Sunday

Hello all,

I worked Thursday and Friday and felt exhausted yesterday. Today I feel better, and was quite social, going to Quaker Meeting, brunch, and will be going to dinner with some friends tonight. Tomorrow I plan to stay home and WRITE WRITE WRITE about my experience, and finally type up the Alicia de Garcia interview! I learned so much, and I don't want it to get pushed aside, so to speak, by other things that are happening in my life here (like work, Pilates teacher training, etc.).

It feels strange to be back ... I miss the community that I became a part of in El Salvador. I don't really have that here. Here my job is much more isolated ... I am a free agent, in a way ... I come into a community center or a school, I teach ESOL class, and I leave. Where I work here, anyway, I have not really been treated as a part of the community, and I have not felt very welcomed.

Where I worked in El Salvador I felt incredibly welcomed and like the people felt that I could be very useful to them, and that I was interesting to them. They also loved to tell me about their country and their work and their experiences, as well as wanting to learn about me. There are members of Alicia de Garcia's family working in both the Comadres office and the Cooperative run by disabled veterans. It really felt like a family, and literally, in part, WAS a family. Then again, I found that sense of inclusiveness and community to be true of many people I met in El Salvador - that people I met on the bus, in my travels around the country, in the neighborhood where I stayed, etc. were very open and more often than not initiated conversations with me and enjoyed talking very much. Often people I did not know invited me to their homes, and if I accepted, fed me (very well) and entertained me for hours! Many different people invited me to stay with them when I return.

Well, here also I live alone, so it is a different feeling than being surrounded by people all the time, as I was in El Salvador. But people in general are different there than here ... I received so many warm smiles on the streets and markets of El Salvador, and here (so typical of New York City - I felt this way when I returned from Vermont as well) it is very hard to get anyone to smile back. Ah, well!

XO
M