Diario: A Snapshot of the Summer
Below are two emails which I sent to friends and family over the summer:
June 14, 2011
Hello Friends and Family!So first of all . . . what am I doing this summer? Notre Dame sent me on a program which is kind of like a medical internship in El Salvador. I'm working with an organization called FUSAL in their program called Libras de Amor, which is essentially a nutrition program targeting pregnant women and children under 5. What this means, is that every day my site partner, Kallie, and I, load up a pickup truck with boxes of nutrient fortified rice and flour, various medicines, a stove, scale, and all those things that are necessary for the operation of the medical team. Then 3-4 of us hop in the truck to brave the mountainous roads. (I should note here that roads does not mean roads in the American sense. Sometimes the truck gets stuck, and I'm often quite concerned about the inevitable collision of my head with the ceiling.) After braving the mountainous roads, we arrive in acanton, which is a rural village generally surrounded by a ton of beautiful tropical trees and such (which also means people like to give us delicious fruit to eat, and I am such a fan of this). Because they're so far out, and transportation is so hard to get out there (most people walk everywhere), it's decently difficult for the people living out here to access adequate healthcare. This is where FUSAL comes in, because their program monitors weight gain of kids and provides vitamins and nutrients to children and pregnant women. When the doctor's around, he also does checkups of all the kids that are sick. It's pretty common for a kid to be con gripe which, as far as I can tell means that they're congested and coughing a lot of phlegm. The FUSAL program also gives instructions on good hygiene, and teaches the group of women and children a different recipe to cook each week. I think today we lost the stove off the back of the truck, so that part of the plan might be put on hold for a little bit. Oops. Such are the dangers of driving pickup trucks on mountainous roads. We've recently been losing boxes of rice and flour off the back of the truck.So during the week we stay in the FUSAL house in Santa Ana (2nd biggest city) or San Julian (tiny), and on the weekends we head back to San Salvador (capital) and get a crash course on history/life/culture of El Salvador, which has been pretty cool. I also have 3 good friends who live in San Salvador, right by the retreat center we stay at on the weekends, so its been pretty sweet to hang out with them and see a different side of life here. It's really impressive to me to see how much Monsenor Oscar Romero (wikipedia him if you don't know him) has influenced the people here, and especially the theology. The Catholic Church, especially the Jesuits, is very much integrated into the culture and politics. For example, a letter signed by 113 priests was run in the paper just last Sunday strongly criticizing the current president, Mauricio Funes. He's the first president of the left elected in 200 years (even though El Salvs hasn't really had democracy for that long), but opinion is pretty strongly against him right now. He just pushed through a law which says that all decisions made by the Constitutional Supreme Court (composed of 5 judges) have to be unanimous. Obviously, this strongly limits the power of that court, and increases his power, so there are a lot of protests and such going on right now about this. Apparently, due to liberation theology and the influence of Romero, the Church here is VERY strongly allied with the people/the poor. Since the majority of El Salvadorans live in poverty and don't have too much influence, the Church is pretty much their only voice/outlet/way to empower themselves. A lot of community organizing happens through the churches, and (of course, depending on the parish, I've also heard of priest who charge to go to Mass)from what I've seen, it's very active and very alive. Something interesting I did last weekend was visit a squatter community called "La comunidad de Monsenor Romero" (note obvious Romero influence here). We talked with the leaders of the community, and I was very impressed with their knowledge, passion, and vision. (Note about story: This is what I gathered from my interpretation of Spanish, so some might be in error) So way back in 2005, there were about 289 families in pretty poor living conditions, without any land ownership, etc. After making several attempts to acquire/buy land legally and being shuffled around, overcharged, and put off, they decided to take the land. They picked a tract of government land which was unused, unclaimed, and no conflict over it, and moved in around 2 am one night with a lot of babies and old people, so that the army would feel bad shooting them. Since then, they've been living there, and their number has dropped to 78 families. They've been trying to acquire the land legally since then, and have gotten donors to even put up the money for it, but somehow the government keeps changing the price of it, or setting new conditions, and they're having a very difficult time. I was really impressed with how organized this community was, and with the intelligence, leadership, and knowledge of legal issues, etc. of the people in charge. They've had people attack their community with guns, had people assaulted, robbed, and tortured, and they still keep striving for this. They have no access to any sort of healthcare, no electricity or water, and not enough land to grow food on. One of the guys died because he couldn't afford medicine to treat his simple condition. It was quite an interesting experience.Also, the amount of international aid I've seen in the cantones I've been to is pretty interesting. Most of our medical stuff is from international donors, and a lot of people in one canton were wearing TOMS. I've just never seen anything like it. As well, in the cantones, everyone there mainly works on the coffee farms, where they are paid the grand sum of $50/2 weeks to support a family of 6 or so. That's a very fair wage here, but it definitely doesn't cover costs of living. For example, I spend about $5-6/day on food. Anyways, I hope all of you are doing great. Have a wonderful week and a great summer!Un fuerte abrazo,Rosie
July 13, 2011
Hello all!
Before I begin my grand SECOND update of the summer, I need to tell you all how I have grown most as a person. I am now an expert bug killer. I used to cringe in fright whenever I saw cockroaches in the shower, giant unknown flying insects in my face, etc. But NOW, I take up my worthy flip flop and smack that bugger (no pun intended) until it has passed on to the afterlife (if buggers have afterlives). Well, there were 2 exceptions to the rule--the 2 inch spider on our bedroom wall (I asked the guard outside with a giant gun to come kill it) and the 6 inch large flying beetle (I just screamed and ran. Have you ever seen a 6 in large flying beetle in your life? Me neither). That's definitely my greatest learned skill (just kidding!)
Also, thanks so much for all the emails you guys sent me! I do appreciate hearing from the United States now and then. However, I do have one request. I need help making a very important decision. What should I do with my life? Sending me possible career choices would be a wonderful thing, just so I can, you know . . . have all the options on the table(? that made sense, right ?) . I mean, I feel like every soon-to-be senior in college runs into this issue; I just feel that I've been dwelling on it way too much.
As well, I feel my experience with bad roads has increased. Especially when it rains, because at this point, you do not only have a pickup on a steep, narrow, dirt path--you have a pickup fully loaded and without traction on a steep, narrow, dirt path. Which means that said pickup tends to do a controlled slide down the dirt path. Recently, (standard) pickup also ran out of battery, so if it stalls, you then have a pickup which does not work, in the middle of the mountains, on a steep, narrow, dirt path. I did push said pickup for 8 blocks down the middle of the road last night, trying to get it to start. And then stood by the road for 30 minutes in the dark trying to get people to stop so we could jump start it. Eventually someone stopped, and we successfully drove the pickup to a delicious mexican restaurant. Lesson learned: Do NOT EVER turn off pickup truck, because then it will never start again. (Note: 3 days later, pickup battery has still not been changed, so every day is an adventure to see if the car will start or not. :P ). We also had to tag team in motorcycle/random truck bus thing down from the mountains today because the car didn't work.
So now, lets move on to the subject of water. Why water, do you say? Well first of all, torrential rain is pouring down about 5 feet from where I'm typing this email. Secondly, I spent a lot of time getting to know the water supply outside this old rundown coffee farm mansion today. By that, I mean I almost fell into the pila, which is a GIANT super deep water tank that's dug into the ground. It's the year's water supply, so that should give you an idea of how big it is. I stepped on the flimsy sheet metal cover of it. It was stupid. Then a lot of little Salvadoran kids laughed at me. They also then showed me how to climb the water tank = their version of a water tower. It's pretty giant, and kind of a dangerous thing to do I feel. It was cool.
On a serious note, though, water is a pretty big deal here. My medical team held a class here for the healthcare promoters of each canton where they discussed how to purify water. A grand total of one person in the class either purified water, or had access to potable water. A lot of the water supply comes from either rainwater, or these nasty brown streams that run through the canton. I definitely see women in the cantones with bottles of water that are just straight up brown. I think a large part of the issue is lack of education on how to purify water, and why its important. Also, just not having a good water source is a pretty big problem. The French government has donated these giant purifying water tanks to a lot of the houses here. Basically, how it works is that the rainwater is collected in the tank, which filters it so that its safe to drink. Which is really, really nice and contributes so much to the good health of the kids here.
Why is clean water important? Well, a big reason is parasites, which are especially harmful to younger children. Rosalba (healthcare promoter of the medical team) told us a great story about a kid she saw who was literally sneezing tiny wriggling parasites out of his nose. Gross. (this was also how she motivated people to purify water.) It also just really weakens your immune system, so if you run into any more serious health problems, then it becomes even harder for your body to fight them. Plus, it kind of stinks cause water is pretty essential to human life--so if you're drinking water that's contaminated that's lowering your quality of life--its pretty sad. Basically, dirty water stinks and kills people, especially young kids without immune systems.
Something that I've made a point of noticing recently is all the health problems that go untreated because of lack of good healthcare. It ranges from stuff like a kid with red bumps and rashes all over his body, to a girl with serious motor development issues that's a year and half old and can't even lock her knees or put her feet down to stand up. A lot of the time, you see older people who were injured, and it just was never set correctly or healed poorly, so they have a lot of trouble functioning in daily life--walking, etc. This is especially not helpful in rural El Salvador, where you walk everywhere.
Well anyways, I am now going to give an example of contrasts. So on my 21st birthday, I got to spend the day teaching in a rural school up in the mountains. It was wonderful, just cause I actually got to hang out with and get to know these really awesome El Salvadoran kids. Something that I miss about the ISSLP is that we really just drop into a community for 3 hours and leave without actually becoming involved in it...so I got to hang out with the kids and walk around the canton and see where they lived, which was pretty cool.
Then that weekend, I went with one of my El Salvadoran friends and about 200 highschool students from all the Marist high schools to climb Volcano Izalco. Which was completely awesome, and very tiring, and brings my total of volcanoes climbed to TWO. I also got to jump into the volcano and see steam rising off warm rocks while the air was super cold at the top of the volcano. There were also a decent amount of gringoes up there, which was cool.
So we all met up at the school beforehand (private Catholic school, K-12), and it was just weird to me to see the contrast between that, and the one that I'd spent the day at just 2 days ago. I mean, one was comparable to our nicest highschools in the US, and the other was this tiny 2 classroom school with 2 teachers for grades K-6, where the kids only attend school 3 hours a day because there aren't enough teachers. And the teachers have to walk 1 1/2 hours up a tiny dirt path through the jungle that people are frequently assaulted in very day to get there, and there are legitimately no resources whatsoever. I mean, they have like 1 or 2 books, which is nice, and every kid receives food if they come to school. And all the drinking water (see, there's water again!) comes from the nice brown stream that runs below the school, so all the kids get sick pretty frequently. And when it rains, they can't come to school because they'd have to walk an hour or so through muddy, unpassable, dirt paths. So, there was kind of a giant contrast.
Well anyways, I only have 2 1/2 weeks left of my ISSLP. It's kind of ridiculous how fast the time has flown by. Once the ISSLP ends, I'm going to head over to Honduras to visit the Finca del Nino (an orphanage/school in Honduras), spend the last weekend back in ElSalvador, and then head back to the US--the land of hot showers and fewer bug bites (literally. I am covered in bugbites. :) ). I hope to send out at least one more update, but if that high goal fails, I hope that you guys have enjoyed my 2 emails. I feel like I could write sooo much more but...then that would make this into a novel, and I wouldn't get to spend as much time doing my nice nutrition graphs and figures on how much malnutrition there is in each canton. :)
Saludos from El Salvador,
Rosie
June 14, 2011
Hello Friends and Family!So first of all . . . what am I doing this summer? Notre Dame sent me on a program which is kind of like a medical internship in El Salvador. I'm working with an organization called FUSAL in their program called Libras de Amor, which is essentially a nutrition program targeting pregnant women and children under 5. What this means, is that every day my site partner, Kallie, and I, load up a pickup truck with boxes of nutrient fortified rice and flour, various medicines, a stove, scale, and all those things that are necessary for the operation of the medical team. Then 3-4 of us hop in the truck to brave the mountainous roads. (I should note here that roads does not mean roads in the American sense. Sometimes the truck gets stuck, and I'm often quite concerned about the inevitable collision of my head with the ceiling.) After braving the mountainous roads, we arrive in acanton, which is a rural village generally surrounded by a ton of beautiful tropical trees and such (which also means people like to give us delicious fruit to eat, and I am such a fan of this). Because they're so far out, and transportation is so hard to get out there (most people walk everywhere), it's decently difficult for the people living out here to access adequate healthcare. This is where FUSAL comes in, because their program monitors weight gain of kids and provides vitamins and nutrients to children and pregnant women. When the doctor's around, he also does checkups of all the kids that are sick. It's pretty common for a kid to be con gripe which, as far as I can tell means that they're congested and coughing a lot of phlegm. The FUSAL program also gives instructions on good hygiene, and teaches the group of women and children a different recipe to cook each week. I think today we lost the stove off the back of the truck, so that part of the plan might be put on hold for a little bit. Oops. Such are the dangers of driving pickup trucks on mountainous roads. We've recently been losing boxes of rice and flour off the back of the truck.So during the week we stay in the FUSAL house in Santa Ana (2nd biggest city) or San Julian (tiny), and on the weekends we head back to San Salvador (capital) and get a crash course on history/life/culture of El Salvador, which has been pretty cool. I also have 3 good friends who live in San Salvador, right by the retreat center we stay at on the weekends, so its been pretty sweet to hang out with them and see a different side of life here. It's really impressive to me to see how much Monsenor Oscar Romero (wikipedia him if you don't know him) has influenced the people here, and especially the theology. The Catholic Church, especially the Jesuits, is very much integrated into the culture and politics. For example, a letter signed by 113 priests was run in the paper just last Sunday strongly criticizing the current president, Mauricio Funes. He's the first president of the left elected in 200 years (even though El Salvs hasn't really had democracy for that long), but opinion is pretty strongly against him right now. He just pushed through a law which says that all decisions made by the Constitutional Supreme Court (composed of 5 judges) have to be unanimous. Obviously, this strongly limits the power of that court, and increases his power, so there are a lot of protests and such going on right now about this. Apparently, due to liberation theology and the influence of Romero, the Church here is VERY strongly allied with the people/the poor. Since the majority of El Salvadorans live in poverty and don't have too much influence, the Church is pretty much their only voice/outlet/way to empower themselves. A lot of community organizing happens through the churches, and (of course, depending on the parish, I've also heard of priest who charge to go to Mass)from what I've seen, it's very active and very alive. Something interesting I did last weekend was visit a squatter community called "La comunidad de Monsenor Romero" (note obvious Romero influence here). We talked with the leaders of the community, and I was very impressed with their knowledge, passion, and vision. (Note about story: This is what I gathered from my interpretation of Spanish, so some might be in error) So way back in 2005, there were about 289 families in pretty poor living conditions, without any land ownership, etc. After making several attempts to acquire/buy land legally and being shuffled around, overcharged, and put off, they decided to take the land. They picked a tract of government land which was unused, unclaimed, and no conflict over it, and moved in around 2 am one night with a lot of babies and old people, so that the army would feel bad shooting them. Since then, they've been living there, and their number has dropped to 78 families. They've been trying to acquire the land legally since then, and have gotten donors to even put up the money for it, but somehow the government keeps changing the price of it, or setting new conditions, and they're having a very difficult time. I was really impressed with how organized this community was, and with the intelligence, leadership, and knowledge of legal issues, etc. of the people in charge. They've had people attack their community with guns, had people assaulted, robbed, and tortured, and they still keep striving for this. They have no access to any sort of healthcare, no electricity or water, and not enough land to grow food on. One of the guys died because he couldn't afford medicine to treat his simple condition. It was quite an interesting experience.Also, the amount of international aid I've seen in the cantones I've been to is pretty interesting. Most of our medical stuff is from international donors, and a lot of people in one canton were wearing TOMS. I've just never seen anything like it. As well, in the cantones, everyone there mainly works on the coffee farms, where they are paid the grand sum of $50/2 weeks to support a family of 6 or so. That's a very fair wage here, but it definitely doesn't cover costs of living. For example, I spend about $5-6/day on food. Anyways, I hope all of you are doing great. Have a wonderful week and a great summer!Un fuerte abrazo,Rosie
July 13, 2011
Hello all!
Before I begin my grand SECOND update of the summer, I need to tell you all how I have grown most as a person. I am now an expert bug killer. I used to cringe in fright whenever I saw cockroaches in the shower, giant unknown flying insects in my face, etc. But NOW, I take up my worthy flip flop and smack that bugger (no pun intended) until it has passed on to the afterlife (if buggers have afterlives). Well, there were 2 exceptions to the rule--the 2 inch spider on our bedroom wall (I asked the guard outside with a giant gun to come kill it) and the 6 inch large flying beetle (I just screamed and ran. Have you ever seen a 6 in large flying beetle in your life? Me neither). That's definitely my greatest learned skill (just kidding!)
Also, thanks so much for all the emails you guys sent me! I do appreciate hearing from the United States now and then. However, I do have one request. I need help making a very important decision. What should I do with my life? Sending me possible career choices would be a wonderful thing, just so I can, you know . . . have all the options on the table(? that made sense, right ?) . I mean, I feel like every soon-to-be senior in college runs into this issue; I just feel that I've been dwelling on it way too much.
As well, I feel my experience with bad roads has increased. Especially when it rains, because at this point, you do not only have a pickup on a steep, narrow, dirt path--you have a pickup fully loaded and without traction on a steep, narrow, dirt path. Which means that said pickup tends to do a controlled slide down the dirt path. Recently, (standard) pickup also ran out of battery, so if it stalls, you then have a pickup which does not work, in the middle of the mountains, on a steep, narrow, dirt path. I did push said pickup for 8 blocks down the middle of the road last night, trying to get it to start. And then stood by the road for 30 minutes in the dark trying to get people to stop so we could jump start it. Eventually someone stopped, and we successfully drove the pickup to a delicious mexican restaurant. Lesson learned: Do NOT EVER turn off pickup truck, because then it will never start again. (Note: 3 days later, pickup battery has still not been changed, so every day is an adventure to see if the car will start or not. :P ). We also had to tag team in motorcycle/random truck bus thing down from the mountains today because the car didn't work.
So now, lets move on to the subject of water. Why water, do you say? Well first of all, torrential rain is pouring down about 5 feet from where I'm typing this email. Secondly, I spent a lot of time getting to know the water supply outside this old rundown coffee farm mansion today. By that, I mean I almost fell into the pila, which is a GIANT super deep water tank that's dug into the ground. It's the year's water supply, so that should give you an idea of how big it is. I stepped on the flimsy sheet metal cover of it. It was stupid. Then a lot of little Salvadoran kids laughed at me. They also then showed me how to climb the water tank = their version of a water tower. It's pretty giant, and kind of a dangerous thing to do I feel. It was cool.
On a serious note, though, water is a pretty big deal here. My medical team held a class here for the healthcare promoters of each canton where they discussed how to purify water. A grand total of one person in the class either purified water, or had access to potable water. A lot of the water supply comes from either rainwater, or these nasty brown streams that run through the canton. I definitely see women in the cantones with bottles of water that are just straight up brown. I think a large part of the issue is lack of education on how to purify water, and why its important. Also, just not having a good water source is a pretty big problem. The French government has donated these giant purifying water tanks to a lot of the houses here. Basically, how it works is that the rainwater is collected in the tank, which filters it so that its safe to drink. Which is really, really nice and contributes so much to the good health of the kids here.
Why is clean water important? Well, a big reason is parasites, which are especially harmful to younger children. Rosalba (healthcare promoter of the medical team) told us a great story about a kid she saw who was literally sneezing tiny wriggling parasites out of his nose. Gross. (this was also how she motivated people to purify water.) It also just really weakens your immune system, so if you run into any more serious health problems, then it becomes even harder for your body to fight them. Plus, it kind of stinks cause water is pretty essential to human life--so if you're drinking water that's contaminated that's lowering your quality of life--its pretty sad. Basically, dirty water stinks and kills people, especially young kids without immune systems.
Something that I've made a point of noticing recently is all the health problems that go untreated because of lack of good healthcare. It ranges from stuff like a kid with red bumps and rashes all over his body, to a girl with serious motor development issues that's a year and half old and can't even lock her knees or put her feet down to stand up. A lot of the time, you see older people who were injured, and it just was never set correctly or healed poorly, so they have a lot of trouble functioning in daily life--walking, etc. This is especially not helpful in rural El Salvador, where you walk everywhere.
Well anyways, I am now going to give an example of contrasts. So on my 21st birthday, I got to spend the day teaching in a rural school up in the mountains. It was wonderful, just cause I actually got to hang out with and get to know these really awesome El Salvadoran kids. Something that I miss about the ISSLP is that we really just drop into a community for 3 hours and leave without actually becoming involved in it...so I got to hang out with the kids and walk around the canton and see where they lived, which was pretty cool.
Then that weekend, I went with one of my El Salvadoran friends and about 200 highschool students from all the Marist high schools to climb Volcano Izalco. Which was completely awesome, and very tiring, and brings my total of volcanoes climbed to TWO. I also got to jump into the volcano and see steam rising off warm rocks while the air was super cold at the top of the volcano. There were also a decent amount of gringoes up there, which was cool.
So we all met up at the school beforehand (private Catholic school, K-12), and it was just weird to me to see the contrast between that, and the one that I'd spent the day at just 2 days ago. I mean, one was comparable to our nicest highschools in the US, and the other was this tiny 2 classroom school with 2 teachers for grades K-6, where the kids only attend school 3 hours a day because there aren't enough teachers. And the teachers have to walk 1 1/2 hours up a tiny dirt path through the jungle that people are frequently assaulted in very day to get there, and there are legitimately no resources whatsoever. I mean, they have like 1 or 2 books, which is nice, and every kid receives food if they come to school. And all the drinking water (see, there's water again!) comes from the nice brown stream that runs below the school, so all the kids get sick pretty frequently. And when it rains, they can't come to school because they'd have to walk an hour or so through muddy, unpassable, dirt paths. So, there was kind of a giant contrast.
Well anyways, I only have 2 1/2 weeks left of my ISSLP. It's kind of ridiculous how fast the time has flown by. Once the ISSLP ends, I'm going to head over to Honduras to visit the Finca del Nino (an orphanage/school in Honduras), spend the last weekend back in ElSalvador, and then head back to the US--the land of hot showers and fewer bug bites (literally. I am covered in bugbites. :) ). I hope to send out at least one more update, but if that high goal fails, I hope that you guys have enjoyed my 2 emails. I feel like I could write sooo much more but...then that would make this into a novel, and I wouldn't get to spend as much time doing my nice nutrition graphs and figures on how much malnutrition there is in each canton. :)
Saludos from El Salvador,
Rosie