Welcome to my new blog! I am hoping to use it as a means to chronicle my time in El Salvador as well as maintain better contact with everyone.

The name means "second round" and although most often used in reference to the electoral process, I mean it as a way to describe my current activities as both a continuation of my previous experiences as well as something completely different and new...

I have now been in El Salvador for a little over two weeks, and after a very brief three-day training I arrived in San Francisco Gotera, my home for the next year, to dive right into work. I had a busy first week that included several visits to schools in the department of Morazan, being a spectator at several sporting events, as well as getting to see some important historical sites in the area.

My official assignment is to collaborate with three other Response volunteers (2 of whom are not yet in the country) and the Ministry of Education to develop a youth volunteerism initiative to be eventually implemented at the national level. So my task for the time being is to understand the education system, visit schools, and talk to people about volunteerism. It is sort of like Peace Corps in fast-forward mode.

I have a desk in the ministry offices in the Centro de Gobierno building in Gotera, but I didn't spend a lot of time at it this past week since there was always someone from the ministry going somewhere, and I got to tag along. The people who are technical assistents in either administration or pedagogy as well as the three members of my department, Art and Culture, go to events and school visits almost every day. To me this seems like a really good thing, although gas is really expensive here. My first impressions from interacting with ministry personnel and visiting schools are that the ministry seems to have good intentions as well as hard-working employees with good ideas. The only problem seems to be that there is just no money to back the good intentions and ideas. I am also really surprised to see how big and overcrowded the schools are. For example, in Gotera there is one main public elementary school that serves the town itself as well as the outlying barrios and it has 1400 students. I have also heard that as a means to save more money, the ministry plans to close rural schools and begin busing students to larger urban schools. Here schools have two shifts, one in the morning and one in the afternoon so each student attends half the day. In some more urban schools, like the one in Gotera, they have started offering "tiempo extendido" or extension for students to take electives like art, music or language once or twice per week during the hours they wouldn't normally go to school. It seems like a really good thing, although not all schools are able to offer it.

Sports are definitely big here, and it seems like a priority of the ministry to support team sports in schools. Last week I went to see the municipal games of a nearby town, where schools competed against each other, the boys in soccer and the girls in softball. All classes were cancelled for the day and the whole community was there, and people had set up stands to sell food and drinks. It was interesting to see that things that might be considered impediments to implementing official sports on a district-wide level were irrelevant here. For example, the fact that several of the girls playing softball had no tennis shoes, so they played in flip-flops or barefoot. There were also not enough mitts. (The shoe-less glove-less team, who were also about half the size of their opponents, ended up winning). That is what I mean about the lack of money here, that although sad and unfortunate, it doesn't seem to stop anyone.

On Friday I went with some people from the adult literacy branch of the ministry to an inauguration of a second phase of the literacy initiative in a town called Jocoaitique. The idea of the literacy program is to have local high school students complete their newly-required service hours as teachers of basic reading and math to small groups of illiterate adults in their homes. Being a new program I think it has only had limited success so far, and I have also heard that many schools, being strapped for cash, waive students' required hours in exchange for a monetary donation to help pay for something the school needs. So the actual percentage of students who are participating in the program is very low. The event, however, was taken very seriously and included speeches from the mayor and the priest. The town itself is famous for being where the first guerrilla groups originated, and features a bronze statue of a guerrilla fighter getting ready to shoot as well as plaques with the names of fallen guerrilleros. The mayor himself was a commandante and their are tributes to the revolution all over the town hall. Afterwards, we visited nearby Perquin where the Museum of the Revolution is located. It has several rooms full of photos, posters and war memorabilia as well as a bomb shell and a giant crater where the bomb actually fell. There is also a simulated radio room, pieces of planes they shot down, and two armored cars that were gifts from foreigners. The museum itself is make-shift and nothing is well preserved, and the reason for that is that they refuse to receive any funding from any political party or NGO in an effort to remain apolitical. So their only funding comes from the 60 cent admission they charge. On the way back to Gotera we stopped at the famous Rio Torola, which once served as the front line of the fighting and was made impassable with the army on one side and the guerrillas on the other.

On Monday, taking advantage of the fact that it is Semana Santa and the ministry is closed, I went with the administrator of a local NGO and a volunteer, both of whom are Spanish, to an area that was once part of El Salvador and after the war became part of Honduras. The people there are essentially stateless. The older ones still have their Salvadoran citizenship, but they are still waiting for their Honduran citizenship, and neither government invests in the region. We spent most of Monday driving around to different peoples' houses along with some people from the capital, visiting people they knew and delivering calendars that featured tiny mugshots of all of the casualties of the war, marked with the dates they died. One of the friends from the capital also wanted to show the people we visited some of the many photos of them he had found on the internet that had been taken by journalists and foreigners during the war. It had been a highly photographed area, and almost everyone there had been involved in the revolution is some way. Kids who were little in the photos are now adults. Two of the friends from the capital had been to a homage to the internacionalistas or "foreigners" who had come to help during the war and died, the day before in Jocoaitique.

So far my time here has been very interesting. I feel like I am still getting used to the culture and the Spanish, as well as trying to make friends. Living in a pueblo is very different from a community, and it is also harder not having a host family. There is still quite a bit of the unknown, especially with regards to my work here. But...so far, so good!