Happy (late) Thanksgiving! And happy Black Friday!
Being here makes me a little more aware of all the things we really do have to be thankful for.
For real. Electricity? Hot water? Or even running water, period, however sporadic it may seem to be on and off. And that's just the material stuff. But, regardless of how cliche it sounds, family and friends are the most important. Seriously, what would we do without them?? :)

I don't have a whole lot to post about, hence the fact that it's been a really long time since my last post. Well, that and the fact that I've been pretty crammed with school work lately... But, I have been having a lot of people ask how we celebrate Thanksgiving here, so here you go!

El Salvador doesn't celebrate it. At all. It's just a normal November Thursday to people here. That answers that, right? Okay, now to what most people actually asked me about.

Food.

No, we don't have turkey here. We had chicken. There are no pumpkins to be found in the entire country. Which was really disappointing to Nathan, who loves his pumpkin pie on Thanksgiving. We did, though, have broccoli casserole, green bean casserole, hand-mashed potatoes, and rolls. All of which was completely homemade, and tasted delicious. I also helped Mom make cinnamon rolls Wednesday night, which was a ton of fun. Plus, they were amazing. Like, super amazing.

If you don't follow me on Facebook, then you also probably don't know that we took a mini-vacation to celebrate Dad's birthday in San Salvador last weekend! After the really long week and stress I posted about last time, it was an amazing time to get away and relax. We sat out by the pool, had great food, saw the new Harry Potter movie (which was great, bee-tee-dub.), and Mom and I even got to listen to live jazz music Thursday night. We sat out under the palm trees with hot tea and just chilled for a while, and then we all watched a movie in the room, and just had a great time all together.

More to be posted soon!

Su amiga,

Erin

PS: Blogspot has made some changes, so my followers have been changed! :O Now you can follow through Google Friend Connect, over on the side, though! :)

So, I've spent part of the past couple days learning a little about HTML codes. Needless to say, I felt the urge to give my blog a makeover :)
Tonight was our weekly English singing service. I love when we get to praise God in our own language. I mean, it's pretty cool singing in Spanish with the people here, and it's really powerful. Even when we can't totally understand each other, we're both worshipping. But, for me, Tuesday nights are amazing.
After it was over, we were about to play a game with Teresa, but we got a phone call from Jose. Apparently some time yesterday a big truck broke down in the middle of the city. It was a semi-ish truck, and it was completely full of oranges. I have never in my life seen as much fruit at one time as I saw tonight. It still hadn't been fixed, and since the oranges wouldn't last long enough to get wherever they were taking them, they were selling huge bags of 25 oranges for a dollar. So, we walked up the street and bought a bunch of oranges! How neat is that? It's a real truck load sale. Only here, right? It was a pretty fun adventure anyway. Not much else worth mentioning tonight, More to be posted later!
Su amiga,
Erin <3

Wow! It has been so long since I've posted, and so much has happened! Over 3 weeks is way too much time. I apologize to all the people who complained to me about not posting.

I have had a crazy awesome past week! We had to go to San Salvador to renew our visas at the immigration office. That's where we started out Tuesday when we took the express bus down the mountain. That was a mistake we do not plan on making again. Can you say, car sick? Blech. But we got to the immigration office with Carmen, the woman we stayed with, and Pedro, our driver. They kept our passports there and said to come back on Thursday. So from there, we decided we needed lunch. And since we were in San Sal, we wanted American lunch. Burger King was amazing. :D Afterwards we walked around through the mall, Metro Centro, and did some shopping. That night when we got back to Carmen's house, she made us some pretty great chicken and potatoes. Nathan also had a fun time playing futbol with the little boy across the street, Jonathan.


Wednesday was a super fun day of all touristy stuff we wouldn't normally get to do. We got up that morning and headed to the zoo!




We had a blast. It was a pretty nice zoo, actually. When we finished there, we ate lunch at Pizza Hut! Salad bar and all.

We went to a museum afterwards. It was the national museum, even though we had been planning on going to the museum of arts or something. But it was kind of interesting. Nathan liked the stuff about jaguars:



Thursday turned out to be amazing as well! I've decided that Pizza Huts in America should take a lesson from the ones here. Salvadoreno Pizza Huts serve breakfast! And it is pretty yummy, let me tell you. That's where we ate that morning and met up with Joel. They surprised us by taking us to the beach afterwards! It was so beautiful. Some of the group that came this past March got to go and ride horses there. Unfortunately for us, the storms caused too much debree and junk to wash up and now the beach isn't flat enough for them, so they weren't there anymore. But we still had a great time going up and down the pier, seeing all the nasty dead fish, the gorgeous ocean, the boats and fisherman, everything. It was a ton of fun. There was a cute little popsicle stand, and we just had to stop there. They had all sorts of flavors; spicy ones, fruity ones, chocolatey ones, etc. I was feeling super adventurous, and had officially the weirdest thing I have ever tasted in my entire life. An avocado ice cream bar.

I only had a little, and then Joel took it. But I was glad I'd tried something new. He took us to a different part of the beach, then, where we could actually go up to the water.

And then we went to one more and had some delicious sea food with a great view. It had a little pool down on the beach with a geyser thing that blew when a wave it. Nathan wanted to swim so bad, but we didn't have time. He did, however, get to walk down around it with Joel.

When we drove back to the city, we had to go to the immigration offices again, praying they were done with our passports and that we could take them and go home. They were! :) Joel came back and stayed the night here in La Palma. The guys played a ton of Halo last night.

Today, we had a great time again! I went with Teresa, Joel, and Nathan, and we met up with Cristian at the park. There was a big festival going on with dancing and stuff to celebrate the anniversary of the start of the signing of the peace papers that ended the civil war here. We got some lunch, and then basically went exploring. There's one store that we were wanting to go to, but it didn't open till later, so we walked around town. We went out on this edge and checked out a gorgeous view of the mountains. (WLH!) There was another pretty hill we walked up, and it had an amazing view as well. It was crazy, unreasonably windy. Apparently it always is in October. It made for some really cool pictures! They're on Teresa's camera and not mine. She's going to be putting them on facebook, though. Well it has (obviously) been a pretty long week, and I'm ready to go chill and watch some Hulu. Thanks always for the prayers!
More to be posted soon!
su amiga,
Erin

I know, I know. It's been over a week this time. Sorry. This blog is going to be all about last Wednesday, September 15th. Here, this is like the equivalent of July 4th. Except, they make a much bigger deal out of it. For the past few weeks, it has been kind of annoying to hear the school band practicing their drums right outside our windows all afternoon. But Wednesday, they got to play for everyone in the parade! There is a big parade, and every school walks in it. Most schools let every student march in it, too, whether they're playing instruments:

Or maybe dancing in the traditional style dresses:

Or maybe just walking along with your school, whether in "traditional" clothing, or uniforms:


Our school was one of the very first that we saw come by. Here are several pics of them coming by:


After the parade was over, nearly the whole town and then some gathers at the park. There is a big basketball court in the middle (which we often see being used not for basketball but for soccer...) which they kept cleared out as a stage. Otherwise, the whole place was packed. Here's an idea of how many people there were:

There was a speech and prayer and stuff at the beginning. After that, though, the music started back up and dancing began! There were dances in the long, flowy, traditional dresses where the girls twirl their skirts out so far, and it's really cool to watch. I got a picture with one of the girls in her amazing dress :)

I also got a picture of me having food from a street vendor! There are almost always some kind of vendors in the park. But often, we can't trust the food from them, not knowing how it's cooked and washed and stuff. This time, though, we watched the woman pull these fries out of the hot oil and pour the normal stuff on them. The normal stuff here? Ketchup, mayonnaise, and parmesan. I was adventurous and had all three toppings. Nathan passed on the mayonnaise, and I'm pretty sure Teresa just had ketchup. But they turned out to be pretty good! Even if I couldn't finish all of mine and ended up passing the rest to a little boy from the school ;)

We had a great time at the park with all the festivities. It's one independence day I won't forget, anyway!
More to be posted later!
su amiga,
Erin

So the torrential downpourage has greatly declined. It doesn't rain as hard, as often, or as loud. Monday night, though, it was raining before church. When I was sitting behind Mom, little Selena came up and sat beside her. Her hair was dripping... she was soaked and shivering, but she still walked to church. She was shaking after a while, and I loaned her my sweatshirt to wrap up in. After church, Mom asked her if she had a jacket at home at all, and she said no. We decided that we were going to change that, so Tuesday morning we went shopping and bought an adorable, warm, black coat for her. And that afternoon, we went to her house to give it to her. Their house was four metal walls and a tin roof, with one lightbulb in the middle that was all the electricity there was. When we gave her the bag, she smiled soooo big, it was adorable! Then it was Jose's turn to talk to her mom for a little while. He asked about whether Selena was liking her school and stuff, and Selena was so excited to tell him all about how great it was. She even showed me all of her school books, and "taught me how to read", which I thought was pretty adorable. And once Jose, Mom, and Selena's mother got onto more boring subjects, Selena wanted to show me their dogs. They live in an area with a couple other families and there were several dogs roaming around. One of them was making a lot of noise out in this little shack, so we went to check on it first. She took my hand and dragged me all around showing me the animals, and telling me how there was one that was all white, and she really wanted to find it to show me, but she didn't know where it was. So she showed me her favorite, or at least it was my favorite. This litlle puppy was not very old at all, and it was so tiny! It's name was Canella, which is Spanish for cinnamon. Pretty cute. :D
Dad went back to Nueva Concepcion today to check up with the doctor for his leg, and he says he's happy with how it's going, as long as Dad keeps up with the medicine and keeping his leg elevated. When he came back, he brought an *amazing* surprise for dinner... legitmate, non goat-cheesy, with real pepporoni and crust, PIZZA. We were thrilled.
On the not so thrilling side, we're without running water tonight, again. They have been working on the tank for a couple days now, and seeing what the inside made me cringe to realize what we have been showering in. But while it has been being fixed, we haven't been able to use any water. It was back for a while this afternoon, just for a little while, and then it stopped again. They said that he should have the filter thing tomorrow so that we can have water again, and hopefully without gobs of dirt in it. I'm hoping all of the power outages are lessening, too. Tuesday night we had Teresa, Jose, and Marlon over for some English praise songs because we had been misisng it. The power flickered a couple times, and then went out. Which was totally ok, during that. It was actually a kind of cool effect. But once the service was over, we wanted the electricity back... But, with nothing else to do, we lit a couple candles and started playing a card game. It was about halfway through the game that we heard the electric water tank thing (don't you love my technical terms?) outside start sputtering and kick on. We almost didn't even notice. Till someone pointed out that it takes electricity for that to work. We reached over and flicked the lights, and they came on. Who knows how long we had had access to power and not used it? But we had a good time with the game anyway, and I'm pretty sure Nathan beat all of us. It's been a long couple days, and we're all pretty exaughsted. Everyone else has already headed back to their rooms right now, actually. I guess it would probably be a good idea for me to do the same. All my friends back home who started school this week, hope it's going alright :)
More to be posted soon!
su amiga,
Ruth Erin

Don't get me wrong, I love pupusas. And Kolashanpan. And Reina's tamales? I can't put into words. But after a while, even the most random stuff that we don't realize is amazing is what we start to miss. Dr. Pepper is pretty high up there. And everyday seasonings/cooking supplies, cake that doesn't taste like chocolate scrambled eggs with sugar sprinkles, and cheese burgers. Well, we got to fix one of those this week! Today was, totally unexpectedly and somewhat bittersweetly, amazing. We drove a couple hours away to a big city called Apopa, and there was a BURGER KING. Um... yeah, I was nervously giggling like crazy when I was looking at that cheeseburger on the table. With real fries? And coke that wasn't in a glass bottle or dirty can? (No, there was sadly no Dr. Pepper lol.) But maybe I should explain why were even out of town to begin with... Tuesday morning Dad left with Jose to do a bunch of home visits. We stayed home and did some work, did some shopping later, and not much else during the day. That night, he and Mom had to go to the clinic because there was some problem with his leg. When they came home, all that the clinic in La Palma had said was that he needed to keep it elevated and keep off of it for a while. Wednesday afternoon I got to hang out downstairs with Teresa and watch a "life changing" movie :). And when I came back upstairs, guess who got another taste of Webb City? The school percussion group was out practicing. From our house in Webb, we were close enough to the high school that I could always hear the band practicing out on the field. Granted, this was not even close to the same quality as Webb City was. I was kind of missing marching band right then, actually lol.

During dinner, though, the nurse from the clinic came to check up on Dad's leg. We almost had to leave for Nueve Concepcion or somewhere right then, but we decided that it would be too dark and not safe for us to be out that late. So this morning, we all got up and packed bags just in case we had to go on to the San Salvador overnight. Mom and Dad went down the street to the local clinic one more time, and they said he needed to go on somewhere. So we loaded up and headed to Nueva Concepcion, which is a city about an hour away from La Palma. It has a hospital, but it was kind of sad to see. The guards (yes, guards outside the hospital's tall, iron gate) only let one person even go in with him. But after the rest of us waited under a tree outside, they came out, with some semi good news. No, we would not have to go on to spend the night in San Salvador. It wasn't very bad right now, as long as he does what they tell him to. Basically, the high altitude had somehow made his red blood cells swell and clot in his leg. I don't understand all of it, but it's better explained on his blog if you want to click the link on the side. He had to get a few different medicines, and he has to keep his leg elevated and resting for the next couple weeks. One of the medicines wasn't available in that hospital, though, so we had to drive to Apopa to a better pharmacy. Sound familiar? Apopa has a Burger King!


I was so stoked... Just look at that :D Haha, I was so happy. Estoy muy contento. (I was very content/happy/satisfied, in English lol) But everything turned out alright. Anyway... A shout out to say Happy Birthday, Grandma! :) I'm pretty tired from a long day. We were so tired there wasn't even a movie night tonight! Haha, I'm going to bed, so...
More to be posted later!
su amiga,
Ruth Erin

I haven't posted in a while, I've got a lot of pictures to put into this entry! I think my last post was about Wednesday. Thursday was not a good day for me; I was sick and stuck at home all day. We had been planning on going with the school on a field trip Friday. They were going to be driving to Santa Ana, an area near the coast, and visiting a national agriculture institute of some sort, and then going to a big water park. It had a wave pool like White Water, and a natural hot tub type area heated by volcanoes! How awesome does that sound? The park had crazy huge and crazy scary slides, too. Or at least the picture made it look like it, and the stories from Teresa and Jose. We didn't get to go because I was still sick Thursday night. :P
One thing that I'm finding that I really miss? Quiet. It's always noisy here. Every afternoon is rain, and depending on the day that can be really loud. We've been watching movies together every night since we don't go out after dark, and Teresa, the other American as she calls us ;), has been coming up to watch them with us several times. One night it got to the point where it was raining so hard that we had the TV at maximum volume and still had to pull it away from the wall and closer to the seats to even hear it over the rain. That was the same night that San Ignacio, another city next to La Palma, was having its huge party. Until after 2 in the morning, the bass lines and dj's voice was echoing throughout the house. It's kind of difficult to sleep when your bed is vibrating in rhythm to a Spanish song... My headphones have become good friends the past couple nights.
A favorite place of ours to eat lunch lately has been Eric's Pizzeria. They have good pizza, but here is a picture of my "quesadilla". It's more like a burrito, but it was yummy! And Mom and Dad sitting across the table from me :)
I've posted the gorgeous views out of our window before. I've never posted the other things on the window, so here is the lizard on the glass last night :)
We watched it eat two moths right in front of us, and it made me slightly less freaked out by the fact that there were several in our house. Less creepy bugs for 2 lizards? Fine trade by me.
Blanca and her daughter Emily came by yesterday, here's a picture of them together in our kitchen.

We also got to check out our backyard outside the compound area, and it's literally a jungle! I don't have the pictures on this laptop, but it is gorgeous. Reina came to pick banana leaves to wrap her tamales in. She's bringing some for us tomorrow night. It was crazy to watch her. She was wearing a skirt, and she was barefoot, and she just went all around with the machete and hacked down the leaves. Then she would pull the sides off of the middle part, and her daughter Amanda would roll them up. There are pictures on Mom's facebook, and I may put up a link to them on mine. Our view is so amazing- we have a jungle, and past the jungle is a river, and past the river is mountains. And more mountains. And more mountains.
Today, it was raining really hard at one point. I glanced out the window, and it was totally white. We were in a cloud! Living in the mountains is beautiful :) I wish I had the pictures right now to put up here, but I'll try to get them on facebook later. Teresa just left from another one of our movie nights, and we're all pretty tired. So,
More to be posted later!
Su amiga,
Ruth Erin

So, yesterday was our first full day in El Salvador as a family- wow!
I'm not sure where to start... I guess I can actually start from Wednesday when we left. Saying all of our goodbyes over the past month has been really tough. Wednesday at the airport was no different. I'm going to miss everyone a lot. The flight itself went well, and all of our stuff made it, too. This picture is to prove to Jenna that I followed through on my promise to take Jo Jo on the flight :). We stayed at a hotel near San Salvador when we got there. It was beautiful; the weather was great, there was a pool and palm trees, and we had all sorts of great fresh food for breakfast. But yesterday was the fun part.
Ruth and Angelino picked us up in a van from the hotel and we headed to the beach! It was pretty, and we saw a lot of neat things on the shore- lots of shells, and I even found a starfish. When we left the beach we went for lunch at a place where the seafood we had could easily have been swimming shortly before... here it is:
When we drove through San Sal after lunch, we saw something really funny. A huge tanker truck thing, like the ones that carry oil, was full of molasses. It had apparently leaked and was spilled all over the streets, several inches thick for about a mile! Cars were sliding in it and sticking, and other cars would spray it back onto the ones behind them.
The prettiest part of the day, I thought, was the ride from San Sal to La Palma. The mountains are gorgeous, and we were in such a high elevation that we drove through the clouds! And now that we're are up in the mountains, it's actually pretty cool. From what I'm seeing on facebook, Missouri is pretty hot and humid right now, so this weather is really nice :).
Today we got to see the place we will be living. What is going to be a children's home/ orphanage thing isn't open yet, and we're living in that until it is. It's actually pretty nice, except for our welcoming visitors today: Several big spiders and a couple lizards... :P
We shopped around for our furniture for a little while, and got to visit this really cute little coffee shop with pastries and stuff. Right now we are back relaxing at the hotel we're staying at until our place is ready. Mom took Nathan down to the pool, and Dad and I are sitting outside listening to all the parrots talk, :)
If you noticed by the title, I am going by my middle name, Erin, while we are here. In Spanish, Ruth is just Rut, and I like the way Erin sounds in Spanish better. It's not uncommon here, though, to randomly switch which name you go by; some people use a couple different ones, even.
More to be posted later!
su amiga,
Ruth Erin