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Even though my own page is published under a pseudonym, not so for the Facebook page of Perquín's upcoming Winter Festival or Festival de Invierno. The Festival, held every August, celebrates the region's considerable bounty: August is the middle of the rainy season and everything's idyllically lush and verdant and—thanks to sufficient rainfall—the crops are thriving. Here's the Facebook page:

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Festival-de-Invierno/539044709537713

The Festival was initiated in 1992, at the end of El Salvador's long and bloody Civil War, which lasted through the '80s and into the early '90s. Let me refresh your memory on that war—another of the many leftist rebels versus military dictatorship confrontations that characterized Central America during that era. Remember Archbishop Oscar Romero? Members of an army death squad assassinated Romero in 1980 while he was celebrating Mass in a hospital chapel in San Salvador. Later that year, four American churchwomen were raped and murdered. In 1981 the Salvadoran army massacred 800 civilians in the village of El Mozote. In 1989, six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter were gunned down at the University of Central America. No matter what your views on the FMLN and Marxism, I think you'd have to agree that we were on the wrong side in that one. Finally, the Moakley Commission and Moakley Report (remember them?) came to that same conclusion and through U.S. and international efforts the civil war was brought to an end in January of 1992. The Winter Festival in Perquín—where the first negotiations that led to the Peace Accords took place—was also initiated to celebrate the Accords and encourage reconciliation in a bitterly divided country.

Perquín, 1992, the two sides surrender their weapons.

Now that I've cheered you up, let me tell you about the festivities. There's lots of food, not an insignificant amount of consumption of alcoholic beverages, live music, dancing, parades, a bicycle race, a five-hour walk from Perquín to Mozote (conducted by Padre Rojelio, the local Catholic cleric, to commemorate the aforementioned massacre), the election of a Lenca Princess, and many boisterous appearances by La Gigantona de Jocoro and her entourage. La Gigantona is a 12-foot-tall puppet on stilts, wearing an intricate and grandmotherly homemade dress, whose presence is a homage to Perquín's preColumbian population, supposedly a race of Giants. This year the Festival runs for five days, August 2–6.

There are plenty of places to stay in Perquín and nearby communities—from beautiful "hoteles de la montaña" with wooden cabins to basic hostels and even camping options. 

I did mention the Facebook page, right? Again, here's the link. Go to the page, "like" it, follow it, talk about it and—if you dare—come to Perquín and enjoy it.

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Festival-de-Invierno/539044709537713

Traumatic Brain Injury

So far this blog has been relatively content-free, probably a relief for many of you who’ve perhaps taken about as much sharing as you can stomach from bloggers, myself included. Like it or not, I’m weighing in on the occurrences of the last three months (but don't worry, I'm not covering all of them in this post). It was three months ago that I first arrived in El Salvador.

The most recent occurrence was that I fell on my head. I had diarrhea and eating and drinking were making me nauseous, so I decided to try getting by without doing very much of either for a couple of days. Bad idea. I was walking home from a meeting, passed out on the street from dehydration and gashed my head.

When you’re diabetic they don’t let you off with a few stitches and a bag of electrolyte formula. They sent me to San Salvador for an MRI of my brain, an electroencephalogram, electrocardiogram, heart sonogram, and battery of blood tests. I spent two days in the hospital but when they released me they said I had the brain and heart of a twenty-year-old. I could tell from the expressions on the doctors’ faces that they were disappointed and felt that in some way they’d failed.

Nobody really knows what happened to me. Each specialist has a theory that—predictably—focuses on a malady closely associated with his or her specialty. The neurologist thinks it was “syncope”—a sudden drop in blood pressure that causes one to faint. The endocrinologist thinks it was low blood sugar. I myself insist that it was dehydration and can muster some convincing arguments to support that diagnosis: food wrappers in an otherwise empty wastebasket that indicated I’d eaten prior to going to the meeting from which I was returning when I collapsed; also witnesses who came to my assistance when I fell and who say that I was never unconscious, plus witnesses who spoke with me five minutes before I fell and report that I was completely lucid at that point.

I’ve been here, there and everywhere, up mountains, down rivers, cross country to see if I’d faint again and I haven’t. Nor has low blood sugar caused me to keel over on any of these strenuous outings. On one adventure a friend of mine—you guessed it—slipped on a rock while crossing a stream and whacked his head! That leaves dehydration as the most probable explanation for my fall and I have no intention of attempting to recreate that condition in order to test my hypothesis.

As if to prove my point, less than a week after my accident a friend from Maine was preparing for a colonoscopy (which requires fasting) and passed out in his kitchen.

I wouldn’t recommend falling down and whacking your head on the sidewalk to any of you. I’m still dizzy when I get up in the morning and have trouble remembering some of the many new names I’ve learned since moving to El Salvador. These symptoms can last for up to three months but are nothing to be alarmed about—routine for anyone recovering from a head injury. Mine was “mild” on the mild-serious-severe scale. I didn’t even suffer a concussion so theoretically I’m better off than Troy Aikman. (10 concussions, God bless him.)

Pupusa Riot

Pupusas are El Salvador's national dish. Pupusas are thick corn tortillas stuffed with cheese, cheese and beans, cheese and loroco (the buds and flowers of a common Salvadoran plant), cheese and chiles, cheese and meat, etc.

You always eat pupusas with your hands. Which sounds like no big deal except that they’re served with curtido—cole slaw—and a tomato-sauce condiment. Sounds terrible but the combination of the three elements is not arbitrary—you know that once you’ve tasted the three together.

Here’s how you eat a pupusa; at least this is how they eat them here in Perquín. You break off a piece of the pupusa and you use that small piece to scoop up some of the curtido, on which you’ve squirted the tomato-sauce condiment. Grabbing the bite of food between your thumb and two fingers (your thumb controls the clump of curtido and your index and second fingers control the hunk of pupusa), you shove big bites into your mouth. It’s a two-or-three-napkin undertaking to eat two pupusas, which is the standard order, two for a buck. You want to make sure you wash your hands before you eat pupusas; your fingers spend a lot of time in your mouth as you eat one.

I live in a pupusería so I’ll be eating a lot of pupusas for the next eight months. Imelda, the woman from whom I’m renting a room, opened the first pupusería in Perquín some fifteen years ago. It’s still the best in town judging from the number of clients who show up every night—and I’m one of them.

Welcome to Perquín

So I’ve arrived in Perquín where I’ll be working for the next eight months as a Peace Corps volunteer, promoting tourism. And exactly how did I become an expert in tourism? you might well ask. As a result of my three years with Peace Corps in Perú, where I volunteered in a community with fifteen outdoor restaurants.

As I mentioned previously, Perquín is a quiet town of 5,000 people in the highlands of eastern El Savador. Here’s what Perquín looks like from “El Mirador,” the highest easily accessible point in the area. It’s quite a beautiful place and I feel fortunate to have been assigned to this region. From the looks of it we shouldn’t have much trouble convincing tourists to visit.

I arrived just in time for the Días Patronales, a yearly festival that celebrates the founding of the town. The festival included soccer tournaments, the crowning of a princess, lots of food, fireworks, a horse show and a greased-pig competition. Imelda, the mother of the family I’m living with, won the women’s division. Here she is stalking the pig she won.

Perquín has an interesting history. It was the principal battleground during the Revolution of the 1980s and 90s. The FMLN, the political party that was then a guerilla movement, is very strong here and people are proud and independent and very liberal; they haven’t forgotten the war, during which most of the poplation of this area was displaced to refugee camps in Honduras and much of the region’s infrastructure was destroyed. Morazán, my state, is the poorest state in the entire country, possibly as a result of the displacements and the subsequent rebuilding difficulties. 

 A mural in the town square depicting some of Perquín's history.

It hasn’t helped that most of the national governments since the war have come from the other party—the ARENA, the conservative party. The conservatives haven’t been enthusiastic about directing money to a leftist region of the country. But in the last elections a member of the FMLN was elected president so more money is coming our way, including the grant that will fund the work that I’ll be doing coordinating the efforts of the tourist sector here in Perquín.

 The town square during the recent festival.

Happy New Year

Harold Stassen couldn’t stop running for president, Garrison Keillor couldn’t make it without “A Prairie Home Companion,” Brett Favre wouldn’t give up football, and I didn’t last long outside Peace Corps.

On August 28 I came home from three years in Callanca, Peru, where I’d worked as a Peace Corps Small Business Development volunteer, and on January 10 I’ll be shipping out again, this time to El Salvador as a Peace Corps Response volunteer in Perquín, located in eastern El Salvador near the Honduran border.

Peace Corps Response is a program that features short-term assignments that address “emergency” needs. Originally the focus was on disaster relief and similar true emergencies. Nowadays Peace Corps Response also deploys volunteers on “urgent” assignments such as mine: I’ll be helping to better coordinate the efforts of hotels and restaurants in Perquín in order to attract more international visitors to the area.

Perquín is a small town (population 4,000) in the mountains of the “departamento” (state or province) of Morazán. Whereas Callanca was pure desert, Perquín’s is a beautiful green landscape: waterfalls, birds, mountain cabins and fresh, cool air.

My last few weeks in Maine were eventful if claustrophobic. At Christmas there was a giant ice storm that left 100,000 Mainers without power. Judith and I abandoned our apartment and spent Christmas Eve and Christmas Day in Portland, at the apartment of Judith’s niece, Felicia, who was away visiting family. We ate take-out Thai food for Christmas dinner. The temperature was below zero for a week straight during New Year's.

I’ll be glad to see San Salvador and some tropical weather. I’ll be in the capital for three or four days for a series of training sessions and then travel to Perquín on or about the 17th of January. Another Response volunteer, Curt, will be training at the same time. Curt is a geographer and environmental specialist from Colorado. He was a volunteer in Guatemala in the 1980s. Curt will be living in Metapán, in western El Salvador.

I’m excited about working with Peace Corps again. I hope I can get involved in half as much as I managed to wander into in Callanca. In Perquín I’ll have to focus a bit better than I did in Callanca since I’ll only be in Perquín for nine short months.

Here’s a link to a tourist magazine that we put together in Callanca during the last few months of my service. I hope we can do something like this and much more in Perquín:

http://issuu.com/irycalle/docs/callanca_finalf