I finally made it to my site in Ahuachapan! I think I am probably the envy of my group since I live in tropical paradise :). But in all seriousness: I am in a little farming community right near a little pueblo and about an hour to 45 min from the nearest Super Selectos. I live with a little abuelita, her husband, their son and their son's wife. And there's also the wife's mother who lives with us as well. They are the sweetest abuelo and abuela I could have asked for. I get along really well with the son and daughter as they are younger, about 30, and I have already played Battleship, Cribbage and UNO with them. They are helping me learn a lot of caliche and get the "lay of the land" in the community. My community is also super organized which makes everything a lot easier, especially since I showed up with a cast on my leg (which I JUST got off yesterday and it feels amazing! But more about that later). As such I have spent a lot of time observing, people watching and animal watching. This is how I found out that chickens are actually really adept tree climbers!
So while I have been trying to hobble to the nearest houses, the community has really rallied together and set up numerous reuniones so that I would be able to meet people in the community and visa versa. Already I have met leaders of the community, all the teachers and children in the school (the school director brought the entire school to my house :) ) and I have gone to misa and culto (culto is evangelical mass and if you've never been to one, I will take you. Its an experience).
The campo language was a little hard to get around at first but now I have become a little more fluent. Simply put: it is stating the obvious and affirming it. For example: I was washing my clothes yesterday next to my abuelita when she turned to me and said: "You are washing your clothes!" to which the only response could be, "yes, yes I am". It is hilarious and frustrating at times but I have come to love it and now I can say "ya estuvo" which means it is "done" and when asked how's its going, I now respond in the tradicional "por aqui" which loosely translates to "about, around, by here." I love my community and my host family and have already been involved in several cultural activities, one of which was killing a chicken yesterday. I felt that since I eat chicken almost every day and it comes fresh from my front yard/patio/whereever the chickens feel like grazing, that I should tke a moment to experience the whole process of how my food is made. So I watched my host sister select the fattest chicken, tie it upside down to a tree and slit its throat. Sorry if this is too graphic but that is how its done in El Sal which I think frankly is more humane than in the states. The only thing I would say is that it took THIS particular chicken a llooonnng time to die. But without going into details of it flopping around on the ground because we thought it was dead and thus cut it down from the tree, I watched a chicken killing. Then I helped to clean all the feathers off and cut it up into bits for soup. It was delicious.
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