Santa Baby

Sparklers!

I have a little catching up to do on here. I keep coming up with topics to write about, but more and more events keep occurring. Then I feel overwhelmed and I do not know where to start, so I just don't. I don't write and weeks go by, and more blog worthy events happen etc. It is a vicious cycle. So I am going to start off slowly and try to catch up on all of the happenings down here in The Savior.

Christmas was a couple of weeks ago, but it was my first Christmas away from home. Last year I flew to Florida for the holidays with my family so I did not get to experience a Salvadoran Christmas or New Years. This year, it was a hard decision not to be home, but I decided to stay and celebrate with my Salvadoran family. As it turns out Christmas, which is celebrated on the December 24th, is much like any other day here. My host dad, Orlando, got up and went to work in the fields. All stores in town are open. Presents are not common. ( I am sure this is for a number of reasons including that most rural families cannot afford them.)

Dirt Fight!

I got up on the 24th and did some yard work. Later in the day I had some dirt delivered and got my garden started. (Which I have been trying to get going for about a year.) Melida, my host mom, decided this would be a great opportunity to tackle me into the giant pile of dirt in my yard. That is the story of the Christmas Dirt Fight of 2012. I may need to make this a yearly tradition...

Cojete anyone?

                                                                       The evening of the 24th is when most of the festive activities take place. Most families make a baked chicken and either eat it in a really delicious sauce or in a sandwich with coleslaw and said delicious sauce. My host family decided to switch it up a little this year and we had grilled beef, rice and pico de gallo. Pretty delicious. The other big part of a Salvadoran Christmas is firecrackers, or cojetes. I set off almost two hundred firecrackers that night. Thank goodness Orlando is such an entrepreneur and decided to sell firecrackers in the front yard all night.

Jossline is my Christmas present this year :)

                                                                          It is also tradition to stay up until midnight on the 24th. At midnight everyone lights off hundreds of fireworks all at once. Unfortunately this year I was fighting some flu like symptoms so after my firecracker rampage, I crashed and decided to call it a night. It was already 2.5 hours past my bed time at this point. 10:30 is late. So I headed to bed, but was rudely awakened at midnight with all of El Salvador lighting off firecrackers at once.

Melida getting a little too into the Christmas spirit.

 The 25th of December was just another day down here. I cleaned up my house in preparation of picking up my Dad the next day. Orlando and I went and purchased giant chickens to eat on New Years. I did have a great time catching up with my parents and my best friend, Ali. As I am wrapping up my service down here and I cannot help but wonder where I will be for Christmas next year...

I hope you all had a great holiday season!

 

Volcano: Take Two

Group pic at the top

About a week ago I started off from my community with my youth group on our third adventure. We had planned on spending the night with the other two thirds of the group in a national park near by my site. But we had to adjust our plans as one of the other volunteers involved in the project said her kids could not get permission to travel so far and stay the night. This is not too surprising as her community is the farthest away from the park. I mean I was having some trouble getting permission from my kids' parents and we live close!

So we hmmed and we hawed thinking up other excursion ideas. Eventually we settled upon hiking Volcan Santa Ana, or Volcan Cerro Verde. It is the tallest volcano in the country and located in between Alex and my communities and Natalie's community. My kids were pretty devastated when I told them we would not be going to Monticristo National Park, and were slightly skeptical when I told them about the volcano hike.  But they are good sports and agreed to give it a shot.

We got the the park entrance early, not really knowing what to expect. We got there and paid the first of four entrance fees. Yes four. You have to pay to enter the park, then you must pay for your guide. Next you have to pay to enter onto a portion of private property that must be crossed to get to the top. And then you have to pay again, but by that point I stopped paying attention to why. We were accompanied by a park guide and a police officer leading the way and another set bringing up the rear. Hiking is known to bring out hiding robbers here in El Salvador, so it is best to go with armed escorts.

Kick Ass Youth Group

Not all of the kids from our three groups were in the best of shape, but they all made the 3 hour hike up to the top of the volcano. For that I am immensely proud of them. They could have quit, but they trudged through and made it all the way up. This hike was so much better than the volcano hike I did when I was in training in San Vicente, Volcan Chichontepec. I learned a lot about myself on that hike and I learned a lot about my kids on this hike. 

Awesome crater and sulfur lake at the top

My feet after the hike...

We made it to the top and the view was stellar. We were on the rim of a huge crater. There was a green, sulfur lake in the middle.  Lago De Coatepeque was visible in the distance. We snacked on chicken sandwiches and reveled in the beauty around us. This was meant to be the last big trip for my youth group, but they have really run with this project. I am more than happy to support these kids as long they are willing to participate. 

Alex, Natalie and I

We are already starting to plan a fourth trip, the one we had to cancel. Also we held the first of several movie night fundraisers at my house several nights ago. The kids have decided to raise money to buy trees and re-forest part of our community. We broke even and then some last night. Every little bit counts and my kids are proving that every day! 

La Dieta

Congratulations! Welcome home! You must be exhausted, I mean you did just give birth to a healthy, happy baby. That is hard work! I hear it is one of the most physically taxing events your body can go through. I mean you have just spent the last nine months carrying and nourishing another living being with your own body. Then after hours and hours of being in labor, in pain, you have pushed that small child out of your body and into the big scary world. That is heavy stuff right there. Might I offer you a cup of drinking chocolate? Some cheese? A tortilla?

Many women in El Salvador, especially those who live in the more rural areas, adhere to what is known as 'la dieta' (or the diet) after child birth. This is a very strict diet that consists of chocolate, cheese, tortillas and sometimes chicken. I am not kidding, this is a real thing. They must follow this diet for the first 40 days of their new babies life. And interestingly enough, if something goes wrong and the baby does not survive, the mother must still follow la dieta.

Most women in my community follow la dieta after child birth. It can be hard to see these wonderful happy babies and know that these mothers are not properly taking care of themselves. It is too easy imagine what kind of nutritional deficits these kids are starting out with. Women have told me that the chocolate is consumed to help bring the milk when the mother starts breast feeding. As for the other foods I do not really know what their significance is. I have heard la dieta is followed in order to control odor, but I think many of these women are just blindly following their traditions. Salvadorians can be quite superstitious.

It is very interesting to see women who believed in something like la dieta, but have since had their minds changed. For instance a woman in my community was told that she could not get pregnant while she was breast feeding. That turned out to be false, and now now she has two daughters 10 months apart. She no longer believes that superstition, but puts all of her faith behind la dieta. Many women here also wear red bands of fabric around their waist during pregnancy. They believe that this wards off the moon which can, during a full moon, cause your child to have birth defects. They believe that the moon 'eats' the part of the child that comes out deformed. Cleft lip, for example, is often blamed on the evils of the moon.  

Some of these women are not very educated, but some are. It is hard to believe that so many people follow beliefs like la dieta in during this day and age. The world is so advanced, with so much information at our fingertips on the internet, that it is shameful to see so many women hurting themselves and their children in this way. Women get defensive if you try to even talk to them about alternatives to la dieta. They raised their children that way, their mothers raised them that way and their grandmothers raised their mothers that way. This is what they know, and change can be intimidating. 

Creepy Crawlers

This past weekend I decided that I wanted to re-arrange my house. I do not have a lot of furniture, so this is not actually that exciting. Mostly I wanted to move my guest bed 90 degrees so it was up against an adjacent wall. In order to do this I had to move a few items that were perched against said adjacent wall. This included a large teal bucket, the box my blender came in, a pair of shoes, a cesta and the enormous binder I created for GAD.

 Things were going fine until I moved the GAD binder. If only I had left the binder, well life would be worse that it is now, but I would not have have known that. Not sure which is worse. So I pick up the binder and I see a scorpion. At first I think it is dead. It is a black scorpion, but its back is brown. It looks like it is already dead and starting to decay. (It had been a while since I had picked the binder up, don't judge.) So I decide I will get a shoe and give it a good smack, just to make sure. You can never be too cautious about these things. Well apparently I was not cautious enough. I brought the shoe down hard, but not hard enough to kill the still very alive scorpion. But what I learned as soon as I lifted the sneaker up was unsettling to say the least. I was momentarily frozen and horrified as I watched baby scorpions flee off the back of the larger mama scorpion and into every crevice and corner of my house. As thin as a needle and as long as my pinky finger nail, I realized that they would be quite hard to find.

I tried to shake off my goosebumps as I figured I needed to at least finish off the mama scorpion. So I killed her and swept her outside. (Which is what I should have done in the first place, lesson learned.) I was able to kill about six or seven of the babies. But when researched later, I found out that scorpions can have up to 50 babies. Lets just think about that. Or not, it makes my skin crawl. I have moved on, but am wearing shoes in the house at all times.

Also in the past few days I have found two tarantulas at my house. The first Bella was playing with on the front porch. It was mostly dead, but I gave it a good stomp just to make sure. The second was a little more disconcerting, I found it in my shower. Now my shower is outside, but still, that is not what I want to find as I am going in to bathe. This one was very much alive, and I made my host sister Iviana kill it for me. It was hanging out in a corner and I knew that if I tried to kill it, more than likely it would involve screaming and the giant spider escaping. So I brought in an expert. Thank goodness for Iviana.

I cannot tell you why these creatures are choosing now, the end of my service, to flock to my house. I can just hope that some sort of creepy crawler bulletin has been sent out and I will not need to deal with more of these little guys. As for the baby scorpions, I have not seen any more in the past few days. Melida says that they will probably just die on their own because they were so small, and no longer have their mother for protection. I am putting Bella on task, get 'em girl! 

Two Things

1. So remember that post where I told you all about how I got Bella fixed? And remember how I said I did it so that I did not have to deal with having a dog in heat? If not you can read about that here. Well a crazy, bizarre event happened where she got her first heat anyways. Woah now you're saying, when you get a dog fixed doesn't the vet remove the uterus, ovaries and fallopian tubes? How is it possible that with out all of that equipment, she could be going through heat. The answer is simple. I have no idea. It should not be possible. But it happened, she had all of the symptoms. Including a myriad of male dogs waiting for her night and day outside of my house. Supposedly she cannot get pregnant, but this does not mean I wanted her to be accosted by male dogs at every moment of every day. So she stayed inside until her symptoms subsided. The only explanation I can think of is that she must have been weeks away from her first heat when I got her fixed, and the surgery confused her body so it just decided to go ahead as planned. I just hope that this is a one time event. Fingers crossed. 

2. My host mom, Melida, sent my host dad, Orlando, to town the other day with a grocery list. Melida needed Orlando to buy the ingredients to make pizza, as she had agreed to show another family near by how to make it. There are two hilarious parts to this story. The first being that on the list Melida put down that she wanted 'salsa', which is a word that is used for everything and anything that is sauce related. She expected him to come back with a pasta sauce, so imagine her surprise when he came home with a two pound bag of ketchup. *palm to forehead* This is not the first time Melida has made pizza, so Orlando should have known that ketchup was not the correct kind of 'salsa'. The situation was eventually remedied, thank goodness.

The other great part of that story is that on the piece of paper Melida gave Orlando she wrote two lists. The first list was the things she needed for pizza. The second list was titled 'Other things I need'. Under that heading it listed: 5 big kisses, two secrete glances and 10 cuddles. Adorable right? Orlando was Melida's only serious boyfriend and they wrote to each other when Orlando was living in the States. He left the US to come back and marry her. They have been married about 14 years and have 4 daughters. So where is the hilarious part? He asked one of their daughters, in all seriousness, where he could buy the items listed on the second list. I can just imagine him trying to go to the market and asking all of the stands where he could buy 5 big kisses. Thankfully he read the list before he left for town.

Happy Veteran's Day everyone!