Vacation, Integration, Collaboration

Well, I have let quite a bit of time lapse since my last post...sorry about that! And I actually have some stuff to update.

In February my parents made the trek down to El Salvador and after briefly stopping in San Salvador to say "hello" to my friend Carol, we headed up to my site. I'm proud of my parents...they sat through the jam-packed 3 hour bus ride up (an hour of it in the winding mountains). The two days at my site were quite busy, but I think my parents had a good experience and I know my town had a fantastic experience. I had arranged for several women to teach my dad how to cook some of the local foods, and even though his Spanish vocabulary is limited to "hola," "gracias," and "¿Ádonde está la baño?," everyone had a great time. The women rarely see a man in the kitchen, so it was a nice sight, and my dad convinced the rest of the people watching (mostly boys) to also partake. It was a good cultural experience for some of the residents in my town and my dad learned how to make pupusas, pasteles, Salvadoran quesadillas (a type of bread), and tamales.

The other highlight of my parents visit in my site was a community-wide lunch that we hosted. My parents wanted to do something for my community when they came down and while physical things are nice, I came up with the idea of hosting a lunch for the entire town. Now, I have a small town and lunches are cheap, so it wasn't much of a burden, but I wouldn't recommend this to volunteers with larger sites in more expensive areas. My host dad helped transport the lunches and we handed them out in the church. People stayed and hung out, possibly for the company but likely because they wanted to win one of the soccer balls my parents brought down and were raffling off. After the absolutely crazy raffle I handed out slightly melted Valentine's Day candy (the lunch was Feb. 13th) and translated kind words that my parents had for my community and kind words my community had for my parents. It was really touching to see how little one can do to touch a person's heart. Eventually my dad also went down to the cancha (soccer field) and played some soccer with the boys and one of the new balls. They had a blast and still talk about my dad playing soccer and racing them back home.

Then I went on vacation to Costa Rica with my parents. It was nice to get away and spend some time with my parents. We did a bunch of the tourist stuff, which was unusual for me and a nice change of pace. It was hotter down there, so it was nice to get back after a week, even though it meant saying goodbye to my parents until December.

Now, back at my site I had some readjusting and integration to do. After having been gone for a week I needed to spend some time getting back into the groove of things and to explain to my community that I hadn't gone back to the United States permanently. I picked up some of my usual activities including environmental science lessons and my women's savings group. I also picked up with my eco-club who now knows how to make bracelets out of the plastic snack bags they normally just throw on the ground. Plus, we now have a small vivero (tree nursery) with just over 100 trees. Hopefully we'll start seeing some growth and in a few months be able to do a reforestation campaign throughout my town. We are creating a bulletin board for the whole school to get regular environmental tips and know what we are up to. We've planned the school garden and are just waiting for some funding. In addition, I hope to set up a monthly environmental award from each ciclo (set of grades - 1, 2, and 3; 4, 5, and 6), to try to encourage a competitive environment to care for the environment.

In other news, my women's group (who works with the NGO Cáritas), is planning on creating household gardens to grow their own vegetables. The goal is to create a little more independent wealth (cheaper to grow your own veggies than pay to get to the city to buy your own veggies), and a healthier diet (organic produce and actually incorporating some vegetables). It has taken a while to get the project off of the ground, but an agronomer came just a few days ago and taught the group (and some of the men who stopped by out of interest), how to make an organic pesticide and an organic fertilizer. There is currently a strong dependence on agrochemicals from large manufacturers, so bringing techniques that reduce the dependence is awesome. Hopefully soon we'll start looking at curing the plots of land they are going to use to get some good dirt in and some seeds going. My personal organic fertilizer is going well and I hope to get it implemented in the school soon. I have a box of worms hanging in my house and I can throw in nearly all of my vegetable and fruit waste as their food. Due to being a vegetarian, I actually have too much waste for the size of my container and would benefit from a large bin in the school also. I'll keep you posted on our lombriculture.

Lastly, I just want to mention a meeting that I went to this past week. El Salvador has 14 departments (like states) and the 140 Peace Corps volunteers are spread throughout 12 of the 14. Peace Corps El Salvador has recently set up people called Regional Leaders who are volunteers who stay for a third year to work directly with the other volunteers and help with anything they need help with. You could call it peer support. Geographically it is easy to divide the country up pretty evenly to give each of these new leaders a couple of departments, with the exception of the department I live in. We are so far north and just not terribly accessible, so we have become our own region. This is slightly funny because there are only 11 of us - 5 will be leaving the country in just another month, but we will be getting a handful at the end of this month when the new group of volunteers swears in. That was a lot of background, though I felt it was necessary to explain.

So all of us in the department, and the regional leaders we are borrowing from other regions until we get our own leader, met up in La Palma for two days. Not only was it nice to get to know a part of the department that I hadn't been to (and is one of the artisan hotspots of the country), it was good to meet the other volunteers that live "close by." I say "close" because the nearest one lives about two hours from me. The idea is to get discussion of collaboration going and share good information about more local projects (based on climate or specific NGOs that work locally). I am the youngest one in the group, so it was particularly helpful for me to hear what some of the other volunteers are doing and work through various ideas that I have. I ended up coming back to my site ready and roaring to get a bunch of new projects going. Seeing as this post is already really long, I'll update on those ideas as soon as I start getting some of them going.