Saturday morning in San Salvador

8am
On our way for breakfast at Pollo Campero.
We stop at the lights. A few metres in front of our car a huge truck overloaded with large tanks of gas lurches forward. Two tanks fall narrowly missing a small boy selling newspapers.

9.30am
Road closed at lights by our house, lots of police. Hard to tell what had happened. All sorts of possibilities come to mind. Kidnap, carjack… I try to stop the others talking about it too openly infront of Chayo.
Later on the news I see it was a drive by gang shooting – 2 windscreen cleaner boys dead.

9.35am
We are by the shops infront of our house. I suddenly see a young woman struggling and a man grabbing her bag. People walking past. I beep in a vain attempt to help, and as I do so notice that the man has a huge shotgun hanging over his shoulder. He must be a security guard. The woman hangs on to her bag and eventually gets away. The lights change and off we go, all of us a bit shaken up. Kinda freaky seeing an armed person in a conflict.

Me and my class

Only in El Salvador...

1. Could a coconut fall on my car and cause a few hundred dollars worth of damage.

2. Could there be so many huge gaping holes in the road. Manhole covers are big business on the black market it seems...

3. Could I sprain my ankle because I hear my sister calling me...
Ok, I was up the side of a hill in the middle of nowhere, with my friend Jenny from Dimas buying organic vegetables. Polly at the bottom with 3 kids in the car... it's getting dark. She starts calling my name "Topsy", then it gets louder and turns almost into a panicky scream."TOPSY...TOPSY..." Jenny and I leg it down the mountain side. Our hearts in our mouths, our heads full of images of carjack, robbery, kidnap... everyday events in El Salvador.

My foot goes in a hole, ankle twists and crunches. I fall, cut my other leg and hand... Eventually when I get down everything is fine, just a truck needed to get by and Polly didn't have the keys to move the car.

The kids who were picking the veg stare at me and my (almost) broken ankle with their huge dark brown eyes . Their mum comes down the hill holding an amazing bunch of white calla lillies which she gives to me.

They can swim!

Holiday snaps

Glasses and Company

I'm sitting in my classroom with 11 minutes left of my 30 minute lunchbreak. I'm eating my very cosmopolitan pasta, pesto and olives out of my tupperware container looking at the mess around me... Carpet covered in polysterene bits, my desk piled with books to mark, xmas cards to write, poems to display.... It's 86 degrees outside, and only occaisionally a slight breeze floats through the room. My throat hurts and it looks like I'm about to come down with a nasty bug.

End of term on Friday, thank goodness. But before then we've got cards, decorations, reindeers and Christmas crackers to make, plus habitat models to finish, carol singing, xmas show, xmas fair, dinner tonight at Chayo's grandma's, kids party after school on Thursday and drinks out with colleagues, secret santa presents to buy, staff xmas lunch....

But the exciting news is that last night POLLY and ELLY arrived!! They'll be here till New Year and we're going to have a few days at a posh beach place which sounds great.

And yes... I now wear glasses... Strange new experience...

Not bad hey...

A friend's place where we went for a few days...