Below are the 4 most recent journal entries recorded in sipalice's LiveJournal:

Tuesday, September 7th, 2004
9:21 am	Mi familia y mis amigos, I am writing from Bradford Rd. and have safely returned from El Salvador, as of late last night. I have not had access to internet for a long time, since there have not been as many opportunities to go into the city in the last month, but I wanted to write one more e-mail to share with you the conclusion of my experience. It is extremely difficult to put into words what exactly I have learned and experienced in the last ten weeks. I don't think that I have yet fully come to understand the impact of this summer on my life, although I know the impact is strong. Saying goodbye was extremely emotionally straining, and I am at the moment quite overwhelmed with my quick reentry. It is shocking to me how I can be living and sharing life with my Salvadoran family one minute and the next find myself in a completely different world, merely 4 hours north by plane. Let me back up and fill you in what I've been up to in the last month. I went twice with my family and friends to a waterfall in the middle of the woods further up the mountain. In order to get there we had to go through tons and tons of fields of milpa(corn), climb up and down hills, and trek through the woods until we reached the top of the waterfall and slipped down the side of the hill to go swimming. It was beautiful, hidden in the middle of nowhere, and it reminded me that simple, natural, and undeveloped landmarks are so much more special than the U.S.'s tourist crazy, over-glorified hot spots. At the end of July I got the great pleasure of getting to spend time with my mom, who came with St. Dominic's Church to do a one week educational trip. I was able to visit Cerro Verde with her group and see beautiful views of two of the seven volcanoes in Salvador, visit a pottery cooperative, and get a tour of a site of ancient Mayan ruins. For one day she also came back to my community with me and everyone was more than overjoyed to be meeting my mother. It was awesome to see her there and be able to share my summer life with someone from home. After she left, the first week of August was vacation week for the school so I got to spend a ton of time with my family and friends. We visited one of the teachers at her home in the city, picked corn one afternoon in a neighbor's field, built a tent over our beds for fun, and watched the dubbed movies on the public tv station when we had electricity. One night I went with my host mother and people from the community to guard the water project materials. The group of seven communities in my area is working on a water project that will eventually install one outdoor faucet in each household, which is a pretty big deal and lots of work for the community. Anyways, all the materials for the project are stored on top of the hill and so every night four people have to stay up all night to guard them. Of course the night we went there was a ton of mud and it rained most of the night, but it was still fun to sit and talk by the fire. Now I reach my series of goodbyes, which was the most emotionally draining couple of days of the whole summer. The last Friday of school was very powerful for me because I realized how many people I had developed relationships with that I did not want to leave. In the morning I had to say goodbye to my little kids and I broke down when they gave me a card that had all written their names in, even though I know most of them can't spell their own names without their teacher. We had ice cream and played games with the other class where Susi, the other intern, was working. In the afternoon, I gave a final exam to the fourth grade (I had already concluded my other classes earlier in the week) and then the school gave us a series of despepidas (farewells). First, three of the classes did performances for us, which were hilarious lip syncing/dancing routines. Then, they presented us with plaques and the principal thanked us for all our work. I was able to also speak and thank the school for everything and express how much my connection with them meant to me. I respect the work and effort put into the organization of that school so much, and it meant a lot to me to be able to speak to the gathered classes and teachers. Then, we had pupusas (most famous Salvadoran food) with the teachers and shared memories from the summer. Susi and I could not believe how much the school prepared to say goodbye to us, and we felt that what we had been able to give was completely disproportionate to what we received from them. The night before I had to leave my community, Sunday, I walked around saying goodbye to families and friends. It was extremely dark and the electricity was out, and I felt depressed and frustrated to be saying goodbye to these people I have grown to love. Even more difficult though was trying to tell Ana, Ivonne, and my grandmother (my immediate family) how much they mean to me. I felt so selfish to be leaving after entering their lives and being accepted so completely into their family, only to return to my comfortable home and over-priced university. Ana, my mother, was really upset and said to me, "Alicia, you don't understand. You go home and will continue to meet new people, but I cannot do that. I will always live here." She reminded me at that moment, that it is a priveledge I have to be able to form friendships with people of different countries and cultures. It is a priveledge to be internationally experienced. While my life seems to be dominated by a sense of movement towards the future, their lives are more filled with consistency, repetition, and much less change. One of the most ironic lessons I learned from living in the rural countryside was that while my community doesn't have any access to the same technology, mobility, or communication devices as we do in the States, they instinctually understand "community" and the interconnectedness of people on a much higher level than we do. Anyways, Monday morning I left La Ciudadela and we drove into the city with our host families and representatives from the school. We had a big final get together with Crispaz and finished our goodbyes with our families. That morning I got the news that my grandmother, Grannie Annie (my father's mother), passed away a couple days earlier. Although I knew she was sick ahead of time, it was extemely difficult to be so far away from home at that moment, and Monday was a pretty rough day for me. Please keep my father and his family in your prayers. Tuesday and Wednesday my group had a final retreat at a beautiful lake outside of San Salvador. It was great to spend time reflecting and venting with my friends from the program and the final night back in the city we had a party to say goodbye to the Crispaz staff. People even sung Happy Birthday to me in four languages (English, Gernman, Spanish, and Swiss), all various peple connected with Crispaz. And now I am back in Cleveland and so happy to be reuniting with all of you, but also sad to be separated and distant from El Salvador. I will miss the tortillas, speaking Spanish, riding in pick-up trucks, the Salvadoran sense of time, hauling water on my head, playing with my kids, and so much more. I am confident that this summer has helped me to gain a deeper understanding of the issues plaguing El Salvador and the rest of Latin America. I know that from this point on Latin America will permanently be a part of my life. Thank you for listening and being a part of my experience. To conclude, as my Salvadoran grandmother tells me, it's not time that is flying by, it is life that is passing before our lives. With love and peace, Alicia (Comment on this)
Thursday, July 15th, 2004
10:22 am	And the stories from El Salvador continue... After another ten days, more or less, in La Ciudadela I have plenty more stories to tell. I feel more and more comfortable in my community and this place has begun to feel like a second home for me. I feel like I am forming and strengthening many more friendships with people around me (outside my immediate family), which has helped me to feel more fully integrated into my community. I´ve gotten more involved at the school, played some soccer, learned more about the war´s effects on the people here, and my name has officially been shortened from Alicia to Ali (the affectionate nickname for Alicia). In the beginning of the stretch of these ten days, I took a trip with my family to Cojute to visit some relatives. Maria (my grandmother) has a sister and lots of nieces and nephews who live in Cojute, which is a larger city a little over an hour away by bus. Ana (my mother), Ivonne (my sister), Maria, and I all hiked down to the bus stop and hopped on the first bus. Let me explain that even though Maria is a completely capable and productive member of our household, she has severe pain in her lower back and has some sort of bone disease that makes rapid movement and too much walking difficult. Now picture a rattly old painted school bus crowded with people carrying anything from giant sacks of corn stalks to crying babies to live or dead chickens, and then picture a 88 yr. old woman ¨hopping¨ onto the bus. Believe me when I say, loading and unloading buses here is something that happens so rapidly that you cannot even blink an eye and here we are with this sweet, yet frail old woman. Taking this trip with Maria made me realize one simple thing: here being old or weak doesn´t mean a damn thing if you are poor. There is no way to secure a safer or less-stressful trip for Maria without more money for transportation and that´s just the way it is. The whole thing sort amazed me, but Maria seemed content and uttered not a single word of complaint. (On a sidenote, bus costs are incredible here. 20 cents for a city bus ride and 40 cents to go all the way to my community from San Salvador). Cojute was an interesting town-city and it was really fun meeting tons and tons of cousins and seeing such a bubbly family reunion in action. There were several adult women cousins who adopted me for the day. They were the funniest women who had tons of stories and I even got to climb a tree to cut down avocados with one of them (my new favorite vegetable). Once you are in the tree you use a giant pole with a cage attached to the end to reach the avocado and miraculously cut it from the branch, shove it into the cage, and bring it back down safely, with the cage 12 feet away from your reach. The funniest part was that one of the avocados I tried to throw down to Ana managed to first bounce off the roof, roll down the pipe, hit Ana in the head, and then land on the stovetop filled with cooking food. Needless to say, I got a lot of laughs for that mistake. On a sidenote, even in a bigger city things like having an avacadoe tree in your backyard, handwashing your clothes, and not having consistent running water are typical daily realities. Since the last time I wrote I have also gotten more involved in the school, which has been great. Susie (the other intern) and I had a meeting with Don Fito (the principal) and told him we wanted to become more involved so we began helping out in the computer classes with los bachilleratos (the high schoolers). We each assist in two computer classes a week in addition to our other English classes. I also added second grade to my agenda, because for some odd reason I found out the other English teacher is teaching all the primary grades except for that one. The computer classes are interesting because they are extremely basic and there are only four working computers for the entire school. The students do very simple excercises in Microsoft Word and Excel, but even that little exposure to computers is beneficial. Even though I don´t contribute a ton because the teacher plans and runs the class, getting to know the high schoolers has been a great experience. I have made a couple friends close to my age and it has given me a whole new window into the young adult generation. One friend, Mariela, who has especially touched me, is a 18 year old girl (yet mature enough to be 28-- females here mature at incredibly rapid rates) who wants to go to the university after she graduates from high school to become a journalist. It is very uplifting for me to become close with a young woman with such an ambitious dream, because so many others don´t even go to high school, already have children, and have little plans for the future. In addition, I have become an expert tortilla-maker (I was told that mine are now just as good as any Salvadorans), I joined the women´s community soccer team (I even scored a goal in my second game as a forward), and I´ve picked up a lot more Salvadoran slang. One of my favorite moments was the day when Ivonne and I decided that playing in the rain was much more fun that just watching it from inside. Since the path outside our house quickly turns into a river anytime it rains, we had fun sending our flip flops downstream to see who´s shoe could make it to the bottom of the hill first. I have also gone back to my favorite place on the mountain to see the cows again and they even named a new, younger cow Alicia after me. In the midst of all these joyful moments, I have also uncovered much more of the effect of the civil war on the lives of my family and their friends. One day Ana took me to a small cemetery right down the road from us where there are about a dozen people buried who were from our community and died during the war. There was a beautiful view of the hills from the clearing and Ana told me that those were only a few of the many hills in the area where countless people of all ages died only a couple decades ago. A storm was coming in and I literally had the chills as I stood next to Ana and silently took in the view. Another night Ana and I stayed up late talking and she told me her family´s entire story in a very matter-of-fact manner. She told me that two of her brothers and one sister (this is a sister I know, named Carmen) fought in the war for the left (Absolutely NOBODY who lives in La Ciudadela is from the right or would ever associate themselves with ARENA. In fact, often times if you find yourself in a group of people there will be few who are not sporting some sort of FMLN paraphenalia). Because there were three family members fighting, Ana´s family was extremely vulnerable to the army. Soldiers were constantly looking for her family and frequently they had to sleep in the nearby mountain for several nights in a row in case the guards came to murder them in the middle of the night. One of the brothers fighting and another younger brother who was not fighting were both killed by the army, the younger for merely being associated with the left. Ana also told me about one cousin who was raped and another who lost both her parents during the war. At the time Ana was about 14-15 years old and she explained that she lived in constant fear of the army, and continues to fear any soldier in uniform. Eventually, the army burned down the family´s house and they lost everything they owned. They then moved to a different, safer part of the country with literally only the clothes they were wearing, and an uncle helped them get on their feet again. After telling all of this to me Ana looked at me completely straight-faced and told me ¨Alicia, hemos sufrido¨-- Alicia, we have suffered. There was no hint of drama or distress; it was merely her stating her personal reality. The whole story was extremely hard for me to take in, especially because of the way she told it. Yet I have also realized that many Salvadorans have taken on this seemingly emotionless attitude towards their experiences in an attempt to survive and live on past the terror of the war. There is no such diagnosis here as post-traumatic stress disorder and openly expressing deep-seeded feelings is not quite culturally appropriate. I understand the need to move on, but it also saddens me to think about how much pain my friends here have undergone and with little ways to express it all. On a lighter note, this Saturday I got to participate in an event the 9th grade was putting on to raise money for kids who can´t afford their uniforms or books. Basically this is how it goes: there are men who are racing horses back and forth under a string tied between two poles and covered with attached metal rings. The men have to catch a ring on their pole and then one of the ¨godmothers¨ gives them a gift. I was one of 40 godmothers and there were only 6 horses. The event could not end until every godmother could give her gift, so as you can imagine this was a long process but entertaining to watch and another good opportunity to get to know people in the community. I feel very content these days, because I have finally reached the pinnacle of comfort in my new culture and world for the summer. Now I have a whole new month to enjoy everything and continue soaking everything in. I might not have access again to the internet for quite some time because our next group meeting is going to be in my community, so I won´t be coming back to the city. I will definitely write at least once more though at the end when we come in for our final retreat, the second week of August. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Thursday, June 24th, 2004
10:14 am	I am back in the city after my first nine days in ¨el campo¨ (the countryside). I arrived back in San Salvador yesterday evening, a day earlier than expected because one of the girls living near me got violently sick and needed to come back. I will tell more of that story later. Being back here at the Crispaz base has been both overwhelming and refreshing. It´s been a great chance to reflect with the other interns on my first week and step away from my community for a bit. On the other hand, the quick transition has made me a little more emotional than expected and I have realized that I miss home more than I thought. So on to el campo... I arrived in La Ciudadela Guillermo Ungo Communities last Saturday afternoon with the two other interns living and working in the same area. La Ciudadela is a group of seven different communities and I am living specifically in the one called Ciudadela. We were accompanied to our community by Javier, an amazing Salvadoran man who works with the rural segment of Crispaz. The hour drive there from San Salvador with all the mountains was beautiful. After driving on the brand new highway (big scandal here because the government pushed the project through despite environmental and budget priority objections from huge masses of Salvadorans) we turned onto a road and chugged up a pretty darn bumpy hill. The best word to describe the way I felt when we finally pulled up to the school (the center of La Ciudadela) was clueless. We met the principal of the school, Don Fito (a sweet yet fiesty old man who is a community leader and used to be a guerilla during the civil war) and then took the first intern to her placement next door. Then Javier and Don Fito took me to my house, which is literally a hop and a skip from the school property. I met my host mother, Ana Ruth Valle, and my host grandmother, Maria, and then Javier talked to my family a bit and said farewell. And that is where my rural adventure began. I live in a one room house with Ana, Maria, and Ana´s daghter, Ivonne. Mi abuela (my grandmother) is the sweetest old woman you could ever meet. She is this tiny little 85 year old Latina woman who loves flowers and has a pet parakeet that she kisses on the mouth. She has some health issues, but rarely complains and cooks most of the family´s meals in a kitchen-like hut set aside from the actual house. Her husband died fighting with the guerillas in the war, but I have not yet gotten any more of that story. Ana, my mother, is another beautiful woman with tons of spirit. She is extremely patient and helpful and has become quite the Spanish teacher. She is willing to correct my Spanish when it is wrong and takes lots of time to explain any words, expressions, or mere culture differences that I don´t understand. She works as a teaching assistant at the school with the kindergarten (which here is actually 3-5 year olds). She is fortunate to have a job closeby because she has a consistent salary without needing to travel to a nearby city to work. She has two more sisters and a brother with families in the same community, which makes it a lot of fun for me because I got to know a lot of people in my area very quickly. Then there´s Ivonne, mi hermanita (my little sister), who is the most adorable five year old girl I have ever seen. She is extremely difficult to understand because she slurs everything, drops consonants, changes words, and uses what I call Salvadoran-style-kid-slang, but she is so much fun and has become somewhat of a companion for me. She doesn´t have any brothers or sisters (most here have at least three) so she is so happy to tell everyone at school that she now has an older sister. I know I just rambled a ton about my family, but I cannot tell you enough positive things about them, because they have made my experience so far so fulfilling and joyful. By the end of the first week, they were already making fun of me and teasing me --- which if you know my family made me feel right at home. I feel really fortune to have ended up with the Valle family in more ways than one. Onto the living situation. My house is actually pretty nice comparatively because from what I can tell my family is a little more well off than some of the other families in the community. We have a tile floor and a refrigerator, which are both signs of status in a community where many live in houses of dirt floors and don´t have any cold food. Mi abuela has one corner of the room, my mother and Ivonne sleep in a double bed in the other corner, and I sleep in a single bed next to theirs. At night everyone goes to sleep around 9:00 (they wake up at 5:00 every morning, while I wait until 6:15 to arise) and there is a chorus of goodnights that echoes back and forth across the room, because all four of us must say goodnight to the other three individually. Because there is no running water in any house, anything requiring water we do using various sizes of jugs, barrels, bowls, and pots of water. The water is carried in jugs from the public faucet outside our house to giant barrels at our house. I shower oustide in shorts and a t-shirt by scooping bowlfulls of water from one of the barrels. It´s quite an amusing endeavor. There are roosters and chickens that are constantly scurrying about and the roosters are forever crowing. We also have two pet dogs, Osa and Peluchin, who follow us around town and who get to eat any left over food from our plates. The bathroom, or rather outhouse, is just how you would picture an outhouse. Set away from the house, it is basically just a structure that surrounds a hole in the ground. I eat extremely well and actually feel like I am constantly being fed. Food is a great source of pride for Salvadorans and my grandmother is forever asking me if I like the food and then she reports to everyone who comes over that I eat everything. I love the tortillas, which Ivonne and I got to buy once a day from this big bustly woman named Maura. Maura has already taught me how to make tortillas, by shaping the dough in my hand before slapping them onto the fire and every day she gives me mini-Spanish lessons while we wait for our pack of tortillas. Most of the meals include either rice, eggs, beans or a combination of the three. I drink lots of coffee and have tried some interesting new fruits as well. My absolutely favorite new food though are the handmade chocobananos that we buy from our aunt next door, which are frozen bananas on a stick coated in chocolate. During the week I work at the school and love being surrounded by kids all day. In the morning I help out in la prepatoria, which is the grade that comes after kindergarten and before first grade (kids age 4-5). Three days a week in the afternoons I teach English classes to 4th, 5th, and 6th grades with the other intern, Sue, who is also working at the school with me. Each grade gets one hour of English a week, so our time is obviously limited, but we are starting with the basics and doing what we can. In addition, Sue and I are also teaching a small English class two evenings a week to a group of adults and teenagers in her community, Monsenor, that is about a twenty minute walk from my house. I love the kids and the school, but since it´s only been one week I´m still trying to find my place and where I´m most needed. It´s been interesting witnessing the education, even from the small time I´ve been here, and I can already see evidence of some of the problems we learned about last week during orientation. Teachers work from 7:30-5:00 every day and since there are not enough of them there are two sessions of school. Kinder through fourth grade is from 8-11 AM and then fifth through ninth goes from 1:00-5:00. Yet, even within those three and four hour time frames there seems to be even less time spent in the classroom once you subtract recess, one meal, and various intramural soccer games. On average in El Salvador people receive six years of inferior education, and only about 4 of every 100 students graduate from college. Even my host mother, who has a salary and works only has an eighth grade education. In a country where 60% of the population is under the age of 30 (due mostly to the effects of the war, but also poverty) it is hard to swallow the lack of educational opportunities available to those in rural areas. I will never forget the first day when I was meeting my little sister and her three cousins, Amilcar, Yeilin and Wilmer and my host mother said to them, ¨Tell Alicia what you want to be when you grow up.¨ They responded, a secretary, a pilot, a policeman, and Ivonne said a doctor. Although I was moved by the dreams of the little kids, I couldn´t help but feel really depressed knowing that it would be almost impossible for Ivonne to get the education she would need to become a doctor. I realized at that moment how much I take for granted my freedom to work hard and choose ma career from a countless amount of choices. Besides all that I have had some ups and downs and lots of funny moments this past week. This includes a lot of surreal moments, like drinking coke from a plastic baggie because bottles are too expensive, to rushing to the side of the road when a bull decided to charge the path I was walking, to being asked why I don´t have any kids. I have been to a Father´s Day celebration in which half the kids in the room didn´t have fathers and I visited a hospital in a nearby town-city where there was only one doctor for the entire emergency room. (By the way, another thing I learned we take for granted in the U.S. is how clean everything is, including hospitals). Overall it´s been quite a stimulating week and yet relaxing and slow at the same time. Life just moves at a totally different pace here and there is a ton of time to just sit and talk. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, June 18th, 2004
11:20 am	La primera semana en El Salvador I have now been in El Salvador for almost a week and I already have so much to tell. I am leaving for the countryside tomorrow where I am living and working for the summer, so I wanted to take the time while I´m in San Salvador to update you on this week. First, I must tell you that in Atlanta I left from Gate 8. Then when I flew into San Salvador sure enough at the arrival gate there was a giant 8 painted on the wall. For those of you who know me, the appearance of the number 8 twice in a row at the beginning of such a big trip made me happy beyond belief. Anyways, I arrived into the hot, crowded airport outside of San Salvador and then waited in a two hour long immigration line to obtain my 90 day tourist visa. The rest of the week has been an orientation week with my organization, Crispaz. Let me take the time to explain this organization. Crispaz was started in the 1980´s in response to the violence and political corruption that pervaded the small country (it is the size of Massachusetts with a population of 6 million). The official name of the solidarity organization is Christians for Peace in El Salvador. They have four main focus areas that address the issue of economics, youth and gangs, rural issues, and north-south solidarity (connections between North America and El Salvador). I have been repetitively impressed by the staff and volunteers of Crispaz. They are a diverse staff including Salvadorans and North Americans and are absolutely incredible people with so much insight. Many of the North Americans have dedicated their entire lives to working in El Salvador and have no plans of ever returning to the States. The organization does everything from working on alternatives for Salvadoran artisans who have been exploited to going into prisons to run programs for gang members who have been alienated from society. I am doing their summer internship program with eight other interns that is focused on rural accompaniment. If you want more information you can visit www.crispaz.org and you might even find a picture of me. After Monday´s orientation to the staff, history and philosophy of Crispaz I spent the rest of the week traveling all over San Salvador and taking in more information than I ever have before. I have gone to presentations on women in El Salvador (at Las Dignas, a feminist organization that was very impressive), the history of El Salvador (at Equipo Maiz, an educational workshop center that works on educating the general public on Salvadoran issues), the economic situation, the environmental issues (at UNES, an ecological alliance of groups working for the environment), the status of youth and gangs, and liberation theology (with Dean Brackley at the University of Central America, or UCA, where the Jesuits and the two Salvadoran women were killed in `89). All of these presentations were really beneficial, but also depressing and frustrating because it opened my eyes to the multi-dimensial problems of a society that has been oppressed for hundreds of years and continues to function with an option for the rich and certainly not for the poor. In addition, we have also visited Oscar Romero´s tomb, his chapel, the cathedral where he is buried, the rose garden planted for the Jesuits, the one and only unionized factory (Just Garments) in the country and the National University (the only public university). We also went to the U.S. embassy where we got a lecture from one of the U.S. representatives. It was quite shocking to walk into the embassy (one of the three biggest in the world) because I honestly felt like I was walking into a completely different world. It was built on the ancient ruins of the indigenous city of Cuscatlan, and the Palm Springs atmosphere of the complex is pretty hard to swallow after learning and witnessing the effects of poverty on this country. All of these were powerful experiences where I realized how much pain lies at the root of many of the issues that Salvadorans are facing today. I learned a lot about the recent elections and the manipulative scare tactics the right party (ARENA) uses to keep power and win ever election over the left party (FMLN). The role of the United States in encouraging this corrupt form of politics saddens and disheartens me, but fortunately Salvadorans are seemingly very politically mature and understand the difference between a U.S. citizen and the U.S. government. Today I had my final rural living workshop to prepare me for leaving for the Ciudadela Guillermo Ungo communities tomorrow. Next time I am in the city in ten days for a Crispaz meeting, I will write again and update you on the situation in the countryside. If you didn´t know already I will be teaching English and computer classes to high school students. The living conditions are going to get radically worse in the country because in a country where poverty is a reality for the majority of people, most people cannot afford to come to the city to work let alone take up residence. I am really excited to meet my family and begin putting my Spanish to work. I am nervous but ready for the challenge. I feel like I have so much more to share and so many more details I wanted to write down, but the internet cafe is closing and I know there are not enough words to express what I am experiencing both physically, mentally, and emotionally. Know that I am safe though and with wonderful, loving people. You are all in my thoughts. With love and peace, Alicia P.S. My new name is Alicia esta en el pais de maravillas sin zapato (Alice in Wonderland without a shoe). The other day when we went to the top of a mountain to get a view of the entire city, and I was trying to get rid of las hormigas (ants) that had taken over my poor little reef sandal. While shaking it I managed to shake the sandal out of my hand and over the edge of the cliff. Just imagine the gringa without one shoe going to dinner to eat pupusas (the most popular Salvadoran dish) and the faces she must have received. That was me. I love you all. (Comment on this)