This is our last week as SIPPIES. I am planning to leave at the end of this week for Honduras, then Mexico, then back to Los Angeles. This last week was my birthday (I am 27, damn my parents feel old right now) and was a vacation week at Oikos, so I spent alot of time at home and in El Transito and Usulutan. Toward the end of the vacation week I was struggling with boredom, heat and blood sucking bastard mosquitos, so I´m happy to be back in the Oikos office for a couple of days to finish up my project and spend time with people here.

I am craving so many weird different types of food right now as my time in the campo winds down. My friend at Oikos went to a conference in Thailand and Japan and just seeing photos of sushi and dumplings mad me crazy and reminded me of all the places I love in LA. Little Tokyo, Happy Family Restaurant, Indian Food, chocolate cake a la mode at the Shite Spot, Vietnamese food. I am craving Special K cereal, soy milk, gorgonzola pear pizza from Trader Joe´s, Spinach salad with strawberries in it, and In N Out Burger. Don´t get me started. The food here is good, but there are moments where you just don´t want to see any more eggs or beans.

So in a nutshell, I feel ready to leave (right now anyway, the day I leave I may be a mess) but I also feel confident that the friends I made here are going to be part of my life for a very long time. I am really really going to miss everyone, its difficult to single anyone out, the Oikos men and women, the kids, Marina, Manuel and Reina. I´m in love with all of them.

I was thinking about the idea of accompaniment today and the CRISPAZ program, and I think much of the time I have been oblivious, or it has been hard for me to understand if my being here has an effect beyond the need to feed and house me, etc. on the people I interact with. Of course when we joke about cultural differences, or when I walk by a pickup full of men and they all move to one side and start yelling things I am aware of the superficial effects of my presence as basically the only chillita from the US around. However, recently I have been really moved by many little things and I have started to realize that my presence here does actually affect the people around me. I feel really humbled by the unearned respect I seem to garner alot of the time, (I think when you are a white person from the states people often assume you are in a position of power, which on some level is of course true though perhaps not in the way they imagine, but its also just that I find people in my community to be generally super patient, nice, welcoming) but ANYWAY, its hard to explain but I feel like this respect, hope, affection is given to me often here and instead of resisting it or feeling inadequate to accept it (as I often feel) I am trying to accept it, appreciate it and use it to become someone who is worthy of the gifts I receive here every day. This in itself has been powerful for me, to stop being so self critical and just to live more in gratitude, in the desire be useful in my efforts when I go back to the states.

Last week Reina, Taty and I, as we often do, went to the soccer field to hang out, watch people, play catch. Taty immediately started climbing trees and jumping around on this seating area made of tires. We laughed at her and after a while we started talking about life in general. Reina told me about her divorce that had happened only a couple of months ago, from someone she was with for 10 years. We are only a month apart in age and actually have certain big things in common. At one point in the conversation we talked about a mutual friend of ours and how fickle she was and Reina told me that right now I was her closest friend. I had no idea that she even enjoyed hanging out with me, I only really knew for sure that she was patient with my spanish.
This is a woman who last week in El Transito told us all to stand up, (me, Ale and Marianita) then picked up a corn cob that had been all eaten, chucked it at a passed out drunk guy and yelled, ¨Corre!¨(Horribly inappropriate and mean but in the moment was really funny.) Usually her catchphrase is ¨fuerte! fuerte!¨ so the whole interaction was really sweet.

The day before my birthday, Aug. 1 I went to the beach with my friend Hector and we ate the most amazing shrimp and swam in a pool (the surf was too rough) that had this great mural all around it. (Including the artists rendition of the pivotal ¨I´m flying, I´m flying, lets make out¨ moment from Titanic, complete with little dolphins and stuff which I was amused by.) On my birthday a couple of friends from Oikos came by and with my family we ate tortas and cake. My friend Giovanni and several members of my host family started calling in saludos on Radio Izcanal which became increasingly funnier and more detailed. They started out as happy birthdays and evolved from there. One put my age at XXX, which was funny another said ¨Happy Birthday to Deborah Elizabeth Helt, she is an international observer here from the states living in Canton El Paraisal and has blue eyes, Isn´t that wonderful, etc.¨ It was so funny how into it they got sneaking around and calling the radio over and over. I have to admit though, I was relieved that the blue eyes one was the final one because I was starting to get embarrassed. After we ate and hung out for a while, Giovanni took my host family, a friend from the neighborhood and I in the pickup up into the mountains to look for a family that sells this homemade liquor called Chicha that my host mom wanted. We didn´t find it that night but bought something else called chaparra. I don´t remember the name of the community we went to but it had steep stairs cut into the earth leading up to the houses from the road and it was very beautiful. One of those places that looks like something out of your imagination.

Sunday morning we had a bit of a scare. Taty, the two year old woke up vomiting y tiene poopoo con sangre. Marina, Reina, Marianita, Ale and I rushed to the hospital her in a pickup and Marina brought a sample to give a lab for testing. The hospital in Usulutan was more simple than I expected. I think it was a better facility before the earthquake but I´m not sure. There were about 25 people waiting in chairs under a tin roof in the emergency area (which was basically outside). A man sitting next to me had what looked like a crushed, bloody hand wrapped in a thin white towel, which I tried not to stare at. After waiting for about half an hour we were moved to another small building that housed the exam rooms. The exam facilities were pretty threadbare here too. There were holes in the walls where air conditioners used to be and the exam rooms just had thin sheets over the doors that hung about halfway to the floor. Other than that though, the facilities were clean and ok.

After we dropped them off and waited some more we were told to take the sample to a lab. I was suprised that they didn´t have facilities at the hospital to do the test. Our friend Mauricio from the neighborhood drove us around Usulutan looking for a lab that was open while Reina stayed with Taty. It was Sunday and there was a festival going on in San Salvador so it was difficult to find any labs open, despite the fact that there seem to be tons of them. Finally we found one that was open and still we had to go running around nearby tiendas looking for someone who could give us change for a ten dollar bill to pay for the test. Half an hour later we had the results of the test which said that Taty had a straightforward but bad bacterial infection and not a parasite or whatever other thing was possible. I was relieved because when I had a bacterial infection I got better really quickly and the medicine was no big deal. So anyway, we went back to the hospital, Taty and Reina showed the results of the test, found out that Taty did not need a shot (which is always traumatizing for a two year old, especially one who is not used to being made to do things she doesn´t want to do) and got some medicine for her.

However, the adventure was not over because in her anxiety about Taty, Marina was having chest pains and needed an injection herself. So we waited about another hour for a doctor that never came to give Marina her injection. We waited outside the emergency area, sitting on some broken concrete rocks. Taty was already feeling better and had a cool white kerchief tied onto her head and looked so adorable. In her usual style she found the steepest, most broken series of rocks and started descending them over and over, before somehow finding a small rusted out chunk of old machinery parts, dislodging a giant rusty screw and using it as a microphone, charming the pants off of every person who was also waiting. She´s just a ridiculously cute child, the kind that draws a crowd.

Anyway, we gave up on the doctor and later in the evening when it was dark, we trekked back through some houses and trees to find a nurse she knows. Marina brought the shot and with the cows and dogs looking on finally got her injection.

If anyone is still reading this you are very patient and maybe need to get a hobby. :)
Much Love,
Deb