Thanksgiving, Swearing In Party & back to site...

So Peace Corps training is now officially over for good and I am a legitimate Peace Corps Volunteer. I suspect this means I am supposed to start working…on what I am as of yet unsure. This past week we had 3 days of Spanish “reconnect” classes at the training center, Thanksgiving with host families from the US Embassy, and our swearing in party with all the current volunteers. On Wednesday afternoon, Ashley, Morgan and I (and most of the rest of our training group) hopped on the bus from San V to San Sal and headed to our host family for Thanksgiving. The 3 of us stayed with a woman named Michelle, who does economic development work for USAID and served in the PC in Ecuador in the 90s. We stayed with her, her Peruvian husband, her Peruvian sister in law, and her 2 daughters. The family was amazing, and so friendly and warm. They made us feel at home immediately and were incredibly kind to us lowly, dirty volunteers. At midnight on Wednesday Michelle took us to the midnight premier of Breaking Dawn (the newest Twilight movie for all of you who are not in the know), and on Thanksgiving we had a Christmas cookie decorating/wine and cheese party with some neighbors and then a huge dinner with about 30 people all together. All the people we met were incredibly interesting, and almost all of the Americans present had been PCVs at some point in their lives. Therefore, they were also very sympathetic and understanding of our plight (aka, our desire to eat 9 plates of Thanksgiving food each) and we received many offers to spend weekends at San Sal apartments, beach houses, etc.  They may live to rue the day they made those offers.

snowmen in the embassy neighborhood

christmas cookies!!!

my thanksgiving dinner

On Friday we said goodbye to the glorious house and family with a sigh and headed to the hostel that PC uses to prepare for our swearing in party, with a short stop at the Sheraton hotel to lie by their pool and have a Bloody Mary first. Our swearing in party involved dinner and then drinks and dancing in Zona Rosa, which is a really nice upscale area of San Salvador that basically looks like any American city. We all had a really good time and definitely celebrated hard.

morgan and i being george and martha washington at the sheraton pool

tyler, jamie and i at dinner pre-swearing in party

Now, I am back in Santa Paula to start my real service. I have 22 months left in site, and no more trainings, so basically no more excuses to not be working. While I was gone I missed the last weeks of school and 9^th grade graduation, so the next 2 months of “summer vacation” I will most likely spend trying to figure out exactly what it is I will be doing next year. While PST2 definitely loaded me up with lots of good ideas for potential projects, I still feel pretty lost as to what I want to focus on in my site. A lot of that will need to come from the community members, so I need to get back out on the road and finish visiting all the houses here in Santa Paula and figure out what we need here. Also, in about 3 weeks my family will be arriving here in El Salvador to spend Christmas in my site and then travel around the country a bit! I cannot WAIT for them to be here! While I could handle Thanksgiving alone in a strange country, it will definitely be nice to have my family here for the most magical time of the year! :) 

ready for xmas in el salvador :)

One character that I have not given nearly enough attention to on this blog recently is Manny. My malnourished, on the doorstep of death kitten has transformed into a rambunctious, gangly adolescent cat in my 3-week absence. He now spends his nights bounding around my bed, alternately attacking my toes, iPod, fingers, and face, instead of sleeping curled up in my arms. Yesterday I received a package from home that included some kitty toys, and he has officially turned into a psychopathic nut job, bouncing around my small bedroom chasing balls with bells in them and a hot pink mouse.  

my devil kitten trying to attack me through the mosquito net

PST2

So, for the last 2 weeks my entire training group has been in San Vicente for PST2 (Pre Service Training, take 2). For me, this was not a huge change, since I go to San V almost every week, but it has been great to all be together, and to finally learn the technical stuff we will need to be effective volunteers in our sites, such as how to write grants, make pinatas, and get eco-friendly stoves for our communities! 

For PST2, Peace Corps decided that I could not stay in Santa Paula, although it is only 20 minutes from San Vicente. Instead, they decided to move me to Apastepeque, aka my pueblo, which is 5 minutes from Santa Paula. So 2 Sundays ago I had to pack up my stuff, say goodbye to Manchita, and head 5 minutes down the road for 3 weeks of training. To get to Apastepeque, I decided to hitch a ride with the softball team which had ordered a pickup to take them to the tourny in Apast for the day. We all squeezed onto the pickup, with me and my luggage barely fitting, and headed to the field to watch the softball game. Santa Paula won (obviously) and instead of allowing me to walk from the field to my new host family house (about a 5 minute walk), they decided to drive me in the pickup. So we all loaded back into the pickup, me really not fitting this time, as we had acquired some new riders at the field, and set off in the alleged direction of my host family's house. We arrived shortly thereafter at a house in the town. Upon knocking on the door, we learned that a different Nina Rina, not my new host mom, lived in the house, and that this Rina had no idea who "Maestra Rina" was. So we set off aimlessly again, until luckily a member of my team spotted someone she knew on the road, and through a shouted conversation discovered where my new home was. So I was delivered to the door of my new host family by about 25 Salvadorans in the back of a pick up truck... what an arrival. 

Everything in Apastepeque has been good, and training has been very informative. This past week we went on an extended "field trip" which involved trips to San Salvador as well as Ahuachapan, which is the department in the far west corner of El Salvador. We spent a night at a beautiful hotel in the touristy town of Ataco, where we ate spinach lasagna, roast chicken and pancakes, and took a hike to an incredible waterfall where we got to swim and play. 

que chivo

the drive home...my San V volcano, aka Chichontepec

One sobering part of this week was my first firsthand experience with the violence of El Salvador. On Wednesday we were heading from Ahuachapan back into San Salvador when we hit a lot of traffic. Eventually, we passed the point of traffic, which was a man lying in the middle of the road with a bullet hole in his forehead, gasping for breath. He was barely alive and there was no one around him or helping him. Our car, like all the others, just drove past and left him there. I am well aware of the 15 murder/day statistic here in El Salvador, but for me seeing this up-close and personal was really shocking and sad. According to the older volunteers, the sight of dead bodies is something we'll become a little hardened to over time, but right now I think that all of us who were in the car are pretty shaken up by what we saw.

Anyway, back on another positive note...this week we have Spanish lessons to get us back in the swing of things, and then on Thursday we all head to the capital to spend Thanksgiving with Embassy host families! The families from the US Embassy open up their homes every year and host groups of PCVs so that we can eat turkey, gravy, and stuffing (and drink good wine, have hot showers, and use washing machines...) so that will be great! Then on Friday we have our swearing in party, which is a party for all volunteers to welcome us as the new group to El Sal. So this week should be busy, but very fun and filled with gringos! Back to Santa Paula next Sunday to get back to work!

Día de los Difuntos

Today, November 2, we celebrated here in El Salvador Día de los Difuntos (Day of the Deceased). This holiday is celebrated by visiting the graves of deceased family members to enflorar (which is not a real word, but basically means putting flowers on the grave) them. 

To give you a really clear idea of what this day is like, you first need a description of El Salvador cemeteries. When a person dies in El Sal, they are invariably buried. To mark their grave, there are 2 options: either a colorful above ground tomb, or a colorful cement cross. These grave markers are piled pretty tightly on top of one another, as there is not a lot of space in the cemeteries. On a regular day, an El Salvador graveyard is a pretty busy place. So when you take that cemetery, and add about 10 people per grave, laden with armfuls of flowers (real and plastic), along with vendors peddling their goods (fruit, water, candy, paint to touch up graves, plastic flowers) up and down the paths, you have a packed event. 

We traveled to 3 different cemeteries today - one in the caserío next to Santa Paula, one in the pueblo of Apastepeque, and one in the city of San Vicente, to enflorar various graves. The cemeteries got more and more elaborate, as well as more and more crowded as we moved from caserío to city, but one thing that was constant was the sense of celebration and duty. All day I kept thinking about what it would be like in the US to have a day like this (mainly because people were shocked that we don't have a day like this in the US). I don't think there is any way in hell that entire families would devote an entire day each year to visiting the graves of their various family members just to pay them memory. But here, it is done without question. Even the little kids who never met these dead relatives partake without complaint. I think that this is in part because death is more frequently a part of life here than it is in the US, because almost everyone has a sibling/cousin/child who died pretty young. Therefore, death is something that people are always aware of. This is pretty inextricably tied to the strong religious faith that everyone has here. People don't shrink away from talking about death or spending an entire day honoring their deceased relatives because people aren't as afraid of death here as they are at home. For example, on our ride home at the end of the day, my host aunt Dinora told me that she didn't like the idea of being cremated because she didn't want to show up in Purgatory burned. I guess if you were 100% sure that there was something coming after death, it wouldn't be so scary.

Host family at the grave of their father

host mom's father's grave 

vendors outside the cemetery

San Vicente cemetery