Tierra de las Mariposas

(The Land of Butterflies).

So. Here I am, in El Salvador, having arrived just a week ago. It's been quite the week -- I started teaching two English classes (with three more to come!) at a school across the Lake from Suchitoto. I moved in/unpacked/organized with Eva, a beautiful Salvadoran woman who also teaches at the school. I've met (and already said good bye!) to some of the other volunteers at the center. And will soon begin teaching another class at Centro Arte para la Paz. Wow -- can it really have been just a week? And at the same time: it been only a week!

I want to start by thanking you, my friends family and supporters. It is you who got me here and I cannot say enough how grateful I am. I've definitely been adapting and re-orienting this week, but feel so much at home here already, so grounded in the fact that this is what had to be.

What have I come home to? The past few days I've been thinking about my arrival and experiences here in terms of butterflies. It's very easy to think of butterflies here: they are everywhere. In fact, my first day here I took a shower with one, a small white one which held its wings open on the wall for me to admire while I washed my hair and face. They flit all around Centro Arte para la Paz, and play tag with teachers and students at the school. They keep me company on my walk between home and the Center, and from the Center back home.

The beautiful thing about butterflies, besides their glorious color and joy-giving way of flying, is that they are more than they appear. Everyone knows that a butterfly was once a caterpillar. Fat, green or brown, many legged little sluggish thing. After this, spending anywhere from a few days to months in a chrysalis and finally emerging.

El Salvador is in many way for me a butterfly. I have come just in time to see the beauty of so much work, love, care, and transformation. Two volunteers left the day after I came and spent my first day helping them finish painting their mural on one of the ramps in the skate park. --This being both the result of their work and also of Sister Peggy's in the building and construction of the skate park (which opens tomorrow!).



I am living with a beautiful Salvadoran woman named Eva who has been adding to the previously one-tiny-roomed house. It now has a beautiful tiled entrance with a fridge, stove, table and hammock! A lovely shower and toilet in it's one little building in the back, and back room behind the bedroom coming!

Suchitoto itself is beautiful, just over a lake (which has its own sad history) but is beautiful. Two days a week I take a boat with Eva and several other teachers to the school. Beyond words.



I have come home to such beautiful people, such a beautiful place. And I, too, in many ways am I butterfly right now: just finished with university and then summer camp with a non profit. Many changes and transformations have taken place over the past four years and I am so happy to be who I am, to have been so formed by the people in my life, by Georgetown. Yet, at the beginning of this new adventure, I am once again very much a caterpillar.

PS -- Here's a picture of the mural Korla (another volunteer) and I painted on Wednesday, designed by students visiting from Santa Clara University