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warning: this is a long one, with lots of pictures

I'm not sure if you've heard about tropical storm Agatha. I don't like it very much. It hit El Salvador, Guatemala, & Honduras. If you know anything about those countries you know that they are like their own little community. They are even working on getting something passed to where you can go back and forth to all 3 countries without a visa or passport. (That would be awesome for missionaries!)

The tiniest of those countries is El Salvador. El Salvador is about the size of New Jersey & as of 2009 approximately 6.2 million people live there. {via wikipedia/ElSalvador}

That is where I was born. Where my family is from... where everyone in my family besides my brother was born. It's not my "home", not it the way most people think of home. When I was 2 my mom moved to California from El Salvador and left me with my grandma. She wanted a better life for me, for us. (wow did I get that & then some! I'm so grateful to her) She would send us money & other things, lets just say I was the only 3 year old in El Salvador with some pretty cool Reeboks. She got settled in & when I was almost 5 she sent for me. I flew to LAX. I didn't have to go through the hard time of walking and riding in a vehicle to the US like most immigrants from there do. A lot of them die. According to the US Border Patrol, 1,954 people died crossing the US-Mexico border between the years 1998-2004. In the fiscal year ending September 29, 2004, 460 migrants died crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. In 2005, more than 500 died across the entire U.S.-Mexico border. The number of yearly border crossing deaths has doubled since 1995. Yet the statistics cited by scholars and the media are merely the number of known deaths and do not include those who have never been found, grossly underestimating the actual number of migrants that have died attempting unauthorized border crossings. {via-wikipedia} I hadn't been to El Salvador since. My mom still hasn't been back. But in September 2008 Mathew & I made a trip. I had to go in order to be able to get my residency ( I have the best lawyer for that by the way & I did end up getting it! I am now a resident with a green card! praise the Lord!). All the news about these countries makes me ache. Stories titled " tropical storm leaves six dead in El Salvador" and "Agatha leaves 82 dead in Guatemala, El Salvador". There are some disaster relief efforts, but have you seen the pictures of the sink hole in Guatemala City? Could you imagine?! Like I said, it's not "my home", but it is. I dug up our pictures. I haven't shared these because we use a disposable camera.We weren't sure what to expect there & didn't want to risk losing our digital camera. Mathew had never been out of the country & neither had I. My scanner is broken so I just took pictures of the pictures. These aren't that great, but with some editing I made it work

This is my uncle Nelson and his family. His wife Flor and his kids are Nelson (junior), the oldest, then Ronald, and Fabiola aka Fabi. They are who showed us around & picked us up at the airport, while we were in San Salvador.

This is the view from our hotel. It was right in down town San Salvador. That mountain right behind the billboard isn't a mountain, it's a volcano. It's dormant though.

we could also walk to Burger King if we wanted to

while we were there we grew attached to my family

Mathew grew specially attached to the kids.

one in particular!

I'm pretty sure he took this picture

In town everything was very nice and looked a like some place here. But out in the "country" we saw a lot of shacks where people lived and women were washing their laundry in the river... I hate laundry anyway. I couldn't imagine washing it in the river. I'm so thankful I have a washing machine. We didn't get any pictures of all that, I'm not sure why, but I found this on flickr and it's what we saw a lot of

El Salvador is so beautiful, yet most of the people there live in poverty. no, it's beyond poverty. Flickr has some really neat pictures of all of it.

we went to Puerto La Libertad and the fish market there

in the big metal bowl to the left of this picture are sea turtle eggs

look at that huge fish!

sting rays

this guy! this guy broke my heart. he'd been out fishing ALL morning and he only caught a couple of things. this fish he said was called the devil fish and you can only eat a certain part of it. meaning he probably wasn't going to get any money for it :( his shirt was full of holes & i just wanted to take him home with us & make everything all better. 

The beaches there are beautiful. We didn't go to one of the nicest ones but we still loved it.

and there he goes with Fabi again... I can't wait to see what he'll be like with Isabella when she gets older

have you ever thought about smuggling children into the country? My husband has.

Our trip made us appreciative of what we have... then we forgot about it & went back to our day to day. I'm going to frame some of these and maybe I won't take things for granted as much. I thank my God for giving my mom the courage to come to this country. For allowing us to be here & have a good life. Now I can give my children even more. We hope to go back and visit again, maybe once our kids are older so they can go too & see how lucky they were to be born in United States.