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