PC: Pre-Service Training Week Six (FBT)

This post may be a little fuzzy because I feel like I spent Tuesday through Saturday in a congested fog. It's one thing to get the flu in the middle of winter when it's cold outside and you can just lie in bed and be warm, but it's quite another to get flu in a hot country in the middle of a full schedule. Field-Based Training is a chance for trainees to visit a current volunteer for three days as a group to see their current projects and get a taste for life and work in the campo. I went with two other trainees and an LCF to the most remote site among the current volunteers. Greg lives in a tiny town a 45 minute walk from the highway up a mountain with 33 houses. I took tons of photos, then promptly left my camera at Greg's house, so maybe he will find it and bring it back when he comes for a session, and maybe it's lost forever and I will have to use my beat up old one from now on.

photo courtesy of Anne 

Tuesday we met Greg and his puppy on the side of the road towards Cuyuiscat a few kilometers outside of Metapán. The hike to his site was 45 minutes uphill under the hot sun but we all made it in the end. Our potential host family backed out at the last minute, so we all stayed with Greg, his host family and the two teachers from the local school. They come up for the week then return home on the weekends. We had a late lunch of black beans, rice, and fire cooked potatoes, then Greg directed us tot the school and the ACE meeting. I don't exactly know what ACE means, but the directiva discussed projects and funding for all things related to the school and the kids. We used one of the assessment tools, to get a feel for the organization. It seems very transparent with good records and well-planned and justified projects, though the assessment tool was clumsy and not very well-suited to the organization we were dealing with. I mostly made it through the meeting, though I struggled to stay awake for some of it just because of all the traveling earlier that day and I could feel the beginnings of a cold coming on. We stayed through the rain and went home together for dinner of pollo recaudo (a sort of thick yellow chicken soup) and pan dulce from San Vicente and coffee for dessert. Noah started explaining chess to one of the teachers and I kind of listened in and mostly just petted the dogs and played with the puppies before crawling into bed.

Wednesday was a full day starting with house visits and not stopping until long past dinnertime. Greg showed us his community map and census information, which I plan to emulate because they look incredibly helpful not only to remember names of community members but also to assess needs and apply for grants. His map is on foam board and he cut out houses from orange paper, writing the heads of each household as he placed them on the map. That will only work with a small community, but I'm hoping for a small community. To get some practice using at least one of the PACA tools, we visited a couple of houses to ask census questions. We visited three families and were exhausted by the end. It's a lot of work asking the same questions and trying to work census questions into a conversation without giving offense by asking for financial details and listening to all sorts of stories that only inadvertently answer the question you asked. Greg did a couple of visits a day, and only when both the husband and wife were there because often if a wife was home without her husband, she had too much pena to answer the questions. One of the families we visited had no water, no sanitary facilities, ten people in the house and very likely more on the way. The grandmother seemed to see no problem in the situation except for lack of money, and was thrilled by the prospect of her children and grandchildren having kids, something she accepted as an imminent reality. Every female seemed to have a baby, even the youngest who couldn't have been older than fifteen (though age is hard to judge here).

Greg has lots of projects in the works, one of which is a continuation of a project the previous volunteer was working on with Engineers without Borders, providing aboneras (composting latrines) for every family in the community without sanitation facilities. The last house we visited had one of the new latrines so we got the lowdown on the project there. Engineers without Borders have four already built and they work with local labor to train and educate on building and using the latrines so they only have to make a few, then the locals take over. The idea of a composting latrine is that it has two chambers for solid waste and a pipe leading away from the latrine for liquid waste. Once one chamber is full of solid waste, it is covered for nine months and the other chamber is used in the meantime. After nine months, the waste will have broken down and can be used as compost for any non-food plants.

Photo courtesy of Anne

After a quick stop at the school to invite the little kids to an activity the next day and lunch and some down time, we were back at the school to give a talk on deforestation and erosion for the older kids. The kids weren't having any of it and it was like pulling teeth to get them to participate in even the simplest things. We had slightly more success with the final activity, writing a letter explaining why "el señor campesino" shouldn't cut down trees. I get the sense that Greg doesn't have much interest in kids, and most of his projects are large-scale community development projects that just happen to help the kids because he has to spin it that way to comply with the Youth Development program.

Photo courtesy of Anne

We transitioned from the tree talk to building hanging plant baskets from plastic bottles, something Greg learned during his Field-Based Training days. The kids have a good system down and they work in teams to wash the bottles, find twelve of the same bottle, bring them to Greg to melt holes for the wire, cut lengths of wire, string the bottles onto the wire, and finish with a wire grid for the bottom and a wire loop at the top for hanging. La Peña is built on mostly rocky land, so they have to get fertile soil from elsewhere for the baskets. There are quite a few already done, and the idea is to sell them (they currently are growing tomatoes, chile peppers and flowers) to raise money for other projects like the basketball court partially funded by Courts for Kids. The court, incidentally, will take out two trees near the school: sports-1, environment-0.

Most of our day was spent at the school because that night was another of Greg's fundraising ideas: a movie and food night. We helped out with the food, making tons of pupusas and elotes locos (corn on the cob with mayo, mustard, ketchup and cheese in this case) and selling them for a quarter each. We didn't even make it through the first movie before we decided to call it quits for the day around 8 pm. At Greg's house I played a passing game with Melissa, his little host sister, and Noah taught one of the teachers some basic chess techniques before falling into bed.

Photo courtesy of Anne

Thursday we were back at the school for an English class on numbers with the kids followed by a softball game. We had cusuco (armadillo) for lunch (tastes a lot like pork, though I'm glad I got just a piece of meat rather than the leg. I don't think I could have stomached holding on to the claw to eat) then met the little kids at the church for an art project. It's civic month in El Salvador, so we brought some Salvadoran national symbols and split up into groups to draw them on the wall in chalk next to the church. We ended up with the flag, the national bird, the national tree, the national flower, a field of corn, and lots of suns and clouds and moons and stars and hearts. It was a brilliant idea and the kids absolutely loved it. They don't have much to do in the afternoons, so any project that gets them out of the house and thinking is a good thing.

We took them all with us to the school to meet up with the older kids to make eco-bricks for a wall that will go around two sides of the school. An eco-brick is a 1.25-2 liter bottle filled to bursting with dry trash (about one pound of trash). He lucked out and got huge bags of mess-ups from the Diana chip company, so filling the bottles was less dirty and faster than usual. Eco-bricks are often used to make schools, and there are non-profits like Hug It Forward that will help fund such projects. Since Greg is just making a wall, it's up to the community to get the funds. The mayor at least is on board with the project, so maybe some help will come in that direction. Otherwise, it's back to fundraising. Greg probably has enough bricks already to make the wall because students from the Institute in Metapán made tons of them and a previous volunteer from another site built a school and had extras left over that he donated, but he's making more so that the community feels a sense of ownership for their project. From what I gathered, the bottles are lined up in wire mesh, then the whole thing is covered in a layer of cement. They act as if the wall were solid cement, but at a fraction of the cost.

Photo courtesy of Anne

We ended the work with a cup of bubble-gum flavored sorbet each, then went home to lounge in the hammocks and eat dinner and reflect and finish answering our interview sheet about what we want in a site.

Friday morning we were up before the sun to catch a ride to Metapán in the next town over. We watched a beautiful pink sunrise as we made our way down the mountain, then took advantage of our two-hour wait and free wifi in Metapán to catch up with the modern world. I tried my best to stay part of the conversations swirling around me, but in the end I gave up and let myself drift in a congested fog with pounding head and ears until we made it back home and I could take a nap. That night I met the newest member of my host family, a one-month-old german shepherd puppy that was going to be a gift for me, but Josiel claimed it first. He named it Cookie and it's soft and adorable and I can't wait to be able to get one of my own (though mine's a mutt).

On Saturday I finally gave in after a mostly sleepless night and went to the doctor, who prescribed me some high-strength flu and cough medicine. Those knocked me out for a solid few hours, then I dragged myself over to work on a presentation we have to give on Monday. A good group came for pupusa night and everyone brought their external hard drives (I need to get myself one pronto) to exchange movies and books and TV shows and music. Once everyone went home I crashed until midnight, at which point I was violently ill for about six hours as my body purged itself of absolutely everything. I don't know if it was something I ate or a reaction to the meds, but I am spending the day in bed. I am, at least, no longer congested.