birthday culture exchange

My host family is made up of a middle-aged couple, Irma and Miguel, and 3 of their children: Rosy (19), Lucia (17), Gerardo (11), and Justin (Rosy's son, almost 2). This past Monday was Gerardo's 11th birthday. All day, the women of the house (including myself) made tamales. Tamales are a special occasion food here in El Salvador. They use a lot of corn, and they take FOREVER to make. Our tamale process started the day before, cooking & milling the corn for the tamale dough. Then, early Monday morning, Irma put the tamale dough (corn, pureed tomatoes, green peppers, onions, garlic, chicken consomme) on the stove to thicken. At the same time, the girls were boiling the chickens and picking the meat off to make the tamale filling. After allowing the dough to thicken, we cut down the leaves to wrap the tamales in, putting them 1 by 1 on the comal to cook a little so they would be more flexible. Once the dough, filling, and leaves were ready, we started wrapping tamales! Tamale wrapping isn't really that hard. You just put a glob of dough in the center of a leaf, add a pinch of filling, and wrap it all up. The dough is watery, so it tends to seep out the sides of the leaves, but that doesn't really matter. In the end, we had 94 tamales. Woo baby! Although I must admit, my favorite part of the tamale process was eating the dough with some filling poured over it before the tamales were cooked. It ALMOST reminded me of grits, one of my favorite foods in the world.

While making the tamales, I was talking to Irma about the traditional Salvadoran foods. She explained to me that tamales were a special occasion food because of all of the time that they take to make, but also that they are a good option for Salvadorans because almost all the ingredients come from the house. The corn comes from the family's milpa and is ground in the family's molino, the veggies are either grown in the garden or bought at the market, the chickens live basically in the house, and the leaves to wrap the tamales up in grow in the back yard. Irma also explained to me that they don't have the money to buy one of the ridiculously overpriced birthday cakes from the town, which cost upwards of $30. This planted in my brain the idea to make a birthday cake for Gerardo. I love baking and I really love cake. I am also a huge fan of birthdays (especially my own). After learning the traditional birthday customs for El Salvador, I therefore decided to show them the American tradition and make a birthday cake for Gerardo.

On Tuesday, my friend Tricia (who lives nearby and came to visit) and I set out for Gotera, where we bought flour, eggs and vanilla from a bakery, and the rest from the supermarket. We headed back to Sunsulaca, and started making our cake! With lots of spectators, I might add. Despite oddly viscous vanilla, a gas oven that wouldn't temperature-adjust, and chocolate that just would not blend into the frosting, we ended up with a pretty delicious all-American birthday cake for Gerardo! Yippee!

Here are some pics...

host mom, Irma, cooking tamale dough

grilling tamale leaves so they'll be more flexible

rolling tamales

putting tamales on the stove to steam

yummy

birthday cake lessons

the bday boy adding sugar

feliz cumpleanos, gerardo!

1 week in

I have now been in my new site in Morazan for almost a week. It is a canton called Sunsulaca. It is about  twice as big as Santa Paula, very hilly, and very pretty. All in all, things are going pretty well. People are very friendly and I have some great counterparts, as well as a couple projects ready to go that the previous volunteer left for me. The only problem so far has been motivation with the looming security conference at the end of the month. With gossip spreading like wildfire across the country it is hard not to get swept up in the speculations. Will the program get shut down? Will public transportation be banned? How many people are going to COS? Our training group, which started off as 15, is already down to 10, with a few more contemplating leaving, too. I don't blame them. We've been in El Salvador 6 months tomorrow, and nothing has been as expected. From receiving the phone call 2 weeks before heading to El Sal telling us we would have to live with host families for the next two years, to the banning of the capital and the shutdown of Honduras, things have been just plain odd for us. While I'm having a hard time getting out and doing stuff in the community, I'm just trying to hold on until the conference (only 12 days...) before throwing up my hands in despair or buckling down and getting to work.

In the meantime, here are a couple pictures I took...

view on the walk to the milpa (corn field)

front of the house

back of the house

Movin' to Morazan

Safety and security remain to be a hot topic here in El Salvador. After getting home from my lovely vacation with the family, my host family told me that 2 women had been shot on one of the pickups that does transportation for my community. That, paired with a couple other robberies and shootings in the area, has led me and Peace Corps to make the decision to change my site. I am not thrilled about this. I really like my community a lot, and was excited to get to work. However, where I was living just wasn't safe.

This decision coincided perfectly with a big Peace Corps announcement yesterday. Peace Corps Washington is going to do an investigation on safety and security here in El Salvador just like they are doing in Honduras, but they aren't going to send us home while they do it. Instead, we are all on temporary hold in our sites, unable to travel, until we have a volunteer conference at the end of January. After this conference, Washington will announce a restructuring plan for El Salvador to ensure our safety. What does this mean? We're not sure yet. Some of the things we know will happen are: the capital is off limits now and forever, it is just not safe there; use of public transportation will be severely limited; we are all able to claim interrupted service and go home whenever we want, possibly to get reassigned to a new country.

Yesterday I got a call from Claudia, my project manager, asking if I would be willing to move to Morazan. Morazan is a department in the north east of El Salvador. It was where the guerrillas were stationed during the war, and due to the ramifications of the war it is one of the poorest departments. I am taking over the site of my friend Morgan, who has decided to take Peace Corps' offer of Interrupted Service and return to the US.

So yesterday I went back to Santa Paula, told my host family, and started packing. It was a sad and stressful day. I really liked Santa Paula as a community, and loved my host family. I was starting to get excited about the new year and the work I could accomplish. However, almost every person I said goodbye to told me it was the right thing to do and that it had become too dangerous in the area...so I know it was the right decision to make.

This morning one of my bosses picked me and all of my stuff up and we headed east to Morazan. We got to my new site at about 12, and I moved my stuff out of the car, into the house, and greeted my new host family as well as the teachers from the school (who came over to meet me). Morgan packed her stuff into the car, and she was off!

I'm still getting my feet under me, but so far this seems like a great community and my host family is very nice. Hopefully I will be able to live in my very own house here, which would be awesome.

I will update more as soon as I can and as soon as I have more information...definitely with pictures, too.

Family visit

So I am back in Santa Paula after a 10 day visit from my parents and brother. It was so nice to see them and get to spend the holidays with them. We started out our trip in San Vicente, where they got to try pan dulce, pupusas, and visit the market. They also made a trip up to Santa Paula to eat lunch with my host family (a mere 30 minutes after eating a lunch of pupusas in San V). 

San V clocktower and park lit up for Christmas

After San Vicente we headed down to Playa Sunzal, which is right next to Playa Tunco, on Christmas Eve. We spent a couple days in a BEAUTIFUL hotel right on the water, where we just relaxed and hung out. A couple of other volunteers came down and met us so we all got to spend some time in luxury.

not a bad way to spend Christmas Eve

Mom and I at Playa Tunco

After the beach we headed up the Route of Flowers, which is basically a path up the western side of the country that leads to some really cute artisan-y towns. We hit up Juayua, Ataco, and Apaneca, and did a canopy tour over a coffee plantation in Apaneca (most terrifying experience of my life). We also went to Santa Ana to see Tazumal, which is a Mayan pyramid. Very cool.

Tazumal

After seeing the west, we headed to San Salvador for a night, where we visited the Peace Corps office and the Artisan market. Then we headed up east to Suchitoto for the new year. 

Mom and Dad at Lago Suchitlan in Suchitoto

All in all, it was a great visit. It was so nice to see the family and get away from the campo and all of the stress that has surrounded Peace Corps recently. It was also great to see some really beautiful parts of El Salvador, since usually what I see isn't so nice. It was hard saying goodbye to them, but hopefully I will be getting home for a little bit this summer, so it won't be too long til I see them again.

Happy New Year!!

Big changes in The Savior

There has been some groundbreaking stuff happening in El Salvador recently. As a group, we PCVs have received flak from PC staff and RPCVs for gossiping and speculating as to what is going to happen to us. I’m going to do it anyway because, quite honestly, Peace Corps is my entire life right now, so even the smallest change will affect literally every minute of every day. Also, I think my friends and family in the US have a right to know what is happening with me here in El Salvador. So here goes the rumor spreading and speculating…

In the wake of the robbery in my site and my general freak out, Peace Corps El Salvador hit us all with some very surprising news. Last Friday, as we were all arriving to San Salvador to spend the weekend together, we received an email from our Country Director and the Central America Director. This email was sent to all volunteers in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras and basically informed us that all new training groups had been cancelled (so much for the fringe benefits of living near the Training Center and spying on new volunteers…) and that new safety and security policies were going to be implemented soon. Cut to: about 15 PCVs hanging out at the hotel speculating as to whether or not we’re going to shut down (overwhelming majority: yes definitely) and what the hell they’re gonna do with us in the event of a shutdown (new country assignment? Send us home with our payout?). Since Friday we have received an email from our Country Director telling us that shut down is not on the table at the moment, but that PC El Sal is going to be a “whole new ballgame” after the changes that are going to be made.

Yesterday I received the news from a friend that PC Honduras has been suspended for 30 days while all volunteers get sent home and PC conducts evaluations on whether it can continue operating safely. What brought this on? And why isn’t El Salvador going through the same process? The only conclusion that we can reach is that recently a volunteer in Honduras was shot in the leg during a bus robbery, which really brought to the forefront the danger in Honduras, maybe causing Peace Corps to take more immediate action there than anywhere else. Honestly though, I would be none too shocked if something like that happened here. Obviously I don’t know all of the facts and I don’t know what specific factors played into Honduras being suspended and El Salvador not, but if it is based on anything like that I would have to say they’re splitting hairs between Honduras and El Salvador safety.

While talking to the other El Sal PCVs, the overwhelming sentiment has been “yeah, it’s really dangerous here, but I always feel safe in my site. ” Unfortunately, for me that is no longer the case. Tuesday the PC safety and security coordinator and one of my bosses came out to my site to check out where I live so that I can stop worrying all night every night about every sound I hear outside my door. Their assessment was that the house that I’m sleeping in is safe, aka once I’m in there no one’s going to get me. Their suggestion was that if I still feel endangered I either look for a new family to live with or consider a site change, but that in general my site has always been very calm and safe and I shouldn’t be too worried. I related this to my host mom, who answered “Yeah, you brought the violence with you. When the other volunteers were here it was very calm. Now it is very dangerous.” Another comment I got the other day from a 9^th grader here in Santa Paula was “The gangs have arrived in San Vicente.” Oh joy. Yesterday morning my host mom informed me that a family in the caserío over from us, right next to my school, was robbed at gunpoint the night before.

So this is my thinking about the whole safety and security in El Salvador issue… I have only been in my site 3 months. That gives me 21 months left of service. Do I stick it out in my site and try to make it work, with the niggling thought in the back of my mind that I probably won’t see any of my projects to fruition because we’re going to get shut down? Or do I consider a site change and go somewhere else in El Salvador where I don’t have to worry about my safety? And if I do that, am I just going to settle into a new community and then be sent home because the country is closing down?

I imagine that 3 months into site is a hard point in anyone’s service. I don’t quite feel comfortable in my community, I miss training and all my friends, and I am casting about fruitlessly looking for some inspiration for a project to start. Add to that the constant worry that we are going to be shut down, suspended, or prohibited from riding buses every again, and it is just impossible to muster the motivation to get anything done. One way or another, I hope that Peace Corps can make a decision soon and stop sending us cliffhanger emails that lead me to waste hours of the day in phone calls with various volunteer friends and renew my internet subscription every day in case we get the email today.

Some light reading on the subject:

• PC Press Release on Guatemala and El Salvador
• PC Press Release on Honduras
• NY Times Article on PC in Latin America 

Giving in the holiday spirit!

Here in El Salvador, public high school and university are free. However, the staggering majority of students stop studying after 9th grade (if not earlier). Why? A combination of reasons. But mostly, it is that families cannot afford to not have their children working and bringing in money, and on top of that they can't afford to pay for their child's transportation and school supplies. Therefore, thousands of kids who want to continue studying are missing out every year. In combat of this, Peace Corps El Salvador has a committee called Women and Youth in Development (WYD), which grants high school and university scholarships of $250 and $450 respectively per year to outstanding applicants who demonstrate academic prowess and financial need. Scholarship recipients go through a rigorous application process that involves many essays, recommendations from professors, and a financial need assessment. As you may know, this year I inherited a WYD scholar, Sofia, from the volunteer who was in the site over from mine. Sofia is incredibly intelligent, shy, funny, and beautiful. If it weren't for WYD, Sofia would be working full time in a pupuseria and helping her mom around the house. Instead, she is about to enter her second year of high school with plans to attend university after that. Please consider donating to the WYD scholarship fund this holiday season so that the committee can grant more scholarships to deserving kids like Sofia all over El Salvador. It is tax deductible and every little bit counts. 

Merry Christmas! :) 

Volunteers and WYD scholars at the WYD camp in December

DONATE HERE

Swimming hole!

Yesterday some kids in my site took me to a swimming hole called La Bruja (the witch) that's about a 20 minute hike from my house...very cool!

the hike

some chicas playing

cuties