Work updates mostly

Saludos --

I'm now a month-and-a-half into my assignment in Citalá, and exactly halfway through my 27-month service in El Salvador. Citalá so far is meeting my expectations. People here are proving to offer the support necessary to make productive use of me, which in my view is the most important determinant of volunteer success and contentment. This is not to say there are so many people here eager to undertake projects that I'm booked every day from eight to five. Unfortunately, such a situation is virtually unheard of in Peace Corps El Salvador. But it is to say that there is enough going on here to keep me feeling optimistic and engaged.

Work-wise, so far I have begun teaching a weekly drama class with 7th-9th graders at the primary school, which is good fun. Who knew that what I learned during my four years in CTE at Tam High would come in handy five years later in El Salvador? Additionally, soon I'll be starting an entrepreneurship class at the high school and an English conversation section with high schoolers attending the private Adventist school in town. The management of all three educational institutions has been very welcoming and willing to collaborate, an openness that PCVs in this country cannot always count on.

Apart from my work in the schools, I am hoping to engage with a committee that the alcaldía just formed to promote tourism in the municipality. I see modest potential for Citalá with respect to tourism development--owing to its proximity to existing touristic amenities, charming ambiance, and pleasant climate--and am interested to ascertain the vision of the committee when I attend one of its meetings for the first time tomorrow. Ideally I would like to find a way for the touristic ambitions of the alcaldía and the entrepreneurial ambitions of the high schoolers to complement one another, but it is yet too early to tell if such a collaboration is within the realm of feasibility.

Another development I am looking forward to with restrained optimism is the renewal of the ADESCO (Asociación de Desarrollo Comunitario) that represents the downtown neighborhood of Citalá and has been mostly dormant of late. The alcaldía is coordinating the effort to elect a new ADESCO board of directors, and though there are all kinds of partisan tensions simmering beneath the surface (I shouldn't and won't go into details), my hope is that the ADESCO leadership that emerges is a motivated group of individuals willing to work for the common good in spite of political differences. We shall see.

Lastly, I expect to co-lead some HIV prevention workshops for youth over the next few months. Last week using PEPFAR funds Peace Corps hosted a training-of-trainers event on HIV prevention to which each volunteer was able to bring two counterparts. I invited one of the health promoters at the medical clinic in Citalá, as well as a person who coordinates a youth group in town. They enjoyed the training and are very motivated to co-lead trainings with me in Citalá using the techniques they learned.

The novelty of working in a community with motivated individuals is not wearing off one bit.

Until next time,
Frank

Above: Some festivities celebrating Central American Independence
Below: Volunteers and counterparts at the HIV prevention training

New site, new opportunities

Citalá as viewed from the hill overlooking it, with
my new friend Ale in the foreground.

Having left Toreras last Friday after ten months there, I'm now living and working in the charming town of Citalá, Chalatenango, El Salvador, located in the country's northwest. If my first six days in Citalá are any indication of what's to come, I think I'm going to be quite happy during my fourteen-or-so months here. People here are sociable and inviting, and hearteningly display great pride in their hometown, and my host family here is helpful and fun to be around. The contrasts between my new and old sites are enormous. While despair and hopelessness lamentably consumed Toreras, vibrancy prevails here. Having WiFi at home and reliable cell signal also don't hurt...

I realize that in time I am sure to encounter some sources of frustration as I begin work projects here (this is inevitable in any country), and that I am in the thick of my site "honeymoon" (as Peace Corps parlance would have it), but for now I am content to enjoy said honeymoon and be grateful for all that Citalá offers that I was not able to count on in my previous location.

That's all for now. Feel free to contact me directly with any questions.

Heading Out West

I have some exciting news to announce: Next week I'm moving to a new site, where I'll serve out the remaining fourteen months of my time as a volunteer in El Salvador.

I hope to bring to a close the days of lamenting Toreras' inadequacies as a Peace Corps site, so it will suffice to say that a community without aspirations for its future cannot make productive use of a Peace Corps Volunteer. I have learned and grown a great deal over the course of my nine months in Toreras, and do not regret having been sent there, but I would be lying if I said that I am not very happy to have an opportunity to spend the duration of my Peace Corps service in a place that has some capacity to make use of me and offers reasons to feel hopeful about its future and the future of El Salvador.

That place is Citalá, Chalatenango, a small city on the western side of the country. I visited there last week with my Project Manager to meet a few community leaders and my future host family, and left with a favorable first impression. I am reticent to provide many details, having only visited my new community briefly, so I'll leave those to future posts. 

I leave Toreras on Thursday, July 24, and my first day in Citalá will be Friday, July 25. 

Migration meditations, pt. 2

 Hi all --

Toreras' situation remains unchanged and I'm afraid I don't have much new analysis of it that I did not convey in my previous, morose post. I do, however, have a dreary tidbit to share that illustrates the difficulty of working in community development with a community that has utterly given up on itself. 

About two weeks ago, Peace Corps staff organized a workshop on gender and sexuality for volunteers, who were to bring one counterpart each (a counterpart in Peace Corps parlance is any community member with which is PCVs collaborates on a project). The two-day workshop was to be held at a hotel overlooking the Pacific on El Salvador's beautiful Costa del Sol and promised to be both an educational experience and an enjoyable opportunity for volunteers and counterparts to relax and exchange ideas with new people engaged in diverse activities in their communities. 

The counterpart I invited was one of the two young women in my community to have acquired a university degree. She is significantly less shy than most young women in my community and, while not actively engaged in any formal leadership positions, has the potential to be a formidable community leader in Toreras. My decision to invite her to the workshop was based on my hope that the activities would familiarize her with various topics related to gender equality (as these issues are never discussed in Toreras and a minimum of outside information manages to enter the community) and animate her to want to address the problem of gender inequality in Toreras. With her newfound motivation, I could push her to take a more active role in the women's group I am attempting to organize in Toreras, my thinking went.

The workshop went great and I think that in just two days my counterpart became significantly more conversant in gender issues. While the workshop did not inspire a ferocious passion in her to tackle gender inequality in Toreras, I felt as we were traveling home from it that I had made the right choice to invite this particular woman and that maybe I would be able to cultivate her into a valuable work partner who could help me propel the women's group forward.

Four days after the workshop, she, like many Torereños before her, left for the U.S.

If you're picturing a young Salvadoran woman dutifully boarding an airplane, eager to embark upon an adventure in a new country, stop. Like most people who emigrate from El Salvador to the U.S., she is traveling por tierra, placing her life in the hands of a coyote, or human smuggler, to whom her family paid somewhere between $6,000 and $8,000.

Her case is not at all unique. Six young people from Toreras--or 3% of its population--have left for the U.S. in just the last three months, and a great many more are hoping to leave as soon as their situations permit, just as hundreds have since the the 1980s. Having dwelled on this topic in my last post, suffice it to say that the the constant exodus of young people--some with genuine leadership potential--is starving this country of the human resources it needs to overcome its tremendous challenges. As I identify unexploited opportunity after unexploited opportunity to generate income right here in Toreras, I question more and more the refrain that illegal migration from Central America to the U.S. is borne of economic necessity and desperation.

----

In a small bit of encouraging news, I have discovered that getting kids to enjoy reading books is not as difficult as I had expected in a community where reading for pleasure is simply not done. A side project of mine is to form a little book club with a group of fourth, fifth, and sixth graders to teach them to appreciate books, improve their reading skills, and expose them to new ideas. As such, I have been spending about an hour a week for the last six weeks reading children's books donated by the U.S. embassy with between four and seven kids. They keep their focus and seem to have fun, and I am hoping later on to train them in basic literary analysis and perhaps to assign them projects to help them develop some creativity, a faculty that the public schools utterly fail to nurture.

That's all for now. Feel free to send me emails with questions or comments.

UPDATE: Here are a couple pictures of book shopping with some girls from my site. The books were purchased with a $500 grant I received to start a book collection at the school in Toreras.