Azacualpa, El Salvador

This is what Rolene and I look like when we cross in to El Salvador. I wonder what we'll look like when we cross into Honduras?


The beautiful Lake Guija. We camped on the public beach for our first couple nights in El Salvador.


We walked along the lake as far as we could before having to cut up towards the road. These women were doing laundry. I have to say that I love washing machines, but if I had to do my laundry by hand, I'd like to do it in the lake or river while chatting and gossiping with my friends.


The trail we walked up from the lake to the road. I love how they plant trees in straight rows to use as their fence posts.


That's Reina up in the tree picking jocotes (I have no idea if I'm spelling or even saying the name of this fruit correctly) for us. We met her earlier when we visited her school and she walked with us as far as her house, which was about a mile.


Not a half-bad place to camp, I'd say. Lots of bugs, but few of them were mosquitos.

The rest of the photos are from the two classes we visited. Azacualpa is a tiny town on the lake with only a primary school with once class in the morning (1st-3rd grade) and one in the afternoon (4th and 5th grades). The first picture is of the three younger grades. When Rolene does her talk for little kids she brings those great masks along and does an activity called "Council of all Beings," which is borrowed from the work of Joanna Macy. The kids wear the masks and then Rolene talks to them as Mr. Crocodile, Ms. Dolphin, Mr Bird, etc. She gets them talking about their habitat and how they live and then goes into asking them about how they feel about the polution, deforestation, and destruction of their homes. Finally she asks them what they would like the humans to do to make things better. It's a really good way to get the kids talking and thinking about the environment. As soon as they become an orca whale, some of the shyness goes away and they get excited about answering questions. They were so unbelievably cute, I couldn't help but add a bunch of pictures of them.







The kids are looking at the tiny seed of the Sequoia, which they have just learned is the biggest living thing on earth.