Visit to my REAL SITE

Oh, man where to start. I just got back to San Isidro from my future new site and after the trip it was actually good to get back, I have a cool family. I actually smiled when I was walking down the street and heard Alejandro yelling. She fed me a meal of kings when I got back too….A fresh avocado, beans, an egg and pan frances. I hate five pieces of bread…I never do that. I was so excited afterwards, that I bought the fam all Choco bananas to celebrate (they are 6 cents each so my Jewish side didn’t react too much).

Lets see… my trip. The trip there was actually not stellar, I didn’t fit in the bus seat…big surprise there… I got ripped off come to find out….out of 40 cents, and it took like an 1hr and a half to go 35 miles for one of the legs. Dirty Buggers. We send out cruddy buses down here, so that they can get cruddier haha. When I got to the big town, San Pedro Nonualco, I was supposed to meet my guy there at 1030. The way the municipalities work here is basically as a combination of what we would call the country and city governments. There is one head over it all, the Alcalde, or Mayor. So about 1130 they come out and bring me into their building behind the bars and all and I meet the alcalde and they gave me coffee and offered bottled water yadda yadda yadda. It was all very nice….they had worked with my predecessor a lot. They know that any money a volunteer can bring in from the outside frees them up to use their money for other things and still look good to the populace. I will hand it over to them though, a bunch of times a year, they call a meeting in the towns and present what they are doing and how they are spending their entire budget. I had the opportunity to sit in on it, and then had the privilege to be unexpectedly pulled in front of the community to introduce myself, jerk. Good thing I can speak Spanish, it would have been too soon for some of the people in the group.

A pic of most of the inside of the City/County hall.

The family that I will be living with is that of Don Raul Lopez, whom has a wife Amalia, and 11 kids whom they are all very proud of. Clearly a very catholic family…but I’ll come back to that. They are a very sarcastic witty family as well, haha…gooooooooood (in a sinister Kim Jung Il voice). That night while they were at a church meeting, I spent the time cleaning the house and especially the fridge. The setup I’m going to have there is actually really sweet as far as volunteers go. I have a latrine that’s decently close, although somewhat unstable, a covered pila (water basin), also he is leaving a small fridge, juicer, crock pot, rice cooker, and blender. There is also a desk and chair and bed. There is also a bunch of random crud as well as some books. He is also leaving a hammock outside. This all comes at a price of course…. About 2/3 of what peace corps is giving us to find shelter and food and settling in etc. I don’t mind though, hes done a ton of really good things in this community, so yeah.

I also attended a scholarship program event where I was thrown in to actually announcing names and giving out the scholarships in front of like 400 people with a mic and all…..ahhhh life is good. Later the next day I got to meet up with what I would think would be an NGO that Annie would like to work for. Its called ASPS (Assoc of Salvadoran Promoters of Salud/Health). In my community its represented by a few women who live there and run a dispensario from 1-5 everyday except Sunday, and spend the rest of the time fundraising and going house to house to get people to come to events they plan and to check on the health of the fams. It’s a realllly cool group of ladies, and apparently one doctor that I haven’t met. In their dispensary the community can come and get checked out for minor things and they have an array of meds on sale for really cheap. I took a pic to send to megan and annie, I figured they might get a kick out of seeing whats there. That day they were giving a lecture on HIV and then served pupusas…..sweet. I got a sneaky idea for funding for them, but that’s a while away.

*I’ll throw in a note here that anyone who knows of groups or NGOs or whoever that donate medicines or acquire medicines to donate to organizations in the developing world (Medical Bridges I think is one, but they use expired medicine a lot and that becomes difficult) please bring it to my attention.*

So, later that day, I was on the bus leaving and it stopped for a while, and then I realized they were all outside. I went out to find that a priest from the neighboring city had locked his keys in his truck while visiting a ‘daycare’, to which a guy had proceeded to rip the entire locking mechanism out of the automatic passenger side door to try and get it to open….annnnnd no. He ended up having to leave the truck and take the bus. Sad.
Then I got lost in Zacatecoluca on the way back, only to ask everyone in the city who give a different answer, avoid the beggars, get some lovin from a bus of latina girls and then luckily happen upon my bus.

All up in the jungle.

The surprise of the weekend though came in the form of the new book I started while I was there. The Great Heresies by Hilaire Belloc. He is now number three behind Francis de Sales and Cardinal Newman, however I think he is in an entirely different category. His vast knowledge of history is incredible, which thus allows him to synthesis theories and ideas that span across thousands of years down to the micro level, not just the macro level that some historians can only sit on. If I could even approach a fraction of his level one day, I could die a happy man. For example in the discussion of the Arian heresy, he went into great depth of how the Roman army worked first and how it fit into society of that time, and then intertwined that with the Catholic populace of the empire/regions at that point, blah blah change in source of Imperial power blah blah later creating interesting theories as to the reasons for the death of the Arian heresy….YET at the same time drawing its similarities and differences with the later heresies of Muhammed, Albigensians, and Calvin. Although Im not through with the Protestant section totally, the part that intrigued me the most was his fifth on Islam. In it he presented interesting theories on why Islam is unique in that it is still alive materially and doctrinally and even still attracting converts with more or less the same simple message. He presents reasons why he thinks Islam is likely to rise again to combat Christian culture (this was written between 1936 and 1938), why the world would have to deal with the Nazis and Russians, and why there would be turmoil in Palestine in the future. All which were astute, even though some parts what should be obvious, predictions.
After seeing how some of the religions have run their course in the US and now seeing how the rural areas, for the most part, are thriving Catholic areas, different from the cities, and now in the light of some different theories on the process of Arianism and Albigensianism and later Calvinism and its doctrinal death compared to the social spirit it imparted, my hopes are somewhat up that all the religious commotion could be a bigger step for unity in the future…..the very distant future.

Anyways, enough of my nerdiness on this subject, he just has a unique talent of bringing history full circle, both religious and secular.

My watch alarm broke a few weeks ago. D’oh.

I sucked on a piece of ice this weekend. Very nice…..how much?

It’s not who you are inside that counts Bruce, it’s what you do that defines you.
-Katie Holmes in Batman Begins