Lots about food
As much as October was a bit of a down month for me, November has more than made up for it. The time has absolutely flown by lately because of how busy it´s been and I honestly can´t believe it´s almost December, and approaching a six-month anniversary in country. If training was the longest two months of my life, PC service itself is shaping up to be the shortest two years.
November 1st began with the long-awaited inaguration ceremony of the classroom/bathrooms that a few different organizations came together to fund and build in one of our canton schools. A local bank and NGO as well as a few members of Comite en Washington (a group of Salvadorans living in Washington, D.C. who raise money to implement projects in El Salvador) and the local community group here in Chapeltique gathered in the canton to officially open the new buildings. It was quite wonderful to experience - the reps from each group cut the ribbons to open the classroom and bathrooms, and the community members including almost all the students who attend the school flooded into the see their new additions. A ceremony ensued where each contributing organization rep had the chance to speak to the crown and recieved thank-yous. The children performed a few traditional Salvadoran songs and dances and then of course we all ate a huge lunch. I had the chance to talk to a few members of Comite en Washington, who traveled all the way back to Central America for the occasion. Criss-crossing between Spanish and English, we talked about the importance of trying to help the communities you grew up in and returning to your hometown to give back. Hugo, the president, expressed that he believes his remesa money (the money Salvadorans in the States send back to their families here) is best put to use through clothing, school supplies and small infrastructure projects such as this, rather than a check that his family might use to buy a new cell phone or big screen TV. It was inspiriting to talk with him and witness his dedication to improving his hometown, as well as his determination to never forget where he hails from. He and his family live, legally, in the US now but he says he´ll always be grateful for the opportunities he´s been given and the efforts he can make to give back to El Salvador. If I needed one more push of motivation to pursue NGOs for further small infrastructure projects, this was definitely it.
I returned to San Salvador November 6th for the Shakira concert, which was a really good time. We waited in line for hours outside the soccer stadium where she performed, but it turned out to be worth it when they accidentally allowed us into the $90, standing room only section closer to the stage. I´m short, even in Salvadoran terms, so I didn´t see much of the woman, the myth, the legend herself, but I certainly heard the music. I´m not a big Shakira fan by nature but I must say it was money well spent.
November 12th is National Pupusa Day in El Salvador, to continue on with the celebrations. The pupusa is the typical Salvadoran food specific to this country. It´s simply two balls of dough flattened out with cheese, beans, pork and/or green veggies pressed in the middle, then fried on a grill (quite delicious, esp. when the cheese spills out and burns a bit around the edges, mmm). They´re comida tipica because they´re so quick and easy to make and generally only cost a quarter each. My town has about four pupuserias and I guarantee they´ll never go out of business. For National Pupusa Day Chapeltique celebrated with a pupusa eating contest - eight young men lined up on picnic tables prepared to stuff their faces with as many pupusas as possible in five minutes. I can usually eat about $.50 worth in one sitting and be full - this year´s winner ate 18. Apparently that´s pretty lame as far as national standards go - last year´s winner in San Salvador ate 40. Regardless it was fun to watch and even more fun to be given free pupusas afterwards at the table of judges (one advantage of being a gringa and having an in with all the town´s well-knowns). My counterpart Carlos wanted to pay me to enter the contest myself, but I told him I´d only do it if he went in as well. He turned me down.
Speaking of Carlos, a few days after Pupusa Day he and I had a conversation I´m not likely to forget anytime soon. Carlos is a 30-something Salvadoran with an extremely open mind, and it´s quite often that he´ll sit down with me and we´ll talk for a long while about politics, religion, and social justice issues not only in El Salvador and the US but all over the world. Once in a while he´ll also play the counterpart role, asking me how I´m doing and feeling here in town, if there are any problems, and generally checking up on me. He and I were waiting for others to arrive at my English class on a Tuesday night and he began this conversation once again. I try to answer him as honestly as possible and I told him that all is well, I´m happy as things stand. We talked for a while and got into the reasons to join an organization such as Peace Corps, and the philosophy behind it. Usually when people here ask me why I´ve committed to this I try to have a pre-prepared answer ready, because many don´t understand the reasoning or logic behind it (mainly why one would voluntarily LEAVE the US to come here) but with Carlos it´s different - I can be more blunt. So instead of thinking of some lofty answer I just told him the truth - simply that I want to help people out. Carlos sort of sat back and thought about this for a moment, then he started telling me the story of his mother. He said he grew up poor, with his parents, sisters and brothers living in a two room house and his father gone working all the time. He explained that his mother worked hard all day at the market and would return home to work again for her family, but that she always instilled in him and his siblings the extreme importance of helping others out, whether they be blood brothers or a stranger on the street. As hard as she worked, she saved a bit of herself always to help out another in need, and Carlos learned that lesson from her example. At this point he stopped, looked at me and said "Aside from my mother, I never thought I´d meet another woman who felt the same way I do." It may not seem like an earthshattering comment but I don´t think I´ve ever felt so complimented in my life. In my short time here I´ve come to respect Carlos and the efforts he makes to help out his community immensely - there is not one arrogant or self-congratulatory bone in his body and I notice myself looking up to him as an example of how I hope to be. To hear him say such a thing really struck me and I felt incredibly honored. I think we all have moments when things just come together and click, and for me that converstaion was one of those times. I truly am here without a specific goal to accomplish, without a specific event or reason that caused me to join, and to have someone understand the value behind such simple reasoning, not only that it´s enough of a reason but that perhaps it´s the MOST important reason meant a lot to me.
After that I was kind of floored and had a great rest of the week at my site until the weekend, when I traveled with some friends to the beach a few hours from here. It was of course beautiful and couldn´t have asked for a more relaxing weekend. We stayed in a place right on the water, chilled at the beach until sunset then ate a huge plate of food and hung out at a bar where each Pilsener comes with a small bowl of salted peanuts and lime. Maybe that´s just my own personal idea of Heaven but I´m guessing some might agree. One of the best parts about being there was just talking to some of the people we met - a group of Salvo kids about to graduate from 9th grade on the beach for an end of school trip, five Texans down for the week to surf, a Nicaraguan waitress named Luisa who played card games with us at the bar. I love the fact that everywhere you go here you´re meeting new people and experiencing the natural wonders of this beautiful country - I really do feel lucky to be here right now.
We had a few more dental charlas the next couple of days up in Perquin, three hours to the north of me in the mountains, which went very well. It´s very satisfying to be able to hand out toothbrushes and tubes of paste to campo kids - we can only hope they´ll use them! The kids were great though - very energetic and too smart. The weather in Perquin was amazing - dry and windy, almost like a mid-fall day back home. I was shocked to discover that it was the same back in Chapeltique - I came home to all the older community members wearing winter hats pulled snugly over their heads. Like Aaron I too had to wear clothing to bed - and use a SHEET. Waking up with a cold nose was sort of disturbing but mostly insanely satisfying. Now the weather is back to normal, although less hot and humid than before. For a few blissful days I had a taste of fall and I hear those days will continue on and off throughout December and January.
That brings me up to this past weekend, Thanksgiving Day onward. I have to say of course that nothing could compare to behing home with my family on our favorite holiday, but T-Day in San Salvador was a close second. Peace Corps sets volunteers up with Embassy families, who are nice enough to invite us into their homes and share dinner with us. Myself and four others thought that perhaps we´d been forgotten when our family was late picking us up from the Embassy, so we followed some of the Marines inside and some of us scarfed food, but soon after we were picked up and brought to a home just afew minutes drive away. I have to say, while the Marines were nice I´m thankful we didn´t stay with them because the family we were assigned to was amazing. Their house was beautiful, the nicest I´ve seen here in country, and the couple very friendly and welcoming. I´m sure all their friends and family knew who the five PCVs were right away, because I don´t think any of us could stop from drooling over and practically hording the appetizer table like starving children. I stooed there with a glass of chilled white wine in one hand and a plate of scallops wrapped in bacon in the other and thought to myself, I´ve died. The family had hired a chef from the Radisson to prepare the main meal and he didn´t disappoint. I´m not likely to forget the turkey, mashed potatos, pumpkin pie and after dinner G & T for a long while (though like I said, Mom, yours would have topped it). Amid trying to figure out how to politely ask this family how we could start working for them instead of Peace Corps we met some very interesting people - most employees of the Embassy and their families. It was great to swap stories of how it is to be a Yankee here in country, the differences between living in the capital and life in the campo, etc. and to make contact and friends with some great people. One younger couple recently arrived explained that they would have liked to have invited PCVs to their home too for T-day but don´t have any furniture or food yet. They made us laugh when they said that upon explaining that to Mike Wise, our country director, he promptly told them "Oh don´t worry about that. They don´t need much - they just want to come into your home and flush the toilet a few times." We all cracked up over that, but um yeah, it´s sort of true. I certainly felt the food and drink hangover the next day but it was all worth it.
A few days later, Saturday, was the infamous carnival in the city of San Miguel, a half hour from my site. This party happens once a year on the last Saturday of November and is considered to be the biggest fiesta in Central America - a smaller scale version of Brazil´s carnival. It started at sunset, where thousands of people from all over the world crowd the closed-off streets and enjoy the festivities. They have everything - a parade with forty-something floats, each carrying the elected queen from each neighborhood in San Miguel; a salsa, rock, cumbia, reggaetone, ranchero or merengue band on very street corner; more food and small shops selling anything and everything; and featured, more popular bands in the soccer stadiums. We walked, ate, danced for hours and turned in around 4am, long before any of the bands stopped playing. The bst part by far was the dancing - I´m not exactly a natural but I think I would have made my second counterpart, Lupe, proud. Before I left I taught him the "baile de hombre blanco" and he me the Salvadoran man´s dance and was convinced I couldn´t do better than that. Chapeltique´s fiestas patronales are coming up in December and I plan on proving him wrong then. We slept late Sunday and I returned to my site in time to cook dinner with my neighbor and her family. She´s teaching me how to make pupusas and if nothing else pans out for the future, she and I have big plans to open Connecticut´s first pupuseria - it´ll be huge.
That brings me just about up-to-date, back at my site and working for a few days before Thursday´s swearing-in party for the new group of volunteers, which most PCVs in country attend. A new Agroforestry volunteer is coming out my way to the municipality next to mine, so I´m looking forward to meeting him. December appears to be just as busy as November, so hopefully the next blog entry wil be enjoyable to read (and as long?). I want to say thanks to Kevin for the card in Spanish - it was great to hear from you! Try not to corrupt that godchild of yours too soon. Erin, thank you for the letter! I´ve sent you one back but in the meantime best of luck with school and SBA Honduras prep. I´m only a fe hours away from Teguc and would love to join you guys in March. Thanks to Grandma, Aunt Laura, Sarah L., Steph, Margaret, Lisa and Nicole for the letters/cards, and to all for the wonderful emails! Amanda, it was great to get a card from you - El Sal isn´t the same without you here and we talk about you all the time (mainly about how stingy you are that you can´t send Angie $2 worth of trailmix). Best of luck in AZ muchacha guapa! Joe and Aaron, continued well wishes on your adventures in Africa - I hope your ventures in work, play, travel and Ramadan are serving both you and your communities well. Thanks to Mom for the package and to my family for the unconditional love and support. Can´t wait to see you guys in January - I promise to bring gifts and the Salvadoran man´s dance back with me. Check out my pictures if you get a chance, I´ve finally added some new ones.
Abrazos,
Erin
November 1st began with the long-awaited inaguration ceremony of the classroom/bathrooms that a few different organizations came together to fund and build in one of our canton schools. A local bank and NGO as well as a few members of Comite en Washington (a group of Salvadorans living in Washington, D.C. who raise money to implement projects in El Salvador) and the local community group here in Chapeltique gathered in the canton to officially open the new buildings. It was quite wonderful to experience - the reps from each group cut the ribbons to open the classroom and bathrooms, and the community members including almost all the students who attend the school flooded into the see their new additions. A ceremony ensued where each contributing organization rep had the chance to speak to the crown and recieved thank-yous. The children performed a few traditional Salvadoran songs and dances and then of course we all ate a huge lunch. I had the chance to talk to a few members of Comite en Washington, who traveled all the way back to Central America for the occasion. Criss-crossing between Spanish and English, we talked about the importance of trying to help the communities you grew up in and returning to your hometown to give back. Hugo, the president, expressed that he believes his remesa money (the money Salvadorans in the States send back to their families here) is best put to use through clothing, school supplies and small infrastructure projects such as this, rather than a check that his family might use to buy a new cell phone or big screen TV. It was inspiriting to talk with him and witness his dedication to improving his hometown, as well as his determination to never forget where he hails from. He and his family live, legally, in the US now but he says he´ll always be grateful for the opportunities he´s been given and the efforts he can make to give back to El Salvador. If I needed one more push of motivation to pursue NGOs for further small infrastructure projects, this was definitely it.
I returned to San Salvador November 6th for the Shakira concert, which was a really good time. We waited in line for hours outside the soccer stadium where she performed, but it turned out to be worth it when they accidentally allowed us into the $90, standing room only section closer to the stage. I´m short, even in Salvadoran terms, so I didn´t see much of the woman, the myth, the legend herself, but I certainly heard the music. I´m not a big Shakira fan by nature but I must say it was money well spent.
November 12th is National Pupusa Day in El Salvador, to continue on with the celebrations. The pupusa is the typical Salvadoran food specific to this country. It´s simply two balls of dough flattened out with cheese, beans, pork and/or green veggies pressed in the middle, then fried on a grill (quite delicious, esp. when the cheese spills out and burns a bit around the edges, mmm). They´re comida tipica because they´re so quick and easy to make and generally only cost a quarter each. My town has about four pupuserias and I guarantee they´ll never go out of business. For National Pupusa Day Chapeltique celebrated with a pupusa eating contest - eight young men lined up on picnic tables prepared to stuff their faces with as many pupusas as possible in five minutes. I can usually eat about $.50 worth in one sitting and be full - this year´s winner ate 18. Apparently that´s pretty lame as far as national standards go - last year´s winner in San Salvador ate 40. Regardless it was fun to watch and even more fun to be given free pupusas afterwards at the table of judges (one advantage of being a gringa and having an in with all the town´s well-knowns). My counterpart Carlos wanted to pay me to enter the contest myself, but I told him I´d only do it if he went in as well. He turned me down.
Speaking of Carlos, a few days after Pupusa Day he and I had a conversation I´m not likely to forget anytime soon. Carlos is a 30-something Salvadoran with an extremely open mind, and it´s quite often that he´ll sit down with me and we´ll talk for a long while about politics, religion, and social justice issues not only in El Salvador and the US but all over the world. Once in a while he´ll also play the counterpart role, asking me how I´m doing and feeling here in town, if there are any problems, and generally checking up on me. He and I were waiting for others to arrive at my English class on a Tuesday night and he began this conversation once again. I try to answer him as honestly as possible and I told him that all is well, I´m happy as things stand. We talked for a while and got into the reasons to join an organization such as Peace Corps, and the philosophy behind it. Usually when people here ask me why I´ve committed to this I try to have a pre-prepared answer ready, because many don´t understand the reasoning or logic behind it (mainly why one would voluntarily LEAVE the US to come here) but with Carlos it´s different - I can be more blunt. So instead of thinking of some lofty answer I just told him the truth - simply that I want to help people out. Carlos sort of sat back and thought about this for a moment, then he started telling me the story of his mother. He said he grew up poor, with his parents, sisters and brothers living in a two room house and his father gone working all the time. He explained that his mother worked hard all day at the market and would return home to work again for her family, but that she always instilled in him and his siblings the extreme importance of helping others out, whether they be blood brothers or a stranger on the street. As hard as she worked, she saved a bit of herself always to help out another in need, and Carlos learned that lesson from her example. At this point he stopped, looked at me and said "Aside from my mother, I never thought I´d meet another woman who felt the same way I do." It may not seem like an earthshattering comment but I don´t think I´ve ever felt so complimented in my life. In my short time here I´ve come to respect Carlos and the efforts he makes to help out his community immensely - there is not one arrogant or self-congratulatory bone in his body and I notice myself looking up to him as an example of how I hope to be. To hear him say such a thing really struck me and I felt incredibly honored. I think we all have moments when things just come together and click, and for me that converstaion was one of those times. I truly am here without a specific goal to accomplish, without a specific event or reason that caused me to join, and to have someone understand the value behind such simple reasoning, not only that it´s enough of a reason but that perhaps it´s the MOST important reason meant a lot to me.
After that I was kind of floored and had a great rest of the week at my site until the weekend, when I traveled with some friends to the beach a few hours from here. It was of course beautiful and couldn´t have asked for a more relaxing weekend. We stayed in a place right on the water, chilled at the beach until sunset then ate a huge plate of food and hung out at a bar where each Pilsener comes with a small bowl of salted peanuts and lime. Maybe that´s just my own personal idea of Heaven but I´m guessing some might agree. One of the best parts about being there was just talking to some of the people we met - a group of Salvo kids about to graduate from 9th grade on the beach for an end of school trip, five Texans down for the week to surf, a Nicaraguan waitress named Luisa who played card games with us at the bar. I love the fact that everywhere you go here you´re meeting new people and experiencing the natural wonders of this beautiful country - I really do feel lucky to be here right now.
We had a few more dental charlas the next couple of days up in Perquin, three hours to the north of me in the mountains, which went very well. It´s very satisfying to be able to hand out toothbrushes and tubes of paste to campo kids - we can only hope they´ll use them! The kids were great though - very energetic and too smart. The weather in Perquin was amazing - dry and windy, almost like a mid-fall day back home. I was shocked to discover that it was the same back in Chapeltique - I came home to all the older community members wearing winter hats pulled snugly over their heads. Like Aaron I too had to wear clothing to bed - and use a SHEET. Waking up with a cold nose was sort of disturbing but mostly insanely satisfying. Now the weather is back to normal, although less hot and humid than before. For a few blissful days I had a taste of fall and I hear those days will continue on and off throughout December and January.
That brings me up to this past weekend, Thanksgiving Day onward. I have to say of course that nothing could compare to behing home with my family on our favorite holiday, but T-Day in San Salvador was a close second. Peace Corps sets volunteers up with Embassy families, who are nice enough to invite us into their homes and share dinner with us. Myself and four others thought that perhaps we´d been forgotten when our family was late picking us up from the Embassy, so we followed some of the Marines inside and some of us scarfed food, but soon after we were picked up and brought to a home just afew minutes drive away. I have to say, while the Marines were nice I´m thankful we didn´t stay with them because the family we were assigned to was amazing. Their house was beautiful, the nicest I´ve seen here in country, and the couple very friendly and welcoming. I´m sure all their friends and family knew who the five PCVs were right away, because I don´t think any of us could stop from drooling over and practically hording the appetizer table like starving children. I stooed there with a glass of chilled white wine in one hand and a plate of scallops wrapped in bacon in the other and thought to myself, I´ve died. The family had hired a chef from the Radisson to prepare the main meal and he didn´t disappoint. I´m not likely to forget the turkey, mashed potatos, pumpkin pie and after dinner G & T for a long while (though like I said, Mom, yours would have topped it). Amid trying to figure out how to politely ask this family how we could start working for them instead of Peace Corps we met some very interesting people - most employees of the Embassy and their families. It was great to swap stories of how it is to be a Yankee here in country, the differences between living in the capital and life in the campo, etc. and to make contact and friends with some great people. One younger couple recently arrived explained that they would have liked to have invited PCVs to their home too for T-day but don´t have any furniture or food yet. They made us laugh when they said that upon explaining that to Mike Wise, our country director, he promptly told them "Oh don´t worry about that. They don´t need much - they just want to come into your home and flush the toilet a few times." We all cracked up over that, but um yeah, it´s sort of true. I certainly felt the food and drink hangover the next day but it was all worth it.
A few days later, Saturday, was the infamous carnival in the city of San Miguel, a half hour from my site. This party happens once a year on the last Saturday of November and is considered to be the biggest fiesta in Central America - a smaller scale version of Brazil´s carnival. It started at sunset, where thousands of people from all over the world crowd the closed-off streets and enjoy the festivities. They have everything - a parade with forty-something floats, each carrying the elected queen from each neighborhood in San Miguel; a salsa, rock, cumbia, reggaetone, ranchero or merengue band on very street corner; more food and small shops selling anything and everything; and featured, more popular bands in the soccer stadiums. We walked, ate, danced for hours and turned in around 4am, long before any of the bands stopped playing. The bst part by far was the dancing - I´m not exactly a natural but I think I would have made my second counterpart, Lupe, proud. Before I left I taught him the "baile de hombre blanco" and he me the Salvadoran man´s dance and was convinced I couldn´t do better than that. Chapeltique´s fiestas patronales are coming up in December and I plan on proving him wrong then. We slept late Sunday and I returned to my site in time to cook dinner with my neighbor and her family. She´s teaching me how to make pupusas and if nothing else pans out for the future, she and I have big plans to open Connecticut´s first pupuseria - it´ll be huge.
That brings me just about up-to-date, back at my site and working for a few days before Thursday´s swearing-in party for the new group of volunteers, which most PCVs in country attend. A new Agroforestry volunteer is coming out my way to the municipality next to mine, so I´m looking forward to meeting him. December appears to be just as busy as November, so hopefully the next blog entry wil be enjoyable to read (and as long?). I want to say thanks to Kevin for the card in Spanish - it was great to hear from you! Try not to corrupt that godchild of yours too soon. Erin, thank you for the letter! I´ve sent you one back but in the meantime best of luck with school and SBA Honduras prep. I´m only a fe hours away from Teguc and would love to join you guys in March. Thanks to Grandma, Aunt Laura, Sarah L., Steph, Margaret, Lisa and Nicole for the letters/cards, and to all for the wonderful emails! Amanda, it was great to get a card from you - El Sal isn´t the same without you here and we talk about you all the time (mainly about how stingy you are that you can´t send Angie $2 worth of trailmix). Best of luck in AZ muchacha guapa! Joe and Aaron, continued well wishes on your adventures in Africa - I hope your ventures in work, play, travel and Ramadan are serving both you and your communities well. Thanks to Mom for the package and to my family for the unconditional love and support. Can´t wait to see you guys in January - I promise to bring gifts and the Salvadoran man´s dance back with me. Check out my pictures if you get a chance, I´ve finally added some new ones.
Abrazos,
Erin
posted by Erin @ 2:05 PM
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