A typical day

When I was home, a request I received from a lot of people was “describe your typical day down there”. This usually resulted in me huffing air loudly from my nostrils or giving an indignant “ha!”

                               

Why, you might ask? Having someone describe their typical day is not like asking them to solve a Rubik’s cube in under 10 minutes. Nor is it brain surgery. Well, for me, it may as well be. While there are certain staples to my days (eating tortillas, lying in a hammock, sweating profusely), each day is as unique as the snowflakes that are too terrified to show their faces down here. But, for kicks, I’m gonna describe for all of you a very atypical day – Thursday.

Wednesday night I got home from San Vicente where I had a meeting with Peace Corps. I came back laden with goodies – pan dulce from my favorite San V bakery, toothbrushes that an NGO had donated to me and I had promptly forgotten at a friend’s house for months, and 2 bags full of worms…yes, worms.

This past month I started a series of environmental education lectures for the 5^th and 6^th graders at my school. Peace Corps El Salvador has an awesome book filled with environment activities for kids and I am slowly working my way through that book with one a week. And what did I do this week? WORMS!!! What do worms have to do with the environment (besides, duh, being alive and part of the environment)? Well, worms, and more specifically worm excrements, are an excellent fertilizer and you can pretty easily set up a small worm “nursery” that produces lots of this fertilizer. For a country that is heavily agrarian, but short on fertile land, this is therefore very relevant. Plus, it sounded fun to get dirty with some creepy crawlers with a bunch of kids.

So let me get back to describing my day.

Thursday morning I was up with the sun. My host family is convinced that cows only poop in the morning. And cow poop is the best worm food. Ergo, we had to go retrieve the cow poop while it was still hot (I mean literally…it was steaming). So at 5:30 AM Lucia, Gerardo and I set out from the house with some plastic bags and a shovel and spent an hour literally following around a herd of our neighbor’s cows, scooping up the freshest, juiciest pies for our wormy buddies.

After rushing home and taking a shower I was off to a meeting in Gotera with the community water committee. They finally found an organization willing to donate the majority of the materials we’ll need to build a new water tank, but they wanted me to come along to meet the people and see what else we may need to finish the project. Upon our arrival at the “meeting”, I realized quickly that this was not actually a meeting, but rather a retrieval of some of our donated materials. Namely, 2000 bricks. Unwilling to be branded “delicate”, “feminine”, or any of the other kiss of death words for female PCVs, I quickly hoisted myself into the back of the truck and started loading bricks with the men. An hour in my fingers were scraped and bleeding, but we didn’t stop till the truck was full. Covered in red dust and exhausted I headed back to my community to visit the school and have lunch with the teachers.

An hour later I was back on the road with the water committee, headed to yet another “meeting”, but this time in Cacaopera. What were we actually doing this time? Retrieving 100 lb bags of cement for the water tank. Yet again, I got in there with the boys, hauling and loading the bags of cement onto the back of the truck. As we loaded the last bag, one of the guys turned to me and in perfect English said, “I need a beer”. Amen. We did finally have our meeting; by the way, so while I’m not positive, I’m pretty sure the committee didn’t lure me into all these trips just to get some free labor out of me.

I headed back to my house that afternoon for some R&R…building a worm palace and transplanting my new friends. My host dad and I quickly constructed a worm heaven on earth – a tomato crate lined with black plastic, then filled with fresh manure and worms. Once we had the worms tucked away snugly in their home, we moved on to the next problem: keeping away the critters. Ants, chickens, and pretty much all other living creatures in El Salvador will jump at the chance to eat some nice juicy worms if the opportunity presents itself, so we needed to find a way to keep these suckers safe. Genius conclusion: we hung the box from the roof of the tortilla hut. Now, swinging gently in the afternoon breeze we have a new ornament, which also serves as an odor-enhancer and a conversation starter. I replicated this project at the school the next day, much to the delight of the 10 and 11-year-old boys who bellied up to the box and got manure up to their elbows in their glee at playing with worms.

That night I showered off brick dust and cement dust, desiccated worms, and cow poop, and rolled into bed around 6:30 PM to sleep a solid 11 hours. I still can’t lift anything heavier than a cell phone thanks to my brick/cement workout and my fingers are still scabbed and essentially useless, and my host sister swears she can still smell cow poop on me even though I’ve showered about 5 times since then, but such is life in Peace Corps, I guess.

So…was that a “typical” day for me down here in El Salvador. In a word – yes. It was typical for me in the sense that every day down here is so spectacularly atypical. Will I ever muck around in fresh cow poop before dawn so that my worms don’t go hungry? Maybe. Haul cement? I hope not. But, I still can’t say that that was my weirdest day in Peace Corps to date. And I’m sure there will be weirder days in the future. So no, I can’t describe my typical day for you. But I can give you some weird stories that I find pretty amusing.  

justin examining the worms and their new home

a lovely ornament for the tortilla hut