Half Way?!

First of all, I had no idea I hadn't updated in forever. Oops. Also, I just (well, yesterday) realized that I am exactly HALF WAY DONE! That is mind boggling, not only because I have been here for 2 months but also because that means I have to leave in 2 months!
On that note, I am overwhelmed by the prospect of describing what i have done since I last updated...let's see...I went on a public bus to the beach, which was an absolutely hilarious and wonderful day....I went on a 3 day silent retreat, which was amazing but i wont bore you all with the inner details of my mind and my newly found infinite wisdom of life and the universe (ha)...my friend got Dengue fever (she is okay, don't worry)....i went to the El Salvador-Honduras soccer game which was absolutely the craziest sporting event i have EVER seen...etc, etc.

So instead of even attempting to write out all those ridiculous amounts of stories, I think I'm going to write about my Praxis site, San Ramon, and the absolutely crazy experience of working in a school here. Sometimes i get so lost in the weekend adventures and the BIG stories that i forget that I should probably also write about what I do every week....

So. Centro Hogar (the school where I 'work') is a private school, but in a very different sense of the word...most kids here are on scholarships for the $30/month tuition that the school charges. The school was started by Alfonso Acevedo, a community organizer who was killed in 1982 by the military for the work he was doing; it focuses on developing the 'whole person-'creativity (which doesn't really exist in public schools here), human and community development, nutrition, etc etc. the school has a lot of amazing programs and works with the San Ramon community a lot. So, there is Centro Hogar ON PAPER.

In real life....Centro Hogar is something along the lines of wonderful semi-organized chaos.
Every monday morning, the kids have 'asamblea,' which means that the teachers try to wrangle 60 kids ages 18 months-6 years old into chairs to sit for 20 minutes. Chaos usually ensues. Each classroom is made up of about 29 kids, but on a given day only about 20-24 come. Keep in mind that each class has ONE teacher, and most teachers don't exactly have their masters in early childhood development...they are amazing women (all women, surprise surprise) from the community who are involved in the school and take classes and workshops on teaching, but I can't IMAGINE managing 24 kids with no formal experience in early childhood education.
The classrooms are bigger than most in El Salvador, and have more supplies and materials than most public schools I'm sure, but nowhere near space for 20 high-energy 3 year olds. The kids have access to a lot of stuff that I'm sure most kids don't--art supplies, their own chair and backpack, a healthy and professionally cooked lunch, a nice playground--but are still missing some basic stuff for a school. Since the teachers can't really control the kids that well (one on 20, it's impossible), the kids miss out on 1-on-1 teacher time, story time (or books in general), general discipline, etc.
I definately love all the kids there--and now that they finally all know my name, I like them even more. But it's heartbreaking to see how violent 3 year olds can become if they have violent influences in their home, no discipline, no consequences for their actions, no problem-solving skills, and, most of all, very little show of love or affection in their lives.
These kids are 3, so it's natural that they aren't awesome at sharing or at talking out problems. But every day, i watch 3 year olds kick, punch, pinch, wrestle, hit, scratch, and bite (and oh, how they bite...). It's not even that this comes a few minutes into an argument. If Josue takes Daniela's swing, she goes straight to punching. Bite marks are practically normal, as are crying children and out of control fist fights.
I try and try and try to have some semblance of control or authority, but it's a lost cause. First of all, they don't listen to me when I tell them to stop fighting (or the teacher, for that matter). Second of all, i have NEVER, EVER, EVER heard a kid apologize. I try endlessly to get kids to say sorry to eachother, or to acknowledge what they did at all. But usually I get blank stares, kids running away, or (worst of all), more hitting. The sad part is, I usually have to give up and just hug whoever is crying myself. With 20 kids, it's impossible to solve every problem that comes up or try to get any kid to change their behavior. I have been hit, kicked, and pinched a few times myself; one kid tried to throw an egg at me once, actually.

Amazingly, I still REALLY like these kids. Even when I am tired in the morning, the second i walk into the classroom and EVERY kid turns around and shouts "SABINA!!!!" and runs at me, I forget that it is 8 am and that i am in for a long, long day. I guess it is kind of hard to NOT like kids this adorable...because even though they are so violent and often so crazy, what gets me more is imagining HOW a 3 year old can BE this violent. If there is violence in their homes, and violence in their neighborhood with gangs, and there are police on every street corner and in every ice cream shop with HUGE guns (true story), how does a kid learn to NOT be violent??
In the end, it's little things that get me through the absolutely insane day at Centro Hogar--like last week when Daniel (who does his fair amount of hitting) went up and hugged every kid who has crying during the day and asked them where they got hurt. It's a confusing world.
This is mostly rambling, so sorry about that. But now you know, if you have been looking at my pictures, a little more about the random kids that show up in all of them. In the end of the day, i have an amazing time every day at Centro Hogar, even when I have kids brushing their teeth and spitting water on me, or running away from me when I'm trying to collect them on the playground, or refusing to apoligize for grabbing eachother's face and hitting it against the wall (yes, that happened yesterday).

Now i am off to catch up on emails and try to plan my vacation in Guatemala for next week...hope all is well in the Estados Unidos. I wish I had more time or more coherent thoughts at the moment, but I suppose that is fairly representative of being in el salvador these past 2 months. cheers to the half way point.
Peace & Love
-Sabine

ps, i put up MORE pictures if you want to look instead of read....www.flikr.com/sabinetb

Campo Week!

Once again, I don’t really even know where to start with this post…and again, it will be unprecedentedly long. so I guess I will just start by simply explaining what in the world I was doing last week and why I dropped off the (technological and communication) face of the earth. Last Saturday at 7 am, all 24 of us in the program got on our microbus and drove about 4-ish hours to Chalatengango, in the Eastern part of El Salvador, for ‘campo week’ Chalatenango is one of the more rural parts of the country, and has a really interesting history because it was controlled by the guerillas during the civil war (1979-1992, ish), so the people there have seen a lot more fighting than most people in the city. For the week, we stayed in pair in the home of a family in one of 3 communities, all fairly rural. Once we finally got there (after a snack stop in Guarjilla to visit the house of Jon Cortina and a lunch stop in Artacao), me and my partner Betsy were introduced to Aminta Alas and walked with her to her house, in the center of the small town of Nueva Trinidad.
The funniest part at first of all this was how our conceptions of campo were pretty off. We all had an idea in our head of where we were going—we were thinking dirt roads, small houses with one room, farms in the backyard, no electricity, outhouses, no running water, etc etc. This is definitely what I was thinking—I have to admit that when I was working at Agros this past year I would spend probably an unprecedented amount of time looking through the amazing pictures in the photo database, and that was pretty much how I formed my idea of where we were headed. So imagine our surprise when we get to Nueva Trinidad on a paved road, see a beautiful small town center, and get to the Alas house made of cement blocks with a kitchen, dining area, 4 bedrooms, and a real bathroom and shower. They actually had a TV (bigger than one I have at home….) and a computer as well. This didn’t discredit at all the ‘campo’ (rural) feeling, but we just had to laugh at ourselves for having a completely generalized conception of where we were headed. Of course, some people did stay in houses with an outhouse, one big room for everyone, and dirt floors, but for the most part we were pretty unprepared for anything. A lot of the land and the work in Nueva Trinidad has actually been done in partnership with people from Spain and from St. Joes and St. Pat’s in Seattle, so it was really cool to have that automatic connection, living really close to both churches in Seattle.
Anyways. This is already long, sorry. Like I said, I am pretty bad at journaling for myself so this is also serving as my memory. Bear with me, if you wish. The family we stayed with, the Alas family, was wonderful. There were definitely some awkward moments and some misunderstandings language wise, but in the end Betsy and I were feeling pretty comfortable and at home in their house. Living there were Aminta and Pascual, her husband, as well as some of their kids, Rosa, Antonio (who just comes home from university on the weekends), William (who just graduated from the national university), Morena, and Morena’s children Kevin and Gaby. First of all, Gaby is basically the love of the entire family. She is one year old and gets more attention than anyone else. This girl gets her clothes changed at least 5 times a day and is played with more than any kid I have ever seen. Also she LOVES to dance unlike any other baby I have ever seen, so a lot of entertainment stemmed from that.
First awkward moment of the week came when, 20 minutes after arriving, Betsy and I had to break the news that we are both vegetarians…literally, right after I said this, the ENTIRE family in the kitchen stopped whatever they were doing—making papusas, sweeping, playing with the baby—to turn and look at us with blank stares. Oops. Food for the rest of the week was also kind of a funny situation. Going to one of the poorer parts of the country to stay with a farming family you would think that we would probably eat decently but not overly well….actually, I was more full of food this week than I have been all of El Salvador (and that is saying A LOT). The family was SO generous with food and, even though we had some awkward moments with the gross cheese they gave us and I had to hide half a grilled banana in my backpack to throw away later, it was overall amazing. We literally ate SO much…for breakfast one morning, for example, we ate 2 papusas (stuffed tortillas) each, a huge piece of bread, the aforementioned grilled bananas, and a cup of coffee each. SO much food. Actually, I have millions more stories about food but I will spare you all…
During the day we….didn’t really do much. It took a few days to get used to the fact that we would get woken up by the animals or the family at 6, eat breakfast, sit at home, eat lunch, walk around, eat dinner, and go to bed at 9 pm. But once we got used to it, it was actually really nice to just accept that we really weren’t going to do much. One of the best days, Pascual took Betsy and I up to the family’s milpa (field) where the grow corn and beans ON A HILLSIDE. Literally, probably a 30 degree slope. It was absolutely beautiful and frankly, just physically amazing that this 70-something man comes here every day to tend to this hillside. See my flikr account for the unprecedented amount of photos that I took. During the nights we would mostly talk to Aminta or the family about life, funny stories, or the war. One night we got to talking about the war, during which they had been refugees in Honduras, and it still baffles me that we keep meeting people with such amazing personal stories about the war, people, and places that I have read so much about in books and classes. It’s nice that El Salvador is a small country, because it seems like everyone knows someone famous.
There is SO much more from this week that I won’t make you all read here. Anyways, to sum up…some lessons I learned from the week:
1. Never, ever, ever ask a Salvadoran about food unless you are prepared to eat it. I had to eat some really gross cheese and got to eat some amazing rice pudding simply because I was making conversation.
2. Salvadorans love ABBA…first day in Nueva Trinidad, we had a sing along to Chiquitita IN SPANISH
3. Apparently, if you shower 15 minutes after you eat, you will die. That is what Aminta told us anyways. Everyone else heard the same thing from his or her campo mom….
4. Statistics and silly things you learn in classes or read in books have absolutely NOTHING to do with the reality of anything. Rough lesson to learn this late in my college career of studying things like poverty…but really. Facts about ‘poverty’ or have very little to do with the reality of this week.
5. I am physically capable of sleeping on a piece of wood, going to bed at 9 pm, and eating food that I am concerned about its origin. And it’s actually NOT that bad.


Now off to manage my life in emails and such from the past week...I just put up a BUNCH of pictures on my flikr so if you aren't already overwhelemed by this blog, then look at those!
(www.flikr.com/sabinetb)

:Sabine