more privacy and less scorpions.....life couldn't get any better

We have really come to like that fact that we have privacy in our house. And having lights!! What a treat! Above is a photo of our bedroom after we had finished painting. We have only found 3 scorpions in total, to this I am extrememly happy about. We do have a random assortment of other insects, but have become more and more accostomed to them. Our neighborhood is plump full of children, so we usually end up having at least 1 or 2 visit on a daily basis and sometimes up to 5. However, at times we feel a little awkward because they don't do too much to start up conversation, they are perfectly fine with sitting and watching us doing whatever we are doing.

The doctor that works in the clinic is back, for those of you who didn't know, funds ran out at the clinic so they we not able to have a doctor for about 2 weeks. The community and the doctor were thinking, due to the funds, she wouldn't return until January so needless to say everyone is pretty happy that she is back. Last week was her first week back, last Wednesday 3 people told her she got fat. I don't care what people say about this being a complement in Central America, it sure didn't seem like one. Especially when the dentist (who visits about twice a year) asked her if she was on a diet!!

Tom and I were invited to have lunch at Gloria last Sunday (Saturday was Ana's birthday). We were able to hang-out with the family, which is something we definately miss. While Tom was helping make tortilla's and I was watching (I didn't feel like practicing this day), Gloria asked us if we would be Ana's godparents! We were both a little shocked at the question, but gladly accepted. Later while we were eating lunch (rice and beans) Gloria told me ¨at least you know what kind of a torment she can be, so it won't be a shock¨ We all laughed at this....including Ana (pictured on the left).

Here is another photo taken this past Sunday. We were all playing UNO, Gloria had a very hard time with this game!!

-posted by Melissa
*the next entry is a new one by Thomas....so read on

Learning new things

While I reciently found out that I still have some eggs of amboeas left inside me and will be taking more medication for the next 9 days it's nice to be back in ¨el campo¨. Below is a story I would like to share:


A few days after my birthday I decided to take on the responsiblity to put up plastic walls (basically) to create a more private showering area. Our pila is located right in front of our house and we have a good amount of neighbors that come by thus necessating privacy for bathing. (See pictures) I spent a good amount of the morning looking through our yard for long branches and with a machete cut and trimmed them to use for wrapping the plastic around. I also trimmed the grass around the pila as it was quite long. All of this took me about an hour as I needed to barrow a machete from our neighbor. After lunch I told Mauricio that I was going to put up the plastic and asked if I could barrow a shovel. Although he had just finished showering and had a meeting to go to he told me let´s go do it together.

When he arrived at the house he asked if I had a post-hole digger, since I didn't know what that word was in spanish I had not so he asked the neighbor (which at this point I suspected had quite a lot of tools) if we could barrow theirs. When he looked at my branches/poles he quickly decided that they were too small and told me to start with the holes and he would come back. After I had finished two of the holes he returned with three 8-10 foot trunks that were each individually quite heavy. (Now something equally as noteworthy is that Mauricio only has one arm as his right was amputated during the war.) Quickly, as Mauricio had a meeting to get to however nonetheless insisted he could stay and help until the end, we finished with the holes, put in the new branches, cut the long plastic to stretch around the poles, cut cardboard to use with nails to attatch the plastic to the poles (I was just going to use Duct Tape), and nailed the plastic on (which turned out to be much better as we could stretch the plastic tighter) in probably the next 10 minutes.

I still had questions as we had two open spaces left, a smaller one by the house and the second leading into the pila. I was able to figure out that we could use a plastic shower type curtain in front but the spot by the house still troubled me. Without really speaking Mauricio understood what I was thinking and we both looked at a piece of aluminum roofing that was removed a week earier from our house. The piece was much too long to fit but in a blink of an eye he found a stick, put on top of the aluminum, bent the aluminum over it and placed it perfectly into the open space.

This quick action that might have taken me 20 minutes to process/figure out and I couldn't help but marvel at this rapid action for various reasons. One, this isn't the first time he found things lying around to use for building purposes; when we were working on the pila before we left for the states he grabbed old sandel to smooth out the cement finish on the washing top of the pila. Two, how quickly we finished a project that I had taken an embarassing hour to do simple steps. I've found myself having to set my pride aside in our house projects as I have more to learn from the people like Mauricio here. The third was the humbling nature that he has continued to help us out with our house. The branches/trunks were probably from his house which he gave away, he had just taken a shower and was drenched in sweat from the work, and he was in the end late for his meeting. These interactions continuously occur with our friends and neighbors often leaving us with insuficiente vocabulary to voice our thanks. We only hope that one day we can return the good will that we have recieved.

-Posted by Tom

Getting re-acquainted

Although the amoebas knocked me out a little over a week ago we finially decided to leave back for our community this last Monday. During our week long stay in the city Melissa was running around continuosly for me making sure I was eating and drinking since the medicine had left me feeling nauseated. The days of school I missed last week due to sickness we found actually were cancelled due to extreme rainy weather caused by Hurricane Felix. So all the work Melissa and I did to get messages to school (since we didn't know the phone number) turned out to be for naught. Once we got to our community I was pretty exhausted and spent most of my birthday (the 11th) in bed resting but by the afternoon I started to regain my strength. It has been good to be back in the community this past week and I feel that just by being there I am regaining some energy and peace of mind.

We just recently brought a few more house items that we are both borrowing and a couple of larger items purchased yesterday to help organize our house. Up until now we have been living out of a couple of suitcases that we need to consistantly keep closed due to spiders, huge crickets, giant moths, cockroaches, mosquitos, tailless whip scorpions, mice, snakes, the occasional chicken, and of course the ever present scorpions themselves. I told Melissa recently that I may develop Shirley's (my sister-in-law) habit of constantly cleaning as it seems to be necessary to keep a house at least temporarily free of insects and rodents. The concerns of cleaning our house stem from not only a health perspective but from a ¨these bugs freak me out¨point of view as well. For Melissa it's scorpions and spiders and I find myself really bothered by the large moths and mice. So far we haven't seen any mice but then we haven't had left any food out of containers yet either, and hopefully neither will change any time soon.

We are slowly getting more involved with our responsibilities in the community. I will be putting together a planning meeting with the youth of our community and hopefully be supporting more of the youth groups of the community than I have been. Contacts are being made and the future looks excitingly different for me with the end of the school year in sight (the school year here runs from around January to Novemeber). Melissa continues to have a busy schedule with the women's group, AMUDESCO, and the meetings were aplenty once she returned. She also is going to utilize her connection with the Casa de Mujeres to start teaching English to a group of women in nearby in Suchitoto.

Stay tunned, stories soon to come!
-posted by Tom

Lazy Dayz

Well, this past week was spent in San Salvador so Tom could get better while having amoebas. The trip to the doctor went well (besides Tom having amoebas), the clinic that we went to was rather fast, we were in and out within 35 minutes. The doctor that attended to Tom, was very thorough, he actually studied in Japan, receiving a degree in ¨Japanese study and other Japanese things¨, yes it actually said this on the degree….I laughed. The medicine has basically put Tom on hold, as he frequently feels nauseated, but not able to vomit, constant headaches, fatigue, etc. So, that left me spending my time doctoring Tom, taking him to the doctor, getting medication, several runs to the grocery store for specific foods, laundry, reading, playing on the computer, and doing other tedious things. Yes, I love Tom, but I don’t think I could handle him like this all the time….sorry Tom.

Yesterday was somewhat constructive for me, I met some of the women in our community for a meeting that was taking place here in the city. I was told to be at IMU (an organization we work with) at 7:30 am, so I went to IMU at 7:30 am for this meeting that was to take place. Time slowly drifted by, the women from our community showed up around 8:30, we ate breakfast and waiting for our ride to come to take us to a larger location (there were 25 women in total, including women from other departments in El Salvador). Time continued to drift by, but finally at 11:15 our ride was there to pick us up!! Yahoo! Everyone was making a joke that we will have just enough time to eat and then go home. Well, it was close to that, we meet for about an hour and a half, then we ate, then we went home. Oh, how I love meetings in El Salvador. This meeting was a little out of the norm, however it is normal to start a meeting at least an hour behind schedule. It was still great to go, I was able to practice some Spanish (as I did very little during the week), caught up with a couple of women I meet in July, and learned some more Salvadoran slang. So, I guess it was worth it.

Well, we are heading out to our community tomorrow, hopefully Tom’s stomach will treat him well.

-posted by Melissa

Finally

Here it is our next post...

Since the last time we wrote a lot has happened but for those of you who have a shorter attention spam (like I do) we will sum up. The first part of July was filled with a protest about water privatization near our small community that ended up with 13 people arrested. I (Tom) nearly accidentally ran into this ugly scene but to cover more on this issue is at least a blog entry or two. The incident is a continuing story and for those interested there is information aplenty including on our organization's website.

Additionally we packed away our things in July, came back to Minnesota (and a side trip to Wisconsin for me) and had a wonderful 5 weeks visiting friends and family, returned to E.S. at the end of August, moved to a different room here in the office, moved to a new house in the country and presently I have amoebas once again. Oh yeah, and most importantly we got engaged! While back in the states Melissa proposed to me and we will probably be planning for a wedding sometime near September of 2009, once we return from Central America.

Many exciting things happened however I believe the break from the blogsite was needed so that we could focus on getting things organized before we left for the states, being present and capitalizing on the little time we had with loved one's in MN, and then returning and moving to our new home.

For those of you who didn't know we had found an abandoned house in the country that had running water, tiled floor, electricity, and a good roof (or at least the capacity for all of that). Since we found the house we have done a lot of fix up work which would include: cleaning the entire house inside and out, cleaning our outhouse, painting the inside with 2 coats of paint, fixing the electricity and lights, putting up a clothesline, and many more miscellaneous things (and most of that was in the last week). Now honestly we got a LOT of help from Mauricio (who helped us find the house and talked to the owner for us) and neighbors. It's really great to see how welcoming they are to us and we are excited to be closer to work (we are now both less than two city blocks away from the clinic and the school).

Although it was sad to move away from Gloria and her family we of course will continue to visit and some of the kids will take turns staying with us (including Ana this weekend). We gave out some gifts to Gloria, Nena, Fatima, Walter, Juan Carlos, Gabby, Ana, and Carolina this past Sunday when we had lunch with all of them. They were so greatful and excited about their presents and we felt so welcomed to be back not only with them but to the community as well.

As for me, my amoebas are getting better but to be sure we are taking one extra day in the city before returning to toilets that are a little farther away. Thanks to all who continue to take the time to read about us.

-posted by Tom