Culture Shock

I´m a little bit amazed and surprised at how quickly I´ve become comfortable living in my training community of St. Domingo. All the trainees spent 5 days away from our towns last week for immersion days, which was no doubt a good experience, but I was thrilled to get off the bus at St. Domingo upon returning today. I´ve only lived in this town for four weeks, but walking up the few streets there are here and arriving at my host family´s home is probably the closest thingI have to familiarity here. My host mom said that she missed me while I was away, and I couldn´t believe how good it felt to hear that. Ten weeks of training really is enough time to become emotionally invested in a host family and community - now I´m starting to realize how difficult it will be to leave here in six weeks. At the same time, the fact that this place is a home away from home after a month gives me hopethat I´ll experience something similar in August when I swear in and get a site for two years.

Immersion day visit was interesting in many ways. I lived in the canton, or countryside, with a family for two days before staying with the PCV stationed in Comalapa (the pueblo outside the canton) Friday to Saturday. The countryside was beautiful- I walked a half hour from the town to get to my house and there was a completely different world from one side to the other. Everything is greener, quieter, more spacious. My host senora lives with just her 7 year old grandson, who sort of stared at me all the first day and then used me as his junglegym the next. There wasn´t much going on in the canton - the one time I left the house was Thursday to walk a half block to the store for soda and squash. Roberto, the grandson, and his two cousins were a great source of entertainment -once they warmed up to me we practiced their reading for school, played hopscotch and I taught them how to juggle (not really - they´re working on throwing and catching one rock successfully right now and often times miss and hit each other, but I have high hopes). Overall it was a good experience to live in a canton for a few days - I saw firsthand how people live without basic amenities such as water and electricity, as many do in El Salvador. The people I was lucky enough to meet were warm and welcoming, as was my host family- the only snag of the two days was when the senora tried to feed me chicken nuggets encrusted with dead ants. I thought it was seasoning at first before I noticed the legs, and I´m praying that by some chance the senora was mistaken as well. I couldn´t tell her I wasn´t going to eat them for fear of offending her, so I sucked it up and chowed down. Just kidding - I fed them to the dog when she wasn´t looking.

Friday was a good day as well - the PCV Stephanie is also my mentor and she did a great job of showing me around and introducing me to her friends and coworkers. It was difficult to explain what I was doing there -try telling someone that you´re a PC trainee, not a volunteer yet, who is only in their site for two days to basically kick it in the countryside, but you´re not doing any work for them, you´re not staying, and you´re not there to be anyone´s girlfriend, in Spanish. I´m thinking I´m going to start carrying around a sheet of paper explaining who I am and what I´m about to read off to people, along with the correct pronunciation of my name "Er-in."

Saturday there was a 4th of July celebration at the Sheraton hotel in San Salvador, put on by the US Embassy, and so all PC folk bused into the capital for that. The hotel was like some kind of tropical resort - talk about a contrast from the countryside. It was extremely fun to spend a few days meeting many of the current PCV´s and to just chill out, eat a hamburger, swim and drink a beer. About half of the trainees ended up splurging on a $100 room at the hotel to stay the night so that we could continue the good time. It was incredibly relaxing and ridiculously weird to do something so "normal" for two days - if PC´s objective is to culture shock the hell out of us, or at least offer us opportunities to do it to ourselves, they´re doing a great job. I had a hard time digesting that on Sunday -just a few days before I was hiking on a dirt road to a place in the middle of nowhere, and on Saturday I was lying on a lounge chair, speaking English with Americans and staring at a beautiful pool. Now I´m back in St. Domingo, somewhere in between the two extremes. As nice as it was to hang with the other trainees in the lap of luxury this weekend, I couldn´t seem to just relax and enjoy it - its too bizarre going back and forth between such opposites. The real El Salvador is what we saw on immersion days - I don´t look down on the people we saw hanging in this hotel, but I wonder if they´re aware of what the living conditions are likejust beyond the front lobby. Again, I can´t help but think about home and how aware I was a month ago of what some people live like just beyond my own front door. I spoke to another trainee about how relatively our service of two years can be viewed- it may seem like a long time, but I know that in two years I´m going to return to a comfortable life in the States, with a healthy family and group of friends (God willing) and all the opportunities in the world at my feet. I´m hoping to live for a long time yet, so in the grand scheme of things two years is a blink of the eye. In two years here, Roberto from the canton will still be living in the countryside, getting through third grade and talking to his parents via phone because they live in the US and he doesn´t have dual citizenship so he can´t join them. I know this is a bunch of philosophical pondering, I guess I just realize how lucky I am to have the opportunity to see what life is like here, and how even luckier I am to be returning home in two years.

I´ve gone on enough for now with my babbling so I´ll leave it at this. Thanks to everyone who has sent me emails lately, I love reading about what´s up at home. Lisa and Steve, congratulations on getting your new house! Don´t let anyone put their fist through the foundation again. Aaron, keep on fighting the good PC fight in Morocco -I´m proud of you. I miss everyone at home and think of you often, as always, so please continue to keep in touch! God bless.