The Legend of the One-Eyed Opossum

February 22, 2009 Day 19

About a week ago I went to the back yard to tend to some business. It was night, I had my headlamp on and before I could take care of anything I saw a fairly large opossum in the very back part of the backyard, near the chicken coop. I went inside and tried explaining what I saw using the word I knew for opossum but I just got blank stares. Then I said there was an animal like huge rat with a white face and they knew what I meant and everyone got up from the living and ran outside carrying a host weapons, but it was gone.

I was expecting a round of jokes about me once we were back inside, but apparently others have seen the opossum before. Veronica said she had seen a big one in the back yard and it only had one eye and it had tried to eat the chickens. Then there was much debriefing about the nature of opossums; if they were edible, if they always tried to eat chickens, if so how big did they have to be? It was basically decided possums were the only tangible threat to their chicken supply. I said something about wanting opossum pupusas (a stuffed tortilla), and everyday since someone has told me to kill the opossum so we could have some pupusas or made a joke about me being a fierce possum warrior. Two days during that week someone would see it and everyone would run outside to get it...last night it was got.

There had already been one possum sighting that night with no success so I already had my headlamp on, and was falling asleep on the hammock when an hour after the first sighting there was a volley of cries about the possum I ran outside and Ricky (the 14 year old who had dengue (who is better now)) was a few seconds in front of me and grabbed the machete and I grabbed a large club. Before I even shinned the light on it Rickey had nearly cut the opossum in half with one stroke. It was writhing and gnashing it's jaws and everybody watched in the dark. I felt bad for it and bashed its head with my club a few times-- it stopped writhing.

I was inside myself watching it die. I didn't feel bad for it or sorry we had killed it; it was just a little stunning, I had never seen a mammal killed in front of me.

The mood was surprisingly merry after the beasts unmaking, and I ran inside and took this picture. I was staring at it and trying to figure out what I was looking, when the mother asked if I still wanted to eat it and a shook my head and she started laughing. Ricky picked it up by the tail with a rag and it spun around and that it was—only one eye! It was somewhat baffling that it only had one eye, I cant understand the significance of only having one eye. So I was expecting that we were going to eat it anyway but then Ricky just tossed it over the brick wall into the neighbors yard and everyone started laughing—to be fair the neighbors backyard seems more like woods than a back yard.

Sazon

February 15, 2009 Day 12

Well I've been with my host family for more than a week now, and I completed the first week of Spanish class. Class is in the house of one of the other volunteers in my town, we arrive at 8 and do work until 12 at which time we return home for lunch (which is frequently hot soup), then go back for more class at 1:15 and either practice Spanish, attend some other class or presentation the Peace Corps tells us to. I've found all the language training (and other training) to be very effective and have been impressed with their programs.

The hardest part of the training is we have to organize some kind of youth project in our community after Spanish class and field trips. It's hard because only one person in are group (of four) is proficient at Spanish, I just sound like a caveman. But were making progress, we introduced ourselves to two youth groups yesterday. Both groups are church related, one was an Evangelical youth group and the other was the Catholic youth group. I'm not really sure what they do outside of church at the moment because both meetings were really just mass aimed at a younger audience (12-20ish) but as of now the groups had no projects they were working on or really had plans to do, but we are meeting everyone who is interested tomorrow.

Today I woke up really late by Salvadorian standards (800) and was questioned why I woke up so late. One of the kids here in the house had dengue fever and has been sleeping on the couch in the living room for the last two days with a wet cloth on his head. He had a temperature of 104 yesterday and was at the hospital for a while, but they said he will be fine. So in the morning I was told I was going to the scrubland with Marta and Veronica to get the kid some medicine, they said it was far and I should bring some water. I thought this was a little strange since there is a pharmacy up the street. We walked to a little village about 1 mile from my town, and I asked what we were doing again. This time I thought they said we were going to get some warmer water for the kid to take a bath in because the water at our house was too cold, but I was strictly wrong about what we were doing. We went to Marta's house and she had a little tree that had some fruit I've never seen or herd of before, it was super weird. It had the texture of raw meat, and the flavor of old strawberries, fresh pineapple and perhaps peach. We left Marta's house and borrowed a huge bamboo pole from her neighbor and we started walking down a dusty trail near some cane fields to knock green mangoes off trees, and collect some little flowers from trees to eat with eggs. Let me explain something about fruit in El Salvador, they have four words to describe different levels of ripeness. A word for unripe, almost ripe, ripe, and too ripe. And they eat the fruit at all stages. At all stages they put salt on the fruit. The green mangoes (once peeled) aren't bad but all the other unripe fruit I've tried is just too sour. It makes sense in a country where there is always lots of fruit, might as well eat the unripe once since when they are ripe there are so many that all can't be eaten.

El Salvador

Well I´ve been putting this off for a while. I keep goining back and forth about what to write so I´ll just start.

I got dropped off at a hotel in DC last week and meet all the other volunteers. I was very suprised when I saw the range of places where everyone was from within the States, I guess I secretly thought everybody would be from New England. Of all the things I speculated that I would learn, learning about Americans was not one of them (at least not until I returned).

We checked into the hotel at 2pm and checkedout at 2am, and were in El Salvador by 2pm. My assignent is Rural Health Facilitator by the way. As the plane was landing I was looking out at the country I was panicing a little and kept asking myself what the heck I was doing, and what did I hope to accomplish. That was definitly my lowest point so far, but when we arrived at the Peace Corps compound in San Salvador there was the entire staff cheering to welcome us and I felt much better.

There was a lot of flip chart paper, eating, and shots the first two days. Those first two days we (the trainees) stayed in a hotel in San Vincente, and got to know each other. And by Friday we were with our host families in smaller towns within a hald hour drive to San Vicente, whom we will stay with for 8 weeks. My family is great, I will learn Spanish very quickly there. They love to grill me when I make mistakes, but they don´t do it too often and when they do it´s in a loving way. Their food is super good! The chicken and eggs are the best, but everything else is really good too.

I made a bet with an other volunteer that I would kill and eat chicken before him at the hotel in DC-I think I will win tomorrow.

The town takes about 10 minutes to walk all the way across so it´s pretty big. There is a nice park in the center where the dogs hang out-oh yeah. There are sooo many dogs here the live in the street and howl terribly at night. There are lots of vistas where I can see for miles. Most of the stores here are in the front part of someones house so their living room might be the same as the store. All the houses have electricity and many nice things, and there running water one day a week.

The average day is 4 hours of language training, lunch, comunitty activities/language, then home for dinner and to talk to the family.

All in all everything here is great. The other trainees are awsome, and El Salvador had the lowest drop out rate of any of the 70 countries Peace Corps is in two years ago, and was in the lowest five last year.

Ciao for now,
Mateo

the only thing i would like is a splle chek!