This post goes out to my father Harold Lee Flanagan III, who throughout my childhood and adolescence drilled me with the phrase "if you`re early you`re on time, but if you`re on time you`re late". In light of the fact that I have not posted here in more than 6 months, despite the proddings of friends and family, it seems fitting for me to mention my dad who has never liked the procrastinator´s proverb (and personal mantra) "it`s better late than never".
It would be impossible to summarize the last six months of my Peace Corps service. That`s probably why most people post more often. I`ll try and re-cap some things I did, diverging into rabbit trails and loosely related memories whenever I feel like it. I`ll start with August because to be honest... I don`t really remember July.
August- Towards the end of the month I worked with a volunteer from the southern region of my department to organize what we called a "Skills Exchange". We invited 6 schools to 2 events and where we provided craft materials purchased with money we received from a USAID grant. The 6 schools were invited based on skills that they were able to share, be it hammock making, belt weaving, wallet stitching ect. Each school taught their individual skill and (hopefully) learned 5 new skills. Money from the grant provided each school with the materials necessary to reproduce the workshop upon returning to their community. So far, I consider that to be one of my most successful projects.
September- My college roommates came down from Chicago! They flew into El Salvador, and from there we took busses to the eastern coast of Honduras. What I learned: Honduras is huge, and it takes a long time to cross. We took 3 or 4 busses for a total of close to 15 hours to arrive at the coast, from which we took a ferry to the island of Utila. Utila is known for being a grungy but hip backpacker haven, as well as the cheapest place in the world to receive scuba diving certification. We spent 5 days scuba diving in beautiful coral reefs. We saw thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of fish sporting shapes and colors that I would have thought were beyond the relm of reality. I grew up reading old national geographic magazines that my grandfather had stashed away and in that sense I was aware of the existence of strange creatures, but seeing them first hand was a whole different experience. Aside from the natural beauty of the trip, it was great to be with my roommates again. College facilitates a unique opportunity for particularly close friendships, and I am thankful that they have lasted through graduation.
October is kind of a blurr. At some point in the year I took over responsibility for teaching computer classes to high school students. We had a computer teacher, but she immigrated to the United States. By October I was working with the high school students three times per week, and I was really beginning to enjoy it. We worked exclusively in microsoft office, practicing typing, document creation, resume writing, spreadsheets, the whole shabang. I discovered two important things. 1) High school students are too cool for school 2) teaching is pretty fun. The fact that my students thought that I was old and lame was beyond strange. I am 23 and like to tell myself that I am not overly uptight. It was a challenge to engage students; to gain their trust without loosing credibility as a professional or as an educator.
I continued my business class and it only got more fun as time went on. I only had 8 girls in the class, and the fact that their participation was voluntary made everything easier. We became a virtual shampoo factory, producing loads of gooey aloe based material, bottling the stuff in an assembly line style with admirable efficency. They never quite mastered the art of sales, so by the end of the class we had aquired a gargantaun amount of shampoo, which was distributed among the girls for them to sell at their lesiure. Of all of my students, I am most proud of the participants of that class.
I had previously mentioned that I started a choir here, but I don`t know if I ever wrote of its terrible demise. It turned out that nearly every single child in the group was either totally tone deaf, or unable to recognize the difference between a high note and a low note. Even the obstacle of repeating a tune that I had sung seemed insurmountable. Soooo..... we switched to recorders! My mom sent me some plastic flutes, and we began music lessons on the instrument which, if held correctly, is completely fail proof! My class has progressed significantly since the switch. We haven`t met in a few weeks due to summer vacations (it is summer here), but I expect to start again as soon as classes begin next week.
In December, the big news in town was the impending visit of my parents (los padres de Yesi). In the time leading up to their arrival, people were asking daily when they would come. When they finally arrived, we rented a car and traveled across Central America, seeing everything cool that time would permit us to see. We stopped at Las Ruinas de Copan in Honduras, which is a huge cultural site of the Mayans. We took a tour through the pyramids and temples with a great guide. Next, we drove to Antigua, Guatemala where we spent 2 days exploring the 2nd Spanish capital of Central America. The city is magnificent, full of old spanish cathedrals, great artisan markets, and cool colonial architecture. It was a once in a lifetime trip.
Our next stop was the largest national park in El Salvador "El Imposible". We did some hiking and saw a rare "anteater-bear". I took a swim one of the most beautiful (and cold) rivers that I`ve ever seen, and marched through the largest virgin forest in the country. Giant mahogony trees 15 feet in diameter tower along the river. The ojuste trees that I mentioned in the last post are scattered through the forest, some as high as 150 feet tall! Suffice to say, it was cool.
On a more recent note, I took a sweet hike last weekend. I hiked from my site with a volunteer neighbor, and went from my site in the north east corner of the country to the municipality of Corinto. The hike was a bit grueling, but the landscapes were beautiful. I`ll try and post a photo or two sometime. We passed through 3 or four small villages on the way and were continually told that we were crazy for trying to walk so far. At one point in the hike we decided to climb a particularly beautiful mountain/rock formation. The formation is about 500 meters across and forms nearly a perfect cilinder with a rouned grassy top. Picturesque. We tried to climb the formation, but hike had taken a lot out of us, not to mention that we had trespassed and were afraid of being mistaken for cattle theives. We gave up, but fortuitously found a cave at the base where we rested in the shade. Upon arriving in the house that I was to stay in I passed out in a hammock, not waking until morning. We made the return hike the next day.
All in all we covered more than 40 kilometers in just over 15 hours. Upon the request of my aching feet, I stayed in my hammock for the better part of the next 24 hours.
We hung out at the beach for a day while I made some failed attempts at surfing, and we headed back to my site to hang out with my neighbors. My parents were instantly famous. During the time that they were there I had more visitors in my house than ever before. People were coming to the house to bring us tamales, bananas, and a whole lot of uncooked beans. I took them to meet many of my favorite neighbors, who clearly took it as a great honor to be visited by "los padres de Yesi". I think they liked being famous. We took a trip to the river where and grilled some meat, and we visited a cave with some petroglyphs made by indiginous people in the past.
It was super great to hang out with my folks. I enjoyed playing tour guide, taking them around the country, translating, and seeing the sights.
The reader, after hearing about the trip with my roommates and then my parents, might think that all I do is vacation. That would not be entirely untrue. On the whole, the last 18 months have been so vaired and exciting that it`s hard to mentally separate vacation and work. That`s not to say that there have been no low moments, just that my experience, now mostly complete, has been generally fun and fulfilling.
I`ve probably mentioned that I work on a committee that promotes youth development through a program that provides mentoring and scholarships to high school and university students. Now that I`m farther along in my service, I`m the president of the committee and I have a few more responsibilities than I did before. We give $250 dollar scholarships to 22 teenagers; an amount that allows even the poorest students to go to high school for an entire year. We provide $450 to university students. The cost of education is unbelievably low, but unfortunatly it is still out of reach for the vast majority of students in my town and across El Salvador. If you would like to learn more about the program, you can visit our website by clicking here and if you would like to donate to our program you can do so by clicking here.
I revised the comments on my blog for the first time today... I probably should have looked at those earlier. If you leave a comment, I`ll try to look at it sooner this time!
I hope all are well! I`d love to hear from you. My address is on one of my first blog posts.
My very best,
Jesse
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
Monday, July 11, 2011
Holy Smokes! It's Been a Whole Year.
This creatively titled post is dedicated to my wonderful mother, who dislikes un-creatively titled posts.
I just re-read my last entry to get my head settled on how I should write this one and I was impressed by two things. 1) It's been a heck of a long time since I wrote a blog entry. Apologies. 2) My chances of writing an organized list of things that I've been up to are far less than my chances of starting to write an organized list and then being struck by my all powerful stream-of-consciousness and spewing thoughts onto this e-page. Here goes, wish me luck!
Some highlighted projects that have been in process:
1) The school choir has transformed into basic music classes. It turned out that they needed a stronger base in their understanding of music before we could make it, or at least before I could instruct it. While trying to teach choir, I was coming up against questions like "which note is higher or why is one note longer than another". More representative of the class was the question "what's a note?". I was also struggling with the fact that no three students had similar vocal ranges. So, we shifted our attention to learning about music. I have about 5 kids in my music classes who come to school on their free time to learn about simple rhythms and melodies. Within a month they were sight reading simple rhythms. Progress is slow, but I'm super proud. In order to put their new found musical knowledge in practice, my parents sent me some recorders, re-transforming my music class into a flute class. Pretty cool. Turns out that these little plastic pipes are the perfect tool to learn music with. I hope to bring the group back to singing one day, but for I'm content with the progress we're making.
2) Business Classes/ Shampoo Tycoons of El Salvador. I gave a 15 week course on the basics of business with the idea in mind that we could start a business at the end. The eight high school girls in the class apparently preferred the idea of starting an empire. In 3 weeks they sold 150 bottles of home-made shampoo. We use Aloe Vera plants and some pharmacy basics to whip-up a killer shampoo, then the girls take to the streets and push the stuff. They make me proud. I still have sessions planned for them on basic book-keeping, and presentation skills. In the next month we'll take a trip to the river to celebrate our achievements and our future take-over of the Salvadoran shampoo market. :-) I started a second shampoo group comprised of moms and dads in a near-by community. Neither group has grown enough to worry about competition. Who knows what will happen if they do.
3) Efficient Stoves. The majority of cooking that is done here is done over an open fire style stove. People start a fire (usually by burning plastic bags because it burns faster) and set a pot or pan over the fire. Efficient stoves are stoves that are designed to direct all of the heat from the burning wood towards the pot or pan. Simple. Efficient stoves use 60% less firewood and the improved combustion cuts down on smoke by %90! Respiratory disease is the second leading cause of disease here, largely because people spend all day inside of a house burning wood as inefficiently as possible. The reduction in consumption of firewood makes a serious impact on deforestation as well. I wrote a grant, went to a training seminar on, and am now promoting the use of these stoves in my site. I'll use the grant money to subsidize the cost of the stoves to each family, leaving them to pay about $24 per stove We should get about 35 of these stoves in August, which represents more than 1/3 of the households in my town switching to efficient methods. Check out the website of the people who make our stoves: www.stoveteam.org
On the downside, some projects have seemingly gone down the tubes. The re-forestation project has stalled do to a lack of people willing to plant trees on their land, and the soil conservation project was put on the back burner after a water engineer told us that "while our bad habits our affecting someone's water supply, they are not affecting ours". It was disappointing, but that news really chipped away at our momentum.
On a more catastrophic level, we discovered about $9,000 missing from the community fund a few months back. Gossip went rampant and the community was forced to face the issue of transparency in community dealings. We held multiple meeting to discuss the issue and all of them were relative failures. There were too many community members related to the people indicated in the scandal for us to move forward. The event caused a severe lack of trust to form between community leaders, but in the end they decided to sweep it under the rug and hope it doesn't happen again. The day that they decided to not investigate further was my lowest Peace Corps day yet. I don't feel like I failed them, but I feel like their collective decision was irresponsible and representative of a community who puts family ties above fairness. Bummer.
Here's a fun story:
On Wednesday I went on a most-awesome hike. One of my nearby neighbors has been wanting to show me a part of the valley that I had not visited before. Our secondary objective was to find a semi-rare fruit that's gaining legendary notoriety for it's health benefits. Ojushte. What I didn't know when I started the hike is that my guide had not visited our destination in more than 25 years. The paths that used to exist no longer do (or he forgot where they were). Worry not, we had machetes. We hiked about 1.5 hours from home into a super steep valley filled by a strange mix of cornfields and jungle. Despite the richness of the soil in the valley, very few families plant corn there because carrying the corn out is so gosh darn hard. Apparently, a strong mule, pushed from behind by a strong man, can make it up the hill. Any lesser combination is doomed.
When we had hacked our way to the famed ojushte trees, I found that these trees were had already emptied their cargo onto the forest floor and begun to decompose. I also found that the forest floor was 45 degree slope on which slip-and-slides have nothing. We made our way down the hill by grabbing near by trees, then throwing ourselves to other trees slightly farther down. To my delight, the fruit being rotten didn't slow us down in harvesting it. Only the shell had rotten, leaving the soft nutty center to be washed and dried. We spent about 2 hours picking up ojushte, not thinking about the cliff that we would climb on our return trip.
As is fitting in a jungle paradise such as this one, there were a pair of beautiful waterfalls nearby that we swam in as we argued about who harvested more seed. As you might guess, I harvested way less, but claimed to have harvested way more.
My 61 year-old guide put me to shame on our way out of the valley. He not only carried more seed than I did, he did it without repeatedly falling into pits of rotten ojushte shell. I brought some interesting smells back to the house with me.
Here are some things I'm looking forward too:
The new volunteers are getting here in about 2 weeks! One of my neighboring communities is being considered for a volunteer, and I have high hopes of getting a neighbor.
Ben and Tim, two of my college roommates, are coming down to visit in September. We're planning to go to Utila, which is a small island off the cost of Honduras to get our scuba-diving licenses. It's some of the best coral in the Caribbean, and its the cheapest program in the world! Too good to pass up.
Still a long ways off, but my parents are coming down in December for two weeks. We'll hit some cool sights before spending a few days in my site hanging out with neighbors. Super excited.
Thanks for reading! I'd love to hear from you! Go ahead and leave a comment, or better, you can email me.
Take Care,
Jesse
I just re-read my last entry to get my head settled on how I should write this one and I was impressed by two things. 1) It's been a heck of a long time since I wrote a blog entry. Apologies. 2) My chances of writing an organized list of things that I've been up to are far less than my chances of starting to write an organized list and then being struck by my all powerful stream-of-consciousness and spewing thoughts onto this e-page. Here goes, wish me luck!
Some highlighted projects that have been in process:
1) The school choir has transformed into basic music classes. It turned out that they needed a stronger base in their understanding of music before we could make it, or at least before I could instruct it. While trying to teach choir, I was coming up against questions like "which note is higher or why is one note longer than another". More representative of the class was the question "what's a note?". I was also struggling with the fact that no three students had similar vocal ranges. So, we shifted our attention to learning about music. I have about 5 kids in my music classes who come to school on their free time to learn about simple rhythms and melodies. Within a month they were sight reading simple rhythms. Progress is slow, but I'm super proud. In order to put their new found musical knowledge in practice, my parents sent me some recorders, re-transforming my music class into a flute class. Pretty cool. Turns out that these little plastic pipes are the perfect tool to learn music with. I hope to bring the group back to singing one day, but for I'm content with the progress we're making.
2) Business Classes/ Shampoo Tycoons of El Salvador. I gave a 15 week course on the basics of business with the idea in mind that we could start a business at the end. The eight high school girls in the class apparently preferred the idea of starting an empire. In 3 weeks they sold 150 bottles of home-made shampoo. We use Aloe Vera plants and some pharmacy basics to whip-up a killer shampoo, then the girls take to the streets and push the stuff. They make me proud. I still have sessions planned for them on basic book-keeping, and presentation skills. In the next month we'll take a trip to the river to celebrate our achievements and our future take-over of the Salvadoran shampoo market. :-) I started a second shampoo group comprised of moms and dads in a near-by community. Neither group has grown enough to worry about competition. Who knows what will happen if they do.
3) Efficient Stoves. The majority of cooking that is done here is done over an open fire style stove. People start a fire (usually by burning plastic bags because it burns faster) and set a pot or pan over the fire. Efficient stoves are stoves that are designed to direct all of the heat from the burning wood towards the pot or pan. Simple. Efficient stoves use 60% less firewood and the improved combustion cuts down on smoke by %90! Respiratory disease is the second leading cause of disease here, largely because people spend all day inside of a house burning wood as inefficiently as possible. The reduction in consumption of firewood makes a serious impact on deforestation as well. I wrote a grant, went to a training seminar on, and am now promoting the use of these stoves in my site. I'll use the grant money to subsidize the cost of the stoves to each family, leaving them to pay about $24 per stove We should get about 35 of these stoves in August, which represents more than 1/3 of the households in my town switching to efficient methods. Check out the website of the people who make our stoves: www.stoveteam.org
On the downside, some projects have seemingly gone down the tubes. The re-forestation project has stalled do to a lack of people willing to plant trees on their land, and the soil conservation project was put on the back burner after a water engineer told us that "while our bad habits our affecting someone's water supply, they are not affecting ours". It was disappointing, but that news really chipped away at our momentum.
On a more catastrophic level, we discovered about $9,000 missing from the community fund a few months back. Gossip went rampant and the community was forced to face the issue of transparency in community dealings. We held multiple meeting to discuss the issue and all of them were relative failures. There were too many community members related to the people indicated in the scandal for us to move forward. The event caused a severe lack of trust to form between community leaders, but in the end they decided to sweep it under the rug and hope it doesn't happen again. The day that they decided to not investigate further was my lowest Peace Corps day yet. I don't feel like I failed them, but I feel like their collective decision was irresponsible and representative of a community who puts family ties above fairness. Bummer.
Here's a fun story:
On Wednesday I went on a most-awesome hike. One of my nearby neighbors has been wanting to show me a part of the valley that I had not visited before. Our secondary objective was to find a semi-rare fruit that's gaining legendary notoriety for it's health benefits. Ojushte. What I didn't know when I started the hike is that my guide had not visited our destination in more than 25 years. The paths that used to exist no longer do (or he forgot where they were). Worry not, we had machetes. We hiked about 1.5 hours from home into a super steep valley filled by a strange mix of cornfields and jungle. Despite the richness of the soil in the valley, very few families plant corn there because carrying the corn out is so gosh darn hard. Apparently, a strong mule, pushed from behind by a strong man, can make it up the hill. Any lesser combination is doomed.
When we had hacked our way to the famed ojushte trees, I found that these trees were had already emptied their cargo onto the forest floor and begun to decompose. I also found that the forest floor was 45 degree slope on which slip-and-slides have nothing. We made our way down the hill by grabbing near by trees, then throwing ourselves to other trees slightly farther down. To my delight, the fruit being rotten didn't slow us down in harvesting it. Only the shell had rotten, leaving the soft nutty center to be washed and dried. We spent about 2 hours picking up ojushte, not thinking about the cliff that we would climb on our return trip.
As is fitting in a jungle paradise such as this one, there were a pair of beautiful waterfalls nearby that we swam in as we argued about who harvested more seed. As you might guess, I harvested way less, but claimed to have harvested way more.
My 61 year-old guide put me to shame on our way out of the valley. He not only carried more seed than I did, he did it without repeatedly falling into pits of rotten ojushte shell. I brought some interesting smells back to the house with me.
Here are some things I'm looking forward too:
The new volunteers are getting here in about 2 weeks! One of my neighboring communities is being considered for a volunteer, and I have high hopes of getting a neighbor.
Ben and Tim, two of my college roommates, are coming down to visit in September. We're planning to go to Utila, which is a small island off the cost of Honduras to get our scuba-diving licenses. It's some of the best coral in the Caribbean, and its the cheapest program in the world! Too good to pass up.
Still a long ways off, but my parents are coming down in December for two weeks. We'll hit some cool sights before spending a few days in my site hanging out with neighbors. Super excited.
Thanks for reading! I'd love to hear from you! Go ahead and leave a comment, or better, you can email me.
Take Care,
Jesse
Saturday, April 16, 2011
9 months in country.
Sorry mom. I know you were really pushing for a more creative entry title this time, but I kind of like the idea of consistent titles. At least for now.
It's been a while since I blogged last, so before I write any thoughts I'm going to brainstorm on what I've been up to for the last 3 months. I tried the same technique in the last entry, but got distracted and only wrote about my first bullet-point. I guess we'll just have to see how things go.
1) About 6 weeks ago Jeremiah and Rebekah came to visit. I've got to say, it was probably one of the best weeks we've ever spent together. We started out the week at a small town in the west. We hiked some beautiful waterfalls, ate our first rabbit, and then made our way to the beach. It was relaxing.
Jeremiah got engaged not long after I left, and he'll be married before I'm finished with my service. Outside of his wedding next June, this was our only chance to catch-up face to face. I'm glad to feel like we took advantage of the trip.
The three of us made our way to an ancient Mayan temple in the west after the beach. Unfortunately the park is closed for maintenance on Mondays... but... fortunately, the three of us possess a certain gringo charm (and a willingness to pay security guards) and we were allowed to enter as the park's only guests that day. The temple was super-duper cool.
Next we ventured to the north to the artisan capital of the country. A young artist 50 years ago developed a style of painting, and taught youth in the town to replicate his style. Today more than 70% of the towns economy is based in arts and crafts. Beka and Jer brought home a hoard of painted treasures. It was a bit rainy, but on our drive out we got a full view of the mountains we were passing through. The northern section of El Salvador is remarkably beautiful.
Our next and final destination was my site. I borrowed some beds from a neighbor and we all bunked up together in my little room. They met the my neighbors, hung out with my friends, ate all kinds of food, and found out just why I hate (with all my heart) chickens and roosters.
We went to a sugar cane mill and Jeremiah learned how to wrap sugar cane concentrate in corn husk and strips of banana tree trunk. An elderly woman died in town, and the three of us were invited to make tamales with the women in the town to provide refreshments during the wake. My community was incredibly proud of my siblings visit, and they were super impressed with how interested they were in the community life. I can't say just how good it was to see them. Six weeks later, I'm still feeling great about the trip. I tell Beka that she should come live with me for a few months. If any of you feel like reminding her of how fun it would be, you have my full support.
I went to drop them off at the airport and bussed my way to a church in San Salvador. I hung out and worked with a group of Trinity students teaching Salvadoran students and youth leaders. It was a great opportunity to see good friends, and it fun doing translation work. I still feel like my Spanish is coming along, and it's nice to feel the progress now and then. We visited a church in the south, we gave some workshops to youth leaders, and we hung out in a school that is on the church's premises. I hope I get the opportunity to help out next year as well.
After that, I finally made it back to my site for while and worked on my projects for a while. Here is an update on my projects:
Water in Las Joyas- We finished! We built a small dam around the natural spring so that the water collects and flows down to the school down the mountain. The fathers of the school children got together and re-built the base that the water tank sits on, preventing the tank from sagging and breaking over time. We hit plenty of roadblocks that delayed the project, but I'm proud of the work that was done.
Creative Business class- A close second place for my favorite project. I have 7 high school girls in my class. The other 15 students have all dropped out, leaving me with dynamic and interested students who are ready to be entrepreneurs. 4 of the 7 girls arrive from a village 2 hours north (as about as far north in El Salvador without being in Honduras) to receive the class. They also receive computer classes as a part of their program in school, but their dedication constantly impresses me. In a place where education is not to be taken for granted, I admire these young ladies that pursue it so enthusiastically.
School Choir-This is my clear favorite as far as projects go. I look forward to it every week. The first week that I held choir practice, I had people asking me "what did you do in school? I saw a slew of kids singing "la la la la la" in the street after school." We practice things like recognizing which note is higher, and singing scales. I have high hopes for the choir because the kids are so enthusiastic about it.
Re-organizing the town council- not my favorite, but I have a lot of hope for it being a positive and sustainable impact on the community. We're talking about how to deal with community money transparently, how to take care of the land around natural spring where we get our water, and how to organize ourselves in a way that allows everyone to have a voice in community affairs.
Painting light posts with youth- On Monday I'm getting together with a group of young people in my site to wash the light posts in town and then white-wash the light them. On Tuesday we'll be painting typical Salvadoran designs and pictures on the posts. I think it will be a nice visible sign to the community that shows that the youth are interested in being involved and that they have things to contribute.
Teaching English- I still teach English once a week at a small school on the way to Las Joyas. The kids are smart and they really enjoy learning new words. One hour per week isn't enough to teach very quickly, but it's fun for all involved and it prepares them for high school where they will be expected to have a basic understanding of the language.
Right now I'm in San Salvador at a small hostel. I've had meetings about a scholarship program that I help to manage for young women. We have a leadership camp coming up for the scholarship recipients at the end of April. We'll be teaching time management, talking about healthy relationship building, practicing money management, and giving self esteem workshops. The camp is designed to support the girls as they study, and to prepare them to be strong leaders when they return to their communities. I like the work a lot.
There are other smaller projects going on and in the works, but these are most of what I'm up to. I spend most of my day hanging out in the school helping with computer classes and occasionally helping teachers learn more about using computers to teach.
I like being a youth development volunteer. I like that my primary focus is on youth and on teachers. The longer I'm here the more I find myself thinking about the sustainability of my work. It's terrible to think that any progress made in these two years can easily be erased slowly by backsliding and resistant cultural habits. However, it's easier for me to believe that I can impact children in ways that will affect the way that they live their lives in the future. I feel like my energies are directed in the right direction as a youth volunteer.
I would really like to continue this reflection, but I've stayed up too late as it is. I would love to get an email from anyone that follows my blog, it's always so nice to hear from friends. my email address is jesse.a.flanagan at gmail (trying to keep internet bots from sending me emails. They are not my friends and I don't want to hear from them).
Thanks for keeping in touch! Write if you can!
Jesse
It's been a while since I blogged last, so before I write any thoughts I'm going to brainstorm on what I've been up to for the last 3 months. I tried the same technique in the last entry, but got distracted and only wrote about my first bullet-point. I guess we'll just have to see how things go.
1) About 6 weeks ago Jeremiah and Rebekah came to visit. I've got to say, it was probably one of the best weeks we've ever spent together. We started out the week at a small town in the west. We hiked some beautiful waterfalls, ate our first rabbit, and then made our way to the beach. It was relaxing.
Jeremiah got engaged not long after I left, and he'll be married before I'm finished with my service. Outside of his wedding next June, this was our only chance to catch-up face to face. I'm glad to feel like we took advantage of the trip.
The three of us made our way to an ancient Mayan temple in the west after the beach. Unfortunately the park is closed for maintenance on Mondays... but... fortunately, the three of us possess a certain gringo charm (and a willingness to pay security guards) and we were allowed to enter as the park's only guests that day. The temple was super-duper cool.
Next we ventured to the north to the artisan capital of the country. A young artist 50 years ago developed a style of painting, and taught youth in the town to replicate his style. Today more than 70% of the towns economy is based in arts and crafts. Beka and Jer brought home a hoard of painted treasures. It was a bit rainy, but on our drive out we got a full view of the mountains we were passing through. The northern section of El Salvador is remarkably beautiful.
Our next and final destination was my site. I borrowed some beds from a neighbor and we all bunked up together in my little room. They met the my neighbors, hung out with my friends, ate all kinds of food, and found out just why I hate (with all my heart) chickens and roosters.
We went to a sugar cane mill and Jeremiah learned how to wrap sugar cane concentrate in corn husk and strips of banana tree trunk. An elderly woman died in town, and the three of us were invited to make tamales with the women in the town to provide refreshments during the wake. My community was incredibly proud of my siblings visit, and they were super impressed with how interested they were in the community life. I can't say just how good it was to see them. Six weeks later, I'm still feeling great about the trip. I tell Beka that she should come live with me for a few months. If any of you feel like reminding her of how fun it would be, you have my full support.
I went to drop them off at the airport and bussed my way to a church in San Salvador. I hung out and worked with a group of Trinity students teaching Salvadoran students and youth leaders. It was a great opportunity to see good friends, and it fun doing translation work. I still feel like my Spanish is coming along, and it's nice to feel the progress now and then. We visited a church in the south, we gave some workshops to youth leaders, and we hung out in a school that is on the church's premises. I hope I get the opportunity to help out next year as well.
After that, I finally made it back to my site for while and worked on my projects for a while. Here is an update on my projects:
Water in Las Joyas- We finished! We built a small dam around the natural spring so that the water collects and flows down to the school down the mountain. The fathers of the school children got together and re-built the base that the water tank sits on, preventing the tank from sagging and breaking over time. We hit plenty of roadblocks that delayed the project, but I'm proud of the work that was done.
Creative Business class- A close second place for my favorite project. I have 7 high school girls in my class. The other 15 students have all dropped out, leaving me with dynamic and interested students who are ready to be entrepreneurs. 4 of the 7 girls arrive from a village 2 hours north (as about as far north in El Salvador without being in Honduras) to receive the class. They also receive computer classes as a part of their program in school, but their dedication constantly impresses me. In a place where education is not to be taken for granted, I admire these young ladies that pursue it so enthusiastically.
School Choir-This is my clear favorite as far as projects go. I look forward to it every week. The first week that I held choir practice, I had people asking me "what did you do in school? I saw a slew of kids singing "la la la la la" in the street after school." We practice things like recognizing which note is higher, and singing scales. I have high hopes for the choir because the kids are so enthusiastic about it.
Re-organizing the town council- not my favorite, but I have a lot of hope for it being a positive and sustainable impact on the community. We're talking about how to deal with community money transparently, how to take care of the land around natural spring where we get our water, and how to organize ourselves in a way that allows everyone to have a voice in community affairs.
Painting light posts with youth- On Monday I'm getting together with a group of young people in my site to wash the light posts in town and then white-wash the light them. On Tuesday we'll be painting typical Salvadoran designs and pictures on the posts. I think it will be a nice visible sign to the community that shows that the youth are interested in being involved and that they have things to contribute.
Teaching English- I still teach English once a week at a small school on the way to Las Joyas. The kids are smart and they really enjoy learning new words. One hour per week isn't enough to teach very quickly, but it's fun for all involved and it prepares them for high school where they will be expected to have a basic understanding of the language.
Right now I'm in San Salvador at a small hostel. I've had meetings about a scholarship program that I help to manage for young women. We have a leadership camp coming up for the scholarship recipients at the end of April. We'll be teaching time management, talking about healthy relationship building, practicing money management, and giving self esteem workshops. The camp is designed to support the girls as they study, and to prepare them to be strong leaders when they return to their communities. I like the work a lot.
There are other smaller projects going on and in the works, but these are most of what I'm up to. I spend most of my day hanging out in the school helping with computer classes and occasionally helping teachers learn more about using computers to teach.
I like being a youth development volunteer. I like that my primary focus is on youth and on teachers. The longer I'm here the more I find myself thinking about the sustainability of my work. It's terrible to think that any progress made in these two years can easily be erased slowly by backsliding and resistant cultural habits. However, it's easier for me to believe that I can impact children in ways that will affect the way that they live their lives in the future. I feel like my energies are directed in the right direction as a youth volunteer.
I would really like to continue this reflection, but I've stayed up too late as it is. I would love to get an email from anyone that follows my blog, it's always so nice to hear from friends. my email address is jesse.a.flanagan at gmail (trying to keep internet bots from sending me emails. They are not my friends and I don't want to hear from them).
Thanks for keeping in touch! Write if you can!
Jesse
Friday, January 28, 2011
5 months in site!
Hey all,
I've been reminded weekly by friends and family that my last blog post was on October 23. That's more than a little while ago, and you'd be right to assume that a thing or two has happened since then. I'm about 4.5 months into my site, and 6.5 into my service. Time flies!
As predicted by most of the volunteers who I've talked to in the last half-year, I'm still stuck in limbo between feeling like a total newby, and feeling like I've been around enough, and am at home here enough, and know my neighbors well enough, that I can be productive here. I have a feeling that I'll continue to live inside that tension for the next 20 months. I think I'm okay with that.
I'll try and make a rough list of some of the things that I've been up to. That seems like a fair way to begin my first post in 3 months. Please don't expect chronological order, my brain doesn't work like that.
-A few weeks ago I met up with a group of doctors in Usulutan to translate for their medical brigade. I was pleased to see that my Spanish has improved significantly since I got here. Translating was phenomenal. The first day I worked with a group of optometrists. I felt like I was cheating, stealing all of the precious moments by being the only one that could understand the occasional heartfelt outpourings of thanks that the patients would give. The very first patient I translated for was an old woman who immediately began to cry when we put a pair of glasses on her face. I wondered to myself if her tears of joy would interfere with the consult. I decided it didn't matter. She referred to me affectionately as "little daddy" throughout the entire consult. Instantly gratifying work.
The next day I translated for a medical doctor. In a period of 5 or 6 hours, he and I saw more than 60 patients. Fast-paced work and a lot more variety than the eye doctors. One young woman waited more than 5 hours to pass a consult with us and confessed that she is worried that she's contracted finger cancer. Interesting. Her pointer finger and her index finger had dark marks on them, when she showed them to us making a sort of a peace sign so that we could see all the way around her finger. The doctor pressed her fingers together and revealed that the two marks connected to make a very straight line, and instructed me to explain that this woman simply had dirty fingers, possibly stained by touching a rusty wire. I was more than tempted to think it was funny. I did in fact laugh afterward. However, at the end of the day, that woman was worried enough to sit in an incredibly hot waiting room for hours, anxious about her condition. In no time at all, the doctor, using his powers of education, lifted her concerns and made her feel at considerable ease. I think that's worth something.
Of course, there were some people that took advantage of the situation by clearly making up ailments in order to collect prescriptions and free medicine. That was frustrating. It raised the question of "how do help people that take advantage of the helper?" Should we deny them when we think we're being tricked? Does that put honest but unconvincing people at risk of being overlooked? Are "give aways" a sustainable method for charity? Even though free things are needed, sometimes the point of being necessary, are they helpful to long term development? Can people that feel entitled to help be truly helped by it? Of course, I didn't answer any of these questions. I feel good about the help I gave the doctors, and I'm proud of the work that the doctors did in El Salvador. Beyond that, who knows?
You thought you were going to get a list of things right? Right.
I've started turning wheels for a creative business class that I'll be teaching once a week to 7th, 8th, and 9th grade students. The school director and the teachers are supportive, the students (some) seem enthusiastic. Our first class is on in 3 days. Hopefully you won't wait 3 months to get an update on the class.
Since school is starting, so are some more projects. My school has also given me permission to start a choir! How cool is that! To start, I'll have kids from 4th, 5th, and 6th grade once a week to sing with. Should be fun.
As we speak I'm at an HIV/AIDS prevention training with one of my favorite 9th graders. I'm writing this in the break before dinner. The two of us came out from our town on Wednesday to learn interesting and interactive ways to teach HIV/AIDS prevention in our town. I'm excited to get back to the school and replicate the trainings that we've gotten here. I'm more excited to see this 9th grader grow as an upcoming community leader.
Due to complications in the grant application process, the water project in my second community has been delayed significantly. I'm re-applying this week, and will hopefully hear soon from the NGO about project funding. Exciting isn't it?
I'm now part of a large PC committee called the Women and Youth Development committee (WYD). We meet in the capital once per month to manage a scholarship fund which is raised by volunteers on the committee, and manage a scholarship program that gives young women with difficult financial situations the opportunity to go to high school and college. Tuition is free for high school, but paying a $1 daily to get to school is often enough to convince a family to discontinue a child's education prematurely. A $200 per year scholarship is enough for a years worth of transportation, which enables the all-star students in PCV communities to continue their education. It's pretty cool work, but traveling all the way to the capital every month, frankly, it sucks.
I wrote a grant proposal on the behalf of the committee last month for $500 to plan a leadership camp for our scholarship winners. It was approved last month making it my first successful proposal ever! The camp should be sometime in early April. Also exciting.
JEREMIAH AND BEKA ARE COMING TO VISIT SOON!!! If that's not cool beans, I don't know what is.
Christmas in site was wonderful. I was constantly treated like a long lost son who could be convinced to stay if he were force-fed tamales. I ate so many tamales. I visited tons of houses, eating more than could possibly have been healthy at each one. It was cool.
Dinner is ready. Thanks for keeping up on what I'm doing! Shoot me an email so I can know what you're up to as well!
-Jesse
I've been reminded weekly by friends and family that my last blog post was on October 23. That's more than a little while ago, and you'd be right to assume that a thing or two has happened since then. I'm about 4.5 months into my site, and 6.5 into my service. Time flies!
As predicted by most of the volunteers who I've talked to in the last half-year, I'm still stuck in limbo between feeling like a total newby, and feeling like I've been around enough, and am at home here enough, and know my neighbors well enough, that I can be productive here. I have a feeling that I'll continue to live inside that tension for the next 20 months. I think I'm okay with that.
I'll try and make a rough list of some of the things that I've been up to. That seems like a fair way to begin my first post in 3 months. Please don't expect chronological order, my brain doesn't work like that.
-A few weeks ago I met up with a group of doctors in Usulutan to translate for their medical brigade. I was pleased to see that my Spanish has improved significantly since I got here. Translating was phenomenal. The first day I worked with a group of optometrists. I felt like I was cheating, stealing all of the precious moments by being the only one that could understand the occasional heartfelt outpourings of thanks that the patients would give. The very first patient I translated for was an old woman who immediately began to cry when we put a pair of glasses on her face. I wondered to myself if her tears of joy would interfere with the consult. I decided it didn't matter. She referred to me affectionately as "little daddy" throughout the entire consult. Instantly gratifying work.
The next day I translated for a medical doctor. In a period of 5 or 6 hours, he and I saw more than 60 patients. Fast-paced work and a lot more variety than the eye doctors. One young woman waited more than 5 hours to pass a consult with us and confessed that she is worried that she's contracted finger cancer. Interesting. Her pointer finger and her index finger had dark marks on them, when she showed them to us making a sort of a peace sign so that we could see all the way around her finger. The doctor pressed her fingers together and revealed that the two marks connected to make a very straight line, and instructed me to explain that this woman simply had dirty fingers, possibly stained by touching a rusty wire. I was more than tempted to think it was funny. I did in fact laugh afterward. However, at the end of the day, that woman was worried enough to sit in an incredibly hot waiting room for hours, anxious about her condition. In no time at all, the doctor, using his powers of education, lifted her concerns and made her feel at considerable ease. I think that's worth something.
Of course, there were some people that took advantage of the situation by clearly making up ailments in order to collect prescriptions and free medicine. That was frustrating. It raised the question of "how do help people that take advantage of the helper?" Should we deny them when we think we're being tricked? Does that put honest but unconvincing people at risk of being overlooked? Are "give aways" a sustainable method for charity? Even though free things are needed, sometimes the point of being necessary, are they helpful to long term development? Can people that feel entitled to help be truly helped by it? Of course, I didn't answer any of these questions. I feel good about the help I gave the doctors, and I'm proud of the work that the doctors did in El Salvador. Beyond that, who knows?
You thought you were going to get a list of things right? Right.
I've started turning wheels for a creative business class that I'll be teaching once a week to 7th, 8th, and 9th grade students. The school director and the teachers are supportive, the students (some) seem enthusiastic. Our first class is on in 3 days. Hopefully you won't wait 3 months to get an update on the class.
Since school is starting, so are some more projects. My school has also given me permission to start a choir! How cool is that! To start, I'll have kids from 4th, 5th, and 6th grade once a week to sing with. Should be fun.
As we speak I'm at an HIV/AIDS prevention training with one of my favorite 9th graders. I'm writing this in the break before dinner. The two of us came out from our town on Wednesday to learn interesting and interactive ways to teach HIV/AIDS prevention in our town. I'm excited to get back to the school and replicate the trainings that we've gotten here. I'm more excited to see this 9th grader grow as an upcoming community leader.
Due to complications in the grant application process, the water project in my second community has been delayed significantly. I'm re-applying this week, and will hopefully hear soon from the NGO about project funding. Exciting isn't it?
I'm now part of a large PC committee called the Women and Youth Development committee (WYD). We meet in the capital once per month to manage a scholarship fund which is raised by volunteers on the committee, and manage a scholarship program that gives young women with difficult financial situations the opportunity to go to high school and college. Tuition is free for high school, but paying a $1 daily to get to school is often enough to convince a family to discontinue a child's education prematurely. A $200 per year scholarship is enough for a years worth of transportation, which enables the all-star students in PCV communities to continue their education. It's pretty cool work, but traveling all the way to the capital every month, frankly, it sucks.
I wrote a grant proposal on the behalf of the committee last month for $500 to plan a leadership camp for our scholarship winners. It was approved last month making it my first successful proposal ever! The camp should be sometime in early April. Also exciting.
JEREMIAH AND BEKA ARE COMING TO VISIT SOON!!! If that's not cool beans, I don't know what is.
Christmas in site was wonderful. I was constantly treated like a long lost son who could be convinced to stay if he were force-fed tamales. I ate so many tamales. I visited tons of houses, eating more than could possibly have been healthy at each one. It was cool.
Dinner is ready. Thanks for keeping up on what I'm doing! Shoot me an email so I can know what you're up to as well!
-Jesse
Saturday, October 23, 2010
One month in!
By now many of you have probably lost hope that I will be the faithful blogger that I aspired to be in my first post. Sorry about that!
On September 17th I moved to a little community in north-east El Salvador to be an actual volunteer instead of a trainee. I'm about 5 weeks into my time here and I'm loving it. I work here as a youth development volunteer, so I've been spending considerable portions of my day in the school here. As expected, my work here has been unpredictable and different than I thought it would be. Thankfully, I'm a big fan of surprise so I've gotten along just fine.
Believe it or not, one of the biggest things I've been working on has been a robotics course for teens in my school. I definitely didn't see that coming. I guess we received a grant from Microsoft before I arrived that provided us with a 2 lego robot kits and some user-friendly programing software. The kids learn about basic mechanics, problem-solving, and teamwork by building and trouble-shooting these robots. The programing software is in English, so I can be of help here and there. It's a very interactive classroom, so it's been a great way for me to get to know kids here.
Getting to know my community is a full time job, if it can be considered a job. When I'm not in the school, I try to walk the street of my town slow enough that people invite me in for coffee and bread. It's a great strategy as far as I can tell. My community has been extremely welcoming and inviting. I've made good friends here, and though many of them are old enough to be my grandparents, we seem to get along well enough. In the last two weeks I was invited to come watch a cow get slaughtered at the top of our hill. Talk about a quick course in animal anatomy. In less than 2 hours the whole thing was divided up into it's different pieces. By 5 am nearly all the meat had been purchased by people passing by.
I was also invited over to make some of the most delicious tamales that this world has tasted. The corn was picked by us, schucked by us, milled by us, and poured into the corn husks by us, steamed by us, and eaten by us. I enjoyed being a part of the whole process. Locally based agriculture isn't a fad here like it is in the states. The reality here is that you eat what you grow and what your neighbors grow. I like it.
There's another school about an hour's hike from my town that I've started getting to know. It is a much more impoverished community, and it's one where I hope to spend time and energy helping the community develop as much as I can. The school has 3 classrooms and three teachers for 6 grades. The young ones come in the morning and the older kids come in the afternoon. Unfortunately, since the school only goes up to 6th, anyone who wants to study further has to walk an hour (depending on where they live, maybe more) to my town. Many of them already walk an hour through the mountains to get to this school in the first place.
Obviously, my work in the two schools will look very different. In the town where I stay, I can teach employability by means of resume workshops and typing classes, but in a village where many people don't have an 8th grade education, a resume is not a very effective tool. My work there (I don't have a clue what it will look like yet) will start by thinking about how they can leverage the resources they do have (active parents, good laborers, lots of outdoors) to form programs and projects that benefit the community. We may try and reorganize the village council to be more active in the community as well.
Since I'm running out of time, I'm going to be more concise about the things I like most here. Keep in mind that these are broad generalizations that, of course, don't always apply. Either way, I appreciate them.
1. You don't need teeth or clean clothes to be well respected. The leaders in the communities here are not the people with money, they are the people that have their lives together and are interested working for everyone's benefit.
2. The mountains.
3. Roots. The elderly in my community don't know how many generations of their grandparents have lived in my village, but they assume all of them, and rightly so. Families have deep roots around them. They know everything about the history of their town. They know who their third cousins twice removed are. Family is family.
4. Knowledge of the land. The people know how good a harvest will be by how the corn sways in the wind (they say the corn sways more if the roots are loose, and if the roots are loose the corn doesn't grow as well). Everyone knows exactly how many days it's been since it rained, and they're darn good at knowing when it will rain again.
5. Peacefulness. On my walk home yesterday I stopped at 2 houses for milk and coffee. What should have been a 75 minute walk turned into a 3 hour tour through the mountains. Less things are rushed, and smaller things are appreciated. It's okay to be quiet for a long time in a conversation. There is little to no sense of awkwardness.
I miss home quite a bit. I miss fall and I miss my family and friends, but I'm happy here. I'm at home here and I like my neighbors. I hope you all are well and I look forward to hearing from you when you have time to write. I'll write you back.
My address is:
Jesse Flanagan
Voluntario de Cuerpo de Paz
Lista de Correos
Nueva Esparta
Departamento la Union
El Salvador, Centro America
Much love,
Jesse
On September 17th I moved to a little community in north-east El Salvador to be an actual volunteer instead of a trainee. I'm about 5 weeks into my time here and I'm loving it. I work here as a youth development volunteer, so I've been spending considerable portions of my day in the school here. As expected, my work here has been unpredictable and different than I thought it would be. Thankfully, I'm a big fan of surprise so I've gotten along just fine.
Believe it or not, one of the biggest things I've been working on has been a robotics course for teens in my school. I definitely didn't see that coming. I guess we received a grant from Microsoft before I arrived that provided us with a 2 lego robot kits and some user-friendly programing software. The kids learn about basic mechanics, problem-solving, and teamwork by building and trouble-shooting these robots. The programing software is in English, so I can be of help here and there. It's a very interactive classroom, so it's been a great way for me to get to know kids here.
Getting to know my community is a full time job, if it can be considered a job. When I'm not in the school, I try to walk the street of my town slow enough that people invite me in for coffee and bread. It's a great strategy as far as I can tell. My community has been extremely welcoming and inviting. I've made good friends here, and though many of them are old enough to be my grandparents, we seem to get along well enough. In the last two weeks I was invited to come watch a cow get slaughtered at the top of our hill. Talk about a quick course in animal anatomy. In less than 2 hours the whole thing was divided up into it's different pieces. By 5 am nearly all the meat had been purchased by people passing by.
I was also invited over to make some of the most delicious tamales that this world has tasted. The corn was picked by us, schucked by us, milled by us, and poured into the corn husks by us, steamed by us, and eaten by us. I enjoyed being a part of the whole process. Locally based agriculture isn't a fad here like it is in the states. The reality here is that you eat what you grow and what your neighbors grow. I like it.
There's another school about an hour's hike from my town that I've started getting to know. It is a much more impoverished community, and it's one where I hope to spend time and energy helping the community develop as much as I can. The school has 3 classrooms and three teachers for 6 grades. The young ones come in the morning and the older kids come in the afternoon. Unfortunately, since the school only goes up to 6th, anyone who wants to study further has to walk an hour (depending on where they live, maybe more) to my town. Many of them already walk an hour through the mountains to get to this school in the first place.
Obviously, my work in the two schools will look very different. In the town where I stay, I can teach employability by means of resume workshops and typing classes, but in a village where many people don't have an 8th grade education, a resume is not a very effective tool. My work there (I don't have a clue what it will look like yet) will start by thinking about how they can leverage the resources they do have (active parents, good laborers, lots of outdoors) to form programs and projects that benefit the community. We may try and reorganize the village council to be more active in the community as well.
Since I'm running out of time, I'm going to be more concise about the things I like most here. Keep in mind that these are broad generalizations that, of course, don't always apply. Either way, I appreciate them.
1. You don't need teeth or clean clothes to be well respected. The leaders in the communities here are not the people with money, they are the people that have their lives together and are interested working for everyone's benefit.
2. The mountains.
3. Roots. The elderly in my community don't know how many generations of their grandparents have lived in my village, but they assume all of them, and rightly so. Families have deep roots around them. They know everything about the history of their town. They know who their third cousins twice removed are. Family is family.
4. Knowledge of the land. The people know how good a harvest will be by how the corn sways in the wind (they say the corn sways more if the roots are loose, and if the roots are loose the corn doesn't grow as well). Everyone knows exactly how many days it's been since it rained, and they're darn good at knowing when it will rain again.
5. Peacefulness. On my walk home yesterday I stopped at 2 houses for milk and coffee. What should have been a 75 minute walk turned into a 3 hour tour through the mountains. Less things are rushed, and smaller things are appreciated. It's okay to be quiet for a long time in a conversation. There is little to no sense of awkwardness.
I miss home quite a bit. I miss fall and I miss my family and friends, but I'm happy here. I'm at home here and I like my neighbors. I hope you all are well and I look forward to hearing from you when you have time to write. I'll write you back.
My address is:
Jesse Flanagan
Voluntario de Cuerpo de Paz
Lista de Correos
Nueva Esparta
Departamento la Union
El Salvador, Centro America
Much love,
Jesse
Friday, September 10, 2010
Hey all,
Sorry it's taken me so long to get another post up. Training has been busy, and responding to emails is sooo tempting when I get to a computer with internet.
Training ends next week, and I'll finally get to head out to my permenant site. I've been placed in a tiny community a stone's throw away from Honduras in the North East corner of El Salvador. Word has it that my site, due to its altitude, is actually cold sometimes! Don't doubt that I'm looking forward to that. I'll be a 7 hour bus ride from the capital city, which may be inconvenient from time to time, but I'm looking forward to being in such a gorgeous place.
Due to some trouble in my training community, I was moved by to a different town about 1 month ago. I now live with a different family in a different town in the department of San Vicente.
My new family, in my opinion, is the bomb. Given the opportunity, I expect us to be friends for a long time. I live with a young couple and their 6 yearold daughter. Aside from being incredibly hospitable, they have made me a part of the family. They often test me on just how "Salvadoran" I am by giving me coconuts to cut with machetes or bowls of corn meal to make tortillas with. So far I've passed every test. If for some reason I don't pass a test, they'll find out I'm a gringo (american) and send me packing. I hope it doesn't come to that. :-)
We farm 1.7 acres of peppers, tomato, and corn. That, along with a good factory job supports my family. Both my host brother and sister are incredibly hard working. My sister is in law school. It's a humble set-up, but it does the job.
The country is experiencing a bit of turmoil right now, but everyone involved, including Peace Corps, is doing they're best to make sure everybody stays in good shape. The goverment passed an anit gang law, prohibiting anyone from being associated with a gang. The two biggest gangs in E.S. teamed up and issued a public petition asking for the law to be repealed. Weird right? A local preist is acting as their quasi spokesman.
The gangs put out pamphlets threatening all kinds of stuff, and have successfully scared good portions of the country into staying put. Some schools are shut down, busses aren't running, and many of the markets are closed. The army is all over the roads making sure nothing happens. things are already simmering down, and the busses are starting to run again. Thank goodness.
I need to take off for my community, so I'm going to cut this short without editing. forgive the errors. But I hope this post finds all of you well!
Take Care!
-Jesse
Sorry it's taken me so long to get another post up. Training has been busy, and responding to emails is sooo tempting when I get to a computer with internet.
Training ends next week, and I'll finally get to head out to my permenant site. I've been placed in a tiny community a stone's throw away from Honduras in the North East corner of El Salvador. Word has it that my site, due to its altitude, is actually cold sometimes! Don't doubt that I'm looking forward to that. I'll be a 7 hour bus ride from the capital city, which may be inconvenient from time to time, but I'm looking forward to being in such a gorgeous place.
Due to some trouble in my training community, I was moved by to a different town about 1 month ago. I now live with a different family in a different town in the department of San Vicente.
My new family, in my opinion, is the bomb. Given the opportunity, I expect us to be friends for a long time. I live with a young couple and their 6 yearold daughter. Aside from being incredibly hospitable, they have made me a part of the family. They often test me on just how "Salvadoran" I am by giving me coconuts to cut with machetes or bowls of corn meal to make tortillas with. So far I've passed every test. If for some reason I don't pass a test, they'll find out I'm a gringo (american) and send me packing. I hope it doesn't come to that. :-)
We farm 1.7 acres of peppers, tomato, and corn. That, along with a good factory job supports my family. Both my host brother and sister are incredibly hard working. My sister is in law school. It's a humble set-up, but it does the job.
The country is experiencing a bit of turmoil right now, but everyone involved, including Peace Corps, is doing they're best to make sure everybody stays in good shape. The goverment passed an anit gang law, prohibiting anyone from being associated with a gang. The two biggest gangs in E.S. teamed up and issued a public petition asking for the law to be repealed. Weird right? A local preist is acting as their quasi spokesman.
The gangs put out pamphlets threatening all kinds of stuff, and have successfully scared good portions of the country into staying put. Some schools are shut down, busses aren't running, and many of the markets are closed. The army is all over the roads making sure nothing happens. things are already simmering down, and the busses are starting to run again. Thank goodness.
I need to take off for my community, so I'm going to cut this short without editing. forgive the errors. But I hope this post finds all of you well!
Take Care!
-Jesse
Saturday, August 14, 2010
I´m here!
Hello all!
Sorry it´s taken me so long to get a post up. I arrived in El Salvador about 3.5 weeks ago, and I´m loving it here. I live in a small village in the department of San Vicente, which is about 1.5 hours west of the capital city, San Salvador.
I´m in the middle of 2 months of training, which mostly consists of spanish classes and hanging out it my community. There are a few other Peace Corps Trainees in my community, but our group of 30 is pretty well spread out within the department.
In my group there are Sustainable Agriculture/Environmental Education Volunteers, and there are Youth Development Volunteers. We all meet together once or twice per week to do more technichal training at the Peace Corps Training Center. We´re going to learn how to make shampoo so that we can help women´s cooperatives start local businesses. We just got a tutorial on how to teach english so that we can give lessons/classes. We´ll be learning about composting, mentoring, and grant writing. The work load is extremely diverse... which I absolutely love.
Like most experiences, the highlights of this trip are clearly going to be the people I´m serving with, both the Salvadoran people and the Peace Corps Trainees/Volunteers. The kindness and generosity in my village is fantastic. I can´t walk through a door without 1 or 2 mothers and grandmothers trying to feed me. They seem genuine when they tell me that I don´t eat enough... but I´ve been around enough grandmothers to know that they´re a tricky people who will never be satisfied, no matter how much I over eat.
I almost forgot to mention how beautiful it is here. I don´t mean to make you jealous, but I live on the side of a giant and gorgeous volcano. I ride to the PC office in the back of a pickup truck (that´s the main mode of transportation here) and I enjoy a wonderful view. My view is sometimes obscured by a insect that finds it´s way into my eye ot mouth, but it´s a good view nonetheless.
To be honest, I had some reservations about blogging. I feel strange asking you to keep up with what I´m doing without having an opportunity to know how you are doing. With that said, feel encouraged to write me an email every once and a while to let me know how things are going. I can´t promise that I´ll always write you back since I don´t make it to the internet very often and my emails are sometimes more than I can handle.... I´d like to hear from you though. my email adress is jesse.a.flanagan@gmail.com.
Keep in touch!
Jesse
Sorry it´s taken me so long to get a post up. I arrived in El Salvador about 3.5 weeks ago, and I´m loving it here. I live in a small village in the department of San Vicente, which is about 1.5 hours west of the capital city, San Salvador.
I´m in the middle of 2 months of training, which mostly consists of spanish classes and hanging out it my community. There are a few other Peace Corps Trainees in my community, but our group of 30 is pretty well spread out within the department.
In my group there are Sustainable Agriculture/Environmental Education Volunteers, and there are Youth Development Volunteers. We all meet together once or twice per week to do more technichal training at the Peace Corps Training Center. We´re going to learn how to make shampoo so that we can help women´s cooperatives start local businesses. We just got a tutorial on how to teach english so that we can give lessons/classes. We´ll be learning about composting, mentoring, and grant writing. The work load is extremely diverse... which I absolutely love.
Like most experiences, the highlights of this trip are clearly going to be the people I´m serving with, both the Salvadoran people and the Peace Corps Trainees/Volunteers. The kindness and generosity in my village is fantastic. I can´t walk through a door without 1 or 2 mothers and grandmothers trying to feed me. They seem genuine when they tell me that I don´t eat enough... but I´ve been around enough grandmothers to know that they´re a tricky people who will never be satisfied, no matter how much I over eat.
I almost forgot to mention how beautiful it is here. I don´t mean to make you jealous, but I live on the side of a giant and gorgeous volcano. I ride to the PC office in the back of a pickup truck (that´s the main mode of transportation here) and I enjoy a wonderful view. My view is sometimes obscured by a insect that finds it´s way into my eye ot mouth, but it´s a good view nonetheless.
To be honest, I had some reservations about blogging. I feel strange asking you to keep up with what I´m doing without having an opportunity to know how you are doing. With that said, feel encouraged to write me an email every once and a while to let me know how things are going. I can´t promise that I´ll always write you back since I don´t make it to the internet very often and my emails are sometimes more than I can handle.... I´d like to hear from you though. my email adress is jesse.a.flanagan@gmail.com.
Keep in touch!
Jesse
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