La Caminata (the hike)

Comandante Sombra. We joined a large group (40 people?) on an expedition to walk up the cerro (steep hill, not quite mountain), down into the crater, up the other side, and finally back down. A great day.


bambú


The young boy in the middle was our guide into the crater. His family gathers the coffee beans for the harvest. He wore only flip-flops on his feet and led us down ridiculously steep walking trails. He was basically awesome.


in the canyon/ hikers in distance


volcano and flower


These kids were rock-stars. They ran down the hill at the end of the hike, kicking up dust that got in our eyes.


100-pound sacks of coffee beans

La Virgen (the virgin)

reindeer made of straw/ presents sent from home (thank you Moms!)


This is a farol (or farolito). It is made of wood and colored plastic wrap. There is a candle inside. We marched in a procession from one Catholic church to the other, following a statue of la Virgen de Concepción.


Bruce and friends after the procession.


Kelly, machete, coconut


This is the float for the procession of la Virgen de Guadalupe. Children were all dressed up in traditional clothes. Young boys had fake moustaches. A throng of singing townspeople followed the float for two hours. Two men lead the float with tall sticks to raise the telephone lines to allow the float to pass. Then the insanity began. Fireworks upon fireworks. A man dressed up as a bull, running through the crowd, setting fireworks off in all directions. This is a tradition. Bruce´s hand was slightly burned. We didn´t return to the park for the 3 am mariachi concert on account of a hike the next day. But the fireworks woke us up anyway.


our adorable neighbor in traditional dress

El Volcán (the volcano)

Kelly está lavando la ropa.


cafe


This is the San Miguel (a.k.a. Chaparrastique) volcano. Our pueblo´s police officers are incredibly friendly and took us on three guided tours of the region in their police trucks. We now know almost all of the cantones (very rural areas) in our municipio. We also saw beautiful sites: the volcano, the ¨laguna seca¨(dry lagoon, really a huge crater), hot springs, boiling ponds of mud (Yellowstone-esque), etc. We saw extreme levels of poverty (cantones without water) and luxury (the hacienda of one of the so-called 14 Families who--before the civil war--owned basically everything).


Kelly y la laguna seca


We could see, in the distance, the volcano of San Vicente (our training site). Also at this summit, we could see trenches leftover from the war.


Kelly and tree


coffee country


another amazing tree


tarantulas strike back!


Bruce, after the kill

La Playa (the beach)

coin pouch...¡que chivo!


monster


malaria pills


Hombre Araña/ It´s difficult to find professional-looking notebooks in El Salvador.


chucho (dog, more common here than term ¨perro¨)


at the beach! with our counterparts!


chickens finishing our coconut


sad chicken/ no more coconut


There is a dog in the middle of these cows, asserting his authority.


just like on the Jersey shore

---

Every so often it feels as though we are characters in a high school Spanish textbook: Bruce and Kelly are Peace Corps Volunteers serving in El Salvador, Central America. They are working with a development agency that has received a grant from an NGO in the U.S. Help Bruce and Kelly translate the following letter...

There are also times when you take a step back and realize that you are dicing radishes for a Salvadoran first communion.

We have now been in our site for one month (El Salvador for three). We have been keeping busy. Police-guided tours of the region. Excellent, beautiful hikes with new friends. Meetings at the mayor´s office about a new recycling-composting program. Soccer. The Carnaval in San Miguel--said to be the largest outside of Brazil. Candle-lit religious processions. Meetings with NGOs, schools, the local health center, Cruz Roja (Red Cross)...

On Monday we held a general assembly with an audience of our Peace Corps bosses and the leaders of the community. We formally introduced Peace Corps, our individual programs, and ourselves. We also presented a long list of project ideas that included excursions to forests and ancient ruins (of the Lencas), reforestation, environmental festivals, gender equality, sexual education, sporting events, English classes for teachers, community newsletters, nights of poetry/art/music/movies... Most or all of these projects will be youth-centered. We will work on these projects in conjunction with community organizations.

We miss everyone back home! Hope you all are preparing for a festive holiday season. ¡Feliz Navidad y Prospero 2009!

First Days in Site

Nightstand in new site


View from window


Drinking water. Delivered on Mondays.


¨Donde Viven Los Monstruos¨ y ¨Huevos Verdes Con Jamon¨. We have befriended the neighbor kids and they are big fans of these books.


A counterpart took us to San Miguel, the nearby city, to see a celebration of 35 years of El Salvador´s Casa de la Cultura (Cultural House) program. Here is San Miguel´s Catedral Nuestra Senora de la Paz.


This is an early 20th-century theatre, recently restored. A great rock band played on the steps. Their setlist included a Mana cover, ¨La Bamba¨, and ¨Another Brick in the Wall¨.


Folklore dancers, part of the celebration


The theatre also featured a temporary exhibit about El Salvador´s role (still on-going) in the war in Iraq.

Swearing In and Moving In

This scorpion was a worthy adversary, but we got the better of him.


A heartfelt send-off to Kelly and Brush


One last dance party


Celebrating the patron saint of our canton, San Diego


A great speech from a friend at the U.S. Embassy


Torta


Kelly, Bruce, another Volunteer, U.S. Ambassador, and our host family

---
We are writing, for the first time, from our permanent site. We live in a beautiful pueblo in the department of San Miguel--in the east of the country. Also for the first time, we are writing as Peace Corps Volunteers (Trainees no longer).

Training ended well. We both joined leadership committees. Kelly is now a member of WYD (Women in Youth Development, they give out scholarships for girls to attend high school). Bruce is on PAC (Program Advisory Committee). We found and killed a scorpion in our bedroom. Christmas decorations started to appear. Our training host family threw us a surprise going-away party our last night in town: Dinner. Dancing with little kids. A sign to wish farewell to ¨Kelly y Brush¨. The night coincided with a procession to mark the feast day of San Diego. A truck with religious statues and a disco ball made its way down the street, surrounded by musicians and a crowd that let off small-time fireworks.

We spent two nights in San Salvador. That Friday (14th), the majority of our training group´s counterparts (folks who will help us get situated in our sites) came out to meet us at a hotel and to attend an orientation. Very nice people. They left and took our luggage to our new site. We then arrived at the embassy for Swearing-In. It is the second-largest U.S. Embassy in the world, second only to the one in Baghdad. A friend of ours gave an excellent speech about the challenges faced by the Salvadoran youth. We met the ambassador and enjoyed a great dinner. Afterwards, there was a hotel party hosted by last year´s crew of Volunteers with ¨most likely to...¨ awards and so on. Kelly is most likely to appear in a Peace Corps poster. Bruce is most likely to appear in a Salvadoran music video.

We said goodbye to the other twenty Volunteers in our group, who are now spread out across the country. When we got off the bus and arrived in our site, the two men we had met the previous day picked us up and gave us a quick tour. We saw the environmental foundation where they work. We opened coconuts with machetes (new hobby) and drank the water. We moved in.

We are living with a widow of ¨la tercera edad¨ (the third age, a polite way of referring to someone between 60 and 90. Our living situation has changed drastically. There are tile floors and high ceilings. There is a courtyard in the middle of the house with beautiful flowers and three turtles. Three of the woman´s four children live in New York. We will definitely stay in this house at least until February (after the second phase of training in San Vicente). Perhaps we will stay for the two years.

Our first night in town, we had dinner with the director of the Cultural House (also a widow) and her daughter. Dinners at their house have become a tradition. Through them, we have visited said Cultural House (reading, arts, crafts, guitar lessons), the church (we met the priest and bought a songbook--now we´ll be able to understand something after the Sign of the Cross), and the Lions´ Club (shout-out to Bruce´s childhood Lions´ Club baseball team!). We had a great dinner at the Lions´ Club in spite of the bat (great word: murcielago) that kept flying just above our heads. Last night, we accompanied them to a special prayer service that is held nine years after someone´s death. A picture of the deceased woman was the centerpiece of a large scene depicting Jesus´s miraculously successful catch of fish. There were many candles, snacks, and relatives from LA.

There are several schools in town in which we´ll be working. We have visited them several times, but not much is going on on account of summer vacation. We are helping referee a soccer tournament held to give the kids something to do.

Instead of launching into projects right off the bat, we will be meeting as many people in town as possible. We will conduct at least 40 house visits to learn about the community´s needs. We will interview the local mayor, police, health officials, Red Cross, Ministry of Education, kindergarten, high school, university, NGOs. We will present the findings from our diagnostic during a general assembly with local leaders and our Peace Corps bosses in mid-December.

We have big shoes to fill. The Peace Corps Volunteer we are replacing accomplished a great deal.

It´s a change moving from our rural training community to this pueblo (town). The residents actually refer to it as a small ciudad (city). At least to us, it doesn´t feel like a city. Figures vary, but there are about 10,000 people in the town. There is a sometimes-bustling market, an attractive park in which folks sit and talk or peruse the $1 pirated DVDs. The pace of life is not quite as slow. There are advantages (great computer labs, more resources for projects) and disadvantages (more expensive, can´t know everyone). But there are still women selling French bread and delicious pastries from the guacals (think large buckets) on their heads. There are still cows running down the streets. There are still geckos in our room. It is still El Salvador and we are excited to integrate into the community.

We mentioned before that our first two months in El Salvador were an emotional roller-coaster. We don´t expect the next two years to be smooth sailing. However, now that we´re in our town and getting acclimated, there are fewer unknowns and we´re feeling more confident and excited about our decision to come here. Everything´s coming up Kelly and Bruce.

Tarantula Pinata Waterfall

Kelly with a neighborhood family



Our host brother (eyes closed) with friends



Our first tarantula



It was big. Now it is dead. Our host brother´s friend stomped it to death.



At la Fiesta de las Familias. Eeyore´s name here is Igor.



La Fiesta de las Familias.



Our host family´s nephew with a pinata before its utter destruction at the hands of other bat-wielding host family nephews.



Our volcano hike was canceled, so we joined a friend on a trip to this local waterpark. However, there was a special event with thumping music and a pupusa-making contest. Not the tranquil daytrip we expected.


Random Observations
Just about all the buses are decorated in the same fashion. There are stickers and posters of either Jesus or Che Guevara both inside and outside the bus. There are definitely stickers and posters of both Tweety Bird (Piolín) and Winnie the Pooh (Winnie Pooh). Many buses are former U.S. school buses.

Roosters crow all day long. Cartoons and songs during our childhood led us to believe that roosters crow in the morning. Serious disillusionment.

Soup is a popular breakfast item. We eat corn flakes with hot milk. Eggs and bananas are common dinner items. In fact, the staples of the diet in El Salvador are tortillas, eggs, beans, rice, bananas. We eat delicious avocados. Pupusas are El Salvador’s most famous dish. They’re similar to tortillas, but filled with cheese and/or beans and sometimes vegetables called ayote and lorroco. We hear there are other varieties.

A small bag of chips only costs 10 cents, but it costs 60 cents to print one photograph at la tienda Kodak. El Salvador’s currency has been the dollar since the early 2000s. Dollarization has been controversial due to sharp price increases. Many folks also speak ill of the somewhat newly-formed CAFTA (Central American Free Trade Agreement).

“Lady in Red”, “Nothing Compares to U”, and “Total Eclipse of the Heart” are among the most popular English songs here.

There are several movies about El Salvador’s Civil War (officially 1980-1992, but things had been really bad for years before), notably “Voces Inocentes” (Innocent Voices) and “Romero” (about the archbishop who spoke out against the military dictatorship until his assassination). They were filmed in Mexico. “Romero” was filmed in English and dubbed by actors from Spain (the difference in accents is significant).

People greet most everyone they see here. Neighbors know one another. These are definitely some of the most endearing aspects of life here.

There are many gestures that take the place of words. People often indicate a direction not with their fingers, but by pursing their lips toward something. To get someone’s attention, you go “Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch” (sounds like the jingle for Chia Pets, minus the –ia sound). It is common to state the obvious. When people are just standing around, you say, “Paseando?” (Just hanging out, huh?). So when people are washing their clothes, you say, “Oh? So you’re washing your clothes?” Et cetera.

The mythology here (mostly scary stories) is fascinating. There is El Cadejo, the wolf-like creature whose eyes shine like embers as she pursues folks who are out after dark. There is Padre Sin Cabeza (the Headless Priest). The Carretera Bruja: a cart that passes by at night with skulls on stakes. However, by far the most popular stories are those of La Ciguanaba and El Cipitillo. La Ciguanaba appears to men (who may have been drinking) as a beautiful woman. Oftentimes, the man will allow her to ride behind him on his horse. La Ciguanaba will then transform into a hideous woman with a terrifying face and breasts that sag down to her waist. The man flees for his life and returns home with a tremendous fever. Sometimes he goes insane. The father of our host father has such a tale from his younger days. Cipitillo is the son of La Ciguanaba. He is basically an uneducated hick. He eats ashes and bananas. His belly bulges out from malnutrition. He wears a gigantic sombrero. His feet are reversed. He is funny—not scary.

Real Madrid and FC Barcelona are the most popular fútbol teams.

Sunday nights there is a popular four-hour long Mexican program on tv called “La Academia”. It is similar to “American Idol”, but with several twists. At the beginning of each show, each contestant needs to write the name of the contestant that (s)he thinks should be kicked off and give reasons why in front of everyone (including that person). Though that may seem cruel, it is nothing compared to El Salvador’s “Cantando por Un Sueño” (Singing for a Dream). Each contestant has a friend or relative with a dream. For instance, someone needs a life-saving operation (s)he can’t afford. Someone else’s house still hasn’t been rebuilt from a hurricane. Only the winner of the contest wins the dream for their friend. Muchos sueños rotos.