Rain y Fiestas

I left off last time talking about food, so I´ll resume that discussion now. El Salvadorans eat these wonders called ¨pupusas¨ and Olocuilta happens to be the land of pupusas! They are especially good with a green called loroco. Almost every meal here is accompanied by a tortilla. Both my hostess and the maid are fantastic cooks. Oh, and that´s something else I forgot to write about earlier: maids are very common here. However, the culture is so welcoming of their hired help; they are treated like family. I´m enjoying doing plenty of dishwashing here too, so don´t think I´m off the hook :p

The past two days we´ve been welcoming local teens into our home for English and virtue classes. Yesterday and today, all we had to do was visit two local schools and speak to their directors. Our host explained that my roommate and I are doing a year of volunteer service. We are offering the classes for free and on a purely volunteer basis. After introducing ourselves to several classrooms we had lists of interested persons. So far, we´ve had 40 kids attend! They arrive in smaller groups throughout the afternoon. This will be one of my projects for the remainder of the calendar year. I start leading Baha´i service activities like Junior Youth groups soon.

And I would have pictures for you all, but a tragedy occured! My camera stopped being able to read my memory card on Monday. I tried plugging the XD card into an adaptor, that didn´t work either. So now everything may be lost, I´m not sure what happened. However, I took it to mean two things: I´m a bit of an idiot and also perhaps the past 2 weeks had been too special to capture in picture form. haha...

Currently, it is nearing the end of a two week festival here in Olocuilta. I´ve had the hardest time going to bed at night because of the LOUD rain and partying going on in the evening. I was able to wake up at 5:00am the other day and take a walk down to the river. It was a mile steeply downhill, then back up. I hope to make a regular habit of it! But people keep getting a kick out of the fact that I´m from Alaska. I´m walking around sweating and wilting. Today, the director of one of the schools gave me a cold, frigid drink and said it was like my home! Aww! Seriously, it was one of the most touching moments ever. And I love asking people if there´s penguins in AK, all of them say yes!