San Salvador, El Salvador.

Hello all, sorry it has taken awhile to post on this blog but here goes.

It´s Wednesday, Sept. 22 and I´ve been here for about 2 weeks and a lot has happened in these past two weeks.

I´m living in San Luis, a nice, secure, residencial area in the nice part of San Salvador, El Salvador. There are about 2.2 million people living in the city with an extreme poverty rate of 20%. It´s strange to live in such a "nice" part of town, which really isn´t nice at all in comparison to western society.

I love my host family. The two parents are lawyers with a 1 year old daughter, Allison, and a 4 year old son, Joshua. The kids love Nickilodeon and Disney, and I´ve found that I can´t escape Dora the Explorer no matter where I go.
The family doesn´t speak any English, and it´s often frustrating when we are talking and discussing our different worlds. I love the food here, and my host mom is a great cook, as I´ve found most Salvadorean women are.
I have a nice bedroom to myself, a bathroom and a little porch, which is nice to sit out on at night. I live about 10 minutes (walk) from a nice shopping center with a bank/atm, grocery store, internet cafès, and other stores.

I´m about a 30 minute walk to my school.

Monday through Friday, 8am to 12pm, is my Spanish class. It´s just me and another girl, from Michigan, in the intermediate class. Everything is taught in Spanish and so far we have been reading, analyzing, watching videos and just doing differnet excercises, oh and a lot of conversation.

Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays, I teach English from 5pm - 7pm. There are five other English teacher volunteers like me, and I´ve found myself hanging out with them, mostly. There is a girl from Sweden, 19, and two Canadians, one 20 one 60, an art teacher from Kansas, in her 20s and then a 23 year old New Yorker. We spend a lot of time together prepping classes, or just hanging out. There are 6 different levels of classes offered to Adult Salvadoreans, from Basic A and B, Intermediate A and B, Advanced and Conversational. I´m teaching Advanced, and am surprised at how much my students already know a lot of Enlgish.

It´s really rewarding because all of the students want to be there, and everyone is really motivated and excited to learn. Teaching a foreign language is harder than it seems, even if it doesn´t seem so foreign to me. But all in all I love my classes and students.

Apart from studying and teaching, I don´t have much time, except for the weekends. The first weekend, the other volunteers and I went out to the National Park: El Imposible. A beautiful Rainforest preserve in the west with heavy vegetation and many rivers and waterfalls. We spent two days there and it was beautiful, but unfortunately, I caught the cold and have been sick the last couple of days.

I love the city of San Salvador, and the countryside too. I´m learning a lot and at times, my brain is on overload but I am enjoying every minute.