10,000 views!

My Hard Corps Life just passed 10,000 page views!

Thank you so much to my friends and family who are interested in what I'm doing over here in El Salvador. I truly love this experience- the good days and even the lonely nights. I'm learning so much more than I ever thought I would. I'm going to come back to the USA feeling like a rock star!

Annnnd thank you to all the perspective PCVs who are finding my blog in their Google searches and keep coming back! You guys are ahead of the curve by finding real life experiences from PCVs in the campo. Thanks for reading!

Parades for days

I feel like I've been celebrating Independence Day for months! I've run with the torch, eaten plenty of plato tipicos, bought votes for like 7 different little reinas, and supported my students walking in the many, many parades we've had the past week. To my disappointment, you don't pick a shady curb to watch the parade pass by. In El Salvador we walk with the parade. So now I've got a great farmer's tan, and some even better pictures.

I have extra love for the marching bands. I tell everyone standing around me when the parades pass that I played the saxophone and was in the color guard. I really need to get my hands on some videos from my band nerd days. I have a feeling they'd be pretty impressed!

Here are some pics from the parade in San Lucas and in my pueblo of Osicala. It was fun to celebrate the 193 years of independence with my Salvadoran friends and family!

The band at San Lucas. My school doesn't have a band, so we went to watch the school over. A large percent of my community (of people who can afford it) sends their kids to this school because it has extra classes like computers and physical education. And band!

I think it's a little funny that my relatively conservative culture still permits baton twirlers in short skirts and high heeled boots. Unfortunately I forgot to take a pic of the twirlers in the pueblo. It was scandalous!  

The reina of the parade. Aysel wants that crown! 

The reina stole my umbrella. I really didn't want to walk in the hot sun, but who's gonna say no to the queen!?

My friend's daughter dressed as a nurse. They dress kids up in respectable professions to walk at the front of the parade. 

The kids in the pueblo.

My friend Erik playing in the high school band. They were good! 

Por la PAZ!

Yesterday I ran with the liberty torch under the burning rays of the Salvadoran sun. The liberty torch is a way to celebrate independence day throughout Central America. It passes from school to school throughout all of the Central American countries. According to The Costa Rica News: 

During its tour of El Salvador, the torch will be carried by more than 40,000 students from various schools, “to encourage them to develop values ​​of peace, brotherhood and citizenship."

Right on! I went with a group of students from my school, including some of my 9th graders. My favorite part was when they pass the flame the students yell "Por la paz!" 

Decorations at the school. The kids hang out during one of the 129482 recesses.  

My student Alfredo with the homemade torch. Each school has their own torch. 

The kids. 

So excited! 

It was so difficult to rangle them into a picture with me. 

Here comes the other school! 

Pass the flame. POR LA PAZ!

Here we go! 

The actual run ended up with about 6 kids who ran at a dead sprint ahead of everyone else, only stopping when the flame went out to relight. Me and my teacher friend were struggling to keep up. My short little legs were not made for running! At one point we were running down the mountain side and I thought for sure I was going to wipe out. When the police escort finally decided to pass us up we thought it'd be best if we hopped on the back of a pick up. We arrived to cheers, and some people shaming us with "Ya no vale!" Oh well! At least we took some great pics! 

Passion

Well, I'll be damned! I finally got a glimpse of that fabled Latino passion this week at a teen poetry slam/bachata dance off.

Yes, that happened. I was peeved when my 9th graders cancelled English class on me AGAIN this week. I demanded to know what was more important than my classes and I got my answer- poetry. The entire 9th grade class went to the pueblo to cheer on Elmer, an 8th grader who entered in a poetry competition against other grade schoolers in the municipality.

I honestly didn't know what I was getting myself into when I got on the bus with my class Thursday morning. All I knew was that our candidate needed a loud cheering section to win. When everything finally got started I was blown away. These teens were passionate! Almost every poem was about love, or scorned love, or new love. The best teens got really into their poems, flailing their hands in anguish or using a human prop to spit their rhymes at.

This is what this one girl was doing, for real. 

And then of course there was a bachata dance off. I shrieked a few times with laughter. Common! These kids try so hard to imitate the music videos, but they're just kids. The dances come off comical from my point of view but their peers seemed to think they were really sexy. Side note- I never want to hear Propuesta Indecente again. Eight times in a row was enough to kill that song for me!

I blame Romeo Santos for teenage pregnancy. 

Elmer, telling Ana how he REALLY feels. 

I had a great time. I was honored that my students invited me to go, but I don't think they'll invite me again. Apparently, I'm a viajita! I also got to spend some quality time with the municipality's teen center staff. It's a brand new building and it's perfect for charlas, youth groups and condom demonstrations. After all that passion, I think we're definitely gonna need more of those.

Girls just want to have fun

It's been a whirlwind kind of week. First I throw myself a grand birthday party, which was fun and all, but ate a significant portion of my living allowance. I also did an interview with NPR about how I'm a huge nerd and I spend my downtime swinging in a hammock eating mangos and listening to podcasts. Then I FINALLY got approved to start my capstone research i.e. I got the kick in the butt I needed to hunker down and get this master's degree in the bag. I took it upon myself to start a housing project, because let's face it, I just want to build Otinia a new house. And to top it all off I got my $2,354 grant approved to buy art supplies and teach gender equality workshops. I'm so happy we get to expand the class but I'm also freaking out over how exactly to present the issue of sexism to a room of children.

It's all so very Peace Corps that you spend months on end just mulling about your room then BAM! Here's a million projects and a big important deadline. Just like that!

I had a little interruption when Clemencia sneak attack recruited me to invite women to yet another taller. Now, I've already walked the entire community, solita, inviting women to a sewing taller that never happened. I did not want to do that again, especially with all the new projects on my plate. But things turned desperate when she told me that they've actually already been approved to host the taller and that it starts in, oh, 3 days. She just needed women to commit to the 6 hours/day, 5 days/week program, and she thought I would be just the person to do it with her.

And so I went. I think the fact that we already had 21 sewing machines coming made it easier for me to sell to the women on the long workday away from the home.

Something interesting happened on the first day of the taller last Wednesday. I was impressed that the majority of the women kept their word and showed up to the taller. The instructor is a sweet older woman named Conchi, and I decided immediately that I liked her tough love approach to the time commitment. I was really caught off guard, however, when a woman was barred from participating in the sewing class. Why? Because she'd learned too much already.

INSAFORP, the NGO that gives the taller, has a rule that you can't participate in the same taller twice and you can't go to more than 2 or 3 overall. The idea being that these talleres are designed to provide specialized training to women, thus creating incoming generating activities in the community. If you don't start a business after the taller, you must be lazy or not willing to commit. Therefore, stop draining our resources and be gone!

But who, WHO I ask you, teaches the women how to start a business? How to keep track of costs and gains? Who teaches them about marketing or customer service? Whooooo?!

Not to mention that in order to learn something new, like sewing or cosmetology, you have to organize at least 20 women to make it worthwhile for an NGO to teach you. And so what they're suggesting is to flood the market with 20 women who can sew clothes or 20 women who can paint nails. Even if a woman does beat the odds and starts a business, she's got 19 other competitors living right next door!

So who then is supposed to be teaching business development in rural El Salvador? Answer: Peace Corps Volunteers. More specifically, COED Volunteers. But obviously we do not number great enough to reach every woman who has ever participated in a taller ever. (Fact check: there are 14 COED PCVs currently serving in El Salvador, but ~14 more will swear-in at the end of the month.) That's just foolish.

I do get frustrated as a PCV when I find out that there has already been sewing, cooking, bread making, cosmetology and school uniform making workshops that have cycled through my community, sometimes more than twice. Everything has been done! But there are no women who continued with what they learned to start a business. I have an opportunity here to teach entrepreneurship, but something else crops up in the back of my mind.

We don't have community colleges, summer camps, park districts or senior centers here in El Salvador. If you want to learn something you have to organize those 20 women and beg an NGO to come to you. And since many women stop going to school around the 7th grade, these workshops might be the only chance they get to try something new. In the US, it's so easy to sign up for a class. My grandma does Tai-Chi and chair yoga, and I think it's wonderful! It's the land of opportunity!

What's so wrong with wanting to learn something? Shouldn't we encourage these women to open their minds and challenge themselves? How dare you say this woman has "learned too much?" Has it literally become a bad thing to participate too much? I see both sides of the story, but sheesh. Even in the campo girls just want to have fun.

First day! Glad they showed up!

The sewing machines all ready to go. 

My eldest host sister, Mina. I filled out her application because she cannot read or write. They needed to put all their identifying info on the app. Mina thinks I'm camera happy.