Sunday 2/5 Part 1

Heather and I grumbled out of our beds around 7 to the sunrise seen in the photo to the right. All of a sudden, I heard Heather cry out and say, “There’s a lizard in the closet!” Sure enough, there was a little green gecko glued to the wall inside the metal closet. " Welcome to El Salvador," he probably wasn’t saying but that was what we thought!

Breakfast was salami and pancakes with what I would call a black bean sauce and honey. There was fresh papaya and several mystery fruits whose names I still don't know. The number of fruits down there seems to be more than double the fruits we know in the states. As we decided whether we liked pancakes with bean sauce and honey, the table and ground started gently shaking beneath our feet. Now we were really awake. Luckily, it was only a tremor, though it reminded me of the painful history of natural disasters that have occurred in El Salvador and that have caused so much poverty - volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, and earthquakes.

A little note about the Ayagualo retreat house (in photo below): It is a clean, luxurious (especially for El Salvador), peach and white colored stucco-several-story-house with a cafeteria and several large courtyards. There is a large church near the house and the nuns who run the retreat house live near the church. The Ayagualo compound is on top of a hill with views almost to the sea. We never saw a dull sunrise. It was the site of the Peace Corps' first attempt to meet with the locals towards the end of the war, in an effort to start sending volunteers to help with the post-war needs. The base of a local gang is right across the highway and a body was found in the woods recently. Thus, the morning runners always ran together.

We piled into the bus for mass at 10:30AM in San Jose Villanueva, the town where we would spend the next 6 days. It was already getting warm from the sun beating down on the tropical mango, papaya, and coconut trees. Later in the week, from below the steep and partly washed out driveway of the retreat house (yikes!), we would see men working on a small field of coffee plants.

Alongside the busy, mostly one lane main highway, people were walking to and from church. The women and girls carried baskets of food or belongings on their heads. Several miles down the highway we passed a gated community with large houses peaking through the trees. Another securely gated community that looked like an American subdivision was just off the narrow, bumpy road to San Jose. Between these two, rich communities were some of the smallest brick houses with animals hanging around out front. This was the route we would take every day between San Jose to Ayagualo.

San Jose Villanueva seemed like a modest little town. We were not allowed to leave the church compound where we set up clinic so I honestly only saw about two streets of the town. I did not see a single house with glass windows. All the windows have a wire fence on the outside and are shuttered shut on the inside. Sick mutts roam the town that I can’t look at.