Parque Acuático

October 22, 2007

On Saturday a bunch of us trainees went to a water park not too far away.  They had two pools and two water slides, which I shall name “Wobbly Spiral” and “Broken Tailbone” aka “Broken Neck.”  Needless to say, there were no wimpy U.S.-style rules, doubtless a reciprocal nod to the lack of rules imposed upon the water park from above.  Or as I like to put it, We may be free to do whatever harm we please to ourselves, but at least there’s nothing assuring the safety of the equipment we’re using. 

Contrary to the odds, especially after subjecting “Wobbly Spiral” to a five-person train, nobody came away with injuries greater than bruises, scrapes, and one mother of a sore neck.  I’d never been on a waterslide before, so I had to take advantage of it.  Fortunately the experience was not nearly as intense as another recent first: my first roller coaster ride, on the Coney Island Cyclone, which made me believe I was going to die more than anything else in my life.  (There is a photograph that proves this belief beyond doubt.)  The waterslides were merely super fun.  I even enjoyed “Broken Tailbone,” although it was little more than a vertical drop onto an unforgiving bump that hits you in the ass right before the water hits you in the nuts. 

 The best part of playing in the water park was seeing how spirited and open our group of trainees is.  Playful and cooperative for three hours in the water, despite the fact that it was probably the coldest day we’ve had here yet, with fog rolling past and no sign of the sun.

Still the Rainy Season

October 22, 2007

 When it rains heavily at night, as it has for the past couple of nights, there’s a leak that drips directly onto my hip.  Funnily enough, this doesn’t make me think about repairing the roof or putting something on my mosquito net to stop the water dripping on me as I’m trying to fall asleep.  It doesn’t bother me much.  Instead, it makes me wonder at the fact that my hip is always in the exact same place!  And it doesn’t even matter which hip is up!  The drips always hit it square on.  I must be a creature of habit.

For Wayne’s World Fans, Mostly

October 22, 2007

From time to time I worry that this blog will end up sounding like a generic young-person-joins-Peace-Corps blog.  Thus it gives me great relief when I draw a comparison like the one I am about to, that only I would ever think of, that helps give this blog a unique voice.  To understand the comparison I am about to make, though, you have to have a passable familiarity with Wayne’s World.  This is the comparison: Salvadorans talk like Wayne and Garth.  More specifically, they talk like Wayne and Garth during the scene when they’re lying on the hood of Garth’s car at the end of a runway watching planes go over and get in their big argument of the movie.  Remember?

“Then go already!”

“Ok then!”

“Go then!”

“I’m gone!”

Or something like that, with their hackles all up and feathers ruffled.  It’s really only a few phrases that bear a passing resemblance, but Salvadorans say these phrases all the time.  A couple of good examples: “Va pues” which translates roughly as “Ok then” and “Ya me voy” or “I’m going already.”  Ya (already) bears a much heavier load than it does in English, and carries none of the impatience or sarcasm that it sometimes can in English.  I’m always secretly amused when someone says something like “let’s eat already!” or “let’s go already!”  I imagine Wayne and Garth on the hood of the car throwing their hands up in frustration at each other. 

It may be a stretch, but a comparison it is. 

It reminds me of today when some of us were helping make hot chocolate (from cacao that grows in one of the host families’ yards), and the guy operating the mill added too much water, to the great dismay of Niñas Gladys and Irene, and I consoled them by saying “he may not be able to mill very well, but lucky for us he doesn’t have the power to stop the chocolate from being chocolate.”  They laughed, but I’m not 100% sure they understood.  It may be bad chocolate, but chocolate it is.

But the thing is, it was delicious!

Salvadoran Kids Need Cracking Down On and Someone’s Got to Do It

It’s about time for a shorter post.  Today I went to the school to interview the principal.  As I was waiting around, I asked a teacher why there were so many kids running around the courtyard screaming or doing whatever other thing they pleased, considering class was in session.  Her answer: class consisted of watching a movie (which seemed in her mind to be sufficient explanation).  The movie: Karate Kid.  This is only the tip of the iceberg as far as permissiveness in Salvadoran schools goes.  That will all change if I ever get in the classroom.  I will be the Draconian Gringo with the Cat o’ Nine Tails at the ready and they will Fall In or Fall Out, Consarnit.

It remains to be seen how much truth is in this jest.

Immersion Days: Up to the Elbows in the Campo

October 14, 2007 

“De tal palo, tal estilla.”  (Of such a tree, such a splinter.)

“Díme con quien andas y yo te digo quien eres.”  (Tell me who you go around with and I’ll tell you who you are.)

“Él que con lobos anda, aullar aprende.”  (He who goes around with wolves learns to howl.)

“Haz bien a alguien y no mires a quien.”  (Do good unto someone and don’t look at who it is.) 

These sayings come from Henry, a 15-year-old kid, small for his age, dark-skinned, with huge, strong hands and a frank smile.  Most of the time between Thursday afternoon and Saturday morning I spent with him.  These were our “Immersion Days.”  All the trainees caught buses to far-flung parts of the country to live alone with a rural family for two days, talk with them, work with them, see what it’s like out there in the sticks, and learn that our host communities near San Vicente, tiny and muddy and poor as they seem, are the Ritz-Carlton compared to where we may end up living. 

The family that took me in lives in the mountains near San Francisco Gotera, Morazán.  Their little homestead is 3-4 km above the nearest cantón, surrounded by a cirque of steep, funky mountains dripping with vegetation, cloaked in fog.  The four kids, ages 8-15, sleep in hammocks in the dirt floor house.  They live with their thick, cheerful mom and tiny, apple-cheeked, stocking-capped grandmother.  Their father was murdered seven months ago in a robbery.  Henry’s sayings originally came from him. 

I slept in a hammock alone in a building several hundred yards away from their house.  It is the cheese-making building, with a rich pleasant odor and week-old calves lowing on the porch.  Henry asked several times if I was scared, but I wasn’t.  I felt totally comfortable from the first with these salt of the earth people and so isolated in their pocket of mountains that I wasn’t worried about intruders.  The ground between the two houses was so muddy from the constant rain that I took to riding one of their horses bareback between them, to everyone’s delight, including, it seemed, the horse.  I can attest that there is a level of delight on the horse’s part that is excessive, but at least I didn’t fall off, and Henry was kind enough to fetch my hat in his great galoshes. 

I woke at 5:15 both mornings, read The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test for a while, then had a cup of coffee with Henry and a Nicaraguan worker named Juan.  Then we milked the cows.  Henry strapped a one-legged stool around his hips so all he had to do was make as if to sit and there he was, sitting on a stool.  We let the cows in from the pasture one by one, let each one’s calf feed while we hobbled it, then tied the calf by the neck to the cow’s front leg.  Then the milking, white jets of milk foaming up the bucketful.  Henry showed me five methods of milking, and I got pretty good at one.  The teats felt thick and richly biological, like What a design!  That this was the first time I’d ever milked cows delighted Henry to no end.  He kept saying I had to come back so I could become an expert.  His mother kept showing me the huge muscles in her hands, and how her daughter Jessica (Henry’s twin) didn’t have them because she doesn’t milk cows.  Nor, she pointed out, did Jessica know how to grind corn by hand, as she herself did at that age.  Jessica is helpful and serene, despite these comparisons.  Henry and Jessica, they assert, are common names in El Salvador. 

Then there was the cheese-making.  I won’t bore you with all the details, as I did with the milking.  Suffice it to say that I was up to my elbows in cheese, catching fresh cheese out of the air in my mouth, and marveling at Henry’s huge strong homunculus hands connected to his tiny body.  Perhaps too much coffee from an early age stunted his growth.  If that’s the case, it’s sad that it was instant coffee. 

And the swimming holes!  Over the dale and through the steep foresty corn fields tumbling down from the sides of the jutting cerros to a small brown river with strangely deep spots.  Me and Henry and the calm, mustachioed Nicaraguan machete-ing our way through confusing terrain.  Henry can’t swim, but he still jumped with a shout into the deepest spots—12 feet or more!—and thrashed around a bit until I hauled him out so he could do it again.  He counseled me that, with the cows, it’s best to show no fear.  Apparently this applies to deep water as well.   

Sometimes I wish you could Google-Earth me, the frame zooming out out out from West Virginia or Brooklyn or North Carolina or Maryland or wherever you are, panning south south south, zooming back in on a small country with strange topography, green and messy and rudimentary looking from above, closer and closer until you see pale old me, creeping through a creek on a mountain with a small brown kid and a strapping taciturn brown man, grouped around the huge freshwater crab we have just found in the stream, then carrying it up the stream—you lose us in the trees from time to time—and over the dale to the house, where they boil it for the grandmother—you can see in the window by lowering the angle with that nifty Google Earth tool—and the grandmother is grinning because crab is her favorite treat and I am blabbing in Spanish about how much better it tastes that saltwater crab.  …Or whatever I’m doing at the moment, you could just zoom in on it.  But, often enough you would just find me reading in a hammock, or falling asleep during a training session, or eating in silence across the table from some guy I don’t even know, and it would also be really creepy, so all in all I’m glad you can’t.  But take a look at El Salvador on Google Earth sometime, if the resolution is worth a hoot.  The topography truly is amazing. 

By way of wrapping up the immersion days commentary, I was deeply touched by the warmth, openness, and frank dependable spirit of the family I stayed with, and their resilience in the face of the tragedy that recently befell them.  Henry’s steady gaze as he explained his love of working with animals, his philosophy of helping those less fortunate, and his devotion to his father’s principles was the gaze of a man the world is lucky to have living in it.  So young, so small, and already solid as a rock.  I like to think that wherever you go, there are always jewels like him nearby.

Hope, A Metaphor of Middling Muster, and a Shabby Museum of Great Poignancy

October 14, 2007 As I was typing in the date, as per Andrew’s suggestion, so that you dear readers may know when I actually wrote what you’re reading (sometimes it languishes for near a week on my USB drive), I accidentally wrote “2008.”  And it struck me that perhaps I will indeed be writing some anecdote for this very blog on October 14, 2008.  And the thought filled me with a tingling of anticipation, and I smiled a little.   

I spent last night with some volunteers who have been here for exactly as long as I will have been here on October 14, 2008.  They were in last year’s batch of Agroforestry/Environmental Education volunteers.  Agfor/EE folks arrive every year at the same time, calculated so that we start our service along with the school year.  The volunteers from last year’s batch will be our closest contacts outside our own training group, like stars in the same constellation without a direct line drawn between them.  Everyone in other programs form their own constellations whose orbits occasionally bring them into contact with us.  In the end, each of us is a star who charts its own course through the night sky of Salvadoran development work.  To my nerdy friends who are thinking to themselves right now, “Doofy, constellations don’t have independent orbits—they remain fixed in relation to each other!  Don’t you know anything?” I say, Put a sock in it and go along with the metaphor.  Also, wouldn’t it be a cool touch in a fantasy movie to have stars that trace independent paths in the night sky?   

We hung out in Perquin, Morazán, met some Hungarians bicycling in shorts in the rain, and went to the museum of the civil war.  Perquin was strong FMLN (the rebels, for you greenhorns) territory during the war, the home of Radio Venceremos, the organizational base for the offensive that took control of most of Morazán department.  As you enter the museum they make sure to tell you that it is not affiliated with any particular political party.  There is a wall entitled “Heroes and Martyrs” with photographs of significant members of the resistance, noting where they fell in battle.  There are quotes from Farabundo Martí, Oscar Romero, Ché Guevara, Roque Dalton, and General Sandino.  There was a whole room of propaganda posters.  The room dedicated to the signing of the peace accords was also chosen to house a large collection of FMLN rifles and mortars.  There were photographs of guerilla forces in training, motley of dress but as one in their maneuvers.  There were candid photos of female rebels toting gigantic machineguns, smiling, holding a child’s hand, or chatting with bearded, similarly well-armed men.  There was a photo of Radio Venceremos interviewing the captured minister of defense, and a captured army medic sewing up a rebel’s wound.  There were several photos taken after the peace accords were signed: a rebel brigade, finally in uniform after 12 years of war, marching expressionless down a street in San Salvador; another of former rebel soldiers graduating from police academy; and another of two army generals who had joined the FMLN meeting for the first time since they switched sides.  The plastic over the photos was wrinkled, the lighting was poor, and the outpouring of humanity through these pictures, quotes, poems, and dated objects under glass nearly overwhelmed me.  “One musn’t speak the revolution with his mouth to live for it, he must hold it in his heart to die for it.”  The hope and conviction and ultimate failure of these people to “vencer” suffused the shabby little museum like a damp fog.  The asymmetric FMLN stars I see painted on the concrete telephone poles have since taken on a poignant cast.

Phone #

I have a phone number!  I just had to buy a SIM chip for the cell phone I brought with me.  It cost $2 with no taxes or fees.  Calls to the States are 10 cents a minute, and it costs me no money to receive calls.  I have no idea how much it costs for U.S. cell phone plans to call here.  In case it’s affordable, here’s my number: 011 (to get out of the US)-503 (El Sal´s country code)-7093-9390. That´s 011-503-7093-9390.

I Dream in English

At 5 in the morning, as I’m dozing my way to wakefulness in my dim room to a symphony of roosters, chores, and devotional music, I hear my host family mutter a few words and I think to myself, “Och!  They’re still speaking Spanish!”  This has happened three times so far. 

 

Books

I just finished Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia.  Incredible book.  Lots of stories of old men as well as men from long ago, which are fascinating to a young man.  And, even better, stories of 18^th century sailing voyages.  Some readers of this blog may know of my attraction to such material.  Also prevalent in the book are tales that show what a rich fertilizer for the human imagination the Age of Discovery was.  An example:

 

            “The Strait of Magellan is yet another case of Nature imitating Art.  A Nuremberg cartographer, Martin Beheim, drew the South-West Passage for Magellan to discover.  His premise was entirely reasonable.  South America, however peculiar, was normal compared to the Unknown Antarctic Continent, the Antichthon of the Pythagoreans, marked FOGS on mediaeval maps.  In this Upside-down-land, snow fell upwards, trees grew downwards, the sun shone black, and sixteen-fingered Antipodeans danced themselves into ecstasy.  WE CANNOT GO TO THEM, it was said, THEY CANNOT COME TO US.  Obviously a strip of water had to divide this chimerical country from the rest of Creation.

            “…Until in 1619 the Dutch fleet of Shouten and LeMaire rounded the Horn—and named it, not for its shape, but after Hoorn on the Zuyder Zee, cartographers drew Tierra del Fuego as the northern cape of the Antichthon and filled it with suitable monstrosities: gorgons, mermaids and the Roc, that outsize condor which carried elephants.” (p. 111)

 

Delightful, no?

 

Still enjoying Mármol.  On the menu are books I either brought with or have scrounged up since getting here.  It’s going to be a grab-bag couple of years.

The End of the Affair, Graham Greene

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe

Óscar Romero, biography by some nerd—in Spanish!

The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini (don’t know the first thing about it)

Literature and Politics

My Spanish teacher lent me a book of poems by the Salvadoran Alfredo Espino (1900-1928).  I don’t think I’m going to make a great lot of headway, both because it’s incredibly difficult to wade through figurative poetry in Spanish and because once I figure out what he’s saying, it’s all over-the-top romantic.  I adore Wordsworth, and I love the bits I’ve read of Keats and Shelley, but Espino is not the same variety of romantic.  Less heady, more one-dimensionally effusive. 

On the other hand, I’m enjoying the lengthy biography Miguel Mármol by Roque Dalton.  Mármol was a communist revolutionary active in the late 20s and early 30s.  He survived the matanza (massacre) of 1932, despite taking several rounds from a firing squad.  Dalton wrote the book in first person, keeping many of the verbal storytelling cues so as to give it a testimonial effect.  Mármol’s voice (with who knows how much Dalton added in) comes through: confident, self-aggrandizing, direct.  His stories of visiting the Soviet Union, being imprisoned and somehow gaining freedom in Cuba and El Salvador, and evading capture in Salvador, Guatemala, Germany and other places are scintillating.  He paints a picture of an entire hemisphere in political upheaval, with agents of petty bourgeoisie imperialism waiting around every corner, and the proletariat starting to get a clue despite brutal repression and grinding poverty.  It’s much more evocative and entertaining than I imagine any academic study of the era being, if perhaps less accurate.  As a lay historian, I’ll take the tradeoff.

The political conflicts of Mármol’s day have lived on strongly in the country.  Dalton was part of what could be called the next generation of communist revolutionaries, and if he hadn’t been executed by his own comrades on various suspicions in 1975 he would have witnessed in the early 80s deadly government repression reminiscent of 1932, and a communist uprising bearing the name of one of Mármol’s comrades, Farabundo Martí.  The FMLN coalesced around 1980 out of various leftist groups, and it lives on as one of the two dominant political groups in the country.  Its trademark red—of course—can be seen painted on rocks and telephone poles by the roadside.  Yesterday I walked to Verapaz, the pueblo near my cantón, passing by a FMLN rally on the way, well beribboned in red.  Many of the attendees wore red shirts, and even most of the cars in the driveway were red!  They were singing a song that I imagine Mármol could have sung during one of the many protests he organized.  This was very strange for someone used to a country in which leftist politicians carefully avoid any link with the “reds” if they want to be competitive.

The gap between FMLN and ARENA yawns wide.  ARENA is the conservative party that’s been in power for almost 20 years.  Their roadside colors are red, white, and blue—no accident, methinks.  It was their military that was funded by the Reagan administration in the early 80s and their president who is friendly with the current Bush.  I’ve even talked to one Salvadoran who believes that the “R” in ARENA, Republicana, refers not to a system of government, but to a particular North American political party.  It confuses me that no one seems to be staking out the open territory in the center, the classic winning move of U.S. politics.  One Salvadoran I’ve talked to claims that the virulent battle between FMLN and ARENA leaves no room in the public consciousness for any other party to have a voice.  Perhaps it also has something to do with the news outlets being effectively owned by ARENA.

There is a third party, PESCADO, whose green and white colors and fish logo I see here and there by the road.  They’re basically center-right, although they started out as a workers’ party many decades ago.  Their popularity was destroyed when the Reagan administration put them in power in the mid-80s (in the form of President Napoleón Duarte) and they responded by creating new precedents of corruption.  But they truck along, unlike the many other third parties that form and soon die. 

Looking forward to the elections in the spring of ’09.  We’ll see if the campaigns here are anywhere as long as they are in the States!