Immersion Weekend

This post I’m going to do a little differently from past posts by trying to incorporate as many pictures as I can. I figure that if it is true that each picture is worth 1,000 words, than this will be a much better way of describing the amazing weekend I had on top of a volcano while experiencing what life is really like for a Volunteer one full year into his service.

My adventure in El Volcan got off to a quick start when after just 10 minutes in my host Volunteer’s cabin, and while still working to regain my breath after hiking for two hours up a volcano to reach his house, a very excited Salvadoran man burst in the front door and proclaimed that he needed our help to castrate the neighbor’s pig. The pace of adventure didn’t slow down much for the rest of the weekend.

Personally, I was in favor of using one of my new machetes to do the job, but it proved to be too big and cumbersome so we ended up using a razor blade. This last shot from the "down & dirty" surgery we performed is of the pig and one of the dogs licking up the blood that was dripping after we were done…kinda weird. Also, in another strange twist, I was in charge of disinfecting the cut after the castration was complete. To do this, they didn’t use alcohol as I was expected, but instead I was ordered to spray gasoline on the wound then cover it with ash from their fire.

These two pictures are of the Volunteer’s house. Although probably not too much to look at in the states, it was a pretty sweet place and I wouldn’t mind at all ending up with a house like it in my site. The volunteer who preceeded him in El Volcan had it built for $500 and he inherited it when the earlier Volunteer left.

The lower left picture is of the front of the house and the picture to the left shows the back of the house. It has two rooms—a kitchen/living room and a bedroom. If a Salvadoran family was living in the same house it would undoubtedly have at least 4 residents, so all the locals view it as quite the mansion. Also, since men in El Salvador never do any household chores due to the incredibly strong sense of machismo in their culture, they are also flummoxed by how a single man manages to live there while having no one to cook and clean for him.

My hands–down favorite part of the house was the bathroom. The latrine was located 30 or 40 feet from the back door and was right along the edge of the cliff,. Because of this, there was no need for walls. Walls around a latrine are basically what makes latrines in this country so miserable, since it means they will be hot, humid, very smelly, and swarmed by more species of insects than any human can identify.

The following pictures are examples of the awesome views from the toilet. At night you can see the lights of San Miguel (one of the largest cities in the West) and on a clear day you can see to the ocean and even to a few islands out in the Pacific. I ended up spending at least an extra 5 or 10 minutes every time nature called just enjoying the views and the refreshing mountain breezes.

We also went on a pretty awesome hike through miles of jungle and farmland surrounding the volcano. Although we got a little lost and ended up spending about 7 hours trekking up and down ridges and through jungle, we had a great time. We got to see some old rock carvings from the time of the Mayans in El Salvador, found the world’s greatest climbing tree, and spent some time at a swimming hole known as "La Brouha" ("The Witch" in Spanish), and I got to investigate quite a bit of the surrounding agricultural areas.

Above is a picture of a corn field we stumbled upon. In the States a farmer would laugh you off his farm for growing corn at inclines of more than 15-20%. If you can´t tell from the picture, this enterprising Salvadoran farmer has a field of corn growing on what is basically a cliff. This is definitely not the exception in the country. Farmers here do some pretty amazingly ridiculous things to survive, but they always often make it work, without any of the technology the rest of the world takes advantage of. I can´t wait to start working with guys like this even more once I get to my permanent site.

Sorry about the placement of most of these pictures, sometimes I just can´t work them into this website too smoothly, especially on these highly suspect Salvadoran computers. Also, I can´t figure out how to get pictures deleted once I´ve inserted them, or flip them around, but the picture below is one of the swimming holes we spent an hour or two at.



Another highlight of my immersion weekend was meeting more people--especially extremely rural, poor people more similar to the people I´ll be living with for two years than the people I´m currently living around. For example, I spent one night in the house of a man who spent 8 years in prison for a murder--a murder his brother, who couldn´t be found following the Civil War--was convicted of. I also met a woman who was widow four separate times, all by machete, during a 13-year period of the Civil War here. Those are the kind of stories that make working with the people here so unbelievable and so interesting, especially since it is all so fresh in their memories.