Don McDonald had a farm....

One month down, one more to go.

For the last month and some change I have been doing my damnest to adapt to life in San Vicente, El Salvador. Some days it feels like I have been here a year, other days I feel pretty fresh from the United States. I have been trying to think of stories to tell people back home when we talk, and I always feel like things here have gotten pretty routine, but really, my life here is totally different from back home.

I have been living with a host family in the little community of Istepeque, in the department of San Vicente. I live with host parents, Niña Juana and Don Rafael, an older sister Magdalena, and a younger sister, Lupita. They're incredibly warm and kind and I really couldn't be happier.

My house is pretty nice here. Niña Juana keeps a pretty flower garden in the front, and a vegetable garden out back. We have chickens that are better dead and in my soup than alive and keeping me up at night. As my friend Alfredo put it, you hear one rooster start crowing down the street, which gets it's neighbor chickens going, and so on, and you can gauge just when the chicken right outside your house is going to start screaming. This happens about once an hour every night.

There are chickens everywhere. Those raised "free range" are called pollo indio. You can always have a conversation with Salvadoran women over what is better, pollo indio, or farm raised chicken from the super. As my spanish teacher pointed out, pollo indio isn't injected with chemicals, which is better. As a fellow trainee responded, the chickens at his house drink his soapy bath water and from the scummy gutters along the street. As for chemical content, the jury is still out. For us gringos, the health benefits of killing pollo indio rest primarily in the hours of sleep we get back once they are dead.

I have heard that some of the other trainees have been having a hard time adjusting to the close proximity of animals to people. It hasn't really been an issue for me, so far at least. Every day herds of cattle walk down my street, and they also graze by our "cancha" which is the football field. One of my fellow trainees lives next door to a little pasture where a group of cows and bulls live. Sometimes we forget why cows are kept, then we remember...

A few weeks ago the newly elected govenor of San Vicente, who is from this community, thew a barbeque in the next town over. He was going to be feeding a bunch of people for free and had one of the cows that lives in the little pasture slaughtered for the party. Though we missed it, the neighborhood kids told us all about it. Two whacks to the face, they told us, laughing hysterically, then they slit his throat. The first hatchet strike between the eyes didn't take him down, it took a second, apparently. Who kills a cow that way?! The kids loved telling us the story, and loved acting out the blade getting them right between the eyes, their tongues lolling out.