I’m not sure if you guys noticed this yet, but Obama won the election. Crazy. I’m gonna say that again. Obama won the election. He’s gonna be the next president. Still shocks me a little when I see that. You guys are probably over it by now, but we live in a bit of a bubble down here so it’s still news to me.

As usual, the onion pretty much summed up how I feel.

<<<I love the onion>>>

Anyway, it was an amazing night for us down here as I’m sure it was for all of you bleeding hearts up north. Rest assured we were fortunate enough to watch it as it happened, albeit through a haze of dollar beers and dollar-fifty whiskey shots.

I'm not gonna bore you with too many details, but imagine PCVs from every corner of the country descending on the capital and taking over, since we're a classy bunch, a TGIF’s our buddy rented out (15 pieces of flair!) to experience it live. For a while you really didn’t even feel like you were in a third-world country. We were surrounded by gringos in an american restaurant eating buffalo wings and watching the polls come in. But then you stepped outside and boom - pollution, poverty and prostitutes. Yikes. Here are some pics from the night.





Boston Joe, aka Zagats El Salvador, aka Peace Corps El Sal's unofficial party planner



I liked Will's latest description of Jimbo's beard: "looks like he's eating a hamster in one bite." So true. God knows how many creatures are living inside of that thing...





The moment they announced the win... pandemonium.









To help with the shock of actually winning an election... Wait, hold on a sec. Have I ever won an election? Hmm, let's see.

Gore - nope.

Kerry - nope.

Gov. Romney? - hell no.

Ah, now I remember. Deval. Okay, I got one.

Anyway, after so much craziness with the election and all, a few of us went to the beach to celebrate our friend Lauren’s birthday and oh yeah, history being made. We rented a house for 50 bucks and celebrated our freedom the only way americans know how, with copious amounts of booze and fireworks. Good times.













AIDS is bad

I know you know that. And even people around here know that. But if you ask them what exactly it is, or even better, how to prevent it, you get some pretty interesting answers. Especially the people who go off on how AIDS can only be cured by prayer... hmmm...

... and so to help counteract stuff like that, Peace Corps just threw a weeklong AIDS workshop up in the western hills. The idea was for volunteers to invite active people in their communities to be trained and hopefully help out with future workshops in the communities. Naturally I invited Salvador and we had a kickass time.

In general, we were bombarded with an impressive amount of lectures and workshops during the day. Pretty much all you could ever want to know about AIDS, the history of the disease, and most importantly, techniques for discussing the topic, which is pretty damn taboo in such a conservative country. But then at night we were free to relax by the fires and just hang out.

Below are some pics from the conference and the charla we gave at a local school to practice what we'd learned.

I sorta look like a monkey...

The whole experience was pretty cool and both Salva and I left feeling pumped to organize some events in our community. He seemed to be really impressed by it all and, at the very least, it was a weeklong vacation for him, which he desperately needed (he's like the definition of a workaholic). Now let's see if I can actually bring any of this to my community...

Computers in the Campo

Something else you all might find interesting... Eventhough we lose power every so often, and a decent amount of the community poops in their backyards, our school has computers! Sort of. You can see in the photo that they're not exactly in tip top shape. Four don't even work, and the six others haven't been used in over two years and kinda smell like cat piss. Nice. But I talked to a kid in my community who's actually a computer geek and we're fixing up the computers to start teaching some informal computer classes. Only a couple times a week, but it's a start.

This is all part of my plan, Operacion Abre la Puerta, which will hopefully figuratively and literally open the doors of the school to the community, who have pretty much written off the school director as corrupt and useless. Did I mention they've tried to sue him twice? And half the community sends their kids to a school half an hour away? Anyway, I've started teaching english classes there once a week to get parents back in the school and maybe, poco a poco, parents will get more supportive. We'll see how it goes.

Our school's computer room, aka, put everything you don't want to deal with room.



That's it for now. I'll keep you updated as much as I can. In other news, with all the traveling I’ve been doing this month, I’m flat broke. No seriously, I have a dollar left in my bank account... and I need it to last until December 1st.

Wish me luck!

Goooooooool!

So in case you're wondering what the hell that's all about, I got my first goal yesterday! Naturally it was a header, since I look like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar compared to most of the guys in my community. And naturally it was in the sunday youth game. But these kids are nastier than I'll ever be, so it made me feel really good to finally get one in. Also hearing them describe my goal when we were walking home and how high I jumped was pretty hilarious. According to them, I literally jumped over two kids and then did a Cristiano Ronaldo-esque full body header. So I got that going for me.

What else is new?

Well, it being "winter" here and all, the sky opened up a few weeks ago and it started raining like god wanted to start over with this whole earth and humanity thing. Basically being at the base of the mountains in Honduras and Guatemala, the valleys just funnel all that rain down to the poor little communities below, hint that's us. So we got pretty devastated. Roads turned into rivers. Houses flooded. It was pretty nuts. The picture below is of the road outside my house.





Also, because of all the flash floods, our community started eroding right before our eyes. This one road near my house disappeared overnight. There one day and then a giant hole the next. Pretty common here since the infrastructure generally sucks.

Anyway, the neighborhood came together and pitched in to rebuild the road and bug the hell out of our mayor's office to fix it. He ended up sending a bunch of rocks, cement, sand, and an engineer, and over the course of a week, we built a retaining wall and filled in the road. Pretty cool. Here are some pics.

Mixing cement. You basically make a giant mashed potato and gravy volcano. Except it's cement. Every kid's dream come true





Here we are collecting river rocks for the retaining wall. Just to give you an idea of how much water this one storm dropped on us, the river swelled so much is was touching the footbridge...



Movie night

Hmm, what else is new? Well half of the reason we PCVs are here is to make communities more organized and self-sufficient. Not always the first thing that comes to mind when you think about the rural health mission, but it ends up being really important, ie, organized communities often = more resources and dinero which = public health projects which = healthier people. Got it?

During training, we learned a really easy way to raise money is throwing a movie night. They're insanely easy to put on and communities love them. Especially little kids and teenagers since they get to gel up their hair and mack on the ladies. So I pitched it to our softball team and we were in business.

We borrowed the projector from the mayor's office, moved all my furniture (okay, basically my bed) over into the corner of my room, set up a ton of benches and chairs, and made a ton of popcorn. We were all set...

Until the rain came. F-ing rain. Literally half an hour before showtime, a huge rainstorm came out of nowhere and made it impossible to go outside. Obviously our turnout sucked. Bummer. But in the end, it was really fun and our team made 12 bucks. Decent!

We showed two movies. Ice Age 2 for the little ones and 300 (of course!) for anyone old enough to know where babies come from. Crappy photo but if you squint really hard, you can see the giant mastodon thing.



Stove Team factory

As most of you know, our stove project has been growing and growing. Up to this point, our community has ordered 100 stoves. Pretty amazing considering there are only about 150 families.

Anyway, last week Salva and I went to pick up the stoves my community ordered. Unfortunately, the factory isn't receiving as much support from the states as it did before and can no longer offer people credit. Crappy economy = less international help trickling down to salvos. It was really bad news for our community, since we're corn and bean farmers and they won't be able to sell their harvest for another couple months. But 25 community members scrounged together their 20 bucks and we were off.

The factory is down in Sonsonate, about two hours away near the coast. On the way, you pass through some really picturesque towns. Looking forward to my next trip at the end of November.



A worker pouring in pumice rocks



Cool sparky guy.



This is Francisco. He works for the mayor's office. Good kid. Loved riding in the back of the pickup... until we passed through the mountains and the temp dropped to 50 degrees. With windchill. Yikes. Anyway, he survived.



Later, Salva and I dropped off a stove he bought for a nearby family. He'd never lit the stoves before so we all thoroughly enjoyed watching him go through about 20 matches, the whole time reassuring us he knew what he was doing. Also, this girl's smile is ridiculously cute.


So that's it. Hope all is well up north...

G