The Life Abroad

This map nearly killed me....

2010-07-12T16:49:00.000-07:00

Yes, I know it's been forever since I've written on my blog. I've been busy these last couple of months with a few big projects: painting a world map, making organic fertilizer for 14 home gardens, and building these casitas, which are coverings over the new wells in our community. I feel pretty good about these projects, they're nice and visibile. But, they really took a tole on me physically, the world map project especially. It took a lot longer than I expected because we had to repellar the wall, which means put a layer of cement on it to cover up the irregularities on the wall. Making the organic fertilizer for the gardens was not walk in the park either, it had to be turned over twice a day for 2 weeks, meaning I got up at 6am and turned it over with a shovel, which took about 30 minutes if I had other people helping me. Then, I had to do it again at 6pm. But, overall, it was a good experience and we all learned a lot in the process.

Here are some of the pics from the last few months.

This is me sanding away at the wall to prepare it for the paint.

Mixing the cement...

This is the part that drove me nuts

Almost done.....

And...done!

Making the organic fertilizer

Constructing the rancho...

And...finished!

August Update

2009-08-10T08:46:00.000-07:00

Haven`t had the chance to sit down and write a blog entry for a while, I`ve been busy with work as normal. A few weeks ago, my English classes organized a soccer tournament to raise money for a trip and to buy (photocopies) of textbooks to continue studying. It was a huge success. We organized everyone into work groups, each group sold something different, like snow cones, pupusas, watermelon, fresco, etc. We invited over 30 teams from the entire municipality, and 14 showed up, so a pretty good turn out. I thought we`d make about $150, but we ended up making slightly over $300! Everyone was pretty happy about that. So last Tuesday, we all went to a nearby waterpark. And we still have almost half of that money left to buy more English materials for the class.

A few weeks back I went to Guatemala for 3 days, my first real vacation in almost a year. It was great to spend a few days away from my community, just to take a breather. We went to Antigua, Guatemala, a beautiful colonial town not too far from the capital. The highlight of the trip was climbing up a volcano and seeing this crazy river of lava. There was literally a river of lava pouring out of the top of this volcano, it was one of the coolest things I`ve ever seen with my own eyes. The lava was so hot that it was difficult to take pictures because hot fiery wind kept blowing on my face. I attached some pics below.

It continues to be extremely hot here, I literally sweat all day long, even when I`m sitting in my hammock, it`s ridiculous. That`s probably why I`ve lost so much weight, I`m walking up and down my commuity all day long sweating a ton. I`m excited about the upcoming weeks and months, I`m organizing a sewing workshop for 20 youth in the community, the idea being that I`ll help them form small businesses so they can sell their products in the departmental capital. I`m planning on starting a reading program in the school so we can finally start using the small library we have. And the biggest thing that I´m planning with the local community organization, called the ADESCO, it a large infrastructure project. We`re thinking about building a cement bridge over one of the rivers. So if we actually get that going, this bridge project will surely become my main project. But, I`m super excited about that because it`s such a big necessity in the community.

Here are some pics from the past few months:

Action shot from the soccer tournament.

Another pic of me on the volcano.

Me and my 2 counterparts at a hotel on the beach. Peace Corps put on a training workshop in project management and design so I invited my 2 counterparts. It was a good bonding experience.

This is me and my nephew eating watermelons.

This is me scaling a climbing wall. The record was 25 seconds to the top, but unfortunately, I missed the record by 1 second.

This is me roasting a marshmellow over the river of lava. Hot fiery wind is blowing on my face, it was so freakin hot, holy shit, but it was worth it.

Another pic of the lava.

Singing in the rain

2009-06-02T15:35:00.001-07:00

It´s been a long time since I´ve written, the last couple months have been packed with stuff. There was a two-week period when I taught in the Sala de Nivelacion, all day Monday through Friday, (a levelling classroom where kids come to recieve extra help in math and language) for my friend Jose who got this great opportunity to go to England. When we found out that he was selected to go, I offered to teach his classes for him to give him the chance to go. Because the teacher in the Sala de Nivelacion is contracted by the government, I had to go to an interview in the capital and take a psychological test to get approval. Let me just say that this psychological test was the most ridiculous, meaningless ¨test¨I have ever seen. It was a series of 50 questions, each question listing 4 adjectives. I had to select the two adjectives that best described me. Here was a typical question:

Tenacious
Modest
God-fearing
Assertive

What!?!?

I thought to myself: If I was a Salvadoran supervisor, what answer would I like to see from this gringo? I must have passed the test because they let me teach for those two weeks.

Most of the time, I loved the kids in the class. We played lots of math and language games, which were tons of fun. I found myself teaching Spanish grammar, like when to accent certain words, which was great for me, because I learned a lot along with the kids. One of the best things I did was read to them. There are a number of large children books in the classroom that never get used, so I decided to read them a story every day. They absolutely loved it. Whenever I read a story, all the kids gathered around sitting on the floor completely absorbed in the story, listening intently to ever word I said. After I finished one story, they all asked me to read another. Pretty cool stuff. This got me thinking that it´d be great to start a reading program in the school. We have this library that never gets used full of adolescent literature. So, that´s one of my project ideas, to get a reading program going.

The rainy season has offically started. It just so happened that the first day it rained really hard, I was walking home from the turnoff to my community. It´s about a 25 minute walk from the turnoff to my house, and I got completely soaked all the way down to my socks and underwear. I walked past the school, which was still in session, and all the kids laughed at me that I got caught in the rain. I´m not looking forward to the rainy season. I have to cross three rivers to get to my house, and apparently, all three of them rise so high when it rains that it makes it nearly impossible to cross. There are two bridges on the first two rivers, and apparently sometimes the rivers reach above the bridges, so if you want to cross, you have to wait until the river recedes. There´s no bridge over the first river, so most people have to wait until the rain dies down, then take off your shoes and socks, hike up your pants, and wade across the river to the other side, carrying your shoes in your hand. Fun. Although I´m not looking forward to the rainy season, I´m sure it´ll be just another aspect of life I´ll get used to eventually.

The rain has brought in tons of creatures into my room. I´ve seen at least 2 scorpions in the last 2 months, a few rats, tons of large flying bugs that sound like mini-helicopters they´re so loud. And for some reason, the chickens that live in my front yard love to fly through the space in between the wall and the roof and lay eggs in my bed. The egg-laying has become such a common event that my host dad regularly asks me if I´ve found any eggs in my room.

So I so the Star Trek movie in the capital a few weeks back. It was the second movie I´ve seen here in El Salvador (the first was the newest James Bond movie which I saw on my friend´s laptop) and the first movie I´ve seen in a theater. It was pretty cool, but somehow ¨engage¨ just didn´t sound the same in Spanish. I´ll have to see it again in English at some point.

In terms of projects, I´ve started a life-planning course for the students in 9th grade. I got 3 other people to do it with me: the local health promoter, a local government worker, and an NGO worker. So far we´ve had two sessions which have gone pretty well. In the course, we´re going to talk about setting goals, planning for the future, gender stereotypes, communication skills, sexuality and HIV/AIDS, and other stuff related to reproductive health. I was really paranoid about teaching the stuff about sexuality, but my 3 other counterparts thought that it would be a good idea and something that is really necessary. So we had a meeting with all the parents of the kids to get their approval, and to my surprise, they all agreed that the reproductive health stuff was a good idea. I´m really excited about the class, especially the sexuality stuff. Nearly all girls over the age of 21 have babies. I can probably count on one hand the girls that don´t. So, I feel that this is something that is really worthwhile and important. Chivo.

Another thing I´m working on is getting 20 young people to participate in a vocational workshop. I found out that a local organization sponsored by the government and a few private institutions, gives free vocational workshops to poor kids. One requirement is that the kids be between 16 and 20 years old and be able to attend the workshop for 2 months, all day Monday through Frida. So, I´m trying to motivate the youth and get this workshop going. It´s a lot of legwork: contacting the institution about my progress, making invitations and handing them out to all the interested youth, getting my counterparts in the community involved, etc. etc. But I hope it all works out, it´ll be such a great opportunity. The workshops include: carpentry, a residential electricity workshop, sewing, cosmetology, brick-laying, and others.

Other projects are going well, especially my English classes. I´ve been teaching a basic English class for the last 4 months every Saturday, so finally I´ve decided to give the final exam next month. The class wants to have a party afterwards at a local waterpark as a celebration for passing the final exam. So we´re trying to raise money in order to go. We should have about 40 kids total, which will require about $150, more or less. I figure that if my 40 students help fundraise we can get the money in a month or two, we´ll see.

Ok, that´s it for now. In the next month, I´m looking forward to giving a workshop to the new Peace Corps volunteers about teaching English, going to Santa Ana to visit one of my good friends - Emily, and a 3-day Peace Corps-sponsored workshop for PCV´s and their counterparts at the beach. Should be fun.

Oh, the title of the post refers to the fact that when it rains, I basically can´t leave my house, so all I can do is sit in my room and play guitar.

Elections, trash, and mangos...lots and lots of mangos

2009-03-20T16:13:00.000-07:00

It´s been over a month since I´ve written, so be warned, this blog entry is a long one. On March 15, El Salvador had its presidential elections. The governing party, Arena (rightist) was beat by the FMLN, also called the Frente, (leftists), after being in power since the civil war ended. Most of the young people in my community are hard core leftists, so after it was announced that the Frente´s candidate Mauricio Funes won, they all piled into trucks and shouted, set off fireworks, and chanted campaign slogans. Aside from that small celebration, the day after was surprisingly tranquilo. It was rather anticlimactic, it was kind of like: ok, now what? Apparently in the cities there was a lot more celebration. A friend of mine who works for Stove Team International said he was in Sonsonate for the elections where there was a mile long backup of trucks with people shouting and screaming for the Frente. And that was just in Sonsonate, the department capital. I imagine in San Salvador there were massive celebrations. But in my small little rural community, not much happened. It was very cool nonetheless to be here during the elections, to see the TV coverage, hear Funes give his victory speech, and to see the excitement of the young people in my community. The significance of the Frente winning is hard to overstate. Everyone under age 25 or so only knows one political party: Arena. They won the last 4 presidential elections, so this election represents a monumental change in Salvadoran politics.

We´ve now officially entered mango season. There are tons of huge mango trees all over my community. The kids climb the trees and knock down as many as they can. To me, mangos are like manna from heaven. I rarely eat fruit so having a seemingly endless supply of mangos is a godsend. There´s also another fruit in abundance called jocote. I´m not sure how it´s translated into English, but it´s a small fruit a little bit larger than a marble and tastes kind of like a plum but tougher. Jocotes are great too. The only downside is that mangos leave strands of mango pulp in your teeth which is pretty gross, but what can you do?

One of my projects that I started last month is a trash collection program. There´s a large garbage dump literally across the road from my community, but there is no trash collection. So, I got the president of the community association, the health promoter, a local NGO, a teacher, and a few others together to go to the garbage dump to petition for a trash collection. We asked for a weekly pickup, which I thought was asking a bit much, but, the owner of the dump agreed. So now every Friday at 11am a truck comes by to collect our trash. It turns out that having a trash collection is more complicated than it seems. First of all, the collection only involves a driver and a truck; there is nobody from the garbage dump to actually pick up the trash and toss it into the truck, which means as a community, we have to do it ourselves. This begs the question: who is going to volunteer to toss all of the community`s trash into the truck every week? And where will the community put their trash? So, I asked a local NGO to donate 4 trash barrells, which we then put in front of the 4 little stores we have in our community. I also asked each store owner to please deposit all trash in bags so it´s easier to toss the trash into the truck. So who actually throws the trash into the truck? Not surprisingly, that burden has fallen on me and whoever else I can organize to help me. I actually really like tossing the trash into the truck, and those who know me well probably can understand why. Just picture it: me hopping on and off the side of a the dump truck, tossing bags of trash 5 feet into the air and over the edge of the truck, and then hopping back on again, waving to the people as I pass by. It´s pretty fun. On the first Friday, on more than one occasion, I tried to toss a huge plastic bag of glass bottles over the edge of the truck only to have it fall back down and shatter all over the ground. This generated uproarious laughter amongst the many onlookers. A few other people who tried to toss bags into the truck had the same thing happen, and every time, everyone laughed hysterically. So, not only is trash collecting helping clean up the community, it`s a source of entertainment. In the future, what we´ll probably do is have each individual person and store owner throw their own trash into the truck as it passes, eliminating the need for a group of guys every week to throw all the trash away. But, for now, I`m enjoying it. Hopefully this will be a sustainable project that continues after I`m gone. We´ll see.....

One more note about trash. On the road where the garbage dump is located, all the trees surrounding the dump are covered with trash. One of my Peace Corps friends said that from afar, it reminds him of decorations on a Christmas tree. So every time I pass by the dump on the way to my community, I think: wow, what pretty trees!

This is me spraypainting one of the donated barrels.

And here´s the finished product.

I helped organize a trash pickup with the students on the day before the garbage truck came.

OK, done with trash.

We had a dance last Saturday in the casa comunal, a large outdoor gathering place, to celebrate the ending of crafts workshop that a number of the teenagers participated in. A local NGO sponsored the workshop. The kids made bracelets, necklaces, and other jewelry out of organic material. Pretty cool. Makes me wish that I had thought of that. Anyway, the NGO wanted to have a dance as a way to celebrate the end of the workshop. So, I helped to organize the dance and get the kids to come. Salvadoran teenagers are increidbly shy, especially the girls, so getting them to dance was very difficult. Much of the first 45 minutes was me dancing in the middle of the space with boys on one side and girls on the other, all the while trying to goad people into dancing. Eventually, everyone got into it and they started moving. In the end, it was a huge success.
Picture from the dance.

Another thing that I started last week is a career preparedness workshop for mostly out-of-school and non-working youth. I came up with a rough outline of the course: resume writing, cover letter writing, preparing for an interview, how to find work, how to use the classified section of the newspaper, how to start a small business, and options to continue your education after high school. I hope to have 2 trips to Sonsonate: one to type their resumes and to create email accounts (few of the youth have email accounts, and even fewer check their email on a regular basis). On the 2nd trip, I´d like to give them a tour of a free technical school and other institutes to continue their studies. 8 kids showed up for the first class, all of them guys, but that´s what I wanted. I´m planning on doing another similar workshop for girls in the future. But I´m glad that only guys are in the class because I think the dynamic would be a lot different with girls. The guys can be more open with eachother. This proved to be true during the first class when we had a conversation about the obstacles to obtaining employment. Two of the guys got teary-eyed talking about how hard it is to find work. They described how being from our community, reliable transportation is a huge obstacle. Continuing your education after high school is even tougher, considering the high cost of attending a technical school or university (about $50 dollars a month. Not much by our standards, but prohibitively expensive for most poor, rural Salvadorans). It was a very moving scene to say the least.

Oh, I almost forgot. Here´s a shoutout to Emily, a PC friend in Santa Ana. We had a conversation tonight about integrating, making friends, and toothpaste. She helped me realize that my favorite toothpaste is Crest, which unfortunately is a lot more expensive than the other brands here, but well worth the extra cost.

Here are some pics from the last month.

This is me and one of my best friends, Jose.

This is me with my intermediate English class at playa dorada, a beach about an hour bike ride from my community.

My students wrote ¨Thanks Jed¨ in the sand. Not sure what the writing above says.

Me in front of my Saturday English class. The class started out with 75 people, but now it´s at about 55 or so.

This is a pic of me with the local breadmakers. I taught them how to make chocolate chip cookies. Unfortunately, the cookies turned out completely flat and tasted pretty bad. But we´ve learned from our mistakes so next time will be better.

Me and my host brother at my host nephew´s birthday party.

These are my clothes hanging out to dry in front of my house.

It´s a Twister!

2009-02-14T05:23:00.000-08:00

Well, no, there wasn´t exactly a tornado in my village, but it seemed like it. A huge windstorm hit my community for about 3 days last week. The power went out and massive amounts of dust, leaves, and debris flew into my room. It was a complete wreck. But my room didn´t receive the worst of it. The wind was so strong that it destroyed the roofs of 32 houses in my community. Most of the roofs are made of sheet metal with logs on top to hold it down. Some houses are lucky enough to have tile roofs which are a little bit sturdier. One roof actually fell on a 9 year old kid and caused a big gash on his head. I gave the family some neosporin and some gauze pads, but it was pretty ugly. The kid seems to be ok now. One house actually completely fell apart due to the wind. Yesterday, I went with about 20 men to repair the house. The family set up a temporary shelter, a hodgepodge of sheets and scrap metal precariously positioned on a few trees. It was actually a really interesting process. We went into the hills and basically just cut down a few trees. We used corvos (large knifes) and axes to hack the tree into smaller logs. We then pushed the logs down the hill and then carried them on our shoulders back to the construction site. Then we used the logs as posts for the house. I didn´t stay to see the finished product, but I imainge they used smaller logs and more sheet metal to finish building the house.

Last weekend, I went to the capital and saw my aunt. She works for USAID and is working in El Salvador this month. So I took the opporunity to go see her and take some time away from my site. We hired a driver and went to Suchitoto, a beautiful colonial town in the north of the country. After taking a few pictures of the city center, we took a boat tour of Lake Suchitlan, which is an artifical lake made in 1973. We then went to the house of Alejandro Coto, a famous Salvadoran artist and film producer. He kind of is a living legend in Suchitoto. He has this huge house with a nice collection of Latin American art. He gives daily tours of his house, so we spent a few hours with him and talked about his experiences in the art world.

I started a basic English class 2 weeks ago for the young people in my community. 60 people showed up the first Saturday. I wasn´t expecting such a large turnout. We ended up taking all the chairs out of one classroom and going outside and I taught the class in the corridor in the school courtyard. The next saturday, 75 people showed up for class. It was a bit overwhelming. I´m glad there´s so much interest in the class, but I´m probably going to split the class into 2 groups to make it easier.

In other news, I sat down with the school director last week and worked out a tentative schedule. I´ll work at the school 3 days a week. I´ll be giving computer classes to the 9th graders, helping the English teacher plan and improve his English classes, and teaching a reading class for kids who either can´t read or a way below grade level in their reading ability. I´m pretty excited to actually have a schedule and to get back into the classroom. Other projects I´m planning/working on: a trash collection program with the local garbage dump, a recycling program, a series of career preparedness classes for out-of-school youth, a shampoo making buisness for a group of women in the community, and we´re talking about a water project - getting a few wells put in so we don´t have to go to the river to get water.

So, that´s what´s going on in my world. In addition to projects, I´m trying to find the time to study some Spanish, practice the guitar, and generally hang out with the youth in my community. Today, there´s going to be a Valentine´s Day dance as a fundraiser for the youth group. Should be a good time. And tomorrow, the youth are putting on a concert in the afternoon.

Until next time...

Pictures from the last 2 months

2009-01-24T07:39:00.000-08:00

Here are a few pics of me in the Zumbumba costume. We wore capes, large pointy hats, masks, soccer socks, and decorated them with shiny paper. We performed the story of the 3 wise men and the birth of Jesus. It was pretty strange and frankly, it didn´t make much sense to me why we all wore masks. But apparently they do it every year and the community loves it. Everyone got a kick out of the fact that I participated. Since we were all dressed up everyone tried to guess where I was in the dance. Sometimes I´d wave to people in the crowd or give high fives to little kids during the dance.

Here are two pics with me and about 10 kids making pizza. It was so much fun. I taught them how to cut the tomatoes, onions, how to grate the cheese, how to make and kneed the dough, and for about an hour I wasn´t doing a thing, the kids were doing it all. I´m thinking about doing pizza making as an income generating activity or as a fundraising activity.

This is me with a scorpion I find in my room. I´ve found a total of 4 so far. My host brother cut off the tail so it couldn´t sting me. Here´s another creature picture. My host brothers found and killed a rattle snake in the corn fields. They cut of its head, I´m not sure why they did that. After taking pictures with the dead snake, my host brother skinned it and used the flesh to make a type of medicine. Supposedly, snake meat has some curative properties. They dried the skin and had plans to sell it for about 5 bucks in the local market.

This is a pic of me killing a chicken. That´s my host sister helping me do it. I was supposed to cut its neck on the adam´s apple so it would die fast, but I ended up missing it so it took a while for it to die. I felt bad, but maybe next time I´ll get it right.
This is me and two of my friends at the beach. We found this large field of coconut trees. These two guys climbed the trees and knocked down about 20 coconuts. We then used machetes to open them up and drink the coconut water and the ¨coconut meat¨ as they call it.
This is me and my host dad, Don Antonio. We´re at the milpa (corn field) getting ready to haul large sacks of corn back to the house. I´ve been to the corn fields a handful of times to help pick corn. It´s backbreaking work, especially when you do it everyday for 5 or 6 hours. The next pic is the view from the corn field.
This is a pic of my room about a week after I arrived. I slept in that hammock for about 5 weeks before I got a mattress. I rent two small rooms from my family. I have cement floors and walls made of cement and plaster, so there´s a large amount of dust in my room. Dust is literally everwhere. When I wake up in the morning there´s a layer of dust and debris on my bed that fell during the night. That said, I love my room, I borrowed some desks from the school, I have a few boxes to put my books and my clothes, and I have two windows to get some air in. You can my guitar in the background. I can play one or two simple songs. My host brothers are teaching me how to play. Hopefully during the next few months I´ll learn a few more songs.

This is from our swearing-in ceremony at the American Embassy in San Salvador. From left to right: me, our Spanish teacher Lilian, Bethany, and Mark. Mark and Bethany are also youth development volunteers.
This is the kitchen-dining room-living room of my house. The second picture is of our traditional wood burning stove with tortillas on it. (My diet mostly consists of tortillas, rice, beans, and sometimes chicken). There´s little ventilation in the room so whoever is cooking (my host mom or my host sisters) breathes in lots of smoke. In the bottom left hand corner you can see a large tub of water with a plate and cup over it. Every morning my host brothers walk down to the river to collect water in large plastic containers called cantaros. They then put the water in that tub of water to use during the day. We put a small amount of chlorox to treat the water. This room is made of wood with tiles on the roof. You can see spaces in between the wood where the sunlight comes in.

Going back West

2009-01-22T16:12:00.000-08:00

I know it´s already late January, but I realized I didn´t write about Christmas or New Years. Aside from a few families putting up red and green lights, Christmas was a pretty low key affair. A few families made tamales and pan relleno, which is basically just a sandwich with chicken, lettuce, and cucumber. Christmas was celebrated on Dec. 24 instead of the 25th, which threw me off a bit. New Years was much more exciting. After we danced the Zumbumba again (in total, we danced probably about 20 times in two weeks, each dance about an hour long), all the kids bought fireworks and for about 4 hours, they set them off all over the community. I was so freaked out that they would blow their hands off, cuz some of them are big. But, no one seemed to care, just another Salvadoran thing. None of them had heard of a countdown at midnight, so I introduced that. We had about 20 people shouting 10...9...8....pretty fun. For the past few weeks, I´ve bee in our training part 2 in San Vicente. I´m heading back out to my community tomorrow. Gotta go now, but here´s a pic of me hauling about 100 pounds corn.

Dancing with the Natives

2008-12-27T09:44:00.000-08:00

Feliz Navidad y Prospero Ano Nuevo! I´ve been at my permanent site for about 6 weeks now, and things are going great. A couple weeks ago, I was busy doing a community diagnostic, basically figuring out the specific needs of my community and finding out ways that I can help. It involved going house to house introducing myself, asking people about the community´s needs, specifically with regards to the youth in the community, and how I can address those needs. I visited nearly all the houses in my community in about three weeks. Based on the responses of community members, I came up with a list of needs. I then presented these needs at an Asamblea General (Community Meeting) and a list of suggestions for possible projects I can do in conjunction with the community.

Here are the needs:

1) Extracurriculuar activities. The youth in the community have virtually no structured activities after they finish school. Lots of youth and their parents want me to organize educational or recreational after-school activities like sports, games, or additional classes (English classes, computer classes, etc.)

2) More opportunities to study. The local school only goes up to the 9th grade. When students graduate from 9th grade, they have the option of attending high school in a neighboring community, about a 40 min. bike ride away. Or, they can attend high school in the capital of the department, about an hour bus ride. With these limited options, many students don´t go to high school, especially girls. Furthermore, only a tiny fraction of the students who graduate high school go to university due to the high cost of tuition, about $50 a month. It may not seem like a lot of money to us, but the cost is prohibitively expensive for most families here. Nearly all the youth in my community want to learn more, they are so eager to continue studying. I´d love to give them that opportunity if I can.

3) Life Skills. Many youth, as well as parents, asked me to help impart good moral values to kids, such as staying away from drugs and alcohol, promoting university, teaching kids how to get a job, write a resume, prepare for an interview, and generally steering them in the right direction.

4) English and Computer classes. Almost everyone asked me to give English classes. So, I´m teaching an intermediate class on Sunday mornings and a basic English class on Saturday afternoons. While any teenager can attend, I´m trying to focus the classes for out-of-school youth.

5) Promoting literacy. About half of the adults in the community are illiterate, and many youth generally have relatively low levels of literacy. Most can read and write, but there generally is not an appreciation for the written word. Most youth don´t read newspapers, magazines, or books for fun. I´d love to be able to give literature classes and promote literacy amongst elementary school kids.

6) Vocational workshops. Lots of youth want to learn a trade and have a skill that they can use. There´s a need for trained carpenters, electricians, bricklayers, construction workers, etc.

Those are the main needs. So for the next two years, it´s my job to figure out ways to meet those needs.

With respect to my living situation, I finally got a bed! For the past 5 weeks, I´ve been sleeping in a hammock using a coat as a pillow. Surprisingly, a hammock is really comfortable! But, I much prefer a bed. And my bed isn´t exactly a bed, its more of a thin mattress placed on a platform made of string, but it works.

Aside from doing house visits, I´ve been doing a few projects. One project I´m working on is getting 3 new computers for our school. Another volunteer in a neighboring department has a computer project and she has a few extra computers. I asked the community leaders if they´d be interested in buying the extra ones, and they said yes. So, we´re going to take out a loan for about $300 to buy the computers. We´ll have to fundraise over the next couple months to repay the money. We should have the computers within two weeks.

Another project I´m working is a stove project. An NGO working in Sonsonate called Stove Team International builds low smoke-emission stoves so I´m working to distribute stoves to my community. The stoves cost $30. I hope to distribute around 30 to 50 this next cycle. People in neighboring communities have also expressed interest, so I´d love to distribute as many as I can.

I´m also helping the school director solicit the ministry of education to put a high school in our community. I have to collect all the names and birthdates of every student who graduated from our school in the last 5 years. Hopefully, the ministry of education will see that a huge number of students, especially girls, don´t go to high school and that there really needs to be a high school in the community.

So, aside from those projects, I´ve spent my days playing soccer, hanging out with the youth, making pizza and pancakes, teaching the youth how to play poker, and generally just hanging around the community talking with people. I´m participating in a traditional Christmas dance called the Zumbumba. We all wear costumes - a mask, a large pointy hat, soccer cleats, and a cape - and dance and sing about the 3 wise men and the birth of Jesus. Then at the end, the devil fights with an angel, the devil loses, and the dramatization ends with a final song of rejoicing. It´s a little strange, but everyone in the community absolutely loves it. And everyone loves the fact that I´m participating in it, it´s a great way to integrate myself into the community. I feel like lots of people have images of Peace Corps volunteers dancing with the natives and partaking in traditional festivals. So, now I can officially say that I´ve danced with the natives.

Until next time.

Be the Beast

2008-11-29T09:45:00.000-08:00

This is the first time that I´ve used the internet in over 2 weeks. I arrived at my permanent site two weeks ago and I feel pretty cut off from the outside world, which has its pros and cons. My site is incredibly rural, but I love it already. There´s no running water so I bathe in the river everyday. Most of the time there is electricity, but whenever there is any wind, it goes out. The community is fantastic though, there are various community organizations that are well organized and eager to work with me to do projects. I also don´t get cell reception in my house, I have to walk up a hill for about 10 minutes to get any reception. I´m really enjoying being away from other gringos, it feels good to be doing my own thing in my community. After two months of training with the other volunteers, it feels great to finally be on my own. I´m living with a really nice family. There are 3 sons, 17, 19, and 32. So, we get along great. Two of the sons also play the guitar so they are teaching me how to play. The food is good but a bit monotonous. I literally eat beans, eggs, and tortillas for every meal, but it´s good so I can´t really complain. Once or twice we´ve had chicken and rice, but chicken is expensive so it´s mostly just beans. My community is also incredibly poor. The municipality is the third poorest in the entire country. Most people live on about $3 a day. Families are huge. The average family size is around 8 to 10, a mother, father, and 6 to 8 children. It seems that everyone is related to everyone. It´s basically just one huge family. You have to cross three rivers to get to my site and in the rainy season, the rivers get huge so no one can go in or out of my community until the rain stops. The nearest internet is in the capital city of the department, Sonsonate, so I probably will be able to check my email every two weeks or so, whenever I feel the need to make the trip into the capital.

The volunteer that worked in my site before me just left this week so I´m the only volunteer here. He used to call people beasts all the time, and all the young people say ¨Ben, you´re a beast!¨ Basically all the teenagers go around saying that all time, so I´ve kind of adopted that as my mantra. Mentally and physically, living in such a rural area is a challenge, but it´s also incredibly rewarding at the same time. During the last two weeks, I´ve felt pangs of loneliness and I´ve felt down a few times, but overall, I absolutely love this community. I feel I´m integrating really well, I´m making lots of friends, especially amongst the teenagers, and I´m participating in the life of the community. I went to the fields last week to pick corn, I made bread with a local women´s group yesterday, I went to the country fair last weekend, I bought a guitar and my two brothers are teaching me how to play, and I´m learning to dance. People love to dance here. They are also so impressed that I know how to dance hip hop and a little cumbia. Anyone who knows me knows that I´m not a great dancer, but when I dance a little hip hop they absolutely love it. And I´m learning cumbia and salsa too, I´ve got the basic moves down, so it´ll just take some time to really get it down. It feels great to be speaking Spanish all day every day. Even though I still make a lot of errors, I can pretty much get by. One thing that is really hard for me is the slang, or caliches. The young people use so much slang in their speech that it´s almost another language. There was slang in Peru and Costa Rica too, but not as much as here. I have to tell people, wait, stop, tell me what that word means. For example, there at least 4 words for pig: marrano, cuche, puerco, cerdo. Tons of other words have double names so when people speak I have to decode their slang. So, that makes things much more difficult, but I´m learning.

For thanksgiving, the local youth group made me a chicken dinner. I had to explain what Thanksgiving was cuz they had no idea. But, they did know that it´s a holiday that is celebrated in the US. It was really nice, we all ate chicken soup at my house with about 15 teenagers from the youth group.

Since I don´t have internet at my site, I´ll try to check my email once every two weeks or so. So give me some time to respond if you send me an email. This week, I´m going to be doing more house visits (where I go house to house introducing myself and explaining Peace Corps), working with a local NGO to provide low-smoke emission stoves to families, giving my first advanced English class, and working on a world map project for the school. The stove project and the English class are hand me downs, the volunteer before me started these, so I´m just taking them over.

Hope everyone is doing well. I´ll try to make the trip to the capital again soon to write another update.

Goodbye San V.

2008-11-07T13:59:00.000-08:00

For the most part, training has been going great. The last few weeks have been filled with all types of activities and field trips to local volunteer sites. I´ve been learning a ton and trying to soak everything in before I head off to my permanent site. On that note, after much anticipation, we found out our permanent sites yesterday. I´ll be living in a small community of just over 1,100 people in the western department of Sonsonate. It´s actually very close to the site I visited for my immersion day which I described in my previous post. So, I´m very excited to be returning there. The area is incredibly beautiful and picturesque, it´s about a 1.5 hour bike ride from the beach, so if I want to get away for the day, the beach is nearby. I don´t know a whole lot about my specific community, but agriculture is virtually the only source of income. The family structure is pretty traditional with the men working in the fields all day while the women and girls stay at home and tend to household affairs. There is one school in the community that goes up to the 9th grade. Students who want to finish their bachillerato (high school) must commute to a high school in a neighboring pueblo. I´ll write more later when I´m actually there. I leave in just over a week.

Last Sunday was Dia de los Difuntos, which is the Central American version of day of the dead. On this day, families attend church services and visit their deceased relatives in the local cemetary. It´s customary to place flowers on the tombstones and/or put a fresh layer of paint on it. I went with my family to the cemetary in San Vicente. When we got there, the cemetary was packed with people selling food, sodas, and pupusas (the typical food here, basically two tortillas with a filling in the middle like beans or cheese). There were at least 4 or 5 mariachi bands walking around asking people to buy a song. A few years ago, the government prohibited people from bringing flowers in vases to the cemetary because of the threat of dengue spread by mosquitos. So now, people buy fake paper flowers instead. The entire cemetary was covered with these paper flowers, basically just this rainbow of colors across the cemetary. It was a really lovely site to see, tons of people, lots of commotion, and lots of partying. It took us a little while to find the tombstones of my family. But when we did, there were about 10 relatives already there having a small argument with a painter about the date he painted on a tombstone. Apparently, this painter painted the wrong date of death on the tombstone, he put 1984 instead of 1982. So, the painter had to repaint the entire gravestone with the correct date. Later that day, we went to the carnival in San Vicente, which was a pretty traditional fair with carnival rides, games, etc. Me and my host sister ended up playing a lottery type of game for a while. After about 45 minutes of playing this lottery game, we came out a few bucks ahead and with a few prizes too.

A few weeks ago, we had our big Movie Night with the local church youth group. The youth group decided that they wanted to buy a sagrario (the ornate box that the eucharist goes in), so we (me, and the two other volunteers living in my community) decided to organize a Movie Night to raise the funds. We had a laptop, a speaker system, and projector, but we were missing one cord that connected the projector to the speakers. So, people could see the movie just fine, but there was no sound. For two hours we were scrambling to find this damn cord. We were just about to cancel the movie night when someone came running in at the last minute with the right cord! So, it turned out to be a great success. About 60 people came and we made about $45, a pretty good sum of money.

Other things I´ve done in the last few weeks include:

- visiting an NGO in the northern department of Cabanas that works with ex-gang members and teaches them machinery and mechanics skills so they can be productive members of society.

- Me and the two other volunteers at my site organized a ¨game day¨ for Dia del Nino (Day of the Child) at the local day care. We played hokey pokey, played musical chairs, sang songs, and generally had a great time playing with the kids. Another volunteer, Mark, dressed up as a clown which drew a mixed response: some kids love him, and other kids burst out in tears!

- I went to the local university, la Universidad Nacional and interviewed a few students. All of the students I spoke with said basically three things about the education system: 1) Even though University can be very expensive, it´s worth it to go because of the possibility of getting a better job 2) getting a good job after you graduate can take many months and often years of looking, and 3) most students who finish high school really would like to continue their studies but can´t because their families can´t afford it.

Next week is going to be packed with wrapping-up activities. We have our swearing-in ceremony on Friday and then next Saturday, I leave for my site. I´ve taken a ton of photos, so hopefully I´ll have some time to upload them before I leave next Saturday.

4 Days in The Campo

2008-10-15T15:05:00.000-07:00

Ok, I finally have some free time to update my blog, I´ve been pretty busy lately with all the training activities - language classe, site visits, cultural and safety info sessions, etc. Right now, I´m living in a small pueblo of about 700 people, there are about 5000 in the larger municipality. I know most of the people in my neighborhood by face, and I´m slowly learning everyone´s name. I´ll be living in this community for another 4 weeks as part of training and then I´m off to my permanent site (I´ll found out where in a few weeks). It´s a pretty rural place, there are cows and chickens everywhere, literally everywhere. Most of the men in the community work in the fields all day while the women stay at home and do chores, cook, and care for the kids. I´m living with a host family which is going well. I really enjoy the food, mostly beans, rice, boiled vegetables, and lots and lots of tortillas. By United States standards, our house is tiny, but here, it´s medium-sized. There are 3 main rooms: the kitchen, the living room, and the bedroom. There is a large cardboard barrier that separates my host parents' room from my room, so I can hear everything on the other side of the cardboard wall, but it´s cool. Our house has running water, but many houses don´t. The faucet empties out into a pila, which is a wash basin consisting of a large tub of water with two slabs of concrete on either side for washing dishes and doing laundry. There is a shower but often times I just take a bucket bath because the water pressure is very low. I actually have grown quite used to bucket baths, it´s really refreshing in the morning.

So that´s the rundown of my living situation. As part of training, each group does a project in their community. My group consists of me and two other peace corps trainees. We decided to work with a local church youth group as a nice way to get to know people and to immediately have a motivated group of young people. Last night, the group chose a project: raising funds to purchase a new sagrario, which is the little box where they put the eucharist, I think, at least that´s my understanding of it. So, we´re going to help them raise funds for the project. It´s a really fun group of kids, so I´m really looking forward to working with them.

Other than that, our job is to integrate into our communities as best we can. I´ve started an English class with a bunch of little kids. 15 kids came for the first class and since then, I´ve had about 20 kids coming, which is awesome. The kids here are absolutley wonderful, they are so eager to learn and have structured activities. So I´ve been having a lot of fun with that. We mostly just sing songs and play games which is super fun. I´m also teaching 5 teenagers and adults after the kids class.

So, on to some stories. Last weekeend, I spent 4 days visiting a volunteer about 3.5 hours away from my training site. Those 4 days were the best 4 days I´ve had here in El Salvador. It was great to get away from all the other gringos (the other trainees) and to be speaking only Spanish. The volunteer I visited had me stay with a local family for the first 2 nights. I went to Sonsonate, a region in the western part of the country. I stayed in a really small town with about 1000 people. The area was stunningly beautiful, lush green forest, vast corn fields, rivers, just utter tranquility. It was some of the most beautiful countryside I´ve ever seen. Anyway...the first night in my host family, I slept in a room with clotheslines hanging over my bed. At about 4am I hear these sounds like ¨fph, fph, fph¨ like something was flapping. Then I hear these strange zipping sounds and I got freaked out! So I grabbed my flashlight and looked up, and there were bats hanging from the clotheslines, about 2 ft away from my face! The next morning, I told the family that there was bats in my room and they just laughed. Another interesting experience was bathing. The family has a large pila (the big wash basin) about a 3 min. walk from the house. There were all these chickens running around, a bunch of ants and crickets, just tons of creatures. There were no walls or anything, just this big wash basin in the middle of this forest. So I was like, I guess I´ll just get naked and take a bucket bath. So I did, and it was great. It felt great to be bathing naked in the forest. So if anyone comes and visits me and I´m living in a rural site, you´ll get to experience that too! The whole weekend was great, mostly because the people in this town were so welcoming. I accompanied a local health worker do family visits. The health worker asked people really personal questions like, are you sexually active, when´s the last time you got checked for cervical cancer, etc. The quality of health care in this area is pretty low, there is lots of malnutrition amongst kids due to lack of resources, for example. So, the municipality employs these health workers to do house visits to make sure people are getting the medical care they need. But, there is only 1 health worker for the entire town. It was really intersting to see how he did his job. I also spoke with the peace corps volunteer I visited about his projects, and I got really inspired. This particular volunteer has built a few bridges for the community so children have safe access to schools, he´s worked to get low-smoke stoves into peoples´ homes, and tons of other really cool projects. It gave me a lot of food for thought.

I have about 4 more weeks of training and then I´ll be posted at my permanent site. I´ll be very busy, but I´ll try to post again in the next few weeks. Until next time.

Oh, I also shaved my head! I´ve been thinking about doing it for a while now, so I finally did. I think it looks pretty good but people say I look a lot meaner. haha, hopefully I´ll get a chance to post a pic soon.

I ♥ Peace Corps

2008-09-15T18:06:00.000-07:00

I'm here in Washington DC for our initial 2 day orientation and I'm having a blast! I was the first one to arrive from my training group, so I had about a day to explore DC by myself. As you may or may not know, I have a fascination with metro systems, so I was a like a starry-eyed kid in a candy store when I rode the DC metro to downtown. If you've ever traveled with me, you know I love to hold the camera in my outstretched arm and take pictures of myself.....constantly. I have lots of pictures of me in front of famous things, including the White House. DC is absolutely amazing - all the famous buildings, the landmarks, the streets, the cafes, all the young people - I loved it. I also got the chance to visit Johns Hopkins (the international affairs school) and GW, two grad schools that I'm thinking about applying to. I would love to come back to DC for school, we'll see...

We're staying in a fabulously nice hotel, but for some reason, I haven't been able to sleep at night. I can sleep just fine in a cheap as dirt hostel in Nicaragua, but I can't go to sleep for the life of me in a $450-a-night luxury hotel in DC. This has happened to me before - the boojier the place, the harder it is for me to sleep. This is actually going to be a good thing though considering I'll be living in a rural village possibly without running water for two years.

Check this out. My job description is to "promote world peace and friendship." Isn't that the coolest job description ever?! Seriously, that is my job for the next two years. When else can you say that your job is to work towards world peace? I truly feel like a superhero.

There are 24 people in my training group, about 8 of us are Youth Development the rest are agroforestry/environmental education. We've known each other for about 36 hours and I absolutely love them. We're like a small family already. At orientation, we've received a lot of training related to cross-cultural adjustment, safety, support networks, etc. All standard stuff, but very useful and necessary. We've heard a lot of stories about life in El Salvador - scorpions and bats in your room, spiders the size of your head, latrines that are in desperate need of basic plumbing, the need to carry machetes (yes, machetes!) for protection against aforementioned dangers...except the latrines. Needless to say, we are anxiously waiting to arrive in San Salvador.

I'll try and upload pics when I can, hopefully I'll do that within the next week. I'll write again soon!

Call me Ben

2008-09-04T15:45:00.000-07:00

Hey all! Welcome to my blog. Here, I'll be documenting my experiences in the Peace Corps in El Salvador for the next two years. It's a shame that I've spent 17 out of the past 24 months abroad and I haven't blogged. Better late than never, right?

If you haven't heard the news, I'll be spending the next 27 months in El Salvador as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the area of Youth Development. I'll probably be working in a public school teaching English and designing/implementing extra-curricular programs. In other words, I'll be spending the next two years hanging out with kids! I really can't imagine a better assignment than that! I leave for Washington DC on September 13 and then for El Salvador on September 16. I've spent the last six months in Fresno, California and I can't wait to go back to Latin America!

As you may have noticed from the URL or from the title of this post, I've decided to change my name (unofficially) to Ben.

But, Jed, err...Ben, why would you do that?!

As much as I enjoy Spanish-speakers butchering my name by calling me "Hed," "Yessie," and my personal favorite "Head Beers," I've decided that this time around, I'll make it easier on everyone by using my middle name, Benjamin, or just Ben. I've always had it in the back of my mind that I'd like to go by Ben some day, and now is the perfect opportunity. Besides, doesn't the name Benjamin Byers sound powerful?! Of course, to all the students I might be Senor Byers.

Ok, Ben, but won't that cause massive confusion?!

I hope not. From here on out, I'll introduce myself as Ben to everyone, even the other Peace Corps volunteers. I'll respond to both names, so you don't need to call me Ben!

I have about one more week until I leave. During that time, I'll be frantically trying to pack all of my stuff, read as much as I can about El Salvador, and get my fill of everything I'll be without during the next two years.

I may or may not have internet access at my site, so I'll try to post updates and pictures whenever possible. I'll still have my same email address and Facebook, of course.

Adios!