
The team: from left to right: (top) Jared, Clay, Jamey Pappas (staff) with his son Jason, Riley, Andrew, Meredith, Alex, Christian, Karli, Kimberly Lauren, Myself, staff Adam and Alyssa, (bottom) Brandon, Sarah, Hannah, Jodi, and Grace.
El Salvador! Before I write anything else, I need to preface by telling you what this project is about. Our team consists of 6 guys and 8 girls from Cal Poly, a guy from UCLA (Jared), and a girl from New Hampshire (Hannah) and 3 staff members and one of their families. Our main purpose is to continue building spiritual movements on 2 of the top universities in the country through evangelism, follow up, and discipleship in hope that we may be influencing the future influencers of El Salvador to be Christ-centered leaders who lead the country with godliness, and sound moral judgement.
After a 3 day briefing at Vanguard University in Costa Mesa, CA, our summer project team flew out of LAX on a redeye and arrived in El Salvador at 7 AM yesterday morning (thursday). We were all quite tired by the time we arrived, but very glad to have made it nonetheless. Most of the day was spent driving to our hotel in San Salvador, the capital, and sleeping since we didn't get much rest on the flight. We're staying at the Hilton Princess, a pretty nice hotel actually with lots of amenities, because we apparently got an unbeatable deal to stay here. We met Manuel, a middle aged Salvadorian who is on staff with Vida Estudiantil on the campus of Universidad Dr. José Matías Delgado which we refer to as the Matias campus. Vida Estudiantil means Student Life and is the Campus Crusade for Christ movement in El Salvador. Manuel is such an awesome guy, super friendly and great sense of humor. I learned that he is friends with Steve Jordan, who is the father of one of my best friends in Lodi. It's crazy the connections you can make! After some rest, we went to have dinner at the house where the STINT girls live when summer project people aren't here. STINT stands for short term international missions. It's about a 1 year commitment to an international mission project with campus crusade. For dinner, we had pupusas, the only truly native Salvadorian dish. It's kind of like a tortilla, but really thick and stuffed with anything like cheese, beans, pork, and/or vegetables and topped with vinegary cabbage and salsa.

Manuel, his wife Sessy, and a STINTer Brandon who went to Cal Poly, and Selegna and Jeanette, 2 other women on staff, talked to us after dinner a little about how the campus ministry works. Today they came to our hotel and gave us a pretty comprehensive overview of what is appropriate and acceptable in the culture of El Salvador; how to dress, how to greet, interacting with the nationals here as visitors from the United States, and other social etiquette. We learned that Salvadorians are very people centered with respect to time rather than event centered like in the US. People place high value on who they are with at the present, and will be late for class or any appointment rather than abruptly leave an unfinished conversation. There are many other things about the culture that I will just have to experience on my own and tell about in more detail later, but one thing that is very striking so far is that Salvadorians are extremely friendly, polite, and hospitable people. Although I haven't had interaction with a ton of nationals yet, it has been true with every single person I've met, and I've been told numerous times that this is a common thing about the people. It is now past my bedtime and I need all the sleep I can get, but I will update again once we have more interactions with students on the college campuses.