Green Mango

Just the other day, when trying to come up with some tasting notes for a wine that will be released soon, I was struggling with a taste/aroma that was hard to define in a white wine. An intense fruit character, very tropical, but not sweet, a little floral, and quite green - unusual and different from the more common peach / citrus / pear / white floral notes. Whatever it was seemed familiar, but just out of reach.

And then it hit me; green mango! When we were in El Salvador earlier this year, and though ill-advised were wandering through the shantytown market area of the center of the city, I saw a woman slicing up green fruit into bags. On close inspection, the fruit was a hard, green mango, which she peeled and pitted, then sliced like a potato or apple into hard, thin slices. I asked her if I could purchase a bag, and she added lime juice, powdered chillis, hot sauce, and pepper to the bag. The combination was cool, refreshing, crisper than an apple, and piquant from the spice. The underlying flavor of the mango was definitely floral and green in a positive way, tart, and pretty darned delicious! A terrific snack, and one I wish we could find here.

NPR Stories about El Salvador

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89431942

I have been hearing this series of 3 stories about immigration issues and El Salvador while on my way to work in the mornings. Quite interesting, and gives an interview with people going through these issues as we change our immigration policies here in the US, we don't think about how it affects people elsewhere whom have their families split up across the continents.

Habitat for Humanity, El Salvador - the Charlotte Model Community

So far, I have not outlined clearly just WHAT it was that took Kristin and I to El Salvador last month. I'll attempt to do that over a few day's time.

Kristin has been volunteering her time the past few years with Habitat for Humanity's overseas arm, known as 'Global Village,' taking her to Tanzania and India to build homes for families that don't have a decent place to live. When some of the people whom she had met on past trips started to plan a short, spring-break trip for early in 2008, I decided to go with her - my first HfH trip! As the planning fleshed out, we discovered that we were going to go to El Salvador, and that there would be 18 people on our team, from such diverse places as Manhattan (both Kansas, and NYC!) Washington D.C., Los Angeles, Calgary, Pennsylvania, Chico CA, Ann Arbor MI, and Ontario Canada.

As the date of departure drew nearer, we found out that we would be part of a 'Blitz-Build' with several other teams with members from around the U.S, Canada, and Spain. The total number of international volunteers was around 100, with about the same number of Salvadorean volunteers from several universities throughout the country, as well as 10-20 military volunteers. In addition, the homeowners are required to put a certain number of hours in every week, as 'sweat equity' in their homes - though since this was Holy Week, many of them were busy observing religious responsibilities within their churches - (particularly on Good Friday, the homeowners seemed scarce.) We were excited about the prospect of so much manpower, and anticipated seeing a lot of work accomplished over the week of workdays.

We were based in the Santa Ana department of the country, in the northwest along the Guatemala border. This is a beautiful, very active volcanic region with very large volcanic mountains, crater lakes, and rich agriculture. Much of the shade-grown coffee farming in the country is centered in this region, and several of El Salvador's largest National Parks are also located in the region, such as Volcanoes National Park. We stayed in a hotel in Santa Ana, a city of nearly 200,000 people, which was about 20 miles away from the jobsite, and were ferried to and from the worksite on some of the colorful busses that you can see pictured in one of my earlier posts.

The project itself was very interesting: where most Habitat builds focus on one building within a mixed neighborhood of other homes, this project is an ambitious build - a planned development with housing for 54 individual families in either single-family or duplex homes, complete with a community center, a community day-care center (to allow the mothers to leave their children safely while they sought work,) and clean, potable water, electricity, and waste water treatment. This community was named "Charlotte" after the Charlotte, North Carolina Habitat affiliate whom has been really active in building housing in El Salvador, contributing large numbers of teams and contributions to make this a reality. The Charlotte community is to serve as a model for further developments of a similar nature throughout each of the departments, or states, within El Salvador.

Some of the information that we were given in our briefing on the first evening; the housing deficit in El Salvador is about 600,000 homes - this is in a country of just 7 million people, meaning that nearly 20% of the citizens are living in substandard housing that is hazardous to health and safety. 11% of El Salvador's economy is dependent upon remittances from family members who are living and working within the United States, sending money home when they can.

Being such a geologically active country has also shaped this need for housing. With frequent powerful earthquakes (2001 brought two earthquakes of devastating power -7.7 on the Richter scale within one month, killing over 1100 people, and damaging 20% of the nation's housing,) volcanic eruptions which interrupt agriculture and destroy crops, and susceptibility to Caribbean hurricanes, El Salvador has been a difficult place for people to find the stability needed to bring their country to prosperity.

The turbulent political history of the country, particularly the civil war between 1979 and 1991, means that although people may have land that they live on and even farm, it can be difficult and expensive for them to legalize their ownership of that land; this is one area that Habitat is also helping to provide legal fees and expertise. This is another reason for the format of the Charlotte community - ordinarily Habitat requires that the family being helped can show clear title to the land before a home is built - this precludes a lot of Salvadoreans. By providing both land and homes, the Charlotte community solves these two problems at once.

Above, I attached several photos of the Charlotte Community, including an overview map and some photos of the work underway. There are TONS more photos on our flickr.com account - if you see cinder blocks or a dirty face in a photo, there is a good chance that the picture was from the Charlotte community!

(My statistics are just reported as I remember them told to me. There is a pretty good chance that I am at least somewhat inaccurate. If you have some corrections - please send them to my comments link! I don't understand very much about the subtleties of El Salvadorean history and politics even now, but want to learn more. To read more about El Salvador, check out the Wikipedia entry - it has a bunch of references as well.)

Lost in Translation

This is the warning sign near the pool at our hotel in San Salvador (Hotel Miramonte.) It is helpfully lettered in both Espanol and English for the convenience of their guests. We happened upon it as we were setting out for our first day as a group in El Salvador.

This sign provides a good lesson to anyone who has a need to make signs in a language other than the one that they were born to; don't let your sister's kid, who has had one year of foreign language in High School convince you that he can handle the translation part of the job, (particularly if the main object of the sign is NOT to amuse snarky groups of tourists who might happen upon it!)

While everyone was smirking and snapping photos of the sign, I had to ask aloud, "yeah, well just how good is YOUR Spanish?" That made us all laugh a bit. And consider that for the next ten days, we were going to be communicating as best as we could in the little snippets of Spanish that we COULD understand, and inventively cobbling together phrases and hand signs and pantomime where we had no clue! It is a really good experience to be the minority, the out of place, the foreigner sometimes, to give a sense of what it is like for those who are living and working among us here back at home.

This and more photos are online at our flickr.com account

The funky busses of El Salvador

While we were visiting, someone joked that "El Salvador is where old school busses go to die..."

It was funny, but it seems that perhaps they travel there to take on a new life!

Each bus is brightly and very individually painted and carefully maintained by the driver, and they seem to travel everywhere in the country. Apparently, the fare is as little as $2 US for a 2-hour trip across the country, and they seem to be heavily used.

Also, the rear of most of the busses, (what I would remember as the "Emergency Exit" from grade school,) is actually used as a valid and often used entrance and exit!

Here are a few of my favorite bus photos - note the shark fins on one of them!

We rode these busses to the worksite pretty much every day - as you can imagine, they were quite dusty and sweaty on the way back to the hotel at night!

(These and more photos are available at full-size, and in their full glory on my flickr account.)

Back from El Salvador

Well, we have returned from El Salvador. We actually came home about three days early - after being sick for a couple days, and dealing with what is NOT an easy country to travel and exist in, we were pretty much ready to spend a couple quiet days at home. We basically told no-one that we were back in town, and stayed at home to work on the house even more, (we had only spent 2 nights in our new house before we flew to El Salvador...)

I just now got around to loading our photos onto the computer - between KLC and I, there are around 380 photos, and that doesn't even include all the pics from the rest of our team! I will post links to our complete collection of photos on Flickr.com and snapfish.com if you have an hour or so to kill, it may be interesting! We tried to delete the duplicate / blurry photos, but some survived.

I will try to post a photo or two every day for the next couple weeks, with some sort of contextual information, so that it is more clear just what was going on in the pic. Stay tuned, and check back daily! There was so much to take in, and so much to still digest, that this will be a more clear way to approach things.

Comments are welcome!

From El Salvador

We have finished our build week, it was good and tough at the same time. My telephone lost power, otherwise I would have been able to post more pics from it while here... a big bummer, but I didn´t bring the charger. Kristin and I both got pretty sick, 38C fever for me and a day and a half off work, being miserable. Feeling okay now, we are heading to the beach with the rest of the team, most of them will fly home tomorrow. We are staying a few more days, and trying to hook up with a local guide to visit a coffee plantation and a few other interesting sites, maybe some Mayan ruins, etc...

Last night was very cool here, as the culmination of ´Semana Santa´or holy week, people decorated the streets with elaborate tableaus, made from sawdust, flowers, and sand. When Good Friday Mass finished at the Cathedral, a procession carrying a crucified Christ on a huge litter emerged into the streets, followed by several saints statues. They were all carried by 20 to 40 people, and there were thousands thronging the streets. They slowly proceeded through the streets, walking over the tableaus laid in their paths, destroying them as they went. The procession continued around the city until late in the night, and it seemed each church was doing it´s own procession, in its own route very interesting! One group came right below our hotel, and we watched them from the rooftop as they slowly moved in their candlelit procession.

Will be home soon, hopefully we will make some more good memories by then.