A Weekend of Surprises

While the past week has had its fair share of quirks, oddities, and laughs, this coming week promises to be just as interesting. For the past few weeks and for the upcoming month I’ve really been staying in my site as much as possible and much more than I had in the past. This is part of an effort to make a big push with a few of my projects that floundered a little while I was traveling for two weeks around Christmas and New Years and to let my bank account recover from my most recent travels and hopefully prepare itself for my next round of Central American adventures. However, to my pleasant surprise, while life in San Luis may not be as initially exciting as exploring monumental Mayan ruins and relaxing at gorgeous Pacific beaches, it none the less holds just as many, if not more, daily surprises and excitement.

Just yesterday, during one of the many digressions that led what should have been a 2-hour morning meeting of mine to last till past 3 pm, over 7 hours in total, a Salvadoran engineer helping my community with our planning of an improved water system commented on how weird Mexicans were because they ate grasshoppers—“sometimes even in chocolate.” I sarcastically contested that it was sort of comical for a Salvadoran to really make that comment, since they eat frogs, chicken feet, iguana, turtle eggs, snake, and raccoon, along with just about any thing else that moves. The entire room just shook their heads and worriedly mumbled that since I was a “gringo norteamericano” I would just never understand some things. After that and everything else that occurred this past weekend, I guess, maybe, they were right.

This past Friday I lost about half my girl’s soccer team, despite the fact that I will most likely be receiving a $500 grant in the next few weeks to finally buy them a set of uniforms, new balls and practice equipment, and pay for San Luis to host a tournament with three other guest teams from neighboring communities. It all started innocently when the Evangelical church across the street from my house announced they would be hosting a movie night and just about the entire population of San Luis proceeded to show up. Despite the fact that just last week I had found a great pirated copy of Forest Gump in the Santa Ana market, I was still excited to get a chance to watch a movie, which I figured would be something from the action or comedy genre…but couldn’t have been more wrong. The church showed a 2-hour documentary featuring numerous interviews with people who described the moments when they had “found their God” then went on to describe the improvements to their lives afterward. The movie also featured interesting interpretations of visits from the devil and other various demons, images of Pope John Paul being ignited and engulfed in flames, and a finale of a re-enacted exorcism. While I only made it through the first 20 minutes of the movie before politely excusing myself to go eat pupusas outside then retreat to my house to go to sleep early (I didn’t have too many other options—the amount of power needed to project the movie across the street meant my house had lost its power), the movie proved to be so inspiring (or frightening…I guess it just depends what perspective you take) that half my girl’s soccer team, including the captain, who even co-signed the aforementioned grant request, all took an oath of sorts to revoke the life of sin and devote their life, going forward, to the church. For Evangelicals in El Salvador, that means soccer is forbidden—it is a sin in their religion. While I still don’t know exactly what I’ll be doing with the grant money, since my girl’s team is now all but inexistent (that movie night really did seem so promising early on…), I think my boy’s soccer team may just be receiving a surprise round of new jerseys and equipment pretty in the coming month. I guess sometimes even the seemingly most simple and complication-free projects can fall apart and some things about development work will just never be understood or overcome.

In another notable surprise from the last few days, I was woken up at 4:30 am Saturday morning by screams of, what seemed to be, an absolutely petrified pig. After fruitlessly attempting to go back to sleep for over 30 minutes thanks to the continuing screaming of the pig, I finally decided I at least wanted to get to the bottom of what exactly was happening. Venturing down the street and across the bridge led by the beam of my flashlight (still so early in the morning that it was good and dark) I discovered a family just a few houses down from me had decided to slaughter their pig. What had led them to do that at such an ungodly hour or why it took them so long to kill the darn thing, I guess is just yet another aspect of life in San Luis I will never understand.

Also, in the impossible to understand category—the lunch I was served by a lady in a neighboring community, Casa Blanca, during a lunch break in an almost all-day meeting yesterday (the same one featuring the conversation about hard to believe, or imagine, foods)…hard-boiled eggs in a very-healthy size dollop of tomato sauce (actually just ketchup).

In the coming week, I will be teaching my newly-formed women’s group how to make their first batch of shampoo, in an attempt to start some small, but sustainable, income-generation programs in San Luis, and making a trip to the Ministry of the Environment in San Salvador with the leaders of my community and a neighboring community to pitch our proposed water project. Despite the fact that there is sure to be much occur which is outside my realm of comprehension, I’m hopeful that through all that I’ll likely never understand, I’ll continue to have a great time every day and possibly make a little bit of a difference down here in El Salvador as well.