Stop and Wonder

I've recently begun to fulfill my life's dream of living off the land. As weird as it sounds, web development and this lifestyle seem to mesh well together. I have a new laptop with a built-in high speed cell phone internet card and can get internet out in the woods. I'm sure most people would flinch at the idea of their web developer working from a tent, but I'm also a much happier web developer and more eager to please.

Even though I'm busy trying to get a straw bale house built for the winter, I'm working at my own pace so whenever I get an e-mail or work request I can typically get to it just as fast, if not faster, than working in the city somewhere. If you're interested to follow our progress out on the land check out our Plan B website. I post blogs and photos on there once every couple of weeks.

Anyway, that's where I am and it's what I'm doing. I want to thank everyone for their continuing business and support, you're helping me to make my dreams come true.

Posted by Tao at 02:43 PM | Permalink

You may have noticed that even though I'm now in the first world my posting rate had fallen off their for awhile. Well, along with all of the luxuries that the first world has to offer it also comes with a lot bureaucratic crap.

For instance, Comcast payed to have our apartment wired. So I call Comcast and ask for their internet service, they say that my apartment isn't in the database even though the apartment next to me is. Apparently this is because it's a brand new apartment and didn't exist before, yet somehow I feel they should know I exist since they installed the wiring.

So they say they have to send someone out to make sure I exist, I say sure, they say call back in a week, I sigh and say ok. One week passes. I call back they say, who are you?, and I say you don't know yet. They say they'll send someone else to make sure I exist and to call back in another week. A week passes. They now know I exist and that my money is real. They setup a time for someone to come out. More time passes. Then Tao has internet.

It's amazing that having the internet can really make a house feel like a home. I don't know how it does that, but it does. Maybe a home is anywhere as long as you can chat with your friends and family. Home is where the wireless hotspot is.

Anyway, long story short. I hope to be posting more now that I don't have to leave the apartment and walk 4 blocks down to the student center to get connected.

Posted by Tao at 06:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (25)

As I mentioned before I'm branching my personal blog and political rants off into a new website. It seems appropriate to do this now that I'm starting a new chapter in my life. I'm going to leave all of my pictures and old posts here on Stop and Wonder but I'm going to mainly be blogging about Web design and programming here from now on.

The new site is called www.Taos2Cents.com, catchy huh? I'm still fine tuning it an adding new features, but it's up and running good enough to handle my posts. I truly hope you'll stop by and check out my new digs. I plan on posting a lot about more political things and posting video and pictures from the protests and events I'm going to start attending now that I'm back in the states. See you over there.

Posted by Tao at 01:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (2513)

Christine is leaving tomorrow morning at 3am, her flight doesn't leave until 6. I'll ride with her to the airport but I don't leave for another 2 days. She's going to meet her parents in DC while they're there for a conference and find us an apartment. It's nice to know I won't be too involved in the stress of picking out our place. If I wasn't so confident in Christine's ability to pick out a good place I might be more concerned.

Our Peace Corps friends came a few days ago and we basically partied for 3 days with them. It was a good time and I'll remember it forever, assuming I dodge the Alzheimer's bullet but in that case someone please use a real one on me.

I suppose that somewhat gruesomely brings me to setting a place for me when I'm gone. On the 2nd night we had a good group at our house and talked and played card games until late. One of the said card games was Texas hold 'em which we played with chips tournament style where people were out once they ran out of chips. Leah went out at some point and was dealt in the next round at which point I related that to setting a place at a table for a loved one in the hopes that they might come home for dinner.

It was a pretty good joke, but Leah had to step in and top me. While giggling on the verge of hysterics she said "stop looking at me, swan". A sweeter non sequitur may never have been spoken. Apparently she was repeating an obscure Billy Madison quote, however I leave you to judge its relevance. To me its lack of relevance was what truly made it shine.

The next day Matt, Darren, and I hiked all the way from Berlin to the laguna in Alegria. I'd made it to the rim of the crater that holds the laguna before where the soldiers guarding the radio tower told me a path went down into it. This time we took the hike down to the laguna which was essentially a path all along the rim of the crater which made for fantastic views of each side of the ledge.

It wasn't a hike for the elderly or unathletic to be sure, but I think it could be a real draw for tourism in Berlin. It would give people a reason to stay in Berlin to see the laguna instead of in Santiago or Alegria. I'll definitely be writing about it on Berlin's web page that I'm making.

Today Christine and I made the rounds at the schools and with our friends in the city to say goodbye. It wasn't too sad until Christine broke down saying goodbye to our landlord's wife, one of the school teachers we're close with. I had a feeling it was coming, I've always been a pretty empathetic person even when I don't seem to be very emotional myself. A lot of them told us they'd always remember us. I don't know that they'll be setting a place for us when we're gone but there might be two empty chairs at the table.

Posted by Tao at 06:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (25)

In 10 days I'll be leaving on a jet plane and boy am I ready. I could tell you all the things I would miss and things I won't miss, but really I won't be missing all that much. I'm tired of being frustrated and seeing so many things that could be better but not being able to do anything about them. I've come to understand that just about all of the problems here and no doubt in the rest of the third world could be solved from within but our discouraged from doing so from outside influences. The 1st and 2nd world don't want the competition and actively work to undermine the average working class. Sure, the 1st and 2nd world make a good show of how they're helping them, but how come all of these people are still poor and ignorant?

I'm just tired of living in it. I want to be somewhere where I can have some real influence. It's like how they talk about Earth avoiding an asteroid. If you can change the asteroid's course even the tiniest bit at the heart of the problem, the farther the better, that little change becomes a large change by the time it gets to Earth. So I'm looking at it that way. I'm going back to the states, but you better believe living in Baltimore I'm going to be demonstrating in D.C. every chance I get. If there's any rally that you want to go to and need a place to crash, you've got one. Just let me know.

One of the things I've come to recognize here is that people need a goal to strive for. Education gives them examples of goals they could achieve and a practical way to do it. I've often wondered how someone could be so content doing the same repetitive tasks every day until they die. I don't understand what they look forward to, but I think it has to do somewhat with the "ignorance is bliss" idea.

There's a guy in Darren's village named Tomas who is far more involved in just about everything in that village than I've ever seen anyone. His drive to be so involved started after one of the church groups brought him for a visit to the U.S. The trip made him believe that the churches should be giving more to them because of all the wealth he saw. It also gave him a goal, something to aim for. Unfortunately, he's turned that into a personal power struggle. He took his son out of school to work in the fields so he could go participate in more organizations and such. Clearly, he's missing the point and is more concerned with improving himself than his family, but if all of that zeal could be focused in a better way people here could really improve their situation a lot.

Basically it comes down to foreign aid from the 1st and 2nd world giving them enough to keep them placated, and the simple act of giving it to them without any effort on the people's part makes them believe that they shouldn't have to work for it. And so it is that paternalism and handout mentality set in.

In other news our friends threw us a going away party this evening and it put a few more things on the list of what I'll be missing. I love talking with educated people here, its really great comparing cultures and stories, etc. The problem is those people are few and far between. I'll miss them though and I'm sure I'll see them again.

We also climbed the hill of the cross today with a delegation from Iowa. It'll probably be our last time for a long while. Our neighbor and god-daughter climbed with us, all the god-daughter hitched more than a few rides on people's backs.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to seeing long lost people in the U.S. Give me a call or an e-mail and I'll make an effort to stop by on my drive from Texas to Baltimore. I hope you don't mind a visit from two angry cats at the same time though.

By the way, I'm also going to be launching a separate blog for more political and news type posts. So get ready for www.Taos2Cents.com. It's not all the way working just yet, it'll be ready before I leave though.

Posted by Tao at 12:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (12)

I'm not a religious person by any stretch of the imagination so when the neighbors asked Christine and I to be god parents to their little girl I wasn't particularly thrilled. Then I found out they were just doing it because to send Estelle to the catholic school in town, which is by far the best, she had to be baptized. I'm pretty sure the reason the Catholic school is so much better is because the nuns don't take any guff and since the kids are actually paying to attend parents don't mind having the nuns discipline their kids. All in all you can tell a big behavioral difference between the public school and catholic schools kids.

Since Christine and I aren't Catholic or married for that matter we're not exactly prime candidates to be god parents but Christine is the one paying for Estelle to go to school so they wanted to give us the honor. Honestly, before I knew about the school issue I thought they just wanted us because they thought we could take her to the states or support them financially. Anyway, they found a church in a nearby pueblo that doesn't exactly care who the god parents are.

I've never liked going to church. It all feels like a big secret society or club and I'm just pretending to be one of them hoping they don't discover the interloper in their midst. I do think all these communities need a reason to get together and build bonds between each other, but churches don't seem to do a whole lot with it. They just get together and talk about how they should do good things instead of getting together and actually doing good things.

In my mind they ought to get together for a big potluck picnic thing every Sunday and people get up and make announcements and such. Then they all have groups and work on community projects like having the men fix the potholes in the road or build a communal grain storage barn. The women could get together and work on setting up a sewing or baking cooperative to earn money for the infrastructure projects that the men build etc.

Basically the churches just seem to be telling them don't do anything bad, and that way you don't have to do anything good to make up for it. Then you can just coast into heaven. I also don't approve all the fear mongering that goes on in churches here and probably the states too. I've been to 3 services in 3 different churches here and without fail the first thing they do is call everyone sinners.

Anyway, I guess I can't complain too much since I can now add "Godfather" to my official list of titles. Far cooler than my pathetic "minister" title even without the power to bless random inanimate objects. I'm such a heathen.

Posted by Tao at 12:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (15)

In just under 3 weeks I'll be back state side. I'm starting to feel the sense of excitement that I've come to associate with moving. Pulling up roots and moving is similar to riding a roller coaster. If you've never ridden one it might freak you out. Who knows if it's safe? How does everything work? After a few rides though those worries fall away and the thrill of something new and different is all you look for.

UPDATE: This was on the frontpage of CNN this morning: Girl's feet severed on ride at Six Flags. I hope that's not a bad omen for our move.

I figure I ought to update you on the different projects and things that have been going on here before I forget or I get caught up in moving. Christine is really the one still involved in the humanitarian work. I sit in the house all day working on web pages trying to save up for the move. Moving to a 3rd world country is easy, but going from a $75/rent to something 10 times that much takes some saving up.

One of the things Christine really wanted to do was get the schools we had been working at some sets of the same book. The kids here never practice reading and the only way to do it as a class is if everyone has their own copy. It's pretty sad when you see these kids that are 15 and 16 having to sound out each syllable before they recognize what word it is.

Using her new connections at the Casa Pastoral she was able to find people in the U.S. with the ways and means. I'm not sure how many sets are coming, but I know that there's going to be so many they're going to both the boys' and girls' schools as well as one of the villages. The kids aren't going to be allowed to take the books home, which is really for the best. I'd like to think they'd take care of them, but I've seen where they live and one good rainstorm or bad older brother and it's gone.

The girls' school is getting the first sets and Christine put the girls to work making pop-up thank you cards. Arts and crafts have really been the only way I've seen to truly get the kids involved and excited. Anything to stimulate their creativity and imagination is worth its weight in gold here. Sometimes its pretty hard to keep them from copying each others personalizing of stuff. If you show them an example and yours happens to have a blue circle on it, no matter how many times you tell them not to copy you, half of the projects will have blue circles if not more.

The Casa Pastoral also does this thing where they give out fertilizer to farmers. It's a very unsustainable form of aid and the farmers are now totally dependent on it. Nothing is happening so that these farmers won't not need more next season. The main reason they need the fertilizer is because all they grow is corn and beans and corn is one of the hardest crops there is on soil. They also don't compost or do any of the things that responsible sustainable farming involves. Darren tried to teach them how to compost but when the Casa Pastoral is just handing out bags of fertilizer no one cares to learn about composting or growing anything different.

Thats really just a microcosm of the whole problem of international aid. I'd like to believe that the IMF, World Bank, and WTO were really trying to help these people but nothing I've seen leads me to that conclusion. Aid is given but the poor are taught to rely on the aid and so their situation never improves. If anything they're hurt by this, just like animals in zoos never learn how to hunt or take care of themselves, if they're released into the wild without training they die. Its the training side thats completely lacking here. Give them fertilizer but show them how to do the other things and then only give them less and less each year.

I also wanted to include this video of a guy working a loom here in El Salvador. Weaving has always amazed me, i just don't understand how it works. It's hard to imagine coming up with such a crazy contraption. It almost seems like he's playing some weird instrument.

On a completely unrelated note we helped one of the people at the Casa Pastoral get a cheap plane ticket to the states. I think we saved him $300-400 on what he'd previously been told by the airlines. Anyway, he was so happy he invited us to his father's day celebration in one of the villages called Las Delicias. His father-in-law is one of the few farmers who actually grows all kinds of different things like yucca, tomatoes, some grains I'd never heard of, etc. He apparently got a lot of land after the war, apparently he was playing both sides.

It's difficult to ask people here about the war without feeling like intrusive. The main thing is that the U.S. was the main reason it drug on for so long and was so deadly. If they hadn't been supporting the military and its hold on the government they would have quickly fallen to the rebels. So especially if they were rebels they're wary telling a gringo about the part they played. Alejandro's father-in-law was pretty forthright though and even showed us his radio from the war. He was obviously a rebel but said he didn't use a gun, he was an "arbiter", which in my mind means he was playing both sides. That would also explain all the land he got after the war.

Also, I'm pleased to report that I'm up to $4.84 from the google ads on the site. Although I have to say it would probably be more if I talked more about plastic surgery, laser hair removal, and gold bricks. Ads for humanitarian organizations and causes only seem to be paying out the minimum. I don't really mind, plastic surgery ads would creep me out, better to advertise something I agree with. By the way, I only get money when you click on the ads, so find something nice and help me out ;-).

Posted by Tao at 06:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (3421)

I first went to Costa Rica about four years ago and it was at that time that many Costa Ricans were protesting the possible privatization of their communications company, at the same time teachers were protesting their pension fund being slashed. Apart from the graffiti I didn't actually come face to face with the demonstrations until several days before I left on my six week trip. The teachers were marching from the capitol to another city nearly 20km away and I was on a bus that going that same way. Well, needless to say it was a hot 30-45 minutes on the bus until we got around them. It didn't occur to me that they were intentionally blocking the highway.

The last day on my way to the airport I learned that blocking the highway wasn't just something that they happened to do while marching it was a tactic in and of itself. As we actually had a flight to catch it was more than just a little frustrating for us. Luckily we had a resourceful bus driver who ducked around off ramps to get around the protest and get us to the airport in time. I remember thinking at the time that it seemed like a good way to turn people against your cause.

Yesterday the group that Christine works for organized a protest against the dams the government is building, among other things like mining and water privatization. Basically, we blocked off an entire lane of the Pan American highway at a major intersection, effectively blocking another major road.

I'll get into the techniques and my list of things that would make it significantly more effective in a minute but I think it's more important to discuss what exactly they were protesting. The government has plans to build at least two new major dams on top of the two they already have. These new dams would flood quite a large area of land and displace an untold number of people. Considering that El Salvador has the population density of Japan but instead of living in cities they all live in the country side, especially along rivers, it could be a lot of people.

The other two dams are used to generate electricity for the country, which I'm not against really. I think that if it were done properly a lot of people could use the stored water behind the dam during the rainy season to irrigate their crops. That's really the best time to grow stuff because it's so sunny. However, I don't think they use the stored water that way and really they ought to be using solar power, we're in the tropics for pete's sake.

In my opinion the main issue here is recompensation. The poor displaced people will be getting nothing or very little in return for their lost land. The issue is that after the civil war the government was supposed to give out parcels of land to the poor. However, ARENA, the military side's party, has been in charge of the federal government since then and has been quick to dole out the parcels to its supporters and completely halted giving land titles to the FMLN supporters. Thus the government won’t have to pay those people for their flooded land.

The other issues at hand were the gold mining companies being given free reign and no pollution restrictions. The rivers that they are dredging are quickly being contaminated with mercury and other nasty things that the poor have no choice but to drink. One of the things that strikes you when you're here in El Salvador is how many deformed people there are. You'll probably see more in one day than months or even years in the U.S. Of course, a lot of those effects are from the unregulated use of DDT for so many years, but the mercury poisoning is going to start having an effect in the form of Minamata disease.

I haven't heard any hard details about the water privatization. That's really one of the frustrating things about the protesters here. They don't do much if any research on the things that they're protesting. That's why I can't tell you exactly what the dam will be used for, how many people will be displaced, who is going to benefit, etc. The leaders just seemed to be assuming that every major government project was evil, which isn't that terrible of an assumption here. It's also probably the reason their only chants were, “No to the dams, No mining, No to water privatization!”

When Christine and I got there we immediately wanted to help so we set about handing out the flyers they'd printed to the stopped traffic. Most of them didn't seem too thrilled about the whole thing. I think that's the effect sitting in 30 minutes of traffic because of you does to people. We probably handed out a thousand or so before the whole protest ran out. We could easily have handed out 10 times as many.

The flyers were pretty ridiculous it was a half sheet of paper printed on both sides in size 12 font. There was one heading that may have been in 14 point font. The problem is most people here, if they can read, can't see very well and are intimidated by that much writing. The other thing is that actual text of the flyer was all about Jesus and how he would be against the dams and would want the people to keep their land. It had nothing really informative about the facts of what was going on with the dams, arguments for and against, etc.

They had the same problem with the banners they had made. They tried to fit 3 sentences on a banner, which were so cluttered I couldn't even read them from 10 feet away. On top of that they were holding them parallel to the single lane we had open so unless people could read them in the instant they were driving by, they might as well have been blank.

One other problem I had with the whole thing was that they drove in a big truck to carry these large speakers, a gas generator all to amplify their voice when a simple megaphone would have done the trick and actually been of better quality probably as the microphone kept cutting in and out.

Anyway, that was a lot of criticism but I really do think they're doing the right thing. I just want them to be more effective at it. Pissing off thousands of people and not effectively telling them why you're wasting their time seems counter productive. Christine mentioned that it would be better to spread out around a big city at stop lights, I think she's on to something. Of course they would be missing out on the solidarity building that the centralized speaking provides, but there's no reason not to do both.

Posted by Tao at 10:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (13)

Yesterday morning I sold out. I decided to put Google Ads on my blog in hopes that it might be able to pay the hosting costs every year. Yesterday afternoon we had the longest earthquake I've ever felt here or anywhere. The ground steadily shook for about 20 seconds. The water jugs were shaking, the fan was wobbling, trees were shaking, etc. If that weren't a big enough sign, my web server went down and when it came back it had been replaced with an old backup before I put the ads up so they were effectively erased. Today I tempt the fates and put them back.

The earthquake turned out to be a 6.8 magnitude one off the coast of Guatemala near El Salvador. I was kind of surprised to find out it was that far away. Normally our earthquakes are local to the volcano here. Yesterday afternoon Christine and I went for a walk up this pretty road along the volcano and saw some fairly large fallen rocks but nothing much besides that.

Most earthquakes here happen during the rainy season when the ground is a lot heavier. It also makes it much worse when they hit because it causes massive mudslides and such. Luckily it hadn't rained heavily here for a couple days. The people in the high risk areas are still living at the church. The word on the street is that they're building temporary housing for them until the rainy season ends. Then they can go home and rebuild their houses to be destroyed next rainy season.

Anyway, if another natural disaster happens today I'll take down the ads. In the meantime, if you don't mind clicking on some of them that interest you from time to time to help support the site I'd really appreciate it. Thanks!

Posted by Tao at 12:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Last Wednesday the city held an Earth Day parade. It was really a march for action to do more about protecting Berlin from disasters, specifically landslides. I was pretty impressed that people were marching with signs saying "Protect the Environment" and wearing costumes as flowers, armadillos, whatever they could think of. It all seemed very out of character as I've never lived in a place where the people take their environment as much for granted. Sure, the U.S. has its problems but people value their parks and are at least mildly informed and concerned about the environment. Needless to say it was refreshing to see here.

The parade went all the way up to Brisas Del Sol(Sun Breezes), the little community where the most of the damage and deaths occurred. We marched into the provisional hospital area set up at the school where several speakers delivered their calls to action. Mostly they said that the government isn't doing its job to protect them and its an outrage.

The most interesting part was when Don Tomas, the english teacher at the girls' school and also a member of the city hall, read an update on the situation and a letter they were sending to the President and the Congress. Currently the death count is at 5 with 1 still missing, but theres not any real hope for the missing person. There were 9 homes totally destroyed and another 60 with partial damage. There are around 60 people still living in the Catholic church and they're looking at building provisional housing for them until the rainy season is over. At which point I suppose they'll go back and rebuild their homes where they can get wiped out next season.

The letter was an exercise in absurdity to me. You see, the ARENA party has the presidency and a few more seats than the FMLN in congress. Last year Berlin elected an FMLN mayor and its no secret that ARENA doesn't equally divide up the funds among the municipalities. Nonetheless, the letter went on to rail against the president and DEMAND that they do something or anyone else who gets hurt or dies is their fault. They then went on to say that they want $2 million dollars to fix the problem although they aren't even sure what they are going to do to solve the problem.

I've heard that they brought in an engineer to look at the situation and he said there was nothing that could be done. So they've been drafting up plans to buy a whole new piece of land and build all new houses for these people. There are probably 80 houses in this community, and I guarantee someone else would just move into them if they were abandoned. The other thing is that anyone with a little common sense can see that there are a number of relatively small things that could be done to make the situation much better and decrease the chances of major damage and deaths.

First of all, the drainage is ridiculous. They built a solid cement "bridge" that blocks the natural path of the water. That caused the water to push around it and come into peoples houses and was almost certainly the direct cause of the destroyed house and killed father and son that I posted a picture of in the last entry. They simply need to dig out the quebrada and make it easier for the water to come through in a controlled manner. That simple and would cost nowhere near $2 million. The other thing they could do, apart from abandoning the entire community, is abandon the first row of houses closest to where the land rises dramatically and landslides would be the most harmful. Then demolish them and build a barrier out of the rubble. Thats a couple days work on a bulldozer, simple enough. Anyway, thats what I'd do if I were mayor.

Interestingly enough, the current mayor was the one who bought this plot of land for the homeless people that were living in shacks along one of the roads into town. He helped bring in NGOs which then built them cinder block homes. Of course, now they blame him for putting them in harms way. My opinion is that I'm sure the mayor didn't put them there with that intention and it seems very callous and ungrateful to think that way. The same guy is now trying everything he can think of to help them.

Posted by Tao at 02:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (13)

We celebrated our 1 year anniversary in Berlin last week. Actually, the entire city celebrated with us although some of them may have been under the impression they were celebrating the holy week. We know what was up though. As is custom to honor us, the townspeople created elaborate "rugs" of colored salt, sawdust, beans, fruit, and whatever else they could find. You may remember one of my first entries from Berlin was about this. Below is a picture of the Oscar our friend who helped us find a place to rent when we got here. He has also been the winner of the best "rug" for the last 7 straight years. He's the one with his hands raised in success.

We passed on the parade this year, which goes two steps forward one step back all around the city and over the "rugs" which are offerings to God. Last year we probably only made it 1/4 of the way in an hour and a half. They did the whole thing this time in about 4 hours.

Christine and I think we may have inadvertently revolutionized "rug" making this year. I can't remember how many times we explained to kids how we were using a grid to enlarge the map we had of the world while doing our mural. It appears that it stuck with some of them who relayed it to their parents and thought it would be great way to make their "rugs". This year when we walked around earlier in the day we saw various groups of people using a grid pattern with their picture also in a grid. We walked around the entire place last year and not a single person was doing that.

While we were walking around I had an interesting idea for next year. All of the "rugs" have scenes from the crucifixion and resurrection. I thought would be cool if they coordinated and made the rugs so that each one told a piece of the story in chronological order. Of course, that would take significant coordination and I doubt it would ever happen, but it's a good idea nonetheless.

Since all of the kids don't have school during the holy week I decided to take a break from work and go for a hike in the hills with Arturo and his sister Cecilia. Instead of climbing the hill of the cross like usual, Cecilia knew of a way to climb another hill that used to be called Bald Hill but since has grown some "hair". I was shocked to find that directly up from our house in between the two hills is a giant smoldering volcanic crater. There were signs of fires and steam vents with yellow sulfur crystals covering them. I had no idea there was another crater, let alone one so close to our house.

Along the way the kids introduced me to a number of new fruits I'd never seen before. You think after awhile of living in a place you'd have seen all of the strange fruits and vegetables that it has to offer, but there's constantly more. I don't know that I can describe any of the tastes but one was called a Matasano or "Mata Gusano" as Cecilia said which means "worm killer". It was a green round fruit about the size of an apple with a sweet yellow center and giant center seed. The other fruit is called a Mame(mom-ay) which is big and round with a brown shell. The inside has the consistency and color of a mango and a similar taste with a kind of nutty after taste. It also has a giant seed in the center.

As we got higher up the hill, which is somewhat higher than the hill of the cross, we came across some blackberry patches. The kids were really excited, almost as if they'd come across a new fruit. It's interesting because apples and grapes are extremely popular here as foreign fruits. They're also very expensive since they don't grow here.

At the top of the hill is a small military installation to guard a couple of big antennas. From there you can see down the other side of the hill directly down to the Laguna of Alegria, the only crater I knew was on the volcano. Down in the background you can see the city of Santiago de Maria a somewhat larger city than Berlin.

The soldiers told us that there is a path down to Laguna that takes about 45 minutes, but we'd already gone far enough for the day. Although I think it would be a great day trip to take with some people. After getting to the military installation you could walk DOWN to the Laguna and then continue DOWN to the little town of Alegria and catch a bus back to Berlin.

The stationed soldiers aren't allowed to bring almost anything with them up to the installation they guard. So they're very resourceful. I don't know if you can tell, but this guy is sitting in a hammock he has made out of metal fencing. It adds to the hardened front they like to portray anyway. I don't even think a soldier here would let you take his picture without his gun, but that's probably the case for a lot of Military people.

Speaking of military and piety, I was listening to "Democracy Now" this morning and they had a segment on tax resistance to the war. Basically it was about people who don't pay taxes for wars. Some people don't pay their taxes at all, but that doesn't appeal to me. I want to pay for the government resources I use but not the sanctioned murder of people. The woman who was on the show said she filled out her tax forms but then just didn't pay the percentage that goes to the war and if you're curious that comes to $.40 per $1. Instead she donates that money to organizations that promote peace and fight poverty. Which I feel is probably a much better way of "fighting terrorism" than anything else.

She said sometimes the IRS will come in and try to take money directly from your bank accounts or garnish your wages, but she says she'd rather do everything she can. I mean really whatever punishment they give you can't equal the amount of damage that money would have done anyway. So I'm thinking about doing the same although I currently don't make enough for it to matter, but hopefully that will change. Here's a couple links if you're interested:

• The National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee
• WarResisters.Org

Posted by Tao at 01:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (13)

Lately I've been angry. I haven't been able to pinpoint the cause if there even is one. It's almost a disembodied anger, just looking for someway to vent itself. Upon venting itself it undoubtedly makes the situation worse and leads to more anger and a self-sustaining cycle. Today I stop that.

I feel like I've known how to fix myself for a long time, I've just always put it off. I believe the first time I came across the method was in a book called The Fourth Way by P.D. Ouspensky about the teachings of G.I. Gurdjieff. I'm not sure how it came into my possession, probably by way of my Dad. Fundamentally the system it talked about was very near to Buddhism. It says that emotions are like instincts, we can not stop them from happening. However, we can be on the look out for negative emotions and recognize them before they manifest themselves in our actions. To do that however, we have to train our mind to be much more aware of itself and its surroundings. If I can see my self being angry, I can acknowledge it and possibly analyze why I feel that way. That I can view it as a sort of phenomena and I'm back in control.

The way that you train your mind to be more "mindful" is through meditation. By focusing our minds on breathing or on any other sense we train it listen to us. I've heard the untrained mind referred to as a "monkey in a cage", which seems to be an accurate description to me. I really only noticed how my mind would jump to whatever thing it could to avoid doing my bidding of watching me breath when I first tried my hand at meditating. However, each time I've failed to continue meditating even though I've felt better after every single time. I can't explain why, but I'm more determined than ever to continue.

Being the son of a man who runs a meditation group, you would think I would I have come to this realization sooner. Although, I don't think one can be pushed into this type of action and I am probably lucky to have come to this realization at all. It's not as if my Dad hasn't been available with information aplenty if need be.

So today I start down the path to mental solidarity by meditating every day and putting forth a concerted effort to maintain that mindfulness throughout the day. If you're interested in joining me buddhanet.net has some excellent resources. Among other things I downloaded a short 28 page "Invitation to Insight Meditation" that seemed to do a much better job explaining the reasons and methods for meditating than some of the longer pamphlets and books I've read.

Posted by Tao at 10:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (12)

It's pretty amazing to think that we've almost been back two weeks already. Time just kind of slides by you here. It also helps that we've both been really busy, which is a welcome relief from the month of laziness in the States.

Coming back through customs here it was pretty apparent both of our Spanish skills had atrophied somewhat. Although I have to say the customs agent was using some vocabulary that I wouldn't have known anyway. We were arguing with him about giving us the maximum 90 day travel visa and he only wanted to give us 60. Finally after we explained everything we were doing his boss gave us the go ahead. In true Salvadoran style he told us if we'd just told us that before he would have let us have it.

Since we had more stuff coming down than we did going back to the U.S. we decided to pay for a taxi all the way back to Berlin. Taking that much stuff on a crowded chicken bus would have been its own version of hell. Now, we've taken a taxi from San Salvador to Berlin before and it cost us $40. The airport is somewhat closer to Berlin so we told the taxi guys $40 again. They said $60, we said $40, they said $60, we said work with us. It's amazing that even if you speak decent Spanish and tell them you know what it costs they still refuse to barter with you just because you're white. Eventually I was just telling them $55 and they STILL wouldn't do it. Finally a new taxi guy came up and I offered him $55 and he jumped at it. I just smirked at the other guys and shook my head. That one fair could have made their entire day if they hadn't been so greedy.

Our place was just like we left it, except with a thick layer of dust on everything. The dry season is terrible for dust and to make things worse we live on a main road which kicks it all up. We spent all of the next day cleaning and restocking our food table.

The kid I'm mentoring, Arturo, stopped by the second day back and has come by just about every afternoon since then. I've been teaching him how to play the guitar a little, he's just about got "Twinkle twinkle little star". I've also got him learning how to type with this Spanish typing program on one of the donated computers. He's also reading a book in Spanish I bought in the states. It's written from the perspective of a little kid immigrating to the U.S. So he has a couple things to choose from and if he does them long enough I let him play a video game on the computer for awhile as a reward. Sometimes we play cards or throw the frisbee, and all of the time we spend together is really helping my Spanish.

Christine got right back into translating for the Casa Pastoral. A big group of 28 or so doctors, nurses, and other people just wanting to help came down for a week. They held what I guess you'd call mobile hospitals at a bunch of the rural villages and one day in Berlin as well. They did basic medical exams, pulled teeth, gave out vitamins and drugs where necessary, and performed eye exams and gave out donated pairs of glasses. Christine acted as one of the translators for the week they were here and I translated one day they were short a few people.

Every day Christine came home she was worn out, but I didn't really understand until I went out with them myself. I was put with the Eye team and it was a crazy busy day. At first I was translating and doing the general eye chart exam to see if they even needed glasses, but then I started going back and forth between that and the other people who were fitting them for specific prescriptions. I'm not sure where he was but the other Salvadoran translator guy disappeared for a lot of the day.

There's one thing you should know about El Salvadorans. They have no concept of making and staying in a line. British people with their love of proper "queuing" would probably have a break down here. People will do anything to cut in line and then lie straight to your face that they've been waiting. Well, after several angry incidents I adopted the bank number method. I just wrote down a bunch of numbers on paper and handed them out. I have no idea how they managed the first 4 or 5 days without doing that, and actually I'll always use that for anything that involves a line here from now on.

Anyway, I spent the latter part of the day working with the fitters, trying to find exact prescriptions with an old set of optometrist lenses and then digging through a pile of donated glasses looking for something close to their prescription. As you can imagine a lot of the frames were very hip...but not like it matters when you can actually see. A couple of times people would tell us they couldn't see out of the glasses even though it was the same prescription as the ones they ultimately chose. It was easier to say that than "these are the ugliest most enormous pair of glasses I've ever almost-seen, I'd rather be blind." All in all though, we made a lot of people smile that they could see so well and we did manage to find a lot of glasses that weren't hideous or at least looked decent on the person.

The group also took a day trip to Perquin and El Mozote. Its the main place in El Salvador that I'd wanted to see but hadn't yet so I stowed away for the trip. El Mozote is a rural village up in the mountains in El Salvador. During the civil war there was huge massacre there. The army told everyone that they were going to be doing operations in the country side around the village and told them all to come into town. So when they did the army came in surrounded them and killed them all. They beheaded all of the men first, then slaughtered the children in the Church, then took the women and shot them, raping some of them beforehand. All in all there were 809 people killed that day in El Mozote. The supposed reason is that so people in the rural villages in that area of the country were providing support to the guerrillas. So they simply wiped out all of that support and at the same time made others scared to offer any support.

Although the army and government has yet to admit that it happened, there was one survivor of the massacre at El Mozote. Her name was Rufina Amaya and she died the day before our trip. It was strange and sad because she had invited the group to have lemonade at her house, instead we ended up attending her funeral. It felt like we stumbled into history happening, although I would much rather have preferred that glass of lemonade. She basically survived because she was in the last group of women to be taken out and executed. As she was walking she fell to her knees and started praying at the same time some other women at the front of the group began screaming hysterically after seeing the bodies of the women in the previous group piled on top of each other in a house. The soldiers ran right past Rufina to handle the hysterical women and forgot about her. She went and hid by a tree and covered herself in leaves until the soldiers left.

After the funeral and before El Mozote we stopped in the Pueblo of Perquin where the Civil War museum is located. It wasn't as big as I'd thought it would be, just 3 or 4 rooms in an average sized building. The majority of items were pictures, but the things I thought were the most interesting were the old Radio Venceremos transmitters and recording equipment. During the war the guerrillas carried radio transmitters through the mountains and broadcast information and talked about what was going on in the country.

I read a book about the massacre at El Mozote in college and so I knew more to the story than the average person. So when I saw the helicopter wreckage behind the museum I got fairly excited. It's directly linked to the Radio Venceremos and the massacre. You see the army general in charge of the Atlacatl battalion that committed the massacre was General Monterrosa. Now, whenever the military captured the transmitters of Radio Venceremos it was a big prize. Well, some time after the massacre the military captured one of these transmitters in General Monterrosa's area of the country. He personally came in a decided to fly the transmitter back to San Salvador and his commanding officer. What he didn't know was that the guerrillas had intentionally let him capture the transmitter knowing that he would take it personally. So as his helicopter was flying roughly over the area of El Mozote the rebels activated the bomb hidden within the transmitter and blew him out of the sky. It's such a fantastic end to the story.

Now we're on to more mundane things. I'm currently writing up a plan for reorganizing the library at the girls' school. In reality, I'm trying to change it from a storage room into what it's supposed to be. In all likelihood I'm in for a very frustrating struggle. Oh, while I'm thinking about it, I'm in need of two computer monitors(that was quick, thanks Bill) for the two donated computers I brought down(thanks to the Computer Co-op). I'd ask if anyone had any spare ones laying around, but the shipping might make it impractical. If anyone wants to donate money for a monitor I'm probably going in to San Salvador in the next few weeks and I'll find out how much they cost. One of the computers is going in the principal's office and the other one is going in the library. The one in the library is going to have a database of all the books and all of the students so that kids will be able to check out books. There are actually girls assigned to the library but just don't have anything to do right now, so they're going to learn how to use the computer and run the show. I'm also going to buy some carpet to lay down in a reading corner and have reading time with the 1st-3rd graders.

Christine is going to be taking over Bill's job at the Casa Pastoral, which basically means organizing and guiding the groups that come down from the U.S. to visit their sister villages. She'll also be helping with some of the projects and scholarships that they've got going over there. One of those is getting water filters to all of the rural families so they can have safe drinking water. Bill is also looking at trying to start up a micro-credit lending program. I bought "Banker to the Poor" by the guy who just won the Nobel Peace Prize for micro-credit lending and I'm letting him borrow it as soon as Christine gets done with it.

Anyway, that's all the news from our corner of the world. If you're interested I posted a bunch of my old and new video projects in my new video portfolio. Most of the videos are on youTube so you can rate them and leave comments if you like.

Posted by Tao at 08:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (14)

You may recall I left you hanging on the rest of Christine and I's Honduras/Costa Rica trip, specifically the Costa Rica half. Well, we lucked out in Tegucigalpa and caught a bus to San Jose, Costa Rica. Crossing the border was easy and I was excited to see what Nicaragua looked like. It's the poorest Central American country, but I was interested in possibly starting a hostel there at some point. To my dismay the vast majority of the country is dry and flat. It made me think of Arizona or New Mexico. There were cacti and only a few short trees.

Our bus had a layover in Managua, the capitol of Nicaragua. On the way into town we passed the presidential palaces and there were poor people digging through the garbage. I guess that sums up a lot right there. We spent the night a simple little hotel and left early the next morning.

Crossing borders isn't a very big deal unless the countries have a stark difference in wealth. The Costa Rica/Nicaragua border is by far the biggest pain in the ass to cross in Central America. The bus let us off and we stood in line of a hundred or more people for about an hour. Then we were supposed to take all of our luggage off the bus and stand in another enormous line, but one guy on our bus had done this before and took up a dollar from each person to bribe the official. I have no idea how much time it saved us, but it was definitely considerable.

When we got to San Jose we walked over to the hostel I'd stayed at in 2003. At the time it had been a small place run by a couple of identical twins about my age who I'd hung out with several times. When we got there it had been transformed. The people working the desks wore shirts with the hostel name, the walls had been repainted and it had the feel of something commercial and icky. Apparently the twins still own it, but have built another enormous hostel next door and opened 3 other locations around the country.

We only spent the one night at that hostel. I found a hostel not too far from there run by Quakers who had also started a Peace Center next door to it. Since my Dad and Charlotte were getting in the next day it sounded perfecto.

We met them the next day at the airport easy as could be and then took the bus back into town. We had to lug around the luggage a little, but it wasn't too bad with all 4 of us. When we got to the hostel Char and my Dad had a nice conversation with the people in Peace House and I'd obviously made the right choice.

The next day we left for Monteverde and the cloud forest. The bus ride wasn't nearly as bad as I'd read. Sure it was a lot of winding dirt road, but I figure that keeps the crowds down. The only bad thing was it was sweltering. Once the bus drops us of we decided to walk the mile and a half to our hotel. Besides one pretty steep part it was a nice walk with some great views. Along the way we dropped some clothes off to get washed at a local place, stopped at a quaker cheese factory, and had two stray dogs follow us just about the whole way.

The following morning we went for a canopy tour. Apart from scuba diving it was probably the most "eXtreme" thing we did, despite the prison jumpsuits and yellow hardhats. Some of the views were pretty spectacular, although most people were too focused on the landing pad at the other end to notice. At the end of the second series of zip lines there was an optional tarzan swing which we all did. They just clipped our same harness on and off we went.

Both the canopy tour forest in Santa Elena and the cloud forest up in Monteverde had humming bird areas where they had set out a bunch of feeders. There were really only two types, but there were tons of them. Apart from that and a few pizotes, which are some kind of cross between a raccoon and an anteater, there wasn't much wildlife. Our 2nd day we got up early and walked around the Monteverde cloud forest, and although we were first ones through the gate we hardly saw anything. We did manage to see one howler monkey which tried its best to urinate on us. We also came across a tour group that had found a Quetzal way up in a tree. Quetzals are rare birds whose tail feathers used to be used for money in Guatemala.

Anyway, our next stop was Arenal, an active volcano just north of Monteverde. Even though it was the dry season, for some reason clouds gather around the cone at night, which is terrible shame because the lava coming down the sides glows orange. When I was there in 2003 it was the wet season and it was quite a site.

Right when we found a place to stay we got offered a tour. I would normally have been against such a thing, but the tour ended at the hot springs which normally cost just about as much as the tour was. They took us out to the park at the base of the volcano. We hiked out to where there had been a pyroclastic flow, basically a landslide of lava rocks. It was nice to get out and walk and we did get to see a couple of wild toucans.

The real fun was the hot springs. When I was there 4 years ago it was only a couple of pools although they'd been building a few others. Now the park just seems to keep going and going with no end in sight. There are now two enormous swim up bars, and probably 15-20 pools of varying temperatures. It was so nice and relaxing, the only thing it was missing was the volcano slowly erupting in the distance.

After that it was time to get to the beach. You don't go to Costa Rica and not see the beach. We decided on Manuel Antonio since I'm familiar with it and it's a great one. We did mis-step here, because we failed to consider that Costa Ricans like to go to the beach and it was a Friday when we hopped on the bus. When we got into town basically everything was sold out. We spent one grungy night in a real run-down dump of a place. The next night though we got a place with air-conditioning and all the basic amenities.

The park itself hadn't changed much and we spent several hours just lounging on the beach. I did have different animal experiences this time. I saw not 1 but 2 sloths, one of them at night and he was moving around. I also a close encounter with a band of capuchin monkeys. I'd seen several the last time, but this time they were right down by the beach fighting over a hamburger bun. This one guy was being chased by several others until he finally dropped most of it. I went over and picked it up, and although its against the rules to feed them I figured they were going to eat it anyway. I threw it up to them and they caught hunks of it. Charlotte got some really great pictures I'll have to get from her.

The last day we were there we went scuba diving off the coast of Manuel Antonio. We were really interested to see the differences between the Caribbean and the Pacific. Where we were it was more rocky and there a lot of puffer fish. The parrot fish enormous and I caught a brief glimpse of a sailfish. In the Caribbean we'd only seen a few tiny strange little starfish, but we saw a bunch of different kinds on the Pacific side. While we went diving my Dad and Charlotte went snorkeling and had such a good time they went snorkeling in Belize on their way back. Charlotte bought a couple of disposable underwater cameras so we got to play around with that. Christine has since bought an underwater case for her camera so you can look forward to more neat pictures like this.

The rest of our trip was pretty uneventful. We ate some sushi for the first time in a long time and took my parents to the airport. We had an extra day because the bus was full so we walked around the San Jose zoo, which isn't that great. They've got a lot of animals in tiny cages. A terrible idea with all of the tourists that come through their country.

Anyway, I think I'll leave you with the last Mr. Pink picture you'll get for awhile. He has now immigrated to the U.S. and I don't think he's missing us the least bit. He's basically taken over my Mom's house although there are some other animals that would like to think otherwise. It's a lonely house down here without him, but we don't have to worry about possums coming in and eating the cat food or him running out the front door and getting flattened.

Posted by Tao at 04:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (18)

I've been getting a lot of questions about how it feels to be back in the U.S. and what I miss about El Salvador so I figured I'd just go ahead and post it. I think a lot of people expect that I would come back and be amazed by the excess and plain shininess of the U.S., but to be honest it's exactly how I remember it. I could still vividly imagine every gas guzzling, suit wearing, fast food eating detail of what life was like here and not much has changed. I guess I'd intially would have described it as just coming home from vacation and missing where you'd just been visiting, namely the tropical climate. As the days have gone on more and more differences have come to my attention.

The first thing started in the airport in Atlanta where my flight was delayed 6 hours due to nothing. I was sitting with some people from Jackson, the majority of them being obese, and they just went on and on about different BBQ places. I just thought how eating was just a hobby for these people. My only addition to their conversation was when they started praising big d's bbq whom I recently finished a website for. They couldn't believe they had a webpage.

I was starving after the first 4 hours sitting around the airport, but I just couldn't bring myself to buy fast food. I've eaten from time to time in El Salvador, but it felt dirty and wrong to me now. Before we left Christine and I also decided to go back to our non-meat low-dairy diet. I say diet, not in terms of losing weight, but as in we eat a diet of this or that for purely healthy reasons. Animal protein is the source of cancer, for those of you who missed my review of "The China Study". Anyway, we figured if we could make it while we were here, then we can make it anywhere.

One thing I've come to feel more strongly about is how small communities like mine in El Salvador get sapped dry of their money. I think it would make a big impact if they'd only spend as much as they could within their own economy and less at coporate retailers that just ship the profits out of the country. I guess it boils down to disliking corporations before I went down and now I just plain despise them. It wasn't just living in El Salvador that made my feelings more intense, it was watching documentaries like "The Corporation" and "The Money Masters" and then just reading articles on-line about communities using their own money to stimulate the local economy.

Yesterday I had an experience that brought me several new realizations. I'm currently filing paperwork to start my own business: "Stop and Wonder Web Development"...you may have noticed. Christine and I have had several run-ins with Central American bureaucracy which I would describe as a form of blunt force trauma. I'd done some research on what I'd actually need to do while here and it all seemed rather easy. So my dad dropped me off at the secretary of state's office, which apparently files business licenses for every type of business except my lowly sole proprietor one. My fault, bad research, so I walked across downtown Jackson to City Hall, and then I was directed to another building, where I filled out the single page application and then waited for the woman to finish her conversation about Jerome's new haircut. I was then sent upstairs to zoning, where they looked through some big maps and produced stamp for my application. Then it was back down to the first desk. Sure, now we're just going to send the fire department out to inspect your office(which is the back storage closet in the Computer Co-op). Then I can come back and finish the remaining hoop jumps. The realization is, all governments are bureaucracies. If I had to guess I'd say it was intentionally set up that way to make jobs for the elected officials' friends.

After that little fiasco I walked around trying to find a bank to exchange my foreign money. I knew there was a big trustmark downtown somewhere that I'd heard would do it but couldn't remember where it was exactly. In El Salvador I have no shame in asking for directions, but having to ask them for somewhere in my hometown made me cringe. I'm not sure if it has to do with the language barrier in El Salvador acting as a sort of security blanket making it feel less real, or if it's just the fact that I look like a gringo who should have absolutely no idea where he is so it's not hard to play the part. It feels like it's a little of both. Long story short, the bank wouldn't change my money because I don't have an account. Gee thanks.

I didn't have a ride home from downtown so I had planned on taking the Jackson public bus system which runs straight from there to the Co-op. I've never ridden the buses here, but I'd seen them out and they seemed like new quality ones. I decided that rather than sit at the bus stop, I'd walk until one caught up with me. I probably walked over 2 miles before one caught up with me 200 yards from the Co-op door. If I had been in El Salvador I wouldn't have made it more than a block or two without one passing me, especially considering I was on the main thoroughfare through the city. Maybe there's a plus to people not being able to afford cars. I read somewhere that if you factored in the cost of the pollution, a gallon of gas would cost over $11.

Overall, it's been nice to see my friends and it'll be nice to see even more of them in Austin, but I probably could have done without this trip. After the vacation to Honduras and Costa Rica I was ready to settle in and start up our projects again, but now I have to wait. I'm certainly doing some useful stuff with the new business setup, bringing the cat back to get neutered, and helping my dad get caught up after the vacation. It still just feels like I'm running errands and not getting down to brass tacks.

PS - If you're looking for a good fight I guarantee you can win, try flying your cat into the U.S. without innoculation papers. The U.S. doesn't require them although every single customs agent on both sides of whatever border will think you do have to have them. It'll turn into a long battle with you eventually being proved correct, but don't expect any "oh, wow, sorrys", it'll be more like an "ok, move along".

Posted by Tao at 01:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (15)

We caught the bus to San Pedro Sula from San Salvador at 5 in the morning. The bus station's poorly laid out website told us that it would take 13 hours to get there, which we thought was believable since we have to cross a mountain range. It ended up only taking 6, happy day.

The national tree of Honduras is the pine tree, which covers the upper areas of the mountain range dividing El Salvador from Honduras. Christine said it reminded her of the Pacific Northwest, to me it seemed dryer and less densely forested than I remember that area.

It was easy to see that Honduras was significantly less populated than El Salvador. The houses also had a wider variety of styles and smaller or invisible piles of garbage surrounding them. I don't know if this is because it's simply harder for them to afford and find plastic packaged junk, or if they simply choose to live simpler. It's probably the former.

San Pedro Sula, known only as "San Pedro" by everyone that's not a tourist, looks a lot like most central american cities. The people in general had much lighter skin and a more spanish look to them. The park in the center of town was nicer than most with statues and a small stream running through it. We watched tv for several hours, probably the most tv we've watched down here apart from the occasional show in a bar, then went to sleep early.

Getting out to the airport was harder than we'd thought. No one in the city seemed to have any idea if buses went out the airport, probably because if you live in the city, you don't go anywhere but your home city. We finally met a military person who walked us down to the bus station and showed us the right bus. There wasn't really any reason to walk us down to the station, but I think it makes them feel important to lead gringos around. Along the way he said he'd only been to the U.S. once, to Georgia, for a "cultural exchange". Georgia is where the School of the Americas is located. In case you're not familiar it's where the U.S. trains foreign armies to do their bidding, how to disappear people, stage a coupe, all of that lovely stuff. What fantastic culture it is that we're exchanging.

The bus only passed by the turn-off to the airport, just like in Belize. This time we caught a ride in the back of a pick-up for the half-mil to the airport. We got to the airport right as my Mom and Gary's plane got in, but it takes 30-45 minutes to go through customs. It was really great to see some family after 11 months of no one. We bought bus tickets out to La Ceiba where we could catch a ferry the next day out to our final destination, Utila, one of the bay islands. Roatan is the big island with the majority of the tourism, but it's also more expensive and more touristy, so we've heard.

We spent the night at a nice hotel in La Ceiba and sat around the pool drinking Honduran beers before calling it a night. The main beers of Honduras are Salva Vida(which is a brand of water in El Salvador), Imperial(which looks a lot like the Imperial of Costa Rica with a slightly different logo), and Port Royal which was my favorite although they were all fairly similar.

The next morning we took a taxi out to the ferry dock and ate some traditional Honduras baleadas. Basically tortillas with eggs, cheese, and beans. The ferry was packed and the mildly rough seas got to Gary at one point so he took a trip to the "head". Christine went up on the front and from there we could occasionally see flying fish "fly" out of the path of the boat. I saw a fairly large one make it 100 feet or more.

A woman from our hotel met us at the dock and gave us a ride to the hotel where we had reservations. This particular hotel was at the far end of the island, at the very edge of the bay the city was situated in. The island only had a few small beaches, but they were all white sand, and one of the public beaches in particular had a lot of charm.

Because our hotel was at the edge of the bay it had easy access to the reef and you could literally snorkel and scuba dive right off the end of their dock. They also had an attached dive shop behind the hotel where Christine and I signed up to get our Advanced Diver certifications. Utila is one of the cheapest places in the world to get certified and go diving. It only costs $15/tank to rent the equipment and dive off the end of the dock.

Christine and I spent the next few days diving in the mornings while my Mom and Gary walked around the island and relaxed. We tried to get them to go snorkeling, but it seemed that one group of us was always gone. They did say they tried it once while we were gone, I'm not sure I believe it. We did manage to drag Mom out on the last day, but Christine lost a flipper after a few minutes and we had to come back. I'm not sure how we could have lost it, but it just disappeared.

Each night we'd go out to eat somewhere different and then sit around at the hotel telling family stories, a lot of which I'd heard before, but some new ones thrown in. I'm sure most of them were new for Christine, althought I've told her quite a few.

As for scuba diving, the reef was a lot like the one in Belize. We did see a few new and interesting creatures like trumpet fish, porcupine puffers, and the very odd looking spotted drums. We also did our first night dive right off the end of the dock. I thought it would be intimidating at night, but it wasn't nearly as much as I had thought. At night the lobsters and shrimp come out, as well as the octopuses. We saw 2 of them, both were hunting, which you can tell because they glow blue when they're doing that. One of them almost caught a little maiden fish while we were watching it.

Another very cool thing about night diving is the effervesence. If you turn your lights off and move your hands through the water you'll brush tiny bacteria that spark a bright blue color. It's like sparks or magic dust coming off of your hands. Your bubbles also sparkle as they set them off.

We also explored the island. Christine and I rented a sea kayak and took the small channel through the island to the other side. When I say small, I mean small. Most of the time I could hit both sides of the mangroves with the paddle and the bottom was probably only an inch or two away from our kayak. The channel opens up into a small bay on the other side witch a tiny rocky island in the center. We paddled out and tied up there and then snorkeled around the reef. We saw a lot more fan coral and several large groups of angelfish, but nothing too spectacular. Apparently farther out, the reef suddenly drops away and goes straight down for 2,000 feet. This is where people see the giant whale sharks, but didn't venture that far out. Coming back was quite a task, because the tide had gone out even farther and the inch or two clearance was gone. We basically dragged the kayak through the channel with pure muscle power.

One of the more expensive places we'd looked at staying was a place called the Jade Seahorse. It's an attraction in its own right. This german guy came over years ago and built this wonderland of seashells and plastered trinkets and beads. There's also a boat/bar in a tree called the "Treetanic". It must have taken the guy years and years to finish, but it's quite the thing to see.

On what we thought was our last day on the island, Christine and I walked down to another dive shop on the other side of the island. Our instructors told us that they got their divemaster certification there and had a blast doing it. A divemaster is the first level of professional certification for divers. With it you can work at dive shops leading groups of divers and just helping out. This particular shop gives you liftetime free diving with them if you get certified there. All in all it would end up costing us about $1,000 a piece to do it, plus $2/night to stay in their diver hostel. Not too bad really. We've also been told you can basically tax deduct any travel expenses if you say you went looking for a job wherever you go. A pretty nice perk. We're seriously looking at doing it during this coming June and July before we head back to the states for the long stay.

The next day when we were supposed to leave we found out that the ferry wasn't running. Apparently they had not renewed their license despite repeated warnings that they had to. It wasn't absolutely necessary that we get back to the mainland that day, so we "decided" to stay another night. Luckily the next day they were running and we got my Mom and Gary to the airport right on time.

Christine and I went into San Pedro and caught a bus to Teguchigalpa, or simply "Tay-goose" as the locals call it. We spent the night at a cheap hotel and had some of the best and largest proportions of chinese food I've had down here. The next day we went to the bus station to catch a bus to San Jose, Costa Rica to meet up with my Dad and Charlotte only to find that the one bus that day was sold out as well as the next day. Well, we lucked out and were the first people on the waiting list and did actually make it on the one that day. So it was on to Costa Rica and another blog entry...

All in all it was a very relaxing time on the island. It was also one of the most laid back new year's eves I can remember, but that may not be saying much. Everyone else went to sleep after some rum and coke before the ball even dropped, but I stayed up and took some pictures of the fireworks from the dock. A couple turned out pretty nice.

Posted by Tao at 02:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)

   This last Friday Christine finished up her "Como Planear Mi Vida" class, literally "How to plan my life". She graduated 9 girls out of her original 40-something. She would have graduated a lot more if she hadn't continued the classes during their summer vacations. They learned a wide variety of stuff like how to communicate clearly, how to be firm, how to think through decision, how to improve their self-esteem, basic sex ed, STDs, etc. The girls were impressive when they got up to say a few things about the class after receiving their diplomas. They all seemed confident and happy.

   At the end of the whole ceremony they all gave Christine a Christmas present. It was a nice handmade purse and doll made by a local women's group that makes everything out of plants and things they find around. They also make pinatas and other stuff they from recycled things.

   I've really just been the support system behind Christine. I designed the diplomas, drew pictures for posters, formatting documents, etc. My biggest contribution though has been their graduation slideshow/movie. I spent probably 2 solid days of work on it and I think it's pretty impressive given what I had to work with and what they could possibly expect. When they heard I'd made a video of them they all looked confused as if I'd been secretly video-taping them or something. They all loved it when they watched it, they made us watch it twice and then the parents wanted to buy copies from me. I told them if they brought me blank DVDs I'd burn them copies. Hope you like it, they did.

   Another thing Christine did was solicit her family and friends for scholarship for needy kids. The kids don't have to pay to go to public school but they have to have a uniform to attend and it also helps to have pencils and paper. Most of the quotes people had been giving us were in the upper 80's of dollars. Not very much, but in the end it was really only like $50/kid. She ended up giving out 5, the one in the middle looks funny because she's got polio. Her mother believed that vaccinations could give you the disease. Ignorance isn't always bliss. She's looking at trying to get a collection of about 50 copies of the same book for a 6th grade class to read together.

   My project when we get back is to get the library working at the girls' school. I'm going to bring down a donated computer from my dad when we come back down and get it set up with a database for the books. Then I hope to do a reading once or twice a week with some younger kids and teach the library girls, who don't do anything right now, how to work the database, organize books, and hopefully do readings with the younger kids so that it continues once we leave.

   Anyway, that's all for this year. I'm sure I'll have some good pictures and stories when we get back from vacation in Honduras and Costa Rica in mid-January. Stay tuned.

Posted by Tao at 04:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (11)

   First of all, Merry Christmas! It doesn't feel much like Christmas here what with it being in the mid-70's every day. I think it was actually colder when we first got here in May. You may notice a underwater theme for our tree: yellow submarines, sea horses, and pineapples...they make good underwater housing I hear. We'll be spending Christmas here in Berlin and I thought I might feel homesick, but it just hasn't happened. It might be that my family is coming to down to see me right after Christmas that makes it so easily bareable. In fact, we'll be going scuba diving for new year's, which is one of the reasons for the tree decoration. That said, this will probably be my last real post before we leave on the 26th. I do plan on posting a neat video slideshow I made for Christine's life skills class before then though.

   So every morning I wake up and the first thing I do is sit down at the computer and go to www.thehungersite.com and click on all of the tabs to donate food, books, child healthcare, animal food, several square feet of rainforest, and even mammograms from the money the sites generate off of advertising. I often stop and think about that bowl of food or wonder what book it is that I've managed to donate to some child somewhere. It's a ritual, a habit, but a good one. Where rituals go wrong is when those participating have forgotten why they are doing them.

   I've never been a religious person. I find things awe-inspiring and beautiful, and I don't need or want someone to explain it to me. I believe that morals are not something that has to be carved into stone and taught. People know how they feel and also have the ability to empathize and know how they would feel in another person's place. I believe thats all that is required for natural morality.

   It seems the reason most people are religious is out of an inherent desire to do good, because simply put, doing good things, making others happy, relieving suffering, those things make us feel good. It's a win/win situation. Religion is just an organized way of doing that, because teamwork allows us to accomplish greater things than could ever be done individually. Of course there are other reasons for being religious, simply the need to be accepted by a group of people, but I like to think that inherent desire is at the root.

   A little over a week ago El Salvador and many latin countries celebrated the day of the virgin of Guadalupe. I had assumed that all of these virgins I'd seen were all just THE virgin, but I've been wrong this entire time. The virgin of Guadalupe was a virgin that appeared to a boy on a hill in Mexico, how he knew she was a virgin I can't say. This was around the time the spaniards were raping and pilaging and the virgin gave this boy a message, she said that everyone should accept the europeans and accept Catholicism. The virgin by the way was an indigenous woman, although you wouldn't guess it from her pale statues. Anyway, the message was miraculously spread far and wide and helped the spaniards convert much of latin america.

   The 20th of December is not the actual day the virgin appeared, but the day that she stomped the devil back down to hell. The night before everyone lights fires outside and sets of fireworks, which down here are basically small chunks of dynamite and gunpowder. Incidentally, firework production is a booming business for child labor here, who else could fit their tiny little fingers in them to pack down the powder for 40 cents a day. It was pretty enjoyable, although I had to wonder if the virgin would approve of the tire fires in her honor.

   The next day people dress up "indigenously" to honor her. Mainly they just dress up the children because I think the adults are too embarassed for the most part. However, another part of it which I find really sad is that I don't think they even understand what indigenous is to them anymore. I'd seen little boys dressed up with white clothes with patches on them before but I'd basically assumed they were dressing up as clowns. The girls put on way way too much make-up and wear bright spanish-style dresses. I know their hearts are in the right places but I feel like it's just another sad reminder of the successful cultural invasion thats taken place.

   Anyway, I was tricked into attending a mass at the Catholic church in town. I had been told we were just going to the park for a celebration. While we sat there and I tried to understand what was being said through the horribly distorted loudspeakers I got gradually more and more frustrated. I could tell that everyone was simply repeating the same rituals mindlessly. I thought of the hundreds of people spending their time on these rituals that had lost all meaning. I have no doubt that it's like that around the world. The incredible waste of time and energy that could actually be used to resolve the problems that these people were coming to church for.

   So these people mill about day after day, say their prayers, obediently listen and sing along, when all of that time they could be building houses for the poor(themselves) or schools, or teaching each other better ways to farm, or doing any number of things that would take actual steps toward relieving suffering and all of those inherently good things that lie at the root of their religion. I'd have a lot more respect for religion and religious leaders if there was a lot less praying and a lot more action.

   I guess the point I'm making is that it's easy just to do things because you've been doing it that way for so long. We have to be vigilant in asking ourselves why we do the things we do. Curiosity and questioning are the things that keep our eyes open and we have to make that the ritual. Amen.

   I'm done with preaching, it's time for some sacrifices. This wouldn't be any kind of a post if I made a play on ritual killings and didn't produce, so here's some blood-letting for you. The neighbors slaughter a pig every week or two and Christine asked to kill it, don't ask me why. I used to be somewhat squeamish around stuff like this, but that's almost completely faded now. It's obviousy nowhere in the picture for Christine. In a way I feel stronger now that it's gone, but I also don't know that I like being accustomed to it either. Sorry for the sideways video, it's too big of a pain to turn it.

   Christine has also started a new soccer career. A couple of the girls from the ecology youth group asked her to play on their all-girl intramural team and man did she kick butt. It was an all-ages league and apart from her they had youngest team. She only played in the last 3 games and they won 2 of them, but didn't quite make it to the finals. However, she made an impression on some of the other women who invited her to play on the girl's team for the whole city.

   From left to right is Dinora, who needs to learn to pass and guard, Fatima, who needs to quit kicking the ball so hard, Raquel their top notch goalie, her baby, Christine, and Clara bella. You may have noticed that at 15 Raquel is somewhat young to have a 2 year old baby. If you knew her step-father you might also notice that the baby bears a striking resemblance. It's one of the tragic and disgusting things about this country. The repressed sexuality leads to a horribly high rate of child molestation and outright rape. The even more horrible part of the story is that the step-father still lives with them and her mother acts like nothing happened. It's shocking to me how far people will go to avoid conflict in this country. Once again, I imagine it stems from the war, but that's no excuse.

   Anyway, I'd like to leave you on a less depressing note and since no post is complete without the ambiguously gay duo on their favorite perch, here you are.

Posted by Tao at 08:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (22)

   The neighbors got a new cat within a week or two of us getting Mr. Pink. Hes much more like your typical Salvadoran cat. He has skinny arms and tail with a sort of pot-belly, which may be partly thanks to us. His face is also more elongated, resembling a small monkey.

   They simply call him "gato" or "mish", which is what they call all cats. Dogs also rarely get names, I'm pretty sure it has to do with avoiding guilt with they mistreat it. Darren told us a story of trying to name his host family's dog and they were taken aback that he would suggest "people" names.

   Anyway, its only been in the last week or two that we've really even seen their cat. He started off sneaking into our house to eat Pink's cat food. I thought that would send Pink over the edge, but he was surprisingly willing to share his food. Since he didn't make a big fuss about it we just let him eat. We figure the food is cheap and if we can ease the suffering of another animal, why not. I decided to give him a name and since he reminds of the Chris Kattan's spastic wild Mango character that's what I've taken to calling him.

   Almost like clockwork he's on our doorstep in the morning for breakfast and then he proceeds to play with Pink for hours. It seems to work the aggressiveness out of Pink, plus it's really entertaining to watch. Even though Mango is significantly smaller than Pink, I'd put money on Mango in a deathmatch. He's just had to work harder to survive. I really enjoy how they pretend they're just being chill and then they'll fling themselves at the other one.

   After a few hours of playing they fall asleep on a chair in the backyard and soak up the sun. Then they have another round of wrestling and eat some more. I've noticed that Pink is only willing to share when he's not hungry. If there hasn't been any food in his bowl for awhile, which is rare since we overfeed him, and I put some in and both cats come, Pink will eat while holding one paw on Mango's forehead to keep him at a distance. I stiff-arm of sorts.

   Another funny thing that they do is that when one of them goes to take a poop, the other one has to join in. I'm sure you all want to see a picture of this, but I thought it was hilarious. It sort of reminds me of how dogs just have to pee in the same spot after another dog has just gone.

   Since they play a lot we decided to give Mango a flea bath just so he wouldn't give Pink any, and we were prepared for quite a fight. It was weird though, he almost seemed not to mind the water at all. It might have just been that he'd never had so much attention and contact focused on him that he was distracted. At any rate we got him clean only to find him literally coated in oil later that evening. We think the neighbors either resent the fact that we cleaned their cat or they were trying to get rid of the mange if he had it or just maybe they think you clean a cat by dunking it in oil.

   Anyway, Mango has become a fixture at the house. Undoubtedly we treat him better than the neighbors and he's even found a way to cross the wall between our houses to sleep here at night. The neighbors complained to us that he was trying to sleep in their bed with them now. We don't let Mango in the bed, cause who knows what he's been in over at their house, but they think we're corrupting their cat. They also think we're corrupting the little girl next door. Christine actually showed her how to pet a cat instead of just man-handling it. It was probably the first time it has purred before and now the girl really seems to have feelings for the cat which the parents hate.

   It's sad that they have to think of animals like objects. Otherwise how would they be able to do their weekly pig slaughter or butcher their chickens? I guess they could become vegetarians....hah.

   Another less welcome critter in the house is this possum that keeps raiding our garbage and cat food. I was sitting in the kitchen the other night and I heard all of this water falling, so I went in the backyard and found it peeing on our roof and it was running off. It then started trying to climb across the rafters, which is where I took this picture. I got our broom out and beat it with the handle a little, it opened its mouth to hiss and just drooled. It quit coming a few nights but couldn't resist gringo garbage.

Posted by Tao at 11:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (16)

   The only road from Guatemala to Belize isn’t even paved. A three hour bumpy ride gets you to small wooden bridge and customs awaits on the other side. Then its a couple kilometers walk, if you choose to avoid the taxi hoard, to the bus terminal. We stopped there and ate some great home-style burritos at an old woman’s stand. They were so good I even got a couple for the road.

   Now I had thought Guatemala was different from El Salvador, but Belize was another planet. The racial demographics were all over the map, Asians, Blacks, and Latinos all speaking one language or another. English is the national language, but you wouldn’t really know it. The Latinos spoke Spanish, but if you spoke Spanish to a black person they’d look at you like you were crazy. Besides English the black people spoke Creole, which is just sort of like Caribbean Ebonics, as well as something called Garunfo which had no resemblance to anything I knew of.

   All of these different ethnicities seemed to be living together rather harmoniously in such close proximity, at least as far as I could tell they were harmonious. I saw several mixed couples and I didn’t sense any tension between anyone, but that may be due to the entire Belizean relaxed attitude. The Anglos are even represented by a rather large population of Mennonites and Amish that produce 99% of all the agriculture and dairy products for the country. Someone told me what language they spoke, but I can’t remember it now. The gringos stick mostly to the beaches and the keys.

   We got to Belize City with a couple hours to spare before Christine’s parents arrived so we went walking around looking for some new swim trunks for me. I’ve lost so much weight that the ones that used to be too tight for me now just fall off. Belize City is nothing impressive, lots of garbage, and canals filled with sewage flow throughout the city. We managed to find some shorts, not exactly what I would have picked out if there’d been a decent selection, but ones that would at least stay on. Then it was off to the airport.

   Just as we got on the bus to the airport a major cold-front blew through and it started raining buckets. The wind was whipping so hard I saw several people with umbrellas turned inside-out. It would remain relatively cold and overcast for the remainder of our week, but it wouldn’t be able to dampen our spirits. Christine’s parents managed to just miss the end of the initial front and their plane arrived on time. While we waited in the airport I marveled at the ridiculous tourist shirts, one of them read “Unbelizeable” which is where I got the title of this post.

   We grabbed a couple of Belikins, the Belizean national beer, at the airport restaurant and then hopped on an island hopper to Ambergris Key, one of the two large keys off the Belizean coast. We were greeted at the landing strip by Pat, a lawyer friend of a lawyer friend of “Uncle Dougie”, Christine’s step-dad. Pat has an amazing house right on the beach next to his brother’s house, which we were going to be staying in. It was above and beyond anything I’d expected. White sand, palm trees, and a gorgeous house 50 feet from the shore.

   The first night we just relaxed, sat around, drank a little wine, and talked to Pat. He does criminal law in Washington State, with a specialty in marijuana cases. You can see his webpage here if you are in need of his servies: www.legaljoint.net. His business card even comes on a pack of rolling papers. I think has the right idea, working from a tropical island in the Caribbean. I hope to follow that example soon enough.

   The next day we went down to sign-up for scuba lessons so we could get open-water certified. We ran some other errands like grocery shopping and renting a golf cart. There aren’t too many actual cars on the island, mostly just golf carts. Ambergris is the more upscale Belizean Key, the other is Key Caulker which is more of the backpacker’s island. Honestly I think I would have felt more comfortable there instead. It makes me uncomfortable having people wait on me hand and foot, even if it is my vacation. I’m sure they get paid well for what they do relative to the rest of Belize but I don’t like being part or even seen as part of the upper-class. I’m just a populist at heart.

   Apart from that I thoroughly enjoyed myself for the week on the island. We went snorkeling that first full day since we weren’t going to start our scuba classes until the following day. It was actually my first time to really snorkel before, maybe because I’d never been anywhere worth doing it. Just in the shallow side of the reef there were all kinds of brain coral and little brightly colored fish. Darlene, Christine’s mom, even saw a manta ray, and Christine claims to have seen a 4’ lobster.

   It was a good intro to the scuba classes because I’d been a little nervous about swimming in open-water, in the Caribbean especially. I remember watching Jaws for the first time when I was very little and being completely freaked out. For years after that I had to walk all the way around a swimming pool before I’d get in, just to make sure. Even swimming in a fresh water lake I could just picture what my feet looked like dangling like chicken tenders from down below. I eventually got over the fresh water and pool phobias but the ocean was still a real fear.

   It was something that had bothered me about my whole dream of sailing. Sure most sailors in antiquity couldn’t even swim, but I didn’t want to have this fear with me if I did decide to go for a swim. So to get on with the story, the first day we simply did drills in the swimming pool and it was a breeze. The next day we went out to the marine reserve and did our first real dive to 30 feet. It was incredible. It was like being on safari on another planet with almost zero gravity. There were all kinds of colored fish and coral. We saw big green eels, small polka-dotted eels, baracuda, parrot fish, lobsters, and innumerable other types of fish. On the 2nd dive of the day we ran into a group of 3 large Spotted-eagle rays flying along gracefully.

   That really got me jazzed and on our 2nd day of diving we dove down into a group of 7-10 nurse sharks. Christine took to swimming after them immediately, and although I knew they wouldn’t attack us I was still wary. Then I turned to look at one of the dive instructors and he had a nurse sharked tucked under each arm to show us how harmless they were. They didn’t seem to mind at all, in fact they seemed to like it when he flipped them over and rubbed their bellies. That did it for me and in no time I was petting them and trying to get them to pull me around. When we saw a much bigger lemon shark off in the deeper waters I was right there trying to chase it down for a better look. Then something happened, when I imagined myself swimming on the surface, it was no longer a shark looking up at me, but me looking up at me.

   The rest of the dives were great, we saw a sea turtle and poked and prodded all kinds of sea life. Some of the color combinations and patterns on the fish even inspired some web design ideas. It got me psyched up enough that when Christine and I go to Honduras to meet my Mom and Gary in a few months we’re going to get our advanced diving certification so that we can dive shipwrecks and caves.

   Apart from the scuba diving we took a boat trip up into Belize to visit some Mayan ruins at a site called Lamanai. The trip took us up through the mangroves to a small village where locals made wood carvings out of a type of heavy iron wood called Ziricote. From there we took a van to another boat that took us to the ruins. The weather wasn’t too great for the trip so we didn’t see as much wildlife as normal, only one small crocodile and the sounds of howler monkeys off in the distance. The ruins themselves were pretty cool, especially this face carved into one of the temples. At the very least we got to see a bigger chunk of Belize.

   The weather didn’t really cooperate the entire time we were there, but it wasn’t so bad that it could stop us from enjoying ourselves. Once while we were fishing just off the beach, a white squall came in and just before it got to us it made two complete rainbows one on top of the other. Then the squall hit us with sideways rain and was gone again within minutes. It was a pretty spectacular thing.

   We went fishing a couple times and didn’t have a whole lot of luck until the last time. Eric, the son of one of Pat’s helpers, really had it down to art. Basically they just use line and a hook and no rod. They use a net to catch sardines that you then immediately cut up for bait unless Romeo, one of Pat’s dogs, doesn’t steal them out of your bucket first.

   There’s a certain guilt that comes with fishing on a coral reef, something like fishing in an exotic fish aquarium. We caught mainly different kinds of snapper, which were very pretty, and very delicious. We ended up with around 15 or so and I helped Eric clean them down by the shore. While we were there standing in about 6 inches of water I turned around and saw a big green eel, maybe 2 ½ - 3’ long writhing just a few feet from MY feet. I basically flew out of the water yelling “EEL!” and Eric was right behind me. Having seen those mean looking bastards with their rows of jagged teeth under water I knew I didn’t want one, obviously hungry and attracted by the fish guts, squirming around by my ankles. Eric simply said “oh man, that’s a big one!”, he then proceeded to whack at it with a large piece of driftwood and it took off in a hurry. The next day Pellon, Pat’s helper guy, cooked up some kick-ass ceviche with the fish that just rocked.

   Considering our normal menu of beans, rice, and pasta we were eating like kings. I’m not usually a big fan of fish, but this trip also started to sway my stance on that. I think I was dissuaded from fish because of all the little bones like tiny invisible slivers that karmically hooked me back. That wasn’t the case with the snapper and grouper, they were bone-free fillets that soaked up the flavor.

   One night we took a trip away from town to eat dinner at Captain Morgan’s resort. We hadn’t been up that way and the roads were water-logged and pot-holed but we rolled on. It was a nice dinner, good wine, and company. It was also the last place that I know I had my camera case with my driver’s license and debit card inside. I know this because you can see the little blue thing on the table there. Obviously I didn’t loose the camera itself, and calls to the restaurant produced nothing, but there’s a good chance I lost it on the drive home.

   By the time we left it was dark, the raincoats that had been left on the seat of the golf cart were gone and it was starting to rain. As we started down the road the battery began to die on the cart and we all ended up pushing. Not only did the motor stop working, but so did the headlights, and although I hadn’t noticed any turns in the road, there apparently were. Christine was the first to pick up on the fact that we weren’t on the right track and by the time we got to any really recognizable landmark we were already half a mile past the house. After turning around we ran over and crushed a poor turtle we didn’t see in the road.

   So you can see how through all of that my camera case might have ended up in the mud somewhere. Luckily no one had been using it, so I canceled it and we’re still holding our breath for the replacement to arrive. It’s hard enough getting money out down here as is, but we’ll make it.

   We said goodbye to Pat and everyone and took our hopper plane back to Belize City where we said goodbye to Darlene and Doug. It took us most of the rest of day but we finally got to Flores in Guatemala. It’s this little island in the middle of a lake that was one of the last Mayan hold-outs to the Spanish. It’s a really nice little island with tiny little streets that I imagine are remnants from the Mayans.

   We spent the night at this really cool little hostel that was only $7/night for a private room. They had a real cool set-up with loft-rooms, ping-pong table, parrots, and a nice restaurant with good vegetarian plates. It was called “Los Amigos” if anyone is interested.

   The next day was my 26th birthday, and I have to say I’ve already gotten to the point where I wouldn’t even know it was my birthday if I didn’t have people remind me. That’s probably a side effect of not having a real schedule, half the time I don’t even know what day of the week it is. Anyway, we took a microbus out to this little beach place on the other side of the lake that has really nice views and pristine water. In that one day we probably got more sun than the entire week in Belize. It sucks that we had to leave the beach to find the sun, but I’m not that surprised.

   When we got back to the hostel we signed up to go to Tikal at 5:00 the next morning. We were hoping to catch the sunrise over the temples. We missed the sunrise, but we also got there before the vast majority of the tourists did. It was really cool being in such a well-preserved forest. You could still see a lot of mounds that you knew had to have ruins under them. The ruins themselves were the most beautiful I’ve seen. Teotihuacan in Mexico is very impressive, but something about the jungle surrounding the temples at Tikal makes it feel more mystical and easier to imagine them as they once were. Unfortunately we forgot to charge up our camera so we only have a few pictures.

   Apart from the ruins, the wildlife is incredible. When we first got to the grand plaza we came across a group of about 17 coatimundis, they look like a cross between a raccoon and an ant eater. I’d also never seen wild toucans before, and we saw several along with a number of wild parrots and other beautiful birds. The sheer number of spider monkeys was amazing, they were all over the place. I have yet to see a howler monkey, but once again we heard them off in the distance.

   One of the funniest things I have seen in a long time happened while we were walking down a back trail trying to see some wildlife away from the tourist crowds. A spider monkey crossing over the path in the trees took a dump on Christine’s shoulder. I was laughing so hard I nearly cried. Ever since one tried to pee on me in El Salvador I’d been wary of standing directly underneath them. I imagine Christine will have the same caution in the future.

   That’s pretty much it for our vacation. We left that evening and were on buses home for about the next 20 straight hours. The house was just as we’d left it and Mr. Pink was more than glad to see us. Although, at this moment he’s got a bad case of worms and we’re pretty worried about him. We’ve given him some medicine and if he doesn’t improve we’ll take him to the vet in the next city over tomorrow. We don't like to see him in pain.

   I’ve also just finished up another website and I’m looking for more work at the moment. I’ve got a few small side programming jobs and I’m working on a renovation of this page. It’s actually more than a renovation, it’s my greatest creation, but it’s not yet ready to be revealed. Anyway, if you know anyone that needs a page design, updated, overhauled, or optimized for search engines, let me know. Here’s a couple of my most recent works: Mississippi Natural Products, JPS Bond Campaign(which passed with 80% of the vote), Big D’s Tepee BBQ, and The Conscious Living Project. Oh, and as always the big versions of the pictures from this post plus some others from the vacation are in the photo gallery and I added a video to my last entry so scroll down and check it out.

   Now that I’ve shamelessly plugged myself and those websites, I’m going to make some dinner. Eggplant pasta sound good to anyone?

Posted by Tao at 07:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (18)

   It had begun to seem like something did not want us to go on our vacation. We had tried desperately to finish our World Map before we left so that it could be protected by a layer of varnish, but we settled for just putting the varnish on the parts we’d done. The varnish the woman at the hardware store sold us also had a brown tint to it even though she had sworn up and down that it didn’t. What did it matter to her anyway? It was a sale and the only way we’d know it wasn’t true was once we’d started using it, that’s if she’d known either way. I think I’m going to start asking for the opposite of what I’m looking for because then I know if they tell me no, then it’s actually what I’m looking for.

   Anyway, long story short our world map looks somewhat aged now, but it didn’t matter to us as we scrambled aboard the bus down the volcano with our backpacks. The 2nd bus to San Salvador was late and over-crowded and when we caught the 3rd bus to the international bus terminal I questioned whether that terminal would accept credit cards or have an ATM. It turned out they didn’t accept credit cards and their ATM wouldn’t take my debit card. To top it off the last bus to Guatemala City left in 10 minutes and the nearest ATM was half a mile away. So, I left my backpack with Christine and ran like the wind. I got back just in time and apparently had outrun whatever was trying to keep us there.

   We stayed in a very simple room in a hotel in downtown Guatemala City for about $6 for the both of us. The next morning we found a bus heading to Xela(Shay-la), in the western Guatemalan highlands. We were heading for a hot springs up in the mountains known as Fuentes Georgianas. I was stunned at how different the landscape was from El Salvador. Women were wearing intricately hand-woven clothes while selling all kinds of hand-made goods along the roadside, while beautiful still-vegetated mountains rolled off as far as I could see. The variety of plants and trees made it seem as if we were somewhere between Japan and the American Northwest and the variety of planted crops had me guessing the entire trip. I even heard other people on the bus trying to figure out all the different things being grown. If you take a trip through El Salvador you’ll probably only notice 1 crop, corn. I don’t know if they think they can’t grow anything else, or if they’re simply too scared to try something different, but relying on one crop too much has always hurt civilizations eventually.

   It took us longer than we’d hoped to get to the springs, but it also took us through some breathtaking places; through a lush green river valley with sheer cliffs on either side and past a small indigenous town with cobbled streets and beautiful church where we found a ride up into the mountains to the springs. We rode in the back of the truck and stood up to soak up the feeling of life that was floating in the misty green valley. As we went higher the temperature fell as did the valley floor.

   The hot springs were nestled back in a deep cut in the mountain, which was really another volcano. As you walked back along the path there were half a dozen small cabins and at the very rear were the actual hot springs. There was one large pool which was directly fed by the springs and therefore the hottest, and two smaller cooler pools a little ways down. The main pool had several large boulders in it and a stone floor. The water had a greenish tint, no doubt from the sulfur, and it also tasted like someone had dumped lemon concentrate in it.

   We soaked up our share the first night and retired to one of the cabins which we found stocked with firewood which we didn’t hesitate to put to use. It took some doing to finally get the fire going because although the wood had no doubt been cut and dead for some time the generally high level of moisture in the air had eventually soaked into the wood, but after a big pile of kindling and several Newsweeks it was roaring. It was a good thing too because it sure got cold up there.

   The next morning we decided to climb up a small trail to find the source of the hot springs. It took us about 20 minutes including the time it took us to backtrack a wrong turn but it was well worth the trouble. It shared a lot of the characteristics of the “infernillos” that I visited during my Peace Corps training, but significantly more pristine. There weren’t old men scraping the sulfur off of the rocks for whatever mystical health benefits they claimed, so that there were large tufts of yellow crystals growing out of the many steaming vents.

   The view from the top was incredible as well. We could see the valley floor and a large distant volcano, looking perfectly conical it the rising sunlight. After exploring for awhile I thought I’d found a small spewing geyser, but it turned out to simply be a hose with a hole in it.

   We soaked again, starting at the cooler pools and working our way up until we were pruned through and through. There were a wide variety of people enjoying it along with us, I heard French, German, and some English with Australian accents. There were also a good amount of local people who brought their own bowls to bathe with. Some of the older people prayed at the base of the springs while others filled their bowls from the rock and drank their fill. One little girl got her first bath and was outraged when her parents dunked her head. Can you imagine being 5 years old before you’ve ever had your head fully submerged in water?

   Instead of taking a truck down the side of mountain we decided to walk. It was 8 kilometers, but down all the way. The fog blocked our views of the valley but we could still see the farmers working away in the mist. Although I see a lot of corn fields in El Salvador I rarely see anyone working in them, it’s completely different in Guatemala. There were people everywhere manicuring their various crops to perfection. They seemed to take a lot more pride in what they were doing; however, I was pretty disappointed to see them using pesticides.

   In the small town at the base of road up to the springs we stopped to wait for the bus. Our tour book mentioned a patron saint of sorts called Saint Simon or Maximon by the locals. Apparently he was a cowboy of sorts and his spirit now lives on in a life-sized dummy that gets passed around between 3 families every few days and gets dressed up in different outfits. When we found him he was dressed in a cowboy hat, glasses, bandana, mittens, and a number of scarves and other clothes. He was seated in a throne of sorts behind dozens of lit candles with so much melted wax on the floor it could have been a piece of art. Among the candles were also entire packs of cigarettes left burning and on a table in front of him were 5-8 full bottles of liquor. While we watched, a shaman wrapped in the American flag waved branches of some kind of plant around the bodies of several people while they prayed. After they were done they tilted Maximon’s chair back and poured liquor into his open mouth. Now I have no idea where the liquor goes, but I imagine there’s a chamber in the dummy that the families have to clean out. For some reason I doubt they just toss out the liquor so I bet that makes for an interesting cocktail.

   We got back into Xela and then trucked it half-way back to Guatemala City to a town called Chichicastenango to check out their big market day. The town wasn’t anything amazing, but the market was quite something. There was an outer market meant for all the tourists, and there were plenty, but if you went more into the core you could find the market meant for the locals. It was a pretty stark difference, but really what do locals need with wooden sculptures and purses they themselves probably made.

   The most interesting part of the whole thing was a church in the center of all the action. The steps were covered in flowers, burning incense, and women in traditional garb selling all of the above or simply just being. Our tour book said that the church was built on top of a holy Mayan site so Mayans still came there to worship in their own way. Quite the sign of the lack of respect the Spaniards had for the native religions. It’s about as literal as they could get to replacing the Mayan religion with Catholicism.

   Later that day we headed out to Antigua, which is right by Guatemala City just to check it out. I’d heard of the great architecture and all of that, but I was actually kind of disgusted by what we found. There were easily more tourists roaming the streets than locals, and every street was littered with travel agencies, McDonalds, and Spanish schools for all the semester abroad kids. It was hard to say if it was just too scary for most people to actually go out to a small town to see the real culture in action, or if they simply didn’t realize they had essentially invaded this town to the extent that it no longer had any legitimate culture. We stayed the night and got the hell out as fast as we could the next day and headed towards Belize.

Stay tuned for Part 2 coming soon.

Posted by Tao at 04:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (16)

   We had another field trip with our ecology club today. This time we were heading down to visit the protected forest with spider monkeys that I went to during my Peace Corps training immersion weekend. I called my friend Bart who was the volunteer there at the time, although he now works for the man at the training center, and he set it up for a guide to meet us. We also were lucky enough to have Bill, the new main man at the Casa Pastoral give us a ride in his pick-up. He had part of the day free and wanted to see some monkeys too.

   Unfortunately as we came down off the volcano it started to rain harder and harder. By the time we got to the forest they were all soaked in the back. The guide that Bart had set up for us was the same guy who was supposed to show me around the area during my immersion weeked and then bailed on me to go campaign for the mayor. It seems that he is a realiably unreliable fellow and we were told he had gone to do something for the Navy that day. However, someone told us he'd arranged for another guide to take us, but the new guide came and told us that it was too muddy to go, which I'm sure it probably was.

   Rather than disappoint the kids completely we drove into Puerto El Triunfo, the large city in the bay, and ate breakfast at this nice two story thing they built down by the dock with all kinds of food vendors and restaurants. Even though it wasn't technically the ocean it might as well have been for the kids. They just started crawling all over the rocks looking for crabs and shells and whatnot. Its not a particularly beautiful area but they didn't seem to mind. They ended up with a dozen or more small to medium sized crabs that they brought back to make soup with.

   As you can probably guess from the photos, we decided to take them out on a boat for a small tour of the bay. They seemed a little nervous at first but after no time at all were spraying water everywhere and having a good time. Even though there wasn't a whole lot to see in the bay I know they'll never forget their first time and perhaps last time, in a boat.

   I rode with the kids in the back of the truck on the trip home and since it wasn't raining by then they were really enjoying getting blasted by the wind. They don't get to ride in vehicles very much, in fact, one girl threw up the last time we took them on the bus. It was hilarious seeing them smiling as big as they could being blasted by the wind so hard they had drool streaks coming down both sides out of their mouths.

   Anyway, I'm actually gonna miss the little turds while we're gone on vacation for the next couple weeks. This will probably be my last entry until we get back. If I have time and feel like it I might write one from a cyber café, but I won't be able to put pictures up until afterwards.

Posted by Tao at 10:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (17)

I mailed off my absentee ballot today. I half expected not to get it until the day after the election which is what happened to me during the primaries. However, I'm now a registered Independant instead of a Democrat so that may have made the difference. Now whether it gets counted or not is a different story, but I didn't vote straight party lines anyway. I voted for Kinky Friedman, an independant jewish country musician for governor of Texas. I hear he's actually in 2nd behind the republican incumbent right now.

Also as some of you might know my 26th birthday is coming up on November 6th. I'll be spending it on a beach in Belize doing my impression of a Corona commercial. Now I realize there are a few people out there, especially from Mississippi, that might normally vote Republican and who might simultaneously be thinking of a birthday present for me. Think no further, all I want for my birthday is a blue vote. The last poll taken in Mississippi, before they decided it wasn't even worth polling again, shows Trent Lott with a 37 point lead. So even if you normally vote Republican your guy will still win, just by less. All I really hope is that Lott might stop and say, "hey, I didn't win by as much as usual maybe I should rethink some of my stances", however far-fetched that might be.

In somewhat related news, we were painting the world map today and the instructions we have include a list of colors to paint each country which has the U.S. as red. Well, I made a slight change and needless to say it's now blue. I really think the person who put the list together should have made the color something neutral like orange or purple just to avoid any political connotation. I would have done that with ours if I didn't have the obligation of negating the numerous red U.S.s painted around the world by now thanks to this Peace Corps packet.

Here's a nice little clip of Christine's life skills class playing "corra caliente" or Hot Quarter. It's an ice breaker with two teams standing in lines, each person has to drop a quarter in their shirt and shake until it falls out and then the next person picks it up and does the same. The first line to finish wins. I think this is the most popular ice breaker overall that we've found. These girls certainly like it.

PS - I'm working on the Mr. Pink video.

Posted by Tao at 07:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

   I've had a couple of old pretty cool videos that I know I tried to convert to put on the web but didn't really work unless you had some special player. Well, this new thing I've got is a lot easier I think so I'm going to post them again. This first one is a boa crushing a rabbit. Some guys that were passing decided they were going to try to act brave and free the rabbit although it was already crushed and beyond hope. So basically they just messed up the natural life cycle of things and killed both animals.

   This next one is of some monkeys at a protected forest I visited during my training. The forest was really only 5 acres or so, but the monkeys make up for it. We're actually planning a trip back to this forest with our ecology club later this month so they can see them.

   Hope you enjoyed those. The movies in the future ought to have sound since Christine's camera has a built-in mic. We've already got a few, but none of them are really blog-worthy.

Posted by Tao at 10:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (9)

   This entry has been so long in coming that the amount of things I would have to write was so overwhelming I didn’t have time to do it. A catch-22 of sorts, or perhaps more of a black hole effect, but either way it’s getting done. While I know I had mentioned a video blog post previously, I think I’ll save that for another shorter installment.

   So I guess I wrote about a month ago and I ended my last entry as the school bands were kicking into high gear for their parades and competitions so I’ll start there. We headed up to the park in town around 9am, which is considered late. We still got there before the bands started playing, but not early enough to get a good seat. Unlike normal parades where the bands march the route and play and then stop near the end in front of the judges’ table to show off, they skip straight to the judges’ table and then follow their parade route for literally two blocks, where they turned a corner and literally disbanded. So unless you were able to cram in around the judges’ table, which we weren’t, you didn’t get to see the real showy stuff.

   Another thing which we hadn’t anticipated was that every kid in the band, including cheerleaders, color guard, and random dancers all had really overdone costumes. Not only that, but we were told that they have all new outfits made every year. It really kind of disgusted us in a way. They say that one of the biggest expenses for kids to go to school down here is being able to pay for their school uniforms, which I don’t think should be a requirement anyway. So these kids in the city have nice instruments and brand new uniforms, while the kids in the country side a mile or two away don’t even have books much of the time.

   A week after that they held the departmental band competition in Usulutan, which is the big city in our department of the same name. We took a couple of girls from our ecology club on a separate public bus just to get them out of Berlin. We’re trying to broaden their horizons a little, let them get a taste of the world outside, even if it’s just a bigger version of their own city. It was a pretty big deal, one girl threw up because she had only ridden a bus a few times.

   It was fun watching all of the bands compete, it was obvious that some of the gimmicks that had probably won someone 1st place in the past and were now a must have since everyone else was doing them; lifting girls up on the big drums or throwing candy to the crowd or what have you. It also made me feel lucky to be in Berlin, turns out as bad as I thought our bands were, they could have been worse. In fact, the high school band that practices across the street from our house took home 1st place in their category. That would probably mean more if they hadn’t made so many categories that just about every school got 1st, 2nd, or 3rd. They really have a hard time hurting anyone’s feelings here. I still say it was our "Berlin's Bands are #1" sign that put them over the top.

   We had a terrible snafu after that competition ended. We had taken a public bus in, and told the girls how much they needed to bring for the fare, but they apparently hadn’t brought enough. So rather than tell us and have us pay for them and be a little upset at them, they disappeared into the crowd to try to catch a ride on one of the school buses. Needless to say we were pretty horrified that we’d lost them and split up looking for them. I eventually found them on the kindergarten’s bus, but then we couldn’t find Christine, and by the time it was all said and done with the girls took the free bus home and Christine and I were stuck waiting for a public bus

   We did however manage to catch the girl’s school’s bus, so we got a straight free ride home. It was especially lucky for our friend Dave who had been waiting at our house for over an hour. We had some miscommunication because my cell phone wasn’t letting me check my voice mail, but who knows how long he would’ve had to wait if we’d had to take the public buses.

   Dave was in town for a Peace Corps soccer game. Peace Corps has men’s and women’s team that go and play different volunteer’s community’s teams. It just so happened that Darren had invited them to his village this weekend, so Christine and I took the opportunity to go check out his site and hang out with some friends.

   They also happened to be a little short so Christine and I both played in the games, which turned out surprisingly well for Peace Corps which doesn’t have a winning record to say the least. The girls team won 5-3 against the barefoot 6th grade team, ooooh, in their face. Christine even scored once, but she was bringing it as you can see from the picture. The guys team actually played the adult male team and if it hadn’t been for a salvadoreno guy that played on our team we almost certainly would have lost.

   Basically the whole village came out to watch, it’s a really big deal to have so many gringos and gringas in such an out of the way place that I’m sure they’ll remember it for a long time to come. Although, what exactly in particular they’ll talk about I can’t say.

   That night our friend Jessica crashed at our house and we whooped it up with a couple other new Peace Corps volunteers that decided to stay in town and check out the laguna the next day, which I hear they enjoyed. We had some good conversation that night and I lent Jessica a copy of the China Study, so we’ll see what she thinks, she’s a pretty hardcore omnivore.

   As far as projects are concerned we’ve started our world map at the boys’ school. We’ve almost got it all drawn, we’ll probably finish that up tomorrow and then we can start painting. I’ve been a little disappointed in the turnout to help with it. The boys who volunteered to do it never showed up or if they did, they did so only once. They just said they couldn’t draw and even after we explained that we weren’t asking them to make up new countries just to copy what was in each little square of the grid we’d drawn they still didn’t want to do it. Almost all the ones who did do it, did it very sloppily as if by doing so they could point to it and say “see, I told you I can’t draw”.

   Anyway, once we start painting I have a feeling a lot more kids will show up. I’m a little concerned that they’re going to be sloppy with that as well though. They were slinging the blue paint around when we were painting the ocean, getting all over the place, even after I taped off the edges they crossed it repeatedly, not to mention the oil based paint they got on their school uniforms. I can only warn someone so many times.

   One thing with the world map that’s already rewarding is all of the kids that come by and are just fascinated by it. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard kids say “wow, El Salvador is so chiquito”. If the most that comes of this is that the kids realize how big the world is and it sparks some interest in seeing more and getting out, then that’s great.

   Christine is having a lot of luck with her life skills lessons to our landlord’s 6th grade girls’ class. She gets all kinds of participation, kids ask questions, and listen. I think about the same classes I tried at the boys’ school and it’s like another world. I feel like the men and women’s spheres here are so different it really does seem like working only with girls you can accomplish a lot more. No matter what I teach the boys, they are far more concerned about what the other boys think than whatever I tell them. I think that’s why the gang problem here is so bad.

   The girls on the other hand are actually willing to take advice and are concerned about improving themselves and their station in life, in general anyway. I think she’s also targeting the right age group, because by 8th grade most of the kids have entered this “too cool” stage where if they listen or learn something they’re a nerd, or whatever facsimile they have of nerds here.

   We've also helped the boys' school get a replacement computer monitor with our friend Jared's help. It was more than a little disappointing when it wouldn't turn on after we got it to the school as you can tell by the look on my face, but turns out it only needs a new cable. The director wanted to call all of the students in to thank us before we'd even tried it, I'm sure glad we talked him out of it. I mean, he sure would have looked silly with that that saw through his head.

   Apart from all of that, we’ve been doing really well with our ecology club. I’ve given some really good lessons on geology and volcanoes recently. I’ve started bringing in my laptop to show them pictures of what I’m talking about in a powerpoint slideshow. If a picture says a 1,000 words in your own language, its probably worth 2,000 of my spanish ones.

   On the theme of volcanoes we took some of our kids to the laguna, which is in the crater of a volcano. Some of them had been there before but once I started showing them rocks that were hardened lava and explaining why there was sulfur there they really got into it. I was fielding all kinds of questions about this and that.

   We also dispelled the myth that there is a mermaid in the laguna that pulls young men down to the bottom and drowns them. We showed them all of the clay in the bottom of the laguna that explains why they get held down and drowned. It probably doesn’t help that most El Salvadorans can’t swim. We also explained that the reason it was only guys that had drowned was because they’re the only ones who try to show off how brave they are by swimming in it anyway. By the end of the day all the girls had their shoes off and were walking around in it. Granted it was only along the edge, but they’d gasped earlier in the day when I walked out in it.

   While we were up there we also tried to show them how to play kick ball, but since most people here don’t even know how to play baseball or softball it was pretty difficult. We gave up on it after awhile and went back to Ultimate frisbee which they’ve all grown to love.

   Our next project with the kids is to try to build some of those paper mache volcanoes and set them off at a parents reunion to show them what they’ve been doing and learning. We’ll probably bring in some of their artwork and other stuff too. We have to get on it though since school ends Nov. 7th. I couldn’t ask for a better birthday present.

   We won’t actually be here for my birthday though since Christine’s parents are coming down to Belize at the end of October. They’re leaving on the 5th so we’re thinking we’ll stick around there for my birthday on the 6th. I’m planning on getting scuba certified there. I never really had that much of a desire to do it, but now that I’m going to do it I’m actually looking forward to it a lot. Maybe I’m just looking forward to a vacation of any sort.

   Speaking of vacations my Mom and Gary will be coming down at the end of December for a week. We’re going to meet them in Honduras and head out to the island of Utila in the bay area. There’s supposedly pretty bad crime against tourists on the mainland, so we’ll just have to stick to the beaches and coral reefs on the islands. There’s supposedly really good scuba diving and snorkeling there as well and it’s one of the only reliable places to find whale sharks. I’m not really sure how I’d handle being in the water with something that big even knowing that it only eats algae.

   Speaking of gringos, we’ve got two new ones in town. There’s a new Crisis Corps volunteer here. Crisis Corps is for ex-Peace Corps volunteers who go on 6 month assignments to places that are in crisis like during the tsunami and after katrina. We were pretty disturbed to know we were in a crisis. Apparently after the 2001 earthquakes a large fault opened up on the big hill overlooking Berlin. There’s a good chance it could cause a big mudslide here and so the new guy, Zach, is a geologist helping them figure out the situation. He says they’ve got a machine up there that measures tension from one side of the fault to the other and will let them know if the landslide moves any more than 20cm and stays there. When he asked them what happens if it just went all at one time, they just looked at each other, and then said, “that’s a good question”. Another problem is that the alarm that it sets off is only on the machine. It doesn’t have any way of alerting the people down below. Brilliant!

   Where we’re located it’s not too dangerous, but some places farther up the hill could be in some trouble. I think right now he’s just looking at trying to cover up the fault to keep all the water off the slide plane, sounds like a pretty good easy plan to me.

   The other new gringo is Bill, he’s taking over Bob’s spot at the Casa Pastoral. They basically do work in the rural villages around the city. They set them up with a church who sponsors projects in their adopted village and then send a group of people down once a year or so to check it out.

   Anyway, Bob was a really nice guy, but the new guy Bill is awesome. He really seems to have a good grasp on sustainable development and like us, believes that education is one of the main keys. He’s asked us to give him some spanish classes a couple times a week to supplement the ones he’s getting from a salvadoreno and he also asked us to be translators when some of the church delegations come down. He’s also offered to take some of our ecology kids to see this protected forest with spider monkeys in one of their trucks. That’s going to be great because it’ll save us a ton of money and be a lot faster. In general though he seems to have less of the hand-out mentality that Bob had and we think he’s going to be great.

   I guess the last thing I wanted to talk about was my soaring web design business. I’ve got jobs stacked up which is great and I really enjoy doing it, but man does it take up all of my free time. I just finished this webpage for a $150 million school bond initiative in Jackson, Mississippi. Right before that I did a web page for this bar-b-que restaurant inside a giant tepee shaped building and my next project is for a mushroom farm. Before you ask, it’s shitake mushrooms, geez.

   So anyway, once I actually get paid for all this work I’ll have my credit card all paid off and we’ll be living quite comfortably down here. It’s really the way to do it. Live in a 3rd world country but get paid like you’re in the 1st.

   Well, thats all for me. I told you this was going to be a big one. I hope you enjoyed it, drop me a comment, I really enjoy them. I’m always tickled when someone I don’t personally know leaves one. Hasta luego y que le vaya bien.

I almost forgot your Mr. Pink fix.

Posted by Tao at 11:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (14)

   I haven't forgotten about you, don't worry. I've been incredibly busy the last 2-3 weeks. My web design business really picked up and we started painting/drawing on the world map every afternoon. I also started spending a lot more time preparing lessons for our ecology group since all of the band kids came back and I really want to make it quality. My teaching techniques and delivery have gotten a lot better, better eye contact, better questions, better organization, it's all good. We've also had a lot of visitors to entertain lately and random errands to run.

    A long story short, I've got a lot to write about, but I don't have time right this second. I'm hoping tomorrow evening I'll have some time and I was thinking I might use my webcam and make a video blog entry, maybe throw in some pictures to be fancy. Really, it'll probably take me less time than writing everything out. I'm also going to start taking more video clips on Christine's camera since it has a microphone on it too.

The big one is coming.

Posted by Tao at 05:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)

   Tomorrow is September 15, the little known independance day of all of Central America from Spain in 1821. Four months later Mexico invaded Guatemala and a year later said it was sorry, so on July 1, 1823 Guatemala and the other Central American Nations declared independance again, but this time added Mexico to the list of people they were independant from. El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicarauga, and Costa Rica then formed the United States of Central America, that alliance lasted all of 15 years.

   I can't help but wonder if the dissolution could have been initiated by the incessant school band practice leading up the independance day. I don't mean to be too critical but they've been practicing for 3 months now, every day, sometimes late into the evening. It wouldn't be so bad if they were in fact good or at least making noticeable improvement or had another song to play besides the Rocky theme. I guess whats really striking is that the renowned latin rhythm just isn't here. I saw it all over the place in Costa Rica, which makes me think it probably has to do with the civil war here.

   In Costa Rica at the bailes or dances all of the generations were present. Little kids, teenagers, old folks, they were raised on it and I imagine just about anyone with such a childhood would have pretty amazing rhythm. Here, the bailes are pretty much left to the teenagers, they play pop bootie music, and its mainly a bunch of creepy sex-starved boys waiting to feel-up any girl that strays too far from the pack. At other events they regularly dress up young girls, 5th or 6th graders, in "sexy" clothes and have them shake their asses at school events which they refer to as "cultural events". They are then shocked by the sky-high rate of molestation, rapes and sexual abuse of minors.

   I know they don't know any better, it's sort of like the war wiped out the responsible adults because they actually stood up for something and were summarily shot. Now it's as if it's children raising children, they can't teach them what they don't know, and unfortunately that means it's literally children raising children. The church tells them that birth control and condoms don't work so don't bother using them and the schools don't tell them the truth because, well, there's a giant virgin mary statue right when you walk in the girl's public school here. The parents don't want you to teach their kids sex ed because then they'll know how to do it, but if they'd open their eyes and look at their countries population density rivaling Japan's they'd realize they already know, they might as well be safe.

   Ok, that's my rant for the day. We're actually hoping that after tomorrow we'll start having more kids come to our ecological club. I don't think most of the kids are really that interested in what we have to teach, but they have nothing else to do, or atleast they didn't until band practice came along.

   A couple of the kids really are interested and have been awesome about recycling the plastic bottles. We've got about 40 full bags right now and hopefully we'll have enough to have them picked up by the recycling people in a month or so. We've started a sort of recycling money system. Each large bag of bottles counts as two bags, they then get back bag money which they can spend on field trips, movie nights, etc.

   During our last meeting we showed them this IMAX documentary that I personally subtitled for them. It took me quite awhile to do it and it was only 45 minutes long, but I think it was worth it. I'm going to make copies for the science teachers at both schools. The documentary was a general introduction to the evolution of life on the planet, the balance of the forces of nature, and how humans are fucking it up. We had them fill out a question sheet while they watched it which I think made them pay better attention. I'm thinking of doing some more subtitling for them and the schools in the future.

   Our next project is painting world maps at both the boys' and girls' school. We'll probably get started on it next week after the independance day stuff has calmed down. Christine has also gotten together with our landlord's wife who teachs 6th grade at the girls' school and they're going to be giving talks to her class on self-esteem, gender roles, and all kinds of good stuff after school.

   And as always, heres the latest Mr. Pink picture. He climbed up on top of the book shelf, looked at himself in the mirror and flipped out and off the shelf. We put the mirror on the floor, but even after 5 minutes he was still hissing at his own reflection and trying to go around behind the mirror to find the fiend who would invade his house. We finally just had to take it away from him.

Posted by Tao at 04:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (13)

   I'm a fairly impulsive person and I've been trying to reconcile a couple of forces within myself. In my last post I was dismissing the idea of life on a sailboat as escapist and leaning towards an organic farm instead. It occurred to me that that plan is also escapist. My days would certainly be filled with more interesting tasks and I'm sure it would be fulfilling, but I'd still be escaping from the world or what I see as my worldy responsibility.

   One of the forces is the fact that I don't want to depend on this system, economically, politically, or otherwise. That leads me to want to be self-sufficient, which inherently leads me to an escapist reality. The other force wants to take an active role in changing the system so that everyone can depend on it, which necessarily means an offensive route which simply can't be done alone so self-sufficiency just isn't an option.

   I kept trying to tell myself that I could do both. I could use my web skills from basically anywhere. Since that would be my main tool in any sort of effort for change why not do it from a sailboat or an organic farm. I would take a defensive position and then hurl my ideas from there, but no matter how I looked at it, I knew that I would not be nearly as effective unless I were actually on the front lines. So what it comes down to is fight or flight, and I know that I will never be content unless I do my damndest and stand up for what I believe.

   So my revised plan is this. When I get back to the states, instead of hiking the appalachian trail, I'll apprentice on an organic farm until August when I 'll hopefully start attending grad school in Baltimore for web design. I'll use my thesis project there to make a website, but it will be less of a website and more of a tool for community organization. That is, unless someone does it before me. Either way I'll offer my skills to moveOn and other web projects that work for social change afterwards.

   I'll still learn to sail at the sailing club in Baltimore and I'll be close to Maya in Boston. I don't see why I shouldn't still develop sailing and farming, I'd like to do both later in life, but only when I'm not using them to insulate myself from the world. It feels like I'm taking in account the two forces, going with the active offensive tactic now, but still preparing for a more self-sufficient life after I've given it my all at change.

   Anyway, I feel better writing this out. I'd been a little depressed feeling like both the plan to farm and to sail weren't going to be fulfilling and now I was back to square one. This new plan feels like I'm reconciling the two sides of me and I may be putting off my pull to sail and farm, but I'll be able to satisfy that by doing the farming apprenticeship and taking sailing lessons during school in Baltimore until I'm really ready for that.

Posted by Tao at 11:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (14)

    I guess it was actually just a small mouse, but since he's still a kitten it was relatively the size of a rat. Mr. Pink nabbed this guy sometime yesterday morning. It was already dead when I found him with it, and I didn't take it away from him until he tore off the head and ate it. I didn't want him to think he'd done something wrong since we want him to take on the bigger rats later on. The same day we got a package from Christine's mom with a bunch of catnip and a little fur fake mouse among other things. We hung up the mouse on a string and he's been practicing every chance he gets.

   I don't want to bore you with a whole bunch of "aww look at my kittie" talk, but come on, look at my kittie. Isn't he freakin' adorable. We've been spoiling him trying to see if we can make the first obese Salvadoranean cat. By the way, does anyone know how well cats digest mice skulls?

   Speaking of cats, I feel I really burned a couple of punks on the street corner the other day. They were yelling "piropos", which mean basically cat-calls, at Christine. I turned around and told them to save their cat-calls for their boyfriends. There were some street vendor ladies nearby who thought it was hilarious and I felt pretty good about myself. The guys here never throw piropos here unless they're with a bunch of other guys. It's just to act like you're both brave and smooth in front of your friends. Unfortunately, it's not brave since they only do it surrounded by a bunch of other guys, intimidating the girls, and it's no where close to smooth. How many dates you think they get by clicking their tongues and saying "I love you forever"?

   It certainly wouldn't be many if you hadn't bathed in a week. Our water, which normally runs just every other day has been off now for more than a week. They're doing some kind of work on the system so maybe we'll have water every day after this. My hopes aren't too high, we've been told the water would come back today but it didn't. We've still got enough water in our basin to last 4 or 5 days and the purified water truck still comes by. It's just that we can't bathe, flush the toilet, or wash clothes or dishes without it. We can bathe from the basin, but that water is just plain frigid. The running water is much more comfortable and it actually comes out of a shower head. I'm sure some of our Peace Corps friends would think us to be pampered, but running water is running water.

   In other news we're really starting to kick in our plastic bottle recycling program. We've got about 35 full garbage bags. Really only the girls have been doing it so far, we finally got a couple of boys to pick up with us this last Saturday. Christine and I go and pick up our share on Saturdays and we tell the kids to come and do it with us and afterwards we'll play games. We played Ultimate with them last Saturday and they really dug it. I'm hoping they'll tell the other kids how fun it was so more will participate in the clean-ups. Next week we're going to climb the big hill by town after the clean-up so we hope that will bring some more out of the woodwork.

   We've set up a system where they get credits for each bag they turn in. They use their credits to pay for the field trips and other activities. For instance we're planning a trip to the laguna which will cost them 4 bags, but a movie and popcorn night will only cost 1.

   The really active girls in our club came by our house yesterday and asked us if we'd climb the big hill with them today since they didn't have school for some reason or another. I swear they only have school once every four school days. They're good kids and we didn't have anything pressing so we agreed. It's nice and cool up there and very relaxing, plus the hike gave me some time to think. Anyway, here's a picture from up at the top. You can kind of see the pueblo in the background. Like always, the bigger versions of these pictures are in the photo gallery.

   Also, we've finally got all of our passport stuff taken care of. It only took us 4 trips to the Ministry of Immigration in San Salvador. We hopefully won't have to fill out another 90-day extension because we'll be leaving the region when we go to Belize in October and when we come back we get another 90 days. That should carry us right on through to our flights home on February 2nd. I'll be flying into Jackson and Christine is heading to Spokane. We're meeting back up near the end of February to go hiking on the Appalachian Trail. I think we've decided we're just going to go as far as we feel like.

   After that I've been putting some serious thought into what I'm gonna do. I had been thinking of trying my hand at some web design program at a grad school on a coast somewhere so I could learn sailing. The thing is, the whole dream of web design from a sailboat is seeming sort of escapist to me. I start imagining a day in that life and it's honestly pretty boring and lonely. Part of the idea was to remove myself from a society I didn't want to participate in, but just removing my support for it doesn't make it go away. Instead I'm starting to lean back toward the organic farm idea. It seems like making a farm as sustainable as possible, while working at a community level would not only remove my additional waste to the system but also be adding to positive change. I start imagining my daily life in that scenario and its much more engaging and entertaining.

   I guess what I'm thinking right now is that after we get done hiking I'll bum around and work until the next spring, then go and find a job working on an organic farm in the same growing zone that our land in Missouri is in, the closer to the actual farm the better. I'm not really sure how it'll all work, but it feels right. Getting to put some actual renewable energy and sustainable practices to work is pretty enticing, but then you add growing something to it as well as maybe doing some community organization and it's more than tempting.

   I don't plan on letting my web skills go to waste though. I'm certainly going to make a fantastic website for the farm, hopefully something where people order what they want ahead of time and then I set up drop times in a central location. On top of that I'll probably do web work when it's not the growing season to keep me busy and make sure I don't let those talents wither.

   I'm interested to hear your thoughts on this so post a comment or shoot me an e-mail. I understand that having a master's degree would enable me to teach, but that's not on my mind right now, and formalized education, at least how its set up now, is just not my style.

Posted by Tao at 05:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (17)

   Despite my now easily accessible internet, I still slack on my blog entries. I’ve been downloading movies and new programs like crazy. I’ve had a lot to catch up on. Mainly I’ve been downloading educational materials, mainly for me on web design and photoshop, but also on games to play with our ecology club, information for lectures for them, and some grad school scouting to boot. I’m also in the process of adding subtitles to an iMax documentary I downloaded so that we can show it to the group.

   Three days ago we picked up our new kitten from our landlord’s house. His name is Mr. Pink, partly because of Reservoir Dogs and partly because Christine likes pink. It’s nice to have a different kind of entertainment around the house. Just seeing him play with a plastic bag or a wadded-up ball of paper is amusing. We’ve already pretty much got him trained to fertilize my failed vegetable patch.

   We also had to give him a bath with some flea shampoo. He had some kind of bugs on him, but they were bigger than fleas and I’m not sure what they were, but I think we got most of them. He handled the water a lot better than I expected. I was all prepared to be dodging claws and the like, but he just settled for looking pathetic and somewhat gremlinish.

   On a much sadder note, the day after we got Mr. Pink we went running on the route we usually take and found a box of abandoned kittens. There were three, far too young to be without their mother. Two of them were a couple weeks old and had their eyes open, but one that looked a lot different from the others didn’t yet and was significantly smaller. I think it was probably from a different litter.

   Anyway, I wanted to just leave them because I didn’t think there was much we could do for them, but Christine was really upset and so we decided to see what we could do. I looked up on-line how to deal with it and basically found out that kittens need cat milk or a special kitten formula because everything else isn’t nutritious enough and doesn’t have special antibodies they need. We took them up to our landlord’s house to see if we could get the momma cat of Mr. Pink to feed them. We rubbed them down with a towel that we rubbed Mr. Pink down with so that we could get some of his smell on them, but it didn’t work. The momma cat rejected them and wouldn’t sit still for them.

   So we tried to feed them powdered milk with egg yolk in it, which is supposedly an emergency formula, but they wouldn’t eat it unless we held their mouths open and dropped it in. In the meantime I found out that even if we fed them that stuff they’d slowly starve to death because it wasn’t nutritious enough and it was only for emergencies until you could get the special formula or a surogate mother. Needless to say they don’t carry kitten formula in the tiendas here so we were pretty distraught.

   On the 2nd day you could tell they were starting to get weak and we made the rough decision of deciding to put them out of their misery quickly rather than having them starve to death slowly. The only vet in town said he didn’t put animals down, which we’re sure is bogus, he just couldn’t do it to kittens. The people here don’t really have the same concept of external suffering that we do. For example, our neighbors just told us to put the box outside and just let whatever happen happen. Out of site out of mind for them.

   A woman at the agricultural supply store told us to feed them rat poison, but that didn’t sound fast or painless and since it was hard enough to get them to eat anything anyway, we decided against it. In the end we decided to drown them. Christine went next door and I tried to put myself in as subjective a place as I could, but I still broke down crying in the middle of it. Now a few days later I don’t feel bad about it. I know I did the right thing, but I made Christine promise we wouldn’t pick up any animals like that again. Mainly I’m just angry at the people here, why did they have to take mother cat away from the babies? Why do they think that throwing shit out by the side of the road makes stuff disappear, whether it be garbage or kittens? It seems so spineless to me.

   Moving on to a not all too different story, about a week ago, Darren, our Peace Corps that lives out in one of the rural areas came through town on his way back from buying rabbits. He’s starting a rabbit program in his area. Basically rabbits eat all kinds of food that people don’t, they grow rapidly, and their meat is much more nutritious than most animals. The people here won’t eat normal rabbits, so he had to buy the albino ones. The red eyes make them seem evil and so suitable for eating. It’s the same logic that stopped the vet from helping us with the kittens.

   Anyway, one of the 3 he brought with him died on the bus and rather than let it go to waste we took it over to the neighbors house and they butchered it for us. We fried it up with some pasta and it was actually pretty good. I haven’t been eating much meat since reading the China Study and I don’t plan but I didn’t want it to go to waste. The neighbors kept part of the meat as a fee for butchering it and were convinced we ate it raw since ‘everyone’ knows that you have to boil rabbit.

   In other benign news, we’ve got some bananas growing on our tree in the back yard. I really didn’t think it was going to happen since all the other trees had already had there harvests but here they are. I can’t wait to throw them in some oatmeal with some cinnamon and vanilla soy milk. It’s my specialty. If you're interested the big version of these pictures and a few others are posted in the photo gallery.

Posted by Tao at 02:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (11)

   We only have running water every other day and then only for several hours. You get used to flushing the toilet with water from a barrel and putting your used toilet paper in the garbage because the septic systems here can't handle it. In fact I'm sure that when I get back to the States it will be some time before I break the habit. We also have no refrigerator or television(not that I miss it) and are accosted by swarms of dengue mosquitoes and flies constantly. Despite this I have high-speed wireless internet in my house, which incidentally is made of dirt.

   It's costing me about as much as it would in the states, which basically makes it about as much as we spend on food in a month. Maybe that explains why I've lost over 20 pounds since I've been here. It's not that I haven't been eating well, I think a lot of it has to do with not drinking beer and the heat makes me lose appetite as well. I recently had to buy new pants and punch a new hole in my belt. I don't think I'm losing too much muscle mass, but what little ass I had before is now gone. It makes sitting for long periods on bus rides significantly more uncomfortable.

   Anyway, so the internet kicked on yesterday, coincidentally our 6 month anniversary in the country. I can't tell you how much more a part of the world I feel now though. I can check up to the minute news (no matter how depressing it might be) or my e-mail whenever I want, and simply having access to information when I want it is great. By the way, if I gave you a webcam before I came down I expect you to hit me up and I'll show you around my place. Anyway, its already coming in quite handy preparing my global warming lecture for our ecology group today. Wikipedia has a spanish section although it has less than a 10th the articles of the english site. I simply used the english entry because it was better and translated what I wanted. In reality I didn't really need what I wrote, I simply winged it since I already know plenty about global warming. It's nice to be at the point with my spanish that I don't have to stick so closely to what I've prepared.

   In other news we took some of our ecological kids up to the big hill near town last week and showed them how to play ultimate. I was really amazed how good they were so quickly. We had practiced just throwing the frisbee around, which they were ok at, but didn't really make any effort to catch it or throw it that well. Then when I introduced some competition and running into it they stepped it up like I couldn't believe. Needless to say they're psyched to play again soon.

   I guess that's it for now, but remember to send me an IM or something if you get a chance. My MSN messenger is taow80@hotmail.com or taobabyluv on AIM.

Posted by Tao at 07:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (18)

   Sometimes my phone doesn’t ring here, we’ve got terrible reception inside the house and only decent coverage in the back yard. I’ve begun leaving my phone outside under the overhang, but it still doesn’t ring sometimes. That was the case last week when two upset voice mails from Christine suddenly appeared on my phone after I’d been washing clothes outside for an hour. She was clearly upset and said that both her and Tony’s passports had been stolen and they were at the embassy in Guatemala. She wanted me to bring her the other passport she has so that she wouldn’t have to buy a $100 emergency one.

   It took me almost half an hour of getting wrong numbers from the El Salvadoran embassy, then getting transferred to wrong places and such until I was finally able to hear Christine shout from the other side of a glass clerk window that she wanted me to meet her at a certain border crossing. I won’t go into specifics but it was an ordeal getting the situation even partially resolved. Apparently no one really knows the immigration laws in either country or at either embassy, and it didn’t help that they just changed within the last few months. You would think that they would have a pretty routine procedure for stolen passports seeing as I’m sure they weren’t the first, but you would never have guessed it.

   In the end Tony was able to leave the country but unable to visit Honduras like he had planned. Christine and I will have to fill out some paper work every three months to stay here instead of just crossing the border and coming back. They’ve changed the laws so that there is now a region that extends from the Guatemalan/Mexican border to the Nicaraguan/Costa Rican border and so we’d have to cross one of those borders for another 90 days in the region, which is more hassle than just filling out the paperwork.

   Enough of that, we had our first clean-up with our ecology group the Sunday before last and only 6 of the 25 kids showed up. Apparently they thought I wasn’t serious when I told them they had to come if they wanted to go on the field trip. One of the kids casually told me that one of the boys wasn’t coming because he was “busy playing Nintendo”. We did the clean-up anyway and picked up around 20-25 pounds of plastic bottles worth roughly $2. I imagine it would have been about 4 times as much if the other kids had showed up.

   So at the next general meeting Christine gave a lesson about icebergs and then I dropped the hammer on them. I let them know how disappointed we were in them and then I told them that if they didn’t feel like doing the clean-ups then we didn’t feel like taking them on any field trips. Then I told them that their city was ugly, which got some shocked some faces. I said that we were doing the clean-ups so that they could change that, take pride in their city, maybe get others to do the same and quit littering, earn a little money for field trips, and get them seen as youth leaders. I’m not sure if it got through, but we’ll see this Wednesday because I cancelled the field trip and replaced it with a make-up clean-up.

   After the meeting we talked with a couple of the more mature girls in the class and they basically told us some things they thought we were doing wrong and things that had been going on that we weren’t aware of. Apparently we’re far too lax on them although my talk was in the right direction. It had crossed my mind that we were, but it’s hard to be authoritative in broken Spanish. You come off sounding ridiculous if you don’t get it just right. Then we heard about one of the boys drawing naked pictures in one of the girl’s notebooks while she was out of the room, and girls from different grades spreading vicious rumors about other girls, etc.

   It looks like we’ve got more life lesson talks coming our way, but all in all it just makes us stronger and better able to deal in unfamiliar situations. At the very least it makes a few situations more familiar. I certainly never thought I’d be doing what I’m doing, or have it in me to do it, but it’s challenging and rewarding at the same time and I feel like I’m growing in a new way.

   Speaking of which, I’ve been recently toying with the idea of going to grad school. Since I graduated I’d been convinced that was it for me. If I wanted to learn something I could do more easily on my own. While it’s true I can learn a lot from books, they’re not responsive and they don’t always tell you the next step to take or differentiate between what’s really useful and why. Anyway, I’m looking at going to school to develop my web design and development skills. I’ve started looking at schools and specifically schools that lie near the ocean with sailing classes available.

   There really aren’t that many schools that specialize in web design or that have exactly the classes I want. I’m looking for some basic digital art classes with internet in mind, and also for web programming and development classes. It’s looking like an art institute is going to be the best bet although I really don’t consider myself much of an artist. Hopefully I can change that, because I feel like there’s one in me somewhere I just have to find a way to him out. It seems that it’s all a matter of putting my logical mind to sleep and letting a different part take over.

   I guess the end goal is to be a professional web developer and maybe be able to teach at some point later in life. It’s certainly a way to earn a living, but it also opens the possibility for change. I’ve always felt like there are ideas out there that could fix a lot of the problems we have in the world, really just “the idea”. When I imagine the idea, I think of those martial artists that can immobilize an opponent simply by hitting a pressure point or two in just the right way. The idea in that case is the knowledge of where to strike and how, and the media is the tool to reach out and deliver it. The opponent would, in a very general sense, be selfishness and the root of suffering in the world. Now I don’t presume to have the idea, and it’s unlikely I’ll be the one to come up with it, but I believe it’s out there. I just want to be ready to provide the means of spreading it and hopefully be in the right place at right time to recognize it when I hear it.

   Of course, there are tons of other worthwhile positive projects and causes that I can help with web design even if they aren’t the complete answer I’m looking for. And at the very least I just enjoy the act of creating something and web design gives me the opportunity to do that. Ok, I’m done talking about what I imagine most believe is naive, but if I didn’t think I had a chance to do something great it would put a serious damper on my drive to do anything.

Posted by Tao at 11:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (10)

   I’ve had a lot of time to myself lately. Christine left last Monday with her friend to go on a week long trip to Guatemala and Belize. I decided not to go because this friend is actually an ex-boyfriend and I also wanted to keep up on my flash classes and the ecology club meetings. I had been somewhat nervous about this whole thing since they had dated for quite awhile before splitting up when she came down here. I talked to her about it and I felt better, but I’m still not happy about it.

   I trust her, but I don’t know what the guy has in mind. I figured that it would be awkward the few nights he would be here, but I thought, hey, I’ll talk to him and it’ll be fine. It was not so. I tried some small talk and it just seemed like he wanted me to go away. I realize that he’d prefer I didn’t exist, I’m sure he’s not the first, but I’m here so he needs to deal.

   Now, we have an extra room with an extra bed and everything, but he decided that he would stay at a hotel, which alright, I guess he wouldn’t like to hear the wild monkey sex which we’d certainly have with him 20 feet away. So, that’s fine, if he wants to waste the money, whatever, but then Christine goes out and buys food for dinner and they go on a hike around the area while I cook dinner. He decides he can’t even eat with us, so Christine has to take his food up to him at the hotel, in the meantime everything else gets cold. This is too much. It’s not as if he hasn’t been dating other people since they split up, I don’t know how feels, but it can’t possibly merit him treating me like a leper when I’ve been nothing but open and friendly too him.

   Alright, I’m through bitching, I’m really just lonely. I talked to her the other day and she said she was going to be gone another week, which I’m not thrilled about. I miss her and all the me-time is getting old. Funny that I would have been this alone had Peace Corps not kicked me out, I’m sure I’d have gotten used to it and probably made more friends around town. Speaking of which, I went up to our landlord’s house a few days ago to ask their son if he wanted to play some pool. I had no idea that there was a secret men-only worker’s society across the street. We had to be buzzed in, and once inside there was a pool table, tables with guys sitting around gambling on cards and dominoes. There was even a man-servant who had a bandolier with different brands of cigarettes that he was handing out along with change and coffee.

   I sat and watched a group of men play a card game I’d never seen before and by the 3rd hand I understood how to play. They were only gambling for small change and so when they asked me to play I agreed, but the game is apparently only for 4 people so they switched to dominoes. I also had no idea how to play the game they were playing, but after the 2nd round I got it and developed a strategy. As soon as I put my strategy into play I won about 6 or 7 rounds in a row and then about every other after that. I quickly turned my 40 cents into 2 dollars. It’s strange to me that they never think that there could be a better way to play a game. They’ve just been playing it however for so long the same way, why change. I think that’s something that affects a lot of the world, but especially bad where the education system stinks.

   Anyway, that always seems to happen to me when I sit down to gamble with people I hardly know and a game I don’t know how to play. I just win and win and win and wish that I could stop. It’s not exactly a comfortable situation taking stranger’s money when you’ve just acknowledged that you don’t know how to play. This is further magnified when you’re in a third world country.

   While I was sitting at the table the door buzzed and who walked in but the principal of the boy’s school. He sat down at our table, lit up a cigarette and started playing with us. Ok, interesting, but then 20 minutes later the door buzzes again and who walks in but the principal of the girl’s school. I guess I’d always wondered what these guys did outside of the school, apparently it’s gamble and smoke. Anyway, after a little while Oscar, the landlord’s son, called me to play pool which I gladly accepted. I learned another new pool game, it’s sort of like 9-ball, but you use all of the balls and you work at the numbers from both sides. For instance, you can either hit the 1 ball or the 15 at the beginning. Once say the 15 is knocked in you have to either hit the 14 or the 1, etc. and you just keep score of how many balls each person or team knocks in. The loser has to pay 5 cents. Ouch! Anyway, I left after a good 4 game winning streak and called it a night.

   It’s strange now though. I walk around town and see the guys from the society and they ask me when I’m coming back. It’s like I’ve now got some connection with these older working dudes around town. Speaking of strangeness walking around town, I’m used to walking past the construction guys and having them whistle and yell shit at Christine, but the other day I walked past them by myself and they started whistling at me like I was a girl and yelling stuff, so I turned and gave them a ‘what-the-hell-are-you-doing?’ look and the guy just started laughing and said, ‘ah ha, he looked, fag’. How retarded is that? In a way it’s kind of funny here how homophobic they are, yet how homosexual they act. For instance, it’s not uncommon to see boys rubbing each others legs, sitting each others laps, giving each other back massages, and here they are whistling at me and calling me a faggot?

   So, since Christine’s been gone I had to prepare the ecology club meeting material for last week, and apparently I’ll have to do it again this week, but that’s besides the point. The meeting went better than any of the ones we’d had before. I really had them captivated when I was telling them about Polar Regions and the ecosystem in tundra. It’s easily the most attentive I’ve seen any group of people in my time here and it was glorious. I even had kids asking questions and showing actual signs of curiosity (gasp).

   Everything however, did not go according to plan. We like to play new games with them during our meetings and since we were studying the arctic I decided to teach them how to play freeze tag. They started out unsure, but by the end were really into it. The thing happened about half way through. One of the boys, our secretary actually, tripped a random little girl that was just playing at the school. When she stood up I could tell her arm was broken. I’ve never actually seen anyone break anything until I came down here. Now I’ve seen a finger and an arm get broken. Anyway, I grabbed the little girl and rushed her to the principal’s office.

   The principal came back a little later to tell me her arm was broken and that she said one of the boys tripped her. Since I’d basically been looking at it when it happened, I was fairly sure that she was right. I went and told the boy that the little girl’s arm was broken and I was hoping to judge whether he had done it intentionally or not, but I couldn’t tell. The kids, especially the boys, don’t really seem to care if they hurt anyone else, especially girls because the girls don’t usually hit them back. Anyway, I didn’t know what to do because this could turn into something nasty. The parents of the girls at the girls’ school weren’t too hot on the idea of having boys in there. I mean they send their daughters to an all girls’ school for a reason. Now the boys were breaking little girls’ arms.

   That night I was pretty distraught and a little angry for having been put in this position by the boy. I talked to Christine and we decided that I’d talk to the principal and tell him that we would kick the boy out of the club so that he wouldn’t come back to the girls’ school anymore. Then I’d go talk to the boy. I planned out what I would say to each and felt significantly better. The next day I went to see the principal and told him what I planned on doing and he told me that the girl had a simple fracture and the bone had been set perfectly and she would be fine. The parents weren’t very upset and so he just wanted us not to play outside while the other kids were having recess. This was more than completely reasonable and I agreed immediately. I was relieved to say the least.

   I still haven’t talked to the boy yet, but I’m still going to give him the talk I planned on. I’m going to talk to him about how sometimes we do things, almost by instinct and don’t really know why, but even though it only takes a fraction of a second to do, it can have serious consequences, even for the rest of our lives. Then I’m going to tell him a story of my own, and tell him that I hope he thinks about it and can avoid things like this in the future that could end up being much much worse. Anyway, I feel like a parent trying to teach some life skills, it’s an interesting feeling. We’ll see if I’m any good at it, but I don't plan on needing these skills anytime soon.

   Also since Christine has been gone I’ve started washing my own clothes by hand. We had a deal worked out where I mopped and she did the laundry. She thinks I can’t do laundry, but really I just don’t want to. I started doing it though, mainly because I don’t want to have a huge pile sitting for her when she gets back. I’ve discovered it’s really not that hard, it’s just time consuming. I haven’t bothered mopping at all though; in fact the front room is covered in dust. They’ve been tearing up the road in front of our house and every time a car passes a cloud of dust rolls in the front door. I don’t feel like battling that.

   And so finally I come to the dragon slug, or so I’ve been calling it. If someone actually knows what this is, please tell me. We found it on our banana tree a few weeks ago and it’s just fascinating. It didn’t move for the longest time, and then it suddenly disappeared and appeared again 20 feet away on a pot of flowers, then disappeared again and appeared on a bag of garbage. I still haven’t seen it actually move. For all I know it jumps, but that seems unlikely considering its body shape, clearly it flies...

Posted by Tao at 05:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (18)

   Two weeks ago we took our ecology club on its first field trip to the top of a large hill by the city. They were all extremely excited about it, and just about everyone in the group went. Even one older kid that I told couldn’t come because he had only attended the meeting immediately before the field and we’d had 5 meetings already. I told him he could go on the next field trip as long as he kept coming to the meetings, but he just decided he’d wait until we left and follow us anyway. I pulled him aside and talked to him after that and hopefully and I’m hoping he’s going to fly right from now on.

   I was fairly surprised to find out that a lot of them had never been to the hill. If I were a kid in this town you better believe I’d know the hills and mountains like the back of my hand. The thing is that parents and people in general tell you that everything is dangerous. Far more dangerous than it really is, and I’m almost positive this is because of the civil war when it actually was dangerous.

   The hill is a pretty decent two or three mile hike on a pretty steep grade. We chilled out for an hour after we got to the top and enjoyed the view. It had rained every day for the past two weeks, but the day we went was magnificent and the view was great.

   After we rested we started on some teamwork/leadership activities. We split them into two groups and I did an activity where the kids had to work together to get everyone from one side of this spider-web I’d made of string. They could only use on of the holes in the web once, couldn’t touch the string, and had to get everyone across. The idea is that they should form a plan ahead of time and then work together to accomplish it. Ideally they figure out that one or two of the bigger people should use the easier holes, while conserving the easier holes for a couple of bigger people who will help pass the smaller people through the harder holes to the other big people who crossed first. Then once they’d gotten all the small people across, they cross through the easy holes they reserved for themselves. They seemed to enjoy it and I hope they got a little of the thinking ahead/working together idea.

   While I was working with half the group on the spider-web, Christine was doing an activity with the other half called the human knot. The idea is that the kids hold hands with two different people in a circle at random and then have to unknot themselves without letting go of their hands. This is more of a leadership activity because if one person directs the others it goes much smoother. She said it went pretty well also.

   We ate lunch and afterwards made them form teams of two and then gave me then a nature scavenger hunt. It was stuff like; find something living under a rock, etc. My personal favorite was ‘find a tree you can put your arms around’. Yes friends, we had our ecology club hugging trees. The last thing on the list was worth the most points and that was picking up 20 pieces of garbage. We took the two winning teams out for ice cream after the next group meeting for the prize.

   All in all in went better than I thought it would. I was actually starting to get a little disillusioned with them. We’d spent 4 of our meetings talking about food chains and webs, so in the fifth meeting we gave them a list of things and had them each come up and put one of the plants or animals into it’s level. i.e. producer, 1st level consumer(herbivore), and 2nd level consumer(carnivore). It was pretty disappointing to see that just about all of them had no idea. When was the last time you saw a coffee plant eat a person? It just made me question whether or not they were really getting anything out of all of this. Remember too, that these are supposedly the best and brightest from the two schools. When we’d start talking about ecology stuff you could see the lights just turn off in their eyes. I don’t expect them to want to sit through an extra class in their free time, but we spend 2/3 of the time playing games, the least they could do is pay attention to us for 20 minutes.

   Anyway, that was how I was feeling before the field trip and the subsequent meetings. We’ve recently voted on a new name rather than the Comité Ecologico, we are now Jovenes Unidos del Medio Ambiente(United Youth for the Environment) or J.U.M.A.(who-ma) as I like to call it. We’ve also voted on a board of directors, president, v.p., secretary, treasurer, etc. That went pretty well and I was happy with their president and v.p. picks, but it went a little downhill after that, but maybe they’ll do better than I think they will. The kids in general seem to be behaving better and I think they’re starting to feel like this group is more their own.

   In other news, Christine and I took a little mini-vacation last weekend. We had planned to go up to Perquin, which is a city in the heart of where the worst fighting took place during the civil war and they now have a museum dedicated to it. It’s also apparently really beautiful in that area in the mountains, but it just so happened that Peace Corps decided to have a conference in the town that week so we decided to pass and go somewhere else. We decided to go to the Gulf of Fonseca near the border with Honduras. The first day we went down to a beach called Las Tunas, which was so-so. The next day we took a boat out to one of the islands in the gulf called Manguerra. It’s the biggest El Salvadorian island in the gulf, there are a couple bigger Honduran ones. We spent a couple nights there, hiked around the island went swimming. It was nice to get away from Berlin for awhile and just chill out. On the opposite side of the island there are these practically hidden beaches. We were basically the only people on the entire 400 yards of beach, there was an old man fishing for a little while catching some little sand sharks and then braining them with his braining stick.

   Each night we were there, right around dusk, these thunderstorms would move in from out at sea. The kinds of storms that bring those gusts of wind that make everything seem alive and charged with energy. It was beautiful to sit on our hotel balcony and watch them roll in. I have to say that although El Salvador is a fairly expensive country relative to Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua we spent all of a $100 on our 3 day trip.

Posted by Tao at 11:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (15)

   I’ve really just been too busy to write a blog for the last...has it been 3 weeks? 4? I’ve lost track. The weeks seem to fly by here. Whenever I do get a chance to get to the Internet I’ve usually got a set of things I’m looking up, I check my e-mail, and that’s it. I’ve begun a practice of just saving every page that seems interesting or like it might have the info I’m looking for onto my memory stick so I can take my time and read through it later on my laptop. It works alright until I find a link on a page that I’d like to open, but since I haven’t saved the link page it don’t work. This is all besides whatever point I was angling at, there’s no apologizing in blogging.

   Besides being busy during the weekdays now that all of our main projects have kicked into high gear, we’ve had time to sort of plan out what we’re going to do when we get back. It may seem soon to be thinking about it, but time here is flying and we’ll be back in like 8 months. Our plans have me really excited about the future, so I’m going to share those first, then I’ll get to an update on our current projects.

   We’re getting back at the beginning of March, and since neither of us have any plans because we were expecting to be here for another year beyond that we’ve decided to do something that’s got me really pumped. We’re going to attempt to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail. It’s around 2,200 miles from Georgia to Maine, and since we won’t have jobs, apartments, or other responsibilities hanging over us, it’s the perfect time to do it. It takes roughly 5 months to hike it all going about 15 miles a day. Since Christine wants to start grad school in August, it’ll give us just enough time.

   Although there aren’t a lot of expenses to hiking the trail besides the initial gear purchase and food along the way, it still comes out to be a couple thousand each. Not really that bad for 5 months, but we still need to earn that before we leave. To accomplish that I’ve started doing web design for my padre and we’re just going to start setting aside whatever money we get for our birthdays and Christmas for it. I think we’ll just be able to get there.

   I’ve also been doing a lot of reading about organic gardening and renewable energy, and I really think that at some point in the future I’d like to start an organic farm on our old commune land in Missouri. The thing is that I don’t want to be tied down all the time to it, so it’s something I’d like to do after I’ve gotten some more adventuring out of my system. It doesn’t stop me from planning and taking not of interesting techniques and tips. I’m always thinking about different ways I could make my own power, sell the vegetables through a website, preserve water, etc..

   Since that’s a ways in the future I’ve been doing more research on my web design sailboat idea. I found some really interesting stuff for portable devices that desalinate ocean water, which would mean I wouldn’t have take fresh water with me. I also found this awesome wind generator thing that can be flipped around and switched to water mode to make even more power while you’re actually moving.

   On the down side I found out that satellite internet doesn’t really work at sea. The problem is that the boat is constantly moving and so it can’t aim at satellite easily. There are some systems set up for cruise ships, but cost something like $40,000. There’s also something called Irridium that just has so many satellites that it doesn’t matter where your satellite dish is pointing it’ll hit a satellite. The problem is that it’s extremely slow, like 1/6th the speed of a modem, on top of that it costs $6-7 per MINUTE. There is however a slightly lower tech solution. It allows you to send and receive e-mails, weather reports, and can send GPS positioning, but you can’t browse the internet or anything like that. Really that’s all I would want for while I was at sea. As far as the web design I could do it how I’m doing it now, by designing it on my laptop setup as its own web server and then take the web pages into a cyber café on a memory stick and upload them when I’m in port.

   My plan is to just start working on web design stuff after we get done hiking to save up money for a down payment on the boat and equipment. I was thinking I might move to coastal town so I could either start taking sailing lessons and/or apprenticing at a sailboat repair place to learn how to do it on my own. All the time doing web design, building up a library of code that I can use while I’m on the boat to make the pages. Once I get enough money to get the boat I’ll probably move on to it and find a marina that has wireless internet and work and practice sailing. I figured once I’m ready I’ll go up and down the U.S. coast, and then head around South America using all this hard-earned Spanish. Then I’d head up to the west coast, then across to Asia and from there around the world. It’s a pretty wild dream, but I really don’t think it’s out of my grasp by any means. Once I get done with that I’ll probably be ready for the farm.

   Well now that I’ve gotten all that out, I can come back to the present. Our projects are all happening to varying degrees. Some are turning out better than others, eso es la vida. So I’ll start with the things that are going good. We’ve now had 4 meeting with our Ecology Club and its going great. We’ve been teaching them about ecosystems, food webs, all kinds of stuff. The idea is to get them to appreciate the environment first, and then we’ll start studying all the environmental problems and hopefully they’ll want to get active in recycling and all sorts of stuff. So far it’s so popular that we’re constantly being asked by other kids if they can join it, but it’s already bigger than we wanted. We were hoping for something like 15 kids, but we’ve got 25 that have been coming. This coming Sunday we’re taking our first field trip, it’s only up to the top of this big hill by the city, but all the kids are excited. We’ve designed a nature scavenger hunt for them and I think they’re going to like it.

   Christine has also started giving talks to the mothers at the children’s hospital and I think they’re actually going to use the things she’s telling them. She only started last week with nutrition but they seem to be getting it, asking questions and everything.

   That’s far more than I can say for my talks at the boy’s school. They’re just completely out of control. They’ve never had any discipline in their classrooms and trying to get them to sit down and shut up is a Herculean feat that I have yet to master. I’ve actually decided to abandon the big class I’ve been teaching. The problem is they just don’t have any interest in learning, and I’m not sure how to spark that. Out of the 40 there are maybe 3 that really seem interested in what I have to say, but with the other 37 screaming and running around, it’s basically impossible to get anything done. This is a 7th grade class, but if you saw their behavior you’d think it was kindergarten. However, there’s a smaller 7th grade class that keeps asking me to come to their class instead and the few times I’ve been there the majority have seemed really interested in what I had to say, even going as far as to shush the other students. I’m going to try with that class and see how things go, my novelty may wear off and the same behavior start again, in which case I’m just going to leave them to their lord of the flies scenario.

   Our English classes that we decided to teach at our house started out poorly. In fact, in our first class we only had one 10 year old girl. However, we changed our scheme from having them pay monthly, to per class, and lowered the price as well so that in our 2nd class we had 8 people. At this point we just want to earn enough money to pay off the $80 we paid to buy the 16 chairs. I think after today we’ll have 3 of them paid off, but I feel confident we’ll have them paid off by the time we leave, plus we can probably sell the chair for about $48, so it’s not a big deal really.

   The library project has stalled somewhat, we’ve been waiting for the school to have another administrative meeting so that they can approve what we want to do with the library, rules and such, and also so they can write an application for the computer we’re going to give them. We want them to apply for it so they’ll feel like they had to do something for it and maybe just maybe they’ll take care of it. The problem is that they were supposed to have a meeting 2 weeks ago, then they told us they were going to have it last week, and last week they told us they were going to have it this week. You can see how this could be frustrating.

   Following in that same vain I went to teach my first Flash class at the high school 2 weeks ago and was informed that there was no school since the students had taken tests that morning, ok, so I’ll come back next week. I came back the next week and was greeted by, “class? Oh, yeah, when should I tell the students to come? Do we need the software?”. I’m just constantly amazed that they can ask me to do something for them and be so clueless. I mean, they ask me to teach them a program that they don’t even have, and then they don’t even bother to invite the students. Who knows if it’ll happen though. These people are the first people to tell you what hard workers El Salvadorians are, but I haven’t seen it, I’ve seen just the opposite. Just another case of telling you what you want to here while doing the opposite, or nothing at all in this case.

   If this stuff falls through, it doesn’t matter to me really. It’ll just give me more time to work on web design and earn money for the hike. I actually enjoy the web design work and sneak it in even though I should be doing other things. The main thing is that I’m here, living cheaply, and learning Spanish one way or the other. I’m not going to kill myself for these people when they’re not willing to put in at least the little effort to allow me to help them. Anyway, I’m still happy to be here and although there are ups and downs I take it all, because it’s all part of the experience.

Posted by Tao at 11:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (13)

   We had a lot of doubts as to whether or not we’d actually be able to pull this off when we first decided to do it. We both managed to keep each other positive and I get more and more optimistic as time goes on. I imagine all of the situations and possible conflicts and know that they could easily turn sour, but then when I actually go and talk with the person or put myself in the situation it constantly turns out better than I could have hoped.

   All of our plans seem to be working out too, however we did hit a mild snag with our passport situation, but that was taken care of with an overnight trip to Guatemala. It turns out we just have to leave the country once every 90 days and pay a $10 fee for a new 90 day tourist visa. No big deal really, plus it gives a reason to take some trips so hopefully next time we’ll spend longer than a night in a crummy border town. Another plus is that our visas are going to be pretty by the time we get done here.

   Also I feel like we’ve been meeting and befriending all of the right people in town and are really getting linked into the network of respected community leaders here. The only institution that we haven’t tapped yet is the mayor’s office, simply because there’s a new mayor who just took office at the beginning of May and who we’ve heard he’s ridiculously busy. He inherited a $200,000 debt from the previous mayor who disappeared for 6 months and then had the gall to show up and run for re-election. The guy did manage to come in 2nd, which I think is due to the fact that people who had government jobs were worried about losing them if the mayor changed. It might also have had something to do with the fact that he hadn’t been collecting taxes from the richest people in town and thus probably supported him, but see above debt for the problem associated with that. It’s also interesting to note that he hadn’t even paid the power bill for city hall for months, so they’d reverted back to typewriters. He also didn’t pay the power bill for all the street lights in town and people were getting nervous about the rising crime because of it. The new mayor got right on top of these things and slowly the street lights are coming back on, including one of the ones in front of our house.

   We’ve also managed to take on about as many responsibilities as I’m willing to take at this point. As of now we’re going to the all boys’ school every Tuesday and Thursday in the morning and while Christine teaches English to the 2 English teachers, I give a talk to one of their classes which they just leave to their own devices. The talks I’m giving are basically just following this book that Peace Corps. gave us called “How to plan your life?”, and so I’m starting out on communication skills and going up through self-esteem, leadership, thinking about your future, parenthood, AIDS, and then how to make resumes and find jobs. The kids seem to like it, mainly the games and activities I do with them, but I think at least some of the lessons are getting through to them…I hope. It’s also made me fairly popular around town since pretty much every kid in every school here knows my name. I can’t walk through the town without 2 or 3 kids yelling hey to me.

   Also, we’ve just sent out invitations for our ecology club that we’re starting which will have about 30 kids and meet every Wednesday afternoon to discuss different themes and to do related activities. Christine also signed up to give two talks every month to the mother’s of disabled children at the children’s hospital around the corner while their children receive physical therapy. She’s starting off with nutrition and I’ll probably be helping her prepare and/or give those talks. I also talked with the director at the Instituto(high school) where I was originally assigned. We had been on somewhat strained terms since the board of advisors said that I shouldn’t work there since they were going to be receiving another Peace Corps volunteer from the next cycle in the 4 months. However, when I went over to talk to him about letting us put up a flyer for our English classes he asked me if I’d be willing to give classes to the computer teacher and about 15 students on using Macromedia Flash. I jumped on it, since I’ve really felt like my computer knowledge was being underutilized. I also wanted to repay them for letting us use their computer lab all the time. He also told me that his son would be taking our English classes and then showed me the best places to put up the flyers around the school.

   Here’s a copy of the flyer if you’re interested. We’re going to give classes for an hour and a half every Tuesday and Thursday from 3 to 4:30 to 15 students for $12/month. It’ll be a good way for us to fund our projects and not have to scrape by every month. We’ll probably be able to save enough money to take some actual trips around Central America as well. We’ve also had a bunch of interested older people who want to take classes from us even though we’d really like to start with students so they’re at least remotely on the same page. We’re telling the adults that we’re using the kids as an experiment and that we’ll offer adult classes at a later time when they’re not working. I’ve also been telling teachers that we’ll let them attend for half-price. If we end up teaching two classes like that then we’ll be doing fine for ourselves. In the meantime I plan on doing some web work for my dad and that $300 Peace Corps readjustment money should be coming any day now.

   So we’re keeping busy. There are a couple other projects that may or may not happen, but I’d like to wait until all of these projects get started to see where we are on free time. Just for kicks I planted some beans in the little garden area in the backyard. I figure since it’s a staple food here, it’s an appropriate thing to have grown here. I’ve also painted the sign out front that said we were a Remesa business. I’m thinking about stenciling “Rancho Gringo” on the sign instead. We’re really not offended by the gringo thing. They don’t use it in a negative way like some people do in Mexico and it’s just easier for them to say than Norte Americano or Estadounidense, which I can’t even pronounce myself. Some people thought we’d be offended by it since when the infamous Barbara was here, whenever anyone would call her a gringa she’d turn around and bark “guanaco!” at them, which is a slang word for Salvadorians that they consider insulting. That’s some cultural sensitivity that definitely was worth promoting to upper eschelons of Peace Corps bureaucracy.

   I’ve realized that I’m actually more offended when people call me “chele”, which means light-skinned or in my lexicon means “whitey”. I guess it’s more offensive to me because it’s identifying me by the color of my skin, rather than gringo which could be the way I dress, walk, talk, etc… In reality I’m sure they’re using the color of my skin as well, but at least they’re not identifying me solely by that. Christine brought up and interesting point about racial tensions between blacks and Hispanics in L.A. The latin culture doesn’t seem to care about identifying people by the color of their skin and the color black happens to be “negro”, so can’t you just see some gang fights erupting over something that was actually never meant to offend in the first place.

   Which I guess brings me to another topic that’s been bugging me. Everything isn’t sunshine and roses. One thing that I find annoying is that we’re constantly being asked if we can help people get funds for all sorts of different things. No matter how many times we say we don’t have any money for that, they don’t seem to believe us, as if every American has Bill Gates on their speed dial. The way they do it is really what makes it annoying. It’s like we’ll be invited to dinner or they’ll help us do something very simple and then they try to use that to make us feel like we should help them by finding funds for whatever thing they’ve got going. A simplistic form of bribery, and I don’t like it.

   Another thing that bugs me and has since Peace Corps training is the religion aspect. Two of three of the Peace Corps goals are about the volunteers learning about the host country’s culture and volunteers sharing their culture with the host country people, but then on like the first day they tell you not to tell anyone if you don’t believe in God, which means tell them you do. It made me feel like we weren’t exactly sharing our culture with them and it also made me feel like I was betraying my own beliefs. I hadn’t been too pressured on the religion aspect until last night after dinner at a ladies house they started questioning me on it. I told them that I believed in God, although it’s by no means their idea of God, by they can’t even comprehend that other people believe in different Gods besides their Catholic version. Then they decided to pray out of the blue, it actually felt more like they were testing us to make sure we were true believers, like if we bent our head and prayed and didn’t believe we’d burst into flames or be smote right in front of them. Afterwards I felt dirty, like I’d been molested or something. I just wish they weren’t so close-minded about things.

   Anyway, that’s it for now. I’ve got my new phone number here if anyone is interested in calling. From the states you dial 01150372196823 and hold your breath. Also, we’ve figured out our mailing address here, and since I just painted a 5 by our door hopefully it’ll start actually making it here. The address is:

Casa No.5
Calle 14 de Diciembre
Barrio Parroquial
Berlin, Departamento de Usulutan
El Salvador, Centro America

Quite the mouthful, no?

Posted by Tao at 04:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (18)

My mind is completely worn out on Spanish. I feel like I’m actually speaking worse and understanding less than I was a week ago. I find that there are a lot of ups and downs, and the smallest interaction can kill or make your day. Peace Corps. says there’s a honeymoon period for the first 3 weeks and then enthusiasm wanes. My honeymoon got cut short apparently. This isn’t restricted to language, the cultural differences are starting to bug me a little. I mean, sure, some of them I actually like or can see getting used to. For example, I like how easy it is to stop and talk with just any random person, and that people really make time for each other, and not that I approve, but being a guy in a machismo culture isn’t exactly hard. Then there’s the concept of time being a far cry from the goal driven American version, which I’ll get used to eventually. If they can be late, so can I damn it.

The main things that I find the most aggravating and that I don’t think I can compromise on their lack of imagination about the future and this feeling that they don’t have much control over their own life. The two are obviously connected and the other things such as rampant littering are really just sub-categories of them. If you’re not thinking about the future, you’re not thinking that the plastic wrapper you just threw down is going to be making your street, river, whatever ugly for the next 5 million years. Also, their child nutrition knowledge is either non-existent or thrown to the wind. I certainly hope they just don’t know that candy is not a suitable meal. I’ve never seen so many kids with candy and it not be on a holiday. It makes me wonder how many people die of diabetes here and no one ever knows what they died of because it just went undiagnosed. Alright, I’m done bitching. All and all I really do like it here, the pluses out weigh the negatives, but after a few weeks the negatives just start to stand out a little more.

So, on the subject of candy, a couple of days ago we went and visited a molienda not far from here up the volcano. A molienda is a place where they process all the sugar cane. They basically, press it, boil it, stir it, and pour it into molds to cool. It smells a lot like molasses when it’s boiling, and tastes a little like it too. The molded cones of sugar are what they sell in the market for a quarter. It was a little disturbing that they just threw the cones on to this nasty sticky dirt floor. Our Spanish teacher said they clean them first but I saw them just putting them straight into a cart that I’m sure was just going straight to the market. The owner even gave us each a cone that he just picked up off the ground. Anyway, the pictures are in photo section if you want to see more.

I believe I mentioned something about duck sex in one of my earlier entries. Well, here are the results of that encounter. Actually, it was probably well before that, but I had no idea there were even eggs. Lucidia had them in her room and they hatched the other night. When they plopped it on the table in front of me I thought it was just a chick(pollito), until I saw the long bill and body. Ducks are called patos, so baby ducks are patitos.

Last night when I was eating dinner I just happened to look down into my cup of hot chocolate. They serve stuff like ovaltine here a lot, mainly because they have to boil all the water before I can drink it. Anyway, there were these little clumps of what looked like chocolate mix. Then I noticed one of them had what looked like antennas, then I noticed ALL of the clumps had antennas AND legs. I almost gagged, I’d already drank about a third of the cup without noticing and I’m sure I must have swallowed a bunch of them since there were at least 20 dead bugs still floating around in there. I wasn’t sure if I should tell Ilda about it, I didn’t really want to embarrass them, and I know I would’ve been teased about eating the bugs forever so I just casually dumped it out when no one was looking. I’m sure the bugs were just in the chocolate powder stuff so the next time they serve it I’ll point it out before I drink any. That’s my plan and I’m sticking to it.

Continuing with the critter subject, I was under the impression that the frogs only came out during the raining season especially since I haven’t heard any, but last night my family pointed out a sapo(toad) in the path outside the casa. I don’t know if you can tell how big it is from the picture but it’s easily bigger than my fist and they said it was a small one. In the rainy season they said they get twice as big. So there’ll certainly be more pictures.

And several days ago a group of us went in to San Salvador to check out the big mall called Metrocentro and the Peace Corps. office, which is more like an old house that’s had dozens of additions which turned it into a labyrinth. It wasn’t all that exciting of a trip, the mall, while pretty large has a horrible selection unless you’re looking for shoes or shoes. The only thing I bought was a Cypress Hill cd in Spanish. I thought it might be cool to here the songs I know in English in Spanish to compare the two. You can tell most of the songs were originally written in English because the Spanish is a little clunky. Anyway, it was nice to get out and see a little more of the country.

This last Sunday the Istepeque crew took a trip up to what they call the “infernillos”, which are basically like hot springs on the volcano. There’s lots of boiling water and steam and the unmistakable smell of sulfur everywhere. We took some pictures and chilled out for while, and then took a dip in a small pool of water farther away from the actual springs where the water had cooled off enough to get into. Despite it already being hot outside the warm water still felt pretty good. After soaking for awhile we started walking back down and almost immediately came across a boa constrictor crushing a rabbit. It was totally some crazy discovery channel stuff. Some other people walking by managed to pry the rabbit free and smashed the boa with rocks. Of course the rabbit was already basically dead and so now both animals died thanks to mans fucking with nature. There’s a deep lesson there I’m sure of it. I would have wanted to watch it eat it and have like a whole series of pictures until the rabbit was just a lump in the boa, but whatever. I’ve also got a video of it that I took with my digital camera, but I’m having trouble uploading it because it’s a big file. There are more pictures in the photos section of a bunch of stuff so check it out. Once again it’s under Peace Corps. training and it’ll be on the last few pages.

I know I’ve got more stuff to say but I can’t seem to find anything in the back of my cluttered mind. Tomorrow is hammock day at the training center where I plan on buying a nice hammock from some local artisans and then we’ve got immersion days for the rest of the week. That means I’ll be going to a volunteers site and staying with some random family for a couple nights, then a night with the volunteer and then everyone’s meeting in San Salvador to celebrate Peace Corp.’s 45th birthday. So that should make for some more good entries in the future. I'll talk to you all soon.

Posted by Tao at 12:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (27)

I’m trying something new. I’m writing this on my laptop at my host family laptop and then I’ll put it on my jump drive and it’ll just be ready to post at the cyber café. It’ll save me like a whole quarter’s worth of time, plus I can take my time and move my words like a prize fighter. So, let’s get this entry started and come out of the gate swinging.

It’s amazing how quickly you can become accustomed to pooping in a hole. I won’t lie, when I first got here I thought, “what the fuck have I gotten myself into?”. My room is a couple of sheets clipped together, I’m bathing myself with what was probably initially produced to be a dog food bowl, and this cement hole is my new bathroom. But let me tell you, I’ve only been here 12 days now and I don’t even flinch at it anymore. Although that first dog food bowl of cold water still makes me gasp, but I look it as a wake-up call. By the way, they call the bowls like that, guacals, so I’ll refer to them as such from now on.

I’m not adjusting to everything as well as I’d like. My privacy is still an issue. For example as I write this I’ve got several children sitting behind me watching me type. It doesn’t really matter since they can’t understand what I’m writing, and I wouldn’t care if they could, but I don’t get any alone time. Yesterday, Sunday, was the one free day we get a week and I just wanted to relax, but for some reason when they sit around and do nothing they’re relaxing, but when I do it I must have diarrhea or be sick. It reminds me of Office Space as all 7 family members ask about me, “yes, I’ve gotten the memo, and no, I’m not sick, please for the love of god pass on the info.”

Yesterday was pretty cool otherwise though. I unexpectedly found a place that I’ll probably end up taking anyone who comes down to visit me. The father of a girl in the cantón, or village here, came in from San Salvador where he works to take his daughter out to eat. She in turn invited us along, but my understanding was that he was just giving us a lift into San Vicente, the town nearby where the Peace Corps. training center is. I didn’t realize that we were going anywhere else until he drove through town and out the other side. We hopped on the Pan American highway and drove into another town, whose name I can’t remember, but I’ll find out when I take you there. We stopped and ate pupusas at what else, a pupuseria. Pupusas are the signature El Salvador food. They’re basically tortillas cooked with your choice of cheese, beans, pork, and some other local vegetables whose names escape me at the moment. The man who took us, Louis, is a civil engineer with the ministry of health and they gave us the extra special table on the third floor balcony overlooking the city and volcano. I went against PC advice and ate a pork pupusa because I was curious. I also ate some cortido, pickled cabbage and other vegetables which they advised against as well. I don’t know what came over me, but I was feeling lucky. They were both delicious and I’m happy to report that they’ve passed in solid form. That’s a pretty funny thing about Peace Corps., after a little while the volunteers have absolutely no problem discussing the size, shape, color, or consistency of their bowel movements in any setting.

Anyway, that wasn’t the place I plan on taking everyone. Afterwards, we drove up to a restaurant on top of a hill called “Buena vista”, which was a ridiculous understatement. From our table on the balcony, we drank local cervezas and could look out over practically the whole country. You could see the ocean to the west, a giant lake with San Salvador on the other side, and the mountains in the distance Louis explained were in Guatemala and Honduras. It was easily the most fun I’ve had here so far. I thought it would be hard to crack jokes in Spanish since I can’t play with the wording or make complicated phrases, so instead I’ve become adept at using only a few quick words to augment what someone else has said. It’s sort of like judo for humor. Anyway, I wish I’d taken some pictures, but I didn’t take my camera because like I said, I thought I was going to a cyber café.

I also had a pretty good time on Saturday after the morning meetings at the training center. We met our mentors, who basically just emailed with us before coming down to answer questions. Then we all went out to a bar to celebrate one of the trainee’s birthday. I don’t want to give you the impression that I’ve been partying. I’ve barely had enough beers to catch a buzz and that was only the once yesterday.

I think I might have mentioned that the older man in my family, Antonio, is running for mayor of the little town I live in. Well, on Friday he held a rally in the little park here. PC also tells us not to get involved with politics, but placing me right in the middle of an election is all their fault. My family locked up the house since they were all going, so I decided to go observe and take some pictures. I decided I’d stand a little back from the main group of people and not applaud or anything so I wouldn’t give the idea that I supported his party, the PCN, which is a far right party. Keep that in mind for what I’m about to tell you. So, as the rally started a couple girls came out in what I’m told are the traditional long wavy skirts and began dancing to what sounded like traditional music. After about 30 seconds the music suddenly switch to what can only be described as booty music and the girls ripped of their skirts to reveal these tiny daisy dukes. They then just started to shake their asses to the great appreciation of the hooting men. Here I was thinking that politics couldn’t sink any lower, I should’ve known better. That was really the only noteworthy thing that went on. The speech was basically just about how he was going to end poverty as well as some other unrealistic promises, and ended by saying they were going to win because it was god’s will.

In other news, I think I made my biggest accomplishment as far as intercultural exchange, spanish, and youth development goes. I was able to explain to the local kids how to play Ultimate frisbee and once we got going they were loving it. I honestly didn't think I was going to be able to get across the rules and if I did I didn't know if they'd like it or not, but I was pleasantly surprised at how it all turned out. They've all been talking about playing again tonight, so I'm looking forward to that.

Alright, so just so you know I've posted a few more pictures in the training section of the photos, they're on the last few pages. Also, I figured out how to add e-mail notifications for my posts so let me know if you want me to set you up so you don't just have to keep checking in from time to time. I really appreciate all the support.

Posted by Tao at 12:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (2246)

So, I've uploaded some pictures to the photo gallery, but here's a couple to keep the blog colorful. This is a picture of some of the women that I'm living with. Ilda is the one on the left, she´s basically the matriarch. She has a hardened exterior, but I keep catching glimpses of a heart of gold. Marìa is the one to my right, she´s basically the unmarried smartass of the group. Lidia is the one on the far right, she's quieter but seems sweet, sweet compared to Marìa anyway.

This is Christa, the daughter of Angelita, who isn't in any of the pictures. The other two kids are just from the neighborhood. I think they were trying to get me to go play fùtbol at the time. Maria and Christa are always giving me crap abou not understanding them, but even when I ask them to they don't slow down or pronounce words. For example, they say "es" like "eh", and that goes for pretty much s's all over the place. The title of the post "Tao no puede español" comes from a little song that Christa made up to tease me. Of course, I started singing in english that she couldn't understand me either. That kind of shut her up.

The family as a whole is quite the experience, even compared with other volunteers families that I know of. I'm actually the 7th volunteer with this family. So they're pretty used to us by now. Although, the first cultural adjustment I had to make was actually doing less. Marìa told me I was like a woman because I was always putting my dishes in the sink, and just generally being courteous. So basically, I've just stopped the chivalry and took my cues from Antonio. It's weird because they seem to be respecting me more. It makes me wonder if they aren't fostering this machismo stuff a little.

I really enjoy being here, but one thing that's started to wear on me is that my mind never feels totally rested. We alternate going between the training center for a day where we have talks about different things all day, and spending days in the community and our spanish teacher comes out and we study. The thing is, that you spend all day trying your damndest to concentrate and understand what she´s saying because we only speak in spanish, because she really doesn't know any english. Then you get out off class and go back to your house and talk to your family, or kids, or whatever, it's basically like theres no break. I'm sure as time goes on I won't have to burn so much brain power on spanish, but for now it's a pain.

I know I've got some funny stories somewhere in my brain. Luckily I've been writing in my journal everyday. I'll look through it before my next entry so I can at least end with anecdote.

PS - thanks for the comments.

Posted by Tao at 05:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (15)

I have been so incredibly busy with stuff, today is the first day I've really had chance to make an entry. I went to another cyber café yesterday but couldn't get it to log in. FYI "galán" is a slang word for excellent or cool here. Anyway, we flew into a little airport south of San Salvador about 4 days ago. It was really neat flying over all the volcanoes and I was sort of surprised at how green everything was even in the dry season. There were fires going in a lot of the fields because they burn the stumps and stuff after they harvest their crops. The pilot said it was 105 degrees at the airport and the entire group let out a gasp. It was around 35 or 40 in D.C. when we left. We were greeted outside the gate by the Peace Corps director for El Salvador, Mike Wise. He's actually from Starkville, MS and right after he finished complaining about how no one was ever from the south I chimed in. So that´s pretty cool, he´s a really interesting guy, has an anecdote for everything. They said that Peace Corps. staff are only allowed to work for 5 years at a time, but every single volunteer in El Salvador signed a petition for him to be able to stay on an extra two years.

I doubt that the temperature was actually as hot as they said on the plane. It felt more like the upper 80's. The thing that struck me initially about the airport and immediately outside of it was how clean and relatively modern everything was. Apparently that's only a feature of the metropolitan areas, but even here in San Vicente where the training center is, there isn't really a ton of trash everywhere. The bus drivers here are about as insane as the ones in Costa Rica were, passing on blind curbs and such. It's also extremely cheap to travel on them, it's like 75 cents to go to San Salvador a couple hours away and 25 cents from my little community, Istepeque down the road a ways.

When we got here, we basically just went over the basic do's and don'ts. How people here view Peace Corps., which is kind of like we're professional aid workers that are well respected. Unfortunately this also means we're expected to dress professionally practically all the time. At least while we're in training. My mentor said that after that you can wear flip flops like everyone else, and shorts as long as they're long. Of course, you can't wear that to go to meetings or official offices and what not. This makes for an uncomfortably warm dress code, and I've been drinking water like a maniac. We've also talked a little about our programs, mine's youth development, and been interviewed in spanish to judge our level, as well as being injected with some vaccine or another. Luckily they space out the 8 shots I've got to get. Although, I did get bit by a dog I was trying to feed last night but it didn't break the skin. Good thing too because I haven´t gotten the rabies shot yet. Also, they don´t call dogs perros here they call them chuchos.

I'm sorry if this is all sort of disjointed but it's hard when there are so many things to talk about, I could easily write an entry that was just one big tangent. So, we spent the first two nights in a hotel in San Vicente and got to chill out and have a couple beers on the balcony with everyone. Apparently it's inappropriate for women to drink...well, unless they're prostitutes, so instead they sent us four guys down to buy beer for all of them and the hotel people probably think that us guys are a bunch of drunks. Actually, they probably know what's going on, but whatever. A lot of our talks in training have been for the girls, and I'm feeling pretty lucky to have a penis at this point. There was a whole section on piropos, which are cat calls, and how they should deal with them, which is basically to ignore them. They told them to think of it as a compliment, but I don´t know how well that's going to go over. They also told them that it's good to walk with guys or salvadoreños(salvadorians), so the two girls in my community are pretty glad. I've definately seen a lot of stares at the girls and then to me, and I can tell they´re sort of biting their tongues. There was also the sexual assault talk and other fun stuff.

This whole process has been a series of things that I've had a fair share of anxiety about and then been relieved immediately after. The main thing I'd been nervous about was meeting my host family. I had been worried that I was going to understand them, but not be able to speak back. So I´d been practicing like crazy to be able to speak and then when I arrived I couldn't understand a damn thing they were saying. They use a lot of caliche(slang) here that they don't use in other countries and my family is from the campo(country) so they don´t enunciate, they slur everything together, drop multiple syllables from words, and hardly move their lips at all. When I did understand what they were asking, I had no problem telling them whatever I wanted, but I'm sure I answered a lot of questions they didn't even ask. I'd just start talking about whatever I thought they might be asking about.

My community, Istepeque(ee-sta-peck-ay) is only about 10 minutes away from San Vicente which is a pretty major city. It's like the capital of the district of San Vicente. Since I´m youth development they placed me in a bigger than average pueblo with 2 other development PCTs(Peace Corps. Trainees, and yes there are LOTS of acronyms). I believe we're the closest community that trainees are living in, the other group of youth dev. trainees are about 15 minutes away in a different direction. The rural health and sanitation trainees are all over the place in the campo, but most are within 45 minutes or so.

My host family consists of an older couple, Ilda and António, who have 2 daughters, María and Angelita, living in what I guess you would call a family compound. There's one granddaughter, Christa, who's 13 and studying english. We've been helping each other a little, which has been pretty fun. There's another woman who lives there too who I think is a niece of Ilda. There´s also some other guys who live there, but they kind of ignore me for whatever reason. The house itself is pretty wild. Basically my room is part of one big room and I've got two walls made of hanging sheets. There's a pit latrine in the back, a big sink thing called a pila that you use to wash dishes, clothes, and yes, yourself. Theres a sheet that hangs down which maybe goes around 2/3s of the way and then there's a tin wall that has a window size hole in it that goes right out to the sidewalk, so it's bucket baths in umbros from here on out. This guy walked by today actually and stopped and pointed and said "mira! un gringo mojado", which means "look! a wet gringo". Ilda ran out and shooed him away, but I've pretty much waved goodbye to all personal privacy. In fact, sitting in this computer cubicle is the most private place I've been in two days. The house also has chickens, ducks, dogs, and cats running around all the time. There seem to be surprisingly few bugs. I have yet to see a cockroach or anything, and only a few flies and mosquitoes. I've also been privy to duck sex, which let me tell you is pretty hilarious. They've also got these awesome hammocks, one of which is on a huge tree on a hill by the house that is extremely comfortable and sways with the branches whenever the wind blows.

I'd been a little worried about being rejected or disliked by the family but after the last day I've been completely accepted. Ilda even told me she only had 3 direct family members living at the house, but that I was now the 4th. I've also been completely accepted by the neighborhood kids. For the last two nights we've played soccer in the street by Christine and Leah´s houses(the other two trainees in my community). They all seem to know my name and I can only remember about 2 of theirs. It's kind of funny because just with the accent here everyone pronounces my name like d-ow, which is how it's really pronounced in China. Anyway, I've got some great pictures but I haven't gotten them off my camera yet. I let Christa borrow it so she could take pictures with her grandmother today. It's a trust exercise, I told her she better be extremely careful with it because it's expensive. She seems really responsible. All of the kids seem a lot more responsible for their age than in the U.S. but still have the ability to have fun like kids. Yesterday the youth development people took us to a school and basically we played games with the kids all day. Kids used to make me nervous, I´m not sure why, but I'm getting over that in a hurry, as well as a lot of other hang-ups. It's a matter of necessity really, it´s also one of the things I was hoping would happen while I was here.

I've also learned that the technology youth development trainees like me are going to be working in some really high tech computer labs. Apparently they've got all new computers, projectors, cameras, etc, but no one that knows how to use them. They also said that the kids are so anxious to use them that it´s going to be cool having kids so excited to learn the stuff I've got to teach.

My spanish is getting better by the hour too. I'm constantly finding new better ways to say things, and I´ve lost almost all my inhibition about just trying to say whatever to whoever whenever I want to. I still get a little frustrated with miscommunication, but there´s already noticeably less of it and I've been good about laughing it off. I've also been the butt of several jokes, but I take it all with a grain of salt. And I know this is a huge entry but they may all be like this since I´m not sure how often I´ll be able to get to internet. They keep us pretty busy monday thru friday and we also do a half day on saturdays. Anyway, I'm really happy to be here and my anxiety has been consistently replaced with relief. Please drop me some comments or an email if you've got time.

Peace corps. out,
Tao

Posted by Tao at 11:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (17)

As I was trying to go sleep after my last post the night before I was flying out to D.C. for the Peace Corps. staging event, the excitement and anxiety finally swept over me. I was alright though when I woke up 30 minutes early(4:30AM) after trying to get to sleep for hours. I was still fine when I said goodbye to my mom and step dad at the airport, but I intentionally made it quick to avoid falling into it again. it was sort of like pulling a band-aid off in one tug. When I got to the counter and American Airlines told me that I might not make the flight because they overbooked I still didn't freak out. It was like I had expected something to stop this from actually happening so I was unusually calm about it, but then after the attendant bribed someone off with free tickets elsewhere I got a seat. Then the plane took off and the butterflies started again. It was like the jitteriness I get after a coffee-induced sleepless night, even though I hadn't had caffeine and had still managed about 5 or 6 hours of sleep.

After a brief layover in Raleigh, where I almost missed my flight because I forgot about the time change, I landed at Reagan International and found a shuttle to the hotel in Georgetown. I had figured that I would have a roommate, but my mom told me that they wouldn't do that because no one knew each other yet. As is the case(from time to time), she was wrong. The room was a double and another set of bags were lying on the far bed.

After a few minutes of just going over the itinerary my roommate came in. Dave Davis from Maine who I immediately got a nice friendly vibe from. We walked down to the registration a short while later and met everyone else in the group. It turns out that it's mixed between two programs. Mine is youth development which has seven people in it, including me, and a water sanitation group with the other 16 or 17 in it. The whole group consists of one married couple, 4 guys(excluding the married guy), and 18 girls(excluding married girl). Apparently that's a somewhat higher percentage of girls compared to all the other volunteers already in El Salvador, but I'm not complaining...Anyway, everyone is white and in their 20's, and also gave off really friendly vibes. I had expected a little more diversity, but I'll get that soon enough.

It's been really nice getting to talk with everyone before actually heading down to El Salvador. There are so many question marks about it that it's comforting to have at least one of those answered ahead of time instead of just being tossed into the fire all at once. I haven't really talked to everyone yet, but the vast majority, and I'm really looking forward to training with all of them. I'm a little nervous about the host family situation, but I'm sure it's going to be fine.

This is turning into a long entry, but a lot's been happening. I'm just going to briefly talk about what the staging was like and what's next, then I'll be done. We basically just talked about basic safety do's and don'ts, did some silly ice breakers, and had discussions about the different ways of handling different cultural things, which have seemed semi-useful mainly just for getting us thinking about the stuff so we'll at least have it in mind. They also mentioned that us bloggers were not to desecrate the Peace Corps. name, but I haven't had any reason to so far. They also gave everyone $140 for the time here, which is way more than enough. That being said a huge group, maybe 17 or 18, went out last night and had dinner at a nice barbecue place and then to a bar for drinks after that. It was really cool getting to talk to some new people in a less structured setting who all seem smart and genuinely good.

Today was a lot of the same safety and cultural stuff. We also got a packet from the training center in El Salvador which gave us some details. It turns out I'll be getting 7 shots out of 8 since I've got actual documentation for my MMR. We also leave tomorrow morning from the hotel at 5AM(EST) to catch our flight for El Salvador which arrives around 2PM(CST). It's kind of convenient going back to Central time so there's no time adjustment except for the fact that we have to be at the training center at 7:30AM M-F and 8-12 on Sat. I think I may have gone 3 or 4 months without having to wake up before 7 until a week ago.

Alright, I think I hit all the main stuff. I don't know when I'll have internet again, but you'll know it. Keep checkin', maybe I'll even post pics next time.

Posted by Tao at 07:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (23)

I've posted the still photos I shot in the gallery section. Friday night after we got done with all the interviews and touring, me and my mom's two grad students partied down on the french quarter. All I know is that I really need to quit riding mechanical bulls when I'm drunk. I don't realize how much I'm hurting myself and I just refuse to let go. Anyway, I feel like I raked my nuckles on a roof like Nicholas Cage in Raising Arizona. I've got deep bruises on my inner thighes and a pinched nerve in my fingertip.

Anyway, I've finished packing up everything and I'm just watching the Super Bowl now. The stuff I'm checking ended up being about 65 pounds for the 2 bags. They had to be under 80 so I'm easily in the clear. My plane leaves tomorrow morning at 6:30 from Austin. I've got everything in order, but it still hasn't hit me yet. It probably will tomorrow when I get in the car for the airport. Wish me luck.

Posted by Tao at 07:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (13)

   I've started sorting out all of my stuff to pack. I made a list and I posted it but its not longer available, I'm not sure if it's all going to make it. I can only take 80lbs and I think I'm pushing the limit.

   I called Sprint today to cancel my service expecting to be reamed to the tune of $150 for breaking my contract. Which was about to happen until I asked the guy when my contract was going to run out, and he said, "oh, this is your last month", I guess he wasn't going to even check. On top of saving all that money he also said I'm getting a $120 deposit back. Pretty sweet.

   We're waking up early tomorrow to drive over to New Orleans to tour the devastation. I've got my digital camera and the video camera batteries all charged up. If I don't get it up before I leave it might be awhile until I get to it.

Posted by Tao at 08:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (11)