A Better Update, This Time with More Eagle

Immediately after I complained briefly about the bus situation here and how I am tired of it, I of course had to go get on a bus to go back to my site. Barbara and I walked to the nearest bus stop and hopped on what we affectionately call one of the “chicken buses”. The idea being that between major cities there are two types of buses; “especiales” which have A/C, nice seats, a movie and a finite passenger limit, and the “chicken buses” with the cramped seats, people standing in aisles, bad transmissions and all manner of whatever anyone wants to carry on the bus and swing in your face, including of course chickens. (Here I should add that on the previous bus I had a bag of chicken swung inches from my face, and if I ever doubted that there was such a thing as a plastic bag full of live chickens, I don’t doubt it now.) It looked like we were in for a good ride, the bus was fairly empty and we each got our own seat and window. Well a few minutes into the ride just after getting on the major highway towards Sonsonate I spotted a car stopped in our lane. Our bus driver put on the breaks but not quite hard enough, and at the end we sorta careened and came to a sudden stop behind the stopped minivan. Our sudden stop was immediately followed by one of those long drawn out sounds of tires screeching, the kind where you clench your teeth, shrug your shoulders and brace for the sound of metal colliding and glass breaking. Luckily there was no such sound. It was then that Barbara and I looked around and noticed we weren’t entirely in our own lane and traffic was creeping around us slowly and angrily and somewhere in the confusion the minivan in front of us had left and now we were the ones causing traffic. Barbara observed that the engine was off and the driver was attempting to start the bus with no success. More confusion ensued and words were shouted and before I knew it all the male passengers were getting up and getting out of the bus. They proceeded to push the bus backwards on the highway so the driver could pop the clutch in reverse and get us on our way. Success thankfully and the rest of our ride proceeded uneventfully, but with me secretly scared that we would stall again every time we had to stop to pick someone up or let someone off. I mean it is the habit of these buses to stop rather short, with or without reason, so it seemed we could stall again at any time.

I’m still in the process of meeting people in my town and getting privy to what is going on around here other than just what the team of social promoters is doing. People are slowly opening up to me and more willing to have substantial talks with me or introduce themselves, other than just the regular questions of “what are you doing here?”, “when are you going back to the US?” and “wow, can you really speak Spanish?”. It was finally admitted to me that there is an ADESCO in San Chico. Although I wasn’t exactly invited to the meeting that day, I have now met the president, introduced myself to a few members and asked to be notified so I can attend the next meeting. I also discovered that my town is in the process of starting up a new water project to increase our water services. We currently have running water, but not in the whole pueblo, and it shuts off for at least a few hours every day. This project sounds fairly promising and I hope it goes off without a hitch. I am worried that if we need a lot of funding it may be turned down in view of the fact that there are plenty of communities here that need water more desperately than m pueblo. I have introduced myself to the water committee and look forward to their next meeting with the mayor. I am happy that I am finally getting into projects in my community and not just other parts of the municipality.

I am actually a little surprised at how well I am getting along with people in my community and meeting more people considering lots of little things. October has been relatively filled with events and reasons to take off for the weekends or for a day here and there. Between a communal birthday celebration at a beach, my getting a GI infection, a soccer game and a Halloween celebration, I have spent a good deal of time on the weekends away from my town, but I am managing to get more contact in this month than in the previous. I suppose I am just not running around as much with the promoters and the short emergency that took everyone out of my office gave me plenty of time to just sit around and talk to people. I have been developing what is known in Peace Corps circles as “site guilt”, which means I feel bad for spending so much time out of my site. But I have been arranging my calendar and it looks like I’ll be spending much more time in my site this month and the few things I have planned are getting more into my work than some of the stuff I had been doing before.

Rushing

I am rushing through the capital right now on the way back to my site from a Halloween Party. It was fun, and it was random. I couldn't decide on a costume so I went the random route and bought the funniest things I could find as a costume. I don't really wanna describe it, but it was about as random as Stephen who went in a Moo-Moo and shaved his hair into a mohawk. Hopefully there will be pictures to come, then you can see for yourselves.

I wanted to do a little ranting for once. I haven't really gotten a good rant in here on this blog yet. I am frustrated right now about a few things and I'll keep each brief. First my flash drive died, so my best source of getting info from my computer to the rest of the world has gone caput. I don't know what happened, but it won't show up on any computers any more or disk utilities. Also I am getting a little tired of the buses. I know I've been fed up with them before, but moreso now that they aren't a necessary evil for training and I use them at my choice. They suck, they are crowded, I stepped in some vomit on one the other day, and they have the tiniest seats. Seriously it is like they bought an extra set of seats and put them in between seats, and not only that, they stretched one side a bit to have a hand at the farce of trying to get three people into one seat with nowhere to put their knees. And can the rain stop already, the rainy season is supposed end in October, I didn't know they meant on the 31st. Seriously this month has been the hardest, most intense rain.

Ok thats enough ranting for now. Gotta run.

The Week In Review

Thank you to everyone who wished me a happy birthday. It has been hard to make or receive calls in my site due to mysterious cell issues. I don't believe it is my phone, since I tried on multiple phones and the outcome seems the same, choppy and screwy sounds and sometimes no sound at all. So if you tried to talk to me I am sorry, I think Tigo is doing something to the cells in my area.

The week started well, with a cool meeting for a human rights group aimed at forming a network to investigate, educate about and combat human rights violations. This is not directed at illegal border crossing even though it sounds like it, it is directed at violations perpetrated against the will of the victim, unlike border crossing which often violates human rights, but the victims choose to proceed of their own free will. Either way, this sounds like a promising project, and they insist on having me take on a position in the committee eventhough I told them that I shouldn't really take one on besides support and advice. We'll see as time comes, but I am happy to be a part of it and look forward to spreading info about this if it turns out well.

For the day before my birthday I was in the capital for medical and wound up spending the night. Randomly one of my pals showed up, so we grabbed a few beers at the hostel that night. That was pretty much the extent of my celebrating.

Only a few people in my town knew it was my birthday. There was talk of slaughtering a goat for the occasion, but that didn't happen and I don't think I am too broken up about it. I had planned to hang out a bit, but that day a river overflowed in Cara Sucia and washed away a few houses causing the mayor to declare an emergency situation. That took everyone away from my town and left me to spend the evening relaxing in my hammock. Wasn't a bad birthday, but a relatively lonely one.

Saturday I met up with lots of volunteers for the monthly soccer game. (Each month it is at someone elses site.) We played hard and had a great turnout, but we still got our tails whipped. We did score though, and so it wasn't a complete loss. Besides we spent the night in a huge house on a gorgeous lake in Santa Ana, which reminded me of either Tahoe or Matt's lake house in Washington.

I told you so

Just so my mom finally believes us I now present photographic proof that the new landcruiser is the same as the lexus vehicle. Not that I would doubt it after having ridden in them many times here, but a photo is worth me saying it a 1000 times.


by cslom


by cslom

Nothing of Importance

I don't have anything planned to write about this time. I am just spending some time in Sonsonate downloading a few things onto my flash drive to take back to my own house and computer so I figured an update was due.

I just got back from a few days respite in the East with a few of my buddies from my training group. We hit up Playa El Cuco for 3 days and I got quite burned. The beach was beautiful though, and if you didn't notice all the thatch roofed buildings with huge patios, I'd say the beach reminded me a lot of the beaches in LA. The similarity was slim though, considering the warm water and the salvadorans everywhere. Either way it was a good time, and since I saw Whitney, now I can look forward to my mayor asking a million questions about her. Somehow he is in love with her (as most Salvadorans are) without ever having met her, he only saw her for a few minutes at swearing in and in my photos.

I am also looking forward to the coming week. I have a cool conference coming up on Tudesday regarding creating a forum to help stop people smuggling, indentured servitude and other forms of human rights violations in my communities. I think that should be good and I am happy it is partially being government sponsored. Also coming up is a soccer game on Saturday, which I am looking forward to because I jost got my PCV uniform and was given a pair of cleats, so I want to break those all in and make a fool of myself playing against salvadorans. And most importantly my birthday is coming up this week. Such a good week!

Also I am trying to get my photo site thing worked out. I started a webshots gallery, and when I look at it I have two albums and some other photos, check it out using the link on the right and if it isn't working please leave a comment for me. I want to be able to share my photos with everyone, but there don't seem to be lots of sites that meet my criteria for photo sharing.

Holiday Reflections

The High Holidays have always been at once some of my favorite holidays of the year and some of my most dreaded. Dreaded for obvious reasons, those long services, getting really dressed up, no eating, you know, the works. Those are all minor discomforts though, and I've borne them happily for years because I know that the holidays mean so much more than just wearing a suit and sitting for hours. It took me years to actually listen to what was going on in services, and in actuality that isn't really enough since its in Hebrew and I don't speak the language. So I started to read that translations and actually pay attention to the sermon. I like the spirit of the holidays and although I don't buy 100% of all the g-d stuff, I agree in spirit. That has been my feeling for years and it still is my feeling.

Spending the Holidays in El Salvador has given me a refreshing look at my take on the Holidays. I still feel much the same way, that I agree with the spiriet of the Holidays and I find that they have a powerful message. What could be more important than celebrating the fact that you have survived another year, hoping for it to be a sweet year and taking all due precaution to make a fresh start and make up for whatever may have gone wrong the year before. That has all that much more meaning when you find yourself in a new country, with a semi-new language and very few people that you know or can rely on. While trying to make out as much of the sermon as I could because it was in Spanish, I got to thinking about jewish values in general and how i was making as good a start to a year as I think I have ever made.

First and foremost, as jews we grow up in a particularly odd state of being taught to read and write hebrew, but not to understand it. That translates directly to prayer, we can read and write it, but not understand what is coming from our mouths, or furthermore the pages. We are left to either carry out the motions or dig and ask for meanings. Our understanding of the actual prayers hinges on our language skills outside of hebrew, and I always thought that in part we continues using hebrew in order to make prayer semi-universal. We are not taught the torah as we should be, but rather prayers for our bar/bat mitzvahs, and so we are left with a void of knowledge in terms of what the stories actually mean. We are taught concepts of jewish life, but not where they come from or how we should expect to look for them in everyday life. One such concept is Tikun Olam, we all know it means "heal the world", but really we learn to associate it with donating some food or clothes to a communal box or putting some change in a box.

I sat in the temple in San Salvador thinking about that concept. Tikun Olam took on the basic meaning that I described before when I was a child. When I was in high school and going to jewish camp every summer it had a slightly larger importance when i actually endeavored to do some community service through school and camp, but rarely more than was required, and only more than was required when it was with friends and really fun. In college Tikun Olam and Community Service started to play a more active role in my life because Community Service was one of the values of my (jewish) fraternity. As such I had to actually plan and encourage others to go about doing doing Community Service for the first time in my life. Didn't seem like much then, and in truth it wasn't much, because we really didn't succeed in any large projects, but we tried. Up until that poing Tikun Olam and Community Service were one and the same. That is to say, they were sometime activities to be planned and executed, but not a value I was living every day of my life. Because after all, aren't values something you live with? Shouldn't you be practicing your values?

So it finally dawned on me that though I live in a country now where the Star of David and the Menorah are taken as Evangelical signs and the people here haven't the slightest clue what a Jew is, I am actually living closer to at least one of my Jewish values than I ever have in my life and learning first-hand what it actually means to heal the world. Afterall, the world is a big place, much larger than the US or Israel, which is where most mone and goods that jews generally give through the temple go. And more than that, I am discovering that I am learning more about my values than just Tikun Olam, humility, sharing and perseverance come to play daily.

Sometimes you find out about the things you learned and are told to practice when you are farthest from the places where that is most easily done. After all, what is more important to me, the fact that I didn't go to temple on Yom Kippur (but still fasted) or that I thought about things and discovered I am doing ok?