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.