Time to get to work

Hi all –

It's been a while since I last put up a post. I don't particularly have an excuse other than it seems only natural that the more “transitioned” I feel in my new life in El Salvador, the less often I'll feel compelled to take to my blog to babble about how shocking my new surroundings are; things I found noteworthy four months ago have become commonplace. That being said, I intend to average two posts a month for the duration of my service, so this last month has been an aberration as far as the frequency of my posting goes.

On Saturday I returned from my site after concluding Pre-Service Training 2 (PST-2), three weeks of additional training back in Nuevo Cuscatlan, where I spent my initial ten-week training period. It was nice to reunite with my old host family—the Garcias—there, as well as the other volunteers in my training group. Despite the diversity of our sites in terms of the degree of community organization, proximity to services and employment, and level of human development, we're all weathering similar challenges of integration and inter-cultural navigation. During PST-2 I also had the opportunity to spend Thanksgiving at the home of a nice American embassy family.

The training we received in PST-2 was much more project-oriented than the initial round, and having received it, I feel much more targeted toward concrete goals in addition to the more abstract notions of gaining confianza and achieving integration in my community. My top two priorities for at least the next six months will be forming a women's association in Toreras and improving the ADESCO (Asocación de Desarrollo Comunal).

The women in Toreras seldom leave their homes and participate minimally in the ADESCO (Toreras' only organization) and other activities promoting development in the community. Many if not most rural communities in El Salvador have some form of women's group, many of which function as income-generating cooperatives that make and sell crafts or food items. Others serve more as community councils that take on community problems, organize social events, and solicit trainings and other forms of support from NGOs and government. Not only are these groups able to realize concrete accomplishments, but they contribute to an overall sense of empowerment among the women who participate (and probably even those who don't), challenging the machista attitude that relegates women to domestic duties and discourages them from participating actively in community decision-making. If Toreras is to confront its most pressing development challenges—employment opportunities, education levels, sanitation and potable water, a decent road—it's going to need female leadership.

Assuming I'm able to successfully assemble a women's association, I'm somewhat impartial as to the form the group ultimately takes. To me, the most important thing is to provide a space for women to learn leadership skills and to express their desires for and concerns regarding the community, thereby building much-lacking self-esteem and showing their daughters (and sons, for that matter) that women serve important functions outside the home. Such a group could spur a culture of female leadership in heavily male-dominated Toreras, which would benefit the community indefinitely and immeasurably. Forming the group will be a slow process—and for at least the first few months, I will very much be running the show—but hopefully by the time my two years are up I'll have put together an organization with the necessary structure, systems, and skills to sustain itself without the support of a PCV. I'm anticipating plenty of challenges, but I've been heartened by some encouraging conversations I've had in the last few days with women and men alike.

As for the ADESCO, it is lacking in pretty much every attribute a representative organization should possess. The executive board's communication with its constituency (the community) is minimal, it lacks strategic thinking and leadership, its officers don't know nor follow its by-laws, and enthusiasm for its purported mission is low. Crisanto, my host father and the ADESCO president, badly wants greater community buy-in and participation, yet seems at a loss for ways to encourage them. There's a lot of work to be done to return the ADESCO to an energetic and well-regarded community organization (I learned from Chris, the first PCV to serve here, that the ADESCO has clearly seen better days), but given the overall good nature of its members, I think I should be able to give it a shot in the arm while engendering habits that will help ensure its proper functioning beyond the term of my service.

Ending on a light note, I gave my host mom here a jar of strawberry jam as a gift upon my return from PST-2. Two day later, she approached me with the empty jar and gleefully told me how much she enjoyed the mermelada. Surprised by how quickly the jam disappeared, I asked her what she ate it with. Bread?...Tortilla? She shot me a puzzled look. I'm assuming she at least used a spoon...

Toreras.edu

(Written on Wednesday, Nov 13 but just posting it today.)

With just ten days left until I return to Nuevo Cuscatlan for PST-II (a second round of training ending December 14), a rhythm hasn't particularly set in for me in Toreras, and I don't think it will for a while. Some days are full of activities—house visits, community meetings, social gatherings, and time spent at the school—while others are mostly devoid of structure. For instance, today Crisanto and I were supposed to meet at 9am with some officials who work for INSAFORP, a Salvadoran GO that offers free vocational training. It's now past noon and they haven't yet shown up at the house. There's still a chance they'll come—Salvadorans are admittedly not a punctual people—but tardando over three hours is uncharacteristic even in this culture. If they indeed don't come, I won't have anything on my agenda until 4pm, when I'll head down to the cancha to play soccer with some local guys (I am abysmal at soccer but they guys are painstakingly polite about it). In many Peace Corps sites I'd be able to fill these gaps in my day by heading to communal spaces—a comedor (informal restaurant), a church courtyard, or any other centrally-located place where people gather at all hours—to strike up conversations with locals and score some confianza points, but in my site no such spaces exist. This is largely a function of the geographical sparsity of Toreras' population, though I can't help but wonder if a centrally-located communal space did exist, if people would gather there in an if you build it, they will come fashion.

Contributing to the quietness in Toreras at the moment is that school is out for the year as of last week. The Salvadoran school year ends in early November and begins in early January, which is pretty logical if you ask me. At this point, there's some uncertainty about the fate of the Toreras' little school. I guess this as as good a segue as any to provide a brief overview of education in my site:

Toreras has a three-classroom, pabularia-through-sixth-grade school located centrally enough that few children need to walk more than an hour to arrive (this is a feat in my site). Currently it has 43 registered students (though only 20-25 regularly attend class) and two teachers. One teacher handles parbularia (essentially pre-K) through second grade, while the other (who doubles as the school director) teaches third through sixth grades (yes, this means the third and sixth grades, for example, are taught concurrently in the same classroom). The school day lasts from 8am to noon, though it sometimes doesn't start on time, as children consistently arrive late. Also, class is often cancelled, because the teachers consistently have mandatory Ministry of Education (MINED) meetings or trainings to attend. When only one of the teachers has a MINED commitment on a particular day, the other takes in that teacher's students and teaches all the kids at once. However, when both have commitments, they simply cancel school, as substitute teachers are non-existent in rural El Salvador. This happens far too often. In fact, since I've arrived in Toreras, school has been cancelled at least once every week, usually more. One week, class was cancelled three out of the five days. The cancellations contribute to the school's horrendous attendance rate, as students are regularly unsure whether they have class on any given morning, and the teachers have no way of efficiently communicating this information to the families.

Public schools in El Salvador have miniscule budgets, so aside from desks, chairs, whiteboards, whiteboard markers, and aging MINED-issued textbooks, the Toreras school has little in the way of instructional materials. Teachers often improvise classroom activities with discarded newspapers, which, with a little creativity, can make surprisingly compelling classroom tools.

The uncertainly about the future stems from the fact that next year, the number of registered students at Toreras will drop to 38, the result of which is likely to be the axing of one teaching position. The one teacher (at this point it is unclear whether this person will be one of the current teachers or someone new altogether) will likely teach the younger half of students in the morning (8am-12pm) and the older kids in the afternoon (1pm-5pm). It's unclear whether this situation is any better or worse than the status quo. If, like this year, the one teacher has regular MINED commitments during the week, we can expect school to be cancelled even more than it was this year, as the teacher won't have a colleague to take over his or her students on these days. However, perhaps splitting the little kids and the older kids between the morning and the afternoon will help students focus and lead to better learning. On the other hand, asking the older students to walk to school at the hottest hour of the day has the potential to depress attendance even further. I could go on and on this handing and other handing, so we'll just have to wait and see how well the new system works, assuming MINED puts it in place. In any event, low school attendance is one issue I'm eager to try to address in my site. It won't be easy, due to the attitudes of many parents (and grandparents, in the case of those children whose parents have immigrated to the U.S.) and the ever-onerous geography of the community, but it's clearly one of the community's gravest deficiencies. I'll blog about it in more detail once I have studied it further.

If you're wondering, beyond sixth grade, students from Toreras have the option of going to schools in nearby Carpintero or Lajitas for seventh through ninth grades (they'll generally go to whichever school is closer to their house). Almost all students who bother to finish sixth grade continue on to complete ninth as well. For the equivalent of high school (called bachillerato, which includes tenth through twelfth grades), students from Toreras essentially only have the option of studying a distancia, a program that involves attending class on Saturdays only, as the only Monday-through-Friday bachillerato program in the municipality is located in downtown Polorós, requiring a $1 bus ride each way to come and go. While some families can afford $10 a week to transport their teenager to class (though many cannot), few students or families can reconcile the time commitment. To come and go, a Torereño would have to leave the house every morning around 4:45am to board the 5:30am bus in the neighboring village in order to arrive at school by the time class starts at 7am. After class lets out at 4pm (the bachillerato school day is substantially longer than that of ninth grade and below), he or she would have to take the 5:15pm bus back toward Toreras, arriving home at approximately 7pm (the exact time would depend on the distance between the student's house and the bus stop). A 4:45am to 7pm school day is a tough sell to families that are tight-knit and often depend on their teenagers for domestic (females) and agricultural (males) labor. Thus, the Saturday-only program is the only palatable way for Torereños to complete their secondary educations, though still many call it quits after ninth grade.

So there's the education situation in my site, in a nutshell. The above description doesn't channel this sentiment whatsoever, but despite the challenges, the school in Toreras is a very happy place. The children that show up are generally gleeful and get along with each other (they're practically all cousins, if not siblings, after all), and the two teachers care about their learning.

That's enough about education, for now. In the coming days, I'll be continuing with confianza-building by going to a couple of rezos (events honoring people who have recently passed away), a soccer tournament, and the annual fair in Lajitas, which people in Toreras seem to be looking forward to. On Monday I went swimming in the nearby river with some of the local kids, which was a lot of fun. And last week I was seated at the mesa de honor (table of honor) at two separate graduations, which I found amusing as someone who just turned 22. I even got to hand out some of the diplomas.

Details, details

I'm now in the middle of my fourth week in site, having spent most of my time so far visiting houses, spending time at the school, and attending whatever community gatherings happen to be taking place. It's difficult at times not to be “producing”—that is, getting work projects done—but así es; starting projects on day one is simply not an option for a volunteer in my program. In order to have an effective two-year service, COED volunteers in El Salvador must first integrate into their communities, obtaining the requisite trust and information to proceed with feasible projects that align with community needs.

My General Assemly

 

This isn't the case with all PCVs, I've recently learned. A few weeks ago I read a Peace Corps memoir written by a former PCV in Guatemala whose assignment was to design and build water systems for rural communities in collaboration with an American-led NGO. Seemingly upon swearing in, this PCV had begun traveling from village to village designing water projects and overseeing their construction. He would spend a few days in a village, conduct the necessary assessments, retreat to the office to design the system, and return to the village with the blueprints and some masons to do the heavily lifting. He focused minimally on building relationships with locals, as such an undertaking was unnecessary given the peripatetic nature of his assignment. The city where the NGO was based, and where this PCV lived when he wasn't on assignment, was merely a home base for him, and he had little reason to fret about how he was viewed by its inhabitants; in fact, he would regularly go out to bars in town and stumble home drunk. I'm not making a judgment about which type of assignment is superior—one like mine, where the PCV is placed in a community with little structure or oversight and a broad (one could even call it “vague”) assignment, versus one like his, where the PCV essentially works as an employee of an existing organization with a professional staff, expertise, a concrete mission, and financial resources. I just found it interesting that a PCV in the country next door had such a wildly different experience than I'm having now. Not once in his memoir did he mention confianza, a term that probably came up five-hundred times during my training.

The whiteboard I prepared for my GA

Anyhow, on Saturday I had my General Assembly, which is an event that every PCV in my cohort is required to organize in their communities during these first few weeks in site. The event takes the form of an all-community meeting at which the PCV formally introduces him- or herself to the community and explains Peace Corps and the COED program. Peace Corps staff attend to help answer any questions and to help dispel myths about Peace Corps (“No, PCVs do not have enough money to pave the road”, etc.) . The occasion also gives the staff an opportunity to gauge how well the PCV is integrating and to detect any glaring problems early. Some PCVs need more support than others.

My General Assembly went very smoothly and there was even some traditional folk dancing and a piñata.

I also left my community on Sunday and Monday to attend my first regional Peace Corps meeting. These meetings take place at the Eastern Regional Office in San Francisco Gotera, Morazán, and are opportunities for Peace Corps staff to brief us on any policy changes, logistical matters, technical strategies, health trends, etc. Most PCVs in the eastern region (nine out of fifteen) are located in Morazán, so they were already familiar with the regional office, but this was my first time going there.

Los alumnos

I don't recall if I've explained the Peace Corps El Salvador transportation policy yet in this blog, so here goes: Due to a string of incidents (mostly robberies) on public buses, PCVs in El Salvador are not allowed to take any inter-departmental buses (departments are El Salvador's equivalent of states). To travel inter-departmentally, PCVs can only use the Peace Corps shuttle, which runs only on certain days. The policy largely traps me in La Unión department, where I am the only PCV. In order to leave it, I have two options:

1) On shuttle days I can take a 3:30am bus (meaning I'd have to leave my house at 2:15am to walk over an hour, mostly uphill, to the bus stop) to Santa Rosa de Lima, the shuttle pickup point. I'd arrive on the bus in Santa Rosa at about 5:30am and wait in the Burger King there until 8am when the shuttle arrives to take me to Gotera, which is only forty minutes away.

2) The day before a shuttle day, I can take a 6am bus (meaning a 4:45am departure time) to Santa Rosa, spend the day and night in Santa Rosa (a hotel room with cable and wifi costs $15), and board the shuttle the next morning at 8am.

To get home, Peace Corps can give me a ride from Gotera back to Santa Rosa. The last bus leaving Santa Rosa is at 3pm, and I'd ride it for about 2 1/2 hours (it's slower because the trip is uphill going north). From where I get off the bus, it's about a ninety-minute walk—mostly downhill—back to my house.

Given this, if I were to theoretically want to spend a day at the regional office, taking advantage of the free printing, internet, office materials, library and staff support that the office offers, under Option 1 (which, again, I can only exploit on days the shuttle is running) I would travel from 2:15am to 8:40am to arrive at the office, spend 8:40 to 2pm at the office, and travel back to my site from 2pm to 7pm. That's 11.41 hours of travel to 5.33 hours of office time. So my point is basically that the regional office, meant to provide services to PCVs in the eastern region of the country, essentially does not exist for me, as someone unwilling to assent to the 2-to-1 travel-to-office time ratio.

Whenever I find myself wanting to complain about how ridiculous my travel situation is, I try to comfort myself by thinking about all the PCVs who have served in countries with much fewer resources and weaker infrastructure than El Salvador. Niger and Chad are usually the first to come to mind. I'm sure PCVs in places like those had to deal with much larger challenges than a prohibitively inconvenient transportation policy. The Peace Corps staff is very apologetic about my situation and I don't blame them for it one bit. The well-intentioned bus policy was handed down mainly by Washington, and there are rumors it might be “relaxed” a bit in order to allow for exceptions for volunteers such as myself who are cut off from Peace Corps services due to the rule.

Anyway, going back to earlier this week, I went with Option 2 to make it to the meeting on Monday, leaving early Sunday morning to spend the day and night in Santa Rosa. Santa Rosa, a hub for commerce between merchants from El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua, is the commercial capital of central La Unión department, with a population of about 30,000. I wouldn't call it an especially charming city, but it's nice enough for my purposes; it has a vast open-air market, a tree-lined park in the main square, a modern grocery store, some internet cafes, and a couple of hotels. It also has some American and American-style fast food restaurants (such as the aforementioned Burger King), in case I'm ever feeling desperate for a taste of America.

On Sunday I spent a bit of time at the market shopping for some bedroom essentials to make my room a bit more comfortable, but I mainly spent the day in my hotel room, relishing in the wifi and the opportunity to watch CNN and even catch game four of the World Series.

On Monday I boarded the infamous Peace Corps shuttle at the Burger King and arrived at the regional office at 8:40am. I didn't get a chance to speak to many fellow PCVs in depth about their experiences so far—right after the meeting of course I had to be whisked back to Santa Rosa to be able to catch the bus home—but it sounds like they're in a wide variety of situations. Some are in relatively developed communities with fairly educated populations and easy access to internet, restaurants, and places to shop (PCVs refer to such scenarios as “Posh Corps”), while others have situations more similar to mine.

The view from my house

In other news, I've now spoken twice with Chris, one of the former PCVs who served in my site (he arrived in 2008 and closed his service in 2010). He seems like a very affable and intelligent guy, and one who fondly recalls his time in Toreras. When I asked him where he went after Peace Corps, he told me he got a job at a company in the Chicago area while attending business school—at the University of Chicago, no less. We were amused by our U. of C. connection—I possibly more than he. Chris has been coordinating a water project for Toreras with Engineers Without Borders, which I'll surely blog more about later on.

I'm trying to think of other things to describe so that my mom doesn't again accuse my blog of lacking detail. I suppose I haven't talked much about my new host family. In the house live five, not including myself. The heads of the household are a couple in their sixties. The husband, Don Crisanto, is one of my community guides (a community member selected by Peace Corps staff to take the lead in facilitating my integration into the community). Crisanto is the president of the ADESCO and a dedicated community leader. He has a somewhat saintly presence, a surprisingly boyish laugh, and loves to talk about community organization and ways to improve Toreras. Also in the house are two of the couple's children—Josefita and Giovanni—both in their thirties. Josefita, hardworking and kind, is essentially my “host mom”, in that she prepares my meals and washes my clothes.

My house

Yes, it feels weird at first to be served by somebody (especially in such strict conformity with traditional gender roles) after becoming accustomed in college to feeding myself and doing my own laundry, but to insist on cooking my own food and washing my own clothes would have attracted unwanted attention to myself and distracted from my work. Plus, it's very convenient to not have to prepare my own meals, and I pay a fair price for room and board, so I don't feel too guilty about it.

The last member of the household is a third-grade girl named Tonia. She is full of energy and spends a good deal of her time shooing the dogs, turkeys, cats, and ducks away from the house. To be honest, I don't know who her parents are, but I assume they're in the United States. Almost half of Torereños live in the U.S. From what I can gather, about a hundred live in Hempstead, New York and maybe seventy in Philadelphia. A handful also live in Houston and the Atlanta area. The implications of this are many, but I won't get into them now.

My host family's house is probably the nicest in the community. It is made of sturdy adobe walls, a shingled roof, and tile floors, and sits on a solid concrete foundation. The electricity is reliable and a steady stream of water reaches the house via a hose fed by a well located a ways uphill (many households in the community are without a water source and have to walk to the river that bisects the community to collect water). My bedroom is large and boasts a hammock, a bed, a table, and a chair. There's no cell signal in my room, so when I'm home I place my cell phone in a sock and hang it above the patio in a particular location where signal (from Honduras) reaches with some regularity. My host family had a good laugh over this, but was understanding of my connectivity plight.

The last tidbit I'll share for now (and possibly a detail my mom would prefer not to know) is that the number of deadly snakes I have encountered so far in my site yesterday rose to two, as during a house visit this morning one appeared in some weeds near the house and a young man killed it with a slingshot and brought it to the patio for us all to see. No one but me seemed particularly bothered that a creature that can kill a man with a single bite came so close a human dwelling. Así es la vida.

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.