I’ve been here since Tuesday without getting a chance to send any word back to the U.S. besides the most basic “I’m alive!” email. The Peace Corps certainly does not make it easy for us trainees to do much of anything besides immerse ourselves in the language and the culture.
I’m writing this in my room in Molineros, a tiny cantón, in the house of María Cruz Durán, affectionately Mama Cruz, with “winter” rains pattering on the corrugated metal roof. “Summer” arrives in October, and the calming sound of rain on the roof for an hour or two a day will disappear until March or April. I’ve been in the country for four nights, the first two in the hotel in San Vicente, the last two here. I already feel at home with my host family. When I arrived I shook hands with Mama Cruz, then turned to see a 4-year-old girl sprinting towards me with her arms spread wide for a hug. They are a welcoming people from an early age onwards, apparently. The girl, Nuria, is the third-cutest little girl I’ve ever seen in my life (next to my nieces), and I constantly get a kick out of her antics. She’s constantly calling me bicho or bichito (slang for “boy” and “little boy”), sticking her tongue out at me, and holding my hand. There is also an 8-year-old boy, Daniel, who’s usually sweet but can get a little forceful with the pinching and hitting. The Frisbee I brought is a good distraction. He calls me gringo, as do most of the people in the village. The word carries none of the stigma here in El Salvador that it does in México or other parts of Latin America. In fact, it seems like it’s said almost fondly—“our gringo.” I wish there were something I could call all of them back, since there are way too many names to learn, many of them strange to my ears (Eulalia, Edit, Ociel), but it probably wouldn’t do much good to shout Salvadoreño at people like they shout gringo at me. Both kids are Mama Cruz’s grandchildren. Daniel’s parents live outside Washington D.C. and Nuria’s dad lives in Los Angeles. (Her mom lives here, and apparently the bed I’m using was hers until I arrived. I don’t know where she sleeps). Pretty much every family here has several relatives in the U.S.
Mama Cruz feeds me the most delicious food. There are lots of tortillas and rice and beans, as you would expect, but they are of the delicious variety, and there’s a ton of other foods besides. Today I had fish for lunch, and an omelette with tomato and loroco, a distinctive-tasting flower, for breakfast. Yesterday it was a delicious soup with tons of veggies, rice, potatoes, and tortilla for dinner, a mix of potatoes, rice, and chicken for lunch (carefully packed for me in Tupperware by Mama Cruz), and I can’t remember breakfast. That was a long time ago. Everything is spiced well (but not too spicy), if a little salty.
The first two nights in country the 29 trainees spent together, living it up before splitting off into our various communities. There was a bar in the hotel (yes, the only hotel in San Vicente—probably a big reason the training center is there), but the PC trainers had suggested that women not drink there. They could have the men bring beers back to the rooms instead. Women rarely drink in public here because they’re seen as promiscuous and disreputable if they do. However, the bar’s only entrance was through the hotel and it was practically empty when we arrived, so we all, men and women, spent a couple of hours playing pool and speaking English until late, despite our exhaustion from getting up at 3:30 AM. The next night was more wholesome, involving mostly impromptu ballroom dance lessons and iPod DJing in the hotel mezzanine. And lots of laughter. On the whole we haven’t been doing much to assuage the reputation of Americans here as an extremely loud people. Besides the night after swearing-in, those were probably our last two together as a group.
They were certainly our last nights as a group of 29, since one of us left during the third day here. Sadly enough for me, she was the only other West Virginian in the group. I wonder if any more will go home. Everyone seems to be doing pretty well at the moment.
My Spanish is coming back/coming along pretty well, gracias a Dios y a Señor Martín (my high school Spanish teacher). I have to ask people to repeat things a lot, but I can get across most of the things I want to say, and they understand my accent. I’m learning to drop my S’s, slur my G’s, make V’s and B’s sound the same, and use a little slang; after a few months I’ll probably sound bien Salvadoreño. We’ve had a few short Spanish classes, but they start in earnest on Monday, from 7:30 AM to 4:30 PM two or three times a week. I’ve been mentally exhausted after the two hour classes, so I can’t imagine what it’ll be like after full days. I’ll probably be going to bed at 8 (it’s tough to stay up far past that anyway—see two paragraphs down). The classes are really good, though. They’re all taught by Salvadoran women who don’t know much or any English. In mine I’m the most advanced student, and it’s really good for me to have to explain in Spanish what certain words mean to my classmates, only rarely resorting to English.
The poverty is pretty in-your-face here—trash everywhere, crumbling infrastructure, super-skinny dogs, etc.—but even so many people seem to have TVs and DVD players. My family even has a nice sound system, a microwave, a toaster oven, and a shower. Strangely enough, the shower may be the most surprising of these amenities. Most people shower with buckets from a water reservoir, and always at least once a day.
It gets dark at around 6 or 6:30 (partly because we’re two hours behind the East Coast even though we’re due south of Central time), and I have trouble staying up past 9. Which means that I get up around 5:30. Everyone else, of course, is already bustling, and the roosters have been trying to get me up since about 2:40 AM. This morning I was still in bed at 5:45, when little Daniel started blasting Don Omar, king of reggaeton, on the sound system. He was happy to hear that I know the song “Conteo” (thanks, Jeremy), and now that’s kind of my official song among the boys of the village. At least some of the lyrics are easy—uno, dos, tres, quatro… I hear the same reggaeton and cumbia here that I heard in my neighborhood in Brooklyn, but I like it better here. The bus that picked us up at the airport sported a flaming paint job, shark fin on the roof, and impressive speaker system blasting cumbia and remixes of American pop songs from the eighties to Latin beats, and I loved the festive feeling the music imparted to the whole experience. It was a great way to enter the country. Let’s hope the positivity I’ve been feeling since then continues, or at least returns after the bad days that I know must come at some point.
Yesterday we went to visit Melissa, a current volunteer, and planted some trees on the land of a farmer she knows well. He grows all kinds of stuff—corn, beans, tomatoes, cucumbers, sugarcane, fruit trees, peppers, fish, and rabbits. Many campesinos just grow corn and beans for subsistence. I don’t quite understand where all the rice comes from. We visited Melissa’s house and chatted about her life there. I now believe what they told us about the radical difference between training and volunteership. Our schedule is pretty packed now, but in December we’re going to be cast out on our own, sink or swim. There are resources, of course, at the PC offices and various NGOs, but judging from what Melissa said we’ll pretty much be flying solo. There’s a lot to learn before that happens.
Wow, it’s really pouring now. There’s so much more to say about the training staff, riding in the back of picos (pickups) on windy roads, the gorgeous gorgeous volcanoes, the strange and beautiful greenery everywhere, and everything else, but this is bastante for now. My love to everyone!
September 24, 2007 at 8:24 pm |
LOL to the tiger. another hearty lol to reggaeton