Three weeks in Milingo

So today I've been in my site for three whole weeks... I'm at an internet cafe in Suchitoto right now and a friend of mine named Carmen is going to come get me any minute now so I'll get in some random details about my life here until she arrives. I've got a cute little room of my in the house with a family. Its the grandfather Don Miguel, the mother and father Eva and Salomon, and the two daughters Leidi (Like Lady) and Karla, who are both 19, and Leidi's 2 year old son..... I just realized i might have already said that in the other post... oh well I dont remember and dont feel like looking. Well they cook for me and I do my own laundry by hand on the stone lavadera which can actually be a nice arm exercise, haha. I help make tortillas almost every day, which I'm getting better at, and I go with them a lot to the pasture to get the cows and walk them back to the house, ot to give water to the horse. I go to the school a lot just to hang out with the kids and I help out in the english classes. I go to the soccer field and hang out there and talk with people. I've been making a lot of new friends and now I feel like I have a lot of people I can just walk around and visit. I'm doing some house visits, where I just go to a house and ask if I can meet them and they happily invite me to come sit with them and chat- somewhere in there I figure out what their interests are in improving their community or anything to do with the environment, such as trash, litter, latrines, efficient wood burning stoves that use less wood, community groups they may be a part of, anything to do with water, etc. Right now the community gets water every three days... which means on the third day they open the faucet and let their big stone basins called pilas fill up and anything else they have to fill up... they they use that water until water comes again in 3 days. They re working on a new water project to get water to come everyday which should be happening soon. The roads need a lot of help too because it rains a lot and the roads are mostly mud and its hard to walk on them let alone a car pass... so that causes difficulty if they want to get a garbage truck to come... The garbage truck came to my community the other day for the first time I think- The people all carried big bags of separated trash to the community building and all the 8th grade boys helped load it all into the big garbage truck for thei "social hour" they have to do for school. They think the garbage truck is going to start coming once a month, which is really great... and if the roads could be improved it could maybe even come more often and go by the houses instead of everyone having to carry it. My community is actually really organized, because it was formed after the civil war from people who had to leave their villages and homes to go live in camps in the "monte"... Everyone had war stories and many family members who were killed during the war... they have stories of hiding for long periods of time..... people who went missing.. even mothers who had to smother their babies to keep them quiet to save the rest of a hiding group..... So thats a little intense I realize but this stuff is very real to them. You should watch the movie Innocent voices.. its fiction but its based on the war and a lot of the details in the movie show you tid bits about Salvadoran life back then and now. Well theres a lot more to tell but Carmen just got here so I'm going to go back to Milingo with her and later the community is having a general meeting to elect a leaders for the development association so Im going to attend. Love and miss you all!!