5-24-11
Well, doomsday has come and gone, and I have to say, I’m a little bummed out that I didn’t get raptured. I knew it was a mistake to give away my life savings.
Ha, just kidding! I don’t have any life savings. It’s surprisingly difficult to save money on a $300 a month stipend.
Actually, I spent doomsday in El Dique Chalatenango. El Dique is my friend Andrew’s site. It’s also the site I went to visit for my immersion day experience last year (see my post, The One Where Emilie Meets a Rat), when the old volunteer, Abby, still lived there. Aside from the rat incident, I have very fond memories of El Dique, and the people there are always excited to see me.
This weekend, Andrew hosted and HIV/AIDS soccer tournament. He and his counterpart, Adella, invited 12 local soccer teams to come and play in the tournament. Before it started, his youth group (the majority of whom attended the HIV/AIDS workshop I talked about in my post Sex in the Dark) ran educational activities for all the players. A representative from PASMO (the Pan American Social Marketing Association, which works in HIV/AIDS initiatives) came out and talked to the players as well. Andrew, Joanna, Kyle (another volunteer) and I helped supervise activities.
We all came out to El Dique the day before, because El Dique is really in the middle of nowhere – it’s a 2 hour bus ride in both directions from the closest large pueblos – Chalate to the north, or Ilobasco to the south. I grabbed the 2 o’clock bus from Chalate, but because they are working on turning the road towards El Dique into a northern highway, we kept getting stuck behind earthmovers. We had to sit and wait patiently while the sun beat in the windows of the old school bus and we lost half our body weight in sweat. By the end of 2 hours, I was about ready to sell my soul to the devil for a glass of cold water. Daring words on the eve of doomsday, but I’m sure I meant them at the time.
I finally made it to El Dique, however – and I should point out that that wasn’t a certain outcome of being on the bus headed there. After we got out from behind the earthmovers, the bus driver (whom I think was about 17) seemed to think he was the Mario Andretti of El Salvador, as he tried to make up for lost time. And let’s face it – a 20-year-old American school bus chugging down the winding dirt roads of rural El Salvador isn’t exactly the same thing as a race car flying around a paved race track. So yeah…I was sweating it out, and it wasn’t just from the sun. We got up the next day, bright and early for an 8 am start to the tournament. The idea was to begin with the HIV/AIDS activities, give the participants a snack, and then move onto the actual tournament.
But it is El Salvador, so although we were ready and on the field at 8 am, we didn’t really expect anyone to show up on the dot. 8:30 rolled around with no participants, and we still weren’t worried. Half an hour late is hardly unusual here. Then 9 rolled by, then 9:30…and we started to get a little nervous. At 10 am, the women’s group starting cooking the pupusas they brought to sell to the players, and we all bought some. At 10:30, with one team in attendance, we started wondering how we could salvage the educational part of the day, if not the tournament part. Finally, finally, at 11 am, some of the teams started straggling onto the field. Three hours late was pretty darn extreme, even by Salvadoran standards, but we eventually ended up with five teams; about fifty participants. It wasn’t the twelve teams and one-hundred and twenty participants we’d been anticipating, but it would do.
We split them into groups for the activities, and the youth did a great job of presenting the HIV/AIDS material. The PASMO representative set up a table with educational pamphlets, bumper stickers, PASMO merchandise, and of course, free condoms for all. (Who doesn’t love some free, grape-flavored condoms?) The participants had their free snack (compliments of the mayor’s office), and registered their teams for the tournament. They finally started playing around 1 pm.
Once the tournament started, we volunteers didn’t really have all that much to do, so we sat around in whatever shade we could find, sucking down bags of water like we were camels that were facing down 6 months in a desert. We also stuffed ourselves full of pupusas, sliced fruit with lime and hot sauce, and snow cones, all of which were being sold on the field to raise money. As it got later in the day, the clouds starting rolling in and cooling things down. We all knew what was coming, so we started packing up the food, tables, chairs, and sound equipment. During the last game, the storm finally broke, and we stood there will the rain came down and sheets and soaked us. Truthfully, it was a massive relief from the heat of the rest of the day.
The event was a success, despite the fact that only a few teams came. (Unfortunately, it turned out the church was putting on some big event that day, as well.) El Dique’s own soccer team won the tournament, and got the grand prize of $75 in cash. After seeing all the equipment off the field, we all trooped back to Andrew’s house and celebrated the day with breakfast burritos (at night) and El Salvador’s finest rum. (Okay, you got me, it’s cheapest. Whatever.) We grumbled a little bit about not being raptured, but we mostly enjoyed the bliss of a damp breeze blowing through the house as we chatted the night away.
