Doin the census, gettin´ by...

22.May.07
A new ciber café opened up in Sociedad, so I now have internet access about 15 minutes from where I live (45 minutes on foot through the countryside). I suppose this means you can email me if you want, cause I’ll check it like once a week, but you should still write, too! And, let me know if anyone wants to talk to me, since phone calls out of here are only 10 cents a minute.

In my life: I finally began to branch away from Don Misael (Health Promoter extraordinaire) and to start doing the census PC requires me to do of 80 houses in the community. You know how bureaucracies are with stats. Since Animas consists of about 450 houses, 80 were chosen from the poorer, but also motivated, areas.

The day I began my census (May15), I ventured out at about 8:30am (late by Salvadoran standards, but I’m still not a morning person) to make the half-hour trek across oxen grazing grounds and open fields. It’s actually a really pretty walk with great views of the surrounding mountains (which tend to depress me, since I know there are cooler places so close to me, yet I am stuck in the oven down below, cursing at the water I drink as it immediately sweats back out my suffering pores).

However, every time I tell someone which path I took, I get an immediate “y no le da miedo andar solita allí?” (and it doesn’t scare you to walk there alone?)…to which I reply “uh…no…? Why?” Then people are like “oh, no, don’t worry about it, there aren’t drunks around here, it’s totally safe.” And I mean, I feel safe…there usually aren’t other people on the path, and if there are, they just say hi to me and ask who I am. Not very threatening if you ask me, but once in a while I tell people I’m going to start carrying my corbo (small machete). This gains a laugh. Girls don’t carry corbos. Silly gringa.

I ran into one guy, and he was like “Buenos dias. choteando?”
To which I replied, “Buenos dias, no, solo paseando.”
There’s an example of caliche Salvadoran slang. Choteando and paseando are the same thing…both meaning like, passing through, visiting, something like that. And word actually got around that I hadn’t known what choteando meant, and I’ve been teased about it. Heh, I’m learning though!

Ok, so back to this first day of doing the census. I made it to four houses. I entered, introduced myself again (most people have met me before and pretend to know why I’m here although it makes no sense to them why in the world someone from the states would want to come here, when people here are dying to get stateside), and made it through the painstaking census. Some questions are simple: who lives in the house, how many times have you been to the doctor lately. Others are a little less comfortable: Tell me what you know about HIV/AIDS. Are you using any form of birth control? They’re not so bad if there are just 2 or 3 people home. But when there are like 7 people home of all ages…things can get awkward. Sometimes questions get skipped over…

Four houses= 1 cup coffee, sweet bread, quesadilla (another type of bread, not tortillas and cheese), hot milk, 2 cups of salva cola (again, sort of like a flat nasty RC cola, but even sweeter)

**digression**
Here they sell “Coca Light” instead of Diet Coke. Why? Because here the word “diet” implies that a doctor has put you on a restrictive diet…so the product didn’t work. Coca light though…they’ll buy. It’s the same thing, except in a silver, narrower, sexier can. The other day, I saw both a Coca Light and a Diet Coke sitting on the shelf together. Strange,
**end digression**

back to the food, I also received multiple tortillas (several people have said to me, “is it true that in the states people don’t eat tortillas??” – here they are the staple of every meal), and some cuajada, which is this cheese made from milk, cut into cubes. It’s actually pretty good, fresh tasting, and not usually too salty. I think that’s all the food I ate along with a LARGE glass of orange liquid (a “fresco”. Now…I’ve talked to these people. I know for a fact that they do not treat their water. It is not potable. But when someone hands you a drink…Let’s just say, I was handed a plate of food, freshly cooked, and I was pretty content. When the bright orange drink landed itself on the table…well…I looked at the fresco. The fresco looked at me. And then I drank the entire glass, somehow actually thinking that if I managed to gulp down every last drop, I would have conquered the cup, and would be out of harms way.

(can you tell where this is leading?)

Fast forward to being back in the house where I’m staying, later that night. I eat MORE cuajada with another tortilla, then a cheese-filled pupusa with curtido (grated up cabbage, carrots, onions, with vinegar…a lot of Salvadorans don’t even eat it because cabbage is really hard to wash, and well…it’s not washed anyway).

**Insert Stomach Ache here.
**Also insert phone conversation with Matthew, and me stating something like “If I make it to the weekend without being sick, it will be a miracle.

Uh-huh. So I’ll spare you the details so as not to make this blog totally gross, but let’s just say I was pretty damn sick, and didn’t eat for about 3 days afterward (though for all the concerned mothers out there, I’ll have you know I was drinking massive amounts of water, and kept taking vitamins!). Anyway. Parasites again…although still not as bad as the food poisoning Matt gave me (haha) in Argentina.

It’s been a week since then, and for some reason, even though I know I like cuajada, the very thought of that cheese makes my stomach churn…even though any number of foods could have given me the amoebas, for some reason that’s the one engrained in my mind. I keep trying to convince myself I like it…maybe in time.

What else. Ah! My mail delivery system, this is amusing. So, a few people were still sending mail for me to the San Salvador office (which is like 5 hours from where I am), so whenever nearby volunteers have to go to the office, they’d be bringing me back mail…then I would go wait at the nearest bus stop, where they’d toss me my mail out the window. So this consists of me receiving a text message, and me grabbing my dog’s leash (pretty sure I’m one of 5 people who own a leash in El Sal), and dog, and half jogging the block to the bus stop. Yesterday, a package was sent to the village near me (I swear, the whole town knew it was there before I did), so another friend who was going by at 6:30 this morning (I had to peel myself out of bed for that one) passed it through the bus window. Pretty amusing. So if you’re going to send mail (aka, when you send mail, because you better be! I have to prove I have friends back home- send pictures!), make sure to send it to Animas (see address in previous blog), and then anxiously await my brilliant reply.

In other exciting news, I was roped into playing softball yesterday with a group of teenagers. I was just going to watch…but of course they all haggled me until I went up to bat…I haven’t hit a ball since like middle school T-ball or something, so my attempts were pretty pathetically girly. However, thanks to the fact that I can run, and the team on the field was just lazy, I got 3 hits….3 runs…whatever. However, since I have not done my summer ritual of playing catch with Dan, I can no longer throw (I always forget how…it’s not like riding a bike, I swear), so my throwing was, well, embarrassing. The bases were plastic bags and rocks, and most people were playing in flip-flops (called ginas here). Fun times though. By the time we were done though, it was almost dark, and I had a half-hour walk home, so I was accompanied by 4 girls and a guy, all the way home.

These kids are the first group of people I’d consider to be my “friends.” It’s about time I got some, right? It’s strange moving somewhere where you just don’t know anyone…I was trying so hard to introduce myself and get some “work” done that I hardly realized I didn’t have any friends to hang out with. But finally, I’m meeting some people. Although, my community is so huge that the different groups of kids I know don’t even know each other.

Oh, and I got my hair cut yesterday. The first time, I cut it myself, just the tips, and I was going to pay someone to cut it, but my host mom was like oh ask Keyri (pronounced Katie), she’s a cosmotologist! So yeah…20 year old Keyri made me a little nervous, but it turned out pretty good. It’s kind of shorter in the front, tapers down in the back….not bad, not bad.

All for now.
More notes from The Savior soon to come, and as always, feel free to email questions or comments, or post them on here….it’s a little weird not having any idea how many people are reading this. Sometimes I feel like I’m keeping in better touch with people now that I did in the states. I guess I have time to write though.