And it has its ups and downs. Sometimes I feel very excited about being here and other times I question why I chose this route after graduating university. It´s much different and more difficult than I expected. The people are very nice, but the basics like hot water, flushing toilets, indoor showers, and trash collection are limited and do not exist where I am living for the first two months, in a small town outside of San Vicante called San Isidro.
One of my favorite things, so far, has been the children. When I first arrived with my host family, the youngest son, Alejendro, 4, jumped on my lap and gave me a big hug. Our group of 33 volunteers is divided into smaller commuties and when the 5 others and me first went to the cancha (field in town), we had a line of kids behind us who all wanted to play frisbee with us. We went there and played some frisbee.
A couple of days later, we went back to the cancha to play some frisbee. Again, kids followed us. We were playing and having a good time, but a storm was moving in from the east. It was a distance off, but we had the sensation that we would need to leave soon. Turns out, we were going to be leaving sooner than we all thought. Suddenly there was a 3 second lighting burst about 50 to 100 feet from us. It was so close, most all of the North Americans took off. The El Salvadorians stayed until the first drops of rain begain.
We´ve been doing lots of things in the community. A couple of things, so far, include picking beans from the field for dinner (was hot and a ton of work), helping a farmer in the field, visiting a local school, and laying in a hammack (my favorite part of the culture, thus far). I also help around the house with dishes and wash my own laundry. It´s all done by hand with cold water. I also mowed the lawn with a thing similar to a machete. It´s a lot of work just to live here.
Other things about the culture are taking time to get used to. For example, I don´t understand the blasting loud music at 6 am. It´s also taking some adjusting to get used to the roosters starting to crow at around 3am and not stopping until around 9, or so. However, I love the busses because they have a lot of character. They´re usually pretty full, or packed, and they play music loud. It´s $.45 to get to town from where I live and yesterday they had to stop to get gas, while people were on the bus.
Well... I only get internet access once or twice per week, but I´ll try to keep this blog going and fairly up to date. I´ll also try to upload photos.
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