Recipe for a Panadería

9-3-11

This summer has officially been the longest time I’ve been in this country without blogging.  Don’t worry, as always, I have lots of good excuses:

1. My computer no longer has Microsoft Word on it.  Apparently, when the trial runs out, they make you pay a bunch of money or something.  The man’s always trying to get you down.
2. I’ve been bien vaga this summer.  I’ve been traveling lots – participating in service trainings, helping with new volunteer workshops, going to other communities to do HIV/AIDS work, translating for American medical brigades, and of course, partying it up on 4^th of July with all the other ex-pats.
3. A monkey got into my house and stole my computer.

Fine, I made that last one up.  We don’t even have monkeys here.  (Which is super lame.  I mean, what’s a tropical environment without some mischievous but ultimately lovable monkeys?  I feel cheated.)  But I couldn’t think of another valid reason, and three reasons sounds better than two.  Deal.

Whatever the reasons, I’m going to try to hop back on board the blogging train.  So right now my two main projects are my water project and the panadería.  The women of my town starting asking me to help them begin a panadería (bakery) pretty much as soon as I got here.  I went ahead and filed it away in my brain with a bridge project, a casa communal project, and a road maintenance project – in other words the infrastructural, never-gonna-happen projects.  I certainly don’t have money to build any of that stuff, and neither does my community.  Plus, my architectural skills are limited to building a popsicle-and-glue log cabin in the 1^st grade.  (Which the authorities deemed “condemned” due to shoddy wiring and building standards.  Damn the man!  With it went all my Frank Lloyd Wright-like ambition.)

However, it finally occurred to me that starting a bakery didn’t mean I actually had to build one – I just had to find an empty building in the village with electricity and running water, clean it up, look for some funds to buy a decent oven, toss in some flour, yeast, baking accoutrements, give it all a good stir, and serve bien calientita.  And voila.  You got yourself a bakery.

Oh yeah.  And I had to teach the women in my town how to actually bake bread.  Shit.

So baking isn’t exactly my forte, but into this fracas came Fomilenio (or Fondo Milenio, the American funded Millennium Challenge Corporation).  Fomilenio, among other things, is working in El Salvador until 2012 to help provide infrastructure support and economic development.  One thing they do is travel to communities around the country and give free vocational trainings – including a baking course.  Phew.  I was off the hook.  I’d hate to have to go through the effort of learning to bake just so I can teach my community.

I sent in a solicitud for a 140-hour baking course for Los Alas back in April.  April, May, June, and most of July passed without me hearing anything from Fomilenio.  In the mean time, I had women stopping at my house almost daily, asking, ¿Y la panadería?  God give me sanity.  I had nothing to tell them, except, Todavía no me han llamado.  Nope, they still haven’t called.  But please, feel free to check back with me at hour intervals for the next three months, just in case.

Finally, finally they called me, towards the end of July.  They wanted to know if we had an empty building to hold the training (sure), with electricity (of course), running water (we’ll bring in some barrels), and clean bathrooms (define clean.  No wait, define bathroom).  They also wanted to know if it was possible for regular, midsize cars to reach my village.  Okay, so my roads have a few man (or cow) eating potholes, but I know for a fact that cars can get to my community, because my parents managed to get a rental there and back, more or less undamaged.

So I told them we had all that, and they said they’d been in touch.  Last week, they called again, asking for an asemblea general with my town – a meeting with everyone interested.  The woman on the phone told me to invite at thirty interested people, because at least twenty had to sign up for the course for them to bother coming out to do it.  She told me she would come on the 10^th of September, talk to the people, sign up interested community members, and then look at the house we planned to use for the training class.  If all went well, she told me they’d likely start the training on the 17^th of October.

I talked to my ADESCO directiva, and they were way on board for it.  We divided into groups to go to different parts of the community, door to door, and find out how many people we had that really wanted to participate.  We decided to offer the opportunity to Los Alas residents first, then ask people in nearby villages if we didn’t have enough.

Then we had to figure out which building to use.  This one was too small, that one not finished, another had electricity but no bathrooms, and another had bathrooms but no lock on the door.  And none of them had consistent running water.  To the rescue, as usual, was Don Mario.  He offered to let us use his large, ranch-style house for the month of training.  He’s rarely even there, so people in his family often use it.  He even loaned me his kitchen when my parents were here, so we could make a big Thanksgiving dinner for everyone.

So.  Next step is inviting people to the meeting.  Thanks to the directiva’s support, for once I wouldn’t have to hoof it to all 45 houses myself.  Stay tuned for updates…