Visit to USAID, volcano hiking

Friday I visited the offices of US Agency for International Development (USAID) at the US embassy. I was invited there by Michelle Jennings, their deputy director of economic growth. She'd seen my presentation on renewable energy at the forum at Universidad Centroamericana in April and wanted me to give her co-workers a replay. They are starting to make a priority of working with renewable energy in El Salvador, and Michelle wanted me to go over what I've learned about how renewables are being or could be applied in the country. The meeting went well. I made a pitch for Don Bosco's new renewable energy institute, looking to see if USAID is interested in helping out. They are, but they need some time to formulate their own renewable energy action plan before they commit to specific projects.

A fun aspect of the meeting was finding out that two of the USAID staffers know people I know from Humboldt. Michelle is friends with Laura Chapman, whom I know through the Returned Peace Corps Volunteer network, and one of her co-workers got to know Bob Gearheart and Barbara Smith from HSU engineering when she took a wetlands workshop at Humboldt.

This week I got recruited to help review plans for a new building on UDB's grad campus. They want me to help come up with ways to make the building greener and less energy intensive. This will be interesting and enjoyable, but it's yet another distraction from the main things I'm allegedly working on, helping develop UDB's energy institute and a renewable energy demonstration project. I continue to wrestle with whether I should let my UDB collaborators detour me into these other activities or be more insistent on staying on task. They're the client, so I'm being sort of passive and letting them make the call. But I do worry that all this is taking a toll on my principal projects.

Yesterday Basilia and I set out on a weekend trip to the west of the country. We took a couple of buses to get to Parque Nacional Los Volcanes. The end of the bus line is actually on top of one of the volcanoes, Cerro Verde. From there you can hike to the summit of either of two neighboring volcanoes, Izalco or Ilametepec (aka Santa Ana). We opted for Santa Ana. Because of the assaults and robberies that have taken place on these volcanoes in the past, the park management requires all hikers to be escorted by a guide and police from PoliTur, the tourism police. This seemed like a weird and potentially uncomfortable way to go on what looked like a pretty straightforward hike, but we went along with it. As it turned out, our guide and the two police officers were a lot of fun to hike with. The guide, Yocelyn, is a 17-year-old high school student from nearby El Congo who looks like she could be from Basilia's home town. She works giving park tours on weekends. One of the cops, Juan Carlos, is a very personable and intelligent guy. Basilia and I chatted with them almost the whole way up the volcano and back, and we treated them to lunch as a tip when we got back to the visitor center.

The top of Santa Ana volcano was beautiful, with a deep crater that contains a lake with an intense green color. The strata of rock and ash around the lake run a gamut of colors and textures. The volcano erupted as recently as 2005, causing the park to be closed for a period. You can still see steam rising from vents around the lake and bubbles coming up through the water at the center of the lake.

On top of Volcán Santa Ana with our escorts

After the visit to the park, we went downhill to Lago de Coatepeque, a lake in a huge volcanic crater, somewhat like Crater Lake in Oregon. Coatepeque is beautiful, but sadly almost the entire lakeshore consists of houses on private lots. It's hard to even see the lake let alone get close to it, since most of the homeowners have put up high concrete block walls for privacy or security. I suspect most of the homes are weekend retreats for wealthy people from San Salvador. We did find a nice old hotel to stay in (Torremolinos) that allowed us lake access. We were apparently the only guests in this big rambling place that had two swimming pools, a dining room with dozens of tables, and a covered dock with another dining area. The place looks like it must have been very glamorous and popular a half century ago, though it's now gathering dust. The staff were attentive and made us good meals, and the lodging and food were quite reasonably priced. I'm not sure why this place and the other neighboring hotels seemed deserted on a weekend. Maybe the middle class these places cater to are hurting more than I suspected from the global crisis. The rich seem to all have their own places, so they don't need to patronize these hotels.

The vast and empty (except Basilia!) open-air dining hall at Hotel Torremolinos

This morning we found a bus over to the other side of the lake and onward to Izalco. I'd been curious about this city since reading about its role as one of the epicenters of the 1932 peasant/communist uprising that led to the government slaughtering 30,000 people, mostly indigenous. It's a picturesque and historic city, and the people we met there were really friendly. As so often happens to me in Latin America, I struggle to reconcile the kind people and innocuous settings of the present with the violent and hate-filled events of the not-so-distant past in the very same places. This aside, we both liked Izalco and may go back before our time here is through.