Here We Go One More Time

 I know that my first shot at being a dog mom kind of failed. But I am not easily dissuaded from such things. I know that Hoja was out of control for a couple of reasons. First of all she was out of her mind crazy. Second of all she and I had totally different ideas of the right way to behave. I wanted to enroll her in Chelsea's Mock Petsmart classes and have her behave like a dog in the states. You know, calm and obedient. She had different ideas. Hoja and I ended up parting ways after she crossed some pretty significant lines with my host family. All of this happened and ended by the middle of last November. It has now been almost a year. That is hard to believe.

So I had given up on being a dog mom for the moment. It just was not the time. But then in mid-June things changed. I had seen this little rat of a dog around my neighborhood for a couple of weeks. She was completely malnourished. Matted in mud, covered in wounds and in a loosing battle with scabies and parasites I decided I needed to try to at least give this dog a proper bath and meal. I had no intentions of anything else. But after I found out that her 'owners' had intentions to kill her because they had mistreated her and she ended up in her sad state, and after she slept for about a week straight on my porch, I knew there was no going back. I was a dog mom once again.

So this is Bella. (Pronounced Beya) It means beauty in Spanish. It was meant to be an ironic name since she was so ugly when she came to live with me. But it was also meant to be encouragement to her. I figured if I called her Bella enough, she might just live up to her name. She has made a full recovery in the span of two and a half months. Her scabies is gone. She lost all of her fur and grew in a new, beautiful and thick coat of fur. She could now be described as a little chunky.  

The photo above was when I tried to feed her a hard boiled egg. She failed at eating it. Bella loves all types of fruit, but especially mangos. During mango season I would come home and there would be 5 or 6 mango seeds and skins on my porch. That is a lot of mangos for a human to eat, let alone a little dog! Bella is still a puppy for sure. She has one baby tooth left and is growing. But since she is a mutt and I have no idea who her parents were, I do not know how big she will get. I think she will stay pretty small. Which is just fine by me. :) Also she can already sit on command and shake. My host family things this is fantastic, they have never seen a dog that could shake hands. haha We are still working on waiting and laying down. But poco a poco we are making progress.

 Bella is now super beautiful and so well behaved. I would like to think it is my excellent training skills, but I think she is just too afraid that I will kick her out to do anything too extreme. Some times when I pick up my broom or I walk towards her too quickly she will run away or flinch like she thinks I am going to beat her. It is so sad. She is so starved for love and positive attention. It is lucky for her that I have plenty of it.

Toddlers in Tiaras

I have a back up of stories and pictures to share with you all! I am going to split them up into two posts, for your reading enjoyment of course. Get excited there are some good ones this time. haha 

Sara on the way up to her site

An example of the fuel efficient stoves

They grow a lot of cabbage in her community

So high up we are in the clouds!

A few weeks ago I went to visit a fellow volunteer, Sara. She lives in the department of Chalatanago, near the town of La Palma. Sara lives at the highest point in El Salvador. Which is fitting because she is over 6 feet tall. Salvadorians always say 'La mas alta en la mas alta', which translates to 'the highest at the highest'. haha Sara has a new puppy, named Osa, she is adorable and we played with her a lot. Sara found Osa down by the river that runs through her town. Someone had just thrown her away, and Sara came upon her and rescued her. (Pay attention, this is a reoccurring theme). Sara is working on a fuel efficient stove project with her community, so we walked around to a bunch of the houses that have the new stoves so I could get a better feel for how the project works. I am also working on getting this project to my community. All in all it was a good trip. Her site is much cooler than mine is. We heated up water for our bucket baths, which is something that I have never once considered doing for my bucket baths at home. It is just too hot where I am.

What is wrong with this picture?

At an overlook in the clouds

Three weeks ago the fiestas partonales began in my community. At last year's events, I had budgeted poorly. (You can revisit that here...) Needless to say it was not nearly as fun as I know it could have been. The main goal of the fiestas is to raise money for the church, so almost everything cost money. Games, food, raffles and church services make up the week. There are pupusas, pasteles (a very close relative to enchiladas)  and bagged cucumber and watermelon for sale every night. Along with an hour long church service, the week nights are pretty calm. People from neighboring communities are bussed in for the evening and it is generally a good time. 

Trying to win a madrina's kiss

Waiting for their turn

This was one of the madrinas... 

The last day of the fiestas is the biggest deal. There are a ton of games, more people are bussed in and there is an event called Carrera de Cinta. This is how it is set up. There are a bunch of men that show up on horses and the goal is to get a small stick (that they are holding) through a small quarter sized ring hanging off of a piece of tape hanging on a line. The riders must gallop at full speed and try to get their stick through the ring. Now the prize for doing this is you get a kiss, gift and sash from a 'madrina', which translates to godmother but in this sense it is more like a fairy godmother. Most of the girls were in their late teens, but there were some like the little gem to the left. Looks like stage moms are cross cultural. Another of the events is called the Arco de Noe, Noah's Ark. There is a huge pile of goodies ranging from bags of corn and beans to chickens, to candy and instant coffee, it is all laid out on a table. The way it works is you pay a quarter and pick a slip of paper out of a bucket. On the slip of paper is your prize. Everybody is a winner! Pretty straight forward. It is terribly addicting, and I ended up spending like $3 there over the course of the day. I mostly won these terrible candies that I dislike, but on my last go I ended up winning a watermelon.

Band that played good music, too bad nobody wanted to dance

Ring toss

Another volunteer, Alex, who lives near by came to my towns fiestas

My host mom, slacking off

My Salvadorian family

I won a watermelon at El Arco de Noe

Belize + Best Mom Ever = Epic

I deduced something mildly life changing last week. I have the coolest Mom ever. Now not everyone can say that, so you should know that I feel pretty damn lucky. I have always known my Mom was awesome, but after spending an epic week with her in Belize I feel like I got to know a totally different side of her.  A jungle adventure having, tequila shot taking, island evacuating side. I apologize in advance if I over use the word 'epic' in this post, but it is the most efficient word to describe every part of the week, from human sacrifice to sharks and hurricanes, we did it all. 

Sharks at Shark-Ray Ally of course!

We arrived on a Saturday. We were staying on the island of Ambergris Caye, in the town of San Pedro. We flew in a small Cessna from the airport in Belize City to San Pedro. After a quick mishap with Mom trying to meet me at airport, only to have me looking for her at the hotel we quickly settled in to our hotel, the Blue Tang Inn. (Totally recommend staying there if you ever find yourself in San Pedro!) We followed my friend, Clement's advice and had a fantastic dinner at the Blue Water Grill. When we got up on Sunday we started hearing rumblings that Tropical Storm Ernesto was headed our way. So we decided to try and get as much done as possible before bad weather overtook our time. We scheduled a snorkeling trip to  Hol Chan and Shark Ray Ally. It was really beautiful. We saw all sorts of marine life like nurse sharks, a spotted eagle ray and turtles. Not to mention tons of fish, sea cumbers and conch shells. It was Mom's first time snorkeling and I cannot imagine a better place to be. When we got back to land, we headed to dinner at a local restaurant that served pupusas. Me, being practically Salvadorian these days, needed to try these pupusas out to compare them to the real deal. I was pleasantly surprised when they tasted just like the ones in El Salvador. That is probably because they were made by a woman from Chalatinago, a department in El Salvador.   

Lunch at Elvi's

Monday I did two local scuba dives in the morning. I had heard about how beautiful the dives would be, but it paled in comparison to the real thing. Tons of fish, a few more sharks, and some sting rays later, we were back at the dive shop. One of the most fascinating things I learned during this trip was about the lion fish that have decided to make the reefs off the coast of Belize it's home. Since these lion fish are not native to Belize, and they are eating all of the reef's cleaning organisms, they have been declared an invasive organism. The coastal citizens are trying to eradicate them by killing them off. So a few of the more experienced divers on the trip brought down spears and killed any lion fish they came across. The fish were then cut up and left to be eaten by something else. I did not expect to actually see any lion fish, but the group found about 4 or 5 and they were taken care of. By 1 I was back in the room and Mom and I decided to eat at the much acclaimed Elvi's Kitchen.

Getting ready for Ernesto...

It was at this point that people on the island were getting serious about TS Ernesto. Allen, who worked at the front desk at Blue Tang, told us that if the TS was upgraded to a hurricane we would be evacuated to the main land. As it looked like the hurricane was definitely going to be upgraded we decided to go ahead to make the plans to evacuate the next morning. As the next day was my Mom's birthday and we did not know what the day held for us, we decided to have her birthday dinner at a much recommended restaurant on the island, Wild Mango's. The food did not disappoint. The atmosphere was perfect for a restaurant wide rendition of happy birthday. After which Mom declared she was now old and a woman at the next table informed her that 50 is the new 30. Duh. I then worked some magic and daughter pressured her into a tequila shot. Epic.

Evacuation day!

Re-usable boarding passes, what a concept

Getting felt up by an iguana

Tuesday morning we got up and were evacuated to the inland town of San Ignacio. We stayed at a sister hotel to the Blue Tang Inn (or the Blue Tang Clan as my Dad called it... Get it Wu Tang Clan? Common now!)  Since it was Mom's birthday and we were in Belize, we decide we could not just mope around the hotel all afternoon. So we visited an iguana preserve that we had heard about. It was pretty cool. We also chatted with another family who had done a jungle adventure and highly recommended it.  They gave us the card of the tour guide who had taken them and when we got up in the morning we decided it might be worth seeing if the guide was free.

Hey, you, over there. You have something in your hair!

Mom being a good sport with our guide

As it turns out, Orlando, the guide was free and agreed to pick us up in an hour. Our recommended packing list for the day was intriguing, a change of clothes, a towel, socks and no camera. After picking up a packed lunch in town, the three of us started our journey with an hour long car drive, mostly on dirt roads. At the end of our car ride we got out and were given bug spray and helmets. We took our socks and lunch but nothing else. Orlando led us to a path that led directly into the jungle. We hiked into the jungle for about 45 minuets, wadding (up to our waists)  across a river three times before we reached the entrance of the cave that had been our destination all along. We had a quick snack and bathroom break before we began the second part of our journey.

Pretty!

The second part of the trek began by swimming into the entrance of the cave with our head-light equipped helmets. The water was so deep at this point that I could not touch the bottom. For the next hour and a half we hiked, waded and climbed deeper and deeper into the cave. At some points we were up to our necks in water where as at other parts we had to hold our heads in a certain position just to make it through the tight spaces. The cave was so dark that head-lamps were necessary to move anywhere. About an hour and a half in, Orlando asked us to take our shoes off and we put on our socks that had been protected in his water tight bag. We continued to walk until we reached an area that was determined to be a location of Mayan human sacrifice. Orlando explained that over 1000 years ago the Mayan population was suffering from an extreme drought which led them to take some pretty extreme measures to get back in the good graces of their gods. They started with blood letting and eventually ended up sacrificing 14 members of their society. During our time there, we were shown 5 skeletons, 4 partial skeletons and one full skeleton, who they called the crystal maiden. The whole trip was really quite incredible. It is amazing that tourists are allowed to enter the cave at all. All of the artifacts are in their original locations and the only thing separating the artifacts from the tourists are small lines of tape that have been placed on the ground. The cave is called Actun Tunichil Muknal, in Mayan, translated it means Cave of the Crystal Sept. Another epic day.     

Drinks with the Binders, a little blurry, but proof is proof.

Since the hurricane had moved on, when we got up on Thursday we headed back to San Pedro. It was a relaxed day that ended with drinks with a family we were neighbors with in Alexandria who happened to be in San Pedro the same week as we were. Neither of us knew the other would be there until my Mom saw pictures they had posted on Facebook. Oh the magic of social networking.

Time to go diving!

Friday morning I got up early and went for a full day of scuba diving. After a two hour boat ride I dove the infamous Blue hole that was discovered by Jaque Coustaue. It is hard to explain what the blue hole looks like under the surface. But basically it is a huge underwater cave with stalactites bigger than a school bus. Oh and sharks. Visibility was not very good so it gives the sharks that much more of a scare factor. It was the deepest dive I have been on yet, ending around 130 feet down. The second dive of the day was equally as cool but a total 180 from the Blue hole dive. There were tons of fish and coral on the second dive. Along with more sharks, rays and turtles. Also on this dive there was more lion fish killing. But what made it more interesting than on my first day of dives was that we were followed by a barracuda that must have been 3 feet long, eating the lion fish as the dive leader killed them. Just when you think it had gone away, there it would be right underneath you... After the second dive, we stopped on a small island for lunch. The island is home to a Red Footed Booby Bird sanctuary. Pretty cool. The last dive of the day was at a place appropriately named the aquarium. I was less than impressed and getting pretty tired at this point when the leader of the dive took out a bag of left over rice and beans from lunch and shook it into the the water. Almost immediately our group of divers, myself included, were in the middle of a feeding frenzy. Though I do not know the type of fish they were, most were as big as my head and there must have been a couple hundred of them. This dive may have been my favorite. Once again a fantastic day. 

Island where we had lunch

Not sure why I was the only one who found this funny

You can just see the outline of the blue hole

 Saturday morning came too soon and Mom left to go back home. I had an extra night in San Pedro so I used it wisely and locked myself in the air conditioned room, made some shrimp for dinner and watched the beginning of Shark Week. I begrudgingly left the next day to head back to reality. Vacation is great, especially when you have an awesome Mom to share it with!

Prince Charming?

Yes, this happened...

   

Grants...

You get a grant! You get a grant! EVERYBODY GETS A GRANT! Oh boy do I wish there was some kind of Oprah show where grants were given out like cars... I am in the middle of four different grant applications and starting to feel a bit bogged down. Since Peace Corps does not provide any funding to its volunteers to complete projects, we must apply for grants. I have been given all of the tools and resources to apply for them, it is just a tedious process. Especially if the application is in Spanish. Grants are a necessary evil if you wish to complete pretty much any type of project in your service.

Some of the grants get filled out in English and some in Spanish. I feel very competent when I am able to write a grant in Spanish. (Don't worry they are definitely getting proofread by my boss.) I mentioned before that I am trying to complete what seems like a million projects. So that equates to a million grants. Some of the projects actually involve applying for one grant and if that gets approved applying for a second grant which is where the money will actually come from. But you have to be approved for the first one before you can get the second one. Oy.

Another obstacle that I have come across is how inconvenient it is to actually submit everything. First you have to write up the grant. Then I send it to my bosses to make sure there are no typos and that I am not missing important parts. Once I get the go ahead I take a bus to town to get it printed. Next I get it signed by everyone that is involved or supporting the project. After that is back into town to get it scanned and e-mailed off the the correct sources.

I cannot even tell you how grateful I am that I live fairly close to my pueblo. For some volunteers it is a day long trek to get into town and back to their communities.

Like I said in a previous post I am still working on completing several projects before my service ends (IN 8 MONTHS!!). I am hopeful that I will have the funds and can start the fuel efficient stove project within the next month or so.

More updates to come soon!

Just In Case

Just in case I was unsure that rainy season was in full swing, upon returning to site three events confirmed this fact.

First off I was assaulted with a huge wave of humidity. I do not know what percentage the humidity is here, but it is high. Too high. My normally bone straight hair is frizzy, curly and unruly. This is really not ok. I do not have the life skills to deal with hair like this. I have never had to deal with out of control strands. As many Salvadorians have naturally curly or frizzy hair, they must deal with this problem their entire lives. And do you know what they do? They use hair gel. Most use a gel called Gorilla Snot... So there's that. Secondly my pila water is back to its dark brown hue. Ugh. It is so hard for me to justify taking a bucket bath with this water. Actually I just took a bucket bath and I actually feel more filthy than I did before... And then lastly (as if I needed anything else) I was without electricity for the first 24 hours I was back. Welcome back to site Chelsea!

So why was I out of site long enough to forget the rainy season realities, you ask? I was in the States for a fantastic vacation. I was able to see a couple of very good friends from college. We got dinner and hung out in Boston. They crashed at my Uncle Paul's house with me. Uncle Paul made us his famous waffles with bacon and fruit salad the next morning. It was as fantastic, as it always is, and I am pretty sure they are ruined for breakfast now, as I have been for years. We went our separate ways after breakfast, but I am so glad I got to see them.

 The main reason for the trip was to see my friends Amanda and Dave get married. It has been about ten years since I have been to a wedding so, besides my extensive wedding knowledge granted to me through watching obscene amounts of TLC, I do not have a lot to compare it to. But it really was the perfect weekend.  I showed up on Saturday for the rehearsal dinner and made fast friends with all of the people I was crashing with at Amanda's family's guest house and all of the relatives who had come in already.

Sunday, wedding day, was awesome. Amanda's family supplied us with breakfast fixin's, and then group of non-wedding party folks headed (including myself) headed to the Hudson River for a little time on Amanda's family boat. I ended up getting a bit burnt, but it was enough fun that I did not mind in the slightest. The ceremony was at 4pm and it was perfect, I cried. Amanda looked beautiful and the groom, Dave, was very handsome. It was a short ceremony and and then the newly married couple headed off to the reception in an antique car of Amanda's family. The reception, in a refurbished barn, was stunning, the food was delicious and the band was great. Dave is Mexican, so the band played some typical Mexican music along with more popular tunes. All in all it was an epic night. The couple headed off to Spain for their honeymoon and have now re-located to England where Dave is based in the US Air Force. 

Another huge perk of my trip was the fact that I got to see a ton of my Boston based relatives. I stayed most of my time in Boston with my Uncle Paul. He spoiled me rotten, and I loved every minute of it. Uncle Paul and I went and had dinner with his brother and wife, my Uncle Dick and Aunt Joyce. It was so great to see them. They are Pug breeders and often show them at national competitions. You should hear they way they talk about and dote on their babies. Unfortunately it was at this dinner that I got food poisoning. It was delicious, but I was out of commission for several days afterwards. All of my Salvadoran friends think it is hilarious that I got food poisoning in the States. They are convinced that I will need to stay in El Salvador for the rest of my life because I can no longer eat American cuisine. Oh man, I fear they might be right.

I had some flight troubles and ended up having to spend several more days in Boston, poor me right? I was able to visit some other relatives, which I was so grateful for. I saw my Aunt Mim and Uncle Tommy one afternoon. They hooked me up with a lot of sweet toothbrushes to use in a dental campaign I want to set up in my community. I was also able to see my Uncle Kevin, another one of Uncle Paul's brothers. Uncle Paul and I met him for breakfast in morning before I flew back to El Salvador. It really is so great to see family that you have not seen in forever.

I am now back in El Salvador and being very productive. I will update on my projects soon!