antonio´s mom and sister and i decided to have a pupusa-making day at their house the other weekend. it was super fun and even though our pupusas weren´t the most beautiful, they were still really good. hopefully i will be able to make them in the states, only i´ll have to use harina instead of corn masa. but, still they´ll be pupusas. anyway, here´s some photos.

firing up the stove

gloria shredding cabbage for the curtido

meanwhile, me and antonio´s mom made tortillas. it doesn´t matter that we´re making pupusas, every salvadoran household has to have tortillas in it at all times.

mixing up moras (kind of like spinach) with quesillo for the pupusas

gloria stirring the salsa de tomate

flattening out the masa to add the ingredients - i´m making pupusas with mora y queso and gloría´s making the frijol con queso pupusas

antonio´s mom waiting for the pupusas to cook

i don´t know how salvadorans do it....my face got all red and my eyes were watering from being in that small space with the smoking stove. meanwhile, antonio´s mom and gloria didn´t shed one tear the whole time.....

the final product, pupusas, curtido and salsa de tomate

antonio, our first client!

remember these kids?

i paid one last visit to my family in molineros a couple weeks ago. it was like i never left! except for the fact that dayana and sindy were both a lot taller! sindy´s now 4 1/2 years old and in pre-kindergarten and dayana´s 9 and in 4th grade! what? ana´s now playing softball with some other women from molineros. i went and played with her the day i visited and man, i haven´t run full speed around the bases in a long time!

dayana and sindy with mama rosa

sindy ready for school

sindy and her cousin hazel ready to go to school

dayana

nothing has changed in molineros. it was exactly like it was when i first showed up that rainy september in 2005. ana still has her tienda, mama rosa and papa ovidio still live across the street. mama viviana is still going strong. jaqueline still comes over with hazel all the time. the same chamacos still hang out above the tienda and yell ¨hey baby, hello¨ when i am walking to ana´s house. it´s still hot as hell during the day there. ana still makes the best food. everything´s the same!

anyway, it was really fun hanging with my first salvadoran family again and i was sooooo sad when i had to say goodbye. ana is really like a mom to me and sindy and dayana are truly like my little sisters! perhaps the feeling hit me that i was really leaving el salvador when dayana said ¨laura, no quiero que se vaya¨ and i realized i wouldn´t be able to come back whenever i wanted. ít´s only going to get worse over the last final week!!!

adios for now.

el pueblo salvadoreño has spoken and funes is its man. yay!!! let me tell you, it was a very exciting election to be a part of. i´ll take you through the process!

sunday morning i went with antonio to his voting place here in apaneca. voting stations in the municipalities aren´t set up by location (like in the states), but by last name. upon first entering the voting area there are lists of names and you find your name on the list to make sure you´re in the right place. then, next to your name is a number and when you enter the actual building or area where the voting takes place, you find your number and that´s where you vote. there is a big board with photos and names of each person who is allowed to vote at that actual voting stand and you have to make sure that all lines up. when you get to the front of the line, the voting workers match up your name to your DUI (which is an identification card which is a mix between a driver´s license and a social security card) photo and number. then you get your ballot: a single sheet of paper with an ARENA flag and a FMLN flag on it. the back the ballot must have a ¨sello¨ (seal/stamp) and a signature. if those aren´t there, the ballot is considered null and void. so once you get your ballot, you go to a cardboard voting stand that has a piece of fabric in front of it with two holes for your arms. it´s not like in the states where you vote behind a curtain or anything. you stick your arms in and that way nobody can see how you´re voting.....it´s kind of weird. anyway, in choosing your party, you put a black ¨x¨ on whichever party you are voting for with a crayon they give you. you can´t mark outside the flag...if so, your ballot is no good. if you show anyone how you voted, your ballot is no good either. you then fold your ballot up, stick it in the box and then you have to return to the voting table to get your right thumb covered with this permanent black ink that doesn´t come off for a couple days so that you can´t try and vote again somewhere else. it was quite funny seeing all these salvadorans with black thumbs on television and walking around town the next day!

there were vigilantes from both political parties there making sure that there was no funny business going on and apparently there were UN vigilantes as well, although at antonio´s voting place i didn´t really see anyone ¨foreign.¨ all in all things were pretty tranquilo around town, although i did hear chambre that don rodolfo, who is an arenero, got in a fight with some young guys that are efemelenistas about who was going to win.

anyway, the rest of the day it was just a waiting game...waiting for the polls to close at 5:00 p.m. i didn´t want to watch the news because here´s what happens next: once the polls close, the voting places start counting the votes. channels 2, 4 and 6 send cameras and journalists around the country, mostly in san salvador, into various voting places to watch votes being counted. for example, the camera will sneak in and watch one table count its votes. it goes like this: the table is surrounded by various vigilantes from both ARENA and FMLN. then there is a person who is physically taking the ballots out of the box and reading them. then the person hands the ballot to a representative vigilante from whichever party the vote is for. then, once all the votes have been taken out and read from the ballot box, each person with the stack of ballots counts how many they have. whoever has the most is the winner of that table and all those in support of that party, at that table, erupt in a bunch of hoots and hollers. so, all night, up until about 7:00 p.m. the news was recording these vote counts and it was nervewracking. especially when they´d come to a table that had a lot of ARENA votes....the guy reading the votes would say ¨arena........arena......arena......fmln.......arena..

....arena.......fmln......arena....arena.....¨ and so on. it was difficult to watch and definitely kept me on the edge of my seat!

the vote quantities started coming in around 7:00 and funes was winning san salvador and we started hearing cheers and stuff coming from down the street. so we went over to our neighbors, the owners of one of the ciber cafés in apaneca, and big efemelenistas, and watched some of the news with them. but it was soooo close all night long. i think the biggest margin was funes - 53% and avila - 48%. the rest of the night, the margin kept becoming smaller and it was like ¨oh for the love of god!!!!!!!!¨

then, the election officials read their official statements....reporting on the results from the various 14 departments. during the first official statement most of the departments only had about 30% of the results so far. about 45 minutes later, there was another official statement and about 80% of the results were in and the margin was even smaller.....51% funes, 49% avila. but that´s where it stayed for the rest of the night. there was a huge celebration in the streets and all the FMLN supporters paraded around apaneca. in san salvador it was a huge party......funes gave his speech in a crowded, camera-filled room with people all wearing red t-shirts. avila finally gave his speech and talked about how arena was still strong despite losing the election.

the funniest thing was the fact that after the election, all these areneros kept saying how ¨funes needs to work with ARENA now that the FMLN has won the presidency.¨ i kept thinking - well, yes, that would be my suggestion as well. but ARENA was NEVER willing to ¨ work¨ with the FMLN when they were in power. NEVER. and now they want funes to do that. and i think funes will. in every speech he´s made so far since winning he´s talked about how he´s more interested in a unified country than one with such harsh political divisions. but it´s going to be an uphill battle....just yesterday, three ARENA diputados (kind of like our senators and representatives) quit. i asked the teachers in my school why they quit....they´re elected officials and just because the other party won the presidency, in my opinion, wouldn´t make it necessary to quit their service in the legislative assemply (kind of like our congress). and they said that they ¨had to, before the other guy takes over.¨ it doesn´t make any sense to me, but i´m guessing that nobody really knows what to do because this has never happened before. this is the first time the FMLN has won and what´s the protocol they have to go by? i guess we can only wait and see what happens.

what´s going to be interesting is to see how the ARENA party handles this defeat. i think they are scared. for twenty years, their campaign has been run on fear....telling the salvadoran population that if they vote for the FMLN there is going to be another war, that el salvador is going to be like venezuela and cuba, that all their family members are going to be deported from the united states and remesas will stop. and they have won all past elections with those campaign threats. but now that the FMLN has won and it´s more than likely that none of those threats will come to pass, my guess is that people are going to see that those were JUST THREATS. how is ARENA going to run their next presidential campaign in 5 years? i think it is a good thing for both parties. ARENA is going to have to have a more educated plan de trabajo....what´s THEIR plan to improve the country? so far they´ve never really come up with a work plan......their campaign has always been ¨you don´t want what the FMLN has to offer, so vote for ARENA¨ instead of saying what makes ARENA better in terms of improving the country. meanwhile, mauricio funes´s and the FMLN´s plan this time around was ¨here´s what i plan to do if i´m president....build a women´s center in san salvador, work on programs for farmers, unify the country, etc., etc.¨ there was NOTHING like that from ARENA......just the same old ¨don´t vote for the FMLN because they´re guerrilleros.¨

so now funes has given the FMLN a chance to prove themselves. let´s just hope they hit a homerun!

here are a couple articles about the funes win...

miami herald article

la times article

the BBC

and CNN

sunday is the big day. it´s time to vote for a new president in el salvador and i am very excited and nervous at the same time. i´ve only written a couple of times about politics here because it´s difficult to write about without getting preachy and revealing my particular bias. but since it´s election time, i´m going to write a bit about what´s been going on for the past year, and specifically, the last few months.

the current president, tony saca, is from the conservative ARENA (Alianza Republicana Nacionalista). ARENA has been in power since 1992 when the peace accords were finally signed, putting an end to the bloody civil war that plagued el salvador for decades. ARENA, in el salvador, equals money. practically every big business, mall, car dealership, bank, television station and newspaper is owned by ARENA...not the party itself, but by people who are ¨areneros.¨ this does not bode well for the FMLN and its candidate, who is vying for the spot as the next salvadoran president.

the FMLN (frente farabundo martí para la liberación nacional), on the other hand, started off as party of guerillas. farabundo martí was a salvadoran revolutionary in the 20´s and is THE face of revolution here in el salvador. in many salvadoran pueblos you will see murals painted with the likenesses of both farabundo martí and che guevara. in a nutshell, the civil war was started when people fighting for rights for the poor in el salvador (campesinos, etc.) decided to take action, rather than sit back and let the military-run government neglect their social situation. they fought and the national military (la guardia) fought back....fought back by mass killing innocent groups of women, children and old people (known as ¨matanzas¨) and punishing those that were trying to make the government listen to the plight of the country´s poor. many of the FMLN candidates in the past have been products of this war...former guerrilleros. however, the FMLN party, over the years, has tried to move away from its ¨guerrilla¨ reputation, and simply focused on creating a more benefits and help for the poor.

there are many official political parties, not just the FMLN and ARENA. others are: PDC, PCN, FDR and CD.

the ARENA candidate is rodrigo ávila, a former police chief and college graduate. (tony saca, the current president, has only a high school diploma). ARENA´s campaign slogan is ¨vote with wisdom¨ (vota con sabiduría)...meaning, think before you vote because you might regret voting for the left (FMLN).....like el salvador might become a guerrillero state if FMLN is in power.

the FMLN candidate is mauricio funes, a former journalist and college graduate. FMLN´s main slogan is ¨hope is born, change is coming¨ (nace la esperanza, viene el cambio.) they´ve, however, somewhat changed to a new slogan that says ¨this time it´s different¨ (esta vez es diferente)

let me just tell you a little bit about how each slogan refers to the state of el salvador at the moment. ARENA is going with the fear factor, while FMLN is going for the hope factor. just about every commercial run by ARENA has hugo chavez in it....saying that voting for mauricio funes is voting for hugo chavez.?????? it reminds me somewhat of what obama went through when conservatives were saying that voting for obama was like voting for terrorists because of his ¨connection¨ with william ayers. these commercials have forced funes to run commercials saying ¨don´t believe the lies.¨

it´s particularly frustrating because every outlet of information (television channels - channels 2, 4, 6, 21 - and newspapers - el diario de hoy and la prensa gráfica) are owned by ARENA supporters. so, for example, you open the newspaper to read ¨ávila attends opening of community center for children¨ and there is a photo of him hugging children and giving them toys. then, on the next page, it reads ¨funes is accused of blocking streets in the zona rosa for his campaign tour.¨ it´s outrageous, not because this happens a few times....but because it happens every single day. i can´t even read the newspapers anymore because it´s pura propaganda. i understand that in the states it´s the same way....but at least there are other ways to get your news that are way less biased than your local newspaper. here, everywhere you turn, it´s the same thing. ávila good, funes bad.

ARENA even put out a commercial saying that if you sing the el salvador national anthem and you say the pledge of allegiance, then you shouldn´t vote for the FMLN and funes because that would make you unpatriotic and you don´t believe in el salvador. meanwhile funes is trying to defend all this, WHILE proposing his plan for a CHANGE.

i can´t believe ARENA has been in power for over almost 20 years....but then again, i can. why? because ARENA runs its campaigns based on fear and presents. i´m not kidding! the poverty rate here is unbelievable. but here´s what normally happens...right before an election, ARENA candidates go to poor villages and hand out things like key chains, t-shirts, hats, sometimes even food - like lunch, and essentially ¨buy¨ their votes. it doesn´t make any sense to me why people buy into this? they´re dirt poor and instead of voting for someone they might think could make it easier to get food EVERY DAY, they vote for the candidate that gave them a free lunch. before our mayoral elections in january (el tigre won again...), el tigre came to san jorge and handed out material for school uniforms. does he does this every year? no. just the years he needs the poor people´s votes. in apaneca (i don´t know how it is around the rest of the country) most of the FMLN supporters are professionals, people with educations beyond high school, those working as lawyers and teachers and doctors. el tigre wins every year by going to the poor villages and giving them key chains. ?????

there was a recent ARENA-run ad on television where this nurse narrated a 5-minute long commercial on how ARENA has been nothing but butterflies and sunshine for el salvador since the peace accords were signed in 1992. she went down the list of presidents since the accords and how they built roads and buildings and how generally they made everyone´s life a living garden of eden throughout the years. it ended with tony saca´s presidency and how san salvador is this beautiful, modern city with upscale malls and high-rise condo buildings. this is true about the malls and such....there are malls here with polo, anne taylor, apple, l´occitane and nautica stores. they´ve been building like crazy in the zona rosa...upscale condos and apartment buildings. but my question is this....how do any of these places deserve to exist when there are still people in this country WITHOUT WATER, or electricity or anything but plastic as walls to their homes? really! how is it possible that ARENA can call itself a party of voting with wisdom when it´s allowed people to go without water in favor of building ¨la gran vía¨ an upscale mall? the government of el salvador recently started building high walls in front of the shanty towns and ¨undesirable¨ parts of san salvador in order to hide the poverty. it´s extremely depressing. i didn´t see anything about this during that 5-minute infomercial narrated by that nurse.

on the other hand, the civil war was very recent (in historical terms), and some people are put off by the fact that the guerrilleros started it. they don´t look beyond WHY they started it. and funes, in a poor decision, selected a former guerrillero to run with as his vice president. i think this was a mistake....kind of like the palin factor in mccain´s bid for president. funes is very well-respected, and most of the negative ads run on television focus on his vice presidential running mate, salvador sanchez cerén. my family in molineros said as much to me when i visited them last week. they said ¨it´s not funes that we don´t want, it´s his running mate.¨

i was really mad one day because shortly after obama took the oath of office, ARENA ran an ad in the newspaper congratulating obama (even though, in my opinion, obama´s political ideologies couldn´t be further than those of ARENA´s). they did this in order to show salvadorans that they approve of obama, even though during the presidential campaign in the states they criticized obama for his campaign promises and ideals. the salvadoran government and tony saca were very close to bush. so after the results came in showing that many latinos in the states supported obama, ARENA did an about face and printed this huge ¨congratulations obama!¨ ad....a huge one-page portrait of obama with the ARENA logo at the bottom. if you are a poor person who can´t read or write, what do you think you see there? that obama is supporting the ARENA party.

shortly after this ad ran, the front page of el diario de hoy stated that ¨the u.s. embassy criticized the FMLN for using obama in it´s campaign ads!¨ i was like ¨WHAT???¨ antonio was fuming. apparantly, the guy who is in charge until a new ambassador is appointed here, made a statement saying that the u.s. is unbiased in opinion of either candidate and it doesn´t want either candidate using obama´s image to support its political campaign. funes did (and still does) use obama´s photo on television in an ad in which he shows both obama and lula (president of brazil) and says how he looks to them as examples of presidents of countries who are fair and just and that provide true democracies. i understand if el diario wants to accuse funes of using obama in his ads, but why omit the fact that ARENA is doing the same thing?

the press is not free here. it´s one-sided and sadly, it´s the ONLY form of information most people have. all i want is for the press to be fair and give educational insight on both parties and candidates. yes, i want funes to win....but my complaints lie in the fact that if el salvador wants to claim that it´s a true democracy, it needs to change a few things. you can´t have a democracy when all of the people making the decisions have been from ONE PARTY for almost 20 years. salvadoran citizens don´t vote on anything except for diputados, mayors and the president. there is no vote for city council, or ordinances or anything. so, for example, el tigre wins in apaneca and he´s for ARENA. he appoints the city council, who, guess what? are all from ARENA. how are there ANY checks and balances in that?

antonio couldn´t believe the absentee ballot i received prior to the presidential election in the states....full of choices of judges, councilmen, ordinances as well as for president. the ballot in el salvador is this: a single page with the flags of each political party. that´s it. then the voters put a big black x on whichever party they want to vote for. so, it´s not a vote for the candidate themself, its a vote for the party. and in this election more than ever, mauricio funes has been trying to distance himself from the idea that he is the FMLN, because of the connotations it has to the civil war. there is a group here called ¨amigos de mauricio¨ - a group of people not so much supporting the FMLN as they are mauricio. but when it comes down to it, a voter is putting an x not on the name of mauricio funes, but on the FMLN flag.

i realize it could be worse. el salvador´s not zimbabwe or some other country....like venezuela. people DO at least get to vote, however corrupt it might be. but i look at the state of this country and it´s obvious that what ARENA has done so far is not working to relieve the economic stress that this country has....no jobs (i´m not talking no jobs like the no jobs in the states....there are REALLY no jobs here), education rates, hardly ANY family planning education, the fact that the income for most people comes in the form of remesas from the states. it´s crazy!

anyway, i know i´m bad about expressing my political opinion and if you want to read a more educated and researched blog go to tim´s el salvador blog. he´s been great about posting some of my blog entries on his site, so i´ll do the same. his blog is a lot more informative and you might get a better picture of things through his posts than mine.

so the election is sunday. i´ll probably stay inside all day because i don´t want deal with any of the negative campaigning anymore. hopefully by monday el salvador will have a clear winner......mauricio funes!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTC05YOj02Q

by far, this trip was probably the best i´ve taken since being here in central america. maybe because it was my last trip down here for a while. anyway, i´ll just get right to it since it´s gonna end up being a long blog entry. we were gone for something like 20 days, but it was well worth it!

so we started out from my place here in apaneca. our first destination was ANTIGUA, GUATEMALA, which as the name indicates, was the old capital of guatemala. i have to say that i really had avoided going to antigua because it is a tourist magnet. everyone and anyone who comes to central america goes to antigua. there is a small english magazine called ¨revue¨ that circulates around central america that is basically all about guatemala, but has a section about el salvador and honduras as well. anyway, i always seem to be able to have the latest copy of revue from wherever...a hotel, the old hostal, some office in san salvador. anyway, what scared me was the fact that this magazine is chock full of ads for businesses, hotels, restaurants...mostly in antigua. if you haven´t noticed by now, after all my blog entries about travel, i´m not a big fan of the whole ¨gringo central¨ thing. but it really would have been a shame to not at least visit antigua once.

so, since apaneca is fairly close to the guatemalan border, we were able to get to antigua in about 6 hours or so. first of all, when our bus pulled into the antigua city limits, i was completely amazed. antigua´s huge! i didn´t expect it to be that big. antigua´s a colonial town (like suchitoto in el salvador, only a gazillion times bigger!). our bus pulled into this weird terminal out in the middle of nowhere and that was it....we were there. we walked around trying to figure out how to get to the main plaza and finally ended up taking a mototaxi because we had no idea where we were and our packs were dragging us down. finally we were in the park, sitting there trying to figure out where to stay. we asked a couple locals where the cheap places were and this woman told us the name of a couple hotels. on the way, we stopped at a few places that were mentioned in our travel books and found them to be completely crazy in prices ($45!!!!! that´s nuts!!!). we finally found a hotel that had super cheap prices.....$6 a night for the both of us. perfecto.

after finding the hotel, i wanted nothing more than to take a siesta. i had a splitting headache and was super tired from getting on and off buses all day. later that night when i finally woke up, i was starving so i decided to go see if i could find some food. i walked down to the main street and was surprised to see a mcdonald´s directly across the street from the entrance to our hotel. i haven´t eaten at a mcdonald´s in years, but the ease of being able to go in, see the prices and order quickly was too tempting, so that´s what i did. when i came back to the hotel, courtney saw the mcdonald´s bag and just laughed.

antigua reminds me a bit of santa fe, new mexico. it´s a town that has things like mcdonald´s and burger king and kodak shops, but the stores blend in with the town. they don´t announce their existence with big billboards and neon signs. and alongside the mcdonald´s and bagel barn there are plenty of artesenias - you name it - jade, woodworking, cigar and clothes shops along with fine art galleries and restaurants. it was odd seeing all the stores and restaurants that i had seen advertised in revue - most of them looked nothing like i´d imagined they would.

consumerism aside, antigua´s best feature is its ruins. i don´t know what the final count is, but on a map courtney and i counted at least 23 catholic churches, most of them classified as ruins. i guess in any latin american city you´re going to finad a number of catholic churches, but for some reason in antigua it seemed to me that every street we turned down there was a catholic church or ruins of one.

like i said before, antigua was the old capital of guatemala, so this is probably the major reason for all the catholic churches and old colonial style. the great thing about antigua is the fact that it has retained its colonial look and feel. one of the things el salvador has failed to do is preserve any of its indigenous or colonial heritage, which is unfortunate both culturally and economically. many tourists come to guatemala because they want a glimpse into the past...they want to see a people who have kept their original dress, language and communities. (this always confuses me because then these same tourists after experiencing this want to know where the nearest dunkin´ donuts is!) guatemala is a place that takes pride in its indigenous traditions, whereas in el salvador, it is not celebrated at all. nobody wears traditional clothing in el salvador, there are maybe a handful of old women who can still speak nahuat and colonial structures are often torn down instead of restored. i think this is part of the reason el salvador has a hard time attracting tourists (well, that and the fact that people are still scared of the violence of the civil war and the notorious gangs). el salvador has other attributes - the surfing, volcano hiking, and above all, the people - but cultural tradition is one thing that´s missing here. back to antigua.....it wasn´t just the old capital of guatemala until 1773, it was also the old capital of basically all of central america at one point. the spanish set up shop in antigua much like they did in mexico city and lima, peru. however, the majority of the structures in antigua met their end in a couple of terrible earthquakes in 1773. this prompted establishment of guatemala city as the new capital.

the next morning we had a plan to go check out the old cemetery as well as the park and the main church in the park. i was not feeling too hot and i kept thinking it was because i ate gross mcdonald´s. it wasn´t until later in the day that i realized i was having that oh-so-familiar parasite feeling. gross! but we went ahead with our plan and first went to the old cemetery on the outside of the main town area. i am a big fan of cemeteries. they are such quiet, well-kept and, despite being filled with dead people´s remains, peaceful places. this old cemetery is huge and literally every tomb is a bright white that almost hurt my eyes to look at. there is a small church in the cemetery - st. lazarus - that was simple and at the time, people-free. outside the church, to the right, was what would have been an amazing view of volcán agua which looms over antigua. but at the time, the top half of the volcano was hidden by clouds.

iglesia de san lázaro

inside iglesia san lázaro

view of volcán agua, half-covered by clouds

after visiting the cemetery we made our way through town back to the main plaza. in the park there is a 250 year-old fountain called ¨la llamada de las sirenas¨ (mermaid´s call). the fountain is beautiful even though it´s kind of weird seeing water pouring out of the mermaids´ boobs. you know, it doesn´t matter where you are in the world...you are always reminded of men´s fascination with women´s boobs. there are at least two volcanoes in el salvador whose nahuat names mean ¨breasts.¨ then you have the grand tetons in the rockies out west in the states. i could go on for days.....

immediately to the east of the park is antigua´s first catheral, catedrál san josé. it was first built way back in 1545, but that damned earthquake did it in in 1773 after being destroyed and rebuilt in-between 1545 and 1773. at one point it was huge - it had something like 18 chapels and a gigantic dome. only two of the chapels have been restored. buried under the alter of the old cathedral are a few people from Conquest times. the ruins are amazing. i can´t imagine what it was like back in the 1600´s when the church was at its biggest. i mean talk about making a statement. all those maya who were partially converted to catholocism probably thought there was no alternative with those huge catholic churches hovering over them. not to mention the fact that it was their labor that built them.

catedrál san josé

promenade of old government building that used to be the center of all of central america

view of old government building from the church plaza

inside catedrál san josé

view above in the ruins of the old catedrál san josé

tombs underneath the ruins

front doors of catedrál san josé, looking out on antigua´s main park and plaza

view of volcán agua from church plaza

anyway, we called it a day after all that religious archaeology. my parasites were attacking me and it ws time to find a cure.

the next day we started by walking down to the famous yellow arco de santa catalina, the site of a convent back in 1609. the iglesia de la merced is down the street and is also yellow - a really bright yellow. it was originally built in 1548, destroyed in 1717, reconstructed and destroyed again in - you guessed it - 1773. we didn´t go inside the church but we did visit the ruins on the other side. apparantly the fountain inside the courtyard is/was the biggest fountain in all of central america. i have no idea if that´s true but it IS really big, and, there wasn´t a breast to be seen anywhere on it. probably because there was a convent there back in the day. on the top of the cloister is a beautiful view of antigua and the volcanoes surrounding it: agua, fuego and acatenango.

arco de santa catalina

iglesia la merced

statue on fountain in la merced

wine casks

volcanes fuego and acatenango

after leaving la merced, we headed down across town in the hopes of going to casa popenhoe, which is a mansion restored to give an idea of what domestic life was back during antigua´s reign over central america. well, casa popenhoe was popen-closed so we headed further down the street and ran into the huge iglesia san francisco.

this church was built in 1579, but can you guess what happened? if you can´t, you haven´t been paying attention. yes, that blasted earthquake of 1773 destroyed it. this church is important because inside is the tomb of hermano pedro de betancourt, who was actually made central america´s first saint (and i think the ONLY saint) by pope john paul II. while the church itself is beautiful, the most fascinating parts of the place are the ruins and museum. even if you are not a religious person, the story of san hermano pedro is really interesting. hermano pedro was a franciscan who came originally from the canary islands and trujillo, honduras (a place i visited on my trip to honduras in july). anyway, he came to antigua and founded a hospital and did all these good deeds, including miracles of healing. the museum has tons of items dating from his time at the church, including his clothes, shoes, walking stick and furniture. probably the oddest things in the museum are hermano pedro´s deathbed sheets, clothes and get this - his underwear! these weren´t fruit-of-the-looms though. they were made of this strange mesh-like stitching and reminded me of chainmail. the tomb where hermano pedro´s remains are placed were originally in another tomb in the church. the church moved them to their present location and in the museum there are a series of photos showing the transfer of the bones as well as what the bones look like in skeleton form. pope john paul II came to give hermano pedro sainthood in 2002. i can only imagine the hoopla in antigua during the pope´s visit.

side entrance to iglesia san francisco

iglesia san francisco

inside iglesia san francisco

tomb of san hermano pedro bettancourt

paintings left on the ruins of iglesia san francisco

that night i had to decide if we were going to go on with our plan to leave for cobán the next day. i was not feeling well at all. the meds i had bought in the pharmacy were working somewhat, but i didn´t feel like getting in a bus and traveling for 6 hours. but i also didn´t want to screw up our plan so i just decided to wait until the morning to see how i felt.

iglesia san pedro, another catholic church in antigua

inside of iglesia san pedro

statues of maximón (san simón), the ¨evil saint,¨ for sale in a nearby artesania. we learned a lot about the maximón tradition when we visited santiago atitlán a couple years ago.

arco de santa catalina at night

more ruins

well, the next day, i didn´t feel any better, but i was on the last round of medicine so i just decided to chance it. we got on the bus and had to sit in back in the last available seat. i don´t know if any of you are familiar with sitting in the back of a bus but it´s the worst place to sit because you´re behind the rear wheels. so every time you go over a bump or are on less than smoothe streets you get shaken up like a martini. and since we were in the middle of colonial antigua with its cobblestone streets, by the time we got to the city limits and on the highway, i was was ready to lose it. my stomach felt like i had just swallowed a bunch of double-edged swords and they were slicing my insides open. it was horrible! when we finally arrived in guatemala city, i was on the verge of calling the trip quits. i saw no end in sight to the parasites and i imagined myself miserable and in pain and farther away from home. in guatemala city i could have easily made it back to apaneca by nightfall and that sounded more appealing to me than dealing with feeling gross for the next 2 1/2 weeks in hotel beds and on buses. but an amazing thing happened. when we got off the bus and got into a taxi, i started feeling a bit better. i think it was just that sitting in the back of the bus made things worse. or maybe the medicine finally was killing the parasites and they were all giving their final death cries. i don´t know. but by the time we got on the bus for cobán, i was feeling 100% better and ready to go. now i just had a 5-hour bus ride to make it through without the pain coming back!

so we were headed for COBÁN (not to be confused with copán ruinas in honduras which i visited back in 2006). cobán is located in the alta verapaz area of guatemala, high up in the pine forests. apparently, back during WWII times there were some germans who set up shop in the cobán region. bus since some of them were nazi sympathizers, the u.s. government urged the guatemalan government to oust them, so they were pressured to leave. however, they left a lot of their architecture and so cobán has quite a few buildings with chalet-type looks to them...which is odd amongst the lamina-roofed houses and central american style that makes up the rest of cobán.

when we finally got to cobán it was already around 5:00 so we had to find a place to stay. i hate this part of traveling - trying to find a place that´s cheap and wandering around like an idiot in search of that place. normally when we get into town we basically have to ask how to get to certain hotels that are listed in the travel book. often times we get to a particular hotel and find out that their prices are triple what the books says, so we end up wandering around until we find something reasonable. but we often run into people who tell us a hotel is one way when it´s in the opposite direction. or people lie and won´t tell you where someplace is because they want you to stay in their cousin´s hotel. however, in cobán, we ran into this nice guy who wanted us to stay in a hotel that he worked for. we told him we didn´t have that much money so he pointed us in the direction of hotel la paz which, he said, was 73 quetzales, less than his hotel. so we headed in that direction and, before we actually found it, we passed another hotel and this guy was going in and he said ¨you should stay here, the rooms are cheap.¨ so we checked out the room but realized it was a shared bathroom and it was 100 quetzales a night. then we found out that the guy we were talking to was only paying 50 quetzales a night because he was guatemalan and we didn´t think that was fair. so left and found hotel la paz and it was only 73 quetzales just like that first guy said, and we had our own bathroom. after all that was done it was like 2 hours later....that´s why i hate the whole ¨looking for a hotel¨ thing...it´s so time-consuming! anyway, we settled in and were happy.

the next day we just decided to hang around cobán. i was outside our room, in the courtyard and there was an old woman sitting out in her pajamas on a bench. i started talking to her and found out she was the owner of the hotel, but i think she had short-term memory because she kept telling me how she´d traveled to egypt, spain, italy, mexico and the united states. i´d go ¨how did you like egypt?¨ and she´d say, ¨i´ve traveled to egypt, spain, italy, mexico and the united states.¨ it went this way for like 20 minutes. she was comical. then coronado, the hotel manager kept walking by and saying hi to us. he was so funny, but kind of a pervert, so we made sure we didn´t act toooo friendly towards him because we didn´t want him to get the wrong idea.

we walked around cobán and tried to find a woman courtney had met a tourism fair in san salvador. she was selling jewelry with orchids in them and had given courtney the information on the association in cobán. so we set out looking for her. first we went to the mayor´s office and got some information. they gave us two choices, neither of which led to the woman. we decided to go a clinic where supposedly a doctor there knew something about the association, but when we finally found it, the doctor wasn´t there. so we walked around some more and found an artesenia that coincidentally had the jewelry courtney was looking for.

chilis for sale in the cobán market

colorful tela in the cobán market

later we decided to walk up to a church called el calvario. el calvario sits way up above the city so to get there we had to climb up a series of steep stairs, passing by various shrines (and a passed out drunk) along the way. at the top, the smell of copal filled the air. copal is used in mayan religious ceremonies and i wasn´t sure why this man was burning it. while he was burning the copal, he was chatting with this woman while a little kid was hanging around gathering wood on the ground. there was a beautiful view of all of cobán from the church plaza on top. we walked into the church and found it empty. the thing that is interesting about latin american churches is that they all have something that sets them apart from the churches we saw the day before. in guatemala almost all the catholic churches have signs of both christian and pagan religions, whether it´s in the paintings (like the churches in antigua) or in the statues (like the church we saw in santiago atitlán on one of our previous trips to guatemala). i walked outside and started talking to the man and woman...i wanted to know what bird was making this crazy noise up in one of the tall trees. they told me its name was ¨ardilla¨ which is what squirrels are called as well. we talked some more and then courtney and i decided to make our way back down.

the first set of steps up to el calvario

iglesia el calvario

view of cobán

inside iglesia el calvario

at the bottom, we walked over to parque las victorias, the entrance of which was just about a kilometer away. when we got there we asked the guy at the entrance what time the park closed. he said 5:00 - it was about 3:00 so we asked if two hours was enough to hike the trails inside. he said ¨yeah¨ so we paid the entrance fee and went in. he gave us ¨walking sticks¨ which were just broom sticks. we headed down a trail and past a small laguna. the trail snaked through the forest where there were tons of tropical plants, trees and flowers. we climbed up for about 45 minutes until we ended up high above cobán and had a view of the other side of the city. we came to a sign that said ¨la montañosa trail, 4 km¨ to the right, and ¨el caracol trail, 8 km¨ to the left. we had taken the la montañosa trail to get up to the top and we had done that in 45 minutes. we thought well for sure we could go downhill on the caracol trail in 1 1/2 hours. so we decided on the caracol trail since we hadn´t seen that part of the forest. things were fine until we were about 45 minutes in to the hike and we were hiking uphill, then downhill, back uphill, and downhill again. we were also getting closer to the highway on the other side of the forest and further away from the entrance which was completely on the other side. it was getting really annoying. the trail kept going back and forth, up and down, and hugging the highway. we didn´t like being next to the highway because who knows what kind of people could just enter the forest from the highway. it´s not like in the u.s. where running into a highway is no big deal. here in central america, highways usually have a lot of foot traffic and delincuencia. anyway, so we just kept following the trail and the minutes kept ticking away. finally we ended up at the top of the mountain and a bit farther away from the highway and back into the middle of the forest. but we still didn´t know where we were in relation to the entrance of the park. it was now 5:00 and it was starting to get dark. finally we saw the roof of a building we thought was the visitor´s center which we had passed on the way into the park. but the trail we were on didn´t go past the building - just farther away . i was like ¨screw this.¨ i saw some lights, like along a road by the building through the trees and i told courtney we should just leave the trail, climb through the forest and get to the road by the building, especially because it was getting dark. so i led the way, trampling over the brush and thorny trees and we finally ended up on a trail by the building and the road that was in front of it. only the building wasn´t the visitor´s center, just a regular house and we were like ¨how the hell did we end up here?¨ we followed the road out of the park and ended up by cobán´s fútbol stadium. we followed the road back into town and realized we were really far away from the park entrance, on the other side of town! so we walked back to the entrance because we had to give back our broom stick walking sticks and when we came up to the entrance from the outside, the guard had this look on his face like ¨you guys are idiots.¨ we made our way back to the hotel feeling stupid, but relieved we had made it out of there before dark.

la montañosa trail

the next morning i woke up and courtney was gone. she had gone back to the park because she realized she had lost her camera case somewhere near the beginning of the la montañosa trail. she came back and said she didn´t have any luck finding it, but had run into a group of guatemalans who were hiking through the park for exercise. they told courtney she shouldn´t be walking through the park by herself because it is dangerous. they asked her, ¨haven´t you read the newspaper?¨ apparently gangs hang out there and rob people of everything - including their shoes! so i guess we were lucky that the only horrible thing that happened to us is that we got super lost!

anyway, that day our plan was to go to BIOTOPO DE QUETZAL. the biotopo is also known as biotopo mario dary rivera after a guy from san carlos university who was murdered in 1981 for battling timber companies in trying to establish protected areas for the quetzal. the quetzal is guatemala´s national bird and the name of its money, and its also a sacred symbol in the mayan world. problem is, it´s in serious danger of becoming extinct, mostly because its habitat is being destroyed. seeing one in the wild is rare, but it is possible, especially in the biotopo.

we took a 1 1/2 bus ride south to the biotopo and when we got there it felt like it was abandoned. nobody was at the front gate, so we walked up the trail and found the visitor´s center. we looked around a bit and then a man came down another trail and introduced himself as one of the park guards. he told us all about the park and about the trails and said the last time he saw a quetzal was a year ago. he explained that there were two trails and suggested we take the shorter one because the longer one was three hours long and it was threatening to rain. we agreed and set off by ourselves. the trail we were on was called el sendero de los helechos, which means the trail of ferns. and ferns there were on this trail. much like in parque las victorias, the trail led through the huge park amongst plants and flowers and even passing by a small waterfall. the biotopo de quetzal was a little wetter than parque las victorias because it´s at a higher altitude and most of the reserve is classified as cloudforest. we saw a bunch of pajuiles - a huge bird - and when we came back from the hike we were able to see some toucans in the trees at the entrance of the park. i really liked the biotopo and would have liked to have been there super early in the morning to catch a glimpse of more birds, but because it´s far away from cobán, it´s hard to get there really early unless you have a car. but i left happy at just being able to hike through the protected reserve.

quetzal in the visitor´s center at the biotopo....sadly, probably the closest i´ll ever get to a quetzal is this dead stuffed one....

on the los helechos trail

a pajuil through the trees

when we got back to cobán we decided to go check out the cost of a trip to SEMUC CHAMPAY - a series of limestone pools located in the lanquin area of guatemala. getting there by bus would have been difficult as there´s not much public transportation in or out of the area. we went next door to our hotel to another hospedaje that had a sign advertising trips to semuc. the price ended up being pretty reasonable, so we booked two seats for the microbus the next day.

the next morning the two drivers of the microbus got us at our hotel. when we climbed in the van, it was about full already. there were these three french-speaking girls, a german couple, and another couple in the back who didn´t talk so i didn´t know where they were from. nobody really talked that much the whole trip, except for one of the french girls who wouldn´t shut up. anyway, the van stopped about halfway to semuc and we got out and took in the beautiful view overlooking the mountains. it was really interesting because the mountains looked like thousands of small hills as far as you could see. we took some photos, then continued on our way.

when we got to the pueblo of lanquin, we turned off and continued down a dirt road until we came to a stop in a small parking lot. the driver said something about that these were the lanquin caves (grutas de lanquin) and we were going to stop here first and then continue on to semuc. well, we didn´t know we were coming here but figured since we were there, we´d pay and go check it out. i mean, we weren´t about to sit and wait in the van while the rest of the people went into the caves. so we paid and followed the three french girls and the driver into the caves. the driver was explaining about the caves and it was odd because he would only pay attention to the french girls. the old german couple was behind us and we were all trying to keep up with the driver and the french girls. then courtney said she though that the girls had paid for a guide to the caves and since we hadn´t that was probably why the guide/driver was ignoring us. that totally made sense, but then we were pissed because we didn´t even want to come there. we bought tickets for a ride to semuc, not the caves. and for us to have to sit in the van and wait for the french girls to have their guided tour was ridiculous. so we continued on with the german couple behind us. at one point the german woman turned around because i think it was difficult for her to climb up and down the slippery rocks. but her husband continued on with us. i didn´t really learn that much about the caves because the guide wouldn´t explain anything to us. but what i did catch is that is that the maya use the caves for religious ceremonies.

well, we continued on and i wanted to pass the french girls, so courtney and i did that, but then we came to what looked like a dead end. so we stood around and then the french group came up to where we were and the guide said to them in spanish ¨so here´s the end.¨ so courtney and the german guy started back and i followed and when i passed the guide, i heard him say to them ¨and now i have a little adventure for us, we´ll go down a little further on a different trail through the other part of the caves and come out on the other side.¨ like he was tricking us or something and we were missng out on something by not being able to go with them. we didn´t even want to go to the caves in the first place! we were really annoyed. we returned back where we came in and when we got back to the van, the german guy kept making comments to the other driver who had stayed with the van. i told courtney that i bet the german guy would go off on both of them at some point, because of the nature of germans. the german couldn´t speak spanish and his english was so-so, but he started getting really pìssed because it was getting later and we were still waiting for the french girls and their guide to get back. i kept telling courtney to get ready for a show from the german. sure enough when the french girls and the guide finally approached the van, the german blew up. the talkative french girl said ¨are we ready to go?¨ all smug and irritating and that was the last straw. the german guy yelled ¨hurry up! we´ve been waiting for you for over an hour!¨ then he started yelling at the guide/driver - in english - and he was saying he didn´t even want to go to the caves, that he and his wife are older and can´t climb around caves. why would they want to come there? then the french girl started arguing with him - in english - saying how they paid for a guide and the german said ¨we didn´t pay to come here!¨ it was hilarious! most of all because they were all arguing in english and it was all that stupid driver´s fault because he was trying to show us all up by taking those girls on that secret adventure. it was quite entertaining. we got on our way and the driver was trying to make up time so he was going way too fast on the road to semuc. it was crazy!

so we made it up to semuc in one piece and since we didn´t want to deal with any of the drama surrounding the french girls and their coveted guide, courtney and i tried to get a head start. we decided to climb the trail up overlooking the limestone pools first and then actually swim in them later. the trail up to the lookout was very steep and rocky, but our goal was to get up to the top before the french group caught up to us. i´d never climbed a trail like this before. there were parts where we actually had to climb up these ladders because it was so steep. finally, after about an hour we made it to the top and were rewarded with the amazing sight of the limestone pools below.

semuc champay from above

the cahabón river flows over (and under) the natural limestone bridge, which is why the water is a such a clear turquoise. we had a few minutes to enjoy the view when we heard the group coming. we took the last of our photos and went on our way. we followed the trail with miguel, who was supposed to be helping the other guide with the french girls. he said he didn´t feel like hiking with them because they weren´t very friendly, so asked if he could hike with us. we got down to the pools and miguel guided us around the bridge in order to view the river as it plowed underground. miguel told us that on time a tourist fell off the natural bridge and into the water and died, and when his body emerged downriver where the water hits daylight again, the only thing they found was a finger! he said the fish all at the rest! gross! later, we swam a bit and then it was time to go back to cobán.

the rio cahobón

when we finally got back the germans had had enough of the driver and at one point told us, in english, that he ws basically just stupid. i couldn´t have agreed more.

the next morning it was time to move on from cobán. we had another long trip ahead of us. we were heading north to flores in the petén district of guatemala. to get there we had to ride a microbus to sayaché, get on a boat across the river ¨la pasión¨ and then take another bus to santa elena/flores. so we begrudgingly walked over to the terminal and immediately hopped on a microbus packed with others on their way up north. it rained most of the way and we had to stop several times so the cobredor could cover everyone´s stuff that was on the top of the van. on the way, courtney made friends with this young guy who, when we got to sayaché, helped us with our stuff on the boat across the river. then, when we got to the other side, he ate with us at a comedor on the bank of the river. he told us he was in the military and works at the belize/guatemalan border putting data into a computer about other countries like the congo and haiti. we didn´t really understand, and he didn´t get into it any more than that, but it sounded like it was some kind of top secret government-type information. he was super nice and rode with us all the way to santa elena. he told us that when we passed through the belize/guatemalan border we should stop and say hi if he was there.

anyway, we took a mototaxi from santa elena to flores, an island full of hotels and restaurants which serves as a base for most people who are going to visit tikal which is about an hour and a half away. we were planning to go to tikal, but not until after we visited belize. so we found a cheap hotel and basically just crashed.

the next morning we were off to BELIZE. we took a bus to the border town of melchor de mencos. the road to melchor was not a paved one and the trip took a lot longer because of it. when we finally got there, we avoided the money changers, crossed the border and entered belize. our entry into belize was quite shocking. central american borders are very sketchy, dirty, filled with do-no-gooders and the migration offices are always kind of ramshackle. well, not so in belize. we entered the office and filled out a form (something we´ve never had to do crossing other borders in central america) and then when passing through inspection (again, never had to do that before), they confiscated my pears! all these sighs had warned about bringing in fruits and i guess i should have pitched them, but i only had four of them! anyway, we had known that belize was going to a bit more expensive than guatemala, honduras or el salvador, but we were in for a huge surprise.

when we got out of migration, taxi drivers bombarded us and we did need a taxi so we asked how much it was to go to benque, where we had to catch a bus to belize city. the price? $5!! ok, so that might not sound like a lot to people living in the u.s., but in el salvador, for example, you can get a taxi from one side of the city to the other for about $4 or $5. and the taxi to go to benque only had to go 3 km. we were starting to get nervous...we were thinking maybe we didn´t have enough money to actually do anything in belize.

we chatted with the cab driver, which was weird because it was in english. we were not used to speaking english, but since english is the official language in belize, we had to get accustomed to speaking it again. we started noticing all these chinese restaurants and tiendas and we asked the driver why and he said, ¨it´s the government. they let the chinese come here for free.¨ well, whatever the reason, there were a lot of chinese-owned establishments in belize. interestingly, belize seemed to be a mini-america melting pot of cultures and religions. we saw afro-carribbeans, latin americans, americans, chinese, and even saw a few mennonites, complete with horses and buggies.

we hopped on the bus to belize city and we even found the bus situation different from el salvador or guatemala. there were some kids standing up in the seats and the cobredor reprimanded them and made them sit down. in fact, he made everyone sit down and didn´t allow anyone to be standing in the aisle or anything. you would never see a cobredor doing that in el salvador....it´s mayhem on the buses there! courtney and i were saying ¨we´re not in central america anymore!¨

the biggest thing i noticed about being in belize (aside from the high prices for everything) was the lack of people. it was nice to be somewhere where the buses weren´t overloaded with passengers, houses weren´t everywhere and people weren´t crowding the highways. just to be able to look out and see an uninhabited landscape was nice. the books say that there are about 300,000 people in belize. ok, so belize is about the same size as el salvador and el salvador has 7,000,000 people. big difference!

so on the bus ride we were just hanging out when this guy comes back and asked us where we´re from. we got to talking to him and he told us he´s a record producer from dallas, texas and he was down there in belize looking for the ¨next big rap/hip-hop artist.¨ his name was aaron and he was born in belize. he said that he´d been shooting a video in belmopan with the rapper sitting a few seats up, named mr. program. ??? he showed us this CD and it´s by mr. program. then aaron started telling us how in belize they charge tourists exhorbitant prices and if we needed a belizean to go around with us, we could call him and he´d prevent us from being overcharged on park entrance fees and things like that. courtney and i were both thinking, ¨is this conversation really happening?¨ when the bus got into belize city, aaron, courtney, me and mr. program got off the bus and we said thanks for the offer, but we were on our way to one of the islands. so they pointed us in the direction of the water taxi terminal and we were on our way. throughout the rest of our trip in belize we kept asking people if they knew mr. program and surprisingly, some people actually did! go figure.

we got to the terminal with a decision to make: which island to go to? caye caulker or ambergris caye (san pedro). our books said san pedro was more expensive, but it is supposed to have better beaches and be a prettier island overall. caye caulker would be more budget-friendly, but not as scenic. then we saw a billboard up in the terminal that advertised a place called ¨pedro´s inn¨ that stated that it was the cheapest hotel on san pedro and had rooms for 20 belizean dollars ($10 american). the ticket booth lady said san pedro was prettier, so we decided to go to SAN PEDRO (AMBERGRIS CAYE).

we hopped on the boat and since it was getting dark, we didn´t see anything on the 1 1/2 hour boat ride. there weren´t too many people on the boat and we were the only tourists. the boat stopped at caye caulker to pick up some boxes and then we were off again for san pedro. when we finally docked it was about 7:00 and we had no idea where to go. the boat guys told us we´d need a taxi to pedro´s inn so we walked down the main street and checked out the hotels there first. we kept hearing hollers and shouts every couple of minutes coming from the various establishments on the main street. we were like ¨what the hell is going on?¨ the places were filled with americans and then we put two and two together and realized it was super bowl sunday. i had no idea! when you´re traveling you kind of lose track of the dates and sometimes the actual days. courtney and i rolled our eyes and continued on our search for a hotel. we found a taxi and told him to take us to pedro´s inn which was on the opposite end of the island.

when we got out there, courtney went in and i waited in the taxi. she came out and said they had one room left and it was $30 (american). the taxi driver said, ¨that is the cheapest you´ll find on the island, believe me.¨ $30 was waaaay more than we had budgeted for but it was the cheapest so we had to take it. so we unloaded our stuff and went into the bar which was filled with older americans - mostly men. they were all drunk and there was a huge flatscreen t

well, back in november i attended my final salvadoran graduation. it was a really busy day. in the morning we had the graduation for my school and later antonio and i were invited to attend papa chepe´s daughter´s graduation in ataco. it was a bittersweet experience! although i was glad to see all the kids graduating, it was sad to think i wouldn´t be there with them again next year...especially those 6th graders. this year´s group of sixth graders were really great and i had been with them since they were in 4th grade. they are all supposedly going on to 7th grade which is a big change from the previous sixth grade classes i had worked with. so i was really proud of them, especially the girls. anyway, here´s some photos from our school´s graduation.

me and the 6th grade girls.....they are on their way to seventh grade! as for me, i´m on my way back home.....

luz de maria

the graduating kindergartners

don jorge´s son abel (don jorge was one of the witnesses for my wedding)

me with two really great 5th graders, ruth and selena

all in the family.....deysi, the oldest, with her two sisters reina and heydi

6th grader rafael antonio

me and jenifer (and her little sister in front)

the 6th graders with the teachers

me with chus, ever and luisito - maria laura´s son

next it was on to papa chepe´s daughter´s graduation. she goes to a catholic school in ataco that has a really large number of students. i thought that was really nice that they invited us to the graduation because it wasn´t just the church ceremony and then the ceremony at the colegio. it was dinner and dessert as well! that´s what i love about salvadorans....even if you are not a physical member of their family they will treat you like you are. they invite you to eat with them, invite you to all kinds of family-oriented celebrations and are really happy to have you. that´s what makes peace corps so rewarding....you get to make all these new ¨families¨ even when you´re missing your family back home. anyway, here are some photos from that event.

me with papa chepe´s family

papa chepe´s whole family (and antonio) and the graduating girls

me and papa chepe after dinner at the colegio

papa chepe´s daughter (right) and her cousin with their medals for excellent marks

so that´s the last graduation i´ll be attending here in el sal and i hope everyone who i taught and saw leave my school in san jorge continues to study until they graduate from university!! buena suerte!

i finally learned what it was like to go out and pick coffee all day. well, i say ¨all day¨ like i was out there at the crack of dawn and worked ´til sundown or something. not exactly. mirna invited me to go with her and her sisters and their kids to her family´s finca after christmas. back in the day, mirna´s grandparents built a hacienda-style house in the forests around ahuachapán and the surrounding land is filled with coffee trees. for a starter coffee lesson, i wrote about the coffee process in this previous blog entry. today´s entry covers more about how the coffee gets cut, who does it and how the coffee is prepared before it´s processed.

my preparation for cutting coffee started with finding a canasta, or basket. on christmas day antonio and i went over to visit papa chepe at his house in san jorge. i told him i was going out to ¨work¨ the next day and so he lent me his basket.

before i go on, i had to post this picture.

when antonio and i went over to papa chepe´s house, it was pandemonium. all these kids were there, papa chepe was drinking guaro (it was 9:00 a.m.!) and this duck was wandering around their house. then it hopped on the couch and papa chepe came over to drunkenly talk to us about politics and sat down on the couch on top of the duck! but the duck didn´t even care, it just moved over.

anyway, enough of the quacks. so the day after christmas antonio and i met mirna at her house and her three sisters came over with all their kids. i think there were 10 of us in all. we packed up and got a pickup ride out to the campo. when we were on the dirt road up to the hacienda, this woman comes running out on the road and says we need to help her. apparently her 2-year old daughter was in the car waiting for her mom to come out and while she was waiting, she locked the doors with the keys still inside. this happened like 45 minutes before we showed up. so we all got out and went over to where her car was and this little girl was screaming inside. the mom didn´t want to break the window, but we were all like ¨you have to break it.¨ i tried jimmying the lock with a wire hanger because god knows how many times i´ve had to do that in the past with my car. but then the girl started vomiting and this guy immediately broke the back window and got her out. it was really a weird event.

so after we all got over that, we hopped back into the truck and continued on deeper into the forest. finally we arrived at the hacienda and hung out for a bit and ate some food. then mirna and her sister took me down to the part of the forest where all the workers were. it was time to start picking coffee.

first we talked to the mandador and he showed mirna where they had been cutting coffee that day. antonio had to show me how to pick the coffee off the branch. my instinct was to just pick each semilla off like you would a cherry or something. but he showed me how you hold the top of the branch, bring your hand down the whole branch and let the semillas just fall into the basket.

so then it was my turn. let´s just say i´m not that advanced of a coffee picker. i did my best. you know, though, i think i had mentioned before in a previous blog entry how coffee cutting is boring, dirty work. well, it is dirty, but boring it´s not. i really liked it, fijate. granted, i didn´t pick that much - compared to what a normal day´s collection is. you´ll see the fruits of my pathetic pickings a little further down when the guys weighed it.

after i kind of filled my basket, it was off to watch the pros do it. here are some photos of some of the people who were out that day.

mirna and her sister waiting around for me to pick my coffee

this guy was too funny. when i was going through the forest taking pictures of everyone, he was eating his tortilla for lunch. i didn´t want to take a picture of him eating, because, well, he was eating! so i said hi to him and then continued on through the forest. then when we were leaving, he came and chased me down and i came back and he asked me really politely if i would take his picture. so i did and he was super happy.

so back at the hacienda, everyone kind of made it back in their own time with their daily product. as i talked about before in the previous blog entry about coffee, everyone then sits out on the grass and separates the green semillas from the red and yellow ones.

everything is then re-bagged and then weighed with a roman scale, like the one in the photo below. each person gets their coffee weighed individually because they will be paid for what they picked.

ok, this is the funny part. this is MY bag of coffee. 12 pounds! that´s it! so pathetic. most people had one sack - which is equal to 150 pounds, or 6 arrobas. mine? 12 friggin´pounds!

once the sacks are all weighed and re-bagged together, the entire lot is weighed again and compared with numbers from the individual weigh-in. these are the final numbers that are given to the beneficio when the finca owners take the coffee there.

it was quite a day! in-between picking the coffee and weighing it, mirna took us down to this waterfall that didn´t have any water because it´s the dry season. but it was a fun hike.

women carrying water from the chorro down by the waterfall back up to their homes.

a view from the top

anyway, so if any of you are wondering what it is like to cut coffee, that´s how it is! hope you enjoyed seeing it!

shame on me! it´s been roughly two months since i wrote last and i´ve got nothing but excuses as to why not. i hope i haven´t lost all of you. i know i said i´d wrap the blog up after peace corps was done, but i´m not going to wrap up quite yet. mostly because i´m still here in el salvador (and will probably be here until march) and i haven´t even posted any entries about anything i´ve done these past two months. i at least want to get some photos up before i sign off. i´m also going on one more trip with courtney (probably our last!) to guatemala in a couple weeks and we´re going to tikal, so i definitely have to post pictures of that.

anyway, so over the next week i´m going to be posting a lot....just updating you all on what i´ve been up to. once my trip´s over and i´ve posted about that, i´ll probably be be ready to sign off.

so first off, i´m gonna post some pictures of christmas and new year´s! i even had a christmas tree this year....a $6 bargain at the grocery store. we had decorations and everything.... christmas eve we went over to antonio´s family´s house and ate dinner once around 7:00 and then ate again at like 1:00 in the morning. the next day we ate christmas dinner again. i was soooo full!

me and antonio in front of our tree

me and gloria knitting on christmas eve

so on new year´s, courtney came to hang out with us. i made chili and we bought some guatemalan 4% alcohol champagne.....didn´t you know guatemala was famous for it´s grapes? i´m kidding. anyway, we ate chili and drank some champagne and then headed outside to let off fireworks. my neighbor, el licenciado had his family over and invited us to his house. licenciado was drunk! he kept offering us tequila and i didn´t want to drink anything really. the guatemalan champagne was fine with me. but we drank a few tequilas with him. but he kept pouring us more and more and i was like ¨please, no more!¨ but he kept on pouring. licenciado´s son is married to a japanese woman and they live in mexico city. so they were there, along with their other japanese friends who also live in mexico city. well, let me tell you....the fact that there were three languages being spoken and there was all that tequila....new year´s was quite hilarious. licenciado kept trying to talk to us in english and then moto, the japanese guy who is friends with licenciado´s son and wife didn´t understand spanish or english very well. so we were all trying to communicate and at one point i would have killed for a video recorder. anyway, so new year´s was really unexpectedly hilarious.

our guatemalan champagne

me and courtney toasting in 2009

shortly before midnight we all went outside to let off fireworks. here´s antonio in the street in front of the house.

courtney trying to light our sparklers

me and antonio...i have about three layers on, it was freezing!

licenciado´s son in the esquina setting up some fireworks

licenciado in-between hugging everyone for ¨feliz año nuevo!¨

licenciado´s mom (right) and his cousin, enjoying the fireworks from inside

anyway, hope everyone is having a great 2009! more soon.......

it´s been a weird couple of weeks and i guess i have been neglecting the blog because i don´t know how to sort it all out in blog form. you know i only have about a month and a half left of service...my COS date is the 30th of december. that date is good and it´s bad. it´s bad because i have a bunch of interviews and medical things to do right around the time of the COS, but because it´s christmas it´s gonna be like trying to spot a quetzal in the wild trying to get everyone in the office at the same time. but the 30th is a good date because it really is at the ¨end of the year.¨ come january 1st i´ll officially be done with peace corps and i´ll be entering a new phase of my life when january 1st comes along.

and you know, it can´t come soon enough. i´m ready to be done with peace corps. i´m not necessarily ready be done with el salvador, but i have to admit i´m ready to end the peace corps chapter of my life. i have been thinking this the past few months, but then a couple weeks ago, during the last week of school, the kids gave me a despidida (going away party) and it was sad. some of the kids were bawling their eyes out! the older kids wrote me letters and they were filled with so much love and friendship and gratitude....it was hard to read them all. i tried to tell them that while i was leaving the school, i wasn´t necessarily leaving their lives, because i married antonio and since he´s from here, i´d definitely be back to visit. and so i think that made the goodbye better for everyone. but still, it was odd to think that i wouldn´t be back next year. it´s definitely a bittersweet experience. i´ve seen this coming for some time, so it´s no surprise that i feel this way. but i think for the past few months i´ve been trying to prepare myself for what´s coming after peace corps that the whole saying goodbye to my community and the kids and all that kind of snuck up on me.

but i still have a month and a half before things really start to change. i had to have skin cancer surgery a few weeks ago and it wasn´t that serious or anything....well, i guess any surgery is serious, but it wasn´t like i was having brain cancer surgery or anything. but every day starting a couple days before i had to go into san salvador to have the surgery until maybe four days after, mirna called me every day to make sure i was doing ok and i wasn´t in too much pain. niña domy called me to see how i was and offered to come over to my house and clean and wash clothes. antonio´s family acted in much the same way. elba, maria laura and mirna all came over with cake and café and food to surprise me a couple days after the surgery. people in apaneca who i normally see every day when i walk to the bus stop were concerned when they hadn´t seen me in a week. ¨qué pasó?¨ everyone wanted to know.

anyway, what i´m getting at is that in a month and a half i´m supposedly leaving this environment. and it´s tough to think about. as much as i´d like to get a job and start earning money again and using a washing machine and all that, i´m just so conflicted about how happy i´m actually going to be re-entering the united states and not living here where everybody really does give a damn about me. there are people back in the states who are family and supposed friends who i haven´t heard from in a year. it´s so funny because the idea of not talking to someone who is your family or your really good friend is just crazy talk as far as salvadorans are concerned. the idea of everyone living their separate lives is strange to them and i guess it´s become strange to me as well. which is why it affects me when i don´t hear word one from anyone back home.

but cultures are different and for the moment, the culture i´m living in is a salvadoran one, and i have to admit i´m quite nervous about leaving it. i was sitting at niña domy´s house the other day and elba and mirna were saying their goodbyes to her until they return in january and i thought how strange it was to be seeing them say that, knowing i won´t be with them when they come back in january. and how strange it is that hanging with niña domy drinking cafecitos and placticaring is going to end at some point.

last but not least, it´s almost time for the blog to come to an end! qué lástima! but the blog has been about my time in peace corps and when that ends, so does the blog. so hopefully i´ll be able to fill it with some worthwhile things before i close its doors forever. so remember to keep checking in!

that´s it for now. my dad´s coming to visit in a couple days and i´m pretty excited about that. don´t know if he´ll like the wind...yes, it´s that time of year again...but i´m sure it´ll be warmer here than it is in ohio right now. at least there´s no snow here.

adios.

if the financial times have you down in the dumps, maybe the following photos will cheer you up a bit. they are just a random selection of photos i took at my school during both the kids´ día del niño celebration and during a science lesson i did with the younger kids about butterflies.

well, even though it´s a month after the fact, i have photos from last month´s independence festivities. they are much like the previous photos i´ve posted of the parades and fiestas, but they are unique all the same. i have to tell you, i´m so glad independence day is over! for about 6 weeks prior to independence day (the 15th of september), the only sound you hear all day and every day is the sounds of drums. playing the same four songs over and over and over again. practicing for the big parade. there are three schools here that have bands and so it seems as if every minute of the day is filled with one band or the other practicing their tunes. apaneca is not big, so the sound of the drums all together resonates throughout the whole pueblo making it impossible to escape. you get so used to the sound that when you realize they´ve stopped, you feel like you´re living in paradise. bless ´em though, those hard-working, drum-playing kids!

the last night in september, they close out the ¨mes de la independencia¨ with another parade (same as the one on actual independence day) and they carry these fuel-lit torches. i can´t think of anything more dangerous (except for the catholic church´s pyrotechnics display during the fiesta de patronales) than a bunch of kids with lit torches marching through town. but there were no disasters, so i suppose it was all a success!

these are pictures from the independence day celebration at my school

i know, it´s been awhile. but you know, i am sure the last thing on anyone´s list to do right now is read my blog with what has been going down in the u.s. lately. geez! anyway, sooner rather than later, i´ll have a real update. things are busy here as well, leaving not that much time to write and/or upload photos. but i´ll find time, i promise!

until then, keep your money safe!

what the heck are farolitos? well, glad you asked. the english word for ¨farolitos¨ is ¨lanterns.¨ but farolitos is also used as the name of a celebration we have here, and only here, in the department of ahuachapán. in all of el salvador, only two towns have a farolitos celebration: ataco and ahuachapán. on september 7th of every year, in these two towns, people come from all over to hang their own farolitos in celebration of the virgen mary. la virgen de maria is the patron saint of both ataco and ahuachapán, and on september 7th, both towns are absolutely glowing.

¡viva la virgen maria!

after getting back from suchitoto, antonio and i were both super tired, but i didn´t want to miss out on farolitos in ataco, so we hopped on the bus again. after the short 5-minute bus ride, we arrived in ataco just in time to see almost every owner of every store and house adorning their stores and houses with farolitos. the traditional farolitos are hand-made with wood frames. see-through colored paper is then glued to all sides of the wooden frame. tie a few pieces of string and put in a regular old candle and you´ve got yourself a farolito. if you don´t feel like making your own, you can buy them (still hand-made, just not by you) at most tiendas in ataco (or ahuachapán, depending where you live).

these are what the traditional farolitos look like

it really is a beautiful sight. it totally reminds me of christmas. the church has it´s farolito display outside the church and various streets have their own as well. and you can hang yours wherever you feel like hanging it. there was a small procession of women from the church carrying a statue of the virgen mary through the streets, followed by fireworks and this year, a lively music show consisting of rock and ranchera.

hanging lights on the church´s display

the church´s official display directly in front of the church´s main door....there was kind of a running mass going on at the time as well

it seriously is almost like how you go see the christmas lights in whatever city you live in back in the states.....only the lights are all candle-powered instead of using huge mega watts of electricity. while the candles are burning bright, people are out and about, socializing, eating tons of food and drinking café or chocolate. the public school in ataco had an especially pretty display....a long line of farolitos set on the ground, leading to the huge plaza in the center of the school. the plaza was lit up like a christmas tree.

the long line of lights to the school plaza

inside the plaza, a wooden cart with a paper-made boy and girl inside, surrounded by farolitos

some kids in the school who were REALLY excited about the fact that i had a camera and REALLY wanted their picture taken

soon, unlike those christmas lights powered by electricity, the candles burn out and everyone winds down and brings their farolitos inside where they will wait until next year´s celebration. but for those couple of hours when the farolitos are all lit up on every street and corner, it´s a truly magical place.

the alcaldia (mayor´s building)

one of the community street displays

i thought this mural, painted on a wall on one of the streets, was clever. they painted farolitos on the mural, but also hung real ones in front of the painting.

a salvador del mundo display (salvador del mundo is the patron saint of san salvador, and generally speaking, all of el salvador)

the libras de amor display (libras de amor is a foundation that helps the poor by giving them food and helping women start up small businesses)

the farolitos outside my very favorite yuquetería

outside ataco´s fmln headquarters....not surprisingly, ALL of their farolitos were red

more of the fmln´s display

an arch of farolitos over a street

some non-traditional farolitos

a hand-painted farolito

flower farolitos

man and woman farolitos

this one is a giant farolito which is a replica of the catholic church in ataco

for the past three years it´s rained cats and dogs on my birthday. particularly awful was my birthday in 2006. it wasn´t that i was feeling down because it was my birthday and nobody cares about your birthday here, or that i was away from friends and family or anything like that. it was more the weather....this god-awful pouring down rain that was cold and depressing. all.day.long. i also remember that it was a wednesday and seriously, there could not be a more boring day to have your birthday than on a wednesday. so that wednesday, i sat in my tiny, dark cuarto at the hostal and huddled under my blankets, listening to the rain dump itself all over the place and wishing the night would be over as quickly as possible.

2007 was a bit of an improvement. and this year was a complete turnaround. this year´s birthday fell on a saturday and that was the best thing ever! antonio and i made plans to leave apaneca this year, since it is always raining like crazy here in september. it was not looking good though as i headed into san salvador on friday for a doctor´s appointment. rain poured down as i got off the bus and it followed me all the way to the doctor´s office. by the time i came out it had subsided a little, but damn that rain! antonio and i didn´t want to waste a weekend going to suchitoto if it was just going to rain the whole time, so antonio kept calling me and asking me what the weather was like in the capital. often times it´s raining when i leave apaneca to go somewhere and when the bus pulls into juayua or sonsonate or ahuachapan it´s clear skies as far as you can see. but taking the bus back up to apaneca, there are dark clouds hovering over the mountaintops and you can´t believe you just left those sunny skies behind.

anyway, we decided to just go for it. antonio met me in san salvador that friday night and the next day, my birthday, was sunny for the first time in three years! we hopped on the bus out of the capital and sat back watching the farmlands of cuscatlán pass us by. i went to suchitoto back in 2005 during training, but i didn´t have a camera (well, i had that crazy 35 mm behemoth that i had to buy after my digital camera got fried. i took a few photos with that thing, but the photos were developed so crappy......i don´t ever think i posted any of them. i think instead i posted pictures that other people had taken and given to me. anyway....). but this time, the camera was working, the sun was shining and everything seemed to go fine.

suchitoto was the old capital of el salvador before san salvador was crowned the new capital. people (well, tourist books and the like) like to say that suchitoto is what antigua, guatemala used to be before all the tourists came. i don´t know if that´s the case because i still haven´t visited antigua, nor do i know what it was like way back in the day before tourists started coming in. but i´ve been to suchitoto twice and it is a beautiful, old, colonial pueblo that has managed to keep it´s architecture, small-town feel and pueblo pride intact. it felt somehow appropriate to be spending a birthday here in this old town, as i am getting to that age.....i´ll be a relic myself before i know it.

antonio had never been to suchitoto so i suggested we go out on a boat on the lake. the lake is not natural...it was filled in about thirty years ago to provide electrical power to most of the country. the río lempa, the biggest river in el salvador, flows both in an out of the lake and there is a dam on the eastern edge of the lake which produces the energy.

antonio was not crazy about going out on the lake, mostly because he can´t swim and fears any kind of water activity. i was like ¨oh for crying out loud...it´s a damn boat with a guy steering it and everything!¨ after finding our hotel, we walked down the long road to the lake and approached the dock and another family was looking to go out as well, so we shared the boat and the fee. i´m glad i ¨forced¨ antonio to go out there because he ended up really enjoying it. antonio´s a really friendly person and always gets in these conversations with people and it was no different with the boat driver. this guy was telling us all about how the whole lake used to be a town before they filled it in and how some areas are over 100 meters deep. then he was telling us that during the war, he and other fisherman who worked on the lake, used to have to take both guerillas and the military across the lake in canoes.

the interesting thing was when i was out on the lake in 2005, we went, i think in october. the water at that time was way higher, and we couldn´t even see the grass or land part of most of the islands. the trees just looked like they were growing out of the water. this time when we went out by the isla de pájaros and the other islands, the water was clearly lower because we could actually see the land.

it did rain a bit, but nothing like it normally does in apaneca at this time. it was just a normal invierno shower that fell on us as we circled the islands and listened to the boat driver tell us about the animals and life back during the war. he mentioned how the birds have altered the catch the fisherman are able to haul in, because the birds are able to dive at great depths and are catching fish while they´re too young to reproduce. this leaves the number of fish that are able to reproduce at lower numbers, hence the low numbers of fish the fisherman are bringing in.

when the boat trip was over we were able to catch a microbus up to the pueblo and from there, we headed over to the church. when i visited in 2005, the church was undergoing renovations and had a bunch of scaffolding in front of it. but it was scaffolding-free this time around. it is a lovely colonial church and i couldn´t help but be jealous that the church was not under construction, unlike the church in apaneca which still isn´t finished. we meandered around town taking photos of the architecture. it´s such a nice pueblo, really laid back but with a life underneath that you know is there even if you can´t see or hear it all the time.

that night it was spinach pupusas for me...mmmmmm. we went back to the hotel to watch el salvador play haiti in the second round of the world cup qualifiers. el salvador won - 5 to 0! it was an all around great birthday for me. gracias, suchitoto!

antonio actually having a good time despite being out in the middle of the water

the nimph flor

some of the birds

a moro tree

back at the beginning of august, antonio and i went to visit courtney in her pueblo, dulce nombre de maria, for their annual fiesta de maíz. their celebration of corn includes various vendors selling elote loco, tamales de elote, rigua, atole de elote, and of course, tortillas de elote. all i have to say to that is yum. they also have a little parade and groups of bailes folkloricas, as well as the crowning of the year´s reina de maíz (queen of the corn). the candidates for queen all have to make dresses made out of corn...the kernels, husks, tassels, etc. a group of young kids also did a play about how corn was a gift from the earth.

in keeping with the corn theme, the other day papa chepe, this guy in san jorge gave me half a sack of elote. i was like ¨thanks,¨ but then i was thinking - what the hell am i gonna do with this corn? it was a nice gift because anybody would kill to have someone give them a half a sack of corn. so i asked niña domy if she would teach me how to make tamales. so last friday i went over to her house and she taught me the art of making tamales de elote and unlike my unsuccessful attempts at making perfect tortillas, the tamales turned out really well. mmmmmm....tamales and crema, the perfect meal.

anyway, here´s to corn!

little girls dancing a baile de maíz

candidates for ¨reina de maíz¨

this girl won, not surprisingly. courtney was saying how the candidate from dulce nombre wins every year. (the other candidates were from surrounding cantones and pueblos)

elote loco!

so my fourth trip through honduras was pretty amazing. while it really was not what i expected it would be (things in central america rarely are) i was really glad i was able to see this part of honduras. like i mentioned before, most of the trip was spent on the beaches, but they are such historical places in the history of the colonization of the new world, that it wasn´t just that we were ¨on the beach.¨ we decided to take the maximum number of vacation days that the peace corps allows you to take at one time, and so for 21 days we explored lago yojoa, cerro azul, trujillo, roatán and triunfo de la cruz.

so back on july 9th, we started out in tegucigalpa (honduras´s capital) but only for the night. with the exception of the twisty road leading from el salvador to tegus which made both me and courtney frightfully nauseated, that part of the trip was rather uneventful. we had come on that road before the last time we visited tegus, but we were on a chicken bus that time and because of the frequent stops, the bus never got a chance to get up any real speed around the curves. this time we took a tica bus for $15 and it was cruising along....getting us there quicker, but definitely sicker. after spending the night in tegus, we headed out the next morning for lago yojoa.

LAGO YOJOA

this lago is about the size of lago atitlán in guatemala (or so i guess) but doesn´t have any volcanoes around it (there are no volcanoes in honduras). we arrived late in the day and decided to stay at this cheap place called D &D, owned by an expatriate american from oregon. he has a nice little place set up, along with a microbrewery (?) and a restaurant. the odd thing was, we didn´t really get what ¨the¨ thing was about the place or the owner. when we got our room, we were browsing around the sala outside of our room and found these old and current guest books. that night, after we ate dinner, we sat in our room like high school girls and read the comments from the guest book.....we really didn´t have anything better to do because it was raining cats and dogs. we drove ourselves to hysterics reading the comments people left in the books: ¨i´ve found paradise on earth here at bob´s place...¨ ¨oh, the blueberry pancakes are sooo good..¨ ¨thanks bob for showing us your artifact collection....¨ ¨i´ve been searching for heaven on earth my whole life and i´ve found it at the D&D...¨ and on and on and on. one after the other about bob and the D&D and all that. we passed bob in the driveway a couple times and he was nice and all, but why all the comments? we figured there must be a special club or something. the comment about the artifacts was quite funny though, as one night we decided to go for a walk down to the main road and we ended up by the soccer field. there was a game going on, so courtney and i found a bench and sat and were watching it when this jeep pulled up and parked next to where we were. then a couple minutes later a pickup with two guys in it pulled up behind us and asked us if we were the owners of the jeep. we´re like ¨um, no.¨ the jeep had illinois plates, which was strange. the guys from the jeep said that it was theirs and then later, one of the jeep guys comes up and asks us where we´re from in english. turns out, he´s from the states, but lives in mexico now. his friend, the owner of the jeep, is a latino from illinois (which is where courtney´s from) and so we started chatting with them. they had started a central american road trip some months back and ended up in lago yojoa. they initially were going to stay at the D&D, but didn´t like the idea that they´d have to be back in the hotel by 9:00 p.m., so they found a family that was willing to let them stay for however long they wanted. so they had been hanging around the locals for quite some time now. anyways, they told us that all the local people that live in the area called los naranjos (where D&D is located) think that bob, the D&D ownder is down here just so he can steal ancient artifacts. they kept talking about how he already has a huge collection of stuff and all this. courtney and i were laughing because of what we had read in the guest books about how he shows his artifact ¨collection¨ to all the gringos and backpackers that come through.

anyway, whatever it is that bob is doing, he´s got a nice, cheap place to stay. it seems to me that it´s like a little gringo enclave, though. for the life of me though, i don´t know why people want to travel to honduras and then eat, drink and sleep like an american while they´re there. why go to honduras when you can do that at your local pub and in your own home? it has to be cheaper, right? well, enough about that. let´s talk about what we did at the lake. our first day, we went outside of town to a huge waterfall called ¨pulhapanzak.¨ we took the bus and then had to walk a couple kilometers to the entrance of the park. the falls were amazing, and i liked the park because it had all these different trails to follow. there were so many crazy bugs and tons of anthills, as well as birds and butterflies. across a bridge there was also a really tranquil area by the river, before it went over the falls to just sit back and hang for a while. there are also caves behind the falls, but we decided not to go because it costs money to get a guide to go through them. everything costs money it seems, and seeing as we didn´t have that much and we were on the first day of a 21-day vacation, it was wiser to just enjoy the falls and leave the caves for another time. (besides, i see enough bats as it is every day of my life living in el sal, so having them fly around my head and freak me out more than normal i can live without!)

the pulhapanzak falls

some of the flying creatures around the falls

the next day we decided to try our chances at rowing from the canal out to the lake itself. we figured, how hard can it be? well, it really wasn´t that hard. it was a lot of rowing, that´s for sure. and it was the only day during the entire vacation that i got a hell of a sunburn. we were told that we could rent a lancha from this old man, don oscar, that lives down the road from the D&D. we headed over there and he gave us some oars and told us he´d walk down to the banks of the canal with us. we got down there, got in the boat and after a bit of a rough start we finally made our way out of his eyesight. the canal was so peaceful, just birds singing in the surrounding trees and the occasional other rowboat passing us. we finally made it to the marshes and the mouth of the canal out to the lake. it was hooooot and we tried to get out into more open water, but the sun was fierce and before long, we just decided to go back. i didn´t realize how far we´d gone out into the lake until we started rowing back. i thought we´d never make it! once we did though, we were rewarded by seeing these pretty, colorful little birds on the shores by the marshes. we rowed across one of the bays and a couple of fisherman in another rowboat passed us by near this humungous tree dripping with spanish moss. we decided to row back as we had been gone for more than three hours, but we still took our time, stopping to take pictures and just enjoy the scenery. when we finally made it back to where we started, don oscar was standing on the bank waiting for us. apparently, the two other fisherman that had passed us had come back and told him that they thought we needed help or something. don oscar said he was about to row out and see if we actually did need help! we were like ¨no, we were just taking our time.¨

the canal leading out to the lake

a view of one of the highest peaks in honduras from across lago yojoa

the big tree with the spanish moss where the fisherman thought we were in need of help

those two adventures made up our trip to lago yojoa. there are more things to do around the area, but we would´ve had to get a guide and spend at least two more days there in order to do everything. i really wish i knew more about birds...i know the basic birds of the states, and even now the ones in el salvador. but as far as all the birds that can be identified at lago yojoa, i really wish i knew more about their sounds and names and all that. oh well. we had a reservation for our hotel in roatán and sort of needed to stay somewhat on schedule in order to make the ferry to roatán the following week. so we packed up and on sunday morning, we left for probably the biggest mistaken detour of any of the trips i have been on!

CERRO AZUL

on the way to the desvio for the lago when we had first come, i saw this sign on the side of the road. it was maybe 20 minutes on the highway before we had to get off at the desvio to go to our destination at the lago.

so on that sunday morning, i thought ¨we have to go retrace our steps and go back to that area where i saw that sign.¨ i told courtney what i thought we had to do and she´s like ¨ok,¨ so when we got back to the desvio, i saw another bus going the way we needed to go and i told the driver and he´s like ¨hop on.¨ we got on and the bus took off and the cobredor asked us exactly where we were going and we said ¨cerro azul¨ and he didn´t know what we were talking about. so i explained where i thought it was and he said, ok, it´s 50 lempiras to go there. i thought that was really expensive, but we both paid it. then later, the cobredor came back and was like ¨we don´t understand where you want to go.¨ so the bus driver is looking at me in the rearview mirror through the door and tells me to come up front. so i did and i sat there in the seat by him and i tried to explain the entrance and the sign i saw and whatever. then the cobredor comes back up with courtney´s travel book and the bus driver pulls over to consult the book. i was embarassed because what did all the other passengers think when the bus pulled over like that? so i say, ¨i can tell you when i see the sign.¨ so he kept going and finally, i saw the sign above. so we got off the bus, got 2o lemps back each (because the driver thought the trip was longer), said gracias and were now on the side of the highway in front of this sign wondering what to do next.

we walked a few yards up the road we assumed led to the park entrance of cerro azul. we asked a couple women standing on the side of the road how far it was to the entrance and they both got this look on their faces like we were out of our minds. they said it was about an hour and a half climb. we asked if there were pickups or anything that went up there to the entrance. they said no. ok, so we decided that we were just gonna have to walk, even though we had our huge backpacks weighing like 50 lbs. on our backs. but what else were we gonna do? so we started walking and got about 1/2 kilometer when we see these two guys over on the side of the hill we were climbing. one of them, believe it or not, drove a mototaxi, and he kept saying ¨it´s a looong climb, you know you´re tired. why not just let me give you a ride for 75 lemps.¨ we thought it over and just decided to go. so this guy picks us up, he´s a real character, totally cracking himself up the whole ride up. after about 15 minutes in the mototaxi we realized we made the right choice in paying for the ride because there were no signs and lots of cutoffs and it was a lot of uphill insanity. so we get all the way up to this cluster of houses and he stops in front of this little white house and he says ¨ok, we´re here!¨ and i´m like ¨what? this is the entrance to the park?¨ i expected to see a ranger station or something and an entrance gate and all that. but no, we were in front of this little white house.

the driver keeps saying ¨this is where all the gringos come!¨ and we´re saying, ¨this doesn´t look much like an entrance to the park.¨ he gets this confused look and drives us up a ways to another house. a woman comes out and we explain what we want to do and she then explains to us that we´re looking for los pinos, the official entrance to cerro azul, which is on the OTHER side of the mountain, back where the desvio we had come from when we left the lake was. courtney then mentions that she saw a sign there at the desvio and i´m like ¨huh? i didn´t see anything, and why didn´t you tell me you saw another sign?¨ so anyways, as it turns out, no tourists really ever come to the part of cerro azul where we were...just scientists and researchers who are studying the biodiversity there. and also as it turns out, the little white house where the mototaxi driver took us is the home of two peace corps volunteers who are married and doing their time in the little village of cerro azul where we currently were standing wondering what to do next. the volunteers weren´t home at the time - they had gone to guatemala or nicaragua (we got several different stories on that) for vacation.

so the woman that came out to talk to us, odelia, she kept saying that if we wanted we could stay in a house there, but there weren´t any real marked trails or anything to follow. we´d basically just be in cerro azul, not able to actually hike cerro azul. finally after trying to figure out what to do, odelia just said we should stay there. because by the time we got down to the highway, got on another bus, hiked up to the park entrance at los pinos, the day would be over and we were planning to head out for trujillo the next day. i heard her mentioning to another woman who had drifted up and was observing our predicament that it was good because we spoke spanish, not like all the other visitors that come there only speaking english. we finally just took odelia´s advice and she walked us up to ¨the house¨ where we could stay. well, after some placticaring with odelia, we found out that they are trying to start tourism there, and the community had built a couple cabins behind this other woman´s house. that explained why odelia was somewhat trying to get us to stay, but was still a little unsure of herself in telling us that there were cabins for people to stay in. turns out, odelia is one of the people in the community group trying to get tourism started. the other woman, magdalena, said she would fix us food and all that and we could stay in the cabins for like 200 lemps a person. so it was a pretty good deal...that´s roughly $10 a person. by this time like 5 people had heard how were the ¨lost girls¨ and how we hadn´t even meant to come there. but we got our cabin, which was quite nice, and ate some breakfast with magdalena and her daughter, mariela.

after breakfast, magdalena told mariela to take us to the waterfall....it was the only place they had carved out a trail to. so we took off with mariela and her cousin up the mountain to this waterfall. the mountain basically had two things: bananas and café. there were other trees and what-not, but the mountain was just covered with these banana trees, and then rows and rows of coffee trees. we made it to the waterfall, which was damn pretty, and damn cold as well. after checking it out and watching courtney fall down on the rocks (ha ha!), we headed back to the town.

later that day, we decided to take a swim in the river that ran behind the house. i don´t know why i wanted to because it was cold outside and the river was even colder. but i figured as long as i was there, i might as well try it out. the water was crystal clear and the swim felt great. but it did feel nice getting OUT of the water as well. after the swim, we ate lunch and then we decided to take a walk further up the road to another cluster of houses. it was a long walk up, and we saw another trail in the distance that we thought perhaps we could tackle. but when we got back to the house and asked magdalena what she thought, she gave us the same look of ¨are you nuts?¨ that lots of people seemed to be giving us lately. later that night we were eating dinner and this guy comes in with this book and he´s like ¨so you´re the turistas perdidas?¨ everyone in that town must have heard about us by then. he wanted us to sign the ¨visitor´s log¨ for cerro azul and when we read the list of names, sure enough, the only people that had visited were biologists, researchers, zoologists, etc. he brought a map of honduras as well, and i was really surprised to see that we weren´t at that high of an altitude. i´m always surprised to see places that i think are at a higher altitude and find out that they´re still not as high of an altitude as apaneca.

me and mariela in front of the waterfall

this tree was completely hollow and so courtney and i took turns crawling in and taking our pictures. then when i got out, mariela and her cousin were looking inside it and found a snake skin! i was grossed out! i hate snakes and would have died if one was in there when i was!

the river where we took a swim

the big community stone oven up the street from where we stayed

in front of the mountain called ¨cerro azul¨ - even though you can´t really see it because of the cloud cover, this mountain was HUGE

our little cabin

after a crappy night´s sleep (i thought the sound of the rushing river below would put me to sleep, but instead it kept me awake), we caught the 7:00 a.m. pickup back down the road to the main highway. that was a nice ride, just passing along all the trees and birds and naturaleza. at the highway we sat and waited for a while for a bus to pass going to san pedro sula. i talked with this old woman that was down on the drunks. it sounded like she hadn´t had a very good life on account of her drunk husband and one of her sons. i felt kind of bad for her, but you know, that´s a lot of women´s stories in el salvador. husbands/fathers/sons hooked on the guaro. we finally caught a bus and were on our way to trujillo, by way of san pedro sula.

TRUJILLO

we ended up having to stand in the front of the bus we boarded because there were no seats. that gave us the chance to freak out oncoming traffic, which did lots of doubletakes at seeing two gringas standing in the huge front window of the bus! it also gave us the chance to realize that the cobredor of our bus looked EXACTLY like moe from the simpsons. seriously, he could have been his non-cartoon twin. the rest of the trip up to san pedro sula was uneventful, except for the high number of dead cows with vultures feasting on them on the sides of the road.

when we arrived in san pedro sula we were dropped off in this huge new bus terminal - seriously, it was like being in an airport. we had to get a cab to get to the place where the buses go to trujillo and so tried negotiating a cab. the first guy we talked to gave us this ridiculous price and i was like ¨wtf?¨ he then said that ¨you´re norteamericanas, you have money to pay the fare.¨ you know, fuck him. and fuck everybody else who goes around judging other people before they even know them. i mean it....this is an open letter to whomever goes around stereotyping and generalizing people before knowing ANYTHING about them other than their physical appearance. knock it off already. anyway, we finally got a cab for a not-so-unreasonable price and high-tailed it over to the other bus station. there we boarded a bus bound for trujillo.....we had a long six-hour bus ride ahead of us and i was not looking forward to it.

slowly we came to tela, then to la ceiba. i was chatting with the guy next to me, santos eugenio, and he was pointing out all the different trees and what-not. he then told me to look at the pineapple plantations and at first i was like ¨um, ok, they´re just a couple fields of pineapples.¨ but then those couple of fields turned into millions and millions of pineapples in like 100 fields or something. i´ve never seen so many of anything in my life! not even corn fields in the states.

after la ceiba we entered into kind of a no man´s land. most people who come to the coast, end their trip in la ceiba in order to take the ferry to the bay islands. we were headed for the bay islands as well, but we were going to visit trujillo first and then make our way back later in the week. the highway to trujillo became less and less populated with people, and more and more populated with groves of palm trees. i think they were date palms...they looked different from the palms that bear coconut trees, plus i didn´t see any coconuts on any of them. also i had read something about how some guy came to the area and planted african date palms. anyway, there were millions of these as well, on either side of the road. nothing but palm trees for miles and miles. then the occasional desvio or town.

finally we got to the end of the line. the bus dropped courtney and i off at this deserted-looking desvio because we were headed out towards puerto castilla, not actual trujillo. we had read about this cheap place to stay on the beach which was about 5 kilometers outside of trujillo. this desvio was deserted though, nobody in sight. then this kid comes out of nowhere, out of the sugar cane fields and immediately comes up to us and asks us for money to buy food. i gave him a 5 lemps and he took off and i was really hoping the bus came because that desvio was giving me the creeps. we waited what seemed like forever for the bus and it never came, so finally we were able to hitch a ride in the back of a pickup from these two guys. they had no idea where casa kiwi (the place we were staying) was, but offered to take us until they saw the sign. finally we arrived at this battered sign saying ¨casa kiwi¨ with an arrow pointing to the left. the guys asked us if that was it and we said yeah, but there was this really long road and we felt bad making them drive us all the way down it. they took us anyway and when we came upon the place, it looked abandoned (much as everything did since we left trujillo). we got out of the truck and offered to pay the pickup driver and he said something about how our amistad was payment enough. hombres, i swear. anyway, someone came out of the back of the restaurant at casa kiwi and we breathed a sigh of relief that it was still in business.

standing in the middle of the road to casa kiwi this is what you see.....

.....and when you´re leaving casa kiwi this is what you see

why did we want to come to trujillo? well, for some time, both courtney and i have become somewhat intrigued by a certain guy with the name william walker. in both of our travel books there are short blurbs about this lunatic filibuster from the united states who came down to central america in the 1850´s and basically tried to create his own republic in central america. he tried in nicaragua, costa rica and honduras. he was actually ¨president¨ of nicaragua for a short period, a presidency declared by himself. anyway, he tried and failed this republic like three times and finally, when he was driven out of nicaragua, he was captured by the british off of the coast of honduras. they eventually turned him over to the hondurans in trujillo, instead of sending him back to the states. so the hondurans took advantage of the opportunity and executed him by firing squad! so he was buried in trujillo and there is a monument in the old fort there marking the spot where he was killed. i think that´s a crazy story and both of us really wanted to see where all that took place. plus we heard trujillo was a nice relaxing area to chill out. unless you´re william walker.

so casa kiwi was something different. it´s pretty much a backpacker´s place, but there was hardly anyone there when we arrived...a few guys from germany and the czech republic and the u.s. casa kiwi is - as the name suggests - run by a new zealander and is one of the cheapest places to stay in trujillo...$4.50 a night! it´s set on a bay that includes trujillo and puerto castilla...from the beach at casa kiwi you can see trujillo to the left and puerto castilla to the right. there is nothing but vegetation on either side of casa kiwi...an almost deserted beach. the place got a real battering during hurricane mitch back in the 90´s and you can tell because there are no wild palm trees on the beach. they were all destroyed, along with all the other trees in the area. but even without the huge palm trees, you can still tell you´re in paradise! the only bad thing about trujillo were the sand flies. ugh, they went to town on us even though we had bug spray and baby oil and all that. they ate our skin and left us with what looked like chicken pox. i didn´t get it as bad as courtney did thank god....i got more bites on my arms, while courtney´s legs looked like she had some awful disease. and oh my god do the bites itch! yuk.

the beach in front of casa kiwi....you can see trujillo across the bay

we left the following day for trujillo. we first visited the fort which is one of the most beautiful places i´ve been. obviously, the fort was built by the spanish who came and conquered the area. it´s set up on this hill and everything out front is pure crystal blue caribbean sea. trujillo is also one of the areas of honduras where there are a large number of garifuna. i wrote about the garifuna when i went to livingston back in december 2006, so i won´t write too much about that this time.

one of the buildings from the fortaleza in trujillo, which houses the little museum there

standing at the front of the fortaleza, overlooking the huge sea

anyway, there is a small museum there with artifacts from both the native indians that lived there before the spanish conquest, as well as things like swords and whiskey jugs (those were great!!!) from the spanish conquistadores. we also saw the little statue where william walker was executed. (by the way, if you want more info on william walker, email me, because my friend ben says that i have enough information on psycho william walker for a master´s thesis or something..ha)

we met these nice, if not really touristy, families from the u.s. there. they were real chipper and friendly and kept offering to take pictures of courtney and i in front of the fort by the cannons. then they asked us what we did, and when we said we were peace corps volunteers in el salvador, they were kind of like ¨oooohhh.¨ everyone always gives us that reaction when we say we live in el salvador, like it´s this war zone and it´s sooo dangerous. i mean, it´s dangerous, but i´d say it´s no more dangerous than any other central american country. but hondurans and guatemalans and everyone thinks el salvador´s like iraq or something. it´s not. anyway, these two families we met were not related, but the two fathers were best friends. and one of the men, his father was actually born and raised in trujillo. he was white as white could be and had some kind of an accent, but i couldn´t place it. anyway, so this old man, in his 80´s, was showing his son´s family and the other family around trujillo and talking about how things were when he lived there. the old man said that now he lives in siguatepeque (near lago yojoa) and he´s a surgeon and spends most of the year in honduras, when he´s not visiting his family in the states. that was pretty interesting.

an old map of the fort in trujillo...this was in the little museum that had all the interesting artifacts

the monument marking the spot where william walker was executed

we stayed there a bit and then ventured off through town to try and find the ¨cementerio viejo¨ where william walker was buried. trujillo does not have a latin american feel, despite the reggaeton and ranchera music blasting in the streets. the houses are all wood plank type houses, not the adobe or cement ones found in places farther from the beach. even houses near the beach in el salvador don´t look like the ones in trujillo (and livingston and triunfo de la cruz, etc.). we found the old cemetery and the man working there was like ¨here´s william walker´s grave!¨ there is a little cement sidewalk leading to it, and the grave/tomb itself is enclosed in an iron gate. the cemetery was quite strange because the tombs were all like you´d find in an old cemetery in the states....no bright pink and turquoise and purple tombs like you find in almost every latin american cemetery. and the names of the people....all english, european people. i saw inscriptions with people from israel and palestine and spain and france and many from england.

flowers in the cemetery

william walker´s grave, which says he was killed by ¨fusilado¨

the cemetery entrance

we left the cemetery and made our way back to the center of town and walked down to the beach. the sun was absolutely fierce and we took shade under a roof on one of the piers. we decided to walk back up to the park to get the next bus out to puerto castilla and casa kiwi. as we were walking, we saw a bus coming and we were like ¨if we´re lucky, that bus will be the one we need and we won´t have to walk up this huge hill.¨ so we asked the driver if it was going to puerto castilla and he said yes, so we hopped on. we were patting ourselves on the back for timing it so well when the bus climbed the hill and back through the park. all these guys got on the bus and they were real loud and rowdy and we made our way through town, back out to the desvio where courtney and i had been dropped off that first night we arrived. but as we got to the desvio, the bus turned the other way...opposite of puerto castilla! courtney and i were like ¨whaaat?¨ the guy sitting next to me said they were going to turn around maybe. and then the driver started saying how the bus wasn´t going to puerto castilla, but the other town on the way to ceiba. we were like ¨wtf?¨ and courtney´s trying to yell at the driver, in spanish, how he told us the bus was going to puerto castilla. so we got up to get off the bus and hopefully catch a bus going the other way.

well, the joke was on us. the whole bus was playing us big time and when we went to get up they all started laughing and were like ¨no, we´re really going to puerto castilla!!¨ me and courtney were busting up laughing and saying how there must not be much for people to do in trujillo if this is how they get their jollies. but it WAS good joke, because we believed them!

the lovely sunset behind puerto castilla

anyway, we spent our last days at trujillo just sitting around and enjoying the beach. at one point, on our last day, we were relaxing on the beach when i turned to see what i thought was a mirage.....a herd of cows and goats coming down the beach! i did a double take and said to courtney ¨is that what i think it is?¨ sure enough, it was a herd of cows, goats and a few dogs, being driven by their owners down the beach and up to a ranch way down on the other side of casa kiwi towards puerto castilla. only in central america.

what´s this? a herd of cows?????

¨don´t mind me¨

one afternoon we were sitting in the hammocks by the restaurant and this guy comes out, says his name is otto and he orders us two rum and cokes. we´re like ¨who is this guy?¨ well, he´s the owner of the christopher columbus hotel, further towards trujillo. it´s this resort type hotel and it´s named christopher columbus because like every other beachland up and down the u.s. and central america, columbus landed there in trujillo. anyway, we suspect that otto is joy´s ¨special friend¨ (joy is the new zealand friend of the owner of casa kiwi. joy and the owner split the year working at casa kiwi...joy for six months while the owner travels, then joy goes on vacation while the owner ¨works.¨) anyway, otto was just one of the many characters we met on this trip.....like nelson, the poet/writer working at the fort in trujillo who was trying to get his book published; the czech dude and his german friend staying at casa kiwi, who bought brand new machetes because they were continuing on to the mosquito coast at some point, but who couldn´t even crack open a coconut with the new machetes...otto had to do it for them.....i wonder if they ever made it to the mosquito coast?; the man who we met at the abandoned desvio the first night we arrived, who was on his way back home from selling vegetables in the trujillo market all day and who´d just gotten deported from the u.s. like 3 months ago; shane, another backpacker we met, who cracked us up and told everyone he was 32, when he was really 40, because he didn´t want to feel like a ¨grandpa¨ amongst all the other younger backpackers...he fessed up on his little lie after i told him i was 35!!!

i really regret not planning to go the mosquito coast instead of some of the other things we did. we were so close to the mosquitia when we were in trujillo. but i think a trip to the mosquitia is a trip in and of itself, so maybe one day i´ll make the trek.

ROATÁN, ISLAS DE BAHIA

joy gave us a ride in the casa kiwi van back into trujillo on friday morning and we had to flag down the bus going back to la ceiba. it stopped and we got on and we were then in for another 3 hour bus ride. when we finally arrived in la ceiba, it was pouring down rain. the bus stopped right in front of these huge puddles of water and we couldn´t do anything but step right in them. we hauled our backpacks off the bus´s undercarriage and under a little tiny roof where there were cab drivers hollering if we needed a ride. ¨taxi? taxi?¨ we asked one of them if he could take us to the grocery store because we wanted to get some last minute foodstuff and boozestuff there. the hotel we booked for roatán had a kitchen: we were figuring that food prices were going to be sky high on the island, so we wanted to be in charge of cooking our own food so as not to be forced into paying ridiculous food prices. the cab driver said he could take us over to a grocery store, so on we went. but then came the dilemma of how we were both going to go into the grocery store but leave our backpacks in the car. the cab driver kept saying that he was honest, he wasn´t going to drive off with our stuff. but we were like on the fence, because that was all our stuff. obviously we were going to take our money and passports and all that in with us, but still, if our backpacks were stolen, we´d be screwed. we decided that i´d go in, but just as soon as i got in, courtney came in and said that our cab driver parked the car and got out and was chatting with other cab drivers. so she kept going out to check on him, and he´d wave at her. i felt bad that we were being so suspicious, but i guess it never hurts to be.

after we got all our stuff at the grocery store, we were then off to the dock where the ferry to roatán leaves. it was a little clearer, but as we bought our tickets ( a whopping 1,024 lemps!!! a huge surprise there....) and waited in the lobby it kept raining off and on. we sat there in the lobby watching revenge of the nerds on the lobby television (so hilarious! i forgot how funny that movie is...although it was even funnier when the part came where the nerds put those video cameras in the girl´s dorm room and they were showing everything, because one of the workers came over and changed the channel and waited like 2 minutes and then turned it back. apparently classic revenge of the nerds nude scenes are more offensive than reggaeton videos, which are shown everywhere, no matter if there are kids around or not! haha). anyway, finally we all boarded the boat and courtney and i were excited to finally be leaving for the bay islands! little did i know that i was in for one of the most horrible experiences of my life.

as we sat there waiting for the boat to leave, the crew started passing out barf bags and i was like ¨i´m not gonna need this!¨ the sky was a bit oscuro, and it kept raining, but the boat took off and we were on our way. from about the moment we left the shore line until we got to roatán, was hell. the boat picked up speed and the water was really choppy and so we were slamming into these waves and going up and down and side to side and immediately people started barfing. it was horrible! then courtney started barfing. i felt like i was in the story of gordie´s in stand by me where that fat kid makes everyone barf. at one point i looked to the side and the boat was really far over on its side before it righted itself. a young guy sitting next to us gave us a couple t-shirts to put over our heads because we were getting soaked by the incoming waves, so i was trying to just huddle underneath it and not think about how shitty i felt. i hardly ever get seasick...christ i was on that sailboat for 7 days and i never once got seasick. but i was definitely getting really close to barf bag time. finally, we approached roatán and we were about 10 minutes from docking when the guy behinds me barfs (thank god, into his bag) but with this sound like he was hacking up his kidneys and pancreas and liver and everything. i thought i was gonna lose it, but thank god, we slowed down and finally docked the boat. as we were slowly trying to get off the boat, courtney says ¨welcome to paradise.¨

but on dry land, everything seemed to get better! the queasiness went away and we got our bags and it was time to be really robbed on a cab fare to west end, where our hotel was. after about a half hour we arrived in west end and in front of our hotel, the argentinian owned posada arco iris, right on half moon bay. we had an awesome little place, with a kitchen and a balcony with a hammock and everything. the place had free use of its kayaks as well as a lovely little beach right out in front of the hotel. that first night though, basically all we did was crash.

the next morning we went out to try and rent bikes for the whole week, and when we did, we got the lowdown on where to go and what to see. we took the bikes back to the hotel and decided what we really wanted to do was hit the beach. so we set up shop out on the beach in front of the hotel and there we stayed for the rest of the day. it was so relaxing and the water was so tranquilo and calm.

so what are the bay islands other than caribbean islands off the coast of honduras? probably the single greatest thing about the islands is that the amazing coral reef lays right off the coast....like you can swim out about 10 feet and there it is! this unbelievable coral reef with colorful fish and sea turtles and coral like you´ve never seen is all right there, super close to where you were just sunning yourself. it´s also one of the cheapest places in the world to get certified in scuba diving. i´ve already written previously about how i´m not into scuba diving, so i won´t get into it again. but i still like snorkeling and boy is it fantastic on roatán. west end, where the cheaper hotels on roatán are located, is pretty much all foreign-owned. americans and europeans have set up shop in one of the most beautiful places i have ever been. the nice thing is, i didn´t get overwhelmed with all the tourists, as i have before in guatemala and other parts of honduras. i guess it´s because the whole place is like that, i don´t know. west bay, about 5 kms away, is foreign owned as well, but it´s much ritzier. it´s where all the resorts and fancier places are, and where lots of rich people have homes. i say ¨all¨ the resorts, but there really aren´t that many. i think i pictured roatán having MORE hotels and businesses than it did. but it surprisingly had much less.

anyway, the next day we decided to take the bikes over to west bay and see the beach there, as they say west bay has the most beautiful beaches on roatán. when we rented the bikes, the guy there told us that the road between west end and west bay was hilly and curvy so ¨bring water and sunblock.¨ we chugged like 2 liters of water before we went, but even then we weren´t prepared for the hell trip it turned out to be. we ended up walking half of it....riding down the huge hills and walking our bikes up them. i thought we´d never make it, but after much sweating, we did.

the view from the mirador along the road we biked to west bay

in the far right of the island you can see half moon bay, where we stayed in west end

courtney had made a contact back in el salvador when she accompanied her mayor to the international tourism fair in san salvador. the contact was this guy named tommy who is sales manager at this place called infinity bay, a resort in west bay. he said to call him when she got to roatán, so when we got to west bay we decided what the hell, might as well call him. courtney called him and he told us to come meet him at the bar in front of the resort. we locked our bikes up in the back of the place and then headed up front, feeling seriously like the hick cousins of all the well-to-do people that were out enjoying their sunday afternoon. we were all bit up (thanks to our stay in trujillo), we were sweating and we were beet red. tommy talked to us for a bit, but i wanted to go down on the beach, so we casually moved on and set up shop under one of infinity´s umbrellas. i couldn´t believe i was looking at that water. i´ve never been to the caribbean before, and sitting on that beach was like being in friggin´ paradise. the water was crystal clear, and it was the most amazing blue and turquoise colors. and you can see where the coral reef begins...where there isn´t turquoise water, that´s where the coral is.

nos llegamos! finalmente! the amazing waters off west bay. where the water isn´t bright and turquoise, that´s the coral reef

we sat and sunned ourselves all day and finally around 4:30 we decided we´d better try to get back to west end. i was not looking forward to that, because i knew every hill we rode down on the way to west bay, we´d have to climb up to get back. but somehow, the trip back didn´t seem so bad...maybe because i knew what to expect. we coasted into west end and about all i could do was crash. thankfully, i hadn´t gotten sunburned at all...i was just seriously drained of energy after biking/walking that road twice in one day.

the next day we went and priced snorkel gear, but by the time we ended up getting our asses in gear, we figured we wouldn´t really be able to do much snorkeling that day. so we planned to get it the next day and go back to west bay (this time by water taxi!). so it was another day just lounging around the beach, only this time we decided to lounge and drink beer...mmmm those tasty honduran salva vidas. by the time dinner time rolled around, we were both feelin´ pretty good and wanting to go out and do something other than sit on the balcony and ponder our thoughts. i said it´d be nice if we could go listen and/or dance to some music other than the boring american music all the establishments in west end played. a honduran guy selling sunglasses on the beach told us that all the latin music is in coxen hole (the capital of roatán, where our ferry came in)....none of the latin stuff can be found in west end. problem is, taxis to coxen hole are like $20, and we couldn´t pay that. so courtney decided to go down and see if there were any taxis that would take us for $10.

she came back with good news! when she told the taxi guys (who all hung out at this desvio at the entrance to west end) that she wanted to go to coxen hole and dance, she said ¨and i´m not paying more than $10 to go there.¨ one of the taxistas was like ¨if you go and hang out with us, we´ll take you for free!¨ we didn´t really know what to do...because hey, it was a free trip into town! but on the other hand...who the hell were these taxi drivers? well, we ended up just deciding to go and went with one guy, jonas, and another guy, roberto, followed in his taxi. we went to this place called the breeze bar..hahaha. they had reggaeton and bachata and everything! we didn´t dance much, but we got out of west end which was nice. we met another taxi guy, colin, and then this hilarious older black guy, we didn´t catch his first name, but his last name was walton, so we just kept referring to him as ¨walton.¨

anyway, walton was born on roatán, but lived in the u.s. for 35 years or something. he kept saying ¨the united states is the best damned country in the world!¨ he kept saying how it´s the only place in the world you can make yourself what you want to be. he kept saying ¨if you´re a hard-working son-of-a-bitch, and you save your money, you can make something of yourself!¨ he came back to roatán, he said, because it was too expensive to retire in the states. but here on roatán, he´s got everything he could ever want. walton was a character. it was his birthday too! and he was there all alone. so jonas bought him a beer and then it was getting late, so we all left. but right before we left, walton gave me a mango. i was like ¨huh?¨ jonas drove us back to west end and roberto gave courtney his number because he said that thursday would be super fun at another bar there. so we half made plans for thursday.

the next day, tuesday, we rented snorkel gear and took a water taxi over to west bay again. that water taxi ride was much more relaxing than the bike ride, that´s for sure! we docked near infinity bay and finagled our way under another one of infinity´s umbrellas (the lounge chairs and umbrellas are supposed to only be for guests, but we kept saying how we ¨knew tommy¨ and he said it was ok....ha). so it was off to go snorkeling! we got out in the water and courtney was having trouble with her mask, but we got going. some guy swam up to us and said there were some sea turtles out by this boat, so i started swimming out there. but the coral in that area was really close to the surface and i was afraid i was going to hit it. you´re not supposed to touch the coral because first of all, it´s endangered and any time something hits it, it kills that part of it and can kill the whole animal. plus, if you do touch it, it stings you, and you can get some pretty nasty infections from coral poison. anyway, i started feeling claustrophobic because i´d get to a bunch of coral that was really close to the surface and i´d have to swim over it really fast. it was weird. but the reef was amazing. i saw a lot more different types of coral than the last time i was snorkeling off the belize cayes - and there were just these huge walls of reef, like a whole other world! these little blue and yellow striped fish (like the birds, i don´t know fish names that well either) that would come up and look at me through the

well, i don´t have anything to post right now. i just got back from a very long vacation (21 days!!) where i didn´t do much but explore different beaches in honduras (except for the few days we were at lago yojoa and cerro azul). it was amazing, but i am extremely glad to be back home here in el salvador. perhaps sometime during agostinas (the weeklong vacation el salvador has to celebrate salvador del mundo, patron saint of san salvador) i will be able to write a little about the trip. so that´s it for now, but i´ll be back soon to fill you in on my lovely trip.

adios.

this past saturday, antonio and i decided to visit panchimalco, one of the oldest towns in el salvador. unlike the majority of the rest of el salvador, panchimalco is one of those quiet little pueblos that has managed to hang on to a few of it´s indigenous roots. panchimalco, nahuizalco, izalco, santo domingo de guzmán, and other pueblos scattered throughout the country are welcome sites sometimes. it´s easy to forget that el salvador was once filled with nahuat-speaking peoples dressed in colorful clothes and carrying on their lives without cars, cell phones and roads. while these pueblos have moved forward with technology and modern-day conveniences just like the rest of the world, they´ve also managed to preserve the almost extinct antiguan salvadoran culture.

we didn´t stay for long as it was quite a bus ride from apaneca to panchimalco, which lies to the south of san salvador, hidden away in the hills. it was very quiet, a few women selling fruits and vegetables on the street, and even a few movie pirates, selling their peliculas for $2 a piece. the main attraction in panchimalco is it´s 250+ year old church which is the oldest standing colonial structure in el salvador. antonio mentioned to me after walking through the church that apaneca´s catholic church was of similar antiquity before it was destroyed in the 2001 earthquake. (believe it or not, they are STILL not finished with the church in apaneca. in fact, it doesn´t look that much different than how it did when i arrived in december 2005. i don´t know what´s taking so long, but i mentioned before in a previous post how the father of the church has refused to accept any money from the government in repairing the church, so it is taking longer than if it were a government-sponsered repair.)

it´s floor was a mixture of bricks and dirt and the adornos were sparse and very, very distressed. but that´s what made the church so interesting. to think that this church was standing that long ago was something to think about. it´s transformation over the years, while physically probably hasn´t been much, the people that have congregated there have changed so much. whenever i´m traveling through el salvador on the bus (bus travel gives you lots and lots of time to ponder things) i sometimes think about what it was like here 200 years ago, or more. a lot of people here talk about how things were better ¨before,¨ the country was safer, the colón was still the national currency and things were much easier to buy. i can imagine for some nahuat-speaking indian who was living here all those years ago, they must have thought they were living in a paradise. i´m not talking so much about things like the fact that thousands upon thousands of indigenous peoples were murdered in the 30´s by el salvador´s then-president, but just in terms of the environment and daily life here. women ground their corn and made tortillas and spent a lot of time cooking food and taking care of the children - often breast-feeding one while the other sat and played in the dirt. the men went off to the forest to hunt or grow corn, using machetes. the only difference between then and now is that the forests have all but disappeared here, so men who do go out are finding less and less leña to start cooking fires with, families are preoccupied with how much ¨saldo¨ they have on their cell phones while they also try to come up with enough bus fare to get themselves to one of the bigger cities to take advantage of cheaper vegetable prices. everything seems to be such a struggle here, now, in the present. they essentially are doing the same things they did all those years ago, yet things are just so much more different. of course i´m speculating because i have no idea what it was like emotionally to live here 200 or 500 years ago; just the daily tasks that we know to have existed, through archaeological evidence made available to us.

i´ve just felt so pensativo lately with the fact that everywhere i turn in this world, what it all comes down to is money. i´ll have conversations with people here and inevitably, the topic turns to money....lack of it, price of food, bus fares, how someone in their family is in the states making more money. all this business with my computer....it´s all about how much money companies can get you to spend. you can spend much of your life without a computer, but once you make that leap to start using one, you can´t live without one, no matter how hard you try. and with that, comes the need for money. and companies know that and they prey on that fact. education is almost entirely grounded in money nowadays. tuitions are sky high, books for classes are some of the most outrageously priced items i have ever seen. i thought education was supposed to be about learning. it´s sad to see poor people be suckered, and i see my fair share of it here. vendors sell some of the shittiest products (batteries, clothes, shoes, toothbrushes, you name it) in the markets here, and these people who are struggling to clothe their kids or put batteries in their flashlights in order to see at night because there is no electricity in their house end up buying these crap items over and over and over again because the products are so shoddily made. i´m not even going to go into health care. i´ll just say what everybody knows - it´s all about money. most people here are willing to risk their lives to cross the u.s./mexico border, not because they want to be americans and celebrate 4th of july or see the grand canyon. they do it for the jobs that net more money than they´ll ever make here.

recently there was a news article on cnn.com that showed photos of these indigenous indians in brazil, who those taking the photos believe have never been contacted by ¨outsiders¨ before. the photos showed the indians waving things at the airplane as it swooped down over their village. apparently those taking the photos are part of a group that tries to protect the rights of these indians as their way of life is in jeopardy as a result of the destruction of the amazon. i didn´t know what to make of those photos. on one hand, i understand the mission of the group trying to protect them. on the other hand, i felt sad that those indians had to look up and see such a spectacle: the strange airplane flying over while a photographer leaned out and snapped photos of them....like they were animals on a safari in africa or something.

with that being said, sometimes i just think it´s nice to sit back and imagine what it was like in the past. a past without all these things that cost so much money that cause us to create our own obstacles to overcome. i´m not saying things were always so much more fabulous in the past or that progression is a bad thing, but i think somewhere along the way our societies have become somewhat misguided. i wish there was a way we could get back on track where we focus more on the good things like health and education and those things that, at their core, make a society a great one. money isn´t everything, we all know that, so i don´t know why it has to dictate our lives so much.

oh, and germany lost to spain in the euro copa final! antonio and i made a harmless bet of ice cream, and so i had to buy ice cream for antonio on sunday. what did i buy it with? yep, more money.

here are some photos of panchimalco. adios for now!

el salvador has the most amazing trees. the trees here are something i will remember forever.

yesterday i made a fool out of myself, but in a good way! i had english class with the third and fourth graders and we talked about clothing, so i thought it would be a good activity to bring a bunch of clothes from home and put them on. i had a big bag of clothes and i gave each kid a chance to pull out a piece of clothing and if they could tell me what it´s name was in english, i would put the piece of clothing on. i had everything from huge sweatshirts to underwear to big flannel pajama bottoms, and i had them on all at once. it was hilarious. i didn´t care that i looked like a complete idiot because the kids were in stitches and they were actually learning the names of the clothes in the process. elba thought it was funny too. then i asked if there were any kids who wanted to put the clothes on and so abby, this really outgoing girl, volunteered to come up front and put on my gigantic clothing and it was even funnier. good times.

i know these pictures are a little dark, but here´s abby with my clothes. totally hilarious!

this brings me to my almost end of service evaluation of my work here. i´ve discovered that i´m a much better teacher than i ever thought i was. while i don´t feel like i want to teach in a traditional school setting, i´ve learned from my work here that i do want to work in some kind of educational setting. the things i´ve been most successful with here have all been related to working with the kids and teaching the teachers new techniques in the classroom. for example, anytime i do an activity with elba´s kids where they´re participating and being creative and having a good time, she notices whatever activity it is and makes really positive comments about it. with mirna it´s completely different because i´ll notice things she changes about how she teaches and she never inferences that it´s because i taught her this different methodology, but like she came up with this idea all on her own. which is a great thing because it´s exactly how it´s supposed to work! she needs to think it was her idea because she´s going to be the one teaching here forever (well, maybe not forever, but for a very long time). the deal is, as environmental education volunteers working in schools we teach the teachers in a way that they start emulating what we´ve done, but also in a way that they are thinking of these things on their own (when we are gone), making changes in their teaching styles in order to get the kids participating and being creative.

i never ever thought i´d enjoy teaching english. i always said that i´m not here to teach the kids english, they need to learn spanish first. this is why at the beginning of the year i told elba and mirna that i didn´t want to teach english to the kids in first and second grade because i thought they needed to spend the few hours they are in school learning spanish grammar. but i agreed to teach 3-6 grades and although i was a little reluctant to do it at first, having an actual english class with those grades every week, i have come to really love it. i like being creative and thinking of new activities and teaching methods in order to make teaching english more than just giving them a list of vocabulary words every week. i´m not trying to get them to be english speakers or anything, but just introducing them to english beyond the whole ¨i love you¨ and ¨goodbye¨ and ¨hello¨ that they normally remember is actually quite fun. i really enjoy doing environmental activities with the kids too....it´s such a good way to be creative and get the kids to be more outgoing and participatory.

being down here and having salvadoran men yell stuff like ¨goodbye¨ and ¨i love you¨ and ¨hello¨ because that´s all they have ever actually learned of english makes me think how dumb we americans probably sound (or at least i did before i learned spanish) when we go to mexican restaurants in the states and say ¨gracias¨ and ¨adios¨ or whatever. latinos probably think we sound like idiots. i´ll never forget that tourist i saw in ataco who was had just got off this big, clean, almost antiseptic tourist bus in front of one of the artesanias there. he was wearing one of those big, bright hawaiian shirts and was drinking the beer and in front of the artesania were these little wooden chairs (i might have written about this before, so if i have and it´s a repeat story, you can stop reading here….i hate it when people repeat the same stories over and over again and i don´t want to be a hypocrite!). anyway, one of the salvadoran workers from the artesania was outside and the tourist walked by and in this really southern accent drawls ¨that´s pequeyyyyño right?¨ and laughs heartily while pointing at one of the wooden chairs that was small. the salvadoran working in the artesania just gave him a look like ¨uh, yeah¨ and i was thinking that salvadoran probably thinks americans are sooooo weird! i just cringed and turned to walk the other way so i wouldn´t be mistaken for being with this group of people.

anyway, nobody´s perfect, and i don´t expect them to be. but, my point is, if i have a chance to teach these kids something in a way that they´ll more likely remember the information and not be those salvadorans that only yell out ¨i love you¨ at whoever, i´m all for it. i´ve definitely felt more successful educating in the school than with the adults in the community. i know i´ve made a difference in terms of the trash and forming the committee and all that, but i feel like i´m not the greatest at motivating people on a community-wide basis. i guess i have motivated people, but it´s been more on an individual basis. actually, though, most peace corps experiences come down to that….it´s not the big projects you work on that end up making the difference, it´s the little, everyday relationships that do it. i feel more effective in the classroom, working with the kids because i can be there on an everyday or weekly basis. and let´s face it, it´s easier to motivate kids than it is to get adults to change their ways of thinking. i mean, i haven´t avoided working with adults, i´ve put myself out there, worked with the community. but i definitely feel like i´ve made more impact on the kids and teachers in the school.

and you know what? these salvadoran kids are great. they´re all super smart and creative….they just need to be given the chance to work at their own pace and actually be given the opportunity to work creatively. there are so many kids here that i can see going on to university and i just hope that they and their families find a way to make that happen. people give peace corps volunteers all this credit for what we do, but it would be impossible to do it without the participation and willingness to learn and teach by the people of the countries we are working in. so, you know, i have to say, i´m really proud of the kids in my school. they come to class every day (if they can) and they are ready to learn. with the classes that i teach, the kids are excited about english and environmental classes and reading. they come prepared and with their minds open and i just feel like the least we teachers and volunteers can do is spend our time making their educational experience a great one. so one of my biggest priorities before i end my peace corps service here in el salvador is getting the teachers, who will continue teaching the kids when i´m gone, to foster that idea of giving the kids a great educational experience.

adios!

p.s. noticias importantes!! so the euro copa is down to the final two......germany and spain. who´s gonna take it? i don´t know, but i´ll be cheering for germany as my family name makes it impossible not to. antonio´s grandmother´s family was from spain (actually his father´s last name literally means ¨spaniard¨), so i guess it´s safe to say he´ll be cheering for spain. sunday´s the day!

ok, well i know that many of you don´t follow fútbol, or soccer as it is known up north, but let me re-cap the ups and downs of what´s been going on lately with this sport in el salvador.

long live once!!

first, back in may, i was totally bummed because the soccer team for the department of ahuachapán got demoted to the ¨segunda división¨ of the national league. for almost the entire year, once municipal (11 municipal), the canarios, were playing without a head coach, or without the players receiving any paychecks. through some political battling being waged by the owner of the team and the other members of the front office, the owner simply decided that he wasn´t going to pay the players anymore. as the season continued, the team kept tying their games, neither winning nor losing, and ended up at the end of the season having the lowest number of points in the entire league. not only were they not receiving any money, their head coach quit (or was fired depending on who you ask) sometime before mid-season, and so one of the players was trying to be coach and player at the same time. so when the final game of the season came to pass, once needed to win the game in order to say in the 1st devision. well, they gave a mighty effort, but ended up not winning and being demoted. it was hilarious after the game though because all the players, including the captain of the team, went off on the front office during interviews and were actually smiling and laughing and whatever because they knew they gave it their best shot and were just glad to be rid of the disasterous season. most of the players will now either be scattered throughout the rest of the 1st division league, a few will end up playing for the team as it participates in the 2nd division (kind of like the triple A in baseball). mind you, this is the same team that actually WON the closing national championship (clausura) in 2006! and now they are no more, at least as far as the national level is concerned.

11 municipal, before they were demoted...

on to el salvador´s national team......last night´s match between el salvador and panama was probably one of the most exciting matches i´ve seen in a long time in any sport. i´m not sure if any of you follow the world cup (i posted about the world cup back in 2006...how argentina lost and italy went on to win....). right now the ¨euro copa¨ is going on which is super important, right up there with the ¨copa sudamerica¨ and the world cup. television channels here pre-empt telenovelas, even the news, to air these matches. spain beat italy yesterday and the day before that, russia beat holland. so it´s down to germany vs. turkey and spain vs. russia for the semi-finals.

anyway, in order to qualify for the world cup, the granddaddy of all fútbol tournaments, countries like el salvador can´t simply just show up for the games. big teams like italy and france and germany and spain and argentina and brazil can pretty much do that. the style and quality of play is different in those countries. first off most of the big talent comes from these countries - many of the most talented players on the european teams (and in the world) come from brazil and argentina. so when it comes time to compete for the world cup, there´s no way brazil (who has ronaldinho and lionel messi) is not going to be competing. but tiny el salvador? no, they´ve got to fight for the chance to compete, even though it´s not likely they´ll make it very far. but it´s such a thrill to be able to play in the world cup it doesn´t matter if they go far or not.

so last night was do or die for el salvador´s team as they participated in the first qualifying tournament (with the ultimate prize being a spot on the world cup rotation). both el salvador and panama were playing for the right to go on to the next qualifying round. they previously played in panama and lost 0-1. panama then had to come to el salvador and play. because panama won the previous game by 1 goal, they only needed to win by 1 goal in order to qualify for the next round. el salvador, on the other hand, needed to win by 2 goals (since they lost by 1 in the previous game). it was a tall order for el salvador, it would be for any team, to go into a game HAVING to score 2 goals more than their opponent.

estadio cuscatlán during last night´s game (this photo is from el diario del hoy, one of the national newspapers here)

so they started the opening and played panama´s national anthem. then they played the salvadoran national anthem (¨saludemos, la patria orgullosos.....!!!¨) and i have to admit i was somewhat emotionally proud, seeing all those salvadorans in blue and white, stuffed into estadio cuscatlán. the game started and about 15 minutes into the game panama scored a goal. antonio was watching the game with me (of course he was watching the game, he´s male and he´s salvadoran, and more importantly, a latin american) and was like ¨they´ve lost it!¨ i was like ¨don´t say that yet, they´ve still got another whole half an hour, and then the other 45 minutes of the last half of the game.¨ but in all honesty, it was looking even more grim for el salvador because now they had to score 3 goals, not just 2. if the thought of scoring 2 was hard, 3 was almost an impossible order.

so the first half of the game eventually passed, it had poured rain for most of the time. there was even cloud cover on the field and i was wondering how the players could even see each other. half time was over and they started the second half and it was like el salvador couldn´t move the ball on the rain soaked field. panama was basically just trying to eat up the clock as they pretty much had the game in the bag. well, about 20 minutes in, el salvador scored a goal on a penalty kick and it was like ¨ok, yay!¨ but still, they needed 2 more goals and with only 20 some odd minutes more, that was a lot to ask. but after that goal, el salvador started to play much better....they were managing to move the ball, despite the puddles of water all over the field, they were passing better and they just seemed generally more ¨with it.¨

then by some miracle, at about the 38 minute mark, panama, who had started to play a little dirtier, committed a penalty in the box on el salvador. panama´s player was issued a ¨tarjeta roja¨ (red card), meaning he had to leave the game and panama had to play with only 10 players. on top of that, el salvador was given a penalty shot (when the penalty is committed in the box, the free kick is from a very short distance, where it´s just the goaltender and the guy getting the free kick...this is opposed as to the penalty kick i mentioned above, which was committed from farther away, so the kick was made in front of a line of players). whenever a team gets a penalty kick from close up like that, it´s like a 90% chance that it´s gonna go in. well, i guess it´s less than that, but it´s so random. the goaltender has to know which side the guy´s gonna kick the ball as well as if he´s gonna kick it low or high. this is how they end games that are tied...with penalty kicks from a very short distance. and it just seems like such a farce, because then it doesn´t really show how good a team is....it just shows whether or not the goaltender can read the mind of the guy kicking the ball. for example, in 2006´s world cup, argentina lost their game not on the game itself, but on penalty kicks.

anyway, so the pressure was on eliseo quintanilla, who was the player to make the free kick. anything could have happened, really, but in the end he was successful and the ball floated in the goal perfectly. so now it was 2-1, in favor of el salvador and they needed to score just one more goal in order to not only win the game, but to go on to the next qualifying round. so the game continued and we´re yelling at the television ¨come on!!!!!¨ like crazy people. the minutes were winding down and there was literally no more time to score a goal when all of a sudden, luis anaya of el salvador had the ball and from 89 or so feet, kicked it towards the goal. the ball sailed through the air, hit another salvadoran player, chepe martinez, in the head and before we knew what had happened, the ball went into the goal. i kept yelling ¨no friggin´way!¨ and antonio was like ¨si es la verdad!¨ (it´s true!). it was completely insane. everyone who had fireworks in apaneca let them off and it was like christmas day or something. it was so unbelievable. seriously, i just kept yelling ¨no puedo creerlo!¨ and it was like i had just watched a badly scripted inspirational movie or something. it was so bananas!  the thing is, they had to play the game for like 3 more minutes because of the extra time the árbitros put on the clock so it was like ¨please, for the love of god don´t let panama score!¨ because even if el salvador won the game, if it wasn´t by 2 or more goals, they´d not make it to the next qualifying round.  but the minutes wound down and they did it.  as all the papers said today ¨sí se pudo!¨ (yes the team could!). 

here is a video of the highlighted moments from el gráfico, the sports paper here. remember, el salvador is BLUE, panama is RED!

here´s another one...if you´re into the whole thing. i can´t stop watching highlights of it. it was so nuts! 

anyway, so now el salvador gets to compete in the next tournament to see if they can make it to the world cup (which isn´t until 2010 believe it or not, in south africa). but i´m sooooo excited!

so that´s what´s going on in deportes here in el salvador. basically that´s what i´ve been doing instead of writing blog entries....watching loads and loads of fútbol!

adios for now and felicidades a el salvador!

besides the fact that i would be horrified be taped, live, standing in front of a green screen, trying to coordinate my hand movements with a map of the united states and clouds and suns and temperatures that are visible to the viewers, but aren´t actually visible to me, with a smile plastered on my face and my hair formed into an updo, i would never, ever, be able to make a correct enough prediction as to what the weather will do in five minutes, let alone overnight or the next day.

what i´m getting at is the fact that last friday, if you readers will recall, i talked about how tropical depression alma, didn´t really affect us here at all. and i also wrote about how it hasn´t rained very much at all around here, despite us being a month into the rainy season. let´s just say i was pretty much waaaaay off the mark on that one. remember how i said that it started pouring while i was typing my last entry? well, it hasn´t stopped. it is STILL raining, and it´s TUESDAY! i haven´t seen the sun since friday morning. school has been all but cancelled, not because the ministerio de educación has cancelled school, but because no kids have come to school because it has been pouring rain every single minute of the day. and the cold.......holy mother of god is it cold. you know, when i visited lago atitlán in guatemala back in 2006, i bought this wool blanket in the market. i remember after we visited the lake, we went to the beach in monterico, and i as i lugged that bag with my new wool blanket in it, i thought ¨what in god´s name was i thinking buying this damned blanket?¨ it was 100 million degrees with a 100 million degrees of humidity and i was carrying around a WOOL BLANKET? but am i ever glad i purchased that thing. that and the scarf i knitted (i finished it on thursday, as a matter of fact) have been my saving grace in this cold, november-like (well, november in ohio) rain.

seriously, i haven´t seen so much rain in one continuous stretch since hurricane stan, back when i was living in molineros and trapped in my host family´s house for two weeks. let´s pause for a minute while i remember that lovely lockdown....me and anna trying to get to spanish class at megan´s host family´s house, me going out of mind with the constant sound of rain for a week straight, my first experience with mold growing on not only everything i own, but on me as well, a volcano eruption, me not being able to speak spanish......ahh, such good times! so why all the rain now? well, it IS the rainy season. but aside from that, apparently, after ¨alma¨ dumped it´s share of agua on us, next came ¨arthur¨ with it´s buckets and buckets of cold, sleet-like rain. after the news channels here decided to stop airing footage of the salvadoran airplane that crashed at honduras´s airport on friday, they were kind enough to start reporting on ¨las lluvias¨ that have been inundating el salvador for five days. they stated that the parts of the country that have been most affected are the western departments and the higher elevated areas. bingo! where´s apaneca? the westernmost department and lucky for us, it´s at one of the highest elevations in the country! i´m not complaining though. for the most part, i was waiting for the rain to come and it´s not like i have to go anywhere. not like back in the states when i had jobs with time cards or only a certain number of ¨days off.¨ if the weather is crappy here, most likely everyone else is staying at home, indoors, because of the ¨mal tiempo.¨ i called the school on monday to see how it was and elba is like ¨DON´T COME HERE!!! IT´S TOO DANGEROUS!!!¨ ok, ok, i get the message! anyway, i don´t know if it´s dangerous as much as it´s just a hassle.

the good thing is because we live in the mountains, all the rain basically just flows downhill after it hits the ground. i would HATE to live in the lower-lying areas, where everything eventually ends up. the only scary thing about the rains is the fact that the ground here is really susceptible to ¨derrumbes,¨ or landslides. the highway that runs past apaneca is basically a mountain road, and either way you go - to sonsonate to the south, or ahuachapan to the north - the highway weaves around and around, hugging the mountain. all the earth and rocks and trees that make up the beautiful mountains can fall at any minute.

i´m supposed to go visit courtney on thursday (not sure if i´ll end up swimming there or taking the bus), and once again, i´m left with what i like to call ¨the clothes decision.¨ you see, every time i have to go to the capital or i´m going up to visit courtney, i´m at a loss of what to wear. not because of my non-existent fashion sense, but because when i get up in the morning here in apaneca it´s so COLD. i´m talking scarves, gloves, winter hats and coats cold. sometimes it´s also raining like cats and dogs. so i dress accordingly.....hiking shoes, jeans, long-sleeved shirt, sweatshirt. by the time i´ve made it to san salvador i´m sweating like a pig, obviously. all i want are my flip-flops and tank top. i end up making the return trip with all this cargo in clothes and shoes that weigh my backpack down and leave me wishing i´d have not worn jeans or brought those heavy shoes. then the bus starts making it´s ascent just outside of sonsonate, and by the time the bus has left juayua and is climbing, climbing, climbing the mountains to apaneca, i wish i would have worn the jeans and put on the hiking shoes.

like i said in the beginning, i´m horrible at predictions and being prepared. good thing i´m just a peace corps volunteer and not a meteorologist! adios for now!

well i thought i´d get one last entry in before may 2008 is gone forever. i can´t believe june is practically here..... may was supposed to bring a bunch of rain and it really hasn´t yet. the weather has been really odd this year. right now as i sit here and type this entry, clouds are rolling through the pueblo and into the windows and doors here at the internet place, making it look like i´m in a haunted house. the past couple of days have been dry and really windy, which is not that normal for may in apaneca. we were on alert yesterday for tropical storm alma, but it never really materialized here, which is good. of course, right after i typed that it hasn´t been raining here, it starts pouring. anyway.....

we finally got the school library up and running. well, not completely up and running, but the kids can at least now come into the classroom where the libary is and read. it was actually quite a lot of work to get the libary ready. we had to cover all the books with plastic to protect them. then we made up cards to put in the fronts of the books so that when the time comes to introduce the borrowing system, we´ll be able to take the cards out of the pockets and keep a physical record of what books have been taken out without having to write all the info down. we´re planning on making i.d. cards for the kids so that when they want to take a book out to take home, they can leave their card with the card from whatever book it is at the school. i drew some pictures and stuff to put on the wall to make it less industrialized. we still have a couple things to do yet, but for the most part, it´s a wrap.

this system may sound arcane to you, but this whole library system is completely new to the teachers and the kids. they´ve never experienced being able to take books home with them, and i will admit, i´m a little nervous about the whole thing. but i guess my feeling is that they can´t be prohibited from doing this forever. kids don´t really care for books here like we do, or like most of us do. they write in them and tear the pages and steal them. but not all kids do this, just like not everyone who is familiar with a library takes care of the books they take out. but i guess my feeling is that maybe they don´t know how to take care of books because they´ve never had a lot of books around them. i don´t know. it´ll be a learning experience, that´s for sure. and i know some books will be lost or whatever, but that just goes with the territory.

anyway, after getting all the books covered and put on the shelves, i looked at the library and i was like ¨it´s so small!!!!¨ we have maybe 200 books in all, including some reference books as well as some books in english. 200 books doesn´t sound like much for a library, in comparison to what we have available to us in the states, but believe me, 200 books to these kids is a lot! so i think all in all it can only be a good thing.

mirna and her first graders were the first to have ¨lectura¨ in the library. it was fun to hear all the kids reading. the plan is to have some kind of project where we work on comprehension, because a lot of kids just like to look at the pictures. there´s nothing wrong with just wanting to look at the pictures, but they also should be reading. so i´m gonna help mirna with some kind of comprehension project where she can get the kids to talk or write about what the book was about. i´ve been doing this a bit (last year and this year) with the first graders. i take a group of like 5 kids and we read a book together, then i ask them questions about the book and they write the answers in their notebooks. hopefully, she can start doing this with the whole class.

anyway, so here are some pictures from the new library! adios for now...... (oh, p.s.....i´ve finally learned how to add video! i added a video to the ¨carrera de cinta¨ post at the end to show exactly what happens there. hopefully i´ll be able to upload more videos of more stuff in the future.)

first graders reading

leydi telling everyone why she liked her book ¨¿Qué ve el sol?¨

my friend eric says that all girls go through a ¨horse¨ phase of their lives, you know where they want a horse and read books about horses and all that stuff. well, i never did (at least that i can remember). i remember going to my friend lisa´s house in grade school and riding horses there which was fun. i remember having a couple of those ¨my little pony¨ toys at some point. i wanted to be a veterinarian, but i didn´t want to focus on just horses, i wanted to treat all animals. growing up, i wanted a goat more than i wanted a horse. i think horses are great, but the closest i´ve ever had to owning a horse is here in apaneca, where a group of five or six of them (and sometimes their offspring) gather right outside my window every night and chomp on the weeds growing in the street and whinny and clop around and then top it off by peeing all over the place. sometimes they come right up to my window and nudge the glass and scare the friggin´crap out of me too. anyway, so i don´t know much about horses or horse competitions or any of that.

here in el salvador, carreras de cinta are very popular. i had no idea what they were when someone first mentioned one to me. i´m sure we have these competitions in the states, it´s just that i´ve never been to one or knew they existed before living here, and i don´t even know what they are called in english. in case you don´t know what they are, i´ll explain. it´s a competition where whoever has a horse and wants to enter the competition pays an entrance fee. the competition includes one thing: charging your horse between two poles with a line hanging across it. from the line hang these small rings, about the size of a quarter or so. when the horse and its rider charge the line, they have to try and get one of the rings on this small piece of wood that the rider holds as they go under the line. the piece of wood is pointed at one end to make it easier to go into the ring.

if a rider is successful in nabbing a ring, he gets a present. girls dress up in their sunday best and each have a present to give to the riders who are successful in grabbing a ring. they do this over and over and over again, trying to accumulate as many rings as possible. at the end of the competition, whoever has the most rings, wins the grand prize which is the sum of the entrance fees to the carrera. and that´s about it. the length of the competition doesn´t depend on how many riders there are or how many rings are collected....it depends on how many presents there are to give away.

i attended my first carrera de cinta a couple weeks ago at my school. the teachers are trying to raise money to build a comedor at the school so the kids have somewhere to eat (they currently take their plate of rice and sit on the ground or the brick wall surrounding the garden). so they decided they´d have a carrera de cinta on the fútbol cancha. they got a bunch of moms to come and cook carne and pupusas and we sold beer and soda and cigarettes. i told them i´d help out, so they put me in charge of the ticket booth....people came to me, bought a ticket for whatever they wanted and then presented their ticket to the women making the food and serving the drinks.

it was alright. i liked watching the horses, but couldn´t help but feel sorry for them. people generally don´t care for their animals here like we do in the states. i mean, i know not every single person in the states takes care of his or her animals (hello michael vick), but the majority of us do and it´s hard to see how people here care, or don´t care, for their pets. there are salvadorans that treat their animals with love and affection and what-not, but the general rule of thumb here is that your dog or horse or cat is there to do a job and not for you to have any sort of affection for it. you don´t pet them, you don´t set a bowl of food in front of them every night, you don´t talk to them or anything. it´s ok to kick your dogs around....they´re dirty (people don´t stop to think that the reason they´re dirty is because their owners don´t feed them, leaving them to scrounge around in ditches and in people´s garbage and what-not in order to eat). i´ve seen starved horses tied up on the side of the road so they don´t run off, with no vegetation or anything to eat. i´ve seen more than my fair share of dead dogs laying in the street, people just walking by not fazed in the least that there is a dead dog laying there. i´ve heard puppies yelping and crying because little kids are hitting them. i´ve seen a squirrel locked up in a bird cage (this was at courtney´s site....the squirrel´s name was pancho.)

i guess what i´m saying is the carreras de cinta here aren´t filled with horses that get treated like the horses in the kentucky derby do. if the riders don´t actually ride the horses to the carrera, they get hauled in pickup trucks (a couple of guys brought their horses in pickups and coming down the steep, hole-filled road in front of the school to the cancha was sheer terror for the horses. one almost fell out of the pickup, it´s hind leg fell outside the pickup and was hanging there until it was time to unload the horses). i´m one of those people that feels bad killing spiders...i generally just try and shoo them out of the house. i hate snakes, but would feel bad killing one, unless it was attacking me (which i assume all snakes want to do...ha).

gracias a díos, with the exception of the horse almost falling out of the pickup, all the horses in our carrera looked ok health-wise. they looked tired and worn out, but they didn´t look starving or anything. the carrera was fun for a couple of rounds, but after that i was bored! it was the same thing over and over again for hours. i was out in the blazing sun selling those damn tickets and half the time i couldn´t hear what people wanted because there was a DJ out on the field announcing all the winners and playing music sooooo loud....ranchera music over and over and over. ugh. the same k-paz de la sierra songs over and over and over again. i like k-paz, but after the fiftieth time of the same song, enough already. plus, the DJ was so totally inappropriate for the crowd (a lot of kids) that was there. he was saying stuff about how different women of different religions sound in bed. he talked about how women want their men to come home drunk after a night of drinking and debauchery.....that they´re sexier that way. i was like ¨whaaat?¨ i couldn´t believe it.

but the thing that really just about sent me over the edge was the trash. antonio came for a bit at the beginning and bought a plate of food. he was sitting next to me and when he was done asked me where he should put his plate. i looked around and there was not one bag, trash can, box anywhere to put the trash from the carrera. at the end of the whole thing i asked mirna what we were gonna do about all the trash and she gave me what i call the salvadoran shrug....this patronizing shrug that says ¨i don´t really give a shit.¨ elba and maria laura at least had the sense to clean up some of the plates that were on the ground and put them in an extra box we had which had been holding the presents. but after we took down the tent and had gathered up all the chairs and generally packed everything away and took it up to the school, NOBODY took that box of trash. they just left it sitting there. besides, the cancha was still covered with plastic bags and plates and whatever that hadn´t made it to the trash box.

mirna saw an empty box from one of the prizes and thought there was something in it. she picked it up and seeing that there was nothing in it, threw it back down on the ground. i picked it up in a complete rage and i muttered ¨it´s not that hard to put it in the trash box.¨ finally i picked up the trash box to take it up to the school and i asked mirna why she didn´t have any shame leaving all that trash there and she said ¨these people are uneducated.¨ meaning, that she, a teacher knows better...but all these poor people don´t know any better. i couldn´t help it....i blurted out ¨you´re just as bad as they are....you´re uneducated too.¨ she gave me this look like she couldn´t believe i said that...hell, i couldn´t believe i said that. but i swear to god, i couldn´t help it!

but seriously, THE DAY BEFORE was the day we had had the earth day celebration. she went on and on about how it was so great and the kids did such a great job. we had cleaned up that cancha the day before as part of the project with the 6th grade girls. and when we packed up after the carrera the cancha looked WORSE than it did before we cleaned it up the day before. i was pissed. i couldn´t believe that after my almost 3 years there the teachers had no sense to provide something, ANYTHING, so that the people had somewhere to throw their trash when they were done eating. they made sure there were enough chairs there. they made sure there was enough food. they made sure there were two tents set up. they made sure there was a DJ. everything else they prepared for. but the cleanup was left totally by the wayside, not even a THOUGHT in any of their minds.

i took that box and threw it in the entrance of the school and left without saying anything to anybody. for a couple of days i was just really feeling down, like my whole time here has been a waste. i know that it hasn´t, but it´s all part of that glass half full/half empty thing, you know? see the forest for the trees, blah, blah, blah.

after a few days i was feeling much better. i had time to analyze the situation. mirna´s comment about everyone else being uneducated comes from a general social inequality here. she truly believes she´s better than the poorer people simply because she is a teacher. she doesn´t question HER actions....she placed all the blame on everyone else, simply because they aren´t professionals like she is. she doesn´t think she needs to be educated on the trash thing because she´s already got her teacher´s degree, she´s already as educated as can be. never mind the fact that some of the poorest people here, some of those people here who can´t read or write, are very conscious about their trash and picking it up and not littering. that thought never, ever crosses mirna´s mind. ugh. sometimes it can be so difficult here.

anyway, despite all that, i did take some pictures and so here they are!

one of the competitors charging his horse

kevin and wendy

selena

niña domy´s granddaughter, paola

one of the competitors getting his present for snagging a ring

me and maria laura

here is a small video of what's going on at the carrera

we celebrated earth day back in april, a couple days later than actual earth day (the 22nd) because they were still fixing up the school roof. anyway, i told mirna that the kids in her class (5th and 6th grades) should be in charge of earth day this year. not that i was being lazy and didn´t want to organize anything, but because our supposed job as volunteers is to work with communities in schools in the hopes that they will be self-sustaining by the time we leave. so i figured it being my third year and all, that it was a good time to put the whole self-sustaining thing to the test.

i will admit, i was the one that had to light the spark under mirna´s butt to move the responsibility for earth day activities into the kids´ corner. but once i did that, she absolutely took over. she talked to the kids and asked them how they thought we should celebrate earth day and they suggested having groups put together charlas and activities for their class about protecting the environment. she decided to call it a ¨gran exposición por día de la tierra.¨ in addition, i asked them if they were interested in doing something fun as well, and they of course said ¨síííííí!!!!!¨ so i suggested that we have piñatas or something, but i told them that we weren´t buying any piñatas, that we could make them. of course, all the girls wanted to participate in that, so i scheduled times for them to come into the school on their off days. we decided that the girls in 5th grade would make one and the girls in 6th grade would make one. i asked them what they wanted to make and they decided on a planet earth and a sun.

now, let me tell you, the last time i made a successful piñata, unsupervised, was back in high school in señor krummel´s 9th or 10th grade spanish class. this is when i first was anointed ¨lauuura¨ (which me and my friends erroneously spelled ¨laúra¨....i was eventually corrected of this in college when i put laúra on the top of my paper and the professor crossed out the accent mark with this huge fat X making me feel like a big dummy. since being here i´m still called lauuuura, just without the accent...) anyway, in señor krummel´s class, we made piñatas for some kind of fun activity...other ¨fun¨ activities included watching the movies ¨el cid¨ and ¨la bamba,¨ as well as making mexican food and watching señor play pocket pool during every class. (sorry señor if by some unheard of coincidence you are reading this blog....you were actually a pretty tranquilo teacher and i´m way glad i took your spanish class instead of the hoity-toity french one.)

so the piñata project 20 years ago...oh my god, it was really 20 years ago, WTF????....we were put into groups of two and my parter, rochelle, and i made a mr. peanut piñata. let me tell you, this thing turned out AWESOME. we won second place in the judging of the piñatas...i think we lost to a pair that made a california raisin. anyway, our mr. peanut piñata was not that big...we used balloons and some kind of powdered paste and tissue paper. it was so damned easy.

the next time i made a piñata was back in molineros when megan, anna and i made a mosquito piñata. we tried it with balloons first (my idea, since i was obviously the piñata expert), but it failed miserably. we were finally pushed out of the way so mama rosa and ana could teach us how to make a piñata the salvadoran (and obviously correct) way. they took newspaper and wire and some OTHER kind of powdered paste and formed it into what we wanted...the shape of a mosquito. it seemed so easy! all the stuff ana had in the tienda and in a matter of an hour or so, we were finished and ready to show it off to the rest of the pc group in training.

so i thought, as i suggested this piñata project to the 5th and 6th graders, piece of friggin´ cake! good times, good project to get the kids doing something fun, everyone can participate in tearing apart the piñata when it´s done. in short, it´s a win-win situation.

yeah, right. i got all the materials...including the mysterious powdered paste called ¨almodon¨ or something like that. i didn´t care that i was spending a few dollars getting the materials. the point was to have the kids doing something creative and seeing the fruits of their labor realized. first off, it was a complete disaster trying to get the wire to be in a round shape. FYI, don´t ever try to make anything resembling something round if you are making a piñata. the girls started off making these piñatas huge and by the time we realized they were too big to form the rounded shape, the wire was all weaved together and cut and basically just a huge mess.

but we pushed on. i kept saying stuff like ¨it doesn´t need to be perfect, the point is the fun in making it!¨ that worked the first ten times i said it. finally i just said ¨think of all the candy we´ll all get afterwards!¨ so next came the whole newspaper debacle. i finally decided to split up the two groups because it was too hard trying to work with them both at the same time. while i was helping one group of girls, the other group was scouring the newspapers and finding all the pictures of the surgery before and after photos that can be found in the mysterious ¨middle section¨ of the newspaper, you know, right after the classifieds end and the social scene pictures are. yeah, there in that no-man´s land are all these photos of people´s private parts that weren´t quite right, but after miraculous surgery now look only slightly better. the girls would go around giggling and running around with these gross pictures and i was like ¨seriously....,¨ knowing full well that at that age (or older even, i wasn´t the maturest of kids growing up...) i would have been doing the same exact thing.

anyway, the 5th grade girls and i all tried every which way to use that god awful almodon to paste the newspaper to itself and the wire. no luck. we finally just ended up using regular old glue. we pasted and pasted and pasted and when we got it all covered, it looked like an asteroid that had already made contact with earth. but i figured, ok, the problem was we didn´t have ENOUGH almodon. so antonio was going to ahuachapan the next day and i ordered him to bring me a butt load of almodon this time. he did and so i figured the 6th grade girls´ piñata would turn out excellent. everything went on great, it stuck and looked beautiful....not a perfect round planet earth, but good enough. i left it that night to dry.

the next day, the 5th grade girls came in the morning and we started putting the tissue paper on. this was the one part that worked fabulously. the girls loved putting it on and seeing the sun become something that slightly resembled a sun. i took a step back when they were working on it and when they were done they were like ¨it looks so great!¨ and i thought ¨ok, that´s what i was shooting for....something that they made that they were proud of.¨

in the afternoon, the 6th grade girls and i went to work on their piñata and all my ¨excellent¨ expectations turned to goo. all the damn newspaper started falling off in strips. so out came the glue again, but this piñata was much weaker. we slapped on the tissue paper, trying to make it look like earth. we filled it with candy and i prayed to god it would at least hold until the first swat at it the next day. but again, both the girls and i were proud of their work.

the following day we started off the gran exposición by having the various groups give their charlas. they all talked basically about the same thing....that we don´t take care of the environment so let´s start doing something about it. the 6th grade girls had us all go out on the fútbol cancha and gather the trash that had collected their since the last time we cleaned it up.

the last group, the 5th grade boys, did their charla about recycling. then at the end of the charla they had an activity that was really similar to the activities i have done with the kids in the lower grades (where we make flowers and butterflies using old toilet paper rolls and construction paper). one of the boys in the 5th grade group has a sister in 3rd grade and he must have seen her flower one day because their activity was making the same kind of flower. only instead of using toilet paper rolls, they used popsicle sticks stuck together for the stems and then we put the flowers in cut off plastic bottles and sand. i loved it!!! they say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. well, i believe it!

after all that, the 5th grade girls shared their sun piñata with the 3rd and 4th graders. we finally strung up the hanging-by-a-thread planet earth piñata and just as i suspected, after about the third swat, the whole thing burst open and the candy all came out. it actually did turn into a win-win situation after all, just not the win-win i had expected.

don´t worry, i did do activities with the other grades too! i printed off a small book that had words about earth day that the 1st graders could write and color in. i had a flower activity book for the 3rd and 4th graders, as well as a book about why plants are important. and in 2nd grade i gave all the kids a copy of a book about how seeds grow into flowers that we read together. if it ever starts raining we are going to plant some flowers that they can take home. but for the time being, we need rain!

last but not least, i went to the old stand by with the kindergartners....activity making things out of toilet paper rolls. the kids absolutely love this activity which is good because it´s something simple maria laura can do with each new kindergarten class.

anyway, all in all it was a fun earth day and i was glad that i didn´t organize it. hopefully when i´m gone they will continue to celebrate earth day in some way, shape or form.

delmy cutting ¨papel de china¨ for the sun piñata

selena pasting the paper on the piñata

more cutting and pasting

ruth, lety and jenifer

kindergarten kids with their flowers

1st graders working on their little día de la tierra books

6th graders irene, ingrid and deysi cutting paper for their ¨planeta tierra¨ piñata

5th and 6th graders giving their charlas about protecting the environment

ok, so the piñata wasn´t exactly round, but it worked and a lot of candy fell out!

the girls´ cleanup campaign on the fútbol cancha

me with the flower i made as part of the activity that the 5th grade boys put together

let me first explain that i´ve been having trouble updating the blog, which i´m sure you´re all (those few that are still keeping up with it...don´t worry, you only have about 6 or 7 months more of it!) aware. first of all, i already told you about my computer woes. well, that problem didn´t get solved. i took it to this out-of-the-way place in san salvador and the tech guy was this dude that seriously needed to take voice lessons, like learning how to talk above a whisper. it didn´t help that the store was blasting this cumbia music, ALONG with the barça vs. real madrid fútbol match on an overhead television. the guy took the computer back into the ¨shop¨ area and came back and says that he couldn´t get it working, but he thinks he knows what the problem is. it took about five times of him telling me this until i could understand what he was saying, because all he did was mumble and whisper. so i ask him if he is sure he knows what the problem is and he just smiles. then i ask how much it costs and he says, ¨i don´t know. probably around $800.¨ again, i had to wrestle this information out of him. finally, i told him to write what he thought the problem was and how much it cost on a piece of paper. then i told him i didn´t think i´d get it fixed just yet.

so incidently, what he wrote he thought was the problem was the logic board. i did some searches online and found many a forum and message board saying that this specific computer (mac) that i have has had a gazillion problems with this. that made me feel somewhat better, as most of the websites said that even if that part is f%)!´ed, the hard drive is probably still ok. so then came the decision about what exactly to DO with my computer. not many people have macs here, and i just really felt uneasy about handing over my computer to this tech that couldn´t describe for me clearly what exactly the problem was and exactly how much it was going to cost. and i´ll be honest with ya, i don´t HAVE $800 for anything right now. i ended up going over to the brand new fed ex office in col. escalón and asked about sending it back to the states.

i must have spent an hour with the workers there trying to dechiper the process of sending something from el salvador to the states. if you send something over a $500 value, you have to pay duty on it, and with that, a bunch of friggin´ paperwork that makes absolutely no sense to me. it´s like it´s written in sanskrit. i wanted to insure it for the full value with fed ex, but didn´t want to have to pay customs on it because it wasn´t something new i was sending home or whatever. all i kept thinking was ¨i just want my computer fixed!¨ so finally the women there helped me out in a big way, and they said if there were any problems they´d call me. so we went to pack up the computer and i´m all in american mode, in this brand spankin´ new fed ex office, thinking they´d have bubble wrap or something to pack stuff with and they´re like, ¨no, we don´t have any of that.¨ so they gave me these confusing directions to some hardware store a million blocks away.

finally, i got the thing shipped off. you know, i don´t even care if i have the computer here, i just don´t want it broken and here. i ended up tracking the package today and un milagro, it actually has made it´s way to northwood, ohio. now all my mom has to do is pick it up or be home when they try to deliver it, and i´ll be able to breathe a sigh of relief.

while i love technology....having the computer, being able to track packages via the internet, being able to write a blog, etc., i really hate it as well. the fact that my computer is less than 3 years old and all of a sudden the logic board goes out for no reason is ridiculous to me. the fact that companies don´t make computers to last, just because they want you to get a new one, absolutely sucks. i can understand if my programs get outdated or it starts running slower or whatever....that´s just to be expected the older it gets, just like a car or whatever. but for it one day just to quit working, when it´s only 2 1/2 years old? so stupid. and it´s a friggin´ mac! i suppose i just have to go with it because there are millions of other people going through the same frustrations with whatever bit of technology they have in their lives.

so writing the blog has become a bit more difficult as i have to sit here in front of the computer screen and decide what i want to say and how i want to say it on cue. also, because i don´t have my computer, i obviously can´t upload any pictures from my camera. i have to save them on a flashdrive, but my flashdrive is super small and so i´ve had to start putting them on other digital cards from my other TWO cameras that i had previously (one broken, one stolen). but thanks to lovely technology, i have a digital card reader, so i´m at least able to use whatever card i want.

and finally, i´ve been extremely busy as of late. i was asked by rolando to participate in a taller in san salvador with 7 other volunteers and a few salvadoran counterparts. we redesigned the peace corps agroforestry and environmental education programs to more fit the goals of peace corps as well as the needs we have seen in the salvadoran communities in general. i´m also working on a huge campaign regarding health in san jorge. antonio and i are working on presenting a nutrition and health program to whoever is interested, focusing especially on risks associated with the salvadoran diet. i´ve mentioned before that people generally don´t drink water in their homes. they buy these 3 liter bottles of soda like 3 times a week, pumping sugar and carbonated water into their bodies. i´m all for the yucca frita and pupusas or whatever, but not every day. all this fried food and grease is basically the diet here, and it´s running a toll on the health of the salvadorans. rates of diabetes are high, as well as high blood pressure and other problems. the ministerio de salud really doesn´t focus much on diabetes, but more on mosquito borne diseases like dengue fever and malaria. thing is, there are higher rates of diabetes than there are malaria and dengue fever in most areas (at least those not on the beach).

don´t worry, i´m still at the school. our library still hasn´t gotten up and running yet because i had the list of ALL the books in my computer and now we have to start over because, well, you know....the computer and all. but we celebrated earth day and i´ve been teaching english regularly. plus the work with the environmental committee.

anyway, i promise to post pictures either this week or next. i can´t believe it is the middle of may already. i´m seriously ready for a vacation......

that´s all for now....

last year when i went home for vacation i was told that 2008 was gonna be a great year for me. ¨it´s the year of the rat¨ i was told, and because i was born in the year of the rat i was supposed to have nothing but good luck in good old 2008. well, let me re-cap some of the fabulous things that have happened to me so far:

- in january i was robbed at gunpoint and had my camera, my house keys, my cell phone and my very special red backpack stolen

- that same week, as i was relaxing on the beach in guatamala, thanking god i hadn´t been hurt in the robbery, a big wave came and took with it my mp3 player, my portable speakers and most horrifying of all, my full bottle of beer (this same wave also swept away courtney´s camera, the ONLY one of our three that hadn´t been stolen in the robbery). the mp3 player was fried, as was one of my speakers and courtney´s camera.

- i had a computer project all lined up at my school and at the last minute, i was told be the project organizer that oops, there aren´t enough computers anymore. this was AFTER we told the school directiva that we were getting these computers and they gave us authorization to buy them and everything. then the directiva told all the parents at the school that i was in charge of this project and yay for laura. i had to tell everyone that we´re not getting any computers after all.

- we planted some things in the garden at the school and yesterday it HAILED....yes, it friggin´ hailed here. let me remind you, i´m in central america, four countries (three of which are less than half the size of texas) away from the equator. and there was ice falling from the sky yesterday. so of course, all the stuff we planted is now all droopy and sad looking from being hit by pellets of ice.

- the other day i went to work on my computer and guess what....i can´t see anything. the computer turned on and it revved up, but the screen remained black. i´ve tried it since and it´s still black. much like this year has been.

and it´s only april!!! i want to say that the person that told me 2008 was gonna be great was totally full of it, but i know it´s probably just because i´m only looking at the bad stuff. like when the embassy gave our school some books (great), i had to go to the capital to get the books. well, i couldn´t carry them all on the bus, so maria laura and her husband offered to take me in their pickup (great). well, we got outside the embassy and luis´s truck totally died (bad, bad, bad) and we had to push it to this service station (bad and embarassing!). luis kept saying how ¨this had never happened before¨ and all i could think of in my mind was that it was somehow my fault because i was with them. ¨i´m having such a terrible year¨ i thought, ¨how could it NOT be my fault!¨

but in the heat of the moment, i feel like i get so upset. like instead of looking at the bad part of those above things, i guess i should alter my vision a little.

- ok, so i got robbed, but i didn´t get hurt, right? i got a new cell phone, and finally a new camera (thanks mom) and i bought another backpack. the backpack will never be able to live up to the previous one, but it´ll do....it serves it´s purpose. and it´s red.

- ok, my mp3 player and speakers got fried. who cares? are those really things that i´m gonna die if i don´t have? thank god i had only gotten myself a cheap mp3 player and not a $400 ipod like everyone else has. and one speaker still works! (my mom actually brought me another mp3 player when she came down.....which turned out to be really great news since my computer doesn´t work, i at least have SOME music to listen to that i had downloaded on the player before the computer crapped out. yes, i will probably be tired of the songs i have on there pretty soon, but it´s something.)

- yeah, that really sucks about the computer project, but the funny thing is, i seem to be the only one upset that it didn´t work out. in fact, the day i was gonna tell elba, i was nervous. i thought she´d be so pissed. she came up to me and was like ¨que ondas laura?¨ and i said ¨muy mala¨ (really bad) and she was like ¨what happened?¨ and i told her and she broke out in a smile and said ¨oh, is that all? i thought you were gonna tell me something bad.¨ and she went on to tell the directiva and parents at another meeting we had and nobody seemed to blink twice at the news.

- as far as the school garden goes, plants seem to bounce back from a lot of things here. we´ll see if our plants decide to stick it out.

- last but not least, my computer. this is a little more tricky because this really is a problem. yes, at least the computer still turns on and i can hear it running. and i think it can be fixed (crossing my fingers) fairly easily. problem is, i think it can be fixed fairly easily if i were in the united states. i have no idea where i would take it to get fixed here. i´ve already tried all the troubleshooting solutions given to me by apple.com and none of them have worked and i think i have a dead video card. i at least had backed up my photos last august so not too many photos will have been lost if my computer is screwed up. i hate computers. i mean, i love them, but i hate them. my computer is less than 3 years old. how in god´s name can it already be ruined. yes, this problem just sucks all around.

but one out of five isn´t that horrible, right? so why do i feel so bleak about it? it´s just that whole half empty/half full idea. it just depends on how you look at everything. it´s like my work down here can be a constant battle of how i look at things. i work with kids in the school and try and teach environmental education and i feel like i´m doing my part, you know? the kids get excited and participate in the projects and activities i do with them and i feel good about it. then i see one kid throw his trash on the ground and i suddenly feel defeated, like i´m not doing my part at all, like i´m an awful teacher and haven´t accomplished anything.

at least i can see the good parts at some point. i mean, i might immediately get all upset and frustrated, but after some time i do sit back and realize that ok, it´s not the end of the world. i think it takes someone really extraordinary to understand that right off the bat, to still remain chipper and smiling after having been dealt some bad news.

i look at some of the people in my community who are facing serious food problems right now. they can´t buy beans or rice, which before were considered ¨poor people´s food,¨ meaning just about everyone could get their hands on some beans or rice to go with their tortilla. food prices are just too high now. people are rioting in the markets. i read some article about people in haiti who have resorted to eating dirt mixed with sugar to sustain their hunger. another article i read said that in el salvador, ¨money buys 50 per cent less food than it did last year.¨ what in the hell am i thinking getting upset about my computer or hail? my life doesn´t depend on these things at all. yes, everyone has their own necessities, but what actually is a necessity anymore? i´d give a thumbs up to food and shelter and water. there are other people who´d go ahead and list their cell phone as a necessity. or their car. or maybe their television. the food crisis isn´t limited to poor countries like el salvador....i know it´s affecting everyone in the world right now. but here it´s very serious because people don´t have anything to sacrifice in order to spend more on food. they can´t say ¨well, i won´t spend as much on take out this month¨ or ¨i´ll cancel my gym membership.¨ they had nothing to begin with and now are in real danger.

but the people that are on the brink of what could actually be starvation and they don´t seem to react the same way i do. they deal with this day by day and as things come, talking about the problem, but never cursing the situation. i´m not saying they´re not scared or that they´re elated that this is happening or they´re content to just live with things the way they are. the difference is that they don´t seem to be walking around in a funk like how i get sometimes when things don´t go right. they are those extraordinary people i was talking about before.

extraordinary i am most definitely not. i´m more like a work in progress and i have the rest of the year of the rat to work on it.

happy earth day tomorrow!!

here are some pictures from my mom and dad´s visit a couple of weeks ago. they brought my aunt barb and i think everyone had a good time, aside from the fact that no matter how many hotels (five star to no star to backpacker hostels) ¨say¨ they have hot water, none of them actually do. or i guess i should say, what we consider hot water in the states, is NOT the same as what people think hot water is here. i still don´t have the pictures yet from the final couple of days of the trip....we went down to a nice hotel on the beach in salinitas, in the department of sonsonate. but as soon as i get them, i´ll post them. you´ll wish you were here after seeing them!

we had such a great time while my parents were here. they got to see the school for the first time, and we did an art project with the kids in 1st and 2nd grade, which the kids loved. they also got to eat some sweet jocotes, a semana santa tradition. we visited some of the people in my community, and seriously, the people here think my parents and aunt are gods! believe me, i´ve heard it all since they left: how my dad is so guapo, how my mom´s skin is so perfect, how my aunt´s so tall and elegant. they will forever be known to san jorge and apaneca not as mary, gary and my aunt barb, but as laura´s (la norteamericana´s) padres and tía.

i took them to the first festival of pupusas in apaneca, and i don´t think they were fans. i think mostly because of the ingredients: chipilin, beans, chicharron, etc. my dad said he had his own way he would make pupusas (i wonder if he´ll ever find himself in that position at all in his lifetime): cheese, bacon and onions. to each his or her own. we had a great laugh with every salvadoran we visited because i couldn´t help but tell them that for the first couple of days my aunt kept saying ¨estoy caliente!¨ which is a big no-no in latin america. if you say ¨estoy caliente¨ you´re basically saying that you´re horny. haha. i had to explain that you have to say ¨tengo calor¨ if you´re hot, like warm. everyone thought that was just soooo funny!

my family got to partake in some good old pollo campero at antonio´s house where we ate one night. pollo campero is THE hot spot for some good ol´ fried chicken here. any airplane trip leading from san salvador to the states has a cabin full of salvadorans carrying buckets of pollo campero to their family in the u.s. they simply think there´s NOTHING that compares to pollo campero. antonio´s family got some takeout and we feasted on that. let´s see, what else.... like i said, our last couple of days we went down to a big hotel resort on the beach. this place was like being in prison at first. they wouldn´t let you through the entrance unless you could show your registration and only if you had the number of people on your registration in your car. no more. you had to wear this bracelet (like what they give out at concerts for people who are old enough to drink) the whole time. everyone had to show their identification. but i realized much later, after my family had returned to the states, that the reason for this is simply safety. well, that and i´m sure they just want to shield all the tourists from the ¨real¨ el salvador, which has nothing to do with pools and luxury and all that. after seeing the tourist buses bringing people in and out, it´s obvious that they´re designed to keep people from having to see the real el salvador, the one of poverty and all that. also, the hotel probably wants to avoid getting ripped off. if you give salvadorans the opportunity to aprovechar, they´ll totally take it. each room has space for at least 5 people, and i´m sure if salvadorans knew they could pay for one and stuff 15 people in a room, they´d do it. everything was included, so that´s even more incentive for the hotel to have us basically on lockdown. drinks, food, everything included. so you pay one price (a totally reasonable price, given what´s included) and drink and eat as much you want the whole time. if you didn´t have a bracelet you could do just about nothing. but after sitting at the beautiful pool and on the beach watching the waves roll in and eating to my heart´s content, i forgot that we were tagged like sea turtles being experimented by national geographic and really enjoyed myself.

the drive back to the airport (the same route we took from the airport) was along the coastal highway and is one of the most beautiful drives i´ve seen....it´s sort of along the lines of the santa barbara to monterrey coastal route in california. big cliffs overlooking the beautiful pacific. there is hardly any traffic on this route, aside from the big trucks hauling sugar cane to be processed. they´ve added some lookouts as well, so we were able to stop and take some really good pictures.

oh, and my mom left me a nice little digital camera, so don´t fret! i´ll now be able to post pics again!

adios for now.

the view from the cabins my family stayed in (the hotel is literally across the street from my house....very convenient)

one of the flowers in the hotel gardens

i don´t know what the name of this flower is (anyone, anyone?), but i like to call it the schnauzer flower (seriously, doesn´t it look like one?)

again, from the cabin door

me and dad

one of the hotel´s restaurant windows

this is in the hotel courtyard

the front of the hotel

my dad cooking me scrambled eggs at my house!

my family with antonio´s family

the festival de pupusas

this lady´s great.....her name is josefina and she always wears the craziest clothes, and the pink shades add that special something.

the clouds rolling in, covering the mountains

the hotel restaurant

ok, here is my aunt barb and this little old lady who´s name is transito. i thought it was her nickname, but antonio told me it was her real name. she´s so little! we met up with her on my parents last visit, but sadly didn´t get a photo. so we did this time. she loved it!

my parents and aunt with the kids in 1st grade after we made flowers with old toilet paper rolls.

the first graders working on their flowers

me playing ¨pato, pato, ganzo¨ (duck, duck, goose) with the kids.

visiting kindergarten

with the second graders

my dad helping mariela make her flower

my dad in front of one of the cabins

eating lunch at el rosario

so how much of your culture do you think is important to the rest of the world? when you go for a run through the park, or when you sit down at the dinner table with your family, do you think anybody else would see that as interesting? living here in el salvador, i don't think i've ever examined my daily activities more. the more i think about it, i definitely think i've gone through at least three stages of cultural examination since arriving in this country. why am i even interested in "cultural examination?" as some of you may know, i majored in history and social studies and minored in anthropology. (i should have majored in anthropology, but i thought that i wanted to teach social studies in the public school system, hence the history/social studies double major. by the time i realized i was probably not cut out to teach formally (in a school), it was a little late to change majors. so i settled for the anthro minor.) anyway, i took as many anthro classes as i could and immersed myself in cultural anthropology which is why i am fascinated with the study of culture and why things work the way they do and why they are the way they are.

but let's get back to el salvador. when i first got here, everything was new and i accepted nearly everything. i never really had time to think about the differences because i was so inundated with the salvadoran food, the language, the living arrangements, the customs and the people that i scarcely had time to really analyze anything. i just ate the pupusas and sopa de frijoles and tortillas, tried to learn the language, used the latrine, appreciated the mosquito net, kept in step with the funeral procession as it wound itself down the road for two miles, changed my sleeping habits by going to bed at 8:00 at night along with the rest of the cantón and grew to love my host family so much that i cried when i had to leave them. this learning experience carried over when i moved to my new home in apaneca and had to learn some things all over again. salvadorans in molineros are different from salvadorans in apaneca....the molineros salvadorans are warmer, they're more accepting, they use the word "charamusca." the apanaquenses are more reserved, they like you, but it takes a lot of time to get them to admit it, they call charamuscas "topolligos," they make their tortillas small and thick, they're poorer, they wear winter hats and scarves.

but then i moved into the second stage of examining this culture and that was of taking on their cultural norms. i started using the word "púchica" all the time, i made sopa de gallina almost every weekend, i got up at 5:00 a.m. just to get a bag of fresh pan frances before the panaderia ran out of bread at 6:30 a.m., i knew the words to most reggaeton songs, i looked forward to dancing to cumbia, i quit calling kids "niños" and started calling them "bichos," i took on salvadoran phrases like "muchos días no vela" and "primero díos" and "gracias a díos" and any other phrase including "díos," i stopped buying all my groceries at the supermarket and started buying them on a daily basis from the tienda down the street from my house ("give me two eggs, one onion, two tomatoes, etc."). i, in a sense, became a salvadoran.

now here i am in the present, and my third (not sure if it's the final) stage of cultural examination. i like to think of this stage as cultural appreciation; appreciation for my own culture. believe me, when i left the united states in 2005, i wasn't a big fan of my home country for a number of reasons: the war, politics, stereotypes. but now, i feel like all i do now is see the differences between my american culture and the salvadoran one. i see the good things about the united states. in any situation that presents itself to me, i think about how it differs from the way we carry things out in the united states: the education system, the way they do things at the post office, prenatal care for expectant mothers, what to expect at hotels and stores, etc. it's like no matter how "salvadoran" i become, i have still managed to hang on to my own cultural norms, those that i grew up with. even though i don't see situations that occur here as abnormal, i still examine them and think how different they are from the united states. when i really sit down and examine this way of thinking, i realize why it's difficult to be in peace corps. you essentially become accustomed to TWO cultures and separating them and acting accordingly can be very tiring. sometimes i have to remember that i'm not IN the united states, i can't expect salvadorans to understand my "ways" and those things that are second nature to me in MY culture.

what are cultural norms for us, or for me? there are quite a few, but i'll just highlight one of them that has been at the front of my mind for a while. as i've stated before, reading for pleasure here is not really a common activity. in fact, i’d bet that the only book most people read (at least outside of san salvador) is the bible. the teachers in my school think i’m weird because i bring a book to the school and after lunch i’ll read instead of watching the telenovela that they watch. they simply don’t understand why i would want to read a book just for the hell of it. when people see me reading, they almost always say “oh, you're studying?” i try and explain that i’m reading a book because i like reading – and i realize that it’s just totally unexplainable to people here. i love discussing the subject of the books i've read with other people, and sometimes i'd explain a story to some salvadoran and their eyes would just kind of glass over and that'd end that part of the conversation. (there is one person that does understand the whole "reading" thing and that person is antonio's sister, gloria. she loves reading books, and i've even given her a few books, like "grapes of wrath" and "the kite runner" in spanish. i suppose i was trying to meet my own needs by giving her books i've already read, just so i'd have somebody to talk books with! she's a language teacher, so it seems that it wouldn't be so strange that she's into reading, but actually it is, for el salvador.)

what's even more difficult, and amusing in some ways, is to try and explain books like harry potter, a story that might seem impossible to actually happen. i never give up on trying to explain the books i'm reading, but for the most part i get more positive feedback when i'm reading books like "kon-tiki" or "compañero" or "mountains beyond mountains" - stories that are non-fiction. i can at least explain that these are things that really happened, not a story that involves wizards and quidditch. but the point of this is to show you how in my world, reading and discussing books is something i never even thought twice about. i never saw it as something worth commenting on. while not everyone in the united states likes to read books, it is an accepted activity nonetheless. if you're somebody who doesn't particularly like to read, but you see somebody else reading a book, it's not weird.

this idea of cultural differences became a million times clearer to me when i was visiting antonio's mom the other day. we chatted for a while and then she went to make us coffee and told me to turn on the television and watch what i wanted to. i found a channel that was showing a spanish documentary about the yanomami (native south american indians who i actually had studied in one of my anthro classes). i left the channel where it was and when his mom brought in the coffee, she saw what i was watching and was like "oh, look at them! their face paint is so ugly! and look at their ears!" (the yanomami wear wood sticks through their ears and through the skin on their face.) antonio and his dad came home a little bit later and they both sat down and all three of them were absolutely entranced with this documentary. they showed the yanomami cultivating yucca and using their arrows. the documentary went on to show the yanomami fishing with these hollow bamboo poles that had these sharpened points at the end. they construct a barrier in the river and then when the fish get trapped behind the barrier, the yanomami attack the fish with the bamboo poles, sending the fish up the hollow part of the pole. then they deposit the fish they caught in baskets. i sat there watching antonio and his mom and dad as they expressed, quite animatedly, "bien creativo!" (that's so creative!) but it wasn't just a casual, "oh, hey look, that's kind of cool." it was like they couldn't believe what they were seeing. they were completely engrossed in the documentary and i was just laughing to myself because it was like antonio´s family was having its own personal anthropology class that day. it was really the first time i had ever seen salvadorans commenting or analyzing another culture other than my own.

what i realized is that we, as human beings, always compare other cultures to our own. what's even more interesting is that we don't normally see anything interesting or weird about our own cultural norms. i don't see anything interesting or weird about reading. salvadorans think everyone in the world likes beans and queso fresco. there in the southern tip of the venezuelan amazon the documentary crew had cameras and microphones and people with notepads taking down every single thing the yanomami were doing. the yanomami probably thought "why is us squatting on the ground cooking yucca of ANY interest to you?" when you're surrounded by a hundred or a thousand or a million people doing the exact same thing you are, you don't see what's so strange about it. i spent all this time studying OTHER cultures in my anthropology classes, yet i never for one minute considered MY culture as anything interesting. when i get a phone call at the school from someone american, the kids are mesmerized at hearing me speak english. i never got why. when i went home for christmas and visited my mom´s first grade classroom, the kids so wanted me to speak spanish. not like ¨hola¨ or ¨adios,¨ but like a full paragraph....it didn´t matter what i said, they just wanted me to say it in spanish. NOW i get it. english, to salvadorans, is as interesting as some click language in africa is to us english-speaking folks. to those kids in first grade, spanish is this wonderful, different language that i have the privilege of knowing how to speak. i get why people like to stare at me here. i´m friggin´ interesting to them!!! all of our cultures are interesting, even our own, even if we don´t see them as such.

so should i just let go of my cultural norms because i'm living in another country, another culture? i don't think it's possible. it’s very hard to let go of those things that are a part of who i am. using my previous example of reading, at one point, i did attempt to avoid trying to explain that simple cultural norm that i never really thought twice about. i didn't stop reading, but as far as discussing the books i was reading or how much i loved the stories, i tried to give that up, because it seemed as if people could have cared less. they only wanted to know how i lived from california or new york. they wanted to know if i had a car. they wanted to know if i had kids or a husband. they wanted to know how much my camera cost me. they wanted to tell me how windy it was that day.

but how important are cultural norms? is it really that necessary to have people understand my reading of books, along with all the other thousands of things that i'm used to? do i really need to be able to visit the drugstore at 2:00 in the morning if i need to? how about a washing machine? do i need that? what about "alone time?" do i need that? what about my need for choice? i like having choices, being able to make my own decisions....not just accepting the only thing that's available. i like NOT having to wait around for a bus. i do like investing in the future...i don't mean not living my life because i'm so worried about the future, but i mean in terms of things like education and the environment. what about the christmas holidays? do i need dean martin to sing me christmas carols, egg nog, a big old pine tree decorated with ornaments from my childhood, stockings hanging from the fireplace, miracle on 34th street? do i really NEED all these things? isn’t it better to be a part of a world, like the slow, salvadoran one, where people are kind and take the time to talk to you, even if they’re nosy, or even if they don’t really care about the whole “who i am” thing? isn’t it better to live in a world where i’m not distracted by all these other things that used to make up my down time in the states so that i can focus on actually living my life? i can’t imagine giving up reading or listening to my favorite music, but all that other stuff...getting cups of coffee at 9:00 p.m., going to the movies when i want, using a washing machine – do i really need those things? my answer to that is in some ways, yes. why? because those things are part of MY culture. take the holidays for example, while all the christmas shopping and insane rush of people packing the local shopping center is not something i necessarily miss down here, the way we celebrate christmas and thanksgiving and the fourth of july with the mess of wrapping paper and overstuffing ourselves with ham and turkey and pumpkin pie and outdoor barbecues and cold beers...i miss that stuff.

i was reading paul theroux's novel "hotel honolulu" and the protagonist in the book is an author who's well-known, but chucks his life in london to escape it all and moves to hawaii, becoming a manager of a blast from the past hotel. he ends up marrying a hawaiian woman and has a kid. throughout the book, the guy feels lonesome, an outcast even, because he is this author who knows a thing or two about the world, yet is amongst all these hawaiians who have their own culture, own traditions, and seem to be quite at home when together gossiping or talking about things only those in their culture understand. they could care less about the things that HE knows about. they don't want to hear him talk about the books he's reading, or the history he knows or his analytical ways of assessing people. they really have no interest in where he came from or who he is. they simply care about how he interacts with THEM. finally he confronts his wife about it and she mentions something about how he's always got his nose in a book, why doesn't he live a little, get a life, etc., etc. like because he enjoys reading, for whatever purpose - learning something new, entertainment, research - he's making himself the outcast. i totally disagree, though. i feel like it's his culture, where he came from. and by abandoning that, he'd feel even more like an outcast....like he's trading one culture for the other. if you live in a culture that's different from what you know, what you grew up with, do you have to give up all that past culture to be accepted or feel comfortable in the new one? i don't think it's ever possible to abandon cultural norms that you had for the majority of your life. however, i do think it's possible to have the best of both worlds....to not abandon those things you love about your own culture, while accepting another culture.

i've come to appreciate the united states a lot more after living here...for a bunch of reasons that i won't go into because this entry is already too long. i'm not talking appreciation in terms of putting american flags on every square inch of my lawn or having a "proud to be an american" bumper sticker on my car or making comments about hating the french or stuff like that. there are things to hate that are extremely american - like excess and arrogance and things like that - but the small things, just everyday stuff that i never thought about before because i'd never lived in a culture that didn't have that everyday stuff. those little everyday things are what i see as our american culture. and i while i do miss that american culture, i'm already thinking about the things i'm going to miss about my adopted salvadoran one.

ooohhh, it´s march already. whaaaaat? anyway, i don´t have any recent pictures to put up, so i decided to go through some random pictures that i have taken over the last part of last year. as far as work and what not, things are moving along quite nicely in the school, while things are a little more confusing the community. but what can one expect? i´ve been teaching a lot more this year....well, as a volunteer supposedly i´m teaching the teachers. actually, i think it is working though. sometimes the teachers will make comments about activities or ways they present things in their own teaching and they say that i influenced them on this. i´m not trying to pat myself on the back or anything, because getting a few simple comments is certainly not achievement by any means. but it´s something. so through my teaching, i guess i am, albeit very little, giving them something to think about.

we got our two boxes of books donated from the u.s. embassy, so we´re slowly but surely starting our school library. it´s a process though, just like everything else.

as for the community work, ugh! people can be so difficult. nobody wants to do anything voluntary. we are trying to fix the main road in san jorge, and all we need is help in the form of labor. nothing too backbreaking. hell, i am out there almost every sunday lifting rocks and hauling dirt and mixing cement. so if i can do it, it´s gotta be a piece of cake for the men of san jorge. but it´s like pulling teeth to get a handful of guys (and women) to come out and help. some men even said ¨are you gonna pay us and give us lunch?¨ a lot of people don´t get the whole ¨volunteer¨ thing. they think any work deserves payment, which i suppose in theory, it does. but then i look at what i´m doing and i´m like - why the hell should i be out here volunteering to do this if none of the members of the community want to do it? i´m there to help, not to do ALL the work. who´s paying me? people think i have all this money stored away....gringa moneybags. i don´t! on a positive note, there are a handful of people who are willing to sacrifice their sunday mornings and come out and try and finish the road. and they work their asses off! it´s nice to see people willing to do something even though tier not receiving a dime from anyone. they realize that by improving the road they are improving the community and in turn, their own lives. but most people are content sitting in their houses and watching telenovelas or whatever else. it´s not like this tactic is foreign to united states citizens, though. you find this kind of behavior everywhere. so i guess what i´m saying is there are both positives and negatives to this project, which is normal. what´s really funny is that those that are willing to help out need a formal invitation in order to come. i´m not kidding. whenever we write up invitations, we get a nice group of people. when we just invite people word of mouth, nobody comes. i want to be like ¨folks, it´s not a wedding or a birthday party!¨ but then again, i´m not salvadoran and salvadorans want and absolutely need formal, written invitations to do anything. so frustrating. but like all things, in time it will get finished. so here´s to that.

well, like i said, here are some random photos for you to laugh at, scratch your heads in confusion or simply enjoy. adios for now.....

this is the mayor of apaneca. i found this picture on one of the computers at the ciber. it totally makes me laugh, because right there in the corner is the tiger that the mayor sat on when he conducted a meeting with our comité...the meeting where everyone else sat there taking him seriously, as i thought in my head, for the millionth time since being here in el salvador ¨where the hell am i?¨

some of the storm damage to our school roof, which still hasn´t been fixed. apparently the ministerio de educación is ¨working on the problem.¨

this huge tree fell over the road and created this cool tree arch. although, every time i walk beneath it, i have a sudden sence of urgency to get to the other side as it´s only being held up by some weak looking trees on the other side of the road.

reapairing the road.

this herd (is that what a group of horses is called?) of horses comes by my house every night n the middle of the night to chomp on the grass that grows on the street. sometimes it scares the hell out of me because one or a couple of them will whinny really loud all of a sudden. anyway, they have a little baby foal that trails the mom and kind of just takes a siesta while the rest of the horses eat.

the sky above apaneca one evening.

i know, what the f%$! is this? i really don´t know. one day niña domy busts this out and shows it to me, asking me what it says. it´s a talking troll or something. i turned it on and after fumbling with the buttons on the front, it started telling a story, in a british accent, about a boy and a magic fish. the troll moves it´s eyes around and hands and whatever. it´s sooo bizarre. it reminds me of a cross between an ewok and the keebler elf.

this is my dog friend. she lives across the street from my house and has become my faithful guardian. she´s really mean and vicious to strangers and whatever, but when she sees me come down the street she runs up and rolls over and then follows me to my house. i give her scraps and chicken bones and stuff like that, but a lot of the time she doesn´t care if i don´t have that stuff. she just likes the attention - i usually talk to her, you know how we americans are, talking in that ridiculous voice that we think animals can understand better. but i play with her and stuff and i´m sure everyone thinks i´m nuts, but you know, i bet if someone tries to accost me outside my house or something, she´d rip their heads off.

this is the post they painted outside my house....i think i mentioned a few entries back that they have painted all the posts in apaneca to make it a little prettier.

oooh, these are the infamous pictures of courtney´s fiesta de patronales. here we are at her friend veronica´s house before we went to se orquestra san vicente play.

huh? veronica´s kids had some halloween masks (no doubt for the desfile de viejos), so we decided to give them a try.

la orquestra!

us with some the band. ok, their not pearl jam or led zeppelin or the grateful dead, but they´ll do.

two food vendors outside after the show was over.

there´s nothing like a big plate of meat after drinking more than your fair share of cervezas. mmmmmm. carne a la plancha, chorizos y casamiento!

in-between my bouts with extreme bad luck this year, i managed to venture off deep into the cafetales to enroll kids in our school with the teachers. a couple of kids from our school who we visited, also live in a house at the center of a coffee finca, so i was able to get some really good pictures of what it´s like after the coffee pickers have finished cutting coffee for the day and have brought it back to the finca to sort and bag up. a coffee finca is basically just a piece of property where there are any number of coffee trees. the owner of that land normally has an ¨mandador¨or ¨colono¨ - someone who lives in a house in the center of the land and maintains the place for the owner. this central area is usually where all the people who are employed to cut the coffee from that particular finca congregate at the end of the day to gather all the coffee that was picked and to work out how much money they are owed for that day´s pickings. anyway, i´ll just let the pictures do the talking.

here is jonathan, one of the kids at my school in front of a beautiful, full coffee tree, ready to be picked.

here´s a photo of all the people gathered at the centro de la finca, kind of waiting around to get their day´s pickings tallied up.

notice the women that wear pants AND skirts...this is just because they are dressing for the climate out in the forest. early in the morning it´s cold, cold, cold...but as soon as the sun is risen it starts getting hot, so they just get rid of the pants and wear the skirts, changing back to the same pants/skirt ensemble when the sun starts to go down.

a basket full of coffee spread out and ready to sort. the red fruit is good, the green ones need to be separated as they´re not ¨maduro¨(ripe) yet. red is good. green is bad. the basket in the photo is what people take out into the forest with them. there is a colorful strap that gets attached and they wear the basket in front of them, with the strap around their waist to keep it secure.

most of the coffee in this area is café bourbon, which is signified by the deep red or gold color when the fruit is ripe. there are two other types: paca y colombiano, but the majority of the type that is grown in this area is the bourbon.

one of the girls who was out cutting coffee all day is now in front of her basket, ready to sort.

sorting the coffee

after all the coffee has been sorted, it gets bagged into ¨sacos¨ (sacks), which are 150 pounds each. each 25 pounds is called an ¨arroba¨ and for each arroba cut, a worker can earn anywhere from .70 to $1.50. after it is bagged it then gets taken to a ¨beneficio.¨ the owner of the coffee (usually the finca owner) sells it to the beneficio for a certain price. sometimes the finca owner doesn´t sell the coffee immediately because he or she is waiting for a better price. the owner checks the international coffee prices every day, and when he or she feels they are going to get a good price for their coffee, they then take their truckloads of coffee to the beneficio. the owner then takes the money they made from the sale of the coffee and uses it, usually very little of it, to pay the workers who cut the coffee. the workers get paid every 15 days, and usually work for a few different fincas in the area as work for one finca only lasts for one to two weeks, depending on the size of the finca and how many other workers there are.

ater the coffee is sold to the beneficio, the beneficio then prepares it for export. preparation starts with getting the bean out. what we call coffee ¨beans¨ in the states, are actually called the ¨semilla,¨ or seed, here. they are a yellow, nutty color. to get the bean out, the coffee is mashed up with machines, de-shelled and de-pulped which extracts the bean. around december through february there is this weird smell around the area and it´s the smell of all the pulp that´s being extracted from all the coffee. after the bean is extracted, then it needs to washed to get rid of any of the remaining pulp that is stuck to the bean. then the beans need to be dried. this is normally done under the sun (la pega del sol). the beans are laid out on big concrete slabs and after about one week in the sun, they are sufficiently dried. all the pulp and shell that has been taken from the beans is then used as abono orgánico (organic fertilizer) for the coffee fincas, helping the existing and new coffee trees grow and produce good coffee for the next year´s crop.

here is a picture of beans being dried, however this is a totally different process than the one i explained above. this coffee is being dried but with the shell still on. this is what individual families usually do. they take the green coffee that has been sorted from the ripe red coffee and sidestep the de-shelling and de-pulping process that is done by the machines in the big beneficiaries. they lay the green coffee out, and after it is dried it turns black like this. then they take this to the molino (where women take their corn to be made into masa, or dough, to make tortillas) and put the dried coffee through the molino. then when it comes out, the dried shells have been separated from the bean. the coffee bean is super, super hard so it doesn´t get ground up when it is put through the molino. then, the coffee is taken home and it is roasted on a comal (a flat, round, clay disk that women use to cook tortillas on....this is a traditional cooking tool that can be traced back for centuries throughout latin america). after they are roasted, they are then taken back to the molino and put through a second time, and this time they are ground up into coffee grounds. because they have been roasted, they lose their durability and are easier to break, which is why they are able to be ground the second time, but not the first. this process is used for the green coffee, but also for families who have a bit of land themselves and want to have some coffee for their own use. for example, antonio´s family has a bit of land with about 50 coffee trees and his dad cuts that coffee and sells some of it to the beneficio, but they also save some for their family.

in the case of the coffee that has been dried at the beneficio, the beans are not roasted there as well. the beneficio sells the unroasted coffee beans to international coffee companies and the roasting is done there.

so that´s the story of coffee, as i´ve seen and been told.

(i just have to mention here that as i was typing this blog entry at the ciber cafe, i looked over at what i thought was a large dog that had entered the place, when in reality, it was a goat. ??????????????? seriously. it is now chasing around this little kid, who is apparently from the family that owns it. WHERE AM I??????)

well, this entry has been a long time coming, but these past few months have been nutso. so i'll just get on with it......

here's edwin and his two sisters carlita (the baby) and brenda

this is my neighbor katy

this is niña domy's grandaughter paola

here's paola with her cousin, gustavo (niña domy's other grandson, the one whose parents took him out of school)

this is another kid from my school, brandon, and his three cousins

here's my old boss tim with his kids anna, mollie and sam

wait, what??? why do i have that last picture in there? haha. well, here's why. because of tim and his wife, cecil, and their kids, i was able to go around my town and give out some toys and games and school supplies to some of the kids that are really poor. the above pictures show some of the kids with the stuff i gave to them that mollie (who was in charge of the "crap that's awesome" campaign) got together from their house - old toys and books and games - that their family didn't really use anymore. i gave away most of the stuff, but still have some left that i'm using for prizes at the school. the grand prize??? a spongebob squarepants lunchpail filled with pens and markers and stuff. whoever wins it is gonna pop their eyes out of their head.

not all the stuff i gave away, though. let me tell you the story of a hook.

this is my hammock at my house. see how it's all draped on the line that i use to hang my clothes on to dry?

well, after about 45 minutes on a chair, antonio and i were able to install this handy-dandy hook (you know the kind you put in your ceiling and hang your bike from or something) that came in the "crap that's awesome" box, i know have my hammock hanging beautifully out of the way of my clothes line!

if i ever get a new camera, i'll probably have more pictures of the crap that's awesome giveaway. but for the meantime, you'll just have to take my word for it......the kids really, really love getting something like a new stuffed animal or a matchbox car. it's cool because it really is a way to recycle that stuff that you know is gonna end up making some kid deliriously happy.

i was reading some book and they were talking about how those bins where you think you're giving your old clothes away to charity really only gets sold to groups of people who then sell it to poor people. it never really gets "donated." this is true....well, i'm not sure if it's 100% true, but down here there are stores that advertise "ropa americana" and it's all clothes, from the states, old hand-me-downs that they sell for like $3 a shirt and $10 for a pair of jeans. basically they're like goodwill stores, they're just down here instead of up in the states. it kind of bothers me because the idea is that you're donating your clothes or "stuff" to people who can't buy clothes, when in reality it's just being sold to them. anyway, what i'm getting at is that this big box of stuff that tim and his family sent down was all stuff that went directly to the kids and people of my town. there was no middleman (well, i suppose you could call me the middleman....but i didn't turn around and sell all of the stuff to everyone, i just handed it out). sure, for some of the toys and games, i'm having competitions at the school to motivate the kids, but that's just to make things more fun for them.

i'll admit, seeing a tribe hat in the box of stuff was a little, well, excruciating....but i did give it away to gustavo who wore it every single day afterwards. hopefully i'll have more pictures to post once i get a new camera. but until then, muchisimas gracias to the crap that's awesome committee!!!

adios, for now

well, the only way to say it is, these past couple of days did not go as planned and were definitely NOT how i'd have liked to spend them. in my last entry i wrote about how courtney and her friend essie were coming to visit me - we were gonna go hiking...specifically, laguna verde on friday and saturday we were going to go down to sonsonate and hike cerro verde with antonio. then the whole monterico thing on sunday. that's not what happpened.

what happened is this: courtney and essie came on thursday night and we chit-chatted and went to eat at a comedor with antonio. later we planned our trips to laguna verde and cerro verde and called it a night. the next morning me, courtney and essie headed out for the hike to the laguna at around 9:15 or so. it was a great day - not too hot, not to fresco. we got about halfway up the road to the laguna (it's about an hour or so hike from apaneca to the top), past this stretch of pine trees when courtney turns around because she heard a noise. i saw courtney turn around so i did as well. essie was ahead of both of us and kept walking. when i turned around, i see this guy coming up behind us wearing a ski mask and he's pointing a gun at us. he kept asking us for "pisto, pisto" (money), and both courtney and i immediately got out any money we had and handed it over to him. meanwhile, essie had just turned around to see us giving this guy money and not being able to speak spanish was like "whaaaaat?" courtney told her to give him her money, and he moves over to essie to get whatever money she had. she had her camera in her hand and held it behind her back and when she went to take her backpack off, he realized she had her camera so he grabbed that from her. then he gets the idea that we all have cameras and whatever else, so he moves back to courtney and is shoving his gun in her side and asking her what else she has. courtney opens up her backpack and shows him that all she has is her water and shirt and tries to give it to him, saying "no soy mentirosa" - i'm not lying - and he decides he doesn't want it. then he comes over to me and starts pointing the gun at my stomach and asks me what else i have. i told him i didn't have anything else and i was arguing with him, telling him i live in apaneca and why would i bring anything...so he feels my pockets and then keeps asking me "lleva más" meaning, did i have more stuff. i told him i didn't have anything else and started taking off my backpack to show him like courtney did and he ripped my backpack off and took the whole thing. then he moved over to essie and takes her whole backpack and then tells us "vayénse" - get outta here. we were like - what.the.fuck.

so, he walks away, down the road and i asked courtney if she had her cell phone and she did, so i took it from her. meanwhile, she's telling me "but he has a gun." she was worried that he was going to turn around and see us on the phone and shoot us or something. i honestly wanted to chase him...it was like, it was hard for me not to...i knew he had a gun, but i kept thinking - that asshole just took off with all our stuff! the guy disappears into the cafetel and i dial 911 and get the san salvador police and they have to transfer me to the apaneca police. so i tell the apaneca police what happened and they say they're sending a truck up. so after i hang up, we then see the guy come back out of the forest - but he's completely changed his appearance....the ski mask's gone, he's got on a baseball hat and he's got a different shirt on. he's got mine and essie's backpacks stacked on top of one another and he takes off into another part of the forest. then, less than a minute later, a pickup truck comes up and passes us...then another car and truck. and us three are just standing there, not even believing that that just occurred. then we call peace corps and tell them what happened and they say to get away from there...to go to a house or something. but there are no houses really, so we just decide to start walking down. we then meet up with the police and they ask us what happened so we tell them. then they ask us to get in the truck and they proceed to drive all over that damned mountain, 4x4'ing it through the forest and into these fincas looking for the guy, asking other people if they've seen him. but we knew that the guy was long gone, hiding somewhere eating the oranges and pan dulce i had in my backpack.

so the police finally take us back to apaneca and we proceed to answer a bunch of questions and fill out a police report and then when that was finished i had to go to the licenciado's house to get the spare set of keys he has so i could get in my house, since my keys were in my backpack. essie had had her passport in her backpack and that was obviously stolen so she had to call the embassy to see what the process was for getting a new one. meanwhile, i had to search high and low for antonio's phone number because i had his number on my cell phone, but not in my memory and my cell phone was in my backpack, long gone by now. fact is, i don't have anybody's number in my memory!

so that is what happened in place of hiking and going to guatemala......since essie's passport was gone, she obviously couldn't go to guatemala. that afternoon we immediately decided that the only way to deal with this is to have some drinks. i mean, really, is there any other way?? we took the bus to ahuachapán and i was hoping to get another cell phone but i was told that if i wanted to keep my same number, i'd have to go to one of the metrocentros - sonsonate, santa ana or san salvador - to do that. so we went to eat, then stopped at the grocery store and loaded up on roasted chicken, beer, vodka and tick-tack (salvadoran sugar cane liquor).

as we sat there drinking at my house, we deconstructed what happened and ended up deciding that we probably could have overtaken this guy (this theory came well before we were drunk). the guy acted kind of nervous and courtney and i think it's because she caught him off-guard by turning around when she heard that noise. we think he was trying to surprise us...which he did, but not the way he wanted. if he would of come up to one of us and stuck the gun in our backs, i would've been waaaaay more scared than i was. secondly, courtney and i were speaking spanish right back to him - arguing with him and what not. he was probably expecting that we were just a few tourists passing through.

i kept staring at his gun, i mean, it was so close to me, it was hard not to. it was some kind of old revolver, but the way he was waving it around didn't really make it seem like he knew what he was doing....or maybe that he was just nervous. i feel like, in hindsight, i could of just reached out and grabbed it or knocked it away from him. i didn't even really think it was loaded, but then we got to talking about the details and courtney said she remembered looking at it and not being able to see through the holes that were sticking out from the place where the bullets go...what the hell is the name for that thing? anyway, so it was loaded and i am 100% certain it wasn't a toy (which antonio keeps telling us he thinks it was a toy, but he is just theorizing because he wasn't there but wants to think he understands everything that happened). but it definitely wasn't a toy. it looked like an old ass gun, but it wasn't a toy.

anyway, this guy was totally not a professional...i mean, i'm sure he's robbed people before, and he was prepared (hence the ski mask and gun and changing clothes routine), and he obviously got what he wanted from us, but courtney and i keep saying that if we'd just been able to think a little faster, we seriously think we could have overpowered this guy. he didn't have us all close together...so he had to keep looking from one to the other to make sure we weren't up to anything. he never told us to put our hands up....we could have been carrying anything in our backpacks...mace, a knife, anything. but he allowed us to freely go through our stuff to give him our money. there were three of us! so looking back, we're kind of kicking ourselves for not thinking faster. but on the other hand, i'm not so sure that that would've been the greatest idea either. i think what we did - just give up what we had - was the smartest thing to do. it's kind of weird, but i felt more threatened by the gun after he walked away and i was on the phone....like he was gonna try and deter us from calling the police. like when he was up in our faces and had the guns in our sides and all that - i really never thought "oh my god, he's gonna shoot me!" honestly i just kept thinking - you have got to be kidding me. like when i saw him coming up behind us with the mask and gun, i was like - this can't be for real. it was so fake-like. like it was a movie or something. i thought - he can't be coming to rob us. it was definitely weird.

but the good thing is, we're all ok and the stuff that got stolen was just stuff. i lost my camera, my cell phone, a few bucks, my nalgene bottle....my oranges! pan dulce! i had just picked those damned oranges at the school on thursday and they were sooo good. i think the thing that i'll most miss is that backpack. i loved that backpack. plus my gray sweatshirt....the twin of the red one i lost in honduras last year. i remember losing that red one and thinking, oh well, at least i still have the gray one. and now it's probably being worn by that guy's cousin or he himself is traipsing around wearing it. i also lost my detroit tigers baseball hat AND my lucky "detroit tigers" dollar which was folded up in one of the pouches in the backpack (one day five or six years back, i found a dollar bill in the middle of a book written by sparky anderson, former manager of the detroit tigers, that my dad had lent me. i ended up having to use that dollar in an emergency parking situation when i was living in cleveland...i thought "this sucks that i have to use this!" a couple months later, i was walking outside of the tigers' new stadium, comerica park, when i looked down and there was a dollar bill in front of me. that became the new lucky dollar. now it's gone! and i'm in el salvador. how are the tigers gonna replace it when i'm in el salvador?).

what a shitty day. but that's all stuff that can be replaced and thank god we weren't hurt. we three kept saying how much more worse it could've been....i mean, at least there was only one guy. i seriously think i would've shit my pants if there'd have been a group of them.

so we're going to go to monterico tomorrow. we three came into the capital today and got an emergency passport for essie and spent some time at the salvadoran immigration department to get her another travel visa. Everyone was really nice and helpful and so we’re glad we decided we weren’t gonna let that jerk ruin our plans...we’re just doing them on a different day.

the thing that irks me is that people keeps saying how "you know how salvadorans are." when essie called the embassy, one of the people she talked to said this, and then something sarcastic like "welcome to el salvador." i had an incident back in october of last year where i had some money stolen from me and i was upset and talking to the police in ahuachapán and they were like "you know how salvadorans are" and making the hand gesture for stealing. i just think that's a stupid thing to say. not all salvadorans are like that and i'm not going to generalize the entire population by something a couple people did. no wonder people and countries get stereotyped. there are robbers everywhere, including the united states. the thing that makes me mad is that those who steal or rob tourists here, or anybody who's trying to explain why other people hold up buses or whatever, kind of try to justify it by saying "we're poor," or "they're desperate." there are tons of salvadorans who are just as poor, but don't go out stealing or robbing people with guns. they do what they can and hope for the best. they take work when they can find it and they try and make the money last. they don't go around hiding in the forest waiting for easy targets. it's funny because i told my neighbor and the licenciado what happened and they kind of had this reaction of surprised-ness that it happened to us, but you could tell that it wasn't like it was that big of a deal. because this happens all the time here....it's just something to expect at some point in your life if you're a salvadoran. whatever - that may be the case, but i still refuse to believe that all salvadorans are like that. it's simply not true. most of them are victims just like courtney, essie and i. i just hope karma gets all the bad guys in the end.

the good thing is, we've been able to laugh about what happened. i don't feel traumatized or anything. the day after it happened, i was having a bit of trouble trying to fall back asleep early in the morning because i kept picturing that guy coming up with his mask on and with that gun...my stomach would get all tight and wound up. but more than likely the wound up stomach was due to the fact that i was extremely hungover. ha.

so our plan is just to put it behind us, which i think in a few days will be the case. in the meantime, although i'm super glad i'm here to write this blog entry, i'm also gonna miss that red backpack a whole bunch.

ok, so yes, it´s been a month since i´ve posted. but the majority of that time, i was in the states, and you all know how the states are, so why would i post about that? anyway, i´m back...i´ve been back for a couple of weeks and everyone here is in the middle of coffee cutting season. on one hand, it´s boring...for those of us not out cutting coffee...it´s ¨bien silencio¨as everyone likes to say. school starts on monday, but there will be maybe two or three kids that show up. plus, some of the school´s roof got torn off during a fierce wind storm that ripped through the country while i was watching snow fall back in the states. the areas of the country that are at a higher altitude had some really terrible damages to houses and fallen trees and the like. so we´re not sure if we´ll even be able to have classes when school actually starts.....which, technically, is starting a couple weeks late anyway because the schools in this area have ¨permiso¨ to start two weeks late due to the fact that there would be no kids that showed up (because they are all out in the coffee forests) if they were to set the start date on the day that all the other schools in the country actually start. so anyway, in the next post i will show you some of the damages to the school.

this weekend courtney and her friend from the states are coming to visit and we´re going to do some serious hiking, then we´re off to guatemala for a couple days. but when i come back, hopefully the ministerio de educación will have fixed our school roof and i can put up my periodico mural and we can have normal classes. it´s not likely though. ugh!

but with all that being said, i´m excited to start this next year. the comité has been working hard (we fixed a road in san jorge on sunday....although, i was the only female out there working with all these men...which got me some strange looks from some of the old women in town..haha), and i think despite all the problems my school has, it´ll be a great year.

adios for now!