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