California in less than a month. It’s going to be a whirlwind of a trip that I couldn’t be any more excited for. I’ll get to meet Novalee for the first time and watch Dad turn the big 5-0. Then there’s Christmas and New Years and Taryn and Bryan’s wedding. I’ll get five days to hang out with Laura and I’m going to try and see all the family and Christopher and Eric I can. And showers…long hot showers! It will be a sensory overload, a culture shock much more dramatic than the one I experienced upon arriving to El Salvador. I’m warning you all in advance, I may be a little emotional.

One thing that you can’t help but notice after you’ve spent some time abroad is that Americans are pretty uptight. I remember my first few weeks in-country and how they were spent in fear as I studied life’s daily habits here. “My God,” I remember thinking to myself. “I’ll be lucky to make it out of this place alive.” Those first few weeks, even the children here terrified me. Nothing seemed to have order, there seemed to exist no law – anything went. Gunshots fired in the air? How fun! Children playing in raw sewage? No big thing. Man walking down the street with a machete? Perfectly normal. Everywhere I looked I saw a hazardous situation and it would take me months before I would ease up enough to enjoy living a life where silly rules and cumbersome laws are simply done away with. I tell you it’s liberating…romantic even. It makes everyday life a thrill. Consider my daily mode of transportation. Third-world driving is dangerous as it is, but the Salvadorians have managed to take these safety concerns and raise them to a whole new level. I travel almost exclusively in the back of a pick-up truck. It sounds harmless enough, but the people here excel at packing the bed of a truck the way you might expect them to pack poultry heading for a slaughterhouse. Often times the back of the truck is so weighed down it’s a mere few inches from scrapping the ground. You would think that whoever was driving the thing would take into consideration that he is responsible for the lives of fifteen or so other people, and you become petrified when you realize he doesn’t even seem to value his own life, barreling over potholes and passing vehicles on blind corners. If you’re towards the center of the bed, chances are you’re packed in so tight that your fear of toppling out the speeding vehicle can be put to rest. But if you’re one of the unfortunate people spilling over the truck’s sides, you’re left to fend for yourself. I find desperately clinging onto the back of the Salvadorian next to me to work better than anything. And if holding on for precious life wasn’t enough to think about, you also have to be on the watch for thick jungle vines that hang down and might take you out if you don’t duck out of their way. If you do get hit, it hurts like hell and boy do the Salvadorians find it amusing. Sometimes I arrive at my destination surprised that I managed to stay alive, and even more surprised that the eighty-something year old lady next to me went through the whole ordeal completely un-phased. Earlier this month I had the experience of attending a carnival somewhere on the other side of the country. What I saw there was nothing more than a smorgasbord of unfortunate events just waiting to happen. There were so many displays of a complete disregard for human life, but perhaps the craziest thing I saw was something called a torrito, or little bull. If I am going to uphold any stereotype about Latin Americans at all, it is that they love their fireworks. Basically, they strap a jetpack of explosives onto some guy’s back, light him up and send him running through crowds of unsuspecting carnival-goers. I watched as people literally ran for their lives, flames shooting from this man’s body, small children hitting the ground and just missing a stray rocket. I tried but couldn’t make sense of it all. When the furry of rockets died out and any immediate sense of danger was out of the way, I saw people’s panic-stricken faces turn to smiles that said, “Oh thank God el torrito didn’t get me… this time.” For the rest of the night I would enjoy the carnival only to the extent that the threat of being burned by fireworks would let me. After a forty minute Ferris wheel ride, in which I spent most of the time stuck at the top swatting away bats and watching children unbuckle their safety harnesses to climb on top of their swaying metal carts, I was ready to head away from the rides and into the dance tent. I found myself being chased by the torrito twice more before the night was over, and after each time when I saw that I hadn’t been hit by a ball of fire, I realized that it was fun after all.

And that’s how life is lived here. True, Salvadorians may put themselves at risk a hell a lot more than an American would, but I’m telling you, these people are having a lot more fun than we are. It all starts at birth I suppose, and continues throughout a lifetime. I’ve seen children here do things that would make an American mother faint; they have a freakishly high threshold for pain and this only seems to encourage them. I’d say that I’m a lot less uptight than when I first got here, but I know my Salvo friends would beg to differ. Whenever I overreact to something outrageous, as I often do here, the host country nationals laugh at my ridiculous gringo ways. “Tranquilo, gringo” they tell me. “Chill out.”

Just in case you were wondering, I am still in love with El Salvador. True, I’m only five months in and I will admit the honeymoon phase is slowly waning, but I’m holding onto it with every ounce of naïve optimism I have inside of me – I’d say I have at least a month before it’s completely gone. And then I’ll have the pleasure of experiencing that bipolar love/hate relationship that you see in the face of every Peace Corps volunteer. I’m not there yet, though. I can tell because life’s daily happenings – picking my own fruit off trees or watching a helpless dog be stoned by a mob of naked children – still makes my heart smile. I mean, just look at this little girl...she´s holding a chicken for Christ´s sake!

The biggest threat to this honeymoon phase is the fact that I’ve just completed all my training, and now here I am with the weight of an entire community on my back. These people expect to see some big things come out of me, and by big, I mean expensive. I feel like I might just spend my entire two years here trying to convince people that I won’t be throwing dollar bills from the rooftops, which is exactly what they must have been thinking yesterday when I was presented with construction plans for a new health clinic with a five hundred thousand dollar price tag. I mean, fundraising is definitely part of my work here but half a million dollars? Do you realize how many zeros that is?! Even more frustrating than the cost of such a project is the fact that a health clinic isn’t even needed, that our solicitation will almost certainly be rejected flat out by the Ministry of Health.

The pressure is on.

I have managed to ignite a few ideas that have potential. I’m starting a health committee, that’s something! So far the going is tough, naturally. The idea of a group of people chosen to volunteer their own time for the betterment of their own community can be a hard deal to pitch. I’m also working with their version of a city council in order to legitimize themselves as local government…you know, balancing books, re-writing statutes, making the group into a real-life transparent democratic institution. Not easy. Working with youth seems to be a guaranteed ego-booster. Even though they can be hard to mobilize at times, their will is weak and they can easily be lured into cooperating with candy. I NEVER visit the school without a bag of candy. They were way enthusiastic about the basketball camp I put on, just don’t tell them that I have no idea how to play basketball and kinda made up all the rules as I went along. (The kids don’t know). Tomorrow I have a meeting scheduled with the teachers – all three of them – to discuss my vision for the school. If anything fruitful comes out of it, you can be sure it’ll make the blog. And then there’s this group of women who are thrilled at the idea of starting up their own business. Either that or they think I’ll be selecting a lucky winner to take back to the states with me. In all seriousness, I think these women just might rock the town.

Work is slow here in El Salvador. Progress comes in bits and pieces and can be very hard to recognize. I find that I am constantly reevaluating my idea of success and expectations for myself, my community and the whole damn human race. There are days when your ideas are shot down dead before they even take flight, days when you curse everything foreign and wonder just how much of a change you can really make here. These days are lethal for your confidence and unfortunately come more frequently than any other kind of day. It’s what Peace Corps calls the toughest job you’ll ever love. It’s tough as hell, but in spite of all the odds that seem to be against me, I do love it.

And as difficult as it is to imagine, I think Laura might be starting to fall in love with South Korea. As of now she’s one of those poor people who still haven’t figured out how to use chopsticks so it’s difficult for me to imagine her in such a place. She teaches school children by day and God only knows what she does at night, but whatever it is she’s always awake at some twilight hour to call me when it’s midday here in El Salvador. For those of you who have requested her address, here it is:

Laura Eileen Dombrady

442-1 Bullo-Dong, Dong-Gu

Daegu, 701-130

Korea

Harsh sounding, I know, but don’t let that stop you from sending her something. A little love note from America goes a long way when you’re off somewhere eating live octopus.

Standard Peace Corps Knowledge: the first three months of your service are the hardest. Besides being obscenely poor or being able to express yourself only half of the time, the biggest challenge by far is the abundance of free time you suddenly have on your hands. The painstakingly slow pace of life that for some reason begins at 4am and slugs on in sweltering heat long after the sun goes down; the everyday occurrence of having every conceivable task complete by 10am and having to come up with a plot to kill the twelve hours of day that remain. No doubt, things could be worse. But for an American that so recently relied on a quad espresso Starbucks to get him through his on-the-go days, this level of boredom is the worst thing that could happen. So, I keep my sanity by keeping busy.

A typical day in my site goes something like this. I wake up between 4 and 5am, not on my own volition, not because there’s a rooster outside my window, but because that is the time the parasites in my body have chosen to spend in the bathroom. It’s like having a Swiss-made clock in your stomach that never fails. I guess it could be the result of a number of things really: drinking tap water, my new habit of eating raw eggs, not washing my hands nearly enough. I’m left to fix my own breakfast while my host parents are out milking cows and usually have another painful bout with the parasites before catching the bus into town at 6:30 – I’m heading for the gym.

Yes, I have a gym membership here and it is a godsend. I pay $16 a month, that’s two full days of pay for me so it’s considered a guilty pleasure. The gym is basically an open slab of concrete patio littered with rusted weights from the 80’s, wedged in between two ramshackle buildings and tastefully decorated with provocative posters of fitness has-beens like Cindy Crawford and Kathy Ireland. The owner of the gym leads a morning aerobics class. She is intoxicatingly hyper, just as a gym owner should be I guess, and never seems to stop moving. Every morning I walk in to find her chatting with her clientele before her class begins, bopping around and running in place in her leotard. “¡¿LISTOS A SUDAR?! –ARE YOU READY TO SWEAT?!” She screams this at me every morning and then bee-bops from room to room, screaming at other clients. And her taste in music is something else. Somehow this woman has managed to speed up normal songs like five times faster to be able to synchronize with her manic movements. The atmosphere is so energizing at such a ridiculous hour in the morning. I love it.

If I can finish up at the gym and catch a ride in the back of a pick-up truck to my site by 10am or so, I’m happy. The ride back is always interesting, usually more aggravating than anything. I suppose hitching rides from strangers is never really safe, but it’s not violent crime or burglary that ever worries me, it’s the ride itself. I always manage to hop in the back of something carrying barrels of spoiling milk that splashes in my face all the way up the dirty, bumpy road or get stuck in a car with a priest wanting to save my soul or with a driver who’ll make me run personal errands with him before dropping me off. The ride could take anywhere from twenty minutes to a few hours and when I finally do make it back, I’ll use the rest of the morning for activities in the school until noon. When school lets out I start the mile and a half walk home with about a hundred kids dressed in plaid skirts and white button downs, all fighting to hold my hand and grab at my attention. It’s definitely a sight to see, one of those cliché Peace Corps moments that if captured in a picture would most likely make it into a Peace Corps advertisement. But brandishing my camera in front of a mob of Salvadorian children that big would be like throwing raw meat into a tank full of piranhas – all those tiny little hands would have my camera in pieces before I could figure out what was happening.

My lunch is prepared with TLC by my host mom, as is my dinner. I know my food is ready when I hear her screaming, literally screaming, “¡GRINGO…GRINGO…COME AND EAT GRINGO!” This lady, my host mom, is my main source of entertainment around the house and I’m sure she could say the same thing about me. We have an interesting relationship, difficult to explain, but generally characterized by her screaming at me and me never really having a clue what she’s talking about. And the fact that I usually don’t understand her only encourages her to scream louder. (I’ve actually come to notice this screaming phenomenon as a trend; people seem to think I’ll be able to understand Spanish better if they just scream it at me but it just doesn’t work that way.) But my host mom is by far the loudest one. One thing that fascinates me about her – and this is true to most Salvadorian women – is that she knows everything going on in the town just by looking out her kitchen window. Nothing can get past her. And whenever I have other volunteers come and visit me, they’re always amazed not only by the fact that my host mom thinks my name is gringo, but that she will easily use it three, four, five times in a sentence. At first being called gringo would twist my nerves, but now I’ve accepted it as my name. Gringo. My host dad is old enough to be considered my host grandpa really. At seventy-two he’s just like any aging Salvo you’d encounter: wildly eccentric and impossible to understand. When I do manage to understand a few words in the mushy sentences he strings together in slow, lazy verse they rarely make sense. I’ll say “well, looks like rain tonight,” and he’ll respond with something like, “da da da, too much salt, da da da, better not try or I’ll kill him.” Then there are other times when I swear he’s trying to speak Arabic or Farsi to me. He’s a silly old guy and he loves having his picture taken.

Usually I’ll have work to do from lunch until dinner, whether it be house visits or a city council meeting or desperately trying to get some other project to take flight. If no work, I’ll spend the rest of the day with friends, which could be just about anybody really. When I lived in America, I had the luxury of being picky with whom I called a friend, but when you’re living all alone in Central America you’ll take any friend you can get. I spend a lot of time with Joaquin, who is pretty much everything I’d want to be as a seventy-five year old man. We’ll go grocery shopping together, attend the latest funeral, or just sit for hours in silence swatting mosquitoes off our bodies. Our friendship is purely symbiotic; we’re both alone and just happy to have company. And then there’s the Figueroa Brothers: Vladimir, Manuel and Mario. Some days they’ll come over after helping their father with the corn crop, their tiny little hands all cut up and looking like they belong to an old man. They’re useful in killing rodents in my house or some days I’ll teach them basic English in a Southern accent, the ridiculous accent being for my own amusement. Other days I’ll go over to their house for a guitar lesson from nine year old Manuel and talk Salvadorian politics with his dad. Every so often I’ll stay home and even though I do have my own house I won’t be alone for long. I always leave my doors open and always have people stopping in, sometimes for a few minutes, sometimes for a few hours. When the visits stretch beyond a few hours, which they often do, I have to remind myself that this is some blessing in disguise, that I need every friends I can get here.

Later into the evening, huge thunderheads pour down all the water they’ve sucked from the Earth throughout the steamy day and force you to stay indoors. I’ll never get used to the nightly lightening shows here. Without any exaggeration, the sky is constantly flashing and rumbling and I feel like I’m in some kind of tropical themed nightclub. Every so often the lightening will strike so fiercely and all you can see is white and the noise the follows is deafening, like the sky is being torn in half. There are some nights when I expect to wake up the next day and find a black whole ripped in the sky and the ground littered with palm trees but the calm mornings never show any sign of the violence that just swept through. Finally, the air has cooled off and the rain has sent the mosquitoes into hiding and I fall asleep to the sound of the passing storm, like I do every night.

A full month in my site and I´m managing to adjust and fit in just fine. To begin my work as a health and sanitation facilitator I´m conducting a health census with each and every family that lives in my village. I´ve gotten over the awkward feeling that comes with asking complete strangers how often they give themselves breast exams or what methods of birth control they use or if they keep their latrines clean. As of today I have fifty down and about two hundred fifty more to go. The work is slow, and sometimes painful, but for the most part I really enjoy getting to know everyone on a more personal basis. Even though I´m early into the work, I think it´s safe to say that the bulk of my work will focus on women´s health and sex education, secondary to bringing potable water and a health clinic to the community. I definately don´t have to worry about the lack of projects here.

When I´m not going house to house meeting my neighbors I meet with the city council regularly. The council is made up of a good group of men who really care about the future of the community among a population that couldn´t care less. The work is often slow and the meetings can last for hours upon hours but I´m doing a good job at helping the group realize their goals and how they can best achieve them. We´ve managed to hook up with a local environmental NGO in order to campaign against possible mining projects in the surrounding hills. If the projects were to go forward, wealthy American investors would extract millions of dollars in gold and leave the community dangerously polluted. During our meeting we´ve had guest speakers come from surrounding areas where mining projects had not been prevented. Their bubbling leisons and yellowed skin is terrifying proof that such projects will devestate Tahuilapa and still we have trouble trying to mobilize the community into action. FRUSTRATING!

I continue to live with all kinds of creatures, some small and friendly, some big and diseased. The other night I was sitting down to dinner when a group of wild cats ran through my house from one of the bedrooms and out the front door like they owned the place. The next night I was doing some writing when a family of frogs jumped in through the windows and taunted me all night. I´d finally manage to catch them as just as I would throw the last one out, the others would be climbing the walls back in through the window. I never manage to see the rats that live in my house, but they leave behind obvious signs that they´re alive and well. The other day I woke up and went to wash my face and the bastards had snuck off with an entire bar of soap! Every now and then we´ll find one dead and decomposed, like the guy in the pic below. If I do happen to catch one scurrying around, I take out the old machete and hack away and never feel bad about it.

In other news, Laura is off and living in South Korea! Can you imagine?! Even though I´ve been living here for the past three months I was still sad to have her leave so far away. We manage to talk on the phone via Skyype on her dime, not mine. You should hear her try to speak the language, absolutely ridiculous! But not to worry, if anyone I know is best suited for a year in Korea, it´s Laura.

I wasn’t told much about my site before I got here. Just that it’s in the most beautiful part of the country and that I’ll need to buy a cowboy hat to fit in. Both accurate. The day before I arrived I spoke with the man charged with showing me around once I got here. “You like riding horses, right?” he asked. I told him I hadn’t had a need to travel by horse in California. “Well you’re gonna need to here so you better learn!” And that was our conversation.

I stepped off the bus heading from the capitol in a place called Metepan. I needed to find the hospital exit where I’d be able to catch another bus into my village. I staggered along the main road with everything I owned and found the hospital exit where a man sat selling coconuts. “Perdon, este es la parada a Tahuilapa?” I asked. Yes, this was the bus stop for Tahuilapa. I thanked him and asked to buy a coconut, sixty cents a piece. He dug around until he found one the size of a bowling bowl, and just as heavy. He took his machete from around his waist and hacked at the fruit to make a whole big enough for a straw from which I drank the milk. When all the milk was gone I handed it back to him to hack some more so I could eat the meat inside.

A sweaty lady with a thin black mustache sat down next me. She set down a box with the name of the man who I was to live with scribbled across the top. When I asked if she knew him, if she too was heading to Tahuilapa, she told me that she was his cousin and yes, on her way into the village. No surprise, everyone is everyone’s cousin in this tiny country. Put two Salvadorian strangers in the same room together and within ten minutes they’ll be able to figure out how they’re related. She offered to accompany me to the house - my house. I obliged and together we jumped into the back of a red pick-up and winded up the mountain side and over the river, past cows and cowboys along a dirt road with a view of the green valley below. When we pulled up, the owners waited to greet me outside, probably had been standing there all morning waiting for me to arrive.

(The picture below is of a haunted crater lagoon formed just below the opening of a volcano. The air at the top of the volcano is cool an misty and a permanent fog rolls over the hills. As the story goes, any man who dares to swim in the sulphury waters will be dragged down to the bottom to keep the lonely hauntress company. Perfectly safe for women to swim though, and you better believe the locals heed the local legend.)

My house shares a lot with another house where my landlords live. When I first toured the inside I was overwhelmed by how big it was, and I still am. The house looks nice, made of adobe and has wood beams lined with clay tiles for a roof. I was elated to find that I have a flushing toilet and a shower. Welcome to Posh Corps - no bucket baths, no cockroaches living at the bottom of an outhouse, thank God. But as I discovered during my first night, a big house with fancy plumbing and electricity is not without problems. In total, I probably slept for three hours that first night because overhead, while I lay tucked under my mosquito netting, a family of bats terrorized me as much as they knew how. I was able to count six as they whopped the air with their loud wings and crashed into walls and dressers. I told my landlords the next day about the problem over breakfast but they were no help. They laughed and laughed, “Oh, the gringo is scared of the bats, aaahaha!” So I figured I’d ask my neighbors what to do, or old man Joaquin down the road, or the group that gathers in front of the tienda across town. But they all just laughed at me! “Oh they’re not dangerous” they say, “but be careful, they could have rabies.” Excuse me, rabies – how is that not dangerous? This got me thinking about that movie where that St. Bernard stuck its nose down that hole and a bat bit him and he went on a killing spree. I hope to be able to get into town in the next few days to buy enough garlic to ward the beasts off, but until then I may just have to sleep with the light on. Just like in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The bat pictured above is one of five killed by a lime thrown from my trusty slingshot. That´s right, I have a slingshot and when I´m bored I take to killing bats with limes. I set their little bodies outside my front door and within an hour a troop of giant black ants will have taken the corpse away. Same for the scorpians that run across my floor during the night. I chop them up thoroughly with a rusty old machete and simply leave their bodies where they´ve been killed. The ants are quick about cleaning up the mess and when they´re done they never leave any trace that a murder had just taken place.

I think I’m going to like it here. Living alone makes socializing a lot harder and I have to take it upon myself to walk from house to house introducing myself as the gringo who will be living here for the next two years. But it’s also a great way to be fed for free. It is customary to offer something to your guests and in El Salvador that something is always food. The home cooked meals – tamales, fried plantains, pupusas – are worth having to make awkward small-talk. As an outsider, when you first meet someone here, you can expect to be asked the same four questions and receive the same four responses.

1) “Are you married and how many kids do you have? WHAT - NO WIFE, NO KIDS?!

2) “Do you like to play soccer? Who do you like more, Barcelona or Real Madrid?”

3) “Are you Catholic?”

4) “Can you help me with a visa to the States?”

Answering any of these questions incorrectly spells social suicide. I have enough pictures of Laura and me to easily convince them that she’s my fiancée waiting for me in the States. Every volunteer makes up a ‘significant other’ in an attempt to try and shake the subject that can feel like a monkey on your back, they obsess over your love life. Obsess! I always answer yes to the Catholic question, and smooth over my inability to act as a consulate by offering to teach them English. I have a new address! Take it down and use it! Send me love, send me mail, send me cookies! Chase A. Coniglio, PCVApartado Postal #13Metapán, El Salvador

We’ll see how things progress in the weeks to come. I start working soon so hopefully everyone will get to know me by name and stop calling me gringo.

Since the day I arrived in El Salvador, I had been counting the days until training would end. After two months, six hours of daily Spanish class came to be more than I could tolerate. But as my final days in Barrio Ixtepeque came to an end, I started to feel like I did before I left the States: anxious to move but very sad to leave. It’s strange to say but the relationships I made became so strong that a part of me felt like I had grown up there. And in a way, I had. The minute I arrived I was taken by the hand, taught how to speak a new language and schooled in a new way of life. I would be leaving behind a host family that hoped everything they taught me was enough to make it on my own.

When I got home from my last day of training, the day before I was to leave Ixtepeque, I arrived to find the women of my family cooking a mass amount of food, supposedly to sell on the street. But rows of tables and chairs in the back yard gave away their plans to surprise me with a grand despedida, farewell party. An hour later the tables sat thirty of my closest friends I had made in the last two months. They were loaded with rum and yipped wildly as I thanked them a thousand times over for an amazing stay; I would never be able to give back what they have so easily given to me. There we had an amazing last dinner together. We danced the cumbia and smoked pure Cuban cigars well into the night, stopping only to take pictures. I left early the next morning with my family standing at the edge of the street shouting “¡Vaya con Dios y Maria!”, go with God and Mary. I miss them.

Our swearing-in ceremony was to be held at the United States Embassy in the capitol city of San Salvador. I was excited to be in the company of the Ambassador and other U.S. dignitaries, powerful men appointed by the President, civil servants to the most powerful nation in the world. I was right to have envisioned balding white men in navy blue suits and red ties, all looking very diplomatic and the presence of the Secret Service made it that much more exciting. Ambassador Glazer was extremely gracious in making us feel welcome in what he referred to as the first face of American diplomacy here in El Salvador. We’re the only group crazy enough (or stupid enough) to live like commoners in a country with one of the highest murder rates in the world, ride their buses, and even call them friends.

And now my two years officially begins.

Wow, I´m really doing it! I´m living in a crazy third world country and living the Peace Corps dream. It´s hard to believe that I´ve only been here for less than a month, it sure feels like a lot longer. I apologize for taking my time to post pics and a little more about my life here. My days are extremely busy but I promise to be more active with my blog. I am so excited to share my recent adventures with you!

So right now I´m living in a small "pueblo" called Barrio Ixtepeque located at the base of Volcan Chinchontepec. It is amazing here, I love it and find that I´m sad to be leaving in just over a month for my permanent site in rural El Salvador. The people here are overwhelmingly hospitable and my friends and I have been well-recieved by all. Everyday is a new adventure with new friends in a new part of the country.

A typical day for me here starts when my stomach forces me out of bed and running for the latrine (I´m still adjusting to a diet of lots and lots of beans), usually around 4am. I hang out with my amazing host family before being served breakfast and leaving for a day of class and training. Class couldn´t be any more painful but usually ends around 3pm if we´re lucky. Right now my group and I are working on a youth community project with young adults in order to raise enough money to purchase a Corpus Christy -- I´m still not entirely sure what it is, but it has something to do with the church and is extremely important in a very Catholic community. Working with slightly older youth has been a lot of fun but I´m excited to start teaching English classes this week to groups of younger kids. After a youth meeting I manage to make a spectacle of myself by maintaining a workout routine and burning off my lunch of beans, friend plantains and rice. Dinner is always delicious and is always served with freshly made tortillas and some kind of fresca made from fruit picked off our own trees. I spend the rest of my night socializing with my new Salvadorean friends and trying hard to strengthen my Spanish, which is improving pretty rapidly.

This week especially has been a week of many firsts for me. I was very excited to help in the killing of my dinner! I knew it was coming soon, but I had no idea it would be so violent. I also got to play in my very first soccer tournament on Ixtepeque´s Fuerte San Cristobal and my town presented me with a totally cool jersey that I feel so special wearing around town. This past weekend I went to my first discoteca and danced with the locals and drank bum liquor with my favorite borachos. And I even got my first haircut in country which I had been dreading for some time, and rightfully so. There is a man in my pueblo that knows how to cut hair but my family warned me against going to him. "He has a sickness of the nerves and can´t hold the razor straight," they said. So I walked to the neighboring village where I was told there was a guy who could do a decent job. Turns out he is a deaf mute! Since I couldn´t tell him how I wanted my haircut I picked out a style from a small book of styles from the early 80´s and hoped for the best. He only cut me once and for the most part I still look guapo! I mean it when I say that everything here is an adventure.

This week should prove to be just as interesting. I leave Ixtepeque for three days to join my PC mentor at his site where I´ll learn more about life as a volunteer in my specific area, Rural Health and Sanitation. I´m excited to see what other villages are like and see what exactly I´ll be doing, cause as of now I still have no clue. So that´s about it! Hope you enjoy the pics I was able to post and I look forward to hearing from you all! Keep me posted on what´s going on in the states, let me know if any good political scandals break out and I´ll be posting again soon.

It's been a long week! Yesterday my adventure started by saying goodbye to my family and boarding my flight to Washington DC where my staging event is being held. Towards the end of my flight, I realized the guy sitting behind me was headed to the same place. We shared a cab and went out for a few beers before heading to bed around midnight. Much to my relief, he's totally normal. A little hippie-ish (from Berkley) but normal. One of my biggest concerns as I flew out was whether or not I would actually like any of my fellow volunteers. I mean, what kind of people join the Peace Corps anyway? -- strange people, that's who.

I woke up super early for some reason so I'm just chillin in the hotel lobby doing my thing. Nothing too interesting to say but I'm sure after meeting everyone later on today I can come up with a few things. I hope to get this blog link out to everyone who might care before too long. Also, my mailing address for the three months I'll spend training in the capitol city is:

Chase A. Coniglio, PCV

Apartado Postal 1947

Correo Nacional

Centro De Gobierno

San Salvador, El Salvador

Use it! Already missing everyone!