planet earth

as some of you have heard, hurricane ida passed through el salvador this weekend. right now the death toll is around 130, mostly due to flooding and mudslides. rescue crews can't reach some towns because of damage to roads and bridges. to read more go here. the president has declared a national state of emergency. although more than 60 people were killed in san salvador alone, i haven't seen any kind of crisis mode within the city. the low, vulnerable part of the city is pretty far from me. yeah, it poured on saturday, and friday, and thursday, but i haven't seen any major damage. it's weird to be only reading about this online and seeing pictures when it happened so close. the clinic is fine - it didn't even rain there on saturday.

to put it in context of el salvador hurricane history, in 1998, hurricane mitch killed more than 10,000 people here. earthquakes have also been equally fatal, killing a little more than a thousand people in 2001. since i've been here i've felt a few little earthquakes - people say "está temblando," it's shaking. the first earthquake i felt was at 11 pm and i was home alone. suddenly everything in the room starting shaking. er-should i get under a doorway? maybe a table? should i unplug my computer? once i decided to just stand up the earthquake had stopped. it is unnerving though, because you don't know when it will stop. when i've felt earthquakes in public, people kind of freeze and look at each other seriously until it passes. even though people here are more used to little earthquakes than i am, they also know the serious danger which any earthquake could bring.

yesterday i went up to one of san salvador's volcanoes with my friend. it is called el boqueron, which translates mysteriously to "anchovy cured in a brine made partly of its own blood." it might more sensibly come from boca (mouth), as volcanoes are sort of the mouths of the earth, but actually are more like pimples if you think about it, am i right. on the road up to the mountain, there were in fact many little mudslides and a lot of debris from the hurricane. the last eruption of el boqueron was in 1917. it is all foresty and fresh and lush up by the crater. check out the crater. it is about a quarter mile deep. there were clouds forming in the bottom of the crater, and when the sun hit them, they rose up and engulfed us and evaporated. SUPER cool. i didn't bring my camera because my friend told me we were going to get coffee but instead we went to a volcano. MLIA.