2 Weeks To Site

I have two weeks left in Concepcion de Canas, El Salvador. It has been pretty great. My family has been awesome and has shown me everything in this area. The other day we went to a waterpark, Peace Corps didn´t tell us about this, even though it was only a five minute pickup ride from the training center! The waterpark was natural too which was great. Trees all over the place, a waterfall and instead of chlorine, they had fish in the pools that ate all the gross stuff (I think they had some means of cleaning other than that too). It was great! I also went to my first baile (dance) at another trainee´s house. Here is a typical dance in El Salvador, it starts at 9, all the guys drink a lot, all the girls don´t touch alcohol, and they play reggaeton all night. We had a good time observing and trying to blend in as much as possible (never going to happen at dances here).

The next day we went to a couple cemeteries for ¨Dia de los Disfuntos.¨It is an awesome tradition. Everyone goes to the cemetary with flowers for their relatives that have died to celebrate their lives. And I mean EVERYONE. At the cemetary in San Sebastian, there were vendors with water, coca-cola, mangos, french fries, etc. walking through the graveyard! People sit on tombs, repaint their old tombs and gravestones, and generally just have a good time. The best part about it is that everyone brings gorgeous flowers to put on the graves so the whole cemetary is bright. It stays bright for awhile too because they´re mostly fake as dengue fever is a big problem here. It is illegal to have vases of water because mosquitos breed in them and spread dengue, the bone-break fever.

A group of us went to Lago Coatepeque the other weekend for our vacation, and it was gorgeous. It is an extinct volcano that has filled up with water and is the only clean surface water in El Salvador, because all of the wealthy people own the land. The only ¨public access¨is from the three hotels, one of which we stayed at. It was a good break. Spanish is going well but I still feel under-prepared to go to site. For the first two months we are supposed to get to know the community and we have some objectives, but not really. We are going to meet everyone, play some soccer, visit with the schools and try and plan some activities, and try to find a project before our second training session in January. I hope to plant some seeds of environmental ed in my community during this period and come back with some technical knowledge to start the real work. We shall see. When I get my site I will post again, I hope all is well in the states.

We are all taking over a hotel tomorrow for the election, all 22 Peace Corps Trainees. We´ll be watching stateside and are all excited for ----- to win! I hope to call some of you tomorrow!

PEACE