Sun., Oct. 12

Decided to sleep in and flex my independence muscle by not leaving with Robyn and Tania at 6am. Had to ask people where to get off the bus and where to go once there, but I got to Parque Cuscatlán without incident. The Tin Marin Museum didn’t open until 10am, so I visited the Monument to Truth and Memory (?), a sort of Salvadoran version of the Vietnam Wall, and then wandered around the preparations for the Shafik Handal (former FMLN leader) memorial birthday festival. I wondered if people thought I was a CIA spy, as had been suggested of a random gringo that showed up on Thursday, then felt legitimized when Rosi came running up to give me a hug. And then Monica. Their hugs really are some of the bright spots of my being here. So I met up with Gilma and Tomasa, Carmen and her daughter Jacqueline and Carmen’s nanny/housekeeper Roxana. We dawdled around for a while and eventually made it into the museum. I wasn’t quite as bowled over as I was two weeks ago, and the girls didn’t seem to be either. They also seemed to miss most of the educational messages (i.e. all that stuff about saving water in the “luxurious” city-style house), and there was a strange thing where they apparently handed out a bunch of stuffed animals and ran out just before Rosi arrived on the scene, but I think everyone had a good time. Gilma and I also slipped out to see Robyn’s advanced theater group perform their play (really more a collection of scenes) about the massacre at La Quesera, which Gilma herself survived. Lunch, more museum, sleepy bus ride back to San Marcos, to get the cows out of the pasture (and pull up the new reflectors from the road) with Astrid and Manuelito, fell on my butt trying to swing on a vine, all-fried dinner despite having eaten a bunch of white-bread-and-spread sandwiches, laundry, knitting (trying to finish the baby blanket for my possible godchild) during “Cantando por un sueño El Salvador,” journal, Bible, bed.

Sat. Oct. 11

Nice, relaxing morning, then into San Salvador, where I got myself to the CoffeeCup (quasi-Starbucks) at the main entrance of MetroCentro to meet Robyn. She wasn’t there (or at the other CoffeeCup location), but I decided not to panic and set about reading my National Geographic. Then Freddy showed up – apparently Robyn had invited him. So we waited a while more, then Robyn came, then Jacob the visiting leftist journalist, then Tania, then we all waited around for Jenny (visiting Robyn through Art Corps), whose birthday it was. She and Vladimir (the Salvadoran guy she met at a bar last weekend) finally showed up and we all went out to a taco bar place and then a bar called “Leyendas.” It was a nice group of people and I didn’t feel like I was just tagging along with Robyn, so it was an overall nice evening. Robyn and I had a bit of trouble finding/getting in to Tania’s ‘pasaje’ (including almost locking ourselves in the wrong one), but eventually made it, again with getting mugged. Tania’s place looked a bit more homey than last time I’d been there – made me want my own apartment.

Thursday, Oct. 9

- My fairy godmother’s back at it – leaving notes for me on Stitch’s paw, telling me about the prince and princesses (one his sister, the other his fiancée), and instructing me to leave a letter for her next to a special yellow (paper) flower in the garden. Oh boy…

- First day all week where the sun came out and it didn’t rain. Temperatures also went back up.

- The spots on my chest where the ‘semilla’ juice burned me on Monday are still itching like the dickens, and I have little scabby things on both my upper and lower eyelids.

Tue., Oct. 7

- According to my new “schedule” set up on Friday, today should have been my first day of working with Estela. Except today she never came in. So it was back to killing time on the internet most of the day, with a little bit of invoicing for Carmen in the afternoon.

- I think my phone actually died. I charged it a bit this morning, then it froze again after about 2 mins., took all day to dis-charge, and now does absolutely nothing when I plug it in. Maybe a trip to Zacate with Loli tomorrow?

- Robyn participated in some workshop over the weekend with a bunch of Peace Corps volunteers. She said they were loud and annoying. When I said I sometimes wished I’d joined Peace Corps, she said she’d never consider it. So I guess that’s good…

- Rosi admitted to being my “fairy godmother” in the evening. I pretended I didn’t believe her. It was her birthday, so Gilma made pupusas and gave her money to get a bit bottle of grape soda for everyone. Which doesn’t seem like much, but I think this trip to Tin Marin Children’s Museum might actually happen.

Mon., Oct. 6

Didn’t have much to do today (Carmen never came in), so ended up working in the cashew plant. By far the hardest thing about using the machine (for breaking open the shell) was not having proper-fitting gloves. The pair I had (the only kind available) were very nice by soup kitchen standards – nice and thick (rubber). But that, coupled with the fact that they were too big, made picking up and handling the ‘semillas’ pretty difficult. Especially when that lovely sticky/slippery/caustic juice gets thrown into the mix. I would have just taken the gloves off if I weren’t pretty afraid of the stuff, but I’d seen the marks it had left on Gilma’s skin and head plenty about how it burned and itched. But even with the gloves and the juice, I managed to do a decent job of getting the ‘semillas’ situated in between the blades, giving them a good crack with the foot pedal, and then splitting them open with the handle. Mabel was working on the other side getting the nuts out of the shells and seemed fairly impressed with how many ‘enteras’ I had, although I’m pretty sure there were a good number that were squished and almost unusable. I did at one point squirt some of the ‘leche’ on my face, and while it did burn a bit, my skin didn’t exactly melt off. But I kept getting the extra room in the thumb of my left glove stuck between the blade and the shell, so that eventually turned into a big hole and my left thumb got covered in black goo. Not burning there, but that thumb turned into a super-prune with no feeling whatsoever when I took a shower in the evening [the skin then proceeded to peel off slowly for the next week]. Overall, I probably only worked at the machine for about 3 hours, but the muscles in my back were all cramped and knotted and the nerve in my right foot was hurting. And despite it being a relatively cool day again (mid-80s?), I was sporting some impressive sweat stains. That work is not for sissies.

- Passed two bulls fighting in the street on my bike ride, which was pretty cool to see. Also kind of scary to sneak past…

Wed., Oct 1 – Sat., Oct. 4

- It’s been raining quite a bit – the new ‘albergue’ (shelter) in Ciudad Romero is already being put to use sheltering people from Babilonia, where the ‘borda’ broke.

- Estela apparently spoke with Carmen on Friday morning, telling her she hadn’t done a good job giving me work to do and proposing that I work two days of the week with the stores (or Quiriguá in general?) and the other days with Estela and the Organization branch. So again, we’ll see how that turns out. Carmen finally sort of showed me how to do the invoicing – when I asked her why she hadn’t showed me how to do it a few months ago she sighed and said she really wasn’t sure, but there was no use lamenting is now. True enough… We also talked about getting some hanging file folders to actually store all the sales sheets in the file cabinet (seems pretty obvious to me) and what points to cover with Aristides when he came in the afternoon (1. the stores project isn’t meeting either of its objectives, 2. What is the plan? Close all, some, or none of the stores?). He actually did dome, but spent most of the time talking about/ doing calculations for the cashew plant. Carmen asked him about the stores sort of as he was on his way out (more like “Liliana wanted to know…”) and I believe he said we were going to close them all except for the one in San Nicolas for the employees, look at each “account” to see what happened, and then maybe reopen in the new year when we can buy a bunch of beans again.

- Eight months. One-third. Am sort of just trying to get through Oct. and Nov. so that I can get to the traveling/visit home in Dec. Then when I get back I’ll only have one more month to the 1-year mark. After that, who knows?