Greetings,
So if you want to know about what I´m actually doing here, then Judith´s most recent post (June 29, 2007) is an excellent one to read because she explains the organization we´re working with and most of the projects it has that we´ve been working on really nicely. Just thought I´d share that...
sábado, 30 de junio de 2007
Vignettes
I´ve been reading La Casa en Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros in Spanish. I read it in English back in high school - excellent book, about a Mexican American girl growing up in the U.S., her hopes, dreams, what her neighborhood is like, and it´s told in a series of short poetic chapters, little vignettes that give a window into a specific aspect of her life or her neighborhood. I´ve been wanting to write some vignettes about my community in a similar style, give little windows into life here.
Griselda
Griselda lives nearby, basically next door and she come over almost every day to visit or to help Daisy with the chores, sweeping the yard or washing clothes, or even making tortillas before the delegation came. Marilu almost always comes with her. The two of them married a pair of brothers. Marilu, shy and quiet while Griselda talks and talks. Marilu, who doesn´t even know how to write her name, but who comes to all the community meetings, is going to get one of the chicken coop projects, and has a beautiful smile. One day she told me that when Judith/Ana and I talk in English, it´s like we´re not even talking and they just look at us with their mouths open. Well, sometimes it´s like that for us when people talk in Spanish, especially the old women without teeth. Griselda knows how to read really well. The other Saturday when we had the workshop on risk management, Guillermo had her help read the laws related to risk managment. She finished up to seventh grade in school. I suppose that´s a lot farther than many in the community, as there are many people, both men and women who can´t write more than the three letters that are their initials, which they use for their firma, or signature. Griselda with her tight brown shirt with a hole right over the lower part of her boob. Griselda with her open face and ready smile. Griselda is nineteen and she already has two children, one of whom is five years old and no longer lives with her, her daughter. Her son is ten months old and always sick. Sometimes she takes me over to her house to visit. She lives in one small room with a hammock outside and a couple of plastic chairs, one of them sewn together with twine at the top where it broke. We play soccer with an old ball. Neither she or the kids in the community can kick it very hard because they have bare feet and it stings like heck to kick it hard without shoes. Today when Griselda left Daisy said esa es pobrecita. Le doy aguacate, limón, ... por el niño.
Por las Moscas/Because of the Flies
Sometimes it seems like we do everything because of the flies. They are always on the table, laning on my arms, my legs. We have to watch each other´s food if someone gets up from the table for a moment, because of the flies. If I want to drink juice while I eat I need to remember to get it out of the fridge before I sit down to eat, so I don´t have to have someone watch my food or go get it for me while I sit and eat. Sometimes Daisy will ask me if I want fresco (what they call fresh juice) while I´m eating and she says, - Espera, yo te traigo, por las moscas - wait, I´ll bring it to you, because of the flies. The other day I helped keep the flies away while she squeezed the liquid out of the cheese she was making. And when she decided to get up from her nap in the hammock today, it was because of the flies.
Tortillas (originally written in my journal, 6-18)
We always eat tortillas with every meal. It doesn´t matter what it is: cheese and cream, french fries, chicken, and rice, guacamole, eggs, and beans, or boiled pipian a delicious squash-like vegetable, we always eat tortillas. Medium sized thick corn tortillas fresh and hot, tucked away tightly in a cloth inside the red plastic basket - because of the flies, and to keep them warm. Daisy told me she was going to teach me to make tortillas my first week, and Monday morning she was washing corn. One moment it was sitting drying and the next I noticed there was suddenly a mound of dough sitting on the mortar. I watched Daisy as she kneaded the dough and expertly broke off a small piece, rolled it back and forth, slapped it into a small patty, and began molding the dough with both hands like a small wheel of clay over and over in circles with small motions that have become second nature tortilla after tortilla week after week, year after year. As a fat thick circle forms, she begins slapping the edges quickly rotating the tortilla with one hand without even seeming to move it, continually slapping the tortilla with the other until it´s ready for the fire. Watching her deft movements, I knew I was going to suck at this, but I wanted to try anyway. I felt ridiculous because even after watching I really had no idea what to do with my hands. Daisy patiently shoed me how to pinch the tortilla with one hand while constantly turning it with the other. The slapping part though was much more difficult. My first two tortillas turned out well enough all things considered, but then the third one kept ripping and I must have started over seven times before Daisy asked me - ¿Qué pasó Betania, ya no puedes? - What happened, Bethany, you can´t do it anymore? and took the dough and felt it and said ya no sirve. Para el cabrito. It´s not useful anymore, we´ll give it to the goat and gave me a new lump of dough, with which I did so-so, and then she told me -ya has hecho dos o tres, ya otro día hagas más- You´ve already made two or three, another day you can make more. Relieved I went back to sitting and watching her hands ba-doom, ba-doom, from patty to thick circle, slap slap, from thick circle to tortilla.
Later in the week, when it came time to make tortillas again, Griselda came over and washed the corn and then together we went up the hill to the molinero, the grinder. A good walk up the hill a man has a motor powered machine with three different metal grinders. The whole area smelled of gasoline. We put the corn in the top, turning on the water spout above so water flowed in too, and it came out the bottom as dough and Griselda grabbed it off the wheel chunck by chunk and patted it down into the bottom of the big plastic basket. Back at the house, she and Marilu tried over and over to show me the motions of tortilla making, but they´ve been making tortillas since they were little girls. This time I lasted for at least ten tortillas at which point the dough was nearly gone, although they probably made three for every one of mine.
Plástico/Plastic
Everyone here just drops their trash where they´re standing. All over the yard, the street. There´s plastic all over the place, all over the driveway up to our house, all over the dry riverbeds that fill up when it rains. Back when the packaging for things wasn´t all plastic, it didn´t matter if people threw their trash all over the place because it would decompose, but with plastic it´s going to be around for years. It causes all sorts of contamination when it rains, etc. but a lot of people don´t know that. The thing is throwing trash äway¨in landfills like we doin the U.S. isn´t really a solution either, it´s a real problem for the environment as well, although maybe better than it just being all over the place. The real problem is with using plastic/not reusing things and just throwing them away, using materials like plastic and styrofoam for disposables, just the one time when they´re not going to decompose for thousands, perhaps millions of years.
Religión: Solo Dios, Aleluya
In my community in the campo in the DR, religion was like a loose garment, tightly woven but not close fitting. Everything happened si Dios quiere, and when the old man died they had a reso, a little liturgical service every afternoon, but few of the families went to church regularly. I know that some of the other people in my group had a very different experience, where they went to church three times a week, sometimes for three hours at a time, and that´s more what my family here is like. My birthday was on a Sunday so we went to church, which they also sometimes call the culto, at a Baptist church called Friends of Israel. Only about fifteen people were there. They sang a lot of praise songs kind of off key (I´m definitely missing the four part harmony) and had a sermon that I had a hard time staying awake during. When we went to church where Romero is buried, the homily was really interesting, very lib theo, but I can´t so much say that of this one. Also, since it was my birthday, they made me go stand up front while they all sang to me. Fortunately there was another girl w/ the same birthday, so I wasn´t alone.
We also have a culto in our yard on Mondays and Thursdays. They set up plastic chairs amidst the mango trees, an altar, and a microphone. They have a time where anyone can take a turn to go up and lead everyone in a song or share their testimony. The microphone is really crackly and they belt out the songs at the tops of their voices. The resulting sound is not the most pleasant, but it comes very sincerely from their hearts. Most of the songs are praising God, Jesus, and the holy spirit. One they sometimes sing is Solo Dios Hace al Hombre Feliz. The chorus goes Solo Dios hace al hombre feliz. La vida no es nada, todo se acaba, solo Dios hace al hombre feliz, or Only God can make man happy. Life is nothing, everything ends, only God can make man happy. Not exactly the sort of theology that I tend to believe in, but they all think it´s wonderful that I come to the culto with them. Every so often they´ll stop and pray. Usually a man leads the prayer, and his voice gets slowly louder and louder until he´s shouting about how wonderful God is, how blessed the day is, saying the people are in need and praising God. The pitch of the voice sounds like fire and brimstone, but not so much the words. The people respond to the songs and prayers and every few sentences of the sermons with cries of aleluya and amen.
Last Tuesday our neighbor Pati took me to visit her cuñada, or sister in law who makes pupusas and is also named Pati. When we got there Pati the sister in law asked me what religion I was. I said Menonita, she said what? and so I said Cristiana, and she immediately replied ¨Want to go to church?¨ Me: What? Now? Her: ¨Yeah let´s go.¨So I went to another church. We were up in central Piedra Azul, rather than El Chirrión, the lower part where I live. The church service had already started, but Pati took me right up to the front row, as if I didn´t already stick out like a sore thumb. As far as worship style, it was very similar to the culto with two people running the service and various people coming up to the front to lead songs. At one point they started singing a song and all of the women went up to stand in front. I didn´t know whether I should too or not. I didn´t know the song at all or what exactly was going on, but when the women went up, only about four or five people were still left sitting. I ended up being glad that I stayed sitting because then each of the women recited a Bible verse, one after another. The thing that was really nice about the service, that I really appreciated and that made me like the service better than any of the others that I´d been to was that every time someone would get up to sing they would say ¨Bienvenidos a nuestra hermana¨o ¨Bienvenidos a nuestra amiga¨ ¨Welcome to our friend¨or ¨Welcome to our sister¨in reference to me, which was really sweet. I started feeling like I should get up and say something in return, and then they got to a point where they were asking for more people to come forward and sing or share or whatever, and no one was coming, so I got up and said thank you for welcoming me and sang the one church song in Spanish that I know, ¨Tú has venido a la orilla.¨The fact that they never sing in tune made it much less intimidating, and on the chorus they all started singing along, which was really cool.
Griselda
Griselda lives nearby, basically next door and she come over almost every day to visit or to help Daisy with the chores, sweeping the yard or washing clothes, or even making tortillas before the delegation came. Marilu almost always comes with her. The two of them married a pair of brothers. Marilu, shy and quiet while Griselda talks and talks. Marilu, who doesn´t even know how to write her name, but who comes to all the community meetings, is going to get one of the chicken coop projects, and has a beautiful smile. One day she told me that when Judith/Ana and I talk in English, it´s like we´re not even talking and they just look at us with their mouths open. Well, sometimes it´s like that for us when people talk in Spanish, especially the old women without teeth. Griselda knows how to read really well. The other Saturday when we had the workshop on risk management, Guillermo had her help read the laws related to risk managment. She finished up to seventh grade in school. I suppose that´s a lot farther than many in the community, as there are many people, both men and women who can´t write more than the three letters that are their initials, which they use for their firma, or signature. Griselda with her tight brown shirt with a hole right over the lower part of her boob. Griselda with her open face and ready smile. Griselda is nineteen and she already has two children, one of whom is five years old and no longer lives with her, her daughter. Her son is ten months old and always sick. Sometimes she takes me over to her house to visit. She lives in one small room with a hammock outside and a couple of plastic chairs, one of them sewn together with twine at the top where it broke. We play soccer with an old ball. Neither she or the kids in the community can kick it very hard because they have bare feet and it stings like heck to kick it hard without shoes. Today when Griselda left Daisy said esa es pobrecita. Le doy aguacate, limón, ... por el niño.
Por las Moscas/Because of the Flies
Sometimes it seems like we do everything because of the flies. They are always on the table, laning on my arms, my legs. We have to watch each other´s food if someone gets up from the table for a moment, because of the flies. If I want to drink juice while I eat I need to remember to get it out of the fridge before I sit down to eat, so I don´t have to have someone watch my food or go get it for me while I sit and eat. Sometimes Daisy will ask me if I want fresco (what they call fresh juice) while I´m eating and she says, - Espera, yo te traigo, por las moscas - wait, I´ll bring it to you, because of the flies. The other day I helped keep the flies away while she squeezed the liquid out of the cheese she was making. And when she decided to get up from her nap in the hammock today, it was because of the flies.
Tortillas (originally written in my journal, 6-18)
We always eat tortillas with every meal. It doesn´t matter what it is: cheese and cream, french fries, chicken, and rice, guacamole, eggs, and beans, or boiled pipian a delicious squash-like vegetable, we always eat tortillas. Medium sized thick corn tortillas fresh and hot, tucked away tightly in a cloth inside the red plastic basket - because of the flies, and to keep them warm. Daisy told me she was going to teach me to make tortillas my first week, and Monday morning she was washing corn. One moment it was sitting drying and the next I noticed there was suddenly a mound of dough sitting on the mortar. I watched Daisy as she kneaded the dough and expertly broke off a small piece, rolled it back and forth, slapped it into a small patty, and began molding the dough with both hands like a small wheel of clay over and over in circles with small motions that have become second nature tortilla after tortilla week after week, year after year. As a fat thick circle forms, she begins slapping the edges quickly rotating the tortilla with one hand without even seeming to move it, continually slapping the tortilla with the other until it´s ready for the fire. Watching her deft movements, I knew I was going to suck at this, but I wanted to try anyway. I felt ridiculous because even after watching I really had no idea what to do with my hands. Daisy patiently shoed me how to pinch the tortilla with one hand while constantly turning it with the other. The slapping part though was much more difficult. My first two tortillas turned out well enough all things considered, but then the third one kept ripping and I must have started over seven times before Daisy asked me - ¿Qué pasó Betania, ya no puedes? - What happened, Bethany, you can´t do it anymore? and took the dough and felt it and said ya no sirve. Para el cabrito. It´s not useful anymore, we´ll give it to the goat and gave me a new lump of dough, with which I did so-so, and then she told me -ya has hecho dos o tres, ya otro día hagas más- You´ve already made two or three, another day you can make more. Relieved I went back to sitting and watching her hands ba-doom, ba-doom, from patty to thick circle, slap slap, from thick circle to tortilla.
Later in the week, when it came time to make tortillas again, Griselda came over and washed the corn and then together we went up the hill to the molinero, the grinder. A good walk up the hill a man has a motor powered machine with three different metal grinders. The whole area smelled of gasoline. We put the corn in the top, turning on the water spout above so water flowed in too, and it came out the bottom as dough and Griselda grabbed it off the wheel chunck by chunk and patted it down into the bottom of the big plastic basket. Back at the house, she and Marilu tried over and over to show me the motions of tortilla making, but they´ve been making tortillas since they were little girls. This time I lasted for at least ten tortillas at which point the dough was nearly gone, although they probably made three for every one of mine.
Plástico/Plastic
Everyone here just drops their trash where they´re standing. All over the yard, the street. There´s plastic all over the place, all over the driveway up to our house, all over the dry riverbeds that fill up when it rains. Back when the packaging for things wasn´t all plastic, it didn´t matter if people threw their trash all over the place because it would decompose, but with plastic it´s going to be around for years. It causes all sorts of contamination when it rains, etc. but a lot of people don´t know that. The thing is throwing trash äway¨in landfills like we doin the U.S. isn´t really a solution either, it´s a real problem for the environment as well, although maybe better than it just being all over the place. The real problem is with using plastic/not reusing things and just throwing them away, using materials like plastic and styrofoam for disposables, just the one time when they´re not going to decompose for thousands, perhaps millions of years.
Religión: Solo Dios, Aleluya
In my community in the campo in the DR, religion was like a loose garment, tightly woven but not close fitting. Everything happened si Dios quiere, and when the old man died they had a reso, a little liturgical service every afternoon, but few of the families went to church regularly. I know that some of the other people in my group had a very different experience, where they went to church three times a week, sometimes for three hours at a time, and that´s more what my family here is like. My birthday was on a Sunday so we went to church, which they also sometimes call the culto, at a Baptist church called Friends of Israel. Only about fifteen people were there. They sang a lot of praise songs kind of off key (I´m definitely missing the four part harmony) and had a sermon that I had a hard time staying awake during. When we went to church where Romero is buried, the homily was really interesting, very lib theo, but I can´t so much say that of this one. Also, since it was my birthday, they made me go stand up front while they all sang to me. Fortunately there was another girl w/ the same birthday, so I wasn´t alone.
We also have a culto in our yard on Mondays and Thursdays. They set up plastic chairs amidst the mango trees, an altar, and a microphone. They have a time where anyone can take a turn to go up and lead everyone in a song or share their testimony. The microphone is really crackly and they belt out the songs at the tops of their voices. The resulting sound is not the most pleasant, but it comes very sincerely from their hearts. Most of the songs are praising God, Jesus, and the holy spirit. One they sometimes sing is Solo Dios Hace al Hombre Feliz. The chorus goes Solo Dios hace al hombre feliz. La vida no es nada, todo se acaba, solo Dios hace al hombre feliz, or Only God can make man happy. Life is nothing, everything ends, only God can make man happy. Not exactly the sort of theology that I tend to believe in, but they all think it´s wonderful that I come to the culto with them. Every so often they´ll stop and pray. Usually a man leads the prayer, and his voice gets slowly louder and louder until he´s shouting about how wonderful God is, how blessed the day is, saying the people are in need and praising God. The pitch of the voice sounds like fire and brimstone, but not so much the words. The people respond to the songs and prayers and every few sentences of the sermons with cries of aleluya and amen.
Last Tuesday our neighbor Pati took me to visit her cuñada, or sister in law who makes pupusas and is also named Pati. When we got there Pati the sister in law asked me what religion I was. I said Menonita, she said what? and so I said Cristiana, and she immediately replied ¨Want to go to church?¨ Me: What? Now? Her: ¨Yeah let´s go.¨So I went to another church. We were up in central Piedra Azul, rather than El Chirrión, the lower part where I live. The church service had already started, but Pati took me right up to the front row, as if I didn´t already stick out like a sore thumb. As far as worship style, it was very similar to the culto with two people running the service and various people coming up to the front to lead songs. At one point they started singing a song and all of the women went up to stand in front. I didn´t know whether I should too or not. I didn´t know the song at all or what exactly was going on, but when the women went up, only about four or five people were still left sitting. I ended up being glad that I stayed sitting because then each of the women recited a Bible verse, one after another. The thing that was really nice about the service, that I really appreciated and that made me like the service better than any of the others that I´d been to was that every time someone would get up to sing they would say ¨Bienvenidos a nuestra hermana¨o ¨Bienvenidos a nuestra amiga¨ ¨Welcome to our friend¨or ¨Welcome to our sister¨in reference to me, which was really sweet. I started feeling like I should get up and say something in return, and then they got to a point where they were asking for more people to come forward and sing or share or whatever, and no one was coming, so I got up and said thank you for welcoming me and sang the one church song in Spanish that I know, ¨Tú has venido a la orilla.¨The fact that they never sing in tune made it much less intimidating, and on the chorus they all started singing along, which was really cool.
viernes, 29 de junio de 2007
And the Glass Shatters
Amanda, Judith, and I have been back in San Salvador for a couple of days, which has been fun because we´ve had some time to be able to relax and share stories. Last night we watched Life as a House, which is really intense, but a really good movie. The CRISPAZ office has a little t.v. and vcr upstairs.
Well it´s been a rough afternoon. I have to switch host families/communities because of some sexual harassment from my host dad that I experienced at the beginning of the homestay. I was pretty clear that it wasn´t okay and I don´t think that he would try anything again but CRISPAZ doesn´t want me to have to be around him anymore. Anyhow it´s going to be really awkward and difficult because I was starting to get to know a variety of people in my community and I really like my host mom and her daughter´s family is really sweet. I spent the night at their house a couple of times and went to the beach with them. So everything´s sort of up in the air right now and I don´t know what´s going to happen and it´s hard. But we´ll see. I still have a lot that I want to write about my community that I never got around to, so I´ll probably write another post about my community later tonight.
Well it´s been a rough afternoon. I have to switch host families/communities because of some sexual harassment from my host dad that I experienced at the beginning of the homestay. I was pretty clear that it wasn´t okay and I don´t think that he would try anything again but CRISPAZ doesn´t want me to have to be around him anymore. Anyhow it´s going to be really awkward and difficult because I was starting to get to know a variety of people in my community and I really like my host mom and her daughter´s family is really sweet. I spent the night at their house a couple of times and went to the beach with them. So everything´s sort of up in the air right now and I don´t know what´s going to happen and it´s hard. But we´ll see. I still have a lot that I want to write about my community that I never got around to, so I´ll probably write another post about my community later tonight.
lunes, 25 de junio de 2007
Erosion in the living room
Saludos a todos!
Well I know it´s been a while since I wrote. I don´t necessarily get into the office at OIKOS very often. I live half an hour away from it, so on days that OIKOS has meetings in Piedra Azul, then they´ll bring me back to the office for the afternoon, but that only happened once last week and we weren´t in the office for very long because in the afternoon we went to the school in El Chirrión, Piedra Azul to give a puppet show. Well Judith and I just helped set up and then watched the show with the kids, which was absolutely marvelous. It combined kids´ songs, environmental protection/soil conservations, being ready for natural disasters (the show centered around the volcano Chapaparastique which we live close to) and even women´s rights in a really fun enjoyable manner. The two puppeteers were great with creating different voices and characters, both people and animals.
On days that I don´t go in to OIKOS I´m mostly just around the house/yard. We mostly just go in the house at night an spend the rest of the day outside. In the mornings I feed the fish and (sometimes) let the hens out of their cage. I help my host mom sweep the yard and I wash a couple pieces of clothing in the pila, or cement sink structure which is used for basically everything, washing food, dishes, clothes, hands, etc. Every morning my host mom sweeps the whole entire clearing in front of the house and around the pila and behind the kitchen. She sweeps away the leaves, chicken poop, and anything anyone may have discarded in the yard from plastic to seeds, and sweeps it all off to the side, to designated trash piles/unswept areas, raising clouds of dust. I can only imagine what kind of erosion it causes to be sweeping the dirt all the time, but that´s how they make things presentable, how they tidy up, like vaccuming the living room. And well, it´s the area we stay all day in and where people come to visit.
During the day day I help my mom make tortillas - I´m slowly learning how, or accompany Carlos as he takes the cows out to the field, or lay in the hammock and read. Lots of ppl often come to visit. A couple times I´ve gone to spend the night @ Daisy´s daughter´s house.
Well more later.... right now I think Judith and I are going to go for a walk in El Tránsito.
Well I know it´s been a while since I wrote. I don´t necessarily get into the office at OIKOS very often. I live half an hour away from it, so on days that OIKOS has meetings in Piedra Azul, then they´ll bring me back to the office for the afternoon, but that only happened once last week and we weren´t in the office for very long because in the afternoon we went to the school in El Chirrión, Piedra Azul to give a puppet show. Well Judith and I just helped set up and then watched the show with the kids, which was absolutely marvelous. It combined kids´ songs, environmental protection/soil conservations, being ready for natural disasters (the show centered around the volcano Chapaparastique which we live close to) and even women´s rights in a really fun enjoyable manner. The two puppeteers were great with creating different voices and characters, both people and animals.
On days that I don´t go in to OIKOS I´m mostly just around the house/yard. We mostly just go in the house at night an spend the rest of the day outside. In the mornings I feed the fish and (sometimes) let the hens out of their cage. I help my host mom sweep the yard and I wash a couple pieces of clothing in the pila, or cement sink structure which is used for basically everything, washing food, dishes, clothes, hands, etc. Every morning my host mom sweeps the whole entire clearing in front of the house and around the pila and behind the kitchen. She sweeps away the leaves, chicken poop, and anything anyone may have discarded in the yard from plastic to seeds, and sweeps it all off to the side, to designated trash piles/unswept areas, raising clouds of dust. I can only imagine what kind of erosion it causes to be sweeping the dirt all the time, but that´s how they make things presentable, how they tidy up, like vaccuming the living room. And well, it´s the area we stay all day in and where people come to visit.
During the day day I help my mom make tortillas - I´m slowly learning how, or accompany Carlos as he takes the cows out to the field, or lay in the hammock and read. Lots of ppl often come to visit. A couple times I´ve gone to spend the night @ Daisy´s daughter´s house.
Well more later.... right now I think Judith and I are going to go for a walk in El Tránsito.
viernes, 15 de junio de 2007
The Garden of Eden is Guarded by Dogs @ Night
Bueno. Aquí estoy en la oficina de OIKOS. Yesterday I arrived in Piedra Azul, a rural community in Usulután. First Tedde and Sally took Judith and I to OIKOS to meet the people there and find out what we´ll be doing. It seems we´ll be helping with various projects in my community, from one where the women will be planting fruit trees in their yards, to a chicken raising project and various others. We´ll also be helping with workshops on disaster prevention and control in various communities and in the schools in my community.
Afterwards we took Judith to her family - her mom could talk the hind leg off a donkey and ¡que rápido! and they have un montón de hammocks and then we went to my home in Piedra Azul. I swear it´s like the Garden of Eden there, even if it is ridiculously hot y hay un montón de zancudos (mosquitos). My host parents own a fair bit of land and they have all sorts of mango, avocado and coconut trees as well as a ton of other plants - corn, papaya, pineapple, stuff that´s like alfalfa, and a ton of stuff I´d never even heard of before. My host parents are really friendly, especially my Papá, Carlos. He showed me all around their land this morning telling me the names of all sorts of different plants, more than I could ever remember and what they´re used for, from insecticide to herbacide, to medicine, to food for animals and food for people. He also showed me how he lets out the chickens in the morning and feeds the fish. That´s right, they have a couple of rectangular cement structures filled with water where they raise fish. They also have goats, cows, turkeys, and guinea fowl. Tedde seemed to think turkeys are gross/ugly. I think they´re the funniest thing ever. In my community in the DR there was a flock of them and the kids would chase after them and clap and the whole lot of them would gobble all at the same time.
My host mom´s name is Daisy. She´s an excellent cook and she makes cheese from their cow´s milk and she´s going to show me how to make it :D She made me some delicious mango juice this morning, and they have a bucket full of mangos that I can help myself to whenever. It kind of blows my mind.
Their kids are grown already and they have seven grandkids, one of whom was visiting last night and will be here until tomorrow. Apparently she comes to visit often. Her name is Eva Marina (Almost like Eva María in the popular Bachata song) and she´s two, small, absolutely adorable, with large eyes and a mind of her own. She was really shy at first and would only stare at me, finger in mouth, or run and hide, but quickly enough she started playing and chattering. Her favorite thing seems to be following around her grandpa, whom she calls Papá Carlos. He always calls her Corazón. Ven aquí Corazón.
Yesterday afternoon my host dad´s sister and brother-in-law were visiting. He laughed when he heard I was majoring in Peace, Justice, and Conflict Studies and said aquí no hay ni paz ni justicia. He could care less for Bush and Reagan, although they seemed to think Carter and Clinton were okay. A neighbor girl who´s nineteen and has two children came over to visit. They told her not to have any more kids at least till she´s older so that she can take care of the ones she has. Her little boy had an engorged stomache, and my host dad´s sister is a nurse and she told her all sorts of things to do.
For dinner last night we had rice, beans, cheese, tortillas, and whole cooked fish. It was all quite good. They asked before giving me fish. I´ve had whole cooked fish before and well I like fish and I don´t really mind if the head´s still attached so long as it´s well cooked. In fact I prefer it to breaded and fried fish stick style fish.
My host parents typically go to bed around nine, nine-thirty and get up around five, five-thirty. I did´n´t get up until nearly seven today, but I imagine I´ll adjust little be little. Judith and I have gotten up to go running at 5:30 a couple of times this week, so... It gets dark here around 7, 7:30 and it´s plenty bright by 5:30.
I have my own room with a hammock, which is really nice. There´s also a treddle sewing machine in my room. The door to both of the bedrooms and the outhouse is a curtain. The one unfortunate thing is that I have to let my parents know if I´m going to the bathroom at night and one of them has to walk over to the outhouse with me, because they have several dogs, and if one of them doesn´t go with me the dogs will start barking, even growling. So last night of course I had to go pee really badly in the middle of the night, so I had to wake up my host mom. Well they both woke up but my host mom came with me. They wanted to know if something was bothering my stomach, but no I just had to go pee really bad. I found it all rather mortifying. I hate asking people for things, and it took me a while to gather the courage to wake her up, but well I really had to pee, so...
This morning after the grand tour of the grounds, we went to a meeting at the next door neighbor´s, donde Patti, where Carlos, who is a leader in the community, and Hector who works with Oikos spoke about the chicken project to a group of women who had gathered donde Patti. Afterwards I came here to the Oikos office, where Guillermo talked to Judith and I about the schedule for the next couple of months. Next week we get to help with a puppet show in a couple of the schools. He also gave us various booklets to read about disaster prevention and control and planning fincas, which the women in Piedra Azul will be doing. We read over various power point presentations that they use as a basis for their workshops and we ate lunch nearby. Judith headed for home, and I´m waiting for Guillermo to be able to take me back to my house and aprovechando el tiempo para escribir este blog entry.
Last night there was something in the news about thirty immigrants in Oregon getting released to return to their homes and my host Dad got really excited and gave me a high hive. ¡Oregón! He thinks that those who come and work hard should be given their place. Dice que los ladrones claro que no pero la gente que es trabajosa...
Well this´ll probably be my last update for several days as tomorrow we´ll be doing a workshop in my community and I won´t be coming into the office then or at all until at least Tuesday. Hasta luego, que nos vamos ahora.
Afterwards we took Judith to her family - her mom could talk the hind leg off a donkey and ¡que rápido! and they have un montón de hammocks and then we went to my home in Piedra Azul. I swear it´s like the Garden of Eden there, even if it is ridiculously hot y hay un montón de zancudos (mosquitos). My host parents own a fair bit of land and they have all sorts of mango, avocado and coconut trees as well as a ton of other plants - corn, papaya, pineapple, stuff that´s like alfalfa, and a ton of stuff I´d never even heard of before. My host parents are really friendly, especially my Papá, Carlos. He showed me all around their land this morning telling me the names of all sorts of different plants, more than I could ever remember and what they´re used for, from insecticide to herbacide, to medicine, to food for animals and food for people. He also showed me how he lets out the chickens in the morning and feeds the fish. That´s right, they have a couple of rectangular cement structures filled with water where they raise fish. They also have goats, cows, turkeys, and guinea fowl. Tedde seemed to think turkeys are gross/ugly. I think they´re the funniest thing ever. In my community in the DR there was a flock of them and the kids would chase after them and clap and the whole lot of them would gobble all at the same time.
My host mom´s name is Daisy. She´s an excellent cook and she makes cheese from their cow´s milk and she´s going to show me how to make it :D She made me some delicious mango juice this morning, and they have a bucket full of mangos that I can help myself to whenever. It kind of blows my mind.
Their kids are grown already and they have seven grandkids, one of whom was visiting last night and will be here until tomorrow. Apparently she comes to visit often. Her name is Eva Marina (Almost like Eva María in the popular Bachata song) and she´s two, small, absolutely adorable, with large eyes and a mind of her own. She was really shy at first and would only stare at me, finger in mouth, or run and hide, but quickly enough she started playing and chattering. Her favorite thing seems to be following around her grandpa, whom she calls Papá Carlos. He always calls her Corazón. Ven aquí Corazón.
Yesterday afternoon my host dad´s sister and brother-in-law were visiting. He laughed when he heard I was majoring in Peace, Justice, and Conflict Studies and said aquí no hay ni paz ni justicia. He could care less for Bush and Reagan, although they seemed to think Carter and Clinton were okay. A neighbor girl who´s nineteen and has two children came over to visit. They told her not to have any more kids at least till she´s older so that she can take care of the ones she has. Her little boy had an engorged stomache, and my host dad´s sister is a nurse and she told her all sorts of things to do.
For dinner last night we had rice, beans, cheese, tortillas, and whole cooked fish. It was all quite good. They asked before giving me fish. I´ve had whole cooked fish before and well I like fish and I don´t really mind if the head´s still attached so long as it´s well cooked. In fact I prefer it to breaded and fried fish stick style fish.
My host parents typically go to bed around nine, nine-thirty and get up around five, five-thirty. I did´n´t get up until nearly seven today, but I imagine I´ll adjust little be little. Judith and I have gotten up to go running at 5:30 a couple of times this week, so... It gets dark here around 7, 7:30 and it´s plenty bright by 5:30.
I have my own room with a hammock, which is really nice. There´s also a treddle sewing machine in my room. The door to both of the bedrooms and the outhouse is a curtain. The one unfortunate thing is that I have to let my parents know if I´m going to the bathroom at night and one of them has to walk over to the outhouse with me, because they have several dogs, and if one of them doesn´t go with me the dogs will start barking, even growling. So last night of course I had to go pee really badly in the middle of the night, so I had to wake up my host mom. Well they both woke up but my host mom came with me. They wanted to know if something was bothering my stomach, but no I just had to go pee really bad. I found it all rather mortifying. I hate asking people for things, and it took me a while to gather the courage to wake her up, but well I really had to pee, so...
This morning after the grand tour of the grounds, we went to a meeting at the next door neighbor´s, donde Patti, where Carlos, who is a leader in the community, and Hector who works with Oikos spoke about the chicken project to a group of women who had gathered donde Patti. Afterwards I came here to the Oikos office, where Guillermo talked to Judith and I about the schedule for the next couple of months. Next week we get to help with a puppet show in a couple of the schools. He also gave us various booklets to read about disaster prevention and control and planning fincas, which the women in Piedra Azul will be doing. We read over various power point presentations that they use as a basis for their workshops and we ate lunch nearby. Judith headed for home, and I´m waiting for Guillermo to be able to take me back to my house and aprovechando el tiempo para escribir este blog entry.
Last night there was something in the news about thirty immigrants in Oregon getting released to return to their homes and my host Dad got really excited and gave me a high hive. ¡Oregón! He thinks that those who come and work hard should be given their place. Dice que los ladrones claro que no pero la gente que es trabajosa...
Well this´ll probably be my last update for several days as tomorrow we´ll be doing a workshop in my community and I won´t be coming into the office then or at all until at least Tuesday. Hasta luego, que nos vamos ahora.
miércoles, 13 de junio de 2007
Off to the campo!!
Well today we dropped Amanda and Matt off at their communities where they´ll be living and working and tomorrow Judith and I will go. I don´t really know exactly how much internet access I´ll have once I´m there so I may not update for a while, other than that I may add another entry in the morning before heading out as I am currently exhausted. I´ll be working within my community, Piedra Azul on a project that OIKOS is working on in my community, supposedly related to environmental education. I´m not sure what it´ll be like, but I´m really excited to be there and to be living with a Salvadoran family. Y comoquiera será una aventura. Siempre es una aventura.
lunes, 11 de junio de 2007
Ay ay ay
It seems the time is going by so fast already. The days are beginning to blur together. I think I´ll pick up where I left off and try to share highlights. Following the water talk, we went to hear about the political and social situation in El Salvador. While there are no longer masacres and the people can walk through the streets and vote for who they want to without worrying, there´s still a lot of poverty and inequity and a feeling that the government is selling the country to foreigners through privatization, free trade zones/maquilas and dollarization. El Salvador no longer uses its own currency, Colones. Now El Salvador uses dollars. The only other two countries in Latin America that do this are Ecuador and Panama, which each have better reasons for being dollarized, as Ecuador has an oil based economy and Panama is an essential trading port w/ the canal. In Apparently there´s a new anti-terrorist law similar to the U.S. Patriot Act. It allows U.S. business person to come over with diplomatic liscences.
Last Wednesday for dinner we went to a pupusería. Pupusas supposedly originated in Honduras, according to Michael, but they´re very common in El Salvador, as well as Nicaragua. Like tortillas, pupusas are made with ground corn, and shaped into a small patty. To make this patty into a pupusa, one then adds cheese and/or beans or meat to the center and shapes the dough carefully around the cheese, etc. then pats it back out into a flat circles. The pupusería was in the gated front patio of a woman´s home. She was really sweet, and she let us each attempt to make a pupusa. Making pupusas is an art form, one that none of us had much talent for. Her pupusas looked beautiful, evenly distributed, round, flat. Ours were small and fat in the middle. They were all, however, absolutely delicious. All in all a delightful meal.
Thursday morning we went to a place that does popular education for a taller (workshop) on Salvadoran history. It reminded me a bit of being at one of our afternoon lectures during SST: five hundred years of history in an hour and a half :). They do some really awesome things @ the popular education center though. They had all sorts of books about free trade, globalization, Salvadoran history, etc. written in simple easy to understand terms with all sorts of illustrations. They also had pictures of Romero everywhere, as is common all over San Salvador. There are all sorts of murals and spray painted images of him everywhere. He´s still an example that brings everyone hope. When he was still alive he said that if he was killed, he would rise again in the Salvadoran people, and I really think he has.
Afterwards we went to a Christian Base Community on the outskirts of San Salvador, which was wonderful. They have a small building where they meet on Sundays for worship. A group prepares a creative liturgy for the service, which includes time for reflection and sharing. Everyone participates, from five year olds to the adult men. In their worship they always remember the martyrs and the massacres, remember the past and also the present situation and how they as Christians are living within this political and economic reality. They have all sorts of programs within the community, from guitar lessons, to making and selling artesanía, helping families with health care, education, and nutrition, participating in marches, and more. They´re open to everyone. They seemed really active and full of hope while constantly keeping in mind the past and present situation.
Bueno, escribiré más luego.
Last Wednesday for dinner we went to a pupusería. Pupusas supposedly originated in Honduras, according to Michael, but they´re very common in El Salvador, as well as Nicaragua. Like tortillas, pupusas are made with ground corn, and shaped into a small patty. To make this patty into a pupusa, one then adds cheese and/or beans or meat to the center and shapes the dough carefully around the cheese, etc. then pats it back out into a flat circles. The pupusería was in the gated front patio of a woman´s home. She was really sweet, and she let us each attempt to make a pupusa. Making pupusas is an art form, one that none of us had much talent for. Her pupusas looked beautiful, evenly distributed, round, flat. Ours were small and fat in the middle. They were all, however, absolutely delicious. All in all a delightful meal.
Thursday morning we went to a place that does popular education for a taller (workshop) on Salvadoran history. It reminded me a bit of being at one of our afternoon lectures during SST: five hundred years of history in an hour and a half :). They do some really awesome things @ the popular education center though. They had all sorts of books about free trade, globalization, Salvadoran history, etc. written in simple easy to understand terms with all sorts of illustrations. They also had pictures of Romero everywhere, as is common all over San Salvador. There are all sorts of murals and spray painted images of him everywhere. He´s still an example that brings everyone hope. When he was still alive he said that if he was killed, he would rise again in the Salvadoran people, and I really think he has.
Afterwards we went to a Christian Base Community on the outskirts of San Salvador, which was wonderful. They have a small building where they meet on Sundays for worship. A group prepares a creative liturgy for the service, which includes time for reflection and sharing. Everyone participates, from five year olds to the adult men. In their worship they always remember the martyrs and the massacres, remember the past and also the present situation and how they as Christians are living within this political and economic reality. They have all sorts of programs within the community, from guitar lessons, to making and selling artesanía, helping families with health care, education, and nutrition, participating in marches, and more. They´re open to everyone. They seemed really active and full of hope while constantly keeping in mind the past and present situation.
Bueno, escribiré más luego.
viernes, 8 de junio de 2007
¡Bienvenidos! My fourth night here in El Salvador has come already. The past three days have blown by in a whirlwind of meetings, lectures, long conversations both serious and sarcastic, card games, jokes, mosquito bites, Spanish both slow and fast... I arrived at the San Salvador airport two nights ago. The heat hit as soon as I got into the airport and the humidity began to cling to my skin soon after. I don´t remember it being quite so intense in the DR, maybe because my family in Santo Domingo lived on a bit of a hill and we got a nice breeze in our house and then I was in the mountains for the rest, or maybe I just don´t remember. I do remember it being like this in Nicaragua though. My flight got in early and I made it through immigrations and customs, or aduana, quickly. When I reached the airport, however, there wasn´t anyone there waiting for me, which it turns out was because my flight was early and I made it through customs quickly. In any case, I thought that someone was supposed to pick me up, but I wasn´t entirely certain, especially when most of the other arrivals and people gathered waiting cleared out. I had the address of the CRISPAZ office and my orientation packet said how much taxi fare from the airport to the office should be, so I decided to take a taxi. While I had supposedly flown into El Salvador, the airport was actually about a forty-five minute drive away. When I arrived at the CRISPAZ office, it was locked. The other SIPPIES were there, but they had instructions not to open the gate. After a phone call to one of the CRISPAZ staff, however, things got cleared up and the others let me in.
For the first week, we´re doing a mini-delegation which means we´ve been hearing lots of speakers and visiting various different places. On Wednesday we started off with a taller (workshop) on water privatization/the water crisis in El Salvador (Whitney, hope you´re reading this part), which was really quite incredible. The environmental destruction caused by the war has had a profound impact on water quality and access. Before coming I´d read that only 2% of the trees before the war were left standing afterwards, and our speaker confirmed that this was so. During the war, the guerrillas were often in mountainous, forested areas and one of the tactics the army used to combat them was to set the forest on fire, sending guerrillas, rabbits, and everything fleeing. As a result, there´s a significant amound of erosion and the soil has lost much of its capacity to absorb water. And the wood remaining continues to be logged because it is one of the natural resources Salvadorans still have, reduced and degraded though it may be.
While El Salvador receives three times the world-wide average rainfall, 89% of the rainfall is polluted. 58% of the population has access to water through the public water system, however they might only have access for an hour a day or once every three days. Maybe 2% of the population has access to water 24/7. So while the public water system doesn´t charge much, the people complain because the water doesn´t necessarily arrive. The fear with water privatization is that companies would charge more than people can afford for a vital resource that is quickly becoming scarce. Salvadoran rivers provide water for houses, for agriculture, and producing electricity, but there is an increacing tendency for permanent rivers to become rivers only in the winter and to dry up in the summer. Also, in San Salvador there are no water treatment plants whatsoever. People´s water in their houses comes from the River Lempa andafter being used goes directly to the River Acerguate (I think) which is (definitely) a tributary of the River Lempa. Yay for sewage in drinking water! In fact, there are only four water treatment plants in the country, and three of them are pilot projects and serve communities or villages, not cities. Many Salvadorans know little about the water cycle or how water becomes contaminated. I find this fascinating and devastating all at once. It´s something that things really could practically be done about, but like almost everything would take a lot of work and dedication and right now it´s something the government virtually ignores.
Well I´ll write a bit more later. There´s so much to tell/share, but I don´t want to put so much into one blog that it becomes overwhelming to read.
For the first week, we´re doing a mini-delegation which means we´ve been hearing lots of speakers and visiting various different places. On Wednesday we started off with a taller (workshop) on water privatization/the water crisis in El Salvador (Whitney, hope you´re reading this part), which was really quite incredible. The environmental destruction caused by the war has had a profound impact on water quality and access. Before coming I´d read that only 2% of the trees before the war were left standing afterwards, and our speaker confirmed that this was so. During the war, the guerrillas were often in mountainous, forested areas and one of the tactics the army used to combat them was to set the forest on fire, sending guerrillas, rabbits, and everything fleeing. As a result, there´s a significant amound of erosion and the soil has lost much of its capacity to absorb water. And the wood remaining continues to be logged because it is one of the natural resources Salvadorans still have, reduced and degraded though it may be.
While El Salvador receives three times the world-wide average rainfall, 89% of the rainfall is polluted. 58% of the population has access to water through the public water system, however they might only have access for an hour a day or once every three days. Maybe 2% of the population has access to water 24/7. So while the public water system doesn´t charge much, the people complain because the water doesn´t necessarily arrive. The fear with water privatization is that companies would charge more than people can afford for a vital resource that is quickly becoming scarce. Salvadoran rivers provide water for houses, for agriculture, and producing electricity, but there is an increacing tendency for permanent rivers to become rivers only in the winter and to dry up in the summer. Also, in San Salvador there are no water treatment plants whatsoever. People´s water in their houses comes from the River Lempa andafter being used goes directly to the River Acerguate (I think) which is (definitely) a tributary of the River Lempa. Yay for sewage in drinking water! In fact, there are only four water treatment plants in the country, and three of them are pilot projects and serve communities or villages, not cities. Many Salvadorans know little about the water cycle or how water becomes contaminated. I find this fascinating and devastating all at once. It´s something that things really could practically be done about, but like almost everything would take a lot of work and dedication and right now it´s something the government virtually ignores.
Well I´ll write a bit more later. There´s so much to tell/share, but I don´t want to put so much into one blog that it becomes overwhelming to read.
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