Mi último día en Mariona

¡Hola Amigos!
Wednesday was my last day in Mariona. To celebrate your time in the community, we planned a despedida (going away party). We invited all our English students and all the people we have met during our time I Mariona. Oti estimated that about 50 people were coming to the party and the Casa gave us a $50 stipend to work with. So Wednesday morning we spent shopping in the Mejicanos market for party things. In typical Salvadorian fashion, nothing went according to plan, but in the end all worked out for the best.

In the market we needed to print certificates for our students and handouts for the conversation they were going to present during the party, buy a cake, buy frosting for cupcakes Jen and I made the night before, get decorations, and find small gifts for each of the students. Our first stop was a print shop. We gave the man behind the counter my jump drive with all the saved documents. We only accomplished printing the certificates (which came out different since his program was not compatible to ours) and couldn’t print the handout because he was too confused and we couldn’t show him what document we wanted printed. So we left and found a cyber café to print the handout. The print shop had given my jump drive a virus so when we tried to print at the internet café, the document refused to open. We panicked a little since we really needed these handouts for our students. Somehow my jump drive miraculously fixed itself and we finally got to print the conversation, but we had wasted precious shopping time. With our papers we hurried off to the grocery store to buy icing and gifts. The store didn’t carry icing and the school supplies were too expensive for our budget. So we ran across the street to a paper store and bought 9 notebooks, pencils, and erasers for the students. Oti wanted us to buy more, but we were on a budget (school supplies are very expensive in El Salvador) and we only had 9 kids who came regularly to class. With our gifts and papers, we began the cake search. The first cake store we walked into was completely empty. All the display racks were empty. There was no cake to be found. Tuesday was worker’s day and no one baked any cakes because they had the day off from work. We found another cake shop, but they didn’t have cakes either. We asked if they sold icing and of course did not. So we bought $10 worth of pan dulce, which was 99 cookies. We continued the quest for icing and were running out of time so ended up buying chocolate to melt on top of the cupcakes.

Once back at the cooperative we thought we had everything under control. We made decorations and stuffed the piñata with candy (we had a cool Nemo piñata that we bought the night before). As the students began to arrive, we noticed that there were 10, not 9. One girl showed up that had only attended the first few classes. She told us she wanted to come to more classes but couldn’t because her mom had been in the hospital. We felt horrible and went into panic mode trying to find one more gift. Luckily we work at a cooperative and we bought a pair of earrings and a bracelet for one of the older girls who volunteered to be interviewed for our praxis project. The student presentations went well and some of the parents after told us our English classes had helped the kids do better in the English classes at school. We felt so proud.

After the presentations it was piñata time. Of course it was fun and everyone enjoyed beating Nemo. After we ate the cupcakes without frosting (which I thought were horrible but the kids liked them) and 100 pupusas (only 30 people showed up so we had a bunch of left over pupusas). After eating, a dance troop showed up to perform traditional dances for us. Over all our last day ended up being great. We exchanged contact info with some of our students and they gave us cute thank you notes. It was kind of sad saying goodbye to our students since most of them didn’t understand why we weren’t coming back in August and why we couldn’t come visit them often. We’re having a big depedida at the Casa Sunday, so I will say goodbye to Oti, Lolo, and the women from the cooperative then.

Paz,
Stephanie