April 28, 2011
PART ONE-BRIGADES
It’s been a busy couple of months! I participated in a medical brigade at the end of March in La Palma, El Salvador. I helped last year and it was a good experience, although I was a bit bummed that some friends from last year weren’t able to come along this year. We had a despedida (goodbye party) for a volunteer in La Esperanza afterwards, which was sad since he was also a Charlotte native and we had gotten along well. It’s a weird thing to become so close to people for a very determined amount of time, and then they leave…
After being in site really only a day after the other brigade finished, another one came along, but this time to Camasca! It was such a great week. Exhausting, yes, but I really felt like it was a good use of my time and the brigade participants as well. Camasca has really never had a medical brigade to this scale, and not for a long time. I had seen brigade after brigade come to the municipalities near us, so I finally convinced a friend of mine who works for the NGO to send us one. I told him I would do all the logistics, but to just give us a chance. And the rest is history! About 7 doctors/medical students and their translators (bilingual high school students), organized by the NGO Shoulder to Shoulder/Hombro a Hombro stayed at the evangelical church in town, and we had 6 days of clinics in different communities or parts of Camasca. The first day we were at the local health center, which was incredibly frustrating, because the nurses acted like they didn’t even know we were coming when we arrived. They had reserved us two rooms for all the patients, which was not nearly enough. The logistics were the hardest part, although we helped around 100 folks by the end of the day. I remember thinking that I wouldn’t make it to the end of the week if each day was like that…BUT the second day we were at the colegio, which couldn’t have gone better. We had 2 medical students do question and answer sessions with all the students, on gender-specific topics. I observed for a small amount of time and it seemed like the students benefited from it. We also did medical consults for the students who had been identified as sick by their teachers, almost 150 in total. Most of the students come from the small outlying communities, walk several hours a day, and are undernourished. One interesting thing that came out of the consults was that after observing the massive levels of malnutrition, Shoulder to Shoulder donated a truck full of fortified dried rice that was then distributed to the hungriest families and also to the colegio to use in the future. Sometimes I get so used to the hunger and poverty here that it doesn’t affect me, but having a concerned doctor tell me about the malnourished students she was seeing really hit me hard. These people are my friends, the people I see on a daily basis, so to then realize they are so thin because they are hungry and starving. But then on the same note, it was incredible to be able to be part of the process to allow them to get the medical attention they need, PLUS food too.
We also visited 5 small communities, and did house visits as needed. Overall, around 530 people received medical consultations. Oh, did I mention the bienvenida/welcome party they had for us? They had planned to have a special dinner (pretty sure it was some variation of rice and beans, but maybe prepared in a “special way?). They had also booked a musical group to play for us. Well I arrived an hour before the event to help set up, and employees of FAO/PESA NGO were waiting to do the same, and it turns out they had ALSO booked a musical group. We eventually figured it out, but later that evening there were still 2 musical groups (musica de cuerda—folksy ranchera music) that played, rotating groups after each song. The closing event was a bit more planned. The Shoulder to Shoulder Honduran committee all said a few words (the mayor with more than a few words, per usual), there was a special dinner, and two colegio teachers had prepared a few songs. Everyone was pleasantly surprised when one of the medical students, previously a musician, played a few songs of his own, one he had even written in Spanish. They left the following day, a Sunday, and then on Tuesday I met them to ride to the Lago de Yajoa. We spent the night at D&D Brewery, a unique spot by the lake with cabins, great food and beer made there, and a nice chill atmosphere. I rode to the airport with them, and then back to La Esperanza with the coordinator of the brigade, Karla, and we also had a quick stop at the caves of Taulabe. All in all, a great week, but an exhausting one!
Before I left for Semana Santa, I taught Camasca the Easter tradition of dying eggs and Easter egg hunts. The event took place at my counterpart Iris’ house, and her 7th grade daughter was supposedly going to invite 10 girls for the party, but called me the day of the event to ask who was coming… We rounded up 8 or so kids eventually, though. There was one girl I didn’t recognize, so I asked Iris who she was, and she didn’t know either…Turns out she was the daughter of someone who was in town from a nearby municipality and had just shown up at the Easter party (oh Honduras). But anyways, we had hardboiled eggs to dye, Easter tattoos, food (including 2 cakes, one decorated with “Felices Pascuas” and the other with “Happy Easter”). I had two of the 7th grade girls hide all the eggs, but I think I should have given them a bit more direction because they hid them EVERYWHERE-I’m talking in the pant legs of clothes on the line, way up in the tallest trees, etc. The little kids got frustrated hah but I think overall a good time was had by all.
Oh, and we finished our work in San Juan de Dios! After working for several months to write the grant, buy the materials, prepare the homes, and then construct, we finished 22 cement floors and had leftover cement to give to the local school to use for a water project that will benefit 200+ kids. It was exhausting, but a great experience! Check out pictures on facebook.
COMING SOON: PART TWO: SEMANA SANTA/Holy Week in El Salvador
So the week leading up to Easter is a week of vacationing, closed government offices, no transportation, beach time, families returning to their home town, and lots of drinking and partying. Oh, and some people go to church. Really, that’s how it is.
I took advantage of the shutdown of my community to go on a much-needed vacation. I was in San Salvador and then in Playa El Tunco, close enough to San Sal by car (but like most places, way too far in bus). While in the San Salvador area, I visited Suchitoto, a cute town with colonial architecture and nice artesania, and also went to el Boqueron, a park centered around a volcanic crater. I was with 2 Peace Corps volunteers, and we also hung out with some friends of mine from El Salvador. And we ate lots of pupusas (claro). We then headed to the beach to relax during the day and party at night. Playa El Tunco is probably the most developed of El Sal’s beaches, at least in the area near the capital. The beach isn’t beautiful—black sand and rocky, and the water is really rough with huge waves, perfect if you want to surf (which a lot of people do) but not so great for lazily lying by the ocean. There were TONS of people there, lots of people from San Salvador and then some internationals as well. Peace Corps had a sizeable representation as well, both volunteers from El Sal and Honduras. One day we visited another beach, Playa El Zonte, which was a lot less developed but I liked the vibe. There were a few restaurants but a lot of smaller places with the thatched roofs selling ceviche. I had fish soup at one place, and thought it would be chunks of fish, like they do here in Camasca, but no, it was an entire fish in my soup. Eyeballs too. I had to get one of my friends to pop the eyeballs out, but as it turned out, he only removed the sockets, I found one of the eyeballs later floating around in the broth. There were also no options for going to the bathroom, so when I asked the owner of the ocean-side shack we were at, she directed me to the hut where her baby was sleeping and had me pee in a corner. Seriously. She said it was just sand so it didn’t matter, but it still felt wrong to pee in her house on the floor while her baby was right there. But yeah, Zonte had less tourists and felt more like a beach my host family would take me to, where people bring their own food and stay for the day. There was music on the beach and a real laidback vibe, with a natural swimming hole by the beach too.
I was exhausted returning from the beach. I was tempted to stay another day but got myself on a bus regardless. After my miserable day of travel, I wish I had just stayed there another night. The buses were super full because everyone was traveling back from Semana Santa. Long story short, I missed the one bus that sometimes travels over the border to Honduras and had to wait a long long while for a ride. I didn’t get back to my site until almost 9pm. Shoot me. It didn’t help that while traveling on one of the many buses that day, a clown got on and wanted money. Let me explain. Buses in Central America are often prime places for vendors to get on and sell everything—sodas, prepared food, fruit, etc. But there are also lots of people that get on and give their talk, whether it be for religious purposes, asking for money because they are handicapped, or selling weird products like special teas that will help you with your “sugar issues” aka diabetes. I wasn’t prepared for the clown, however. He told a few jokes, sang a few songs, and then asked everyone to “collaborate”. I really didn’t appreciate how he was basically sitting in my seat during all of this.
Finally got back to my site and realized my phone was barely working, and my hot water heater on my shower had burned out. Hey, I know hot water is a luxury and most of my PC service I’ve been without, but if you pay for one of those heaters, which are expensive, its annoying when it stops working. My house was also covered in large, dead bugs, since rainy season is about to start and all the critters are coming out. I find them in my dirty clothes, attached my clean ones on the line, in my purse, by the stove, in the fridge, literally everywhere. Zach said he found a cockroach in his pancake batter box today.
Last story—yesterday I was asking a few people that work at my sitemate’s NGO if they had seen him, because I couldn’t get in touch with him. One of the guys who seemed nice enough said that he hadn’t seen him, etc etc, and then started telling me about how he was in the USA for a few years, tried to speak some bad English to me, and I knew that I wanted out of the conversation. He mentioned that his wife was still there, which made me feel for him and stay a bit longer. But then, no more than a minute later, I found that he was telling me how beautiful I was and could we please spend some time together? Ridiculous! I asked him, didn’t you JUST tell me how your wife was still in the USA and you missed her?? “Well, you know, she’s not really my wife, just my….” (lover? Girlfriend? Baby’s mama? Are any of those acceptable?) Anyways, the story did not end in love, just me turning and walking away. I will never understand the men here.
