On Friday mornings, we have our public health class. Today we talked about culture and how it affects the health of a population. Our teacher can speak English but she is not super at it so we had a translator today. The translator gave us these devices with earphones so that he was able to translate for us while our teacher was talking. I thought it would be a great idea but it sucked. I was hearing the teacher speak Spanish at the same time as hearing the guy through the crackle-ly earphone. Plus the earphone kept falling out. AAAAnyways…..the overall of the class was that so much of the population here follows old natural medicine. In most of the rural areas, there are not doctors so people will either completely ignore their illnesses and problems or they will seek care from a herbal therapist or “witch” doctor. A lot of their believes are based on old wives-tales that have not been straightened out or the belief that God wanted them to get sick. It was somewhat interesting but it was difficult to understand because of all the weird translating.


Our bus picked us up at the UCA and we drove to San Ramon for lunch. We ate at this small “comedor”; here it means café or eatery. I had chicken, vegetables, rice and “casamiento” which was a mix of rice and beans. We drank cantaloupe juice; it was so delicious, I felt like I was drinking a cantaloupe. The world cup game was on; Spain was playing Chile so pretty much everyone was cheering for Chile.

We went to this area because it is where Anita is a social worker. She works in this community in the school and she helps with this soy project. The head of the soy project, who has lived here for 17 years working for some missionary, spoke to us about it. They make soy milk in that kitchen and families can receive a cup per person per day for only 6 dollars a month. They also sell soy wheat for an affordable price. The project promotes using soy for its nutrition value because it’s high in protein and other nutrients. Next, we visited Anita’s school. We saw all the little kids; they were so cute. One of Anita’s bosses spoke about their health clinic and some other things about public health. We drank some delicious coffee and this cheese bread made out of their soy wheat. The bread was amazing; it tasted a lot like corn bread. 

Since their community is at the base of the volcano, they are very worried about landslides right now because of the rainy season. Pretty much everyone I talked to there mentioned the possibility of a landslide soon and how it would completely destroy the area like it did in 1990 or something.

We visited the homes of two families from the school. We spoke to the mothers about their lives, jobs and economical situations. Both of them expressed how important their children were in all of their decisions. They both spoke about how they work hard every day so that their children can live a better life.

Before we left we picked up six homemade pizzas from the café where we ate lunch. We ate the pizzas for dinner and they were good. The crust was very good and it was made from the soy product. After dinner we went bowling! The bowling alley looked just like any American bowling place. We had a great time together and we even ordered a pitcher of beer haha. When two of the girls ordered it, the woman showed them like a clear pitcher that they would fill with tap beer. When the waiter person brought us the beer it was just a metal bucket with 5 bottled beers haha. The entire place was blasting American music so that was fun. We then returned to the Casas to pack for our Saturday overnight trip to the Finca (farm like place).

Saturday:

We woke up bright and early to leave for the Finca. The drive there was pretty because we were driving in between bright green mountains. We arrived at this little town and then switched to a truck. We all put our bags in the driver part and stood in the back of the pickup part holding onto bars. It was scary because he was going fast. Anita told us to just wait until we got to the unpaved roads haha. The unpaved roads were literally red clay with huge rocks; the ride was so bumpy and we just went up and down huge hills the whole time. We stopped off at this waterfall area; it was very beautiful. The two boys started to climb the rocks of one part and disappeared. We waited and waited for them because we were trying to leave. The driver told us that they could not hear us yelling because there was another huge waterfall about 15 meters up. So then, a group of kids climbed through the woods to that upper area to find them. I did not go because it was really steep and full of bugs. After seeing what they looked like when they got back down I was really happy that I didn’t go.


We drove further up the mountain and arrived at the Finca. The view was excellent and I got a lot of cool pictures. Literally as soon as we walked into the kitchen to eat lunch it started pouring. The clouds creeped over everything and we could only see like 10 feet in front of us. Because we were so high up we were literally inside the cloud. It continued to rain all day and through the night. The leaders told us that it was a huge tropical storm. We could not go outside to do anything because it was raining so hard. It did not stop raining for over 20 hours!

We all stayed inside the kitchen/dining area all day. We played card games for, no joke, 7 hours. After dinner, we made Salvadoran-style smores over the stove. We used these local cookies that have chocolate on the bottom so that was their version of graham crackers and chocolate. We roasted regular marshmallows to put in between the cookies. They were delicious but not as good as the ones at home. We played a few more card games then went to our cabin. I slept with six other girls in one cabin and it was a nice cabin. We each had our own bed and there was a bathroom with running water and a shower. The only problem was the bugs. I thought there were a lot of bugs at our house here but man was I wrong! There were spiders, beetles and mosquitoes EVERYWHERE. No joke. I could barely sleep. The spiders were larger than a golf balls and the other cabin found a scorpion in their bathroom. When I pulled back my sheets, there was even a spider in my bed!

We had to wake up at 7 am for breakfast then we got back on our pick up truck to go back down the mountain. It started to rain just as we arrived to meet our van. When we got back to the Casas my roommate and I took a nap until noon because we all sleep like shit at the farm.

Our cabin group and the clouds coming in!