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!

Si Dios Le Permite

Death in El Salvador is, unfortunately common place. The Civil War that started it all started in 1979 and lasted until 1992. Upwards of 80,000 people died. Remember that El Salvador is roughly the size of Massachusetts. So consider if Massachusetts went to war within its self. Here is a brief history of the civil war that took place here:

 In 1980, El Salvador's civil war officially began.  The US government-supported Salvadoran military targeted anyone they suspected of supporting social and economic reform. Over the ensuing twelve years, thousands of victims died.  Some of the most notable were Archbishop Oscar Romero (shot to death 1980), four US church workers (raped and murdered 1980) and six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter (shot to death at home 1989).  The military death squads wiped-out entire villages believed to be assisting the guerrilla efforts.  In 1981, the military killed over 1,000 people in the village of El Mozote. (As a reference my community has about 850 people in it.)  The first reports of the attacks were denied by both El Salvador, but after the mass graves were uncovered, it was hard to deny what had taken place.

 The opposing side was lead by the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), a coalition of five left-wing guerrilla groups. As the military defended their stand of killing any alleged rebels, the FMLN also worked to blow-up bridges, cut power lines, destroy coffee plantations and anything else to damage the economy that supported the government.  The FMLN murdered and kidnapped government officials.  The war eventually came to an end in 1990 with the establishment of a new civilian police force, some constitutional amendments and FMLN's was to be allowed to function as a political party in the nation's democratic process. The Peace Accords were not actually signed though until 1992.

During the Civil War here, many Salvadorians sought refuge in the United States. In order to protect themselves from violent gangs in the US, these guerrilla trained Salvadorans created a little gang called MS-13, you may have heard of them. They are quite violent and deal in all of the shady things you would expect them to deal in. As you would expect these violent gang members eventually started to get deported back to El Salvador where they pick thing right back up. There are now several gangs down here, M-13 being one of them. Since the war and then later the development of these gangs, El Salvador has known a lot of death. A few months ago El Salvador was ecstatic to announce its first murder free day in years. This was epic. However although the murder rate here seems to be going down, most people just assume that the murders are still happening, they are just going unreported. 

Ok, so that was a lot of history (most of which was gotten from Wikipedia), but I wanted to make sure you all understood a bit of the background of El Salvador's violent history. I also want to say that El Salvador is full of lovely people. Please do not get the wrong idea about this country, they have just been given the crap end of the stick too many times. Many Salvadorans are so used to this culture of people they love dying that they have developed sayings that are hard to ignore. The most prevalent saying being 'si Dios le permite', meaning 'if God allows it'. If you invite someone to a meeting or to dinner etc, many will respond with 'si Dios le permite'. Basically it is like saying if I don't die before then, I will go. That is some heavy stuff. I will also say that it can also be used as an excuse to get out of doing something or going somewhere, and that is just annoying.

Last Friday was the Day of the Dead in Central America. I went with my host family to a cemetery in the community above mine. We cleaned off and decorated the graves of my host mom, Melida's, father and grandmother. Her father asked to have pine needles sprinkled on his grave every year, so we did that on both of the graves and then decorated the tombstones with multicolored plastic flowers. The graveyard was full of people when we got there, all doing the same thing. There is no groundskeeper for the cemetery's down here, so it can get a bit sloppy looking if the families do not come and keep the area in order. Another interesting fact I learned while there was that you must pay the mayor's office every 5 years to keep your family interred. If you do not pay, they apparently have the right to come in and dig up the body of the family that did not pay so the spot can be used by someone else... Rough stuff right there. There was also a short mass in the cemetery. I was surprised to see that everyone I came across was generally in a happy, social mood. This was not a time for grieving over lost loved ones, it was a time to celebrate their lives and re-connect with friends. 

It amazes me how resilient this culture is. These people have been knocked down again and again, yet they keep moving forward the best they can.  I do not have any photos because I was unsure if it would be appropriate. Looking back I am sure it would have been fine, but I was not trying to be the crazy gringa in the cemetery taking pictures of everything.

Madness... In A Good Way

Rawr.

What do you get when you mix 30 kids, 3 chaperones, a broken down car, a zoo and and one of the most dangerous cities on earth? Madness, that's what. I woke up yesterday, after sleeping 12 hours straight, feeling like I got hit by a train. It is stressful being in charge of other people's children.

A lot of cotton candy was involved in this day.

This was the second excursion that my youth group went on. I met my kids at 6am and we walked up to the entrance of the community to meet the Alex with his kids and bus we hired to take us to San Salvador to go to the Zoo. After we picked up lunch for 35 people we hit the road. It is about a two hour drive to San Salvador. As we were arriving into the city, Natalie (the third volunteer involved in this project) called and told us that she and her kids were 30 minutes outside the city but were stuck in terrible traffic AND their transport had broken down. Poor girl, she has had such terrible luck with transport during this project. On our first excursion to the beach, the transport she had arranged canceled the night before the trip. She ended up finding new transport, but now on this second trip her transport broke down. So I took 22 kids to the Zoo and Alex went with our bus driver to go find Natalie and her kids.

Tired kids after the scavenger hunt.

I set down some guidelines for the kids. Pretty straight forward stuff, do not talk to strangers, do not leave the Zoo, do not touch or feed any of the animals etc. We had created an informational scavenger hunt for the kids to complete, but I did not want to start it without Natalie's kids, so I gave the kids that were with me an hour of free time to explore the Zoo. Luckily Alex was able to find Natalie and her kids pretty quickly. When they got to the Zoo, we broke the kids up into groups of three (one from each community) sent them off to complete the scavenger hunt. We gave them two hours to find the answers to 40 questions. A lot of the answers could be found by simply reading the plaques in front of each animal. But some of the more complicated or strange questions you had to examine the animals or ask Zoo staff for the answer. Example: How many toes does an ostrich have? What kind of food does a hippo eat? When looking at birds, which gender tends to be more colorful? We also told the kids that they needed to put the scientific name of each animal with each answer, that way we could ensure that they had actually visited the animals. I think the kids really enjoyed this part of the trip.

This was also there...

Castle and slide

After the Zoo, we gathered around and ate our lunch. We then headed to a small natural history museum, where we learned all about the topographical, animal and sedimentary history of El Salvador. There were lots of stuffed animals, fossils and maps for everyone to get a good sense of what our guide was talking about. Our guide was very well informed and kept the kids engaged, which might be a miracle since it was around 2:30 at this point and everyone was starting to fade. After our museum tour we headed over to this really cool park that was on the same property. We gave the kids an hour or so to blow off any extra steam they might have had. There as a really awesome slide that was connected to a castle type house. All of the kids loved it. And of course I had to take my own turn on the slide just to see what it was all about. Pretty awesome.

Oh yeah we did matching shirts!

We headed home around 4, which was a little later than we had wanted to get on the road, but the kids were having such a good time that it was hard to pull them away. We ended up hitting some traffic and did not actually make it home until 6:30. Parents were starting to get worried at that point, but we all made it back in one piece. Oh and Natalie's transport driver was able to get the car fixed while we were at the Zoo, so she was able to make it home safely as well. When we got to our community I asked my kids if they were exhausted and they replied that they were not tired, but were still having fun from the trip. I am going to count this as a success, even with the AM craziness. Two trips down, one to go!

One last thing: RAINY SEASON HAS OFFICIALLY BEEN DECLARED OVER. Halleluiah people, halleluiah. 

Facts Of My Current Life

1. I just used Fabreeze as perfume. Rainy season is upon us and it is not doing any favors for my clothes. Mildew is not a smell that suits me.

2. This is the current state of my shoes...

3. I was discussing dating prospects with another volunteer the other day. We both agreed that proximity to us is our current most attractive aspect in a guy. I realize how ridiculous this is, but it is where we are at right now.

4. I have 100 bottles of home made shampoo sitting on the floor of my house waiting to be labeled and sold. That is a lot of shampoo. The honey flavor makes my hair look fantastic.

5. Lest you think I am complaining about my life, my bangs have grown out! I no longer have to deal with them! Yay! And it only took nine months.

6. I went flower shopping a couple of weeks ago and bought some really beautiful flowers that are now hanging on my porch. Heaven forbid I could plant something in the ground that is not protected by a yard of chicken wire. Chickens eating everything in site is a definite downside of chick rearing.





7. I just had this super awesome dress made. 

Pay no mind to my hair please.

8. I found okra in the market yesterday! I repeat OKRA! Nom.

9. I am getting ready for my next excursion with my youth group. We are going to the Zoo and an environmental museum in San Salvador next Saturday. The kids seem pretty excited about going to the zoo, this will be all of their first trips to the zoo and to the capital.

10. I officially have less than five months left of my Peace Corps service... Where did the time go? I feel like yesterday I was leaving my Mom in the Panama City Beach airport to head off to staging and now I am thinking about what is next. Crazy