Letter, October 12, 1975

Hi folks!

Yup, I finally got around to sending you another roll of pictures. This roll stretches over a long time span & I didn’t keep a record so it’ll be pretty much “pot luck”. The last 3 pictures are of the farm where I am working now: First some people threshing rice by hand, them me & another guy working in the trench silo we’re building, then a shot of the main set of buildings at “El Maizal”. The thing that looks like a sawed off vertical silo, isn’t. It’s a water holding tank for irrigation. You just don’t see vertical silos here.

I also tried to take some pictures while I was in Guatemala, but it was cloudy & I doubt whether many turned out. The first part of the roll, if memory serves me, should show some pictures of a party in San Isidro shortly before I left there. Any thing else that turns up in those pictures you’ll have to ask me about!

Tell Carla I’m sorry for accusing her of being 15 years old. I was thinking about something else when I wrote her that card & somehow I got it in my head she was turning 15. Tell her she’s got another year of childhood left before she has to start husband hunting! A friend of mine in San Salvador also celebrates her birthday the 19th, so we’ll see if we can’t celebrate a little for Carla & Dad as well.

Last Saturday the 9 people from my training group who are still in El Salvador got together to celebrate being here a whole year! Actually it won’t be a year ‘til the 17th, so we were anticipating a little, but as one cynic commented, you couldn’t get a plane ticket home before then anyway! Really doesn’t seem like I’ve been here that long (but my grammar has sure suffered!). We did some drinking & talking and had a good old time.

Got a letter from Marcia letting me know she’s still alive and working again. { My sister Marcia was badly injured in a car accident, but had mostly recovered by this time } Seems like it’s mighty hard to keep a Jefferson off his or her feet very long! Only person I haven’t heard anything from in a long time is Merna, but Jan wrote me saying she seems busy & happy; guess that’s a good way to be.

When you get to picking corn, let me know how it yields, etc. Corn is such an important crop to the small farmer here & such a staple of the people’s diet that they’re always asking how the “cosecha de maiz” {corn harvest} looks back home. I’ve told them, of course, we grow corn too, which always seems to reassure them that the world isn’t so different elsewhere.

So long now,

Dean