Am currently staying in the capital city, San Salvador, after having to go to the hospital to get a persistent stomach bug checked out. It's not nice, but does give me a sense of the health systems here in El Salvador.
The doctors try hard to accommodate but they don't have the resources in the rural communities to make the necessary checks so I was presumed to have a parasite and was sent packing with some very generic pills. Unfortunately to get good health care it seems you need to travel to the capital and have money to pay!
I am spending 10 weeks volunteering in El Salvador, Central America. We have completed almost 2 weeks of training, have just begun the first project in Arcatao (near the border with Honduras) and will spend the last 4 weeks in the capital San Salvador working on issues such as gender inequality, sexual reproductive health and environmental sustainability.
Lily Bland, a Progressio Empower volunteer spending time in El Salvador, has sent over these photos from the group's third week in-country.
At the end of last week we were given a tour of the local school by the Principal, who warmly welcomed us, despite the whistles and stares we tend to receive from the young people - we're pretty foreign-looking!
Sexual health
That afternoon we attended a workshop at the clinic by IMU (the partner organisation that we're working with) about gender equality and sexual health. It was delivered to a group of around 15 'popular' young people from the area, and also a few local parents, as we were told that schools don't really provide sexual education here.
I decided to get started on the poetry whilst I'm here, as I'd fallen out of the habit after all the busy-ness of day to day life! This morning we went to meet the principal of the local school, who showed us round, next we're off to participate in a workshop with the parents of some youths who undertook a sexual health project at the local clinic.
Read some extracts from Empower volunteer Katherine Wright's blog:
12 July: During the thunder storm which hit Suchitoto this afternoon the training venue was hit by a stray piece of lightning. No one was hurt, but the sound of the lightbulb blowing was enough to send us all jumping out of our seats! These first few days in El Salvador have challenged and surprised us all and we are just at the beginning of this amazing experience.
I just got back from El Salvador where I went to see an environmental project in El Tamarindo, travelling with Maggie von Vogt, our development worker specialising in communications and advocacy.
El Tamarindo is on the coast (“el tamarindo” is also a slang word here for thief, but I digress). The community is by a river delta that comes through the mangrove and out to the sea.
Yesterday I visited some Progressio partners in the place known as Nahuaterique in Honduras. Set high up in the mountains bordering El Salvador, the lush fields of maize, interspersed between a mixture of pine and deciduous forest, belie the fact that many of the 7,000 or so inhabitants are in fact malnourished, only 250 of the 4,000 children can go to school, and the whole population is effectively stateless – and has been for more than 18 years.
Lily Bland, an ICS Empower volunteer aged 18, from Bristol, writes home saying “After a five AM wake up call, two long plane journeys and an armed police escorted coach ride - I'm here in Suchitoto, El Salvador!”
