Parents Day

Peace Corps celebrates "Parents Day" on July 28. In honor of that, I was asked to write an article and send some pictures to PC Washington (since my parents met in PC). I'm not exactly sure what Peace Corps' plans are for that article, but I figured I'd post it here, too, in case any of you all are interested in seeing it! 

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When I was 4 years old, I spent a month living in Bangui, Central African Republic. My mother, it turns out, was filling in as PCMO as a favor to the Peace Corps Country Director at the time, but my fuzzy childhood memories hold nothing of her work or Peace Corps at all. What I do remember of my time spent in Africa are the torrential rains that turned our house into a mini island and eating hot, crispy beignets on the side of the road where the neighborhood women fried them every morning. I remember picking doll-sized green bananas, making lemonade from the tree in our backyard with my friend Faustin, and playing with Dungba, the African street dog that had been adopted and so thoroughly spoiled that he was given his baths in the tub instead of outside like his fellow mutts.

I grew up in a house where the word mwesi was used in place of thief and vibrant African tapestries were draped on our walls. My parents’ time with the Peace Corps was woven so seamlessly into the fabric of our life that I can’t easily separate it from other parts of my childhood. From the African paraphernalia that littered our house, to the semi-annual reunions with RPCV friends, to using Swahili in place of English when we liked the sound of a word better, Africa and Peace Corps left an indelible mark, and my parents inspired in me from a young age not only a love for travel and exploring new cultures, but also a desire to help others and in some way or another serve.  

My parents met while working at the Peace Corps training center in Bukavu, Zaire (now Democratic Republic of the Congo) in the 1980s after finishing their services. My mother had served training traditional birth attendants in Bossangoa, Central African Republic and my father taught English professors in Bukavu. Their experiences - the places they saw, things they experienced, and people they met – gave shape to their lives, and therefore shaped mine. For me, joining the Peace Corps after graduating college was an easy decision, although not one to take lightly. Having two parents that had survived two years of bathing with a bucket, washing their clothes in the river, and eating their meals out of banana leaves, not to mention learning a language (or two), integrating into a new culture, and working hard left me with no illusions that my Peace Corps service would be a two year vacation; however, the amazing friendships they made, the things they learned – both about themselves and the world – and the memories they brought back with them left me certain that two years as a PCV would never be time wasted.

My Peace Corps is not my parents’ Peace Corps. I’ve spent my time in El Salvador living in a real concrete house with electricity, a working shower, and a cell phone that lets me call my family whenever I want. My counterpart speaks English and lived in the United States for years, and a 20-minute bus ride away I have air conditioning and wifi at my disposal. Regardless of these modern comforts and conveniences, which I worried would somehow invalidate or diminish the legitimacy my service when brought up in comparison with a remote desert in Africa, though, I, too, have experienced the essential Peace Corps. I’ve had the chance to learn a new language and immerse myself in and fall in love with a foreign culture. I’ve made incredible friends, both in the PCV community and with the Salvadorans I live and work with, learned many new things, and had innumerable memorable and life changing experiences along the way. There’s no doubt in my mind that moving forward I will always carry a piece of this with me, whether it be the permanent adoption of the word chucho into my vocabulary in place of dog, or future visits to El Salvador with my children.

Dad in Zaire in the 80s

Mom in CAR in the 80s

Parents in Zaire

me in CAR, 1993

The whole gang in El Salvador! 2013

OVENS!

It was only a matter of time until I managed to turn my love of food into a Peace Corps project. As I think I’ve made pretty clear over these 2 years of blogging, food is a very important part of my life. Coming down to El Salvador, I was bombarded with a very different diet – tortillas, eggs, and beans, mainly, with lots of fried food & sugar to go with it. Over time, I’ve managed to adjust my eating around this different diet (and lose the 20 pounds I gained during my first 6 months in service) and find some Salvadoran foods that I am absolutely addicted to. Namely, corn products. This ranges from a hot, crisp tortillas straight off the comal to soft, salty-sweet tamales de maiz, to break-your-teeth crunchy totopostes out of the oven. Of utmost fascination to me has been pan dulce (sweet bread), which is not always made with corn, but is almost always delicious, especially when dipped in hot coffee. One of my missions in El Salvador has been learning to recreate some of these delicacies so that while I’m back in the states, well ensconced in an apartment complete with central air, wifi, and real furniture (read: couches instead of hammocks), I will be able to transport myself momentarily back to my hammock, where these days I pass many afternoons sipping coffee, dipping baked goods in said coffee, and listening to the torrential rain beat a tattoo on our tin roof.

Lucky me, Peace Corps was more than willing to aid & abet my cooking pursuits. One of the many objectives of PC volunteers down here is to introduce “environmentally friendly” ways of cooking. The vast majority of people down here cook with leña, or firewood. The stoves and ovens that they use with this leña are very inefficient and lead to the use of tons of wood to cook very little and also produce large amounts of smoke, which then remains in the structure or our lungs thanks to lack of chimneys or pipes. This also has helped El Salvador become the most deforested country in El Salvador, an astonishing fact when you consider the verdure I’m surrounded with at all times, but still a fact. To facilitate the PCV quest to reduce deforestation, protect Salvadorans from the black lung, and et cetera, Peace Corps has a strong relationship with 2 different NGOs that produce eco-efficient cook stoves and ovens. We volunteers can write grants for funds to help purchase these products for our communities, and also to pave the way for our various culinary pursuits.

new oven!

traditional oven

To obtain eco-efficient ovens, I wrote and was granted funds to purchase 2 wood-burning (but efficient!) ovens from Stoveteam International for my community: 1 for the school and 1 for the community center. Now, since these ovens are not replacing pre-existing, inefficient ovens, I have a hard time claiming that I am taking great steps to save the environment or protect my community members from the harms of cook-stove smoke. However, I am going to use these ovens for many purposes, one of which is educating people about the importance of looking for more environmentally friendly ways of cooking their food (another of which is turning my entire community into banana bread addicts).

While these new ovens of mine still burn leña, and are not gas or electric, they burn WAY less than the traditional adobe oven which Salvadoran women use to crank out their delicacies. With an adobe oven, it must be stuffed full of leña, which is then set on fire and allowed to burn for a few hours in the oven, after which the oven is swept clean and the food is placed in the same compartment. This oven of mine uses about 3-5 small pieces of wood, which go in a separate compartment from where the food is placed. The wood is ignited and burns for about a half hour to heat up the oven, after which the food can be put in the oven and firewood stays in the lower compartment to maintain the heat. All in all, a much cleaner, nicer process. Also, any smoke that this oven produces (which is negligible), goes out the stove through a chimney, so as to maintain our pristine pink lungs!

pan dulce in the adobe oven

pizza

experimenting with the new oven

ohhhh yeah

So far, there has been nothing but positive response from my community. This weekend we had the official “premier” of the oven, which included me making pizza and handing it out to anyone within arms reach and then a day-long “training” where we showed women how to turn on the oven and then made banana bread for any and all to try. Needless to say, my prowess is in high demand and I’m already booked as baking instructor for the next few weeks, hopefully with the payoff that some kind señora takes me under her wing and teaches me the ways of baking with ground corn in return.

first test run