PUPPY!!

Her name is Maggie, and she is super cute! 

Halloween, take 2

As you know from my previous post, we PCVs celebrated Halloween a couple of weeks early at the beach. Therefore, when the actual day rolled around, while there wasn’t anything going on amongst us volunteers, I did get a chance to celebrate in my site.

The day before Halloween, I decided to give a Halloween presentation to the 7^th grade class at the school. The presentation was very brief – I showed some pictures of my brother and I dressed up from when we were little, talked about trick-or-treating, costume parties, and haunted houses, and gave out a mountain of candy. Then, we did a little art project making masks for Halloween. We used the powdery papery stringy stuff that is used to make casts, and the kids molded it to their faces, creating face-shaped masks. Then, on Halloween day, they came back to the school and painted their masks for Halloween. The masks came out pretty cool, and the kids had a lot of fun.

November 2^nd is Dia de los Difuntos (Day of the Deceased/All Soul’s Day) down here. I wrote about it last year, but once again this year I went to the graveyard to put flowers on the graves of deceased family members with my host family. However, this year on November 1^st I participated in a new activity that I had never heard of before. While there aren’t our traditional orange pumpkins down here, they do have ayote (squash), and the evening of November 1^st is the time to go out and “pedir ayote” (ask for squash) – or basically, salvo trick-or-treating. All the houses in our neighborhood cooked up giant pots of ayote dulce (chunks of squash cooked for hours with sugar), and then at around 6:30 we left our houses in groups and went from house to house demanding this ayote upon threat of eternal damnation. When we arrived at a house, we would all chant “Animos somos/Del cielo venimos/Ayote pedimos/Si no nos da/Al infierno iran” (We are spirits/we come from the sky/we ask for squash/if you don’t give it to us/you’ll go to hell). We marched from house to house collecting our steaming chunks of sweet squash in a black plastic bag, getting tamales and coffee at some houses instead, until our bags were literally bursting at the seams. It was really fun to go out with the kids in my neighborhood, and definitely was an interesting spin on the normal trick-or-treat. Also, it appears that my neighborhood may be the only place that they actually do this…no one did it in San Vicente last year, and none of my PCV friends have heard of it, either.

Then, the 2^nd was the traditional trip to the graveyard to leave flowers for the deceased. I went to the Lolotiquillo (town over) cemetery with Irma and Lucia to decorate the graves of Irma’s mother and sister. Same as the year before in San Vicente, the graveyard was packed to the gills with people, flowers (artificial and real) and vendors of all sorts of goods. There were women wandering around selling popsicles, fruit, pupusas, and soda, as well as packs of young boys travelling around with cans of oil paint and paint brushes, offering to touch up your grave for you ($0.75 to paint your cross, an extra quarter to paint the person’s name on it, too).  The traditional gravestone here is a painted cement cross, which is rarely engraved with name and dates, so every year on Dia de los Difuntos relatives pay to have the cross re-painted. Dia de los Difuntos remains one of my favorite holidays down here. 

Happy Halloween!

Lucia, Irma and I enflorando

Lolotiquillo cemetery on Dia de los Difuntos

Camping, and Batman, and turtles...oh my

I’ve heard former El Salvador PCVs somewhat sheepishly describe their service as a “2 year vacation”. While I don’t think that perfectly describes my service thus far, I do understand why people say that. While in general I’d say volunteers down here work really hard, we also play really hard. What’s more, we are “playing” in pretty cool, unique places.

October has been a very busy month. We started off with a Morazán GLOW (Girls Leading Our World) camp. Each volunteer in the area brought 3 teenage girls up to a hotel in northern Morazán and we had a 3 day camp filled with HIV education activities, leadership and gender role lectures and games, and some self-expression crafts. I brought 3 girls from my school, and then my host sister Lucia also came as a counterpart to teach a jelly-making course to the girls. It was a really great camp, everything ran smoothly, and the girls had a lot of fun (as did the volunteers, for the most part).

Last week I left my site again to head out west to Ataco (again) for a training for security wardens. Each region of the country has PCV security wardens who have special training in case of any sort of emergency (from civil unrest to an earthquake to a volcano erupting). I got trained along with 3 other PCVs, including Kara who celebrated her birthday during the training. Immediately from Ataco, we headed to the beach with a bunch of other PCVs to celebrate Halloween a little early and do some cool stuff.

volunteers and campers

 Friday afternoon we headed down to Playa Tunco, which is one of the best surfing beaches in the world and also the only real beach destination for tourists and backpackers. Tunco is great because it’s really one of the only places in El Salvador with tourist infrastructure. They have a café that has iced coffee (a rarity here), a wok restaurant; tons of cheap seafood restaurants, and waterfront bars that are open late and have live music and dancing. We spent Friday night in Tunco enjoying all that it has to offer, then the next day headed a few kilometers down the coast to Playa San Diego. Saturday we spent at Playa San Diego and had our volunteer Halloween costume party. It was a little odd having a costume party with about 12 PCVs in a rental house, but everyone dressed up and got in the Halloween spirit and it was a lot of fun. I dressed as Bane from the newest Batman movie. Jamie was Batman and Kara was Catwoman, so we were pretty well coordinated.

batman and bane

 Sunday night we did one of the coolest things ever…we released baby sea turtles!! There is an ex-PCV down here that works with a Salvadoran NGO for the protection of wildlife. Through her, we coordinated an “excursion” to walk on the beach at night and observe adult sea turtles come lay their eggs, and then later in the night to release recently hatched baby sea turtles into the ocean. This is a pretty popular tourist activity, although usually it takes place during the day. When people release baby sea turtles during the day, they are essentially sacrificing those sea turtles, because in the daylight the babies are extremely vulnerable to all sorts of ocean predators who are almost sure to snap them up. As it is, only 1 in every 1000 baby sea turtles that is released into the ocean will survive due to various threats on their lives. Therefore, when we got in contact with the NGO about doing this activity, they suggested that we do it at night – both to increase our babies’ chances of survival, but also to allow us the opportunity to see the mother turtles emerge from the ocean and lay their eggs (which they only do at night).

The whole experience was very cool. The first part of the night we wandered up and down the beach, keeping a lookout for mother turtles emerging from the ocean. We got to see 2 lay their eggs. First, they would crawl out of the ocean, moving surprisingly rapidly for a 100-pound creature that essentially resembles a giant boulder. The NGO workers would help the turtle situate herself comfortably in the sand and dig a hole. Then, the turtle would slip into what the NGO described as a “trance” period, which is when she would begin to lay her eggs. Sea turtles lay about 50 eggs in each session, and this specific type of turtle will lay 3 times every 2 years. After laying all of her eggs, the turtle shimmies, shakes, and pushes sand over the hole her eggs are in, then twists about and messes up all the sand to camouflage the area, in a movement I can best describe as an attempt at a 360-degree snow (or sand) angel. She then turns around and books it back down to the ocean. We couldn’t take pictures with flash or make much noise while observing the turtle lay her eggs, but while she was in her “trance” we could get very close to her and even got the chance to stroke her shell (which essentially feels like a coconut). While this whole adventure was very interesting, it does not surprise me after observing it that sea turtles are an endangered species. It took a team of about 4 workers to help the turtle get into an appropriate egg laying position, lay her eggs into an adequate hole, and then get back into the ocean. While I have no doubt that the turtles would have successfully laid their eggs with or without this assistance, the workers then collected the eggs and brought them back to the NGO office, where they are placed in special protected incubators so that they can hatch safely. Sea turtle eggs are a delicacy down here, and poachers collect all that they can find and sell them in the market, even though this activity is punishable by law.

mama sea turtle post egg laying

guarded turtle nests (under the sand, naturally)

Celebrating El Salvador’s independence and, more importantly, reaching the halfway mark as a PCV

September has been a very busy month and, as I say at the close of every month, I can’t believe it’s already over. However, the end of September is actually kind of significant for me because in September we had 2 pretty big milestones: the celebration of the independence of El Salvador (and all of Central America) from Spain, and our 1 year anniversary as PCVs.

First, I’ll tell ya a little about Independence Day down here. As in the US, Independence Day is a pretty big deal. One advantage (or maybe disadvantage…I’m not sure) that El Sal has to us is that theirs falls during the school year, so they get to celebrate it in the school. More than anything, they do this through national pride parades. My school started preparing for their parade in July, when the school band began practicing a couple of times a week. Don Mario is a very skilled musician and has created a pretty strong music program in our school, so even though it’s small, our school band has a pretty good reputation and is in high demand. Therefore, while a normal school will have 1 parade/celebration for Independence Day, our school band ended up playing in 3 separate parades. On Thursday, the 13^th, they played in the Gotera Kindergarten Parade. On Friday, the 14^th, they played in the parade in my community, and on Saturday, the 15^th (actual Independence Day) they played in the Gotera parade.

My favorite of the celebrations was the parade in the community on Friday. All week, the school was abuzz with preparations for the celebration. Each day, different groups of kids would put on different cultural performances, all in competition to decide who would get to perform on Friday. And Friday, we all got up very early and met at the end of my street (about a mile away from my school). The band, the dancing girls, the color guard and about 75% of the rest of the students dressed in traditional Salvadoran clothing (long flowy skirts for girls and loose cotton tunics for boys), all arranged themselves in marching order and we proceeded to parade from my house all the way down to the school. All community members came out to watch the parade go by and it was really just a great community bonding-esque event. There were some slight mishaps, such as running out of water less than halfway through the walk, and holding up the bus on its normal route for about an hour, but in the end, everyone arrived at the school safely and in 1 piece. 

marching through the center of town

traditional salvadoran dancers

causing a traffic jam with the bus

Then, once we got to the school was time for the ceremony. This involved singing the national anthem, reciting the pledge of allegiance (which is about 50 times longer than America’s and very hard to say), and then the best performances from the preceding week doing their acts for the audience. I served as Master of Ceremonies for this event, which was fun and not as terrifying as I had anticipated. A lot of people showed up, lots of cute little kids did cute little dances, and it was a fun day.

The parades in Gotera were nice, too. The kindergarten parade was great because, aside from the bands, all of the groups marching were solely kindergarteners, so it was really really cute. And the parade on the 15^th was nice because it was all of the best bands in the area, so there was some pretty good music, although it was an absolute madhouse since so many people turned out to see it.

master of ceremonies

the interminable pledge of allegiance

some very cute "indio" dancers

On September 17 Tricia, Jamie, Kara, Andrew, Tyler, and I completed our first year as PCVs. This means we also entered into our final lap as PCVs, since the assignment is for 24 months. This past weekend, in celebration of this momentous occasion, we headed out west as a group to party.

First, we headed out to Ataco, one of the cute, touristy, artisanal towns on the Route of Flowers in the department of Ahuachapán. I visited Ataco when my family was visiting last Christmas, but it is a beautiful, fun, funky little town and I was very happy to get back. We bought some souvenirs, ate goat cheese and eggplant pizza, drank amazing coffee, and went to a restaurant called the Portland Grill that had real cocktails (collective intake of breath), and had an all around great time. The next day, after Andrew and I talked each other into some ill-advised henna tattoos from the man on the corner of the park and ate chocolate covered bananas the size of my forearm, we all packed up our stuff and headed south to Tacuba to hike EL Imposible . 

the ladies (jamie, kara, myself and tricia)

andrew and i embrace our inner gangster

hanging out in downtown ataco (andrew´s shirt is off so his tattoo dries, not just for fun...)

Tacuba is a little town on the edge of the biggest national park in El Salvador, El Imposible. On Sunday, we went on a 6-hour waterfall hike through El Imposible. The hike was incredible – we basically wound our way down a river, jumping off at various points (waterfalls) into the freezing cold water. The jumps were slightly terrifying at times, but it was awesome to be in pristine nature and surrounded by such beauty, and we all had a really fun time. The evening was spent horizontal, playing card games and planning our next group trip (Nicaragua, baby!)

Now I’m back in site, experiencing the post vacation blues. But these upcoming weeks are super busy, and I’m sure we’ll manage to squeeze in some fun excursions and activities amongst all the work. 

view of some volcanoes in Guatemala

KOWABUNGAAAA

wet & freezing, but pretty happy

the original slip and slide

the whole gang: tricia, tyler, me, kara, andrew, and jamie

Water! Finally!

As those of you who read my blog semi-loyally may know, getting a new water tank is something I've been trying to help my community with basically since my arrival here in February. We've been back and forth with various NGOs, trying to find funding for a new water tank so that the whole community can receive potable water directly to their home.

A couple of weeks ago, the water committee informed me that they had gotten approximately 1/2 of all the materials they would need to build a new water tank donated by a branch of the Salvadoran government. This was great news, since finding sufficient funding for all the materials in one place was pretty daunting. Therefore, I started looking around for an NGO or some other organization that would be able to donate the rest of the funds (around $1000) so that we can complete the water project.

Well, this morning the committee broke ground on construction of their new water tank, and last night I received notice from an American NGO called Water Charity that they are going to support the other half of my water project!! While Water Charity is going to send me the funds immediately so that the committee can finish their construction project all at once, I need to get down on my knees and beg that all of you consider donating to this project (as they will need to re-stock their funds after sending me the money)!! Check out the website, read about the project, forward it to your family and friends, whatever you can do! Seriously every little bit counts, and I will be VERY appreciative. :)

Sunsulaca Water System