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 ;-).
