Samana Santa

Samana Santa (Holy week) was a pretty busy vacation week. Most of the time was spent preparing for the weekend.

Though, I do remember spending a least one day reading leisurely in my hammock.

The first big event of the week came on Good Friday. This is when they build alfombras. If you don’t remember from last year, an alfombra is a carpet type thing made of salt, dirt, sand, saw dust….etc. It usually depicts a religious theme – but has been known to divert to tweety bird.

I spent most of the week preparing for this. We had to go get the dirt (by we I mean Iris, Yessica, Heidy and I) (oh…and by get I mean go flirt with some guys at the construction site…hehehe), then dye the salt the different colors, buy flowers, glitter and all sorts of things.

I guess I’ll go through the stages of building an alfombra, or at least how we did it. First we put up the canopy – ‘cause nobody likes working in the sun for 5 hours. We then nailed together four beams of wood to act as a frame and to keep the dirt in one spot. Next up was putting in the dirt and wetting it slightly. In the center of the dirt we placed the drawing. The drawing is made of card stock paper and is kind of like a stencil. We laid it out see where it would go and mark an outline. We then lifted it and filled in the outline space with fine grained dirt….sand-ish really. Then you lay the drawing back down and start filling in the ‘stencil’ area with the different colors of sand. Once done with this, you lift up the paper and are left with the drawing. Here is where you have to clean up the lines and colors (if they accidentally mixed). After the main drawing was complete, we covered the dirt surrounding it with pumice ash. On top of this is where we stenciled in the biblical verse that has to accompany any good alfombra. In case you are wondering at this point – the drawing was of a risen Christ and the quote was “And if we have died with Christ, we also believe that we will live with Him Roman 6, 8”.

Once done with this, we removed the wooden border, fixed the border with the remaining salt, and put on a flower border. At the base of the drawing we added about a foot of white salt to create an ‘alter’ area and put flowers and candles on it.

Now, I’m not one to boast – but I think we one the competition this year. I’ll confirm as soon as I know.

Now if that sounds like a lot of work – that’s because it is. It was a pretty stressful day for me. I had invited Zach down to participate and he brought some extra volunteers. There were more then what I expected, but it worked out for the best. My problems stemmed from two groups working on the alfombra – the gringos and the Salvadorians. Both have very distinctive tastes. One group would be fighting to have the alfombra one way and the other group the other way. But the fight always went through me. I also had both sides that were comfortable with me – which is a good thing, but also meant they both felt free to pick on me throughout the day. Though, the biggest thing that got to me was how some people would look at it and tell me what to do and how I was doing it was wrong – and these wore people who hadn’t helped in the least bit to arrange it. I nearly shot one or two of them.

But as I say, in the end it worked out for the best and was a beautiful alfombra. (pics to follow when I get them from Zach)

After the stress of that, I had Saturday off to prepare the house for Easter dinner. On Palm Sunday my mother told me she didn’t want me to be alone on Easter. So, on Wednesday I decided to host a dinner. In all I had 9 volunteers over to my small abode to enjoy beef stew with potatoes. Thus I spent Saturday and Sunday morning preparing food and robbing Iris of sheets, forks, plates – you name it, I stole it.

In all it turned out to be a great night. There was more then enough to eat – though I will admit the beef in the stew was a little chewy and fatty – but not too bad. It felt like just the right amount of people (plus two visiting puppies). At night there were beds everywhere – even outside on the patio.

In the morning, I made bagels and cinnamon rolls – which I believe everyone enjoyed – and had others make the coffee and hand out the banana bread. It was a slow morning – since I can only cook six bagels at a time in my toaster oven.

At the end, I sent them on their way (after helping me to return the beds) with the extra bagels and cinnamon rolls. After I left I learned that we returned three of the beds to the wrong owners – what can I say…they were all white! Ricardo helped me fix the mess.

I then promptly cleaned the house and am now writing this while my muchacha washes an incredible amount of sheets, towels and other assorted items. I love her.

Picking up where I left off…

I guess I’ll pick on where I left off – Thursday and Friday were at a Peace Corps security conference. This was the first one of these we had and it was meant to address security conditions within the country and overall updates.

I did appreciate the information I received. That being said, these things are always scary. I won’t go into specifics, but more or less they talk about crime in the country, where it is concentrated and who it affects the most. No, my pueblo wasn’t mentioned as a security hot spot – so have no fear.

Besides this info, it went over our emergency procedures and other information not crime related – such as the large percentage of ancient buses still in use in El Salvador.

So – after getting all scared up. I made my way home for Friday night and headed out Saturday morning for the beach!

That’s right….two fantastic nights ocean side. I went with a handful of other volunteers to a small beach located not too far away. We stayed in a place where you could make your own food – so we did.

I won’t go into all the activities we accomplished – but a few mentionables include 2 bbqs, Mayan temple construction, reading, watermelon, drinking and dominos. I even managed not to get burnt.

Somehow, my compatriots managed to convince me to get on the bus to come back to my community. But not before one last good lunch, the borrowing of some books and a new recipe.

If you couldn’t follow – this now brings us to Tuesday. Tuesday through Thursday – not too much happened.

Friday I went back into San Salvador to sort more books. They were finally able to make it through customs. It actually went way quicker then I thought it would. We were done before lunch even though we had twice as many books as last time to sort. We went through it mad quick since the boxes came labeled with how many books were in them. Some boxes we didn’t even have to open since they came with sufficient for a box for each school – like encyclopedias.

This leads us into Samana Santa and a week of vacation!

whole lot going down

It was Ricardo’s b-day on the 25th of February – so thus it was party organizing time. I somehow got put in charge of the cake. I didn’t mind picking up the tab – I minded ordering the thing!! They just kept asking questions – like what type of fruit, what color frosting (orange or blue), what to write on it and so on and so forth. In the end I just asked them to make it pretty.

The day of the feast I chilled over at Sonia’s house to learn how to make pollo guisado. It’s a type of fried/boiled chicken that is really good. We’ll see how it goes when I cook it – it was definitely a ‘little bit of this a little bit of that’ type of recipe.

The party turned out to be a lot of fun. Adam, Sonia’s boyfriend, brought over a bottle of Jonnie Walker Red Label and the night went on from there.

Tuesday through Thursday I spent organizing things for my artisans trip on Friday. I took four of my artisans up to Guatajiagua to learn how to make black pottery and learn a little more about using a pottery wheel. We left at around 6 am Friday and arrived around 11am. I won’t go into grand detail – if you want to know more you can check out the artisan blog. http://artisansofsddg.blogspot.com But I will say that I was thrilled with how the trip went and am really happy we did it.

On the way back from Guatajiagua, I was dropped off in San Salvador since I had worked to do in the capital the following day.

Sunday I was suppose to go organize books for a donation that my school was receiving, but that got pushed to Monday, so I filled the day with other events. First of I headed to mass – I don’t think it was a Roman Catholic mass, but I figure Christianity is Christianity no matter how you split it up.

Once there I met another volunteer who was good friends with a family from the US Embassy – so I got to go chill out at the embassy pool for a few hours…I even got lunch out of the deal. It was nice and relaxing. Unfortunately, I didn’t have my bathing suite, so I borrowed someone’s shorts and just chilled pool side.

After that I headed over to the Anthropological museum. I can’t say I was that impressed. It pretty much skipped over the civil war and in the religion section failed to talk about the importance of the Church during the civil war and liberation theology. But, it did have some nice old pottery and other artifacts. Some of which I still see in use today.

Across the street from the museum was a convention center type area and it was holding an agriculture event. So, I wondered over and took a look at the cows (milk producing and meat varieties), bought a cutting board and checked out the local goods available. I wish I had had more time to go through it all, but it was starting to get dark and I had to catch a bus back to the hostel.

Monday is when we did organize the books. A volunteer down here (Megan) worked with several Rotary Clubs to organize a book donation. In total 12 schools and 1 orphanage will each receive approximately 400 books.

Unfortunately, only about 1/3 of the books had arrived by Monday. So we quickly shorted through them in preparation for the following day when the schools would come to receive training and the books.

I ran home after Monday on a number of buses (I won’t go into details, but I had to take two additional buses on account of an emergency bathroom stop) and just passed out from so much traveling.

Tuesday I got up and headed off to the Library Training. We left around 7am and got there a little before 8:30am. We would’ve gotten their earlier had the men in the front seat actually listened when I told them to turn – but I’m not bitter. The training lasted all day and was pretty through about how to set it up and explaining systems to catalog the books.

Unfortunately, again, the rest of the books hadn’t arrived and still haven’t. So, the volunteers will go in at another date to organize the books and figure out transport from there. But I must say, from the book I have seen, they look great. They have all sorts of titles, including Latin American authors, the Magic School Bus, Clifford and a whole lot more.

Wednesday was when I held another fuel-efficient stove meeting. Only two people showed, but they turned out to be the right people. They were excited about seeing the stove and how it worked. They organized meeting for their communities and have vowed to have a good turn out. I’m also hopeful about talking to one or two other community members.

Alright, I’ll cut this off here and continue next week.