Sazon

February 15, 2009 Day 12

Well I've been with my host family for more than a week now, and I completed the first week of Spanish class. Class is in the house of one of the other volunteers in my town, we arrive at 8 and do work until 12 at which time we return home for lunch (which is frequently hot soup), then go back for more class at 1:15 and either practice Spanish, attend some other class or presentation the Peace Corps tells us to. I've found all the language training (and other training) to be very effective and have been impressed with their programs.

The hardest part of the training is we have to organize some kind of youth project in our community after Spanish class and field trips. It's hard because only one person in are group (of four) is proficient at Spanish, I just sound like a caveman. But were making progress, we introduced ourselves to two youth groups yesterday. Both groups are church related, one was an Evangelical youth group and the other was the Catholic youth group. I'm not really sure what they do outside of church at the moment because both meetings were really just mass aimed at a younger audience (12-20ish) but as of now the groups had no projects they were working on or really had plans to do, but we are meeting everyone who is interested tomorrow.

Today I woke up really late by Salvadorian standards (800) and was questioned why I woke up so late. One of the kids here in the house had dengue fever and has been sleeping on the couch in the living room for the last two days with a wet cloth on his head. He had a temperature of 104 yesterday and was at the hospital for a while, but they said he will be fine. So in the morning I was told I was going to the scrubland with Marta and Veronica to get the kid some medicine, they said it was far and I should bring some water. I thought this was a little strange since there is a pharmacy up the street. We walked to a little village about 1 mile from my town, and I asked what we were doing again. This time I thought they said we were going to get some warmer water for the kid to take a bath in because the water at our house was too cold, but I was strictly wrong about what we were doing. We went to Marta's house and she had a little tree that had some fruit I've never seen or herd of before, it was super weird. It had the texture of raw meat, and the flavor of old strawberries, fresh pineapple and perhaps peach. We left Marta's house and borrowed a huge bamboo pole from her neighbor and we started walking down a dusty trail near some cane fields to knock green mangoes off trees, and collect some little flowers from trees to eat with eggs. Let me explain something about fruit in El Salvador, they have four words to describe different levels of ripeness. A word for unripe, almost ripe, ripe, and too ripe. And they eat the fruit at all stages. At all stages they put salt on the fruit. The green mangoes (once peeled) aren't bad but all the other unripe fruit I've tried is just too sour. It makes sense in a country where there is always lots of fruit, might as well eat the unripe once since when they are ripe there are so many that all can't be eaten.