This was the first time in 24 years that I have been away from St. Joseph, MI for christmas. I was thinking about that the other day, that is a pretty good streak! They celebrate Christmas on the 24th in El Salvador and actual Christmas day is just a day of rest. On Christmas Eve my town had the annual soccer tournament. We had two teams from our town play, my team lost in the first round, the other team won the whole thing! Since there was only one field the games were quite short, 12 minutes followed by penalty kicks. Some tournament, huh? My team lost in penalty kicks 2-1, but I made my penalty kick! There was a lot of pressure too, because all the fans crowded the goal, behind me, and on both sides. If I had shot wide by a foot the ball would have clocked someone in the head!

After the tournament I had dinner at Niña Martas home and went dancing with a couple of the families here. They are having lots of laughs at me dancing cumbia, bachata, and merengue. I am learning, slowly, but still, I think I am doing alright! Oh, Christmas is also a big night for fireworks. Everyone buys them here and sets them off at midnight on Christmas eve. These are not your little firecrackers either, they are big mortars that you would see at a fourth of july show!

As for working, I have made contacts with a local NGO about an efficient stoves project for the community and am looking into starting a womens sewing cooperative as well. The stoves are really important for health and deforestation reasons. All the people here cook over open fires, which emit smoke into the house and cause eye and respiratory problems. And, the women that cook do so three times daily. The efficient stoves emit little smoke and use much less wood than open fires, so I think this will be a good project for the people here.

School will not start for another two weeks and by that time I will be in San Vicente for my next round of training, tech training they are calling it. We will be learning organic gardening methods, composting, classroom management styles, etc. Well, this has been good so far, I will put up some photos soon, sorry I always forget my camera!

Peace out,

Zach

Hello everyone,

Reporting from the Department of Morazan! I have my site, it is a great little canton nestled in the mountains of Morazan. The town has less than 1000 people and has three separate smaller villages that make up the whole. These smaller villages are very far away, almost an hour walk up the mountain to get from end to end in my community. I moved into a brick home with a dirt floor. I have a small electric hotplate to cook some of my meals, a bed, two desks, a hammock, and some plastic chairs for visitors. One of my desks is full of Spanish material right now - I study every night for about two hours as I need to increase my comprehension of this language before school starts in January.

As an Environmental Ed volunteer the agency I will be working with the most is the local school. I'll be teaching English and Environmental Ed classes, starting in January. Which means until than, my job is to get to know the community and plan with the teachers once they come back in early January. I've gotten to know a number of community members so far. I eat lunch and dinner at Nina Marta's home, who is a really sweet woman. We watch Barcelona and Real Madrid soccer games (people here like Spanish league more than the team in their backyard, Vista Hermosa) and telenovelas. Telenovelas are soap operas, but with even more drama than those in the US, good for Spanish I guess. I also joined the community soccer team, we have a game tomorrow up by the border which will be pretty sweet, nice and cool playing in the afternoon.

The Christmas tradition in my town is very cool. About 18 different soccer teams from all around the area come to play in a tournament. The tournament lasts all day as there is only one field to play on. After, there is a baile and tons of food to eat. I'm excited to play and join in the Navidad celebrations. There is also no Black Friday here, which was a relief to me - but people are into the commercial Christmas here as well. I saw two other volunteers for Thanksgiving the other day which was good. Dia de los Pavos, as they call it here, has no significance to Salvadorans, so it was nice to celebrate with friends. And I just saw the Lions lost again, keeping that tradition alive as well!

Zach

Hey all,

I got my site! I am heading to the department of Morazan, in the northeast portion of El Salvador. I received a site report from the previous volunteer, Evan, on the day we found out. I will be working with two schools, one K-5 and one K-9. The community I'll be living in has less than 1,000 people and around 200 families. So, very small. I will also be working alongside the local ADESCO (Associacion DEsarrollo COmunal - in English, Community Development Association). They are trying to improve their potable water - when it is the dry season in El Salvador there are a lot of problems with water. Rivers dry up, rain doesn't fall for months, and people generally have to put a lot more effort to get clean water. Twisting the faucet head doesn't work here. The volunteer also wrote that there is ambition to start an agricultural cooperative in the community. I'm very excited for this, as it has so many benefits for a community.

We are going to the US embassy for our swearing-in ceremony this weekend. We have a training day with our counterparts, a teacher from the school I'll be working at will be with me. After this we have the formal ceremony, I still have to buy a tie for this, ugh. The Peace Corps group from one year ago is hosting a party after a hotel swimming pool, should be a good last hurrah for us. The next time I post a blog I'll be in Morazan, hope all is well back home.

Zach

I have two weeks left in Concepcion de Canas, El Salvador. It has been pretty great. My family has been awesome and has shown me everything in this area. The other day we went to a waterpark, Peace Corps didn´t tell us about this, even though it was only a five minute pickup ride from the training center! The waterpark was natural too which was great. Trees all over the place, a waterfall and instead of chlorine, they had fish in the pools that ate all the gross stuff (I think they had some means of cleaning other than that too). It was great! I also went to my first baile (dance) at another trainee´s house. Here is a typical dance in El Salvador, it starts at 9, all the guys drink a lot, all the girls don´t touch alcohol, and they play reggaeton all night. We had a good time observing and trying to blend in as much as possible (never going to happen at dances here).

The next day we went to a couple cemeteries for ¨Dia de los Disfuntos.¨It is an awesome tradition. Everyone goes to the cemetary with flowers for their relatives that have died to celebrate their lives. And I mean EVERYONE. At the cemetary in San Sebastian, there were vendors with water, coca-cola, mangos, french fries, etc. walking through the graveyard! People sit on tombs, repaint their old tombs and gravestones, and generally just have a good time. The best part about it is that everyone brings gorgeous flowers to put on the graves so the whole cemetary is bright. It stays bright for awhile too because they´re mostly fake as dengue fever is a big problem here. It is illegal to have vases of water because mosquitos breed in them and spread dengue, the bone-break fever.

A group of us went to Lago Coatepeque the other weekend for our vacation, and it was gorgeous. It is an extinct volcano that has filled up with water and is the only clean surface water in El Salvador, because all of the wealthy people own the land. The only ¨public access¨is from the three hotels, one of which we stayed at. It was a good break. Spanish is going well but I still feel under-prepared to go to site. For the first two months we are supposed to get to know the community and we have some objectives, but not really. We are going to meet everyone, play some soccer, visit with the schools and try and plan some activities, and try to find a project before our second training session in January. I hope to plant some seeds of environmental ed in my community during this period and come back with some technical knowledge to start the real work. We shall see. When I get my site I will post again, I hope all is well in the states.

We are all taking over a hotel tomorrow for the election, all 22 Peace Corps Trainees. We´ll be watching stateside and are all excited for ----- to win! I hope to call some of you tomorrow!

PEACE

Hey everyone,

So I have yet to write a blog in country. Whoops. This reminds me of looking at my friends´Peace Corps blogs that haven´t written in them for months.

Here is a rundown. I am in my fourth week of training. I have been living with a family of six for the last month and it is all going great. There are four kids in the house: Pedro (24), Melvin (18), Gabi (17) and Fatima (12). The family make their money by farming, they have a milpa (corn-bean field) on the side of a mountain. I went to work on the milpa a couple of times and it is really damn hard. First of all, it is a cornfield on the SIDE OF A MOUNTAIN. So it is really hard to keep your balance while hacking off pieces of the plant with a machete. But it was fun to go. Pedro, Arcadio (the Dad) and their cousin Tony work at the milpa 5-6 days a week. It is hard work and it takes about a twenty minute walk down the mountain and a 35 minute walk up to reach their plot of land. Our canton is pretty much full of farming families and many of them are poor. But you can certainly see the effect of remesas (remittances) on our community and much more in the cities in El Salvador. As of now there are 2.4 million Salvadorenos living in the US. Many of them send back money once a month, and this money surely goes a long way in the agrarian areas. Most families have TV´s, some have cars, computers, and very nice homes for the area we live in. Remesas are a very heated topic in El Salvador because they are good for people without money and work, but are they going to be good in the long run? I´m not convinced that they will be. One of the Peace Corps training staff members told us that the generation of Salvadorenos growing up in the US now that have not been back to ES, will most likely not be sending remesas when they reach working age, causing a long-term problem for many families here...

Anyways, I taught English today to a class of 1st graders. It was fun, we did greetings and I taught them fruits in English. They got up, showed their pictures, and pronounced the name of the fruit pretty well for the first time. I really liked it and it reminded me of being a camp counselor many moons ago. I actually haven´t worked with kids for six years. We are responsible for starting a youth group in the area too, and right now we have about 15 teens that come to our meetings once a week. Our project as of now is to cook bread and sell it for money to buy tree saplings. We want to start a garden to take care of some saplings for the area and plant them around Canas at different homes. We are looking for fruit trees - orange, mandarin, papaya, coconut, etc. By the way, the fruit here is so good! I have spanish class 5 days a week for about 6 hours and have been using my spanish a lot throughout the community.

I visited another PC volunteer last weekend in the fresh coffee growing area of the country in Santa Ana. It is a bit east of San Salvador. I stayed with a real cool married couple and worked at a school for two days. The first day Emily (the Volunteer) and I picked up plastic bottles with her Eco-Club, made dreamcatchers with Hans´ (the other Vol) art club, and did two different charlas on worm composting. The next day was a fundraiser for the school and I helped with a ring toss game, a used clothes sale, a game called palo encebolla (grease pole), and even helped start out the dancing. Palo encebolla is gross - it is when you rub cow guts on a flagpole and tape 10 bucks to the top. The people that play have to try and climb up the slippery pole to get the dinero, but it is really rank. They had a prom queen equivalent too where there was one girl from each grade that was ¨Reina.¨ Hans and I started out the dancing with them while hundreds of Salvadorenos watched. That pretty much got all the embarrassment that I´ll have out of me.

Sorry this entry is long, but I´ll get better about writing in the future. Good news here, my friend Jordan Silverman is coming on Feb 4th as a Rural Health Volunteer. I went to her going away party because she´s in Wyoming now, but I just got the message that she´ll be in El Salv with me for the next two years! Send me news of how the US is doing!!!!

I am heading to El Salvador tomorrow at 3AM! I have met the other 23 Peace Corps Trainees in the past couple days while we've been staying at our swanky DC hotel and it has been a great time. It is crazy that 5 months ago I knew that I would be heading to El Salvador on this day and now it is finally here...

Tomorrow we'll be in San Salvador at around 12:30PM and will get some shots, see the capital, and meet the Peace Corps staff there. There is a Country Director, Medical Director, Project Coordinators, Safety Directors, and a few more people I believe. After a couple days in San Salvador we head to San Vicente to move into our host families' homes. We'll be staying there for a couple months to enroll in Peace Corps immersion: language training, cultural training, and technical training for our specific jobs six days a week. Never thought I'd be in a job this demanding, but I'm so excited to finally get down there and get to business.

It is late and I am very tired so I will post another letter here within the next two weeks describing my culture shock and hopefully describing my swiftly ascending Spanish skillz. I will be getting up in 2.5 hours and heading to DCA Airport - Miami - San Salvador. I wish you all back home the best and feel free to contact me via-email, facebook or this blog. I have phone numbers and will setup an account soon so I can call home and here of all the good times you're all having, and tell you about the Salvadoran way of life! I miss you all and hope to hear from you while I'm gone. If anyone wants to visit, it is only a three hour flight from Miami and I do have 24 vacation days per year... Alright, my big hotel bed awaits.

Much love,

Zach

I just got back from Maryland yesterday!  10 months, much of my time in an unhealthy state of mind and body, are done!  I am excited to be back home in Michigan for a little over a month before heading off to the Peace Corps.  

I will be going to El Salvador on September 19th.  There I will be immersed in language, culture, and technical training in San Vicente for three months.  After this, hopefully they think I'll be a good volunteer, and I am accepted as an official PC Volunteer!  I'll head to my site somewhere in the country and start working.

Right now is the period where I must tie off all loose ends such as banking, loans, my car, etc. before I leave.  I've got a month to do all these things and see my family and friends.  The weekend of August 23rd friends and family from all over the country will be out to see me off, which will be a good time.  I'll be keeping in touch at least once a month throughout my travels in El Salvador and wish you all a good day.

Zach