3 weeks and counting....

Three weeks and counting until I´m in my official site! Phase 1 of training is now more than half way over! The last week or two have been really busy and crammed, but now that the end is in sight I´m much less stressed (although now I have a whole new set of anxieties about starting over alone in a new place!). Last weekend my family was invited to go with my neighbors to their family´s beach house in La Libertad. It was GORGEOUS and really relaxing, and totally necessary as we´ve hardly had any free time!
Things are progressing with the youth group - the alcaldeza (mayor) said she´d try to help with the street lamp project and we´re working on a fundrasing activity with the group right now. We only have about 2 weeks left to actually be in Tepe working with the group, so it´s possible we won´t be here to see the fundraising event (which will most likely be a show of somekind) and we defintely won´t be here to see the lamps get put up.
This weekend El Sal has their presidential elections and the atmosphere is pretty tense and excited - well see what the results are on Sunday!

View from the beach house in La Libertad

Immersion Weekend

Immersion Weekend was amazing! I went to Morazan (north eastern department about 4-5 hours away from San Vicente) to visit a Volunteer. Turns out she is from the 757 - such a small world! I had to travel alone for part of the trip and I was really nervous and kinda scared to do it at first, but it turned out to be no problem at all - I had no idea where I was supposed to go but people were very helpful and patient with my crappy Spanish. The Volunteer's site is up in the mountains, small but really nice and she loves it there. We visited a school she´s working with, went to a monthly meeting of the Morazan PCVs, went to the museum of the guerilla war, hiked a bunch of mountians and got super lost on our way to a waterfall, found the waterfall, swam in the ice cold water, hiked back, and FINALLY got a chance to relax with some of the PCVs at a hotel near her site. All in all a fantastic weekend :)

My Training group has had a couple meetings with our youth group and they decided they wanted to do a project to get street lights in part of the town. I think this is a great project, but I have no idea how were going to help them do it - we have no money and like 3 weeks to work on it. We need to get info from the Alcaldia about what kind of funds etc... they need for the project and what the youth can do to facilitate it - hard enough for us to try and do in English much less in Spanish with a bunch of people we don´t know very well! On the upside I´m getting really good at doing ice breakers/dinamicas in Spanish as I´m in charge of them in every meeting haha! Today my group also taught 3 classes of English at a local school about the verb ´to be.´ I was really dreading it but it wasn´t as bad as I thought (probably because the class I taught was the smallest and most advanced...) I´m also trying to organize an excursion to climb the volcano next to San Vicente with the training group. The US vs El Salvador soccer game is the Saturday before the day were climbing it and I really want to go, but its the same day as our family fiesta so I dont think we can...also I hear Americans get poop and bottles and stuff thrown at them at the games and usually require a security escort so... I might have to pass anyway.





El Chorreron Waterfall





View from mountain top in Morazan (looks like the Blue Ridge mountains right?!)