Another day of celebrations in La Palma! Today was the celebration of the signing of the peace papers during their civil war. It started in La Palma, hence the name and nicknames calling it the city of peace and such.

Anyway, a parade went through town this morning. The two older schools from La Palma marched. And then a whole bunch from all over, too. As a band geek myself, not even gonna try to deny that one, I like watching these kinds of parades and seeing the differences. There isn't the same kind of budget to have these bands sounding or looking like any similar to where I'm from. As a matter of fact, most of the younger schools and some of the older ones don't even use any instruments besides percussion. Another difference is their equivalent to color guard. There tend to be a group of girls with baton in each group. Then the actual band playing, and sometimes some people carrying country flags. Also, there are groups of students dressed in the "typical" clothing. Girls wear the dresses with the super long flowy skirts, and guys dress like farmers. That's about what the average school does. Some schools, on the other hand, go a little out of the ordinary and make it fun. For instance, having a dancing lion mascot.

The whole parade was a bunch of fun. Teresa, Mom, and I stood outside Lilian's for most of it. The street was supposed to be blocked off for the parade, but somehow a bus got through! It was stuck with no where to go. Eventually, after the driver had gotten out and talked to several officials and people, he started to drive on forward. The girls at the front of the parade were looking around and trying to figure out what to do if he kept going. Luckily, they didn't have to and the bus did procede to put it in reverse and go back down the hill eventually. A couple times we noticed some official looking people and cameras videoing parts, and we're kinda excited to see if we show up on one of the new El Salvador tourism videos! ;)

The parade route led all the bands to the soccer field, where they then competed. We went to the field for a while, but couldn't stay the whole time. It seemed like it might go on forever, and it was getting really hot and sunny out. Even though we didn't stay long, I have a sunburn. My neck, face, and forearms are bright pink. I've got one of those hard outlined farmers' tans from the t-shirt I was wearing. And the little lines on the top of my feet from my flip flops XD. But hey, the bright side? Maybe now I'll finally get the golden tan everyone expects you to have from living in Central America. Right, Megan? ;)

Despite the sunburn, it's been a great day. As always, thank you to everyone for the prayers. Please continue! Here's the SPECIAL REQUEST mentioned in the title. There is a medical mission trip happening here next March. We really need more medical personnel; doctors, nurses, etc. If anyone is interested, or knows of anyone who might be, let me know! More to be posted soon!
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

Yikes... I went almost three weeks without posting. I'm sorry to everyone who mentioned it to me and asked me to post waaaaayyyyy before this. I guess it's because last time I posted twice in one day! There is so much more to write about! I really don't know where to start. In my past posts I talked about how much it has rained and the "torrential downpourage". Up until last week, it had rained literally every day since we moved here. But, we have now been over a week rain-free! It's moved into October, which is apparently windy season. It's so windy, you can hear the buildings practically shaking. Sometimes I wake up in the morning to the wind so loud it sounds similar to the crazy loud rain we were finally getting used to. The locals think that it is just freezing when the wind blows like that. We think it feels pretty great. Since there's been no rain, there have hardly been any clouds. Last night when we were walking home from Reina's, we looked up and just stopped in awe. There are no words to describe how breathtakingly beautiful the stars were. We had seen a few from here before, but it's almost always cloudy. Last night was perfectly clear. We saw the Milky Way, a planet, and a kajillion stars. As cliche as it sounds, it's pretty amazing to think that I can see the same stars here that you all are seeing back home. :)


When we first arrived here, the Sunday morning church services were set up so that there was one big class combined for adults and kids, then a break, and then worship services for everyone as well. This meant that the kids weren't receiving any children's Bible class or anything that we're used to having in America. So Mom and I have been doing a children's class every Sunday morning during the first class. And of course, where do we start but with Genesis? So, we started with the days of creation.


Mom drew a picture for each of the seven days on a paper plate, and told them the story. Then we picked these 7 volunteers to line up in the right order with them. We put them in order the first time. The second time, we mixed them up in crazy orders, and let the kids figure out where they went. When all that was over, we had an art project. We had little coloring pages with birds on them and a verse about it from Genesis. They could color them, and when they were done I would come around and put glue dots on them and give them the bird's "feathers". They were just some cut up pieces of streamers, but the projects ended up looking great, and the kid's were so excited. They aren't used to doing things like that. In the schools, kid's don't get their own text books to work from; the schools can't afford that. The teacher has one, and they copy it onto the board and the kids copy it into their notebooks. That's almost all they do! They don't learn how to color, or cut, or make art projects.


The next week's class was a lot of fun for me. We were going over Adam and Eve and eating the forbidden fruit and whatnot. At the beginning of the class, Mom brought in a bowl of little cookies. She made sure to make it clear that no one was allowed to eat them, or even touch them. The kids were very serious about it. They said the understood, nodded, and looked super serious. At that point, Mom faked like she had forgotten something at home and had to go back over to the house. So she left, and I was in charge of the class. I walked over and picked up the cookie bowl. I looked around, and (in Spanish) asked, "Want a cookie?" The kids looked shocked at first. I said we had tons. Come on, just take one.. And every kid in the class gave in and took a cookie except two; Nathan, and a little girl named Gabby. When Mom came back into the class, most of them were still eating theirs. Some gasped when they saw her, some tried to hide the cookies or shove them into their mouths quickly. She acted like she was so sad that they'd taken her cookies, and what else did they do but blame me? "But Erin said!" "She gave them to us!" Stuff like that. We just moved on to the story. When it got to the part about blaming the serpent and everything, you could literally see a light come on in some of those kids' eyes. One of them looked at me, smiled, and shook her finger at me. Watching them really get the lesson was great. We did another craft and made little serpents with a verse on them.