First post from site!

Just over two weeks ago I arrived in my site—Caserío Toreras in the municipality of Polorós—in the very northeast corner of El Salvador. My first couple weeks have been both eventful and uneventful. I've been gradually getting to know the 230 residents of Toreras through house visits and time spent at the school and community events, while also enjoying a solid amount of time to myself to read, reflect and try to make sense of my existence as a recent UChicago grad from the suburbs of San Francisco living in a rural community in Central America where nearly all adults are illiterate, most people travel by horse, and the only livelihoods available are subsistence farming and remittances. The pace of life in Toreras is slow, with men setting off to their fields in the mornings to collect enough food to feed their families and animals for the day, and women working in the home—cooking, cleaning, and making tortillas. Some children attend school, and others don't.

My first full day in site was a bit distressing. I went out with my host uncle, Pancho, to visit houses and begin the process of integrating into my community and gaining the confianza (trust) of the people, which will be necessary to accomplish project goals. I had been alerted by Peace Corps staff that my community was spread out and I would have to walk long distances to reach many houses, but as I learned on that first day, I hadn't quite grasped the gravity of this warning. Trudging with Pancho along narrow, rocky paths carving through hillside milpas (cornfields)—and the puddles, so many puddles—I wasn't so much troubled by the physical exertion required to navigate in my community as I was the apprehension I felt at the idea of being a PCV focused on community organization in a place where people have to slog through mud and thicket just to reach the main road. How am I ever going to get all these people in the same place for meetings and workshops? How will I even communicate with them the existence of meetings and workshops?, I thought to myself.

I now feel better about this. Since that first day, I have been to a couple of community events attended by dozens of community members from all over the caserío. These people are used to walking. And they have time. They don't work nine-to-six jobs, or have bosses to report to or TV shows to catch. The kids don't have extracurricular activities, college applications, or SAT tutors. On the communication front, my community guide Carmen, the director of the school in Toreras, told me that one way to advertise upcoming gatherings is to come to school and give each pupil a circular to take home to their parents. The geography of my site will always pose a challenge for me, I predict, but based on what I've learned and observed, it shouldn't be insurmountable.

House visits can be bizarre. In Salvadoran culture, there is much less pressure to converse while in the presence of others than in American culture. In Toreras, it seems perfectly normal for one community member to show up to another's house and just sit in near-total silence. This is how many of my house visits begin, especially when the man of the house is not home. Pancho and I arrive, the woman of the house invites us to pase adelante and sientense, and fetches us a couple chairs. Then she disappears, usually to the kitchen or the pila (Google it) to resume her domestic duties. Pancho and I sit quietly, perhaps occasionally exchanging an observation about the weather or the animals—cows, horses, chickens, ducks, turkeys, dogs, cats—that inevitably are strutting around the property. A child might stare at us from the doorway of the house, unsure of how to behave around a foreigner. Perhaps after five or ten minutes, the woman returns from inside, often with glasses of fruit juice for Pancho and me. I say thank you and try to pose a couple simple questions before she retreats back inside. How many people live here? Do you have family in the United States? From there, with Pancho's assistance the conversation continues (topics are usually limited to family, animals, and the weather) and gradually the resident becomes more comfortable with the idea of my existence. And, believe it or not, that's really the goal of these visits. These people know no foreigners and seldom interact with people outside their own families (nearly everyone in Toreras is related), so it is incumbent upon me to try to ease their anxiety toward me as best I can.

House visits aren't my only bizarre activities. Just two days ago I attended a community meeting convened to celebrate the bestowal of documentation from the central government (specifically the Ministry of External Affairs) certifying that the cantón of Lajitas, to which Toreras belongs, is indeed part of El Salvador and not Honduras. Apparently there was some doubt. Perhaps feeding the uncertainty is the fact that everyone in my community uses Honduran cell phones, because that country's cell towers are the only ones that reach Toreras. (As such, I now have two phone numbers—one Honduran and one Salvadoran—and a cell phone that conveniently carries both SIM cards at once.)

Overall, I'm doing fine. My host family feeds me well and my health has held up impeccably since arriving at site. As you might have surmised from the recent dearth of blog posts, I don't have internet at my site (I'm posting this from an cibercafe in downtown Polorós). It's hard to have limited access to news and email, but I promised myself getting internet wouldn't be my first priority when I arrived at site. I wanted to prove to myself that I could live without constant access to news, and I can. I'd still prefer not to though. Soon I'm going to work on getting a Honduran internet modem, which will be challenging considering I can't actually go to Honduras due to Peace Corps rules, but I'll figure something out.

I recently finished reading Paul Collier's The Bottom Billion, Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It. It's an important book that makes the argument that most developing countries will achieve at least upper middle-income status with or without aid from the global north. Those that won't are the countries stuck in some combination of three “traps”: the conflict trap, the natural resources trap, or the trap of being landlocked with bad neighbors. He argues that these countries, whose combined population totals approximately one billion (hence the title of his book), should receive the bulk of development aid, lest they remain stuck in the traps forever.

I found Collier's book pretty convincing, and it made me think a lot about my own mission here in El Salvador, which is not a bottom billion country. As amenable as I am to Collier's argument, I wouldn't go so far as to extrapolate from it that Peace Corps El Salvador should be shuttered and its funding and personnel redirected toward programs in the Central African Republic, Afghanistan, and Laos (Collier probably wouldn't favor this either). Helping these countries is certainly an important responsibility of rich countries, but there are bottom-billion conditions here too, and it doesn't appear that much of the wealth being generated in San Salvador and San Miguel is going to make it here to the zona fronteriza anytime soon. 

That's all for now. I'll leave you with a few photos from my swearing-in on October 3.