Movin' on

Hey folks. So I am back in Suchitoto after spending the weekend in San Salvador with Alicia and the Casa family. It was a great couple of days. I had been looking forward to the program reunion which took place yesterday. Basically representatives from all of the Casa program's "praxis" sites joined together with Casa students and staff for an outing to one of the community's in which Casa students work.
The community we visited is called Las Nubes, which is appropriate enough as we had to climb Volcan San Salvador in order to reach it. We had a great time and I was just to psyched to spend time with my Salvadoran mother Angelica and four other women from my former praxis site Tepecoyo.






Today I returned to Suchitoto with Sister Peggy after a relaxing morning with Alicia. I was still tired out from the hike yesterday and the drive back out to Suchi in the heat so I grabbed a nap before reuniting with Pablo and Cassandra, the two new (recently married) volunteers here. We had some pupusas and caught up with each other a bit and now I'm just hanging in the office looking forward to another week in Suchi.

This week will be a bit different because I am actually preparing to move out of the Center at some point to a community called El Bario. I will live with two Salvadoran guys named David and Chumingo, and their grandmother. I am a bit nervous about how the whole commute to the Center will work out, especially if I am limited in terms of how long I can hang out at the Center during the day (the last bus might leave no later than 5, in which case I'll be playing less soccer and going out for pupusas with my fellow volunteers much less). Overall I am excited to make a move further out into the Salvadoran community here. It will be great for my Spanish and I hope to do some organizing out in El Bario, maybe get another soccer team going or hold some yoga classes out there too. We'll see, the sky pretty much appears to be the limit. I just hope I still have time to be part of this excellent community of volunteers we now have.


Speaking of that community, I'll share some pictures now from last Thursday. Although we are missing Korla right now as she's visiting her family in Minnesota, we have Colin, Christy's boyfriend, out here for the week, and on Thursday our friend from Suchitoto, Rosaura, was also here.

The picture to the right here features Christy and her Colin at center there, with Cassandra flanking on the right (her husband Pablo is taking the picture), and then Rosaura and myself on the left there.

This picture to the left gives you a glimpse of the handsome Mr. Paul "Pablo" Kiger.

And in case you've lost track, our other volunteer buddy is Ariel who arrived to pupusas late on thursday. Here she is with Cassandra in the comedor of the Center:So the other great pictures of the week featured on this post are as follows: first is Cassandra surrounded by youngins at the skatepark, the second is the colorful and delicious meal we cooked on Thursday (also featured above in the picture of Ariel and Cassandra) cooking the meal featured in several pictures in this post (Rose, you would have loved it), and the third is Paul skating with some of our friends in the park.

A final photo for the night, and one I am most proud of, features last thursday's yoga class. I will post the guided meditation at some point if I remember all of it. For now, here's the class:

There's Delmi on the left, one of our friends who works in the office here; Rosaura in the front middle, Luis Felipe on the right facing a different direction than everyone else, Ariel behind Rosaura, our friend Flor in there in the middle behind Rosaura, with her little brother Carlos behind her.... I'm not gonna name everyone, but it was a great group.