6-22-10
I’m finally back in Chalate. It’s good to be back in my site, but it’s been a slightly rocky homecoming. I left San Vicente on Friday, but decided to spend a night in San Salvador for a little “me time”. I’ve been so constantly surrounded the last month by either other volunteers or my host family, that I thought it would be nice to spend an unscheduled night in a hotel room by myself, with no agenda to follow but my own. I went to the mall, got some coffee, did a little window shopping, but ultimately ended up sacking out in my hotel room watching Knocked Up, Saved, and reruns of Scrubs all dubbed in Spanish. Whole new level of hilarity.
I took a really long, hot shower in the morning and grabbed some breakfast at a café that reminded me strongly of Panera Bread, and then hauled myself and my luggage on a bus back to Chalate. Unfortunately, somewhere in there I managed to lose my cell phone. Again. I lost my first one a month into training when I got on a bus with my cell in a loose pants pocket. Guess how I lost it this time? You’d think I’d learn not to do that. I got home a few hours later, sin cell phone. I’d looked forward to moving into my new house almost immediately, but my host mother informed me that the electricity still wasn’t working in the house. She made some vague noises about Don Alfredo trying to fix it this week, but wasn’t able to give me a definite moving in timeline.
The real cherry atop my homecoming pie, however, was waiting for me in my room. Since the roof on my host family’s house is seriously sub-standard, it has a tendency to leak. A lot. All over my bed. I knew this before I left, and tried to put everything I was leaving behind either in plastic storage tubs or my plastic ropero – my dresser. But judging by how mildewed and damp my room smelt, I knew something had gone sadly awry. Apparently, they got some really bad rain shortly after I left, thanks to Tropical Storm Agatha (I saw some semi-cleared up mudslides on the road in, so I knew how bad it was). My room flooded. They didn’t think there was any damage since everything was in plastic, but apparently there were some bad leaks over my ropero, and some water seeped into the top couple drawers of it. That was almost a month ago, which gave all my clothes in those drawers plenty of time to start growing copious amounts of mold. Awesome.
I’ll admit, I cried just a little bit. Pity, party of one?
It didn’t help that it rained more that night, and I spend the entire night chilly, huddling in the middle of my bed like a hedgehog, because there are leaks over my bed right at the foot and head of it. Common sense would dictate that I move the bed, but my room is so small, and there are so many leaks, there’s actually no place I can move my bed where it won’t be leaked on. At least where it is, I can sleep more or less dry, as long as I remain in the fetal position.
Yesterday, I decided to get proactive. After waging a serious war against the mold on my clothes with several soaks in rinso and multiple washings, I went into Chalate to start buying things for my household. My house is just sitting there empty, so I figured I could at least begin filling it, so it’s ready to move into as soon as the electricity is working. (Maybe even before, depending on how sore my back gets from sleeping in a ball. Using candles and a flashlight for a week won’t kill me.) I decided to get the big stuff out of the way first. I bought a bed and mattress, a cocina chiquita (a little two burner stove with a gas tank), and a dorm room-sized refrigerator. The store promised to dar transporte for free. They said they could bring it the same day, but I decided to have them wait, since I hadn’t actually seen the inside of the house in a month and didn’t know what kind of shape it was in.
That turned out to be a good call. I went into it this morning, and the floor was covered in dust, leaves, cobwebs, and general grime. (It’s seriously hard to keep a clean house here – most women I know sweep and mop twice daily.) Also, there was a barrel of frijoles in one corner, and a set of metal bunk beds in the other. The bunk beds were so rusty I wanted a tetanus shot just looking at them. They also had damp cardboard lying across the metal springs and a plethora of spider webs littered with crickets so big and ugly that they made the cave crickets in my mom’s Jersey house look like cute little ladybugs. I spent the better part of the morning killing animalitos with an industrial-sized can of Raid, and callously sweeping their dead little bodies out the door. My host mom also helped me move the barrel of frijoles and the rusty bunk beds out of my house. Don Faustino, my counterpart’s dad and my future landlord, also stores his maíz in silos next to my house. My host mom assured me that I could use as much as I wanted to make all the tortillas I was sure to eat. How well she knows me.
The delivery guy finally showed up at around 4 pm – which I find ridiculous, because anyone who’s lived in this country for any amount of time knows that, during the rainy season, it’s sunshine and smiles in the morning and clouds of doom pissing down buckets of rain in the late afternoon. We had to wait 20 minutes for the rain to lessen up enough to move the stuff in. Fortunately, the mattress and boxspring were wrapped in plastic. I was also very pleased to discover that, even though it had been raining steadily for a couple hours, my new house only had a couple little leaks near the door – so once I actually move in, there’ll be no more fetal position sleeping for me. Now I just hope that the house doesn’t have rats – but I won’t know that until I sleep there, because they tend to only show their nasty little faces at night. I don’t really care if my house has bats. Bats avoid people, so the worst they’re going to do is swoop through the house at night, and maybe poop on some stuff. But the rats here are bold little bastards. My friend Joanna had rats climbing on her mosquito net at night in her host family’s house in San Vicente.
That’s about it for now, but I’ll leave you with one last funny, compliments of – who else? – everyone’s favorite Salvadoran grandmother, Angelita. I was sitting in my hammock the day after I got back, and Angelita was next to me, taking clothes off the line inside. Apparently I accidently left a pair of underwear in the line when I went to San Vicente. She asked me if they were mine, and I affirmed that. Then she said, “I knew they were yours because they’re so big!”
Ah, Angelita. Always keepin’ it real.
