Not much to report on this past month. I was back in San Vicente for my final few weeks of training. Which meant a return to the plastic chairs of the PC Training Center. (Congress should really appropriate money for some overstuffed recliners.) I also stayed with my original host family again, so it was good to see them again. We completed our final weeks of tech training. We met with NGO´s as well as attended a USAID conference on transparency. So now the hard part begins with actually starting to implement projects in our communities.

While we we´re in training we took a field trip to the Ruta de las Flores in Sonsonate & Auchapan, which is one of the areas the government here is trying to develop into a tourist destination. We visited several artesania workshops as well as La Laguna Verde (photo below). The lagoon was gorgeous its ontop of a now dormant volcano in Apaneca, we went in the morning and it was so silent and green. I have a ton of photos that next time I´m in the PC office I´ll upload them and send out.

This week I plan on meeting with the schools again with my counterpart to discuss a possible recycling project we would like to do as well as some of the other projects they mentioned to me when we first met. Other than that not to much to report this month. Salú pue.

I know I´ve been a blogger slacker this month, so here´s a quick update on what I´ve been up to this month (other than trying to avoid heat stroke). This past month I have been visiting the schools and other institutions here in the pueblo to get a better idea of what the community needs are and what I might do to keep myself busy over the next two years. After visiting the schools, ADESCOs (local community groups) and other institutions I definitely now have a laundry list of things they would like to get done and I may need to remind them that I´m only one gringa. The environment seemed to top everyone´s list of concerns, as well as computers and library books for the schools (the Min. of Education only provides schools with $13 a year per student to cover all expenses books, infrastructure, educational equipment). The Peace Corps also came out this week to meet with me, my counterpart and group of community leaders to check on my integration into the community and what needs I had identified here in the pueblo. While they were here the list of the community´s requests continued to grow, so definitely no chance me lounging around in a hammock full time. Oh well.... :)

Also, I have been assiting my counterpart this month with restocking the river here with fish. The purpose being not only to hopefully establish more balance in the ecosystem, but to also give the community another source of food and possible income generator. We´re hoping that after a few months the fish will have grown and reproduced so people can start fishing. We released several thousand tilapia into the river with the assistance of students in some of the schools out in the cantons or more rural parts of our pueblo. The first day, my counterpart suggested that I go out to the river with a second grade class from one of the local elementary schools, he told me it would be more scenic and good way to get to know another part of the community. Great! So we load up several of the Alcaldía´s pick ups with approx. thirty bags of fish, each bag weighing about twenty pounds and we pick up our second class and head out this country road towards the river, we get as far as this farm and we stop and the other alcaldía employees tell me we have to walk the rest of the way to river, because the trucks can´t make it any further. But, they tell me its a short walk, so we unload all the fish and seven year olds everyone and including the kids are helping us haul these twenty pound bags of live fish down this trail towards the river where we are going to release them. Well, that "short walk" turns out to be over a kilometer down a rocky hill that is completely turned to mud, becuase after all its the rainy season and everything has turned completely to mud. Next thing I know we have fish and second graders going every which way slipping & slidding down this rocky hill (did I mention we also had to dodge several cows at this point too?). When we finally make to it to river after about a half hour of slipping and slidding down this hill, the kids enthusiastically release what fish we had left into the river and then jump into river on top of the fish they just released to go swimming with them. Needless to say I´m not sure how many of the fish actually survived to repopulate the river. Afterwards we returned the kids to their school completely covered in mud and sopping wet. Its good thing their school is far out in the campo and I don´t have to see their school director everyday, becuase I´m pretty sure I´m not her favorite person at the moment.

Anyway, I´m heading back to San Vicente for our last several weeks of training in July. So hopefully by August I´ll have a clue as to how to actually start on my list of things to do. Hope all is well stateside. Adios!

Trash & Trees are two of the first things that all extranjeros (foreigners) or at least Peace Corps volunteers notice about El Salvador. Before the Spanish arrived El Salvador was called Cuscatlan, which roughly translates to "land of beautiful things", unfortunately over time a lot of those "beautiful things" have been mismanaged or lost for one reason or another. Today El Salvador has startingly few trees, as most have been cut down usually for agricultural reasons and trash collection is still a fairly new concept. As most Salvadorans just throw their trash wherever they please, like out the bus window (I´ve seen this now at least a million times). Right now it seems to consist of a guy with a pick up truck and when I asked where it goes from there, my counterpart told me that was the problem. Apparently El Salvador is lacking in landfills. Therefore, I have spent the better part of the last two weeks attending conferences with my counterpart in San Salvador and Sensuntepeque on environmental issues here in El Salvador. And as I have been assigned to the Unidad de Medio Ambiente (Environmental Dept of the City Hall), this will most likely be what I will be working on over the next two years. Of course nearly all volunteers here work on environmental issues regardless of their "official" program or counterpart designation. But, as I get to know my community better, I´m sure I´ll find many more things to work on (computers and libraries here run a pretty close second to environmental issues).

Also, the rainy season has started here, which I must say has so far lived up to all its hype. It has basically been on torrential downpour after another and everything I own (just as I was warned) has become damp and the veterans here told me just to wait after a few more weeks everything will start to mold over. Can´t wait for that to start, but a least it only lasts till October. :)

The past two weeks have been a blurr....with packing to leave San Vicente and swearing in last week in San Salvador. Last Thursday my training class was officially sworn in as Peace Corps volunteers by the US Ambassador to El Salvador at a convention center in San Salvador. Afterward we had dinner with our respective program groups, we Muni´s opted for Mexican food. Later we went to a party with the rest of the volunteers here already, it was great to get to meet everyone and get some last words of advice before we headed out to our sites the next day.

I arrived here in Cabañas last Friday, just in time for their Fiesta Patronal. Which meant that two hours after finally arriving here, I was introduced to the pueblo at the Miss Casa de la Cultura coronation. This fiesta focused more on beauty pageants and dances aka bailes than dangerous fireworks. Although this time I was talked into riding the what is possibly the world´s least safe ferris wheel (I believe in previous posts I referred to it as the ¨rueda de la muerte¨or the ¨wheel of death¨they had the same one at the last fiesta I went to last month), so that was my near death experience at this fiest patronal. Besides why would you need something to hold you into your seat? Anyway, I think I´m fiesta patronal free till next year. But, you should know despite all I have said, they are fun!

The fiesta has been keeping my busy during my first few days here. It has been a good way to meet the community as well as the other volunteer here. Next week I will finally spend some time following my counterpart around getting a better lay of the land and what work I might have to do over the next two years. Other than that I have been getting settled and adjusted.

Anyway stay tuned to more of my adventures here in Cabañas.

-Jenni

Yesterday was site assignment day and I am off to Cabañas next week to start my two years of service. Cabañas is in the Eastern side of the country on the border with Honduras.They had a small ceremony here in the training center for site assignments where everyone was gathered around the large wall size map of El Salvador and gave everyone a star and as the sites were announced everyone's star went up on the map. Needless to say everyone is pretty excited to be finished with training and to be starting their assignments. Although we have one more busy week to get through. Our swearing in ceremony is next Thursday in San Salvador and before that we have three days of orientation, where we go over more HR stuff. Should be a ton of fun. Also, this weekend we hiked to the summit of the volcano here in San Vicente. It was six hours up and about five down. Four days on and my legs are still killing me. It was a fairly difficult hike to the top and when we got there the top was completely shrouded in clouds and we couldn't see anything so we headed back down for ice cream. But, the cloud forest we hiked through to get to the top was beautiful as were all the fincas we passed.Well, that's for now. I'll keep you posted on swearing in and my first few days in site soon.

I know I have been a blogger slacker lately, so here´s what I´ve been up to the last two weeks....

My English class went well the other week, I played a game with the kids to practice their vocabulary, which they loved (but, I´m pretty sure the teachers in the surrounding classrooms didn´t, it got a little ruidoso). My host sister was in my class so I had at least one person I already knew to help get the kids anwsering questions and participating. But, like most English classes and coversations here it eventually devolved into all of them wanting to know what the English equivalent of their names is (they love that as much as reggaeton and digital cameras).

Also, in the past month I have survived at least four major tremors (including one this afternoon that nearly knocked me out my chair and my host dad out of his hammock) and I have a sinking suspicion that there are more ahead of me in the future. But, as long they are just tremors and not earthquakes, I´m good. However, my host mom did go over with me what to do in the event of an earthquake, it essentially is run for your life so nothing falls on you - which is some solid advice if you ask me.

We finally finished our youth group project here in the pueblo. We raised close to $180 in $0.25 raffle tickets to construct our garden at the local church. I have to admit we gringos had no idea how popular a raffle for a new blender would be. Another group is currently raffling an iron with similar results, apparently the more useful the prize the better. We are now on the party planning phase for the kids before we leave in two weeks for our permanent sites.

Yesterday we went out to visit other volunteers to see what kind of work they are doing. My group visited a volunteer in the department of Morazan who is teaching computer literacy as well as running a computer lab at the local school. Our group taught a class in which the kids learned how to Google and watch videos on YouTube and Sports Center online (not actually the assigned curriculum, but I think the kids enjoyed it).

But, most importantly we are only one week away for Site Assignment Day, when we finally find out where we are going to be for the next two years. Needless to say the 40 of us are anxious and nervous to finally find out. However, to calm our nerves we will be climbing the volcano here in the pueblo on Sunday. I´ll let you know how that and Site Assignment Day go in a future post. Also, once my new flash drive arrives, I promise to finally get some pictures up as realize this blog is a little boring right now.

Well, that´s all for now. As they say here in El Salvador, Salú.

-Jenni

This past week we had immersion day, where we all went out and spent a day with another volunteer. I spent the day with another municipal development volunteer in the department of Ahuachapan. Ahuachan is western most department of El Salvador on the border with Guatemala. It was great to finally get to see what it is I will be potentially doing in a month as well as to see another part of El Salvador. I went with the other volunteer to her Alcaldia to meet her counterpart and coworkers there and then I attended her ecologically friendly stove demonstration, where I got to demonstrate my lack of tortilla making skills, by burning mine. Nothing draws a crowd quite like a gringa burning a tortilla on the sidewalk. I don´t think this incident detracted from the project as most people in the pueblo signed up for a new stove. Afterwards, it was off to the future sight of the coffee house she is starting with her local youth group. Muni volunteers as we are called sort of have an open ended assignment and a lot flexibility in what we want to do. Of course getting there as an adventure, I had to change buses four times to get there, because buses here don´t go directly to anywhere. But, I made it so I´m feeling a little more confident about getting around.

Also, our community project with the youth group here in town is finally getting started. We will be planting a garden at the church with the youth. Right now though we are fundraising by holding a raffle for a blender (Yeah, we didn´t think this would be such a big ticket item, but like a lot of other things we have turned out to be wrong about that too.) at the church. We are also planning a movie night as soon as we find a projector.

Other than that training continues we are in training sessions everyday. Tomorrow I am teaching my English class at the middle school here in town and I´m hoping they don´t eat me alive, so we´ll see how this goes. I´ll update you more on this later.

Saludos,

Jenni

So, when I said that things we´re getting back to normal here in the pueblo after all the Semana Santa festivities, I spoke to soon. Because, this week was the Fiesta Patronal or the week that the pueblo celebrates its patron saint, San Jose. Which if you read last weeks post you now know involves processing around the pueblo behind a giant lit up San Jose and cuetes (sic?). Cuetes are essentially bottle rockets attached to giant sticks, which sound like a gun going off, that they shoot off around town 24 hours a day during the fiesta. Needless to say no one has been getting much sleep here.

The fiesta patronal is the pueblo´s annual party that lasts all week, with processions twice a day, a daily mass, and lots of cuetes and fireworks (more on those in a minute) all day long. The processions have been getting larger and more elaborate all week long with marching bands (that play Sousa marches) and the floats for San Jose. On Friday night though the party really gets started with the flaming toritos. All of our host families were excited for to get participate and see the toritos, which apparently is everyone´s favorite activity of the year. So, my host family brings me down the main plaza with the rest of the gringos and their families to see men dressed as bulls with sparklers and running through the streets, which all seemed to be in good fun, until the gringos realized there was a little bit more to this cultural experience than we bargained for. The toritos while dressed with party sparklers then start to throw firecrackers into the crowd and then everyone runs around the plaza trying not to get hit by the firecrackers, then they up the ante my throwing fireworks (yes, they type you see on the 4th of July) into the crowd and everyone keeps running. The Salvadorans loved it, the gringos not as much. One of the girls in my group got some good video of the mayhem and as soon as she posts it online, I´ll e-mail you the link. The funny part of all this was this was the first year they had thrown fireworks at each other, normally the ball up newspaper soak it in gasoline and then light it on fire and throw that at each other, but they decided this year that wasn´t as safe as fireworks. Luckily, though no gringos were charred in the process of this cultural investigation, several Salvadorans, however, were not as lucky.

This week we also took our first trip into San Salvador to visit the PC office and get some American food, trust me Pizza Hut never tasted so good. We also visited the anthropology museum and learned more about El Salvador´s indigineous past. This week training continues and next weekend we go spend a day with a current volunteer to get a better idea of what we will be doing.

It´s been a crazy week here in El Salvador, it´s Semana Santa! Its part cutural festival, part vacation and part, well Holy Week, but other two aspects seem to take precendence. As part of our training here we have to work on a small project with a local youth group, our group is working with the local Catholic youth group, who invited us to help with thier alfombra. Alfombras are large murals that various groups make out of colored salt that depict various biblical scenes (or in our pueblos case, lots of Santo Subitos for John Paul the Second) in the streets, that the whole twon then process through later in the evening, more on that in a minute. So myself and three of my other group mates went to the parque (thats what they call plazas here in El Salvador) to help which involved using our hands to perfectly place the salt in a design, in our group´s case it was the Virgin Mary embracing John Paul II. I have photos which as soon as I remember to take my camera to the PC office, I´ll upload. It was huge it was about 5 feet by 10 feet. It seemed like everyone in our pueblo was out in front of their homes drawing these elaborate designs for the evening Good Friday procession.

On Good Friday about 7pm the entire pueblo (or just about) gathered in front of the church to march by candlelight through the town behind the priest, nuns, and a giant graphically depicted crucified Jesus and some sad looking nuns lit by neon lights. Despite the ktisch factor it was actually quite beautiful especially with the moon illuminating the Volcano in the distance. We marched around town for about three and half hours as the priest read scripture and one of the nuns sang. The procession goes through all the salt pictures (and the little boys in the youth group told me getting to kick the sand in all the pictures was their favorite part). But, that wasn´t the only procession, in fact holy week here in El Salvador involves a lot of procession every town has them almost every day starting Palm Sunday lasting through Easter. The next night they had another candlelight procession starting at 11:30 at night and lasting through 2 in the morning (I didn´t partake in this one) where they parade a Resurrected Jesus, also lit by neon lights and happy nuns where once again the priest, the nuns and everyone read scripture and sang hymns throughout the town, but because Easter is a happy occasion this time they added celebratory cuetes, because nothing says Christ has risen unlike celebratory bottle rockets. Needless to say it was a noisy night, on the bright side I couldn´t hear the neighbor´s rooster so I suppose thats something.

Anyway with Semana Santa over things here are quieting down, this week we are going on our first expedition to San Salvador and the all important gringo destination, the Metro Centro, which is El Salvador´s large Americanesque mall. Other than that training continues, but I think we are all starting to adjust to our new homes. Well, that´s all for now and feel free to incorporate any of the above Salvadoran traditions into your own holy week next year. :)

-Jenni

Hi Everyone,

I know I haven´t been able to update you much on my adventure so far this week, so here I go. Needless to say I have survived my first week here in El Salvador, its beautiful and the people are wonderful or as they say in Spanish muy amable. We started orientation on Sunday in Arlington, where me and the other two volunteers from DC got roped into playing tourguides for a few days. There are approximately 40 of us in my training class from all over the US, and so far we all get along really well. We arrived in El Salvador on Tuesday at lunch time and were met my Peace Corps staff on the plane; needless to say 40+ gringos with a ton of luggage tends to elicit a lot of stares from the locals. The Peace Corps kindly provided a chicken bus to take us to our hotel the first night (I have photos and will post them as soon I get that figured out.) On Wednesday we were dropped off with the families we are going to live with over the next 8 weeks of training. My family is old hat having a gringa around, as they have been hosting volunteers for years now. I´m in a small town about thirty minutes from the training center in San Vicente which is about an hour from the capital, San Salvador. The community I`m in is at the foot of one of many volcanos here in El Salvador, but locals assure us its dormant (this was after all the east coast gringos asked if it was possible to out run a lava flow - the one trainee from HI also found this question to be strange) and is surround by sugar plantations. My host family thought it was strange that we don´t have sugar plantations in VA, and that I had only ever seen sugar in a supermarket.

We have been pretty busy this past week, with orientation and getting situated, today is our first real day of training. We have Spanish in the morning and technical training in the afternoon. After our 8 weeks, we will be going to our permanent sites for 3 months and then will return to San Vicente for two more weeks of training, before officially starting our assignments. So I won´t really begin working on my assignment till August.

The past few days I have been spending time with my host family getting to know them better and start practicing my Spanish. They took me to a molienda on Friday night, which is one of the sugar processing plants, where they produce caramel and molassess or as they call it dulce. It was really interesting to see as the equipment they we´re using, as it had to be a least 100 years old. On Saturday, they took me to see the crater of the village volcano, which was not what I was expecting at all. I always imagined the crater to be at the top of the volcano, instead here it was on the side about 3/4 of the way up. It smelled of sulfur and was emitting alot of water vapor. And, then yesterday I went to my host family´s niece´s quinceanera. A quinceanera is a big deal in latin culture sort of a cross between a Bar Mitzah and a Sweet Sixteen party, they are a lot of fun, try to get yourself invited to one if you can. :)

Well, that´s all I´ve been up to so far. I´ll try to add more cultural tid bits in future posts and photos. I hope all is well back home and I miss you all!

Saludos,

Jenni

Hi All! I’ve been promising for weeks now to set up a blog to keep all of you updated on my Salvadoran adventure, so here it is….Finally. I leave for pre-service orientation and then training this Sunday, March 9th in Arlington and then it’s off to El Salvador on Tuesday! I thought I would use this first blog posting to answer some of the frequent questions I’ve been getting over the past several months, so here’s what I know so far:

Q: Where are you going?

A: El Salvador

Q: Where is it?

A: El Salvador is on the Pacific coast of Central America, sandwiched in between Guatemala & Honduras. (I have posted in the link to the CIA Factbook’s El Salvador page on the left, if you really want a more specific answer.)

Q: How long will you be gone for?

A: My official service dates are March 2008 – May 2010.

Q: Where will you live?

A: Initially I will live with a host family near the Peace Corps training center, once I complete training and get my permanent site, then most likely I will have my own little casita.

Q: Do you get vacation/Do you get to come home?

A: I get 24 vacation days a year, which I can use however I like: to come home/travel around El Salvador or other parts of Latin America, etc.

Well, I need to finish packing. But, I promise to keep you updated on what I’m up to. And, if you ever need a Central American adventure of your own, you are all more than welcome to visit. :) I’ll miss you all!

-Jenni