I´m Lazy, Lo Siento

Hey everyone,

So I have yet to write a blog in country. Whoops. This reminds me of looking at my friends´Peace Corps blogs that haven´t written in them for months.

Here is a rundown. I am in my fourth week of training. I have been living with a family of six for the last month and it is all going great. There are four kids in the house: Pedro (24), Melvin (18), Gabi (17) and Fatima (12). The family make their money by farming, they have a milpa (corn-bean field) on the side of a mountain. I went to work on the milpa a couple of times and it is really damn hard. First of all, it is a cornfield on the SIDE OF A MOUNTAIN. So it is really hard to keep your balance while hacking off pieces of the plant with a machete. But it was fun to go. Pedro, Arcadio (the Dad) and their cousin Tony work at the milpa 5-6 days a week. It is hard work and it takes about a twenty minute walk down the mountain and a 35 minute walk up to reach their plot of land. Our canton is pretty much full of farming families and many of them are poor. But you can certainly see the effect of remesas (remittances) on our community and much more in the cities in El Salvador. As of now there are 2.4 million Salvadorenos living in the US. Many of them send back money once a month, and this money surely goes a long way in the agrarian areas. Most families have TV´s, some have cars, computers, and very nice homes for the area we live in. Remesas are a very heated topic in El Salvador because they are good for people without money and work, but are they going to be good in the long run? I´m not convinced that they will be. One of the Peace Corps training staff members told us that the generation of Salvadorenos growing up in the US now that have not been back to ES, will most likely not be sending remesas when they reach working age, causing a long-term problem for many families here...

Anyways, I taught English today to a class of 1st graders. It was fun, we did greetings and I taught them fruits in English. They got up, showed their pictures, and pronounced the name of the fruit pretty well for the first time. I really liked it and it reminded me of being a camp counselor many moons ago. I actually haven´t worked with kids for six years. We are responsible for starting a youth group in the area too, and right now we have about 15 teens that come to our meetings once a week. Our project as of now is to cook bread and sell it for money to buy tree saplings. We want to start a garden to take care of some saplings for the area and plant them around Canas at different homes. We are looking for fruit trees - orange, mandarin, papaya, coconut, etc. By the way, the fruit here is so good! I have spanish class 5 days a week for about 6 hours and have been using my spanish a lot throughout the community.

I visited another PC volunteer last weekend in the fresh coffee growing area of the country in Santa Ana. It is a bit east of San Salvador. I stayed with a real cool married couple and worked at a school for two days. The first day Emily (the Volunteer) and I picked up plastic bottles with her Eco-Club, made dreamcatchers with Hans´ (the other Vol) art club, and did two different charlas on worm composting. The next day was a fundraiser for the school and I helped with a ring toss game, a used clothes sale, a game called palo encebolla (grease pole), and even helped start out the dancing. Palo encebolla is gross - it is when you rub cow guts on a flagpole and tape 10 bucks to the top. The people that play have to try and climb up the slippery pole to get the dinero, but it is really rank. They had a prom queen equivalent too where there was one girl from each grade that was ¨Reina.¨ Hans and I started out the dancing with them while hundreds of Salvadorenos watched. That pretty much got all the embarrassment that I´ll have out of me.

Sorry this entry is long, but I´ll get better about writing in the future. Good news here, my friend Jordan Silverman is coming on Feb 4th as a Rural Health Volunteer. I went to her going away party because she´s in Wyoming now, but I just got the message that she´ll be in El Salv with me for the next two years! Send me news of how the US is doing!!!!