an alarming hat

they just won their soccer game 5-1, look how overjoyed they are

the lempa river starts in honduras
it is dry season now

swimmin in the sun

ooh am i invited?? (no)

mauricio eats a raw plantain, for some reason

una senora in her hammock

this weekend i went to the lower lempa, which is where the lempa river empties into the pacific ocean. i went there to make a small film about a community there called la canoa that partners with a dc-based org called voices on the border. the town is about 2 hours from san salvador by car but i went by bus and it took 5 buses and 1 pickup truck and 4 hours. not too bad. i wore an orange baseball cap but i am not accustomed to it. every time i closed my eyes for a long period on the bus and opened them again, i was startled by the hat's rim above my eyes. GAH what the hell is-oh it's my hat. the girl sitting next to me was even roused from her texting stupor to laugh at me the third time it happened.

while waiting for the last bus, i found a stall that sold riguas and delightedly purchased some that had just come off the grill. riguas are sweet fried corn strips, they taste like fried cornbread and you eat them with a soft wet cheese. they were very hot. abruptly the bus showed up and i got on with the hot greasy riguas in one hand and my bus fare in the other. this left no hands free for holding on, which i needed to do as there were no seats. a young man offered me a seat, i said oh no, thank you. a minute later the bus stopped very suddenly and i fell very completely into his lap. er sorry, i guess i did want your seat.

i met up with the voices on the border staff and we walked through la canoa, the tiny community, and i did some filming. the lempa river is at the edge of la canoa, and as the photos show, it is very dry right now. but very warm! mm. we stayed overnight at a guest house in a nearby community. most of the communities in this area have an interesting story. the people used to live in morazan, which is 6 hours north (by bus). morazan is where most of the fighting in the civil war took place, so they were displaced from their homes and lived in refugee camps in honduras for almost ten years. as they neared ten years, the war was still going on, but they said eff this, lets go back to el salvador, except they settled in lempa, where the land was more fertile. many of these communities are only 20 years old, but they are very well organized and do a great job of working with foreign NGOs and governments to improve their quality of life. you can read more about them at the voices on the border website (above).

there was a "super fiesta" with "lasser disco" on saturday night on the basketball court to benefit two community members who have cancer. it was like a middle school dance, but with constant strobe light and someone selling cabbage. the proportion of dancers to watchers was the same as middle school (1:15). we danced with great fervor. even at night it was terribly hot, everyone was damp with sweat. the strobe light is tricky - while it is on, everything you do looks cool, but when it goes off, there's a big disappointment. i prefer no strobe light, because then you have to work hard all the time, and that's what fun is about. after about an hour of dancing, the entire town lost power. pitch black. kind of eerie to know that you are in a dense crowd of people but you can't see the hand in front of your face. a pregnant moment, i think you might say. unfortunately darkness means danger so the dance quickly dispersed.

the next day, the group i was with prepared to return to san salvador. two guys had come down in a car, so we would get a ride back. alberto had driven his beloved 1977 volkswagen beetle, which was bright red and was made in brazil and only had one working door. he chatted about how the brakes were not working last week and he stuck his hand in the engine a few times before 4 of us squeezed into the backseat. i'm sorry you have to read this, poppy - it is the nadir of vehicle safety. the window of the broken door was not openable. alberto and freddy sat up front, and spent much of the ride singing together in sometimes doubtful harmony. a wooden rosary hung from the rearview mirror. as we jalopied through wide green plains and passed the humps of volcanoes in the little-red-car-that-could, i felt like i was watching a trailer for a movie that i would dismiss as trite. we stopped to get gas and also got ice cream and at that moment it was the best ice cream in the world, although it was actually my least favorite ice cream chain here (too many weird ice crystals). but so good right then.