Earthquakes and Hurricanes

A few notes and stories from my past few weeks:

1. Last week we were hit by two earthquakes and two hurricanes. It literally didn’t stop raining for a week and at points it felt like the earth was never going to stop shaking either. For someone who’d never felt an earthquake, it was all pretty exciting, but all the rain definitely had all the farmers (that means everyone) worried about their plants rotting due to the massive amounts of standing water.

1b. Fast-forward a week. It hasn’t rained and I haven’t even seen a cloud in 4 or 5 days. They are now talking about it being the “drought” of the century. The bean plants can only make it a few more days without rain before they lose them all. Thanks change pretty quickly around here.

2. For the most part, the people here only bathe once every week or two and definitely wear the same thing for at least three or four days…minimum. This has quickly become one of my favorite aspects of life here.

3. I expect to easily shatter Cal Ripken’s Iron Man record within my two years here. I have now had beans, tortillas, and eggs 28 meals in a row…and counting. In the morning the beans are mashed, lunch features hot bean soup, and dinner is consistently accompanied by cold bean soup. The eggs are always scrambled…every once in awhile with tomatoes or peppers. The tortillas are, well, always tortillas. Also, once every few days I get a hot dog. For some reason though, I’m not really tired of it. It is kind of refreshing to know exactly what you are always going to eat, and honestly, it is all so fresh that it never gets old…at least not yet.

4. Before El Salvador, I definitely thought the last thing I would ever become was a coffee-drinker. I never liked the taste and I never wanted to be one of those people that has to have coffee every morning. That has certainly all gone out the window. They seem to be incredibly insistent on serving me a cup of coffee with every meal, no matter how many times in the first week I tried to politely tell them I wasn’t really a coffee drinker, but now I have just kind of given in. I still don’t really like coffee with dinner, but lunch I can tolerate, and I’m actually starting to kind of like it with breakfast.

5. My days have basically all been taken up with conducting house visits. I have now visited about 60 families (have about 25 or 30 more to go) and have truly enjoyed getting to know all that the people of San Luis La Magdalena have to offer. I have been tricked into eating a chile pepper that had tears pouring from my eyes for well over 10 minutes (everyone in town heard about that story in a matter of hours…I now have to re-live it at every new house I visit), been forced to take my jeans off so that the grandmother could patch them while I continued the conversation in my boxers, been fed both breakfast and lunch in the span of one two-hour house visit, faked understanding more stories than I can count, eaten some of the strangest fruits Central America has to offer, looked at pictures of easily over 200 weddings, births, and birthdays, taught one man how to calculate the total area of his parcel of beans and corn (his family had apparently been staring at a piece of paper with the measurements of all the different sides and angles for two days, not knowing what to do next), and been asked how soon I want to find a Salvadoran girlfriend an average of twice per visit. In addition to all the memorable experiences, memories, and fun my house visits have proven to be, they are also invaluable for me in starting my service here as I can now much better identify areas the community needs help with, identify who I should include in certain types of projects, and can now count on having the trust and friendship of the majority of the people who live here.

6. Although the vast majority of the corn is harvested here in November and December, I have helped out with early harvests twice this past week. It is pretty fun, a great way to spend a morning outdoors, and returning to the house by noon having already put in at least 7 hours of work is a great excuse for simply relaxing in a hammock the rest of the day. However, much like my house visits, it has been one place I have done a lot of cultural learning the awkward way. When harvesting corn, Salvadorans clear patches in random spots of the field with machetes, then while harvesting corn from all over the field, toss each ear into the cleared areas. Obviously, with fields full of men, this is bound to turn into some sort of hooliganism. Here, it usually evolves into never-ending games of dodge-ball played with ears of corn. Due to the fact that Salvadorans all really only play soccer and therefore never really get much practice throwing things, corn ends up flying everywhere. These games of dodge-ball also have quite a few unspoken rules that were definitely never communicated to me, most of which I have already learned the hard way…like after I hit the preacher of the church, who I now know is completely off-limits, with an abnormally large ear of corn straight to the gut.