third time´s a charm......not

so saturday i´m washing clothes in the pila, dressed oh-so-fantastic once again (surprise, surprise) when nina teresita is like ¨someone´s here for you.¨ i´m thinking ¨you have got to be kidding me...¨ so i go to the front door of the hostal and there´s tonito and he´s laughing at me, telling me that i must have been sleeping and he´s pointing to my feet. i was wearing a pair of flip-flops, and i´ll admit, the rest of my attire didn´t suggest that i´d NOT been sleeping....but still. it was like 1:30 in the afternoon for crying out loud!!! sure, in the states, i wouldn´t at all be surprised if someone came over on a saturday at 1:30 and insinuated that i had been sleeping, because there would probably be a 90% chance that it was true. but here, in el salvador, it´s almost impossible to sleep that late. in any event, i assured tonito that i was not sleeping, that i had been studying spanish earlier, and that right now i was in the middle of washing my clothes. i was confused as to why he was there, because the last time i talked to him, we left it at that i was going to meet him for that meeting on the 19th. i asked him if he was in apaneca working or something and he´s like ¨no.¨ so i was at a loss as to what else to talk to him about, because i talked a lot with him on thursday, and other than repeating all that stuff, i wasn´t sure what else to chit-chat about. never mind the fact that ít´s hard for me to just ¨chit-chat¨ in spanish! so after a while i was telling him that i couldn´t wait until that night because the pupuseria in my hostal was going to be open (people in el salvador don´t eat pupusas for lunch, only for breakfast or dinner) and i was starving. so that led to the all-important pupusa conversation...what kind do i like? (cheese) do i like them with frijoles? (no, only with cheese and lorroco) what kind of pupusas did they have in san vicente? (same kind as here in apaneca)

- sorry for the interruption, but as i´m typing this...there´s a funeral procession going down the street in front of the internet place....complete with fireworks and a mariachi band...... -

ok, back to the pupusa conversation......anyway, whenever you go to a new community, people want to know what you think of the pupusas and even though it sounds like a pretty quick conversation, it can really get quite lengthy. i always throw in that when i was in suchitoto, i went to a place that had pupusas with spinaca (spinach).....just in case there might be a place here in apaneca that has this awesome variety of pupusas that i don´t know about. anyway - tonito was telling me that there is a place in front of the catholic church that makes pupusas. i was like ¨when do they make them?¨ and he said ¨right now.¨ i was confused because i was certain that nobody served pupusas until at least 3:00. then tonito goes ¨i´m asking you if you want to go.¨ see how these conversations go?? how i missed that he was inviting me to go with him is beyond me. i thought we were just talking about them. in any event, i was all for that and i agreed immediately.
so we left the hostal and went to the corner and he´s like ¨we have to wait for the bus.¨ ok, again, what was he talking about??? i might have been new in town, but i certainly wasn´t THAT dumb. i thought, there is no way you need to take a bus to the church....it´s friggin´ down the damn street!!! so i just kind of looked at him confused, and then he goes ¨we have to take the bus to ataco.¨ OHHHHHHHH!!!! then i got it......he had been talking about ataco - a town a little bit north of san jorge - and it was here that he wanted to get pupusas. so i pretended i knew all along that that´s what he meant. so we took the microbus up there and as it turned out, which i had no idea, there was a fiesta de patronales going on that weekend. so there was a parade and there were tons of people there. we watched the parade, then he took me over to the catholic church which is really cool. then we went back over to this pupuseria on the corner of the street we were just by (nowhere near the church....i don´t know what he was talking about, the pupusa place in front of the church) and his two friends -edwin and mario - were there, sitting in front of the pupuseria. they were two of the most hilarious salvadorans i´ve met here. but i was right, they weren´t making pupusas until 3:30, but apparently because tonito knows the old lady that runs the place, she agreed to make us some. anyway, we then finally ate our food and hung out with his friends for a while. then edwin asked me if i like yucca....which, of course, i do. it´s one of the best things here.....it´s kind of like a potato. anyway, so next thing i know, all four of us are walking down the street to this little place that serves yucca. that´s the thing here....people ask you if you like something, and if you say ¨yes,¨ the next thing you know, they´re shoving a plate of it in front of you. you can´t just say you like something just for information purposes. if you say you like a certain type of food, then there´s a 99% chance that you´re going to be eating it within 5 minutes.

so i stuffed myself full of yucca - yucca that had some sort of ensalada on top of it, along with bacon - until i couldn´t eat another bite. then tonito asks me if i want to leave. i said ¨sure¨ so we left edwin and mario and then walked back over to the church. i guess he wanted me to see it with all the lights on or something. then we stopped at this tienda in the mercado and he kept pointing at the wall and i´m like ¨what now??¨ after about two minutes, i finally realized that he was pointing to the christmas lights. i had told him sometime during the day that i wanted to get some christmas lights for my cuarto.....so after i put all this together, i ended up getting a set of christmas lights. it was getting late, so we decided to leave ataco. then on the way back he´s like ¨there is a meeting tomorrow that you could go to.¨ so apparently, i agreed to go to a meeting with him the following day somewhere near san jorge.

which is exactly what we did. he came to get me in the afternoon and we went up to this tiny caserio way up in the middle of the coffee forest where he was holding a meeting with some of the people from the town. apparently, the town - los doblones (not sure if that´s spelled right) - wants to become a canton...which is bigger than a caserio. so they have to get support from everyone in the town, but they are having problems with that. why tonito is helping them with this, i don´t know...given that he´s the promotor de salud for the san jorge area. in any event, there were like 10 people there, including mario, and it seemed like the people that were there were really excited about moving forward. i, of course, did not understand the entire meeting, but i think i got most of it. plus, i got to meet a lot more people - which is what i´m supposed to be doing for 3 months. so when the meeting was over tonito and mario were like ¨want to go back to ataco for the last day?¨ so because i had nothing else planned, i agreed. there were a lot more people there that day. tonito and i met up with his mom, his sister and his younger brother in the park. there was this huge long discussion about my age and how they couldn´t believe i was 33, blah, blah, blah.....and it was really embarassing. anyway, we left them and went back to the pupuseria and got more food there. then we returned to the park where there was this concert going on with this cool band that was playing musica tradicional. all in all i had a great weekend. i met lots of different people and i finally feel like there are a couple of people here that can help me meet even more people - especially in san jorge.

i´m posting pictures below from the last days at my family´s house in molineros, as well as the whole swearing in festivities......

adios!

me, mama rosa and sindy with ana´s rosas blancas

dayana

sindy, ana, me, dayana, mama rosa, mama viviana (papa ovidio´s mother) and jessie (ana´s sister)

the salvadoran workday.......this dude was ¨working¨ at the kitchen in the bar where we spent our night before swearing in

anna, me and megan the night before swearing in

papa ovidio, me and ana at the ambassador´s house the day of the swearing in

the entire agroforestry/environmental ed and youth development group 2005!! (minus courtney..one of my good friends here)

the agroforestry/environmental ed group (minus brendan, courtney and armeda)

me, kate and anna at the bar after the swearing in

so this is what it feels like to have almost too much down time

[i posted two entries today....so for the previous one, scroll down to ¨my two years has officially started¨ before reading this one]

so for all of you who thought i´d be busy my first week in my site, i´m sorry to disappoint you, but i´ve done basically nothing since arriving! actually, it sounds worse than it really is. first, school is out until february….so neither my counterpart, or any of the other teachers are hip to ¨working¨ right now. christmas is coming and they´re all preoccupied with that. secondly, i live in apaneca, which is about 2km from my ¨site.¨ i think it would be kind of awkward going up to san jorge and just wandering the streets, introducing myself…even though that´s basically what we´re supposed to do. third, my spanish is pretty good, but far from great. and doing this whole introduction thing sometimes leads to deeper conversations and that´s territory i´m not sure of. it´s easy to say stuff like ¨hi, i´m laura. nice to meet you. do you live here?¨ stuff like that. but when you start saying things like ¨what projects should i start, what problems does san jorge have, where´s the best pupuseria in apaneca,¨ that just opens up dialogue that is difficult to follow. most of the time if i get into these long conversations, i get maybe ¾ of it….which isn´t bad, but i don´t want to start off meeting people and only understanding like ¾ of what they are saying to me. the responses to questions about names and locations are generally short and sweet and i can totally follow them. wait, i take that back about the names thing. you ask somebody their name here and they give you six names. seriously…..jose antonio christian rodriguez jiminez. but the guy goes by tonito. but other times, his mom will call him jose. like my sister in molineros – her name is dayana guadalupe de ceron dimas. half the time they call her dayanita. some of the time they call her ¨lupe¨ or ¨lupita.¨ or in sindy´s case, because she can´t say ¨lupe¨ she calls her ¨wupe.¨ so it´s kind of crazy when you are trying to get to know an entire community and they´re all giving you like 3 names, none of which is used more frequently than the others. and it´s even funnier when they ask me my name. i´ll say ¨laura¨ and they´ll stand there hanging on it, waiting for me to say more. so i´ll tell them my middle name ¨¨ann¨ and they´ll act all disappointed because that´s all i have. so i´ll try to beef it up and say it´s ¨anna¨ and sometimes that gets a little approval. then i´ll try to give them my last name, which is always met with looks of confusion (much like it is in the states), and then they´ll ask if it´s my mother´s name, my father´s name or…….my husband´s name?? which then leads to the shocked response of ¨you´re 33 and you´re not married??¨ seriously, if you have seen that movie bridget jones´s diary where she is at that dinner with her friends and there are only couples there and they are grilling her on why she´s not married…well, that is basically what it comes down to here every time i meet someone new from the community. it´s like i´ve suddenly got horns growing out of my head, or i´ve said that the virgin de guadalupe is a fake. they seriously think there is something really wrong with you if you are 24 or older and have not had a child or gotten married yet. but you know, i just laugh when i see them trying to control their six kids, or i find out their husband has slept with half the town. or when women, especially, tell me they are 27, and look like they´re about 45. seriously, women here look a way lot older than they really are. they always think that i look super young, which i don´t think is the case, but compared to a lot of women here, i guess i do look a lot younger than 33. so for any of you who are blowing wads of money on anti-aging shit, buy a plane ticket to el salvador and see what aging really looks like.

so i just went way off topic…..ok, back to my site. so like i said before, all i did was sleep and unpack my stuff for two days. i finally ventured out to the corner tienda on sunday to get some food. on monday i decided i should really do something, so i decided to head to ahuachapan (the city) and try to set up my new mailing address. ahuachapan turned out to be way bigger than i thought – but in a good way. there´s a huge market, and tons of artisan shops. and it has something i like to call a little piece of home and that´s a grocery store. it´s just like being in the states when you´re in the grocery store here. so after spending like an hour in the post office, i bought what seemed like an ungodly amount of stuff for only $25 at the store. the kid who bagged my groceries put them on one of those cart things to help me out to the car he apparently thought i had. i was like ¨all i have is this backpack¨ and so he walked away and just left the cart there. ha. so that was the sum of my work on monday.

tuesday i went over to the casa de cultura in apaneca (advice from the previous volunteer) and introduced myself to don carlos, the guy who is in charge there. he gave me this book on the history of apaneca to read which was really cool. i found out that apaneca means ¨rio de viento¨ (wind river) which explains why the hell it has been freezing cold and windyat night since i´ve gotten here. apparently, the months of november, december and january are the coldest and windiest here. yay!!!

wednesday, i finally got up the guts to go up to san jorge. i decided to visit the family i had stayed with during my site visit. when i got to their house, only madelyn was there so i talked to her for a little bit and wached some of this soccer game that was on. then some dude came out of one of the bedrooms and i introduced myself. i never caught his name, but i ended up having this hour-long conversation with him about the problems el salvador is having with the coffee and fruit prices. he also was talking to me about some of the problems san jorge has. he was a really cool guy, and hopefully i will get to talk to him again. then mercedes came home and i couldn´t believe it, but she gave me a huge hug. seriously, these were the same people that didn´t talk to me at all my first day at their house. i was totally surprised. so i talked with her a little while and then decided to go try and visit the promoter de salud, don tonito. i had visited his house the last time i was there and talked with his sister, claudia.

so i ventured down there and he wasn´t there, but claudia was, and just like mercedes, she gave me this huge hug. so i talked to her for a while and she showed me some family photos…so i felt better because i had at least made some community contact. i gave her my phone # to give to her brother and told her that i was staying at the hostal orquideas so if he is apaneca he can visit.

well, who do you think stopped by on thursday?? yeah, you guessed it. and if you remember, the last time i met this guy, i was wearing my pj´s. this time wasn´t much better. i was just going to stay at the hostal all day and study spanish, so i was wearing this detroit tigers t-shirt that i´ve been wearing off and on for about three days. i had on scruffy jeans and socks and tevas. yeah, you read that right….it´s so freezing here at night, i´ve gotten accustomed to wearing socks w/ my tevas when i´m just at the hostal. and to top it off, i was wearing a red bandana on my head (you know, like a farmworker). seriously, i looked like i was there to clean the hostal, not like i lived there. so after nina teresita knocked on my door and told me that tonito was there, i greeted him and embarrassingly sat down and talked to him in the lobby of the hostal. but whatever, who cares really. we just talked about the kind of stuff we can do, and he is super gung-ho about working on a trash campaign in san jorge. so that´s all that matters. we talked for a little bit and then he said that there is a meeting on the 19th of december that he wants me to go to. i kept trying to ask him what the meeting was about and he just kept saying ¨con la comunidad.¨ so i still don´t know what the meeting is for, but i suppose i´ll find out soon enough. so i told him i wanted to write it down in my notebook (like i have soooo many other meetings scheduled), and when i did, he kept saying ¨make sure you write down that it´s in san jorge, and it´s with the community, and it´s at 8:00, and it´s a monday.¨ i was like ¨chill dude!¨ then he asked me if i had his name and phone # written down and i said yeah, but he asked to see so i showed him, but i apparently didn´t have it absolutely correct, so he asked me for my pen and took my notebook and wrote his full name (see the above paragraph on names) – rafael antonio riviera gallegas. for real though, i´m not going to forget his name, he´s like the only person i have talked to about work stuff.

in any event, you can all breathe easy, because i have a meeting planned!!!!

as for today, friday, i came back into ahuachapan to pick up some things i didn´t get before. i´m on the hunt for a pillow. i´m tired of sleeping on these weirdo faux pillows that are nothing more than some shirts stuffed in a pillowcase. every person here has this crazy pillow idea and it just doesn´t work for me. i think i might have to go to san salvador though. i can sleep on ratty ass beds, or on the floor even, but this pillow thing has got to go.

finally, i have a new address….i´ll still get things if they get sent to the san salvador address…but it will take me way longer to get them because i´m not going to be in san salvador more than twice a month. so here it is:

1 av y 1 calle orte #2-1
apartado postal #23
ahuachapan, el salvador
central america

ok peeps, i´m outta here for now. I´m off to buy a machete!!! (sorry i don´t have any pics….i´ll post some next time – of swearing in and all the festivities)

my two years has officially started!!!

well, people, i´m officially a volunteer now. i wish i could say that there was some kind of difference between being a trainee and being a volunteer, but really, other than not having every single minute of my day accounted for like it was in training, things are basically the same for now.

so last week was a little nuts…..monday was our last official day of training and then on tuesday and wednesday we had orientation from some of the people from the san salvador office. actually, wednesday we didn´t because the FMLN blocked all of the major roads in the country so none of the people from the san salvador office could get to san vicente. we weren´t able to leave san vicente until after 5:00 and even then, we had to take some weirdo backroads route.

by far the worst part of the week was leaving our families on wednesday a.m. it was really hard and surprisingly, the person that was most preoccupied with my leaving was mama viviana, papa ovidio´s mother. she was the hardest person to talk to, and to understand what she was saying, but she and i got along really well. she would always come over and bring me oranges and watermelon and tamales. the night before i left, she came over and hung out with us and every couple of minutes kept asking ana about where i was going and if i was going alone and who was i going to live with. she was just totally preoccupied by it and when she went to leave, it´s like she didn´t want to. then the next a.m. she came over to make sure that i would stop at her house and get oranges for my trip. anna met me on the road and so we walked over to mama viviana´s house and she gave us each this big bag of oranges and we tried to tell her we only needed like 2 each, but she insisted. anyway, the whole leaving molineros thing was really hard – a lot harder than we all expected.

anyway, so the first thing some of us did when we got into san salvador was go see harry potter. we were happy because they were showing a subtitled version. the whole dubbing thing is just super ridiculous. and the movie was only $1.75??? the usual price for a movie is $3.50 here. not $8.00…..$3.50!!!! anyway, after that, we met the rest of the crew over at some bar near metrocentro and had an awesome time. there were some ag4/ee volunteers from 2004 there, as well as some other people from other groups. we all ended up super drunk and walked back to the estancia down crack alley – which we totally should not have done – but whatever. the estancia is kind of like the peace corps hostel, because other than the occasional backpackers, only peace corps volunteers stay there.

the next day was rough because we had to get a bunch of things done before going to the embassy in the afternoon. i was totally hungover, but we managed to pull ourselves together and cab it over to the embassy. there, we were searched 3 times before being allowed to enter. then we had to attend a security briefing (because some guy was supposed to give us the briefing in san vicente on wed….but he couldn´t get there). basically, we learned in the security briefing that as of the latest statistics, el salvador is now the most dangerous country in latin america. it has even surpassed colombia for crying out loud. this is because of the recent gang activity here which has resulted in an ungodly amount of random murders here. the guy was saying that unlike colombia, where it´s mostly terrorist related killing (from the guerrilla groups there), here it´s almost all related to gangs. the gangs are made up of young punk kids, lots of them are only like 8-14 years old, as well as deported guys from the states. these guys were born in the states, but because of the recent crackdown on illegal immigration in the u.s., and because they got into trouble in the states, they were deported and joined gangs here. the biggest gangs here are the mara salvatrucha and the ms-18. anyway, they have initiations like they have to kill someone their own age, or they have to kill two people, or rape someone or something stupid like that. the good thing is, i´m in a relatively safe area….and basically if you´re in the campo (the country) you´re probably safe. there are specific areas that are super dangerous…one of them being sonsonate, which is bad news, because i have to go through sonsonate to get to san salvador from apaneca. not only that, but i have to change buses at the sonsonate terminal, which is really, really sketchy. i did not feel comfortable the last time i was there. but whatever, i´ll just have to make sure i´m always there during the daytime.

so after this dude scared the bejesus out of us, we walked on over to the ambassador´s house and met up with our 2 family members that were able to attend. papa ovidio and ana were there, and it was like seeing my own family back in the states. i was so glad to see them. i asked them how things were going and they said mama viviana was still asking about me. anyway, then we all had to sit through a bunch of speeches and then take an oath where we swore to prtect the constitution of the united states, blah, blah, blah. then we had to walk in front of everyone and get this certificate and try not to fall down. when the formalities were overwith, we were served this amazing, amazing food, but it was kind of sad again because we ate with our families and we knew this was the last time we´d see them, at least until christmas. anna´s host mom was bawling, and everyone from molineros was hugging and saying goodbye. it really was one of the saddest times here. after our families left, we went and took some group pictures and then headed over to the hotel princess for some drinks. there was going to be a party later at this other bar and like every volunteer serving in the country was going to show up. the hotel princess was lame, because we ordered mojitos and they weren´t even full and they cost $4.00, which is a lot in el salvador. seriously, a $2.00 lunch is considered expensive. the party at the other bar was fun, but man was i dragging ass from the night before. we generally just acted ridiculous and drank shots of tequila the rest of the night.

surprisingly, the next day, i felt fine. we had to meet up with our counterparts at 8:30 back at the princess hotel and attend a meeting all morning about the work we´ll be doing and all that. after saying goodbye to everyone, we had to go on across the street to the peace corps office and get all our stuff, load it up in the truck our counterpart was supposed to bring with them, and leave san salvador. my counterpart – elba – brought mirna (one of the other teachers with her) and then some dude, who was driving the truck. on the trip to apaneca she was telling me how the guy driving was from the mayor´s office in apaneca and that the mayor was letting us use his truck. they kept calling him ¨el tigre¨ but i was confused. there was a sticker of a tiger on the front windshield but i still have no idea why he is referred to as the tiger???

so after they dropped me off in apaneca, what did i do??? sleep, sleep, sleep!!!

adios for now…