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!

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.