Getting Things Off the Ground

Did you know that these weird trees (morros) produce the fruit that makes horchata? They wait until the green fruit turns black and hard, then scoop out all the seeds, toast them up, throw them in a blender with a few other ingredients and call it good. My host family made fresco de morro last week and it was AMAZING.

First things first, I have some #Peacecorpsproblems - Google can't even find facebook, and when it finally agrees that Facebook does, in fact, exist, it takes longer to load than it does on my flip phone. I am incredibly glad I get any internet at all, but it's a pain when it takes over an hour to read four emails and I can't even respond to them because the reply box won't load. Also, Why do I even have a mosquito net if I come home to find scorpions and flies INSIDE of it? I was better off sleeping in a hammock next to the river.

On to business: A week ago we took the first steps towards a few projects. I mentioned that we had a General Assembly a week or so ago, and now we are taking steps to realize the proposed projects. We had a meeting with the families in La Colonia to assess the terrain and find out whether we could get permission to build on both sides of the river from the respective landowners (yes!), then I wrote a proposal with the ADESCO president to our mayor and the neighboring mayor to get support for building a hammock bridge, which we will turn in (hopefully) this week. I also got in contact and started writing a project proposal for the eco-stoves that will replace 20-30 stoves in our community. I still need to visit all of the potential houses and take pictures, but the mayor said he will help out with transportation costs and maybe he will throw a few bags of cement in the deal too. 

This past week I hosted three trainees for their Field-Based Training. I don't know if they enjoyed it, but I had a good time letting them lead an English class and finally being able to break out into groups of twenty or less for sports. The sports class was a blast because we split into four stations - volleyball, freeze tag, kickball and frisbee. If I had support that would be how I would spend every week...looks like it's time to start enlisting youth to be sports teachers. They come watch the class every week anyway, so they might as well make themselves useful.  I also have a little youth English class that I'm hoping to use to create English teachers. They just need to get a few lessons ahead and be confident, then they can start planning lessons every once in a while to teach the simple stuff.

On Thursday afternoon we headed down to spend the night at the river. I like to pretend that I could live just fine like Salvadorans here, but then we have nights that I sleep in a hammock and I appreciate all over again how nice it is to sleep in a bed. I can sleep in a hammock, but it's not nearly as restful as a bed. We spent the entire afternoon throwing ourselves into the river from a rock jutting out over the water. On Friday morning, we had a major achievement - I got a picture of almost my entire host family. Brayan is already back in the United States and Walter left early to work, but everyone else showed their faces for a photo with the trainees. I'm still working on smiles, but just getting them all together without hiding was fantastic.

After they left I may have spent the better part of a few days re-watching all of Firefly and seeing some of the Oscar movies, and soon I'm going back to Nuevo Cuscatlan with my puppy to visit my old host family and take a trip to the vet. Productivity comes in waves, I suppose.  

Finally, all the jocotes are ripe!!!! So much fruit! And the mangos are not far behind.