November 20, 2007
Unfortunately the only college football game I’ve had a chance to see this season, Ohio State v. Michigan, was boring. It was raining and sleeting, making it difficult for the offenses. That weather also made the Midwest seem very very far away, along with all the other parts of the country that are getting colder.
November 19, 2007
I’ve just returned from my site visit, the most important thing to have happened so far during the course of training. For those of you who are Peace Corps illiterate or haven’t been following the course of this blog, for the past 8 weeks I have been in training for my Peace Corps service, living with a temporary host family outside San Vicente, El Salvador. At the conclusion of the remaining two weeks of training, I will be sworn in as a volunteer and move to the village that will be my home for two years. The aforementioned “site visit” was a four-day stay at the village to see the place, meet the people, and arrange housing. Hence, momentous. The village, by the way, is in eastern Morazán, where they make huge flat tortillas, but Peace Corps forbids me publishing the name of the village on the Interweb.
Now that I’ve been responsible to the faction of you who may have been confused about the basic structure of my life right now, I shall continue on my normal course of talking about this and that without necessarily helping anyone understand what is actually happening to me these days. There is much to say about my site visit. I think the best place to start is a list of highlights (crowd pleasers to sate those of you who may not last through the rest of the post).
-cowboy hats with scorpions embroidered underside the brim
-the local postmistress asking me, in all seriousness, for the zip code of Gilroy, California
-a current volunteer commenting that “10,000 dollars’ll get you a lot of goats”
-a local man boasting of his habit of rising at 3 AM, drinking a large cup of coffee, and going back to bed
-my counterpart telling me she’s going to “squeeze the juice out of me”
-giving not one but two speeches at a 9th grade graduation ceremony
-the current bat-infested, electricity-less, water-less, latrine-less, dirt-floored state of the house I’ll soon be living in
-said shambles’s owner’s shameless attempt to make me pay 2 ½ times the reasonable rent for a house in good condition
-that ridiculously inflated rent figure still falling $700 short of what I paid in Brooklyn
After 5 hours on buses, I arrived at my site in the middle of a gigantic party. My counterpart (the person Peace Corps has tagged to work closely with me) had wanted it to be a surprise, and had told Peace Corps to keep it a secret from me. She succeeded. The truck that took me the last 3 km from the nearest town was actually a Norteña band’s tour bus. They set up in a cow pasture as another Norteña band blasted our eardrums from inside the school. The setup in the pasture fascinated me. Somehow the truck contained an entire stage with overhead rigging to mount lights on, walls of huge speakers, and a sizeable sound booth to station in the middle of the crowd—practically a portable Woodstock. This is not amazing in itself. Getting power to the setup is where it gets interesting. Several members of the band got busy with various lengths of heavy-gauge wire, stripping the ends, bending lengths together, splicing them onto jumper cables. Another, clad in hugely baggy shorts and white tooled-leather loafers, commenced lashing three rickety ladders together and slapping them up against a power line pole in the corner of the pasture. This can’t be going where I think it is, I thought. But indeed it was. Our friend in the smooth-soled loafers labored through his shorts up the ladders with a rope tied to his belt, hauled up a set of jumper cables, clipped them here and there on the power lines, hauled up another set, clipped them onto a couple more spots, and, leaning back a bit from his setup, asked for a test run. Successful. They were ready to boom several million decibels of Norteña music and flash several thousand watts of multicolored lights for hours across the pastures and mountains, courtesy of four trusty alligator clips. Typical Salvadoran ingenuity, powered by the necessity of partying.
I probably ought to say something about whether I like my site or not. I do. The road there climbs up and up and up, giving amazing views of the bay of La Unión and the San Miguel volcano, then later of the interior of Morazán. Eventually the road more or less levels off on a high, rolling plateau with small mountains here and there. Cow pastures with scattered shade trees dominate the landscape, and a coffee farm shows off its glossy leaves here and there. Bedrock underlies the soil closely, breaking through here and there in grand volcanic wave-shapes. There are lots of fences with V-shaped stiles.
The feeling of the landscape, due to its elevation and remoteness, reminded me of the Western U.S. It feels like those Western towns where the closest neighbor seems to be the enormous sky. The look of the landscape, though, for those of you familiar with the West Virginia highlands, combined the mostly flat-yet-high-up aspect of the area between Davis and Mt. Storm on Route 93 with the rocky pasture aspect of Middle, Rich, and many other mountains of the area. Landscape-wise, I’ll definitely feel more at home in this particular site than most in the country. And, party, bonus, the sunsets and sunrises are incredible.
Another incredible thing about my site: the hats. I’ve never seen such a variety of cowboy hats! I was reminded of Billy Collins’s poem entitled (I think) “Hats,” in which the hats of a bygone era almost take on personality as they go about town on the heads of their owners. During the party it was possible, from my gringolicious height, to observe a sea of hats turning this way and that, interacting with each other just as their owners were. I look forward to making it my first priority in site to get a fantastic hat.
Many of the owners of the hats in my site are cheles, or “whiteys.” They would look at home in Texas or Wyoming—cowboys who get a little too much sun on a daily basis—except that they’re about 8 inches too short. The northern mountain areas of El Salvador retain more white-skinned people, as I experienced in Chalatenango several weeks ago. It would be great if this made me stick out less, but it’s doubtful that I’ll ever manage to come off as less than an obvious gringo. There are just too many minute signals that give it away right off the bat. It’s not a problem, though—that’s what I’m here for, to be a gringo. And a particular type of gringo at that: one who has an interest in the needs of rural Salvadorans.
Falling into the same theme with the Western feel, cowboy hats, and whiteys are the many pickup trucks. I think I saw one sedan in the four days. Many of the pickup trucks are old Toyotas. I like to imagine that their former owners in the U.S., proud of how long they’d kept it running, sold them for $100, then they somehow made it to El Salvador, where the locals have kept them running for 10 more years.
Something else I like to imagine: that the phrase I saw on several buses in Morazán, Sólo Dios sabe si volveré (Only G-d knows if I’ll return), is a union of Catholicism and Buddhism referring to reincarnation. That’s a lot less chilling than what I suppose the intended meaning is: only G-d knows if I’ll make it off this bus alive.
Salvadorans have an irrepressible tendency to emblazon all sorts of American symbols everywhere, but especially on buses. The most common examples are American flags, eagles, Nike swooshes, and Looney Tunes characters. They find themselves in the company of Spanish league soccer team logos, religious phrases, and cheesy Hallmark-style declarations of love. The oddest appropriated symbol I’ve seen recently was an enormous Boston Celtics logo on the back of a bus in San Miguel, with no mention of “Boston” or “Celtics,” and the leprechaun daring us Intenta vivir sin mi (Try to live without me). I remain delightedly flummoxed as to how this odd image made it onto the back of that bus.
The house I mentioned way up in the highlights section, yes, the one I’m going to live in, worries me a bit. But it’s also exciting. I’m looking forward to the challenge of getting it all in order and livable. I have pledges from members of the community that they’re going to put in a concrete floor, build a latrine out back, and install a hand pump on the out-of-commission well in the front yard before I move in. That leaves me to figure out a pila situation (refer back to the post entitled “Pila”) for washing clothes, dishes, and myself; as well as electricity. The neighbors offered to let me run an extension cord from their house, but I’ve also heard that it doesn’t cost so much to hook up to the grid. The most challenging aspect may be discussing the rent and improvements to the place with the landlord.
Finally I’ll mention one of many serendipitous occasions that occurred to me during my site visit. On the bus into San Francisco Gotera, the department capital, with the school director to attend a training session for school directors, I ran into a volunteer I’d met before. He was Evan, the guy who hosted me for immersion days (refer back to that post), and he told me that the monthly meeting of Morazán volunteers was happening that morning. So I went and got to meet several more of the volunteers I’ll be working closely with. As far as I know, Morazán is the only department in the country that has a monthly meeting like this. I’m excited to be joining such an active volunteer community.
November 10, 2007
Just about the time we trainees were settling into a steady state of 50-50 gringo-Salvadoran social life, and starting to forget the imminence of our diaspora, there came a reality check. Site Assignments. Here’s a before-and-after dramatization:
Before: “Gee whiz! I can’t wait to find out where I’m going! Jeepers, this
is exciting!
After: “Holy moly, I’m actually going there, to that dot on the map, to live,
the lone gringo, for two years. Oh geez.”
This is pretty accurate, except in reality there were more 1950s-style interjections.
My site is a village called _________, outside the small town of Corinto, in the department of Morazán (Peace Corps forbids me to publish the name of the village on the Internet). There are good satellite photos various places on the Internet. I’ll be there on Monday for a three-day visit, but for the meantime here are a few key facts I’ve learned:
There is a cave of petroglyphs right outside Corinto. They are poorly studied, but have been verified as 14,000 to 20,000 years old. I’m sure some of my nerdy friends, especially those who had Michael Spiers at Swarthmore, know more about the context, but from what I know these dates are inconsistent with current theories of Pre-Columbian migrations in the Americas. If I had more time to mosey around the Internet I would find out more. I hope to see the paintings in a couple of days.
From the road to Corinto you can see the faraway ocean, since it climbs so steeply.
There are pine trees in the area. It remains to be seen whether my village is high enough to have them. The terrain of the region climbs and dives every which way, so I could be up on a ridge or down in a valley. I just hope there are breezes.
Morazán is famous for its war history. Much of the province was a stronghold of the FMLN guerillas during the war in the ‘80s. I will be at my site in time to attend the Dec. 11th remembering of the massacre at El Mozote (~2 hour bus ride from Corinto?). On that date in 1981 a special battalion of the Salvadoran army killed hundreds (estimated 900) of men, women, and children. The facts were denied not only by the Salvadoran government but by the Reagan administration as well, until hundreds of children’s skeletons were exhumed in 1994. Isaac, one of the trainers for Peace Corps here, went to several of the Dec. 11th gatherings at El Mozote and says the atmosphere is incredible. Lots of anti-Americanism, but the people are very welcoming of individual Americans. Last year being the 25th anniversary, the gathering at El Mozote was an especially big deal, and I expect their fired-upness will continue into this year.
Some links on El Mozote: http://www.markdanner.com/articles/show/the_truth_of_el_mozote http://www.newslinx.org/articles/1-27-1982ElMozote.htm http://www.counterpunch.org/gould12232006.html
Oh, another thing about my site is that it’s seriously out there. My village isn’t far from Corinto, which being a pueblo can’t be tiny, but Corinto itself is far from anything. I’m looking forward to the feeling of being solidly out in the rural zone. I’m looking forward to a lot about my site, in fact. Among the many places I could have been assigned to, this is pretty much the best. I could tell from my first glance at the map that it had to be good: several rivers have their sources right around Corinto.
November 2, 2007
Quick note: I’ve just put up a montón of posts, all written on Nov. 2nd, so go back and start with the first one of those.
My fellow trainees have elected me to give a speech (in Spanish) at our swearing-in ceremony, something like a class speaker at a university commencement. I’ll have to balance Latin American standards of ceremony (which means exploring the many Spanish equivalents of “esteemed”), my own desire to be off-kilter funny, the obligation to be touching and meaningful, the need to be understood by trainees with lower language levels, the need to cater to our rural host families, political correctness (U.S. gov’t officials will be there), and limits of subtlety in a language I don’t know all that well. I certainly can’t adopt the style of my high school graduation speech, which bounced from giant alien bugs to the villainy of Henry Ford to how great metal folding chairs are, or of my brother’s, which was mainly about aardvarks trundling across the African plain. At least I have a while to prepare. I’ve heard too many stories of PCVs being put on the spot to give a speech in front of hundreds of people.
November 2, 2007
The Spanish word for battery, pila, is also the word for the large water basins you’ll find in every house in El Salvador. These truly are the batteries of the house in a country where the water flows intermittently. Depending on the community it might flow most of the time, or twice a week for two hours, or even more seldom. The pila is there to save water for all purposes. You wash your dishes on one side, your clothes and yourself on the other, and dip water out with plastic dishes for cooking and drinking. I once read an ethnography of a certain African tribe of the banks of Lake Tanganyika, in the far reaches of Tanzania. The book hammered home the importance of the hearth to those people, going to great lengths to put it at the center of a well-organized concentric arrangement of their daily lives. I thought it too sensical—almost universal—an observation to carry as much of the book as it did, but I’m going to go ahead and make a comparison to the pila here in El Salvador. More than the hearth (wood-fired cook stove, that is), the pila is the center of daily life here. When the campesino starts his day, he bathes and fills his water bottle at the pila, ventures out through the concentric bands to a far-flung cornfield or pasture, and returns to splash off his face at the pila. Etcetera. I’ll avoid driving it into the ground like the author of that ethnography and let you imagine the manifold other ways the pila serves as a center of daily life. The word itself has begun to take on a matronly connotation to my ears.
November 2, 2007
I’ve decided to discontinue photos on this blog (sorry, Vicky). The reasons are: it takes too long for those of you with slower connections to load the page, the audience for bodybuilders group-hugging is small at best, the process of uploading photos to wordpress annoys me, and a text-only blog retains a sleekness and elegance that pictures only disturb (although perhaps I’ve already sunk this blog’s chances at elegance by talking about diarrhea and using the word “balls”).
I may make up for it by establishing a photo site at flickr or one of its ilk. I’ll let you know.
November 2, 2007
Before going to Chalatenango for Field Based Training we five trainees destined for that site spoke with John on the phone about how to prepare. He had many good recommendations, as well as one request: bring beer. It’s difficult for he and Katie to buy beer, since stores are far away and carrying groceries on the bus isn’t very discreet. Being caught with beer in a rural Salvadoran community can cause women to be thought of as whores and men as drunkards, so it’s best for volunteers to steer clear. We brought them a six-pack of Heineken in the car. It was the first time they’d had beer at their site in the year since they’d moved in. They polished them off in a couple of evenings and slipped the bottles back to us swathed in several plastic bags, just in case anyone saw.
Contrasting this example are the experiences of another couple of volunteers I’ve met. I noticed a large number of empty Pilsener bottles in one’s kitchen. My guess is he drinks one or two of an evening in the privacy of his house. And another told me about brewing beer in his site no problem. He even gave me the phone number of another guy who’s leaving soon and wants to donate his brewing equipment to an incoming volunteer. So, provided I can keep the affair private enough when I get to site, I may not have to give up good beer for two years!
November 2, 2007 Being amused by names of sports players is a longstanding tradition in my family, and it reached a new peak during my rural El Salvadoran viewing of the World Series: the catcher for the Rockies Yorvit Torrealba. Much amusement. I’m a fan of whatever led to this man having this name.
November 2, 2007
Visiting John and Katie in Chalatenango was an experience in Spanglish. The goal proposed to us by our Training Directors for Field Based Training was to speak only Spanish for the four days. Everyone knew this goal was much like a meeting time in Salvadoran culture: an impossible ideal that no one will come anywhere close to.
‘Twas a good goal nonetheless, however, and it got us speaking more Spanish than we would have otherwise. Also helping was the presence more often than not of Secundino, John’s counterpart and friend in his site. It’s rude in El Salvador to speak English in front of non-English speakers.
Nevertheless, there’s a certain awkwardness inherent in discussing detailed technical matters in Spanish with a group of fluent Anglophones whose command of Spanish is variable. So John, who despite a year in his site is one of those with a “variable command” (due to learning Spanish as an adult without formal classes), would from time to time switch the conversation to English to make sure we understood, for example, just how much worms love eating cow shit when it’s mixed with coffee hulls. But, and here’s the point I’m getting to, he would often retain the key Spanish words in his English sentences, so we would be hearing something like this: “In order to aprovechar your worms you have mesclar the abono twice a week and make sure it’s totally seco before you quitar it,” or “Ready to go podar some limones?” Nor did John limit his hybrid-speech solely to the technical realm. Sitting around in his house we heard sentences much like this: “In the evenings there are always kids coming around to watch a película or pediring us to prestar them our camera, so the only time I get to myself is in the mañana.” Not only are the Spanish verbs adapted to English grammatical rules, but the pronunciation throughout is gloriously American.
At a certain point this kind of Spanglish ceases to be cutesy and, while still somewhat amusing, becomes just plain useful. It helps fix useful words in the brain, and moreover aprovechars the many words, especially verbs, that are just punchier in Spanish. The crowning example, as any aficionado of Spanglish will know, is the elegant aprovechar, which equates to the clunky “to take advantage of.” It doesn’t even need a preposition in Spanish. Buscar (to look for) is another good one that quitars the preposition, and quitar comes off more effectively than “to get rid of.” I just finished the translator Gregory Rabassa’s memoir If This Be Treason and I am reminded of his passage on the translation of the title Doña Inés contra el olvido:
The first challenge of the tranlator, as is so often the case, comes with the title. It all has to do with that simple and understandable Spanish word olvido. If we take a careful look at the word, however, we find that it has no real English equivalent. It comes from the verb olvidar, to forget, so we come up with forgetfulness. No soap. This last term is best applied to the fabled absent-minded professor. Olvido has the sense of a state of having been forgotten, for which I am unable to pull out a term in English. The closest would be a manufactured word, forgottenness. This is what the title really means. Psycholinguists must look into this situation in which a common and sensible notion in Spanish cannot be expressed in a like manner in English.
Rabassa eventually settled on Doña Inés vs. Oblivion, not to his full satisfaction.
Learning another language not only opens up a new mode of expressing ideas, it opens up new ideas.
November 2, 2007
The other day another trainee mentioned that she only had a couple of items of clothing that “still smell like the States” since they haven’t been washed here yet. I thought it was an apt statement to characterize the stage of adjustment we’ve reached, 6 weeks in country.
No doubt we will give off a smell of the States throughout our service, but hopefully it will only be a whiff.
Here’s the math, for what it’s worth: barring extension for a third year, we have 800 days total in country, of which we have spent 45. That puts us at 1/19th of the way to our Close of Service.
Great, that gives me very little perspective. You?
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