Well, I am now back in Santa Maria after a fabulous week soaking up the sun and suffering from mosquito bites at the beaches of El Salvador.
We had originally left with the intention of renewing our visas and having a student conference in preparation for the community conferences…but found out that starting last August, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua started a new law for looser borders and so crossing into El Sal didn’t help us at all and I’m going to have to go to Mexico or pay a fee and wait for the paperwork in the capital…
We got to San Salvador and then down to La Libertad and took a bus to a smaller town called El Tunco (named after a big rock that looked like a pig) where we stayed in a great little hotel with a patio stretching out over the river that fed into the ocean. The Conference was held in the mornings for 3 days and then we played on the beach in the afternoons. I made a turtle, swam in the ocean for the first time in my life (I’d been to the beach but never went further than my feet could touch or tried to ride the waves) and went boogy-boarding though I didn’t have the guts to try surfing. Dustin was stoked for surfing and got up on his first wave and became a veritable professional in his week on the beach. It was a fabulously beautiful black sand beach with a long sloping beach under the waves that was perfect for playing in and learning to body surf. Miracle of miracles, I didn’t get burned and didn’t even get any tanner…I was slightly paranoid and so I actually put on some 15 sunblock but then the latter days I didn’t even put that on because it was obvious that I wasn’t going to get any browner. Ironically enough, our native Guatemalan David burned his nose to a crisp and was complaining about how much his chest hurt from the sunburn. Go figure.
We met a bunch of international surfers including a pair of guys from Switzerland, a guy from England, another from Boston, a German, a couple from San Francisco, and some Israelis. Most of them hadn’t learned a word of Spanish and were just excited to hit the waves. It was weird to be around tourists again though it wasn’t that full since the rainy season detracts a lot from the tourist trade. I had a hard time being a tourist though and I really wanted to get away from the group and get to know some of the locals without the reduction or our relationship to economic transactions.
On Wednesday, I decided that I was done with the touristy beach and wanted to go up north to another beach with a coral reef and so even though the rest of the group decided to stay, I left. I had to take a round-about trail because the direct route didn’t have any real good direct buses so I went back through San Salvador to Sonsonate and down to the beach of Los Cóbanos. Once there after 5 hours in the buses, I saw that not only were there no tourists but there were no workers or residents either. Well, not NOBODY but definitely not well-visited. Thus, more of my kind of place. I was excited to spend the next 3 days doing NOTHING and chilling on the beach while I worked on catching up on fieldnotes and outlining the rest of my time in Guatemala…but Heavenly Father had a different plan for me.
I went and found a place to stay the night (though he wanted to charge me $10 for the day and $10 for the night explaining that people usually rented the room for one or the other but not for 24 hours like a normal hotel and that the only other hotel would charge $30 a night of 24 hours which turned out to be true…), changed my clothes and went down to the beach. It was a much different kind of beach and it kinda surprised me. The sand was more of the sandy color I would think of and was thicker with lots of little seashells unlike the silty black sand of the other beach. There were lots of large rocks buried in the sand so it was more precarious to jump in, but the waves didn’t crest at all near the shore since the shore just dropped off after a short while and you couldn’t touch down after the first 2 feet of water. So, it was great to swim in and feel the pushing and pulling of the waves without them crashing on your head.
When I got tired of treading water, I headed to the beach and just played in the waves hitting me. I had seen a group of people swimming next to me and as I was on the shore, I saw they had 2 little boys with them that were playing soccer in the sand and every once in a while the ball would escape into the waves and float with the curves as the waves lapped against the shore. Once the ball escaped toward me and I told him in Spanish to be careful and he grabbed the ball and ran away. Pretty soon, the whole group came out of the water and started playing in the sand. Little by little, the game came my way until the ball was swirling around my head with each play. I wondered what was going on but I liked watching them play and I was really entertained. I was really grateful to be at a normal locals’ beach and kept thinking how simply beautiful that was to see a family playing soccer on the beach rather than chain-smoking Germans and language-illiterate surfers. After a few minutes, the family sat down a little ways away from me and I decided to talk to them and I asked if they were from here. The ringleader young woman got really excited and her eyes lit up as she asked if I really spoke Spanish. I laughed and said yes and we started talking. They asked where I was coming from and if I was afraid to be traveling on my own. I talked about the other students and how I wanted to see another part of the country and get away from the tourists and they said that they had seen some white people occasionally but they don’t ever know any Spanish so they can’t talk to each other. I asked them if they knew places I should go to or beaches that I should visit and prompted them to take me around the next day if they had time. They looked at each other and said that would be great and they would come to pick me up and I said I would go write down my cell phone so that we could call each other if we got mixed up on how to meet up. When I came back with the paper, they said they had been talking and thought it would be better if I just came to their house and stayed with them and that I would save money that way because they wouldn’t charge me for the house or food. I hesitated for a second and said a quick, silent prayer about whether that would be good or not and I felt really good about and said that I would love to go. So, I ended up spending 3 of the most fantastic days of my life hanging out with the family and going on short roads trips around Sonsonate to small El Salvadorian towns and to the beach of Barra de Santiago.
We had pupusas every night—beans and cheese wrapped up in corn dough and served hot with sweet salsa and cabbage topping—and ate rabbit meat (which was way stronger than I had expected and I wouldn’t personally recommend as a meat of choice), had real cold milk, lots of beans, and fresh French bread from the family’s bread shop.
At the beach, I almost died by almost stepping on this dead blowfish that had washed up on shore, I played soccer for hours and beat the natives while we got covered in sand and then jumped in the water, took pictures of fishermen with huge shrimp and small trout—and after taking the pictures of one of the workers, he gave me 2 fish as a present and I gave them to the family to take home—and had the most relaxing and work-free time of my time here.
I also made some incredibly touching relationships with the family and was shocked with how much trust they gave me and how comfortable I felt with them over the span of 2 and a half days. They told me that it was their responsibility as Christians and on Thursday they had a culto (religious meeting) at their house and invited me to participate with them and even lent me a skirt so I could go. The 23-year-old son is looking to become an evangelical preacher and despite his initial timidity, he eventually started some very intense religious conversations with me about his beliefs and attempts to prove that God, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Ghost were all the same God with 3 manifestations. At first I was tempted to be logical and use my debate mode, but as I kept saying silent prayers to be able to say the right things and touch his heart through the Spirit or otherwise do the Father’s will, I found myself just being quiet and letting him explain whatever he felt necessary. I told him that I wasn’t looking to argue with him and there was really only one thing I wanted to tell him. I said that I wasn’t going to fight his doctrinal knowledge of the Bible, instead I just wanted to say that I, personally, knew that God was real and that He was at the head of the Mormon Church and that He had answered my prayers and given me a personal answer to my search for knowledge. I said I wouldn’t try to convince him but instead just tell him what I knew for myself and shared my testimony in that way. He sat back and thought for a minute and then went back to some of his previous citations. We do have a lot of doctrine in common, but it was interesting to me to see how even with those similar doctrines, the different emphases and applications changed the significance. For example I talked about the existence of prophets as in times of old and he said that he believed in prophets too and that a guy named William Brannon was born in the States and was called to be a prophet and now that he has died, his son is the current prophet. I had never heard of other churches that believed in modern-day prophets in the organizational and administrative way that he cited so that was interesting.
I talked to him about Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon and when we were back at the house, I showed him my scriptures and when he drove me to catch the bus, I left my triple with him and told him that I would lend it to him but I would make another trip down to visit his family before I left for the States. Who knows what will or will not happen with that, but it was a touching experience.
The family really received me as one of their own and it was hard to say goodbye even after such a short time. They said they had never actually conversed with a white person before and even with a lot of their family living as immigrants in the States, they didn’t know a lot about Americans or America and were excited to maintain contact with me. I am sad that they are so far from my little niche in Santa Maria, but I am decided to make another trip down there before leaving Guatemala and I hope to keep in touch in the future. It’s frustrating though because Guatemalan telephone companies for whatever reason don’t believe in making it possible to call their neighboring country and I have yet to figure out a way to even call them…but we’ll see how it works out.
In the end, it was a great week off and I was given yet another confirmation that God knows where we are and what we need. He knows me and knows that I am not happy being a normal tourist and being treated as a white girl rather than a complex person, and He blessed me with the chance to get to know a truly Christian family that are now dear friends of mine. As Suzanne reminded me when recounting the story, the best thing I could take away is a testimony that we are all God’s children and regardless of how insignificant we feel in our small little places in life, he knows where we are and what we need. They refused any attempt to pay them for their food and house (which was complete with a 2:30 AM cockroach visit that freaked me permanently out of my mind of living on the coast) but I know that if they are willing to take it, the best compensation I could ever give would be the restored gospel of Christ that they have a lot of but don’t have in it’s entirety.
This coming week I’ll be working on setting up the community Thank You Conferences and probably making a trip to Mexico to renew my visa. I hope all are enjoying the summer and those of you in Utah are living up the Statehood celebrations. I am now 4 weeks from going back to the USA, so I really need to crank for the next while to get things done and I can’t believe how fast the time is going. I hope to hear from you all soon!!
The wonderful familia Arias Polanco (and Carolina's familia that I don't know their last name) in Sonsonate, El Salvador. Carolina is the one in the middle in pink...the one that first talked to me and invited me to her house.
We had originally left with the intention of renewing our visas and having a student conference in preparation for the community conferences…but found out that starting last August, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua started a new law for looser borders and so crossing into El Sal didn’t help us at all and I’m going to have to go to Mexico or pay a fee and wait for the paperwork in the capital…
We got to San Salvador and then down to La Libertad and took a bus to a smaller town called El Tunco (named after a big rock that looked like a pig) where we stayed in a great little hotel with a patio stretching out over the river that fed into the ocean. The Conference was held in the mornings for 3 days and then we played on the beach in the afternoons. I made a turtle, swam in the ocean for the first time in my life (I’d been to the beach but never went further than my feet could touch or tried to ride the waves) and went boogy-boarding though I didn’t have the guts to try surfing. Dustin was stoked for surfing and got up on his first wave and became a veritable professional in his week on the beach. It was a fabulously beautiful black sand beach with a long sloping beach under the waves that was perfect for playing in and learning to body surf. Miracle of miracles, I didn’t get burned and didn’t even get any tanner…I was slightly paranoid and so I actually put on some 15 sunblock but then the latter days I didn’t even put that on because it was obvious that I wasn’t going to get any browner. Ironically enough, our native Guatemalan David burned his nose to a crisp and was complaining about how much his chest hurt from the sunburn. Go figure.
We met a bunch of international surfers including a pair of guys from Switzerland, a guy from England, another from Boston, a German, a couple from San Francisco, and some Israelis. Most of them hadn’t learned a word of Spanish and were just excited to hit the waves. It was weird to be around tourists again though it wasn’t that full since the rainy season detracts a lot from the tourist trade. I had a hard time being a tourist though and I really wanted to get away from the group and get to know some of the locals without the reduction or our relationship to economic transactions.
On Wednesday, I decided that I was done with the touristy beach and wanted to go up north to another beach with a coral reef and so even though the rest of the group decided to stay, I left. I had to take a round-about trail because the direct route didn’t have any real good direct buses so I went back through San Salvador to Sonsonate and down to the beach of Los Cóbanos. Once there after 5 hours in the buses, I saw that not only were there no tourists but there were no workers or residents either. Well, not NOBODY but definitely not well-visited. Thus, more of my kind of place. I was excited to spend the next 3 days doing NOTHING and chilling on the beach while I worked on catching up on fieldnotes and outlining the rest of my time in Guatemala…but Heavenly Father had a different plan for me.
I went and found a place to stay the night (though he wanted to charge me $10 for the day and $10 for the night explaining that people usually rented the room for one or the other but not for 24 hours like a normal hotel and that the only other hotel would charge $30 a night of 24 hours which turned out to be true…), changed my clothes and went down to the beach. It was a much different kind of beach and it kinda surprised me. The sand was more of the sandy color I would think of and was thicker with lots of little seashells unlike the silty black sand of the other beach. There were lots of large rocks buried in the sand so it was more precarious to jump in, but the waves didn’t crest at all near the shore since the shore just dropped off after a short while and you couldn’t touch down after the first 2 feet of water. So, it was great to swim in and feel the pushing and pulling of the waves without them crashing on your head.
When I got tired of treading water, I headed to the beach and just played in the waves hitting me. I had seen a group of people swimming next to me and as I was on the shore, I saw they had 2 little boys with them that were playing soccer in the sand and every once in a while the ball would escape into the waves and float with the curves as the waves lapped against the shore. Once the ball escaped toward me and I told him in Spanish to be careful and he grabbed the ball and ran away. Pretty soon, the whole group came out of the water and started playing in the sand. Little by little, the game came my way until the ball was swirling around my head with each play. I wondered what was going on but I liked watching them play and I was really entertained. I was really grateful to be at a normal locals’ beach and kept thinking how simply beautiful that was to see a family playing soccer on the beach rather than chain-smoking Germans and language-illiterate surfers. After a few minutes, the family sat down a little ways away from me and I decided to talk to them and I asked if they were from here. The ringleader young woman got really excited and her eyes lit up as she asked if I really spoke Spanish. I laughed and said yes and we started talking. They asked where I was coming from and if I was afraid to be traveling on my own. I talked about the other students and how I wanted to see another part of the country and get away from the tourists and they said that they had seen some white people occasionally but they don’t ever know any Spanish so they can’t talk to each other. I asked them if they knew places I should go to or beaches that I should visit and prompted them to take me around the next day if they had time. They looked at each other and said that would be great and they would come to pick me up and I said I would go write down my cell phone so that we could call each other if we got mixed up on how to meet up. When I came back with the paper, they said they had been talking and thought it would be better if I just came to their house and stayed with them and that I would save money that way because they wouldn’t charge me for the house or food. I hesitated for a second and said a quick, silent prayer about whether that would be good or not and I felt really good about and said that I would love to go. So, I ended up spending 3 of the most fantastic days of my life hanging out with the family and going on short roads trips around Sonsonate to small El Salvadorian towns and to the beach of Barra de Santiago.
We had pupusas every night—beans and cheese wrapped up in corn dough and served hot with sweet salsa and cabbage topping—and ate rabbit meat (which was way stronger than I had expected and I wouldn’t personally recommend as a meat of choice), had real cold milk, lots of beans, and fresh French bread from the family’s bread shop.
At the beach, I almost died by almost stepping on this dead blowfish that had washed up on shore, I played soccer for hours and beat the natives while we got covered in sand and then jumped in the water, took pictures of fishermen with huge shrimp and small trout—and after taking the pictures of one of the workers, he gave me 2 fish as a present and I gave them to the family to take home—and had the most relaxing and work-free time of my time here.
I also made some incredibly touching relationships with the family and was shocked with how much trust they gave me and how comfortable I felt with them over the span of 2 and a half days. They told me that it was their responsibility as Christians and on Thursday they had a culto (religious meeting) at their house and invited me to participate with them and even lent me a skirt so I could go. The 23-year-old son is looking to become an evangelical preacher and despite his initial timidity, he eventually started some very intense religious conversations with me about his beliefs and attempts to prove that God, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Ghost were all the same God with 3 manifestations. At first I was tempted to be logical and use my debate mode, but as I kept saying silent prayers to be able to say the right things and touch his heart through the Spirit or otherwise do the Father’s will, I found myself just being quiet and letting him explain whatever he felt necessary. I told him that I wasn’t looking to argue with him and there was really only one thing I wanted to tell him. I said that I wasn’t going to fight his doctrinal knowledge of the Bible, instead I just wanted to say that I, personally, knew that God was real and that He was at the head of the Mormon Church and that He had answered my prayers and given me a personal answer to my search for knowledge. I said I wouldn’t try to convince him but instead just tell him what I knew for myself and shared my testimony in that way. He sat back and thought for a minute and then went back to some of his previous citations. We do have a lot of doctrine in common, but it was interesting to me to see how even with those similar doctrines, the different emphases and applications changed the significance. For example I talked about the existence of prophets as in times of old and he said that he believed in prophets too and that a guy named William Brannon was born in the States and was called to be a prophet and now that he has died, his son is the current prophet. I had never heard of other churches that believed in modern-day prophets in the organizational and administrative way that he cited so that was interesting.
I talked to him about Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon and when we were back at the house, I showed him my scriptures and when he drove me to catch the bus, I left my triple with him and told him that I would lend it to him but I would make another trip down to visit his family before I left for the States. Who knows what will or will not happen with that, but it was a touching experience.
The family really received me as one of their own and it was hard to say goodbye even after such a short time. They said they had never actually conversed with a white person before and even with a lot of their family living as immigrants in the States, they didn’t know a lot about Americans or America and were excited to maintain contact with me. I am sad that they are so far from my little niche in Santa Maria, but I am decided to make another trip down there before leaving Guatemala and I hope to keep in touch in the future. It’s frustrating though because Guatemalan telephone companies for whatever reason don’t believe in making it possible to call their neighboring country and I have yet to figure out a way to even call them…but we’ll see how it works out.
In the end, it was a great week off and I was given yet another confirmation that God knows where we are and what we need. He knows me and knows that I am not happy being a normal tourist and being treated as a white girl rather than a complex person, and He blessed me with the chance to get to know a truly Christian family that are now dear friends of mine. As Suzanne reminded me when recounting the story, the best thing I could take away is a testimony that we are all God’s children and regardless of how insignificant we feel in our small little places in life, he knows where we are and what we need. They refused any attempt to pay them for their food and house (which was complete with a 2:30 AM cockroach visit that freaked me permanently out of my mind of living on the coast) but I know that if they are willing to take it, the best compensation I could ever give would be the restored gospel of Christ that they have a lot of but don’t have in it’s entirety.
This coming week I’ll be working on setting up the community Thank You Conferences and probably making a trip to Mexico to renew my visa. I hope all are enjoying the summer and those of you in Utah are living up the Statehood celebrations. I am now 4 weeks from going back to the USA, so I really need to crank for the next while to get things done and I can’t believe how fast the time is going. I hope to hear from you all soon!!
This first picture is me alongside my masterpiece sea turtle I carved on the beach. Didn't last long...but it was beautiful let me tell you!
This next one is a beautiful sunset on the beach of the Barra de Santiago. I loved this beach and spent a good deal of time playing soccer and soaking up the waves on my last day in El Salvador
The wonderful familia Arias Polanco (and Carolina's familia that I don't know their last name) in Sonsonate, El Salvador. Carolina is the one in the middle in pink...the one that first talked to me and invited me to her house.
I had to take a model walk (actually I was playing soccer and it just turned out a good picture lol...) and here's a star in training, little Johan playing soccer in the sand.We next have a tub full of HUGE shrimp and the town drunk that wanted to show them off to me.
Next we have a fisherman holding up his catch. Soon after I obliged when he asked me to take his picture, he gave me two fish to remember him by. Unfortunately, I had to leave them behind and we didn't have time to cook them up since I left early the next morning, but it was cool all the same.
Finally, Gervis of the host family working in his bread shop. The family was so cool and I really wish I could have stayed longer with them...
1 comment:
pretty cute...
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