The Other 6 Months

I know I already had a post titled 6 Months, but this one is actually more meaningful, though the other one seemed really cool and important at the time. This time I have actually been in my site, that means actually working in my community for 6 months. Which also means that I am 1/4 done with my Peace Corps service. Crazy Stuff I know.

On the work side of things my Municipio has become the first in the country to create a municipal secretariat of women's affairs. I will be doing some behind the scenes work for this movement since the three people in charge of it want some assistance in designing a schedule and looking for groups to provide the trainings and workshops they hope to bring to our area. I have several ideas, but I will need to see some of the diagnostics that were done at the first meeting before really getting my feet wet.



It is all very exciting, but as a man it is hard to be completely on the inside of this thing. It is also hard to be publicly proud about this seeing as how El Salvador works, but I'm behind it and secretly proud.

Time still seems to be cruising by at an insanely fast pace, especially since I got Kaya. I just realised it has been over a month since I got her and a sudden change of scenery yesterday made me realize how big she has gotten. Photos can't seem to capture the change as I examined them as closely as I could, but at least I can't see it. Maybe someone else can. I updated photos of her in my gallery as well as some stuff of my community. Click my webshots link on the right if you haven't for a while.

You Can't Go Back

Just to mix it up and not combine seperate thoughts, this is a completely different post.

For some time now I've been having little day dreams and very vivid actual dreams of Meadow Oaks Camp. Yeah yeah, I know that was like forever ago, but the kicker is I am 100% sure it is some sort of mental trigger for the delights of my childhood. I mean I have these very vivid sort of daydreams and whatnot of places and things that used to happen there, specifically the camp part not the school, which I have all but forgotten about.

I often dream I am paddling a boat around on Secret Lake and Greg (the counselor) is rushing up to turn on the sprinkler under the bridge to soak me before I go through. Or perhaps I am imagining swinging on the rope swing and splashing into Secret Lake, which few people used to do because there were rumors it was full of sewage water. I felt in on some secret as a school goer because I used to see it filled with fresh water near the end of the school year and know they cleaned it, although it acted as a bus parking lot a good portion of the time.

Secret Lake was the site of my first meeting with long time school companion Geoff Plitt and the site of my permanent image of him. He was a chubby kid in my group, a little older than me, wearing a Home Depot painting hat with pride and basically flaunting the dork he would become. He always wore who he was with pride, and I look back on it remembering how torn I was over that hat. I hated it, but secretly I liked it and I wanted into the dork club. Well I got in eventually.

I also vividly remember nearly every turn of the water slide, climbing up, sliding down, the changing rooms, the mysterious ticket booth that sat nearby, and sitting in the shade playing geeky dice games. I was a self proclaimed king of the slide, going down as fast as I was capable and skimming the water in the pool all the way to the steps. Ah good times.

There was the pool, where I used to pretend I couldn't swim. Unless of course I was going down the small slide or jumping off the diving board.

There were the jerks that stole my very first G-Shock watch and used to come to camp with Jack in the Box twisty fries every day.

The Snack Shack and the Slim Jims it sold.

That waft of horse dung as you walked to the lame little horse area. Which also happened to be where I mischievously locked my cousin Daniel in a latrine and shook it trying to tip it over.

Moto and getting my "liscense". In retrospect those undersized quads aren't nearly as cool, but hey, they were close to the mini golf course.

Right, the good ole days. The point is that is all gone now. Its gone, caput, over and done with. Nobody else will ever learn those secrets and have those memories because they are gone, making way for the expansion of Viewpoint School. I went to Viewpoint too, but it wasn't the same, that was school, Meadow Oaks was always more of a camp with long school times thrown in to me. I secretly never wanted that buyout to happen years ago because I knew that it eventually meant Meadow Oaks would slowly disappear. Now I have no place to sneak a peak at those years of my childhood except while daydreaming or sleeping. I didn't think I would get all nostalgic for that sort of stuff, but the years are coming on quickly and staring the rest of your life in the face sometimes does that to you. I mean I've been having these little flights of fancy since before departing for El Sal, but they come more frequently the longer I am gone.

Mostly though I miss Secret Lake and I don't know why.

Dia de Amistad

Happy Valentine's Day, or as they call it here, Dia de Amistad.

I'm not doing anything special, unless you count hanging out with Kaya, maybe doing some laundry and getting some pupusas for dinner something special. I personally wouldn't consider it special because I do most of that every day. So continues another year in a huge streak of having nothing in particular to do for Valentine's day. Every seems to want to be on the other side of whatever they have, meaning if you have nobody you feel like junk and if you have a ball and chain you wish you were single instead of forced into this hokey holiday.

Been a little while since I last posted. With regards to my dog I finally got the supplies my parents sent and everything is working out great. A proper crate is something my dog totally needed and the rest of the supplies give me extra stuff as the dog grows, like a larger collar and a cloth leash as soon as she stops trying to chew on her leash, until then I am using a chain.

Its been a busy time, but not all directly work related. I've been in and out of my site, which makes me sorta scramble around trying to figure out what to do with my dog. I spent two nights in order to go to the monthly soccer game and one night in order to go to a regional conference for all western volunteers. There have also been a rash of meetings for volunteers in my micro-region (four adjacent municipalities with 11 total volunteers). I am happy to be doing a little more group work, but it doesn't seem all that developed other than my area's planning a workshop for adolescents. Hopefully we can get on the same page as a group of volunteers and find a way to use the micro-region to support our projects and bring each other in.

As I stated I am finally working a little more closely with the other volunteers in my immediate vicinity. It is nice because they all live pretty close and I am getting to know where they all live by going to their respective houses for meetings. I also bring my dog along to their places because they don't mind and several of them also have dogs. So its like two meetings at once, we are working and our dogs are meeting. It kind of makes me look forward to when my dog is a little older and I can take her wherever I go outside the Alcaldia.

Speaking of outside the Alcaldia, I finally got my chance to enter El Imposible with some community members. i wanted to take my dog but I was advised against it, and I'm glad I didn't. The hike was a little to long and hard for Kaya to have accomplished at this point. We hiked out to the source of water for our town and I finally have a full understanding of why we only get water for about an hour and a half a day. The system is really rather poor and old. I can't even begin to describe it in a reasonable manner here. I took pictures, but they just seem to highlight the innate beauty of the forest rather than the water system. Still, I am glad I finally got in there and have a better understanding of both the water system and the forest now. I can't wait to get back in there for a purpose other than work. All this of course is because we are trying to find a way to upgrade or replace the current water system. 2 hours of water a day just doesn't cut it, and often times I don't get home at the correct hours to fill my pila up. That means restricted water use for bathing and washing of clothes and such.

I'm also hopeful to start a project with Habitat for Humanity. I don't want to jinx it, but the lady I spoke to seemed interested in trying to get a meeting together with my mayor and see whats up. They are spreading into our region and I think they can provide some support for replacement housing for families that lost their homes in October floods. Personally I like the way Habitat works rather than other NGOs. Families have to work and pay for part of the project with them and I think that adds value to the home and teaches Salvadorans to take matters in their own hands rather than wait for a free project from some crazy rich country. Seems much more sustainable to me and I have made a conscious decision to avoid projects that just hand people stuff with a non-visible money source and a management that isn't of the community.