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

Travels with Maggie

This weekend, Maggie and I decided to go on an excursion. I had long promised a visit to my friend Shelby’s site up north in Morazan, and I really wanted to bring Maggie up there since Shelby’s boyfriend, Pedro, will be adopting Maggie when I go back to the US. As much as I would love to hit Mags with a giant tranquilizer dart, stuff her in my suitcase, and trek her home to the states, I don’t (1) have the patience for the mutt, (2) have anywhere to put her (or myself for that matter) and (3) I don’t think she would like the adjustment to life without constant chicken/pig/toddler built-in playmates, corn fields to get lost in, and tortillas to munch on between meals. Therefore, Maggie will be packing up as I do, but not heading quite as far north as me when we both depart Sunsulaca.

So, Saturday morning after a quick stop by my church for a breakfast of fried chicken sandwiches (a major food group in El Salvador and my personal favorite invention of all time), Maggie and I headed for my bus. Now, Salvadorans are wont to stare down a 2 ton bull, nonchalantly kill scorpions and tarantulas with flimsy ginas, and regularly board some of THE most sketch transportation devices in the world (I’m talking hanging onto a rusted piece of an old pickup truck with your feet balanced on the license plate, hurtling down a mountain). However, they are absolutely terrified of Maggie (and all other big dogs in general). Therefore, trying to hoist Maggie onto a bus filled with aforementioned Salvadorans causes pandemonium without fail. As I loaded Maggie onto the bus that morning I was met with the usual – gasps, sharp intakes of breath, and a few squeals and “santo dios”-es from the frailest of the bunch. Mind you, these are the same people who have hoisted baskets with live chickens in them onto my lap and who regularly foist their sweaty tortilla bellies into my face while on this same bus, so I was not feeling too apologetic.

After a rather uneventful ride – Maggie was unsuccessful in her attempts to leap off the moving bus, thankfully – we got to my pueblo of Cacaopera where we needed to await the second bus up to Shelby’s site of Joateca. Joateca is about 2 hours north of Cacaopera along a very long, very bumpy deserted dirt road. Much to my dismay, when Maggie and I arrived at the bus stop I was immediately informed by a friendly little old man that there was no bus to Joateca that day…the bus driver was on an “excursion” and wouldn’t be doing his normal route. So little old man, Maggie, and I walked a little ways down the road and decided to try to hitch hike to Joateca. Lucky for us, about a half hour later a giant truck drove past. The ingenious driver had slid wooden plans horizontally across the bed of his truck creating benches, and there were already about 15 passengers with their cargo en route. After lifting Maggie into the arms of an assistant up above, I (un)gracefully launched myself into the truck and we were off!

Now, I know that traveling in the back of a truck perched on a wooden plank on a deserted dirt road does not sound the safest…but it is one of my favorite modes of transportation. The views of the countryside are gorgeous, the breeze is fresh in your face, and you can easily space out and ignore everyone around you trying to chit chat. Maggie feels about 100% differently from me. She couldn’t get her sea legs and spent the whole ride making loopy drunken circles around the bed of the truck before finally collapsing under my gentleman friend’s legs halfway up.

I was beyond tickled with my sweet situation and texted Shelby that I would be there “soon”. I have learned this lesson many, many times in El Salvador, and Saturday I learned it again – no matter how well something is going, DO NOT call it a success until it is over. Halfway up the mountain, along this oh-so-deserted road, our sweet ride came to a screeching halt and had us all unload. I looked to my hitch-hiking buddy in confusion. “Hasta aqui no mas va este” (He’s only going this far), my friend informed me, about an hour too late. Apparently this had been said when we got on the truck, shattering any erroneous belief I had previously held that my Spanish was functional after 2 years down here speaking essentially only Spanish. As I tossed a disgruntled Maggie off the truck and hopped down myself, I started to contemplate my options. We had passed the last bus back down to Cacaopera en route, and I was still about an hour from Joateca by car, so I was pretty fully screwed.

As I sat, sweating and contemplating my options, a fruit and vegetable vendor drove by. Since stores in the rural areas of El Salvador can’t stock produce as it goes bad too quickly, vendors load pickup trucks with fruits and veggies in San Miguel and then spend the day driving at a snail’s pace around the campo, blasting advertisements from a megaphone tied to the roof of the car and stopping for any person who leaves their house looking to purchase. I flagged down this veggie truck and with my biggest smile, and sweetest gringa pleading voice asked him to PLEASE save the life of my child and me and take us to Joateca. No problem, the man informed me kindly, but I would have to ride in the back with the produce as there was no room up front, and since he entered every community on the way it would take us about 3 hours.

This was far more attractive to me than spending 3 hours either walking towards Joateca, 3 hours walking down to Cacaopera, or just trying to sleep on the side of the road, using Maggie as protection, warmth, and a food source if it came down to it. So, Maggie and I rearranged the goods in the back and wormed our way in with the plantains, watermelons, potatoes, and other perishables.

As promised, Maggie and I spent about 3 hours in the back of that truck. As a result, my butt will be permanently bruised from now on (nothing like perching your butt on the edge of a pickup truck and then not changing position as you go lurching over huge potholes), but on the upside I am now officially trained as a vendedora if I can’t find any suitable employment in the states post-COS. I also arrived at Shelby’s with a nice juicy watermelon and a good story.

my first ride

mags, relatively calm

the trickster

second ride - those clouds are joateca

maggie lovin' life

Since nothing new and exciting has happened to me lately, I’m going to take a moment to tell you all a story that happened to me a few months ago, but never wrote about. I hope you like it.

This year I geared up to spend my first Christmas away from home and without my family down here with me. Seeing as Christmas lasts for about a month in our house and I start blasting Christmas music and making cookies the day after Thanksgiving, I was anticipating a pretty melancholy season free of snow, nondenominational holiday tunes, and, most importantly, sweets.

My mom, too, was feeling a tad glum without her merry-making partner-in-crime and took it upon herself to mail me a special Christmas package to open on the day. Having previous experience with El Salvador’s less than efficient mail system, she sent it at the end of November to leave a large margin of error. Imagine our surprise, therefore, when there was nary a hint of a care package when I swung by my local correo on December 21^st. How could this be? I was not to let this ruin my Very Salvadoran Christmas, and managed to have a lovely holiday season, dressing as an angel in my community’s nativity play, making Christmas cookies in an adobe oven, and drinking my first spiked eggnog with my fellow PCVs in the “chilly” Perquin (at least there are pine trees).

The 26^th I was off to Nicaragua and my wayward Christmas package didn’t cross my mind again until I was back in El Salvador in January, suffering from the “back in site blues” and looking for a little whiff of America to get me through the slump. This time when I went to the post office they had news for me – no package, but a slip of paper telling me that my package was at the Salvadoran/Honduran border detained by customs as it had been “randomly” selected to be opened & the contents taxed.

This is one of those situations in which a language barrier, be it miniscule, is a huge detriment, and so I, thoroughly confused by what the postal worker was telling me and convinced he was holding my package hostage and pilfering my goodies in the back room, dispatched our PC Gotera office manager to the post office to work his Salvadoran magic and somehow get me my present. He, too, was unsuccessful and the end result was the two of us embarking on a journey from Gotera two hours due East to the border to retrieve my package. Mind you, by the time we finally got around to this road trip it was mid February, exactly 3 days before my parents were due down in El Salvador for vacation (imagine the irony – my mother arriving before the package she had sent off 3 months ago).

Carlos and I arrive at the customs office ready to do battle. First things first, I must show not only my passport, but also turn in a copy of it. I have no copy. The customs office WILL NOT make me a copy, despite their very evident copier in the background. Off we go to a nearby cyber café to make photocopies!

Back to the customs office. But, the package says “PCV Elsa Augustine” and my passport just says “Elsa Augustine”…clearly I am not PCV Elsa, I’m plain old Elsa, and therefore am committing identity fraud and cannot have this package intended for the other Elsa Augustine residing in El Salvador. No no, the head customs agent steps in, tells his minion to stop being ridiculous, and my package is produced.

I try to make off with my intact (miraculously so) parcel, but am quickly detained. The package must be opened and the contents inspected. We open the package and out springs an adorable, fuzzy Christmas stocking. I reach into this enticing piece of oversize footwear, previous experience with my mother’s stocking-stuffing skills telling me that I will not be disappointed, and pull out an abundance of Christmas presents, each individually wrapped. “Look,” I tell him. “It’s my Christmas presents from my family. May I go?” Of course not. We must open every little package so that I can be taxed on each item that I am retrieving. Do I get to open these presents? Oh no. This is the job for Super Custom Agent! But I will not be denied the unique pleasure of ripping through tissue paper and revealing my treasures, and so Super Custom Agent and I face off on opposite sides of the mail counter racing against one another to tear open all of my presents (any movie that depicts small children under the tree on Christmas morning will give you an accurate picture of what this looked like), while ever-cool Carlos sits in the corner, observing us and chuckling to himself.

Praise the lord my family loves me and nothing embarrassing or too weird was revealed in the unwrapping, and after conducting some obscure calculations it was determined that I would be taxed a whopping $4.60 for my goodies. I gladly whipped out a five-dollar bill to be informed that I could only pay this debt at a bank that was located across town and closed at 5:00PM. It was 4:45. Carlos and I hoofed it across the city; dripping with sweat by now (did I mention we were on the coast? Yeah, it’s hot there). I finally make it to the clerk, clammy bills and papers clutched in my sweaty paws. As I hand over my passport, my receipt, and my money, the kindly clerk asks for my NIT (a random Salvadoran document we were given upon arriving to country and which I have not laid eyes upon since). My eyes glaze over and may or may not fill with tears as I see my lip-gloss, dove chocolates, and candy canes slipping into Custom Agent’s pockets in my mind’s eye, and I start trying to strike a bargain with the clerk. Luckily, Don Carlos comes to my rescue once again and produces his NIT, which he carries around in his wallet like any responsible adult. Ms. Clerk accepts a stand-in NIT although my name is clearly not Carlos, and I finally pay my debt and am able to race back to the agency and this time demand what is rightly mine!!

Carlos and I made the trip back to Gotera in relative silence – me gloating over my goodies and relaxing in a sense of smugness over a job well done, Carlos more likely than not marveling at the nut jobs that Peace Corps selects to send down to his beloved country.

Dear Legions of Loyal Readers,

A quick scroll through my blog of late shows that my focus has been 2 things: various beasts and food. While this is a pretty accurate depiction of what is going on in my head 99% of the time, I've wantonly neglected updating you all on what I've actually been up to down here in salvo-land.

Project-wise, it's been business as usual. Tricia, Mike and I continue our work with the HIV youth group, and in the past 2 months had the kiddos travel to our respective schools and educate their peers on HIV/AIDS prevention. I was very impressed with the amount they know about HIV and their confidence and maturity in replicating the activities with their classmates. Now I'm in the process of recruiting 2 teachers to take the helm on the project when I leave so that the project isn't dead in the water.

students replicating an HIV prevention charla!

Last weekend Tricia, Mike, Jamie, Tyler and I brought students from our schools to a town called Alegria for a "bro" camp. Basically, we spent 2 nights in Alegria, which is a really cool, pretty town on the top of an extinct volcano, doing things such as sex education, gender equality activities, hiking to the nearby crater lake, and having race days and soccer tournaments. Camps are such a great mini project down here because they give us the opportunity to work together (and nothing is better than being able to pass the baton or just spend 15 minutes bitching in English with another PCV when you're at risk of bludgeoning one of your jovenes with a day-old tortilla), but it's also a great way to take campo kids who maybe have never left the community to another part of the country, teach them some new stuff, and let them make new friends. This was the last camp I'll get a chance to do in Peace Corps, and it was by far the smoothest, most enjoyable one, so I was really happy with it.

Last week we ALSO got our formal invitation to our COS (close of service) conference. My training group, which consists of myself, Tricia, Jamie, Tyler, Andrew, and Kara, will be eligible to finish our time as PCVs starting August 14...2.5 short short months away. On the one hand, the time has dragged by at a snails pace and I can't believe the amount of experiences, activities, and both torturous and wonderful moments that have been packed into these 2 years. On the other hand, time has FLOWN by and I feel like I got here just a few short months ago, fresh out of college and ready for some real world experience. I promise to write a more introspective, end of service blog post sometime soon, but I just wanted to let all of you who have been waiting to start your "Elsa is back in the US" countdowns for some time now that the end is in sight!!

Anywho, here are some pics from the BRO camp...enjoy! Also, if you want to see more pictures from these activities, click on this link: pics

boys

Tyler & the giant worm we found

crater lake!

playing with mud, naturally

PCVs & campers in Alegria

talkin about HIV under the watchful eyes of Jesus

Jamie & I supporting our communities in the soccer tournament finale...Sunsulaca WON!

Environmentalism! Sending Kids to School!

x

Hey all,

Sorry for my sparse updating of late...I've actually been kind of busy, plus I lost my camera in a hike from Tricia's site to Jamie's (6 hours walking in the direct sun up a mountain...we're dumb).

I promise to do a meatier update soon, but in the meantime take a minute to check out this link to my friend Mike's project page. Mike is building a classroom for a kindergarten & first grade in a part of his community that has never had a school before. Previously, these little kids had to walk over an hour to get to school every morning. But, instead of building a traditional brick & cement structure, Mike is using plastic soda bottles stuffed full of plastic trash (chip bags, grocery bags, etc), which, when filled properly, are hard and durable enough to stand in place of traditional bricks. Mike needs $1000 to buy other materials to complete the construction of this school, which is starting May 15!

So, check out the link below, take a look at how cool this project is, watch the video, and please consider donating. Every cent helps!

Mike's Bottle School

My latest accomplishment

I killed him!! After many months of seeing this monster on my wall, I finally discovered him on my floor and killed him with my sneaker. Much to my horror, I quickly learned he is an identical twin, and his brother is now haunting me, waiting for revenge.