half empty or half full?

last year when i went home for vacation i was told that 2008 was gonna be a great year for me. ¨it´s the year of the rat¨ i was told, and because i was born in the year of the rat i was supposed to have nothing but good luck in good old 2008. well, let me re-cap some of the fabulous things that have happened to me so far:

- in january i was robbed at gunpoint and had my camera, my house keys, my cell phone and my very special red backpack stolen

- that same week, as i was relaxing on the beach in guatamala, thanking god i hadn´t been hurt in the robbery, a big wave came and took with it my mp3 player, my portable speakers and most horrifying of all, my full bottle of beer (this same wave also swept away courtney´s camera, the ONLY one of our three that hadn´t been stolen in the robbery). the mp3 player was fried, as was one of my speakers and courtney´s camera.

- i had a computer project all lined up at my school and at the last minute, i was told be the project organizer that oops, there aren´t enough computers anymore. this was AFTER we told the school directiva that we were getting these computers and they gave us authorization to buy them and everything. then the directiva told all the parents at the school that i was in charge of this project and yay for laura. i had to tell everyone that we´re not getting any computers after all.

- we planted some things in the garden at the school and yesterday it HAILED....yes, it friggin´ hailed here. let me remind you, i´m in central america, four countries (three of which are less than half the size of texas) away from the equator. and there was ice falling from the sky yesterday. so of course, all the stuff we planted is now all droopy and sad looking from being hit by pellets of ice.

- the other day i went to work on my computer and guess what....i can´t see anything. the computer turned on and it revved up, but the screen remained black. i´ve tried it since and it´s still black. much like this year has been.

and it´s only april!!! i want to say that the person that told me 2008 was gonna be great was totally full of it, but i know it´s probably just because i´m only looking at the bad stuff. like when the embassy gave our school some books (great), i had to go to the capital to get the books. well, i couldn´t carry them all on the bus, so maria laura and her husband offered to take me in their pickup (great). well, we got outside the embassy and luis´s truck totally died (bad, bad, bad) and we had to push it to this service station (bad and embarassing!). luis kept saying how ¨this had never happened before¨ and all i could think of in my mind was that it was somehow my fault because i was with them. ¨i´m having such a terrible year¨ i thought, ¨how could it NOT be my fault!¨

but in the heat of the moment, i feel like i get so upset. like instead of looking at the bad part of those above things, i guess i should alter my vision a little.

- ok, so i got robbed, but i didn´t get hurt, right? i got a new cell phone, and finally a new camera (thanks mom) and i bought another backpack. the backpack will never be able to live up to the previous one, but it´ll do....it serves it´s purpose. and it´s red.

- ok, my mp3 player and speakers got fried. who cares? are those really things that i´m gonna die if i don´t have? thank god i had only gotten myself a cheap mp3 player and not a $400 ipod like everyone else has. and one speaker still works! (my mom actually brought me another mp3 player when she came down.....which turned out to be really great news since my computer doesn´t work, i at least have SOME music to listen to that i had downloaded on the player before the computer crapped out. yes, i will probably be tired of the songs i have on there pretty soon, but it´s something.)

- yeah, that really sucks about the computer project, but the funny thing is, i seem to be the only one upset that it didn´t work out. in fact, the day i was gonna tell elba, i was nervous. i thought she´d be so pissed. she came up to me and was like ¨que ondas laura?¨ and i said ¨muy mala¨ (really bad) and she was like ¨what happened?¨ and i told her and she broke out in a smile and said ¨oh, is that all? i thought you were gonna tell me something bad.¨ and she went on to tell the directiva and parents at another meeting we had and nobody seemed to blink twice at the news.

- as far as the school garden goes, plants seem to bounce back from a lot of things here. we´ll see if our plants decide to stick it out.

- last but not least, my computer. this is a little more tricky because this really is a problem. yes, at least the computer still turns on and i can hear it running. and i think it can be fixed (crossing my fingers) fairly easily. problem is, i think it can be fixed fairly easily if i were in the united states. i have no idea where i would take it to get fixed here. i´ve already tried all the troubleshooting solutions given to me by apple.com and none of them have worked and i think i have a dead video card. i at least had backed up my photos last august so not too many photos will have been lost if my computer is screwed up. i hate computers. i mean, i love them, but i hate them. my computer is less than 3 years old. how in god´s name can it already be ruined. yes, this problem just sucks all around.

but one out of five isn´t that horrible, right? so why do i feel so bleak about it? it´s just that whole half empty/half full idea. it just depends on how you look at everything. it´s like my work down here can be a constant battle of how i look at things. i work with kids in the school and try and teach environmental education and i feel like i´m doing my part, you know? the kids get excited and participate in the projects and activities i do with them and i feel good about it. then i see one kid throw his trash on the ground and i suddenly feel defeated, like i´m not doing my part at all, like i´m an awful teacher and haven´t accomplished anything.

at least i can see the good parts at some point. i mean, i might immediately get all upset and frustrated, but after some time i do sit back and realize that ok, it´s not the end of the world. i think it takes someone really extraordinary to understand that right off the bat, to still remain chipper and smiling after having been dealt some bad news.

i look at some of the people in my community who are facing serious food problems right now. they can´t buy beans or rice, which before were considered ¨poor people´s food,¨ meaning just about everyone could get their hands on some beans or rice to go with their tortilla. food prices are just too high now. people are rioting in the markets. i read some article about people in haiti who have resorted to eating dirt mixed with sugar to sustain their hunger. another article i read said that in el salvador, ¨money buys 50 per cent less food than it did last year.¨ what in the hell am i thinking getting upset about my computer or hail? my life doesn´t depend on these things at all. yes, everyone has their own necessities, but what actually is a necessity anymore? i´d give a thumbs up to food and shelter and water. there are other people who´d go ahead and list their cell phone as a necessity. or their car. or maybe their television. the food crisis isn´t limited to poor countries like el salvador....i know it´s affecting everyone in the world right now. but here it´s very serious because people don´t have anything to sacrifice in order to spend more on food. they can´t say ¨well, i won´t spend as much on take out this month¨ or ¨i´ll cancel my gym membership.¨ they had nothing to begin with and now are in real danger.

but the people that are on the brink of what could actually be starvation and they don´t seem to react the same way i do. they deal with this day by day and as things come, talking about the problem, but never cursing the situation. i´m not saying they´re not scared or that they´re elated that this is happening or they´re content to just live with things the way they are. the difference is that they don´t seem to be walking around in a funk like how i get sometimes when things don´t go right. they are those extraordinary people i was talking about before.

extraordinary i am most definitely not. i´m more like a work in progress and i have the rest of the year of the rat to work on it.

happy earth day tomorrow!!

the much-awaited second visit

here are some pictures from my mom and dad´s visit a couple of weeks ago. they brought my aunt barb and i think everyone had a good time, aside from the fact that no matter how many hotels (five star to no star to backpacker hostels) ¨say¨ they have hot water, none of them actually do. or i guess i should say, what we consider hot water in the states, is NOT the same as what people think hot water is here. i still don´t have the pictures yet from the final couple of days of the trip....we went down to a nice hotel on the beach in salinitas, in the department of sonsonate. but as soon as i get them, i´ll post them. you´ll wish you were here after seeing them!

we had such a great time while my parents were here. they got to see the school for the first time, and we did an art project with the kids in 1st and 2nd grade, which the kids loved. they also got to eat some sweet jocotes, a semana santa tradition. we visited some of the people in my community, and seriously, the people here think my parents and aunt are gods! believe me, i´ve heard it all since they left: how my dad is so guapo, how my mom´s skin is so perfect, how my aunt´s so tall and elegant. they will forever be known to san jorge and apaneca not as mary, gary and my aunt barb, but as laura´s (la norteamericana´s) padres and tía.

i took them to the first festival of pupusas in apaneca, and i don´t think they were fans. i think mostly because of the ingredients: chipilin, beans, chicharron, etc. my dad said he had his own way he would make pupusas (i wonder if he´ll ever find himself in that position at all in his lifetime): cheese, bacon and onions. to each his or her own. we had a great laugh with every salvadoran we visited because i couldn´t help but tell them that for the first couple of days my aunt kept saying ¨estoy caliente!¨ which is a big no-no in latin america. if you say ¨estoy caliente¨ you´re basically saying that you´re horny. haha. i had to explain that you have to say ¨tengo calor¨ if you´re hot, like warm. everyone thought that was just soooo funny!

my family got to partake in some good old pollo campero at antonio´s house where we ate one night. pollo campero is THE hot spot for some good ol´ fried chicken here. any airplane trip leading from san salvador to the states has a cabin full of salvadorans carrying buckets of pollo campero to their family in the u.s. they simply think there´s NOTHING that compares to pollo campero. antonio´s family got some takeout and we feasted on that. let´s see, what else.... like i said, our last couple of days we went down to a big hotel resort on the beach. this place was like being in prison at first. they wouldn´t let you through the entrance unless you could show your registration and only if you had the number of people on your registration in your car. no more. you had to wear this bracelet (like what they give out at concerts for people who are old enough to drink) the whole time. everyone had to show their identification. but i realized much later, after my family had returned to the states, that the reason for this is simply safety. well, that and i´m sure they just want to shield all the tourists from the ¨real¨ el salvador, which has nothing to do with pools and luxury and all that. after seeing the tourist buses bringing people in and out, it´s obvious that they´re designed to keep people from having to see the real el salvador, the one of poverty and all that. also, the hotel probably wants to avoid getting ripped off. if you give salvadorans the opportunity to aprovechar, they´ll totally take it. each room has space for at least 5 people, and i´m sure if salvadorans knew they could pay for one and stuff 15 people in a room, they´d do it. everything was included, so that´s even more incentive for the hotel to have us basically on lockdown. drinks, food, everything included. so you pay one price (a totally reasonable price, given what´s included) and drink and eat as much you want the whole time. if you didn´t have a bracelet you could do just about nothing. but after sitting at the beautiful pool and on the beach watching the waves roll in and eating to my heart´s content, i forgot that we were tagged like sea turtles being experimented by national geographic and really enjoyed myself.

the drive back to the airport (the same route we took from the airport) was along the coastal highway and is one of the most beautiful drives i´ve seen....it´s sort of along the lines of the santa barbara to monterrey coastal route in california. big cliffs overlooking the beautiful pacific. there is hardly any traffic on this route, aside from the big trucks hauling sugar cane to be processed. they´ve added some lookouts as well, so we were able to stop and take some really good pictures.

oh, and my mom left me a nice little digital camera, so don´t fret! i´ll now be able to post pics again!

adios for now.

the view from the cabins my family stayed in (the hotel is literally across the street from my house....very convenient)

one of the flowers in the hotel gardens

i don´t know what the name of this flower is (anyone, anyone?), but i like to call it the schnauzer flower (seriously, doesn´t it look like one?)

again, from the cabin door



me and dad

one of the hotel´s restaurant windows

this is in the hotel courtyard

the front of the hotel

my dad cooking me scrambled eggs at my house!

my family with antonio´s family

the festival de pupusas













this lady´s great.....her name is josefina and she always wears the craziest clothes, and the pink shades add that special something.







the clouds rolling in, covering the mountains


the hotel restaurant


ok, here is my aunt barb and this little old lady who´s name is transito. i thought it was her nickname, but antonio told me it was her real name. she´s so little! we met up with her on my parents last visit, but sadly didn´t get a photo. so we did this time. she loved it!










my parents and aunt with the kids in 1st grade after we made flowers with old toilet paper rolls.

the first graders working on their flowers





me playing ¨pato, pato, ganzo¨ (duck, duck, goose) with the kids.



visiting kindergarten

with the second graders

my dad helping mariela make her flower



my dad in front of one of the cabins

eating lunch at el rosario

culture

so how much of your culture do you think is important to the rest of the world? when you go for a run through the park, or when you sit down at the dinner table with your family, do you think anybody else would see that as interesting? living here in el salvador, i don't think i've ever examined my daily activities more. the more i think about it, i definitely think i've gone through at least three stages of cultural examination since arriving in this country. why am i even interested in "cultural examination?" as some of you may know, i majored in history and social studies and minored in anthropology. (i should have majored in anthropology, but i thought that i wanted to teach social studies in the public school system, hence the history/social studies double major. by the time i realized i was probably not cut out to teach formally (in a school), it was a little late to change majors. so i settled for the anthro minor.) anyway, i took as many anthro classes as i could and immersed myself in cultural anthropology which is why i am fascinated with the study of culture and why things work the way they do and why they are the way they are.

but let's get back to el salvador. when i first got here, everything was new and i accepted nearly everything. i never really had time to think about the differences because i was so inundated with the salvadoran food, the language, the living arrangements, the customs and the people that i scarcely had time to really analyze anything. i just ate the pupusas and sopa de frijoles and tortillas, tried to learn the language, used the latrine, appreciated the mosquito net, kept in step with the funeral procession as it wound itself down the road for two miles, changed my sleeping habits by going to bed at 8:00 at night along with the rest of the cantón and grew to love my host family so much that i cried when i had to leave them. this learning experience carried over when i moved to my new home in apaneca and had to learn some things all over again. salvadorans in molineros are different from salvadorans in apaneca....the molineros salvadorans are warmer, they're more accepting, they use the word "charamusca." the apanaquenses are more reserved, they like you, but it takes a lot of time to get them to admit it, they call charamuscas "topolligos," they make their tortillas small and thick, they're poorer, they wear winter hats and scarves.

but then i moved into the second stage of examining this culture and that was of taking on their cultural norms. i started using the word "púchica" all the time, i made sopa de gallina almost every weekend, i got up at 5:00 a.m. just to get a bag of fresh pan frances before the panaderia ran out of bread at 6:30 a.m., i knew the words to most reggaeton songs, i looked forward to dancing to cumbia, i quit calling kids "niños" and started calling them "bichos," i took on salvadoran phrases like "muchos días no vela" and "primero díos" and "gracias a díos" and any other phrase including "díos," i stopped buying all my groceries at the supermarket and started buying them on a daily basis from the tienda down the street from my house ("give me two eggs, one onion, two tomatoes, etc."). i, in a sense, became a salvadoran.

now here i am in the present, and my third (not sure if it's the final) stage of cultural examination. i like to think of this stage as cultural appreciation; appreciation for my own culture. believe me, when i left the united states in 2005, i wasn't a big fan of my home country for a number of reasons: the war, politics, stereotypes. but now, i feel like all i do now is see the differences between my american culture and the salvadoran one. i see the good things about the united states. in any situation that presents itself to me, i think about how it differs from the way we carry things out in the united states: the education system, the way they do things at the post office, prenatal care for expectant mothers, what to expect at hotels and stores, etc. it's like no matter how "salvadoran" i become, i have still managed to hang on to my own cultural norms, those that i grew up with. even though i don't see situations that occur here as abnormal, i still examine them and think how different they are from the united states. when i really sit down and examine this way of thinking, i realize why it's difficult to be in peace corps. you essentially become accustomed to TWO cultures and separating them and acting accordingly can be very tiring. sometimes i have to remember that i'm not IN the united states, i can't expect salvadorans to understand my "ways" and those things that are second nature to me in MY culture.

what are cultural norms for us, or for me? there are quite a few, but i'll just highlight one of them that has been at the front of my mind for a while. as i've stated before, reading for pleasure here is not really a common activity. in fact, i’d bet that the only book most people read (at least outside of san salvador) is the bible. the teachers in my school think i’m weird because i bring a book to the school and after lunch i’ll read instead of watching the telenovela that they watch. they simply don’t understand why i would want to read a book just for the hell of it. when people see me reading, they almost always say “oh, you're studying?” i try and explain that i’m reading a book because i like reading – and i realize that it’s just totally unexplainable to people here. i love discussing the subject of the books i've read with other people, and sometimes i'd explain a story to some salvadoran and their eyes would just kind of glass over and that'd end that part of the conversation. (there is one person that does understand the whole "reading" thing and that person is antonio's sister, gloria. she loves reading books, and i've even given her a few books, like "grapes of wrath" and "the kite runner" in spanish. i suppose i was trying to meet my own needs by giving her books i've already read, just so i'd have somebody to talk books with! she's a language teacher, so it seems that it wouldn't be so strange that she's into reading, but actually it is, for el salvador.)

what's even more difficult, and amusing in some ways, is to try and explain books like harry potter, a story that might seem impossible to actually happen. i never give up on trying to explain the books i'm reading, but for the most part i get more positive feedback when i'm reading books like "kon-tiki" or "compañero" or "mountains beyond mountains" - stories that are non-fiction. i can at least explain that these are things that really happened, not a story that involves wizards and quidditch. but the point of this is to show you how in my world, reading and discussing books is something i never even thought twice about. i never saw it as something worth commenting on. while not everyone in the united states likes to read books, it is an accepted activity nonetheless. if you're somebody who doesn't particularly like to read, but you see somebody else reading a book, it's not weird.

this idea of cultural differences became a million times clearer to me when i was visiting antonio's mom the other day. we chatted for a while and then she went to make us coffee and told me to turn on the television and watch what i wanted to. i found a channel that was showing a spanish documentary about the yanomami (native south american indians who i actually had studied in one of my anthro classes). i left the channel where it was and when his mom brought in the coffee, she saw what i was watching and was like "oh, look at them! their face paint is so ugly! and look at their ears!" (the yanomami wear wood sticks through their ears and through the skin on their face.) antonio and his dad came home a little bit later and they both sat down and all three of them were absolutely entranced with this documentary. they showed the yanomami cultivating yucca and using their arrows. the documentary went on to show the yanomami fishing with these hollow bamboo poles that had these sharpened points at the end. they construct a barrier in the river and then when the fish get trapped behind the barrier, the yanomami attack the fish with the bamboo poles, sending the fish up the hollow part of the pole. then they deposit the fish they caught in baskets. i sat there watching antonio and his mom and dad as they expressed, quite animatedly, "bien creativo!" (that's so creative!) but it wasn't just a casual, "oh, hey look, that's kind of cool." it was like they couldn't believe what they were seeing. they were completely engrossed in the documentary and i was just laughing to myself because it was like antonio´s family was having its own personal anthropology class that day. it was really the first time i had ever seen salvadorans commenting or analyzing another culture other than my own.

what i realized is that we, as human beings, always compare other cultures to our own. what's even more interesting is that we don't normally see anything interesting or weird about our own cultural norms. i don't see anything interesting or weird about reading. salvadorans think everyone in the world likes beans and queso fresco. there in the southern tip of the venezuelan amazon the documentary crew had cameras and microphones and people with notepads taking down every single thing the yanomami were doing. the yanomami probably thought "why is us squatting on the ground cooking yucca of ANY interest to you?" when you're surrounded by a hundred or a thousand or a million people doing the exact same thing you are, you don't see what's so strange about it. i spent all this time studying OTHER cultures in my anthropology classes, yet i never for one minute considered MY culture as anything interesting. when i get a phone call at the school from someone american, the kids are mesmerized at hearing me speak english. i never got why. when i went home for christmas and visited my mom´s first grade classroom, the kids so wanted me to speak spanish. not like ¨hola¨ or ¨adios,¨ but like a full paragraph....it didn´t matter what i said, they just wanted me to say it in spanish. NOW i get it. english, to salvadorans, is as interesting as some click language in africa is to us english-speaking folks. to those kids in first grade, spanish is this wonderful, different language that i have the privilege of knowing how to speak. i get why people like to stare at me here. i´m friggin´ interesting to them!!! all of our cultures are interesting, even our own, even if we don´t see them as such.

so should i just let go of my cultural norms because i'm living in another country, another culture? i don't think it's possible. it’s very hard to let go of those things that are a part of who i am. using my previous example of reading, at one point, i did attempt to avoid trying to explain that simple cultural norm that i never really thought twice about. i didn't stop reading, but as far as discussing the books i was reading or how much i loved the stories, i tried to give that up, because it seemed as if people could have cared less. they only wanted to know how i lived from california or new york. they wanted to know if i had a car. they wanted to know if i had kids or a husband. they wanted to know how much my camera cost me. they wanted to tell me how windy it was that day.

but how important are cultural norms? is it really that necessary to have people understand my reading of books, along with all the other thousands of things that i'm used to? do i really need to be able to visit the drugstore at 2:00 in the morning if i need to? how about a washing machine? do i need that? what about "alone time?" do i need that? what about my need for choice? i like having choices, being able to make my own decisions....not just accepting the only thing that's available. i like NOT having to wait around for a bus. i do like investing in the future...i don't mean not living my life because i'm so worried about the future, but i mean in terms of things like education and the environment. what about the christmas holidays? do i need dean martin to sing me christmas carols, egg nog, a big old pine tree decorated with ornaments from my childhood, stockings hanging from the fireplace, miracle on 34th street? do i really NEED all these things? isn’t it better to be a part of a world, like the slow, salvadoran one, where people are kind and take the time to talk to you, even if they’re nosy, or even if they don’t really care about the whole “who i am” thing? isn’t it better to live in a world where i’m not distracted by all these other things that used to make up my down time in the states so that i can focus on actually living my life? i can’t imagine giving up reading or listening to my favorite music, but all that other stuff...getting cups of coffee at 9:00 p.m., going to the movies when i want, using a washing machine – do i really need those things? my answer to that is in some ways, yes. why? because those things are part of MY culture. take the holidays for example, while all the christmas shopping and insane rush of people packing the local shopping center is not something i necessarily miss down here, the way we celebrate christmas and thanksgiving and the fourth of july with the mess of wrapping paper and overstuffing ourselves with ham and turkey and pumpkin pie and outdoor barbecues and cold beers...i miss that stuff.

i was reading paul theroux's novel "hotel honolulu" and the protagonist in the book is an author who's well-known, but chucks his life in london to escape it all and moves to hawaii, becoming a manager of a blast from the past hotel. he ends up marrying a hawaiian woman and has a kid. throughout the book, the guy feels lonesome, an outcast even, because he is this author who knows a thing or two about the world, yet is amongst all these hawaiians who have their own culture, own traditions, and seem to be quite at home when together gossiping or talking about things only those in their culture understand. they could care less about the things that HE knows about. they don't want to hear him talk about the books he's reading, or the history he knows or his analytical ways of assessing people. they really have no interest in where he came from or who he is. they simply care about how he interacts with THEM. finally he confronts his wife about it and she mentions something about how he's always got his nose in a book, why doesn't he live a little, get a life, etc., etc. like because he enjoys reading, for whatever purpose - learning something new, entertainment, research - he's making himself the outcast. i totally disagree, though. i feel like it's his culture, where he came from. and by abandoning that, he'd feel even more like an outcast....like he's trading one culture for the other. if you live in a culture that's different from what you know, what you grew up with, do you have to give up all that past culture to be accepted or feel comfortable in the new one? i don't think it's ever possible to abandon cultural norms that you had for the majority of your life. however, i do think it's possible to have the best of both worlds....to not abandon those things you love about your own culture, while accepting another culture.

i've come to appreciate the united states a lot more after living here...for a bunch of reasons that i won't go into because this entry is already too long. i'm not talking appreciation in terms of putting american flags on every square inch of my lawn or having a "proud to be an american" bumper sticker on my car or making comments about hating the french or stuff like that. there are things to hate that are extremely american - like excess and arrogance and things like that - but the small things, just everyday stuff that i never thought about before because i'd never lived in a culture that didn't have that everyday stuff. those little everyday things are what i see as our american culture. and i while i do miss that american culture, i'm already thinking about the things i'm going to miss about my adopted salvadoran one.