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:
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