Training continued...

A few of us came to Vera Paz, the closest pueblo, for some business and now I´m at the internet cafe. Theres so much to say! I´m still enjoying my host family and getting really close with them. They asked me if Peace Corps would let me stay with them for the whole two years! I wish I could, but I will be leaving in about a month to go to my site on my own. Training is about halfway over. I´ve been in-country for more than a month now. Communication is a little harder than I expected, but I do have my cell phone and have been able to make a few calls now and then, I´m just vert busy. Most of the time I´m doing things with the host family, or I have spanish class in my community, or I have to go into the office in San Vicente for other training ( safety and security, medical, technical...) I´ve been all immunized and I´m fully aware of all the weird illnesses I´m susceptible to! Haha we learned about Chagas the other day, which you can get from a bug called an chinche that searches for you while your sleeping and bites you near your mouth, defacates, and and a parasite is passed along that can kill you slowly in a few years or decades!!! Exciting! Luckily I have a mosquito net and I will be very carefully keeping it nice and tucked in! No worries everyone, I don´t think its very common. On a lighter note, I went to a quinceanera fiests yesterday. It was a pretty big celebration which started with a mass and then ended with food, music, and dancing. I remember sitting there with my family eating chicken, rice, and tortillas and as I looked around at the surrounding corn fields and the sugar cane and the volcano hovering over the fiesta, and then I heard Lady Gaga´s Poker Face come blasting out of the giant super-speakers (they like their music loud). It reminded me that I wasn´t THAT far away from home, haha. Then it proceeded to rain harder that you could ever imagine, the tent fell down, and everybody tried to fit under the awning of the house. Then when the rain let up we waded home. Always an adventure!
I also went to visit another Volunteer in Usulutan, one of the hottest departments, to see what life was like there as part of what the Peace Corps calls immersion days. This was our first time traveling alone and visiting an even more rural area. I unsuccessfully tried to kill a chicken that weekend, swam in a river, and bathed the traditional Salvadoran way, in my clothes. I´d say the chicken experience was upsetting but it really didn´t compare to hearing three pigs be castrated. It sounded like you´d think it would sound.
Oh yeah and I walked in a 7 mile religious pilgrimage from my community to Santo Domingo, which was really hot and also a wonderful experience- about 90 of us rode back that night in the back of a giant truck- it was a little scary but a beautiful ride.
Other that those random adventures, I´m still enjoying my freshly squeezed OJ, my watermelon, and my hammock time, waking up with the sun, and bucket bathing with fresh cool water during the heat of the day, loving the nightly storms and the cooler nights, leading yoga in the early mornings for my trainee friends, and hanging out with my new Salvadoran family, taking the daily cat calls as compliments ( I´m the hottest I´ve ever been...in all senses of the word), workin on my spanish and my slang.. PUCHICA! My new favorite word. It means damn. the good and the bad... but its not a bad word so you can pretty much use it all day long. Puchica Ive been here a long time so Í´m gonna go back to Molineros and maybe watch the pirated version of the new Harry Potter movie in spanish. Adios!