El Salvador has two seasons: rainy, and dry. We’ve recently and very gently entered the rainy season. It started with a light sprinkle one night and gradually grew into an almost nightly full-on rain, often with lightning and thunder. Last night it rained harder than ever. This is exciting for many reasons:
1) We feel much more connected to, and influenced by, the weather here. We can’t shut windows and turn on the AC. Our house is very open to the outside world. There are no screens on the doors or windows. During a storm, it’s best to just hang out in the hammock and enjoy the breeze.
2) Everything is getting green again! We hadn’t had rain since November, so things were getting really dusty, dry, and dead around here. The rain has brought life back to our little corner of the world. It has also brought two very bizarre, daylong plagues of different insects. Who knew??
3) Every day is different than the previous. The rains will get stronger and more frequent until it’s raining all of the time in September. This might not sound too exciting, and we’re sure in September we’ll be more than ready for it to end (we were pretty sick of the rain last September). However, it’s more exciting than the dry season; which is basically a guaranteed daily forecast of sun and inescapable heat…and perhaps dust in your lungs.
We’ve been super busy lately. Too busy. We haven’t had time to do a lot of the community integration things we’re supposed to do. We’re going to try to make some changes this week to remedy this. One reason we’re so busy is that we’re working with several different schools. We’re always running all over town trying to maintain clubs and organize meetings, etc. And there are still other schools with which we have not yet worked. So, our new plan is to start a super chivo youth club open to all youth in our town. Instead of maintaining clubs in half of the schools and ignoring the other half, we’ll invite everyone to join this one club.
We’re also going to start being more direct. During training we were told that the culture in the US is much more direct than the culture here. So, we were taught to be super gentle with our words. We’re finding that this is backfiring. People have suggested some projects that, for various reasons, we simply can’t do. Instead of saying “well, no that can’t work because of x, y, and z” we’ve just been saying “we’ll see.” We’re in a big pueblo; people can handle a gentle no, maybe even a direct no. We’ll see.
We’re also not going to laugh immediately at jokes anymore. In order to please people and make people feel good about themselves, we often laugh before taking a minute to make sure we fully understand what’s been said. So, we’ve encouragingly laughed at little one- liners like, “Sometimes people forget they’re married, right Bruce!” and “Bruce should look for a younger wife.” and “Who’s Bruce on the phone with, his girlfriend?” So, that ends today. We’ve decided that a blank stare and a “¿cómo?” would be much better. What were we thinking?!?!? (To be fair, we’re more direct with people we know well. The fake laugh usually happens with people we hardly know).
Ahhh, we’ll be coming home to visit this summer! The dates are still up in the air. It will be glorious! We can’t wait!
Pictures from our adventures this month:
We went to the Lion’s Club for a dinner / dance to celebrate Mother’s Day. This group of kids from the next pueblo over played some great marimba.
We found out that a high school-aged girl in our town has won seven medals in chess tournaments. So we recruited her to be the strategy coach for our kids.
There were literally thousands of these winged ants all of a sudden one morning. Two days later they were all dead. We had been warned about them a few weeks ago. As in, “in a few weeks there will be thousands of winged ants everywhere.” However, we assumed that it was an exaggeration. As it turns out, it was all true. Some people call them angelitos, little angels.
one of our neighbors, enjoying sandía
the view from our most recent hike/ we saw a huge snake!
Bruce during his charla (lecture/chat) about gender equality. We each give a charla on each hike. This hike was the most successful. We only invited kids from our eco clubs and kids from schools who could send a chaperone. Thus, order was maintained. Little victories.
Kelly during her charla about trash separation
the celebration of the First Communion of our neighbor friend
Piñata!
our favorite little neighbor friend
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