Dia en la Vida, Ode to a Pila

So I realized the other day that I haven´t written a whole lot about what life is actually like here in El Salvador, or at least what my daily routines are. So here we go:
I wake up about 6:30 to 7am every day to the sound of those horrible roosters crowing, a Peace Corps volunteer´s worst nightmare. There are some volunteers who were vegetarians when they came to El Salvador but they are leaving the country as proud chicken eaters for this and many other reasons. Chickens here are not like they are in the states at the tiny family farms and petting zoos. They are dirty, loud creatures that like to eat, poo and make a lot of noise. The only thing I remotely like about them is the fact that they have to sleep in high places at night and thus climb our one pine tree in my front yard…But I digress…
After waking up I feed my 3 cats which if I didn’t feed them they would probably still be living off tortillas like most domesticated animals here do although I am not quite sure how. They wait outside my door every morning and start to meow when they hear me undoing the locks to open the door. Then my host grandma/mom (she´s old and a grandmotherly figure so I really just saw she´s my grandma) asks me if I want her to heat me up a tortilla, which is Salvi code for do you want to have breakfast, because it is a literal sin to eat a meal without a tortilla. Even spaghetti has to be eaten with a tortilla. When I say yes, she brings out my holey (because she uses a twig to heat it over our wood fire), old, burnt tortilla (which I actually do like because it´s crispy) and my corn coffee. Yes, corn coffee. Even though I am surrounded by coffee plantations I drink ¨coffee¨ made from ground up toasted corn. Saying it´s coffee is like says tobacco leaves soaked in hot water is black tea. But it´s ok.
Then if it isn’t freezing and I have no immediate work to do I go and shower. Now showers here are not like the fancy shmanzy showers people have in the states or in Europe; I get to shower using a large sink and a bucket (thus the term used frequently in Peace Corps ¨bucket bath or shower¨). I dip my bucket into the large sink known here as a pila and then dump that water on my head. You fill the pila up with a faucet that sticks out over it and you have to twist the knob just right so it doesn’t squirt all over the place and get you, your towel and shower tote sopping wet. As risqué as this may sound, I and many volunteers actually prefer the bucket bath because when it is really cold here and raining as it is from about June to November, it´s nice to be able to take a breather between ice cold dumpings of water on your body. A regular shower would probably shock your body and give you brain freeze. I do have to admit though, on hot days there is nothing like a good, cold bucket bath to make you feel sane again.
I would like to take this time to give a sort of ode to the pila if you will bear with me for a moment. The pila here is probably the best invention since Coca cola and electricity (yes, in that order). The pila can come in many shapes and sizes from being a huge water tank that a whole community uses to a small sink-like thing that I use for my bucket showers. I have a pila for showering and then a different pila which is bigger for washing clothes and dishes. The bigger pila is like having a large, cement tub with really high sides and which is in between two slabs of concrete where you can scrub things by hand like clothes, sheets and god forbid, sleeping bags. That’s right, I wash all my clothes by hand and I´m proud of it. It´s actually kind of relaxing and I kind of look forward to having a nice load of dirty clothes to scrub and then throw on an old electrical wire to dry in the sun. I think that when I do move back to the states I will have a pila made for me for my house because I really can´t imagine living without one. And they´re super ecofriendly! It´s like a clothes washer and a dishwasher all in one and uses zero electricity and it´s meditative. I really don’t know why more people don’t have them.
After bathing or washing my clothes or sweeping and mopping my room (yes mom, I know you´re shocked) if school is in session, I usually make the five minute walk to school which usually takes me twice as long because I have to stop and say hi to everyone on the way. This is another thing I love about El Salvador, everyone loves to greet one another and it´s actually kind of rude if you pass someone without saying hello here. At the school I so far have just observed the teachers and done little ice breakers with the kids to get to know them better. Soon I will hopefully be teaching English and computer classes, and doing some art and environmental projects. I can´t wait for school to start in January because right now I don’t have that much to do. During vacation I usually just do house visits which are exactly like they sound: I go up to people´s front doors and they let me into their home and then we talk for at least 20 min about the weather, the harvest, their family, my family, religion, and the fact that I am not married yet and why is that? Then we go on to talk about the future: me with the work I´ll be doing in the schools and they telling me that I am going to marry an El Salvadorean and stay here forever. Then they give me free food (awesome) and I go on to the next house and the whole process is repeated. I seriously am not joking when I say I LOVE house visits. They´re like a confidence booster wrapped up with love in the form of food.
In the afternoon I have ¨gringa¨ time which can be nap time, reading or resting in the hammock, but either way its time just for me. Then I chill with my host family until dinner and then we (all 6 of us) watch our two favorite telenovelas (Llena de Amor and Soy tu Dueña) until it´s time for bed around 9pm. And that’s one day in a nutshell until I wake up to do it all over again!

The Beauty of a Hot Bath

So PST2 (training session part 2 of Peace Corps) ended last week and it was a stress filled (in a good way) week. We learned a lot of technical things to bring back to our sites but I also felt really overwhelmed and maybe my Spanish has regressed a little. It definitely gave me a new spring of energy and confidence about some projects in my community. It was also great to go back to my site afterwards and be really happy to be back. I am starting to feel like my community is more and more like my home. I actually missed my host family and the sounds of the campo. I even missed the stating the obvious conversations that we have in the campo every day.
And a week later, here I am, back in the capital for the celebration of Thanksgiving. A lot of the volunteers (myself included of course) are staying with embassy families for the holiday and so far we have been having a great time. I am staying with my friends Anna and David with a great family. The wife is actual a RPCV ((Returned Peace Corps Vol) from Africa and we have been having a great time talking and exchanging stories. They made us a fabulous lunch of spinach salad and we just had lasagna for dinner with warm apple pie and vanilla hagendas ice cream! I definitely ate way too much but it was so worth it. They even have a dog that the wife brought back with her from Africa. That makes me think that I should definitely adopt that puppy that my neighbor is saving for me!
The best part of the night, so far at least, has been the bathtub. They have a jacuzzi tub in their embassy house and I soaked away about two months of dirt and grim and it was AMAZING!! Thats one of the things I have missed the most about the states: soaking in a hot bath while reading a book. Tomorrow we will be hanging out at the embassy, swimming, and then joining some other embassy families for a good ol fashioned American Thanksgiving dinner! SO excited!

Back in Black

Hey everyone! So sorry to have kind of fallen off the face of the earth but I have been kind of busy. My new site is awesome. I am really enjoying living in the campo in the mountains with my host family, chickens, dogs, cats, and a horse. I have already had tons of fun at the school and have just arrived in the capital, San Salvador, to hang out with some friends before starting training (second round). But before I go into that, what have I been up to that has made me so busy? Well...

I have had a lot of meetings to get started on a couple of projects in the community. Who knows if any of them will actually work out but what we are hoping to do is: 1) build three more classrooms for my school so that kids can go to school up to 9th grade and 2) buy land for a cancha (soccer field).

The first project is really needed in the community because as of right now the kid in my community can only afford to go to school up to 6th grade. The nearest school is about 5 min bus ride away or a half an hour walk. The problem with taking the bus is that the kids have to pay about 70 cents a day for a round trip. This might not seem like a lot to people in the states but when youre family only makes about $100 a month, its a huge expense, especially if the parents are sending more than one kid to school (the average family here is about 3 to 4 kids!). Also, the nearby schools dont have enough room to accept the kids from my community so a lot of kids, especially girls, are made to stay home after 6th grade, do household work and then get pregnant and start families without any higher education opportunities.

The second project is equally important. A cancha is the central meeting spot and play center for any community here. It is where all recreational activities happen from festivals to soccer games. My kids right now play on the highway which is extremely dangerous but they have no other option. The only problem is that land is very expensive and soccer fields are big! I am currently working with community members on project planning skills and how to write grants so hopefully we will have some success with this project as well. It would be an incredibly great resource for the community, especially since El Salvador has one of the highest crime rates in Central America and I want to keep my kids from joining gangs.

Other than getting our foot in the door with projects I have been going to festivals including day of the dead celebrations which were awesome. Its like a huge party where people decorate the gravesites of loved ones and get together with their living members of the family. I wish we had something like that in the states. I also participated in a youth festival in my pueblo, a cancer awareness walk, and went swimming in the river! So far I love love love my site and living in the campo in El Salvador.

Did you know that chickens can climb trees?

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.

Juramentacion!

Today I officially get sworn in as a Peace Corps Volunteer! I am really excited to finally be considered a real volunteer and not simply an aspirante. The swearing in ceremony is an official event where members from the embassy come and make us swear our loyalty to Peace Corps and the US of A. Then we get to have a fun party with our host families with a dinner including various comidas tipicas, etc. After the family dinner all the newly sworn in volunteers get to hang out at the Peace Corps office and then later at the hotel. Then, bright and early we get to get on a bus and head out to San Salvador to meet our guias communitarias or community guides who will help us negotiate and meet people in the community where we will be living for two years! My community guides are the school Director and my host dad :). I will really miss all my good friends in Peace Corps: Anna, Katherine, Esther, Jamie, Amy, David, and Jeff.

Peace Corps Haiku

By Sarah Sterling, Nicole Wooten and Katherine Plotnick

Sharing cultures; good.
Peace Corps homework, not so good.
Rice and beans and cheese.

Entonces, va pues.
Waking up to rooster calls.
Telenovelas.

Oh dios mio!
Gang members are on my bus!
Chichontepec, wow!

Playing with children,
Teaching English at my school,
and making shampoo.

Bring it back with me
These lessons learned in Peace Corps
Already miss it.

My Site

Yesterday I was assigned to be a Youth Development volunteer in the municipio de Ahuachapan which is in the Southwest region of El Salvador. It is one of the centers of artesenia in the country as well as the home of the Parque Nacional El Imposible. I am about 1.5 hours from the beach where I went for my free weekend. I will be in a small community living with a small host family and helping out in the local school. My site is a town of about 600 people and the school is grades Kinder to 6th with 150 students and 3 teachers. I am super excited and can't wait to get started! I will write more when I get there but so far this is what I know: in nearby Guaymango and Ataco there are ecological parks, a french restaurante where I can buy whole wheat bread and basil as well as a place that sells goat cheese!!!! Thus, I am psyched to be going to one of the most beautiful municipios in the country to work, play and live!