On Saturday my training group visited
the Museo Nacional de Antropologia David Guzman Museum, whose
collections mostly focus on Salvadoran history, with an emphasis on
economic history. It also has a powerful exhibit featuring
photographs of impoverished families in their homes all over Latin
America (see photo below).
That's all for now!
Sunday was the Festival de Maiz
(Corn Festival), an annual celebration of the years' corn harvest,
which is organized by the Catholic church. The event at the center of
the festival is a competition to crown a new town Reina de Maiz
(Corn Queen). Girls representing different local
institutions—schools, churches, and neighborhoods, for
example—compete by raising money from family and neighbors. At the
crowning ceremony, they all wear dresses made entirely of corn
(presumably made by their moms, aunts, sisters, etc.). Some of the
dresses were pretty unbelievable (see photo below; yes, one of the dresses
is designed to resemble a mermaid).
Today in Spanish class we had one of
our six “Community Contact” (basically interviews with people in
our training communities representing different aspects of life, like
business, education, etc.), this one with the president of the local
ADESCO (neighborhood council). He was very gracious and thoughtful,
but seemed to have little desire to address the partisanship that has
placed the council in a state of total paralysis. Any leader of a
representative organization needs to commit to building bridges
between factions. Elections for a new board will be held September
14, and I'm going to do my best to attend that meeting to get a sense
of where the local ADESCO might be heading under new leadership.
Starting Thursday we'll be spending
three “immersion days” in rural towns, where we'll each live with
a family and shadow a current PCV located in that town. The purpose
of the exercise is to introduce us to a Peace Corps site and the
daily activities of a Peace Corps volunteer. The volunteers we'll be
shadowing are part of the Youth Development program, as there are
currently no COED (Community Organization and Economic Development)
volunteers in the country (Peace Corps' presence in El Salvador was
scaled back significantly due to security concerns in 2012, so at
present there are only 25 PCVs in country, all of whom are Youth
Development). I'll be sure to blog about my “immersion days”
experiences after the fact.
On another note, I'm very eager to see
if tomorrow's launch of Al Jazeera America (AJAM) marks the start of
a quiet revolution in the American news appetite that favors a return
to serious, sober journalism. I don't think it'll effect any rapid or
radical changes in many Americans' habits, but I'm optimistic it'll
pressure the other cable networks to produce more meaningful stories,
creating sort of a ripple effect throughout the major cable networks.
I'm also excited that AJAM has established bureaus in cities that are
at times overlooked by the current players. As a Californian I'm
sensitive to the media's East Coast-centric tendencies, and I think
AJAM's decision to invest in high-quality bureaus throughout the
country will bring to light important events and issues that
otherwise would not have made national headlines. As of now, I refuse
to join the skeptics who think only the already media-savvy will
watch the new network and the rest of American society will stick to
their talking heads.
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