Junio y Julio

Perhaps the greatest West Nottingham Academy reunion ever held in El Salvador. Bruce taught history for two years at the same school where the Costa Rican mother/ wife of these good folks teaches Spanish. The sons were students of ours (Kelly was a substitute for three months). The family drove from Maryland to Costa Rica, stopping at points of interest along the way. And thus, they momentously became our first visitors from alla (over there=the US) and enjoyed their first ever pupusas. They spent a night on their way down in June and another on their way back up in August.


The winners of the Ajedrez Increíble (Incredible Chess!) competition. A teacher at the school does some mean calligraphy, so we anticlimactically held this brief ceremony days after the competition to allow the teacher time to fancifully write the kids’ names.


We helped organize this charla on home and school gardens.


We brought four leaders from our community (representing the mayor’s office, the health clinic, the local environmental NGO, and a school) to a three-day workshop on Project Design and Management. It was funded by USAID, run by Peace Corps El Salvador, and held at a posh resort on the Costa del Sol. Topics included citizen participation, leadership, community mapping, identification of community strengths/ weaknesses/ opportunities/ threats, objectives, budgets, action plans, evaluations, and grant applications. Our community focused on possible projects to promote tourism, such as the development of an ecological park.


We planted trees outside one of the schools. But we needed to protect the young, vulnerable trees from horses, drunks, etc. So beforehand, we walked a mile to a forested area where we had been granted permission to cut down bamboo stalks. Seventh and eighth grade eco club kids cut down the tall bamboo and made a fun competition of cutting them into stakes (fewest whacks of a machete wins).


This young man is the president of our eco club. But in light of the situation in Honduras, some of the other kids have been joking about a golpe de estado (coup d’etat). They say this president doesn’t do much. Hence, this propaganda that shows him working.


Girls are usually more hesitant to participate in physical tasks, be they sports or tree plantings. It is constantly a priority of ours to hassle them until they join in.


The newest Peace Corps Youth Development and Sustainable Agriculture/ Environmental Education group is currently in training. Both groups have now visited us in our site. Here, some of the new "Youthies" try out their magic wands during a game day we organized with the fourth graders.


A few weeks before we left on our trip to the States, Kelly saw a scorpion in our closet. I was already asleep. We decided to put masking tape around the door to form a seal and kill him in the morning. We searched thoroughly but found nothing. Over a month later, I got out of the shower, opened the closet, and chose a shirt. He was inside that shirt. As I put my left arm through the sleeve, he hitched a ride on my hand. He got me with his tail (and I think also his pincher). I threw him to the floor. I was barefoot, so he was able to make a getaway. He ran under the dresser. From there, he could have easily slipped under the door to the room of our host mother. The initial pain was no worse than a bee sting. I yelled to Kelly. Then the scorpion emerged from his hiding spot and I killed him with Kelly’s sneaker. I started the treatment I had memorized in training: scrub the infected area, apply Hydrocortisone cream, and take Benadryl capsules. Within a short while, my mouth went numb. I headed out with Kelly and Gerardo to hand out invitations for a meeting. We were to visit all the schools. After chatting with the director at the first school, I stood up, walked outside, and sat down. My legs had gone numb. I went home and rested. My arms went numb. The local advice poured in: bite a stick, eat brown sugar, rub the guts of the scorpion on the bite. My body was asleep all day. My hand was still numb the next day and the pain lasted another two days.


Bruce the Hobbit. The morning of the scorpion bite, he had to lean on the walls on his walk to the bathroom. He then graduated to this stick. Kelly thinks he bears a striking resemblance to a man known as “Joe, the Wizard from the Northeast”--a homeless and slightly crazy man who wandered the banks of Delaware´s Christina River and was full of crazy tales for all the rowers during regattas.