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.