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