Banging my head against an unrepaired wall

Time has been flying down here in El Salvador and I’ve been very busy. I’ve been teaching a 4 hour English class every Saturday in Gotera for elementary school English teachers who don’t speak the language (aka 95% of all English teachers in this country), and working on various things in the school. 13 of us headed to Costa del Sol beach for the 4^th of July and rented an AMAZING beach house for 2 nights, which was fun and relaxing and patriotic. I’ve started playing my saxophone with the school band and have interested some of my female friends in the joys of American baking (helloooooo 6 loaves of banana bread in the adobe oven).

I feel like my personal relationships, both with community members and other PCVs, are strong and fulfilling. I’ve made a lot of great friends since I got here and I feel incredibly close to a handful of people in my community. However, yesterday it hit me that while I’m constantly busy and moving, I’m not really accomplishing anything work-wise. My biggest project lately has definitely been teaching English every Saturday to about 35 adults in Gotera. It’s supposed to be a language and methodology course for English teachers who did not receive their “specialty” in English and therefore don’t speak it. This past Saturday we had a special review session for anyone who needed extra help. One woman came and talking to her just made me want to throw my hands up in the air, rip all the pages out of our text book, and run from the room screaming. The woman had not retained a SINGLE thing from the classes. Not one word of English. Now, I understand that learning a second language is very hard, especially after a certain age (like 12?). But you also can’t just expect to learn by osmosis purely because a couple of Americans are teaching it to you.  

Then, yesterday I was at the school talking to the director. We just got a bunch of money to paint maps of the world, El Salvador, and Morazán on a wall at the school, but we need to repair the wall with cement first (it’s brick and very bumpy). Well, upon seeing the budget (which he approved before I turned it in), my school director pointed out that we are missing a lot of things we need money for – namely, sand to mix with the cement and money to pay someone who actually knows how to repair a wall. Why this wasn’t pointed out to me beforehand? Who knows.

What’s frustrating is that lots of people in the community have great ideas for projects. There’s just little to no follow-through on anything. I discussed and pretty fully planned out a way to get community trash cans set up with the community governing body, and when I tried to get people to go visit the mayor with me to talk to him about the garbage truck no one would go. Why? It would take 2 hours tops.

A lot of times it feels like Peace Corps is just a good will ambassador program for the US. If that’s what the government wants from me, then I think I’m doing a pretty ok job. My community is definitely learning the ins and outs of having a gringa around, and I’ve taught them the joys of peanut butter and linen pants. But if what the government is expecting is some sustainable international development from their PCVs, they may have to look outside of Sunsulaca. Unless someone opens a banana bread tienda upon my leaving. 

Immigration

My conception of Peace Corps before departing the US was that I would be falling off the map for 2 years. This to me meant both not seeing or talking frequently to friends and family back home for the whole time, and also Host Country Nationals (PC term for the locals) not knowing much about the United States. I think that I went in with this belief mainly due to the fact that 90% of my information about Peace Corps came from my parents, who both served in Africa in the 1980s. Everyone in the know knows that PC Africa is a different animal, even today. Now, 30 years ago I can’t even imagine how different it is than what my modern Peace Corps El Salvador experience has been.

Salvadorans joke that El Salvador is the 51^st state. Every Salvadoran I’ve ever met either has lived in, or has friends and family members living in the United States. They are up to date on American politics, culture, and sports (well, soccer anyway). They intimately know the geography of different states, too. I’ll never forget the first time I told someone I was from Boston and he asked me “Where in Boston? I lived in Chelsea for 15 years.” I’m used to getting called out by Americans for saying “Boston” when what I really mean is “a suburb of Boston you’ve NEVER heard of so I’m just gonna say the city,” but I never expected that from an old farm worker who doesn’t speak a word of English and is missing a good portion of his teeth.

¼ of all Salvadoran people live outside of El Salvador. There are approximately 8 million Salvadorans in the world, and about 2 million live abroad. Most of these people live in the United States, although there are some in Canada and other places. A large portion of those living abroad is doing so illegally. Salvadorans represent the second highest Hispanic population in America after Mexicans. All of these people are coming from a country the size of Massachusetts, which is astounding to me. Most elderly people have either lived there or have children there and most young people have the hope that they will live there someday, even though they realistically acknowledge that they will probably not be given papers and therefore will have to cross illegally.

While illegal immigration has been around for ages and has been an issue in the United States for years, before coming to El Salvador it was not on my radar. Living in suburban Massachusetts I was never aware of a large illegal immigrant presence and the raging political debates in Arizona, Texas, and the like seemed alien to me. Now, living in El Salvador, I have a very unique perspective on illegal immigration that most US citizens will never have.

Let me be upfront about this: I strongly dislike illegal immigration and am very much against it. This is not because I don’t want illegal immigrants taking advantage of our public services or sucking up all of the job opportunities. Not at all. I am against illegal immigration because I hate to see what it does to the families of the immigrants and the nations that they leave behind. Kids are growing up in broken families. Parents, siblings, and friends are missing. When someone goes to the US the assumption is that they will never be seen again. Hopefully, this is because they have successfully crossed the border and will be living there. The alternative is that they get killed in the crossing, get put in jail, or get deported.

Mere days after leaving my site in San Vicente to move to Morazán I found out that my host brothers, Marvin and Erik (age 18 and 16) had left to cross illegally into the US. They are now living with their parents (who have been in the US for about 15 years) in Chelsea, a city right outside of Boston where my mom worked for years. A few weeks later pictures popped up of them on Facebook on the duckling statues at the Boston Public Garden…one of my favorite childhood locations. How surreal. Marvin and Erik’s parents left for the US 15 years ago, when Marvin was 3 and Erik was 1. They left their children for a very legitimate reason – they wanted to make money to send back home so that their kids could have a better life in El Salvador. They left them with Blanca, their aunt and my host mom. Blanca raised them as her own and they grew up considering her to be their mother. They never had interaction beyond Facebook and occasional phone calls with their parents. However, in January, the parents decided that they were ready for their sons to join them in the US. They made the arrangements and mandated that Blanca send the 2 boys over the border (I’m not sure how they made this happen, but I imagine with threats of withdrawing remittances). Marvin and Erik were not at all happy. They did not want to leave the family they had grown up with, their hometown, and their comfortable, upper middle class life in El Salvador to live in a poor, cramped neighborhood of a working class city in Massachusetts. Marvin and Erik made it across the border safely and are now living with their parents in Chelsea. A cousin of theirs was grabbed at the border and detained in Chicago for some time before being released to his parents. They both say that they miss Santa Paula and their family, but the reality is that they will probably never return to El Salvador unless they are deported or somehow win papers and can travel back legally. Blanca misses them daily. Her biological son has been in the states for 5 years now, and Marvin and Erik were like her surrogate sons. Now all of her children are living in the US and she will probably never see any of them again. 

Now, in Sunsulaca, I am having another experience with immigration. Tonio is one of my favorite kids in the neighborhood. He is perpetually happy, walking around town grinning a gigantic smile and saying hi to everyone. He hangs out and watches me watch movies in English just to keep me company, asked me to be godmother of his puppy, and once identified my friend Tricia as my “friend with the orange water bottle” (instead of going for the more obvious qualities such as her height of 6 feet or her white-blonde hair). He collects marbles, loves to draw, and turned 8 in May. Tomorrow, he will be heading across the border alone to join his mother in New York. Tonio’s mom is paying a “coyote” (professional border-crosser) $10,000 to get her son across to New York. She doesn’t have that much money, so she’s had to borrow it, from whom I don’t know. Tonio has no interest in leaving El Salvador and crossing to the United States. He will be leaving his whole family and making the trip alone with an unknown man. He’ll be forced to walk for days, go without food and water, and hide from authorities. If he makes it, he’ll be living with people he doesn’t remember in a place he doesn’t know. He’ll be cold, he won’t speak the language or know the customs, and he won’t have any friends to help him out. Tonio’s a good kid and he’ll adapt quickly, but I hate that he’s being forced to. He’s too young to be experiencing all of this, but then again I don’t think anyone should ever have to go through what he’s about to.

In the United States the illegal immigration debate is generally based around the civil rights of the immigrants and the effects their presence has on US citizens. Here, it's about the people who are getting left behind, and the broken families that fill this country and the immigrant population of the United States. I just wanted to write this so you all can have a glimpse of what it’s like down here. I don’t pretend to have any brilliant, deep ideas or insights about this issue, but I hope that it gives you a new perspective on immigration.

my buddy Tonio

The volcano, the lake and the beach!

One of the cornerstones of Peace Corps is being out of your site (and consequently feeling guilty about it, but really loving it). I am recently returned from a week out of site – half of which was travel for pleasure and half of which was Peace Corps mandated training. Last Friday a few friends and I boarded the lovely Peace Corps shuttle and headed out west to Santa Ana. We stayed the night in a campground with cabins shaped like igloos (!), which, appropriately, were freezing cold. There were no towels, hot water, or blankets despite a phone call I had made to the caretaker the day before confirming that they had all those things. However, we toughed it out with what few blankets and towels we had (wrapped around our bodies for warmth) and spent our first freezing cold night here in El Salvador. AND I got to cross sleeping in an igloo of my El Salvador bucket list! The next morning we got up bright and early and headed up the Santa Ana volcano. There are various active volcanoes in El Salvador, but Santa Ana is the most recently active (erupting in 2005 and killing 2 wayward hikers). It is also the easiest volcano to hike – it only takes about an hour and a half each way. When we got to the top we were disappointed to find ourselves in a cloud aka without view. However, the brilliantly blue sulfur lake we could peer into in the volcano’s crater more than compensated that. We ooh-ed and ah-ed and took millions of pictures, then high-tailed it out of there to head to Lago de Coatepeque.

igloos and volcanoes! 

volunteers in front of the crater lake

Lago de Coatepeque is a crater lake a few miles from the volcano. It is giant, ringed by mountains, and pristine. There are rambling hostels that extend out over the water by means of extensive docks, and it is just an all-over awesome place to visit. One of my friends said, and I agree, that Lago de Coatepeque is the only traditional touristy place in El Salvador that we have been to that hasn’t been a disappointment. We spent 2 nights at the lake hanging out, swimming, and relaxing. Liz made an appearance after a month of vagabonding in Central America (she COSed in April), and it was great to see her.

Lago de Coatepeque

Tricia and I getting our float on 

After a couple relaxing days at the beach we packed up and headed to the beach for a Peace Corps mandated IST (In Service Training). Each PC program has an IST once a year, so this was our first. The numbers were low since so many PCVs have left in the past few months, but those of us that remain discussed resource sharing, current and future projects, grants, & etc. It was nice to get to know some of the volunteers from other groups, and it was great to be staying at a nice hotel right on the beach. Only in El Salvador can you do work on the beach, and I love it.

These next few months will be extremely busy, both with things going on in site and Peace Corps activities. Time should fly at least til my birthday in July and our year-in country!! 

Visit home

I am back in El Salvador after spending a lovely week visiting home. It was so great – I saw family and friends, spent a lot of time in the city, made a quick trip to NH, and ate everything in site (literally, everything). I got to celebrate my dad’s birthday with him, which was awesome, and also go to a Red Sox game at Fenway on Marathon Monday (in 90 degree weather…those poor runners). This year is Fenway’s 100^th, so it was pretty cool to be at the stadium. I got to spend endless hours with my pets, and sit on a real couch and sleep in a real bed (sans mosquito net)!!!

Before leaving I was a little nervous that going home would make me want to stay at home, and make coming back here for another 17 months of service as a PCV unbearable. While I’m having a mildly hard time re-adjusting, I think that the trip really helped refresh me and if anything made me happy that I decided not to COS. Of course I was envious seeing my friends nice apartments in the city, and loved using a washing machine and driving a car, but all those things will be waiting for me when I finish my time as a PCV, and I would always regret if I had left early.

with my parents for Dad's bday dinner

In honor of being back in El Salvador, I decided to make a couple of lists – the things I miss most about the US and the things I love best about El Salvador.  This exercise doesn’t really accomplish anything, but it was fun.

Top 5 things I miss about the US:

1.     Friends and family

2.     Washing machines, dishwashers, AC, smartphones…etc

3.     Clean, well-fed and well-behaved, snuggly animals

4.     FOOD – all varieties always available

a.     Adding on to this – being able to drink alcohol without judgment

5.     The ease of everything – being able to drive where I want to go in a car, walk around without getting stared at, not get catcalled by every male in a 1 mile radius.

Top 5 best things about El Salvador:

1.     The people are SO friendly and so generous. Not always the same in New England

2.     Amazing fresh fruit and vegetables all for under $1 in the market

3.     Painfully beautiful weather 360 days of the year

4.     Being able to do 1 thing in and feel like you had a productive day

5.     Hammocks

anyway, now back to El Salvador life - aka washing my clothes by hand and reading in the hammock! 

semana santa & etc.

We are in April! My 9th month in country and 7th month as a PCV! More than 1/4 of the way through! Craziness!!

March closed out very busily...we spent a couple of days in Tunco to say bye to Ashley and Cory, which was very fun although bittersweet. Ashley is already back in the US, Cory is vagabonding in Nicaragua at the moment. I'm a little jealous of both of them, but still happy with my decision to stay. 

The Morazan volunteers put on a camp at the end of March. Camps are a pretty popular "project" amongst PCVs - usually a 2-3 night excursion to a hotel with each PCV bringing a few kids from their community. This camp we did was a combination of creativity and HIV-prevention workshops up in Perquin, a town in northern Morazan. I brought 3 kids from the 9th grade. The camp was crazy busy and hectic, but it was really fun and I think that the kids learned a lot and had a good time. 

This past weekend, Eva and Tricia came up to my site and we hiked El Coroban, which is allegedly the highest "mountain" in Morazan, with some of the kids from my youth group. The hike was really tough (first exercise I've done in 9 months), but it was very beautiful at the top and a lot of fun. 

Now we are in the midst of semana santa (holy week). Semana santa is a BIG deal here. There is no school and all businesses shut down so people can attend all of the religious activities. This leads naturally to me spending a lot of time lying in my hammock and unsuccessfully trying to download the latest seasons of all the TV I miss...but it's all ok because I get to have some serious face-time with my community, win them over with my willingness to attend church, and score a free ride to the beach on Wednesday! Also, I can handle anything right now because in 10 short days I will be home!!!! I'm coming home for 8 nights to spend some time recharging my batteries, eating delicious food, and seeing family, friends, and pets. I can't wait!! I may or may not have already started packing (blush blush). 

the gang at tunco

hiv camp in perquin

morazan volunteers

eva, tricia, and i on top of the coroban

volunteer group on the coroban

Updates

We finally heard back from Peace Corps Washington about the security review here in El Salvador. In an email sent to all PCVs it was stated: "The team concluded that Peace Corps can continue operations in El Salvador given the current safety and security environment if aggressive risk mitigation measures are taken and enforced."


So what are these "aggressive risk mitigation measures" you ask? Well, first things first, we will never be allowed to travel on buses that cross departments. Therefore, from now on I can only take buses within Morazan. Seeing as El Salvador is the size of Massachusetts, and there are 14 departments, this means that our travel on public transportation is pretty severely limited. For the time being, PC is running a shuttle Monday, Wednesday, Friday every week from each major city to the capital, so that volunteers can get to the capital if they have some official business there, or to transfer to another shuttle and go somewhere else in the country (to visit another PCV, or for personal travel, or whatever). 


Also, all volunteers who are living in determined "unsafe" areas and departments will be relocated. Luckily, most people are safe. All volunteers from San Vicente are being moved, as well as the other southern departments (La Paz, La Libertad, Sonsonate). But there are so few volunteers in those areas it ends up only being 3 or 4 people needing site changes. In the future PC will only be placing volunteers in the "northern corridor" of El Salvador, which is basically northern La Union, Morazan, Chalatenango, and Santa Ana. 


And lastly, the San Salvador office is being closed and moved and the training center is being closed and moved from San Vicente. This is a huge blow to PCVs and to staff. First of all, San Salvador is the only large, modern city in El Salvador. To move the office will mean moving it basically to a pueblo somewhere else. For staff, this is awful. Almost all of PC staff lives in San Salvador and do not want to have to commute hours away from the city for work every day. Rumors have been circulating that about 50% of staff will probably choose to leave when the office is moved (sometime in the next 6 months). 


There are still a lot of unanswered questions and uncertainties, but this is the basic gist of how things will be proceeding. Unfortunately, all of these changes have led to a lot of PCVs making the decision to opt for early Close Of Service (COS). The last possible date to take advantage of the early COS option is April 13, so people are starting to flow out of the country fairly quickly. Some of my best friends are leaving, which is very sad and hard to cope with. PC estimates that there will be about 20 volunteers left at the end of April. When we got here there were 140. My plan is to stay and ride it out, though. These changes won't really affect my day-to-day life, only when I choose to leave Morazan, which is about once a month. The biggest difference for me will be fewer PCVs to talk to on the phone...which is sad but something I can deal with. 


So this week we are heading to Tunco to do a despedida for Ashley and Cory, 2 of my friends who have decided to leave. It will be very sad to see them go, but it is also going to be awesome to get together with all of my friends after almost 2 full months of house arrest! I can't wait to get on the beach and enjoy the sun, sand, ceviche, and salvadoran beer! 

Hello all,

It's been pointed out to me that it's been quite a while since my last blog update. I was kind of waiting for a safety and security update before doing my next blog post, but since god knows when we will get that information I may as well do a post now about what I've been up to in the meantime. So here goes...

Things have been going really well over here in Sunsulaca. I miss my host family in Santa Paula still, but this seems to be a community that needs a PCV more and there are more obvious projects to get involved in. Integration has been smoother here, too, probably because it is the second time around. I really like everyone I've been meeting and there are lots of people here who want to collaborate.

From the beginning, somethign I've been doing is "art" classes in my house. There are tons of little kids in my neighborhood, and apparently over vacation Morgan was teaching art twice a week to all the kids that wanted to come. When school started back up all the kids started asking me when I was going to teach art. I hadn't planned on doing it, but now we do once a week informal "art" classes together. A lot of the time we just sit on the floor and draw, but some of our cooler projects have been water colors, valentines, and paper bead necklaces. The kids are sweet anad love to get together, the only problem being that every time they see me in my house now they come in thinking it means painting time. We're gonna have to work on those boundary issues

watercolor class

some kids and their artwork

paper bead necklaces!

Another thign I've started is English classes, both in my house and at the school. I've been hesitant to teach English, mainly because I have zero interest in it. But everyone in the community has asked for it, and seeing as I am the only one who speaks it it seems kind of rude to not comply with their requests. Also, Peace Corps provides us with lesson plans, so it is minimal effort and big rewards. The classes are going well and people are really enthusiastic, although for me it is really frustrating (aka, I don't know why you need to put "do" in a question, you JUST DO DAMNIT!)

The past few weeks, my school director Don Mario, a teacher Nina Graciela, and I have been going to Gotera to receive training on how to form a volunteerism-based youth group. This Wednesday we had our first activity with our new youth group - a trash campaign at the nearby river, Rio Torola. We got 24 kids to come and we spent a couple hours picking up trash all along the river. It was awesome! I was very happy with how many kids came and their commitment to actually picking up trash and not just messing around. We are going to continue with weekly meetings and hopefully participation will remain high.

Rio Torola

girls getting trash

some of the group

The last "project" that I've been working on is getting a new water tank for our community. A lot of people in our community get water from a tiny, borrowed tank that doesn't work very well. The rest don't get water at all, because the tank is not capable of pumping to that many houses. Therefore, the water committee here in town wants to get a new tank system, so that everyone can have water. There is a Salvadoran NGO that was already in contact with members of the community via the former PCV here, and I have been facilitating communication between them. We turned in a grant a couple of weeks ago, and it seems that the NGO is very interested in working with us, so hopefully soon we will have a new water tank (with a water treating system) pumping potable water to all the houses in the community!

The rest of my days are taken up swinging in my hammock, eating tortillas and beans, wandering around the community, and visiting with Tricia (who lives very close and is easy to visit). Last week her host family took us down to Playa Cuco for a day trip. It was awesome!! So beautiful and really fun to get down to the ocean for a day.

That's all for now. I'll update as soon as we get more news from PC/Washington, or as soon as something cool happens!