Feb 28th

2/28/10
Wow… where do I start? I just got back from spending the weekend in a remote village with a current Peace Corps volunteer named Adam, who has been here for about a year. His site was relatively nice. He had a dirt road (meaning we didn’t have to walk to his village like some other volunteers did). My friend Mya took a 3 hour bus ride to a town near the Guatemalan border and then had to walk up a mountain for 3 hours to get to her village. If that was me… it would have been GAME OVER! Next bus to the airport PLEASE! Anyway, I had a relatively nice weekend. On Thursday we went to the school and taught an English class. After we gave the students, ages 12-18, an assignment and I was walking around the classroom and individually checking their work I thought to myself…. Holy shit if someone were to have told me five years ago that this is what I’d be doing 5 years from now I probably would have laughed in their face. I will never forget when I walked out of my last Spanish exam in high school… I was the last one finished and I yelled in the hallway “YESSSSSS I WILL NEVER EVER TAKE A SPANISH CLASS AGAIN”…. Not only did I take another Spanish class again, I minored in it in college and am now living in El Salvador teaching English, health education, youth development and learning Spanish every day. Funny how things work. On Friday we gave a presentation on HIV/AIDS to about 20 guys from the village. They ranged in age from 14 to 35. It was really interesting to see what they actually knew, thought they knew, and the things they had never even thought about. Nearly 100% of them thought you could look at someone and tell whether or not the person had HIV. They also thought HIV could be spread by mosquito. After presenting some facts to them we hung 8 beautiful models that we cut from a maxim magazine on the chalk board with blank pieces of paper below them. We had each guy put their name under 3 of the girls in which they would like to sleep with. After they were all sitting down we told them that one of the girls had HIV, trying to establish the point that you cannot simply look at someone and see if they have HIV. After telling them which girl it was that had the disease we made the guys stand who were now “infected” while all the others in the room giggled and made fun of them. But because they each signed up for 3 women, the other 2 girls they picked were also now infected with HIV, thus all the other guys who signed up for those women were also now infected. Long story short by the end of it, all the men in the room were standing. We made our point and they understood the dangers and how easy it is to contract HIV if you have multiple sex partners and don’t use a condom. Mission complete. We may have just saved one life. As the men walked out of the hot and sweaty classroom on a Friday afternoon with smiles on their faces I quickly realized how awesome that was and how much happiness it brought me. If this is going to be the next 2 years, I am going to be happy.
After I wrote everything above I spoke with my grandmother on the phone…she recommended that I add the fact that I slept in an empty cinderblock room with only a hammock and 3 50 pound bags of corn. I also had no door. Outside the room there were ducks quacking, roosters crowing, wild dogs barking, and a parrot that continually repeated “hola”. After I described this to my grandmother she simply asked “and why do some many people work so hard to join the Peace Corps? I just can’t imagine begging to live like that.” “Please please can I go somewhere where chickens peck at my suitcase and keep me up all night?”