Chateau Gabriel’s Shack in the Campo Now Hosting Live Music!

December 29^th, 2007

I just had the best supper ever.  I can’t credit the food, although my potato creation was scrumptious.  No, what made it so fantastic were the two musicians who arrived, unexpected and uninvited, and played for me in my house, belting out norteña music with the gusto of a brown bear swatting a salmon.  They arrived as I was browning the onions, played as I cooked and ate, then took a break for a cup of coffee and conversation, then played a couple more before disappearing into the night.

The skinny, taciturn guitar player I already knew; he played guitar at the many posadas I attended during the Christmas season.  But the bearish, declamatory fiddler and accordion player I had just met earlier in the day.  Intrigued by the strains of accordion that kept wafting through my window at night (in their passage they thinned out and I initially mistook the sound for a harmonica), I had gone searching for the bard who made my evenings down-home-ier.  I found him and his large, taut stomach holding forth for another man.  He smoothly switched gears when I inquired about the music, listing for me all the instruments he owns and what lengths he had to undergo to acquire the tuning pegs for his guitar.  Then he swiftly shook me with his ham-hand and resumed his previous conversation mid-sentence.

The bigly bestomached bard’s brusqueness gave me no sign that he was to show up at my door that evening to enthusiastically blast me with his deep voice and devil-may-care accordion licks.  But in he waltzed with his wordless accompanist and instantly created an atmosphere all his own, cowboy hat and shirt open to the diaphragm, unapologetic tremolo liberally applied to the lyrics, music that would strike me in the U.S. as hopelessly cheesy Latin American crooning but in real life charmed the pants off me.  These were my first visitors; I was delighted to start to repay the many cups of coffee I’ve had offered to me as an unexpected visitor in Salvadoran homes.  I hope every subsequent visit proves as vivacious and entertaining.

Fortuity and the Art of Gringo-Salvadoran Conversation

December 28, 2007

Ah, the sweet taste of fortuity.  It’s as good as pancakes for dinner or eating all the blueberries out of your pail at once.  And it’s a flavor I savor regularly.  This morning I decided to go on a walk around the more remote parts of my community that I haven’t explored yet.  Normally I don’t walk around much in the morning, but something drew me out today; it just didn’t feel right to sit around studying Spanish, preparing English lesson plans, and thinning my banana trees like normal this morning.  Yesterday I went to the Headquarters of Health (La Sede de Salud) to copy the map of the community hanging on the wall between copious pictures of women breastfeeding correctly and incorrectly.  The pictures echoed the real live group of young mothers I’d given a speech to a couple weeks ago, half of them breastfeeding away, Salvadoran-style, which is to say, quite blatantly.  No trick bras or artfully hung cloths for privacy like in the U.S.  Needless to say it was a distracting audience for an American used to more demureness, but I got the sense it was nothing out of the ordinary for them, so I rolled with it and I don’t think my Spanish even suffered despite the significant surface area of bare breast in the room.

The map I copied shows every house in the community, the chapel, school, soccer field, sugarcane mill, and the few streets and many paths.  I noted the two groups of outlying houses I hadn’t seen yet and decided to hunt for them.  The search took me farther out through the beautiful rolling pasture that’s great for sunsets than I’d been, and I realized that the far end of it resembles a mesa; both sides of it start to drop away precipitously and it eventually narrows into a point with a great view over the pastures and the pueblo of Corinto to the west.  A trail switchbacks down the north side to a cluster of adorable houses.

Here’s where the fortuity comes in.  I ran into a couple of men leaning on a fence, introduced myself, and struck up a conversation.  One in particular was happy to talk, and I ended up shooting the shit for about an hour.  The threads of conversations with men are relatively predictable.  I’ll describe the general pattern.  We start out with agriculture, maybe a little weather.  Then comes the U.S.: where I’m from, where they’ve lived (almost all men in this region over the age of 25 have lived in the U.S.), and where their relatives live (ALL men have close relatives there).  Then it’s on to the community here: whether I like it, the freshness of the climate, how the people are good and there aren’t many drunkards or thieves, and how various nearby communities have lots of drunkards and thieves.  Then, if the conversation has endured to this point, we move on to miscellaneous political and religious philosophies.  Common themes include: family is the most important thing next to God; we are but powerless ants next to God; we’re all the same under God and ought to treat each other with respect and love; one should work really really hard, just on general principle; and the U.S. really has it together, doesn’t it?  What a great country.  If only El Salvador could have it together like the U.S. does.  Then we move on to some variety of the creepy racial question, which goes something like this: In the U.S. there are two races, right?  The white race and the black race, true?  Well, when I was there I noticed that some of the blacks worked really hard, but some were lazy and never did anything.  Why do you think that is?  To which I never know exactly how to respond besides to say, Well, there are a lot of lazy white folks, too, right?  At this point we’ll usually, finally, move on to what work I’m here to do, which sometimes leads to productive information.

The conversation with the guy I ran into this morning followed this general pattern.  Luckily he spared me the creepy racial question, added in a couple good war and immigration stories, and offered up a particularly interesting political philosophy segment.  His philosophy on the U.S.’s immigration policy is that it’s good—they’ve gotta crack down.  Lots of Salvadorans, he says, just go up there to murder and rob, so it’s only just that the U.S. sends them back.  They should murder and rob in their own country if they’re going to do it anywhere, he says.  The U.S. has to watch out for its own good.  He himself, of course, went illegally to the U.S., crossing into Texas in 1985, getting caught, and then paying an lawyer $500 to represent him.  The lawyer ended up succeeding in getting him a green card, and he lived in Alexandria, Va. for several years.  Now seven of his children live in the U.S., five of them illegally.  But still, he’s all for a tough immigration policy.

Ok, I still haven’t really gotten around to the fortuity business.  We finally got to the good stuff about 40 min into the conversation.  He invited me to mill sugarcane with him in February, to help him plant his corn and sugarcane, and to stay in his house in Corinto during the festival in January, when I might be out late at the rodeos.  Even better, he told me about a guy who lives in a nearby village who raises fish in several ponds and has a successful tomato farm, and we have plans to go together to visit the place on January 3^rd.  This could be excellent news for my work.  Just having something new to do is fantastic, and a fishpond project could be lots of fun.  It’s also great to make an active friend who clearly understands why I’m here, when I’ve been feeling ambivalent about how successfully I’m making friends and making my role here understood.  Good thing I decided to walk around exploring this morning.

Something on this order of fortuity happens so frequently here that I’m beginning to think it’s the nature of the place.  But it’s necessary to put yourself in the place to make it happen, like Wordsworth’s philosophy—although you can’t make it happen yourself, you must put yourself in the position for the lightning to strike, for the epiphany to happen.  For me that involves walking around a lot, greeting everyone I see, and allowing conversations to go on and on even when they’re awkward or about nothing. 

After parting ways with my new friend I met a young guy with a tattoo and flat-brimmed Yankees cap working on a house.  He’d recently returned from Virginia.  I asked him how he liked being back.  He said, in English, “Not much, man.  It’s boring.  I’m going to Belize next month.  I’ve heard it’s pretty cool over there.”  In conversations about the Salvadoran diaspora the U.S. steals too much of the show.  I want to hear more like this.  Moving to Belize because he’s bored.  That’s the spirit.

Pending No More

December 26, 2007

I’ve spent 99 days total in El Salvador.  That includes 27 in my site and 6 in my own humble house.  The whole time I’ve felt like I’m in a transitory state.  At my host family’s house during training I slept with my clothes on the bed next to me for lack of another place to put them.  My other bullcrap piled up in a jumble on a tiny table, awaiting the time to get stuffed in my backpack and leave again.  Once that time came I spent three weeks living with a strange bachelor of few words, never knowing exactly when I was going to move (one gets used to uncertainty in this country).  My clothes lived on an extra mattress on the floor, and the same assorted bullcrap piled up on a slightly larger table.  Then I moved into my house, where I scraped by with my food stored in a drywall bucket and my clothes in a hammock for a few days.

But tonight I finally felt at home, done with the perpetually pending period.  I realized it when I was cooking supper and started dancing involuntarily to a Joss Stone song, spatula in hand, watching my shadow from the one bare light bulb bob on the wall.  The cardboard-and-stick contraption I rigged up today to store my food delights me.  It hangs from the ceiling with anti-mouse tuna cans on the strings a la Appalachian Trail shelters, and gently swings any time I take something out of it.  I’m also enjoying my new gavetero (which translates as “drawer-er”), or dresser, and the stick I’ve hung from the ceiling to hang clothes on, or do pull-ups if I’m feeling particularly sassy.  Hanging things from the ceiling has got me really cracked up about it, although perhaps it’s nothing new—in Brooklyn last year I hung the Christmas tree from the ceiling when the stand I made for it failed miserably.  I was tempted here to hang my desk and dresser, just to amuse myself, until I realized that would not only be silly but obnoxious as well.  The other extreme would be laying my hammock on the floor; I think I’ve struck a fine balance in the choices I’ve made.  Perhaps the boldest improvement so far is the newest installment in my long line of odd wall decorations: on the largest, blankest section of wall (freshly whitewashed by me from waist-level up with four coats of lime) I’ve painted a giant triangle, square, and circle.  This is a Zen motif, but the way I’ve done it—in primary colors and with rakish tilts—it makes my house look sort of like a kindergarten classroom rather than an austere temple.  The house doesn’t need its austerity emphasized anyhow, and I’m pleased with how I sometimes giggle out loud when I look at the wall, so I deem the decoration a success.

Cooking supper and looking around at all my improvements I realized how comfortable, moved-in, and at home I felt—finally!  It’s amazing how inconsequential these improvements have to be in a one-room dirt-floor adobe house to make a big difference.  Simplicity itself.  I also realized that in Brooklyn I fantasized about living in a one-room cabin in the great tradition of Henry Thoreau and Dick Prenicke (look him up).  I even made lists in my little pocket notebook, an attempt to isolate one man’s bare essentials amid a gigantic city of excess, of every item I would need (hatchet; large soup pot; tin cup; propane stove; lantern…).  And now I’m doing it!  What a fantastic thing to suddenly realize that you’re living your dream.  I suspect such auspicious epiphanies often occur with a simple tool like a spatula in hand.

A remaining wrinkle to iron out is the clothes-, dish-, and body-washing situation.  I have a pila on my porch (refer to the post “Pila” if you don’t know what it is), but I have to put down concrete and make some sort of drain before I can put it to much use.  Right now it drains onto the dirt porch floor and out through a hole where I removed a brick.  Not a permanent situation.  I’m bathing up the road at the school director’s house.  Her four-year-old daughter climbs ladders to watch me and her stunningly beautiful 15-year-old daughter today asked me coyly if I’m married.  Also not a permanent situation.  I had a simple plan to change things: buy a bag of cement, mix it with the gravelly sand I already have in my yard, and cover the porch with it, angling the surface so it would drain out a section of pipe I would put through the wall.  Then I would hang shower curtains for privacy.  Easy as pie, but in a stunning move of Salvadorean-ness my counterpart has thrown the situation into uncertainty several times over.  Now I don’t know if I’m doing it or if my landlord is doing it, or if my landlord is even going to let me keep the pila on the porch.  Needless to say I don’t understand every twist and turn that led to this situation, mostly because of my landlord’s unwillingness to talk to me, but I am sure it will figure itself out given some time.  There’s a saying in El Salvador: Hay más tiempo que vida (“there’s more time than life”).  The exact meaning is difficult to pin down (I’ve gotten many answers on how to interpret the phrase), but it just seems right to say in certain situations, and this is one.  I’ll let you know what happens after some time.

Thusly I remain frustrated but content, confused but cheerfully at home, your humble servant and dogged blogger, Gabriel.

Jaripeo

December 17, 2007

My first Salvadoran rodeo walked the line between entertaining me and disturbing me with breathtaking precision.  I actually attended two nights of jaripeo, as rodeos are called here, in the nearby municipality of Joateca.  The bus ride to Joateca took me through Cacaopera, which in Castilian means “shit or pear” but, disappointingly, the etymology is probably Indian.  I already knew the first leg of the journey was awesomely beautiful; the second leg made me fantasize about the bus tours I could take visitors on to make their jaws drop.  Come March 2008 the Hotel Gabriel’s Shack in the Campo will be open for business, so start thinking.  I’ll even sleep in the hammock so you can have the bed.

Every year for its four days of jaripeos Joateca contracts a company to build them a small wooden stadium.  Small for a stadium, that is, but huge for a transient structure—it can fit several hundred people.  They knock it together with nails, so dozens of uses have chewed the ends of the boards to shreds.  It rocks with the smallest motion; a soccer team, let alone an army, would want to fall out of step to march around on it. 

The first night I was underneath the bleacher seating, in the “pit,” so to speak, looking through the gaps between the boards that form the actual arena.  The gaps were wide, making for an excellent, close-up view, but also making me wonder about how much of a bull could fit through them if it took a mind to.  The first thing I saw upon taking up my position was one of the rodeo clowns/bullfighters (they’re dressed as clowns and distract the bull, but also take up the red flag and do the toreador bit) get butted harshly into the boards by a huge bull.  He crawled underneath and recuperated amongst the feet of other denizens of the pit before getting back out there a few minutes later.  His more athletic companion, nicknamed Sorghum, entertained the bull alone in the meantime.  Sorghum’s best move was kneeling down facing away from the bull, looking over his shoulder, and pointing at his butt.  I was not as impressed with the way he avoided its charges: unlike the elegant sidesteps of the classic toreador, his strategy seemed to be to run away from the enraged thing directly along its course.  Good thing he was wearing soccer cleats.

One great thing about the bullfighting was it didn’t involve actually killing the bull.  I was not in a mood for that much gore right in front of me.  In fact, I’ve managed to avoid much gore at all in my time here, while it seems almost all of my Peace Corps companions have already slaughtered chickens.  I’m sure my time will come.  Other distasteful spectacles, however, made up for the lack of gore.  They tied a monkey to a bull’s back and let it go; the poor monkey eventually seemed to commence the aimlessly rocking motion of the mentally ill.  The announcer at one point invited two 15-year-old girls to join him in the arena, where he first tried to get them to “sexily” rub a banana over themselves—including inside their clothes—and then had each of them dance way too closely with him until he chose a winner.  This was one of the few events that failed to walk the line between entertaining and disturbing—it just plain disturbed me.  Fortunately along came the trick soccer game.  The announcer invited eight guys into the arena to play a game of 4 on 4, first team to 5 goals wins 40 bucks.  The only rule: you can’t leave the arena.  Not a minute after they started playing the rodeo gate opened and in charged an enormous bull.  All the players scattered up onto the boards enclosing the arena, to hop down every now and then, kick the ball, enrage the bull, and leap back up onto the boards a hair’s breadth from being gored.  Every now and then a couple of guys would get too involved in their dribbling and come even closer to serious injury.  My heart was in my throat the whole time, the players were grinning, the bull was pawing at the dust: excellent entertainment.

Jaripeos are not just a venue for bullfighting, bull riding, and molesting underage girls, but a general-purpose entertainment event.  Various showpersons get lengthy slots to work with.  The first night the main attraction was “Sensual Elizabeth,” a tall, ample-but-not-fat woman in miniskirt and cowboy hat.  She sang poorly but with gusto to match her body, and invited various “boyfriends” out of the crowd to dance with or for her.  These men were invariably bolos, or drunkards, who invariably committed hilarious acts of foolishness.  Bolos are a Salvadoran fixture, providing amusement at a predictable level a predictable number of times a week.  You could keep your calendar by them.  And to get rid of them you just have to threaten to douse them with a dish of water.  Sensual Elizabeth went on for way too long, but it was all worth it at the end, when she invited the incredibly awkward, small mayor of Joateca to do a certain dance with her.  I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw that this dance involved the mayor leaping up and wrapping his legs around her waist—from the front—and Sensual Elizabeth bouncing and carrying him around.  I thought this country had already shown me heights of awkwardness beyond my imagination.

The second night’s main attraction was a classic mariachi, dressed in a toreadorishly “soon” gray Eisenhower-jacket suit, alligator skin cowboy boots, and the obligatory giant sombrero.  He strutted through the crowd, somehow managing the rickety, holey structure in those boots, showing off his tiny butt, putting his hat on people, and belting out songs in an incredible voice.  I was entranced for the first couple of songs, but the dude did not warrant half an hour.

The upshot of the jaripeos, despite the sexual harassment, animal abuse, public embarrassment, and mortal structural danger, was extreme amusement.  Luckily my municipality’s feria, with several nights of its own jaripeo, is coming up at the beginning of January.  I’ll be there, but don’t think I’ll be volunteering for that soccer game.  Dancing with Sensual Elizabeth might be another story.

A Conversation For Your Enjoyment

December 12, 2007 

[Last night, in my counterpart’s small store.]

ME: So anyway, I’ll be off.  I’m tired.  Hope you feel better.  See you in the morning.

MY COUNTERPART: So you know how to graft?

ME: [taken aback but rolling with it]  You mean like fruit trees? 

MY COUNTERPART: Yeah.ME: Well, not really, but I understand the concept.

MY COUNTERPART: And make rabbits more productive?  You know what rabbits are, right?

ME: [still rolling with it]  Well, sure.  [mimes a rabbit’s nose sniffing]  But what are you saying about making rabbits more productive?  What do you do to make them more productive?

MY COUNTERPART: You know, when the male rabbit mounts the female rabbit and they have little rabbits.

ME: [starting to get frustrated]  Yes, I understand sex and how it makes babies, but I don’t understand what that has to do with grafting.

MY COUNTERPART: I don’t really like rabbits.

ME: [fully frustrated] I don’t understand why we started talking about rabbits!

MY COUNTERPART: [silence]

ME: Well, good night then.  Sleep well.

MY COUNTERPART: Good night. 

I’m tired of conversations like this.  It turns out my counterpart was referring to my curriculum vitae, which Peace Corps El Salvador took the liberty to fill in with all sorts of bullcrap we vaguely touched on during training, including grafting and rabbit projects.  Firstly, I had no idea they had put these things on my CV, or that they had given my CV to my counterpart.  Secondly, my counterpart’s extremely non sequiter statements caught me off guard.  (He’s kind of a weirdo, but an adorable weirdo whom I’ve come to like.)  Thirdly, I was tired. This exchange made me realize that I’m going to have to permanently maintain a positive attitude to leap the lingual and cultural communication gaps. 

Serendipity, Carpentry, and Cumas

December 11, 2007 

Yesterday I spent all morning painting the inside of my house with a simple mixture of lime, salt, and water.  It’s got to be the cheapest paint ever.  The lime is pure white, which helps bring light into the house, starved for windows like every other Salvadoran house, and the salt keeps the finished coat from being too dusty when you touch it.  The salt doesn’t fix the dust problem 100% though—I’m going to have to avoid leaning on my walls once I move in. 

I also had a serendipitous run-in yesterday.  Serendipity happens so often here that I’m beginning to wonder whether it’s a permanent characteristic of the place or I’m just overeager to call things serendipitous.  I walked over to my counterpart’s house to talk about something or other, but he didn’t seem to be home.  His brother Santos, however, was sitting under an orange tree in front of the house.  Just sitting, seemingly without any reason to be there.  So I sat down and started chatting with him.  I just happened to have my new cuma with me (it’s a hook-shaped cutting tool—sort of the humbler equivalent of the machete; machetes in their highly adorned sheaths are a fashion statement, whereas homely, sheathless cumas signify worker), which I’d just put a handle on.  I needed a file to sharpen it to the point where I could use my sharpening stone.  Santos just happens to be a woodworker, with not only all kinds of files but other tools that I’ve been wanting to see.  I’ve been extremely curious about what the workshop of a rural Salvadoran furniture maker looks like.  And I hardly ever see him; he seems to be somewhat of a hermit.   

So after chatting for a while we strolled down to his house, surrounded by fresh boards leaning up under the eaves to dry.  He worked on my cuma while we chatted.  His wife served me a bowl of soup with fried corn patties that were delicious.  (I ought to take every opportunity to rant about the amazing hospitality of Salvadorans; where else in the world will people instantly, unquestioningly invite in a complete stranger, give them a cup of coffee and the only seat in the house, and feed them?)  I marveled at his hand-cranked lathe.  He complained that he can’t work with it whenever he likes because he needs someone to crank it for him; he wants to buy an electric lathe.  I offered to crank it for him sometime in the interim.  I also got him to invite me along next time he goes to mill a tree.  He claims he rents a tool to do it that’s handheld, which I think is impossible, but perhaps my Spanish is just bad.  I am duly impressed with the furniture he makes with only handheld tools—Skil saw, electric planer, router, drill, chisel.  He has no table saw, band saw, router table, or the other large tools I had considered essential for woodworking.  Simplicity itself. 

After much more chatting we strolled out to his yuca  (manioc) patch because he wanted to know if I had any advice on fertilizing it.  While we were there Santos taught me some trees and revealed that he’d done a series of training sessions on sustainable agriculture.  This, of course, is great news for the work I hope to do here, and I never would have found it out if I hadn’t spent a couple of idle hours with him.  These people are not forthcoming, so it takes time and patience to learn anything about them.  This was not the only time when I’ve spent an hour talking with someone about nothing, enduring long stretches of silence, suppressing my American instincts to say, “Weeeell then, I guess I better be going,” only to suddenly learn something about them that’s incredibly pertinent to me. 

Then Santos noticed a bunch of ripe bananas hanging practically over our heads and decided he wanted to harvest them.  I’ve been curious about how one harvests bananas for a long time, especially since there are several ripening bunches of them in my backyard.  I lent Santos my cuma, which he used to chop down the laurel sapling growing right in front of us, which he’d just taught me how to identify.  He sharpened it to a point, handed me back the cuma, and plunged the pole into the banana tree’s spongy trunk as high up as he could reach.  All this without moving five steps.  With some levering back and forth, the banana trunk gradually split apart, and the weight of the banana bunch pulled the top toward the ground until it came within reach.  Two more jobs for the cuma—cutting off the bunch and cutting all the way through the trunk at chest height—and the job was done.  I’m not sure whether the trunk grows again from where we cut it, or if new banana seedlings sprout up from the ground.  Banana is truly the strangest tree in the world.   

What a lesson in being plan-less and using what’s right in front of you.  So un-American.  I couldn’t believe it when Santos chopped down the laurel sapling, which had potential to turn into a perfect hard-wooded tree to harvest for his woodworking, but then I realized it was just about the right thickness to make cuma handles.  So there you go: another benefit of that spontaneous job of work that involved walking less than five steps. 

I can’t tell which aspects of this story are serendipitous and which are just examples of a typically Salvadoran way of going about things, and my ability to adapt to it.  But I have to say that at the very least, the beginning, Santos’s random decision to sit in front of his brother’s house, was definitely serendipitous.  Give me more run-ins like that and I’ll be a happy Peace Corps volunteer.

El Mozote

December 9, 2007 

As I mentioned in the last post, yesterday I attended the 26^th anniversary of the massacre in El Mozote.  I think I’ve mentioned the event earlier on this blog, but to briefly catch you up, in 1981 a battalion of the Salvadoran army gathered together ~200-300 people from the tiny village of El Mozote and the surrounding area, raped many of the girls, and killed everyone.  Then the Salvadoran government and the Reagan administration denied that the event ever happened until the mass grave was exhumed in 1994.  There’s a lot more to the story, but that’s the basics. 

This became perhaps the most infamous single event of the Salvadoran civil war, simultaneously representing the brutality of the army against the rural peasantry and the thousands of other smaller-scale massacres committed by death squads.  El Mozote has become a powerful symbol, and its annual commemoration has duly become a large and strange affair.  Here collide Ché Guevara T-shirt-wearing teenagers who’ve probably never even heard of Karl Marx, priests following in the tradition of Monsignor Romero, grizzled middle-aged men who may have fought as revolutionaries during the war, vacationing gringo families (one of them, to be exact), dirty backpacking Latino hippies with leather bracelets, cityish people from San Salvador, Peace Corps volunteers, and sleek-looking FMLN campaigners preparing for Election 2009.  Lots of red.  Shirts proclaiming “Don’t steal.  The government doesn’t like the competition,” or juxtaposing photos of Ché, Romero, Farabundo Martí, and Castro.  Fewer Venezuelan flags than I expected, but plenty of Cuban ones.  My favorite outfit was a middle-aged guy wearing a shocking red FMLN bucket hat and a tight Boy Scout shirt—chosen, I suppose, for its vaguely militaristic look.  I failed to get close enough to read where Troop 379 was from. 

Much of the spectacle was less interesting than I anticipated—so much Ché-trendiness—, but some of it was touching as well.  There is a beautiful memorial wall with the names of most of the victims on it, sited right in front of the church where much of the killing happened.  People were respectfully contemplating the names and placing flowers.  Families were having lunch or just sitting on the grassy hillside behind the church, which somehow touched me.  And the murals on the sides of the church are beautiful. 

One of my favorite activities of the day was observing the obviously foreign white people in the crowd, who were from a wide array of backgrounds.  I didn’t talk to any of them besides the other PCVs, but I still learned who they were: an Italian journalist (impressive sideburns, balding, smoking a cigarette), the revered Belgian priest who’s lived in a neighboring community for 35 years (meaning he was around when the massacre happened), a couple of German Peace Corps-equivalent volunteers, a couple of American students, a couple of Irish students, and once again the vacationing family, looking extremely out of place.  Not that I don’t, of course, but at least I don’t feel out of place.  I know how to eat pupusas and toss around Salvadoran slang. 

The events on stage ranged from Catholic prayers to firebrand anti-imperialist speechmaking to interpretive dances representing the experience of innocents during the civil war to Nicaraguan dancers shaking their booties.  Those Nicaraguan dancers could really shake their booties.  I arrived at the event looking forward to the firebrands, but their rhetoric sounded so dated, so played-out, that I was extremely relieved when those Nicaraguans took the stage.  They were from Puerto Cabezas, on the Caribbean coast, and boy their looks and dancing were different from what you find here. 

I’ll Stay Safe in the Future, Don’t Worry

December 9, 2007 

The limits to which people push vehicles in this country astounded me from the start.  El Salvador is definitely one of those countries that export photographs and stories of hellaciously crowded bus and pickup truck rides, with live chickens and little old ladies in your lap.  I’m sure you’ve seen such photos or heard such stories.  I have no doubt they are much the same throughout the developing world.   

Well, I pushed new transportation limits of my own this weekend, and I’m glad my mother wasn’t there to see me.  After attending the annual commemoration of the El Mozote massacre yesterday, I caught a ride out on a packed-full camión (large truck).  I had to jog to catch up with the camión as it left, and ended up standing on the rear bumper, hanging on to the tailgate, for five kilometers or so of dirt road.  Then today I left the youth camp I’d been at lying on top of a pile of mattresses in the back of a pickup, significantly higher than the cab, comfortably rocking back and forth over the deeply rutted dirt road.  Neither of these rides felt particularly safe, but neither were they anything out of the ordinary for El Sal. 

This is the way it is in the campo, when you’re beyond the reach of even El Sal’s impressively extensive bus system.  You catch a ride with whatever truck happens by, and there’s always room for one more.  But don’t worry about me; I probed the limits of my comfort this weekend and decided I’m not going to take up the next opportunity to hop on a camión’s bumper.  That was neither fun nor comfortable.  The mattresses are another story—the comfort and hilarious jostling outweighed the risk.  I’d love to do that again.

Concepción

December 7, 2007 

This evening I dropped by the house of my school’s director.  Her four girls, ages 5-15, were out in the yard setting off firecrackers like a bunch of madwomen.  They were even emptying the explosive powder out of them and putting burning sticks to it.  It was hilarious.  I thought it was just par for the course at her house, but after I left I noticed that I was hearing firecrackers from all sides.  Then I saw a gigantic bonfire being lit in a front yard.  And when I got back to the house I’m staying in, the old lady who’s also staying there had just put the torch to another giant bonfire.  She and a little boy were busy hucking firecrackers gleefully into the flames.  When I walked up she pressed a huge bunch of firecrackers into my hands and told me to throw.  Thus does one learn of the festivals of El Salvador.  This one was for the Concepción, the Conception (perhaps divine babies only have a three-week term?).  The celebration of these more minor festivals is matter-of-fact and brief.  People didn’t even gather together, they just lit huge fires in their own yards and set off firecrackers.  And the fires, made of dried bean vines, burned out after 20 minutes or so.  I suppose when there are as many celebrations as there are in Latin American Catholicism one learns to be economical with one’s time.

Using the Oven as a Radical Act

December 6, 2007 

6:38 PM  At the moment I’m baking a favorite dish: cubed potatoes, onions, and garlic in plenty of oil.  Unfortunately olive oil isn’t available; I’m keeping my fingers crossed vegetable oil will do.  The dish is baking in the small oven here in the house I’m staying in.  Most Salvadorans with any money (which of course doesn’t equate to most Salvadorans) have a range with an oven under it, just like every American kitchen.  But the thing is, nobody uses the ovens.  I don’t know why they even have them instead of a more compact, cheaper tabletop range—I suppose it just seems more proper or something.  It wouldn’t be off the wall to say perhaps they buy them because it seems more American, considering the way they idolize America.  If they use an oven at all it’s an all-day affair with a giant mound-shaped earthen oven; usually a couple of women in each community have one, although not in mine.  There is zero baking in my village.  Thus it blew everyone in the room’s minds when I asked to use the oven.  They marveled at the way I checked for a pilot light, didn’t find it, pulled out the bottom of the oven, and lit the burners with a match.  One of the women, whom I’d earlier in the day taught to use a microwave, said, “You know how to use everything, don’t you?”  That’s only relative: many of my friends will tell you that microwaves still gave me trouble until recently.