I Have Arrived!

I have arrived! I came in the back of a pick-up and when I stepped down a heard about 60 kids yelling “Nacho”! The school had made welcome signs and was waiting to meet me. I nervously said a few words in broken Spanish and then started to move into my house across the street. I am living with a family in a basic but nice house. I have my own small room, next to their small store that sells a few basic things and candy. The family is a guy and his wife who are about 45 and their 6 or so kids, ages 9-22. They are really nice, but I still don’t understand a lot of what they say. The water runs every other day for a couple house to fill their water basin. They have a flush toilet (gotta love it) and showers are done in the small room with a drain which also contains the toilet. I dip a bowl in a basin and pour freezing water over myself to bathe. Their cook over an open fire in their kitchen and we eat a lot of beans rice and tortillas.
The community is small, maybe one eighty houses scattered throughout the mountains. We are about 3 miles up a mountain from the nearest town. The most common crop is coffee, which the people export. There are also a number of vacation homes that people from the capital own and occasionally visit, which creates a sharp economic divide with the locals. There are several volcanic craters, some about 300 feet deep and half a mile across, some with lakes in them. There was a series of small earthquakes last night, I was baffled and a little scared since my room is probably not very earthquake proof. Luckily, they weren’t very strong.
The climate here is really nice; it reminds me of northern California. There are forests to shade the coffee plants and fog/rain rolls in periodically throughout the day. It is one of the few places in the country that is at high enough altitude to never get very hot. The people get their water by taking water from one of the crater lakes and chlorinating it.
The volunteer that I am replacing is here until Oct 11 so he has been introducing me to people and places in the community. He teaches science and environmental studies at the school, mostly by doing small hands-on experiments. He has also been doing a revolving loan program, started a small recycling program, and coaches a youth soccer team. I will probably be taking over these projects, but now I am still getting settled in. Today I am heading into town to print out a brochure about myself, the Peace Corps, and my role here. I am then going to visit all the houses I can and pass out my brochure to try to get to know everyone and invite them to a community meeting I am holding next month to present my ideas and talk about the communities ideas.

9/25
So I’m one week in, and things are going well. Its rains here everyday, sometimes multiple times. I have been visiting houses and passing out my brochure and asking people about their family and what they think the problems in the community are. The answer to the questions about problems have ranged from “everything is a problem” “to there are no problems”. Other people mention lack of jobs, lack of trash pickup, and poverty in general. I’m hoping to work on the second one, the other two are some pretty big problems to try to solve. People are very welcoming, I am treated with interest and respect since I am a new and important person here. I just walk up to people’s houses and start asking a bunch of questions, and people are usually interested and open with their lives.
I’ve been observing the volunteer I am replacing teach classes and do science demonstrations for the kids. Its going to be tough to keep class moving with my level of Spanish, but I’ve got lots of time to practice. I’ve been trying to shake my American sense of having to be accomplishing things all the time. My main job now is mostly just to live here to gain trust and familiarity with the community.
I usually either read or study Spanish in my free time. I also try to just hang around people and find an excuse to talk to people both to practice and to build relationships. I’ve also been playing soccer with some of the kids in the street. Soccer is the universal language.
The other day, I went to work at the coffee farm with two guys my age who I live with. I thought we were going to work but ended up just hiking around the mountains for 4-5 hours, which was fun but exhausting. We went by an enormous volcanic crater, about 300 feet deep and half mile across, with very steep walls. However, there was a cornfield at the bottom, apparently there is a steep tiny trail down the side and someone goes down there and farms it. Most of the land here is coffee farm, which is shade grown so they have planted forests to shade the crop, so some mountainsides have checkerboard patterns from these planted trees. Other parts sre to steep to farm and are native growth jungle. Which is dominated by hanging vines that give the hillsides a rainforest appearance.

new place

view from down the road

the lagoon

almost done with training

It’s finally here! The swearing in is tomorrow and the next day we all travel to our sites. I found out that my site is in one of the most beautiful and coldest regions of the country (I got really lucky with this one). There is a tourist town nearby with paintballing and go-carts. Not what you expect in rural El Salvador, but surprises have become the norm. I will be replacing a volunteer who will go back to the States in the middle of October, so there will be a month overlap so he can show me around and help me set up. I have heard that he works with intensively with the local school teaching environmental education and also coaches a youth soccer team, which I am eager to take over. It’s a little sad to leave my family here since it feels like we were just becoming close and I was part of the family, however I will return in two months for our second round of training that lasts two weeks. I will be living with a host family in my new site too, hopefully everything will work out well. I can’t say much now, but I’m sure next week I will have a lot more to tell everyone.

Una Semana mas

One more week of training left, I’m ready to stop talking about it and get down to the business of volunteering. We had our final Spanish class yesterday, and I feel like I have made a lot of progress. I am able to write out pretty much what I want to say, but using things in a conversation in a timely manner is a different story altogether. I have my second Spanish interviews today, which will tell me how much I have improved. The PC encourages everyone to make it to Intermediate, but if I don’t it just means I will have to come back for a couple of extra class days in two months. Once training is over we are sent to our sites and are on our own for towo months until there is a second training phase that lasts for two weeks. Our focus in the first two to six months is to meet as many people and build “confianza” which means build relationships and trust so later the people will want to work with you on projects.
As an Environmental Education volunteer I have heard that our group has one of the most structured programs, in that we are given a book of environmental lesson and should give then over time to the local school we are assigned to. This is a base for our work, and then we are free to work on anything else that our community wants or that we want to do. I don’t have many plans yet, except maybe a gardening and composting project, as everyone seems to do these and are fairly easy and effective.
I don’t know if I have described my daily life so I will here;
6:00 Get up (never thought this would happen)
6:00-7 Get ready, shower from a bucket, have breakfast made for me, get dressed)
7-8 Work on homework or projects or read in English (my guilty pleasure)
8-12 Spanish class with three other trainees and our teacher in an extra room in my house
12-1 Lunch with Spanish teacher
1-4 More class
4-7 Work on projects, investigate community in areas like healthcare, water, holidays, school system, flora and fauna, beliefs ect. Sometimes play soccer or Frisbee with the kids
7-730 Eat dinner
7:30 -9 Work on homework or projects, read, listen to music
9 – go to bed (earliest since I was about 8 years old, but I’m exhausted by then)

This one is of my birthday fiesta with my family

Salvadoran Backflip

This is part of my house during a fiesta for mt now nine year old host-sister.

Kudos to Katie for the Costa del sol pics.

This one speaks for itself.

The family I stayed with during Immersion Days

Training here is winding down gracias a Dios. We have our swearing in a week from Thursday where we actually become PC Volunteers instead of trainees. I’m really looking forward to being in my site and getting to know people. They have been keeping us incredible busy here with classes, projects and other activities. Once we are in our sites we get to completely set our own schedule and do whatever we want whenever we want. I find out which town my site this Thursday, which is probably the biggest thing that I have ever left to chance in my entire life since I will be spending two entire years. They have been emphasizing to us the importance of building relationship our first few months in our sites. This involves meeting everyone, participating in local activities and building trust. I am really excited to do this since I my only responsibility is to hang out with everyone. Sounds like the worlds best job to me.
Life here has been good, I have given up trying to learn Spanish quickly and have resigned myself to a more “slow and steady wins the race” approach, which has relieved some of the stress I was feeling. I can get my basic point across usually but still get very lost in most conversations. My go-to Spanish words are bastante which means plenty or enough (I have heard this when I asked how many kids someone has), quisas which means maybe and va a llover which means it is going to rain, which is almost always the case here and can serve as a great conversation in itself.
We had a free weekend for the first time last weekend and most of us pooled money to rent an enormous house on the beach complete with hammocks, a pool, patio-bar, and general awesome tourist amenities. We finally got to drink a bit and hang out and speak English and get to know each other better. The house was right on a beautiful beach and was basically a slice of paradise to relax in. It was a very much needed vacation.
We have been meeting with a group of kids for the last few weeks trying to get them to do a community project of some sort, and they decided to do a community clean-up today. However, none of them actually showed up this morning. The other gringos seemed a bit surprised, but I knew that the last thing kids probably want to do on Saturday is clean up trash in the mud. We’re going to try again Monday morning.
Even though my malaria medicine gives me strange dreams, its usually stranger when I wake up and remember what I’m doing and where I am.