The days are beginning to pass more quickly here as we fall into routine. Most of are time is occupied either by Spanish class, cultural immersion activities or going into the PC office for a day of lectures. Today we met with our “youth group”. We had early gone to a school and sat in on an English class, and at the end passed out invitations to come to my house at a specified time to participate in PC community activities. The class we visited was 9th grade and the kids were about 15. We passed out 14 invitations and 4 girls ended up showing up, 45 minutes late. We explained to them (in pre-written, badly executed Spanish) who we were and what we had in mind, and then asked them to take us on a tour of their community. We walked down to the local stream, were all of the local greywater drains to. The water was a frothy diluted milk color, and there was trash everywhere. This is all too common, 90% of surface water here is deemed unfit even for animal consumption. When we came back, we asked them for ideas about a project to better their community that we could help them do. They had some good ideas, such as more trash cans in the community and community workshops on environmental principles. We are very constrained on both time and money, however, so we have to set our sights fairly low. We are planning to meet with the girls every week to start getting a definite plan into motion. The project is a little strange since the PC has predetermined all the steps, and it is not really geared toward getting results, it is mostly to serve as a training exercise for us, so we can do actual work when we get into our sites.
We got a really good lecture from Rolando, our Environmental Director the other day. He is a Salvadoran who got a PhD from some school in Mississippi in Agriculture and has been with the PC here for 16 years, since the program reopened after the civil war. He basically highlighted that the environmental movement in the US hasn’t always been what it is today, that it really got started in the sixties, and he basically challenged us to make the same thing happen in El Salvador. That’s a pretty intense mission objective, but also inspiring. However, one can’t help but notice that the Environmental Movement in the US rode on the back of unheard of economic prosperity, and we don’t have that luxury here. However, Costa Rica stands as an excellent example of what can be done, and its close proximity encourages hope El Salvador.