End of January updates

Hi all –

Things are feeling a little more upbeat in Toreras, for the moment at least. At last week's meeting, I convinced the ADESCO to do away with the silly monthly membership fee that I derided in my previous post. They seemed to respond to the argument that participation in community decision-making should be a right, not a privilege that one purchases. I am not expecting an automatic increase in the number of people attending ADESCO meetings, but I think the cancellation of the fee gives the ADESCO a good launching point for a membership drive to pull in people who have historically viewed the ADESCO as exclusive. The ADESCO members were excited to replace the lost revenues by sponsoring weekly pupusa dinners at houses in the community, which will hopefully carry the added benefit of improving community morale (Toreras is possibly the only rural community in El Salvador where people don't get together to eat their country's national dish).

At the same meeting, the director of the school in Toreras, Niña Carmen, announced that due to the drop in enrollment (the number of students at the school has halved since 2010, from 70 to 35), she would be relocated to another school, leaving just one teacher to run the school and teach kindergarten through sixth grade. At first, she delivered the news in her signature poised and confident way (as the only person in the community with El Salvador's equivalent of a bachelor's degree, she is well respected and has a very dignified manner of speaking), but her voice soon started to break and she promptly began to sob. Just managing to let out a, “Don Frank (which is how people address me in my site) please take it from here,” she stormed out of the room in tears.

Alarmed as anyone to see the normally-composed Niña Carmen break down to the point of losing her ability to speak, I immediately registered the twenty sets of mostly middle-aged Salvadoran eyes peering at me, expecting me to put the aghast room at ease with all of my twenty-two years of wisdom. It was one of those moments, probably typical of any Peace Corps service, when it hits a volunteer what an outsize sum of responsibility and credibility he commands.

I managed to improvise a decently befitting monologue about how the community would need to pull together to adapt to the new situation at the school, and that (badly lacking) parental involvement was now important as ever.

I've scheduled a meeting for February 8 to form a women's group in my community. I'm not entirely sure what to expect, but I'm preparing for as many contingencies as I can conceive of. Most of the women in my site have never participated in any kind of formal organization, but they're all the CEOs of their families, and are likely unaware of all the skills they employ as part of that job. One of my tasks will be to get the women to become aware of their strengths and how they can be applied in the context of a community organization. As far as the precise purpose of the group goes, I'd like to help them arrive at that decision on their own.

In other news, there is one exceptionally smart sixth-grader at my school. A few days ago I gave her an almanac that I came across the last time I went into town, thinking back to my own childhood when I used to spend hours with my almanac absorbing country statistics and memorizing state flags (I still enjoy doing the former). I wasn't sure she would take to it, due to the utter lack of any reading culture here. Much to my delight, when I arrived at school yesterday morning, she was huddled around a world map with two other girls and the almanac. We spent the next hour matching countries profiled in the almanac to their locations on the map and talking about the different languages spoken throughout the world. It was wonderful how interested the girls were, but at the same time profoundly sad to observe how little knowledge of the outside world their classes and circumstances have imparted on them up to this point.

That's all for now. Tomorrow I get to go to San Salvador to greet the newest group of Peace Corps trainees as they arrive at the airport, then help out with two days of orientation activities. It'll be ironic to be the “in-the-know” guy for forty-eight hours before returning to my site where I'm still very much in the process of wrapping my head around the situation.

Some views from Toreras

Bashful about the dearth of photographs in my blog, here are a half-dozen taken along my route to the bus stop.

Pena, cohetes, and more pena

(I actually composed this post on January 1, but alas, I haven't been able to post it until today due to my lack of a decent internet connection.)

Hi all, and happy New Year –

I don't have many new developments to report, other than an ADESCO meeting which I'll discuss in a moment. Mostly I've been continuing with house visits and participating in my community's modest holiday traditions. For Christmas (celebrated on the 24^th of December; the 25^th is just a day of rest), most households (the women of most households, that is) either make tamales or panes con pollo, which are quite tasty chicken sandwiches with cabbage, beets, potatoes and sauce. In the evening, one house in my site hosted a party, the highlight of which was a Christian music sing-along led by a predicador that must have lasted at least two hours. Other than the predicador's opportunistic diatribe against family planning and abortion, it was a pretty charming occasion. Cohetes, or firecrackers, were also a feature of the Christmas party.

New Years' was celebrated similarly, minus the sing-alongs and espousals of social conservatism.

The end-of-the-year ADESCO Asamblea General on Monday was illuminating but not all that surprising. Asamblea Generales are supposed to be monthly gatherings wherein the ADESCO's directiva (executive board) updates the community at large about its activities, solicits feedback from community members, and proposes items on which the community votes. This ADESCO, however, employs a dollar-a-month membership fee, which effectively shrinks the “community at large” to “community members willing to part with $12 a year in exchange for the right to participate in community decision-making” (remember that in communities as poor as Toreras, $12 is not a nominal sum). A testament to the idiocy of this policy is that, while Toreras has a population of slightly over 200 (a majority of whom are adults), there are 28 fee-paying members of the ADESCO (four of whom are technically from the neighboring community of La Guacamaya, which does not have its own ADESCO). I'm not contending that lifting the membership fee would unleash a sudden surge of community activism, but the financial commitment undoubtedly excludes some families and sends the toxic message that the ability to participate in community decisions is a privilege to be purchased with cash rather than a right inherent to membership in that community. The membership fee has the additional consequence of allowing the directiva the latitude to be complacent when it comes to organizing fundraising activities, contributing to the organization's overall malaise and depriving the community of fun events that contribute positively to the ADESCO's image and promote community morale. (Morale-boosting efforts are crucial in a community with zero employment and population loss of 4-6% a year due to out-migration.)

In all, about twenty ADESCO members showed up to Monday's meeting, held at the school in Toreras. One of the agenda items was an end-of-the-year financial report by the treasurer. When Don Crisanto, the president and my host father, called on the treasurer to present the report (which had already been written word-for-word on a whiteboard), the treasurer succumbed to pena. No one English word corresponds directly to the Spanish pena, at least as PCVs in El Salvador encounter it; pena is some kind of hybrid between embarrassment, skyness, shame, and petrification, and renders children and adults alike unable to speak or otherwise participate in group activities when called on to do so. So the treasurer, a 28 year-old man (we'll call him Juan) who in one-on-one conversation is quite gregarious, just sat silently, unresponsive to Crisanto's prodding until the backup treasurer reluctantly stood up to struggle through the report (he is mostly illiterate and had difficulty reading the whiteboard).

Situations like this require the utmost sensitivity from PCVs; while from a gringo lens it seems preposterous, even reprehensible, that a two-minute financial report would render catatonic an adult elected to serve as the treasurer of an organization, one must consider the advantages that entrenched poverty denied Juan. Unlike many young Americans, Juan didn't grow up with organized activities like sports and debate through which to learn leadership, nor did he have access to an education of a high enough quality to develop skills and confidence in areas such as public speaking and presentation-making. His willingness to take on a job like treasurer is a step out of his comfort zone and should be commended.

After the meeting, I walked home with Juan, who had returned to his normal sociable self. “I'm just a farmer, but it's been so great getting to be treasurer and learning how to work in the ADESCO,” he remarked. As PCVs we can't lose sight of how important these rare leadership opportunities are to some people, even if they appear to be struggling with the demands of leadership and organization.

Apart from the ongoing process of integrating into my community and laying the groundwork for my eventual work projects, my current fixation with The West Wing has over the past month proved an impediment to my reading. Fortunately I only have a little more than one season left, at which point I'll be able to take on a more ambitious reading regimen. That being said, I haven't completely left my literary appetite un-satiated, having just finished William Easterly's The White Man's Burden, and recently starting Peddling Prosperity, one of Paul Krugman's earlier books, on the intersection of economic thought and politics, and Democratizing Innovation by MIT economist Eric von Hippel. I've also been flipping through A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas by Chuck Klosterman, part of the Hope Yao Book Club.

I also have figured out how to get modest results out of my internet modem here. Doing so requires me to stray about a hundred yards from my house to a path covered in horse poop, which boasts the strongest Honduran cellular signal in Toreras. For now this tradition seems worth it to be able to load Teagan Goddard's Political Wire and a dozen or so articles from the New York Times' mobile site (both sites are nicely optimized for lethargic, cross-border internet connections).