EL SAlvador: Tecoluca

For the rest of training I am living in Tecoluca, a "suburb" of San Vicente. I lucked out because some of the volunteers are placed in cantones (which are little clusters of houses), whereas I am in a pueblo (set up more like a city). There are 2 other volunteers here with me, Ashley and Jeremy, although we each have our own family. Ashley's host parents are the parents of my mother, so technically Ashley is my aunt.

Living with a host family is hard! I have a madre and a padre, Lupita and Zeniff and two sisters, Nathaly (5) and Victoria (almost 2). Also, for pets I have 3 rabbits (a mother and 2 very tame and brazen babies) and 5 turtles. One of these turtles lives under my bed and enjoys crawling through my suitcase daily. He also leaves droppings all over my floor.

Lupita is a 5^th grade teacher and Zeniff is a health promotor. This means he goes to the very rural villages where there aren’t doctors or anything and assists with any medical problems and also educates. On the side, he hosts a ranchera radio program at 5 am daily and also works as a clown. They are extremely nice and helpful and fairly young. Lupita’s mom, Selena, is the host mom of another volunteer, so we see each other a lot which is nice (and they have wifi...which I am using now). I have a room to myself and a double bed which is nice, and Zeniff helped me hang my mosquito net so now I have my little cave.

Saturday I got to go to the grocery store with the family. The super (supermarket) has tons of stuff! They have mac and cheese, cereal, peanut butter, shampoo… it’s great! The peace corps gives our families money for our food but nothing else, and I feel bad because some of the things I prefer (i.e. diet coke instead of regular) are pretty expensive, so I think I may try to supplement them or something. I also want to try to find a battery operated fan that I can put at the end of the bed. It cools down well in the nights but my room has a tin roof and concrete walls so it retains the heat of the day pretty well.

Yesterday I got up at 3:30 to leave for church at 4:30. I did this because on Saturday I got up at 6:45 to go to my lesson at 7:30 and the whole family had waited for me to eat breakfast. Sunday, though, there was nothing to do (we weren’t eating breakfast before getting on the bus) so I just sat there for an hour. The bus ride was miserable. 3 hours on a packed (3 to a seat), old American school bus. But the scenery was amazing!!! We traveled to Santa Ana which is in the mountains and it was so pretty! The cathedral there is beautiful too. Mass was a pretty relaxed affair. The church was packed to the gills and people were kind of just milling about and talking and stuff. My family ate breakfast in the church (bologna sandwiches on white bread). After church we walked around the festival which was absolute madness but very cool. I tried various fruits preserved in sugar. After this I thought we were going straight back to Tecoluca bu they brought us all to a water park near Santa Ana for 5 hours. Luckily Ashley, one of the other volunteers in Tecoluca, was with me too so I didn’t have to do it alone. We finally got home at about 7.

Training starts back up tomorrow after our weekend with the families. I'm excited for the "city life" of San Vicente...ha