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In March, I took some time away from winemaking to travel to El Salvador as a volunteer with Habitat for Humanity’s ‘Global Village’ program.  Kristin and I joined about 100 other volunteers from the United States, Canada, and Barcelona for a week of hard work, constructing simple, decent homes for people who need them.

Although Kristin has volunteered on Habitat trips for the past few years, travelling to India and Africa, the trips always seemed to coincide with harvest or other busy times at the winery.  This time, I was able to go, and I see why it has been such a gratifying experience for her.  We worked side by side with the family members whom will become the new homeowners, played soccer with their kids, shared meals with them, and learned from each other.  The work was hard, and the food was simple and repetitive, but we enjoyed the time that we spent, and it was amazing to see how much progress we made over the course of the week.  I think of all the great little kids that we met, and about how they will be growing up in these houses that we helped to build with our own hands, and how they will have a clean, safe home to call their own – it feels pretty good!

You don’t have to go to a different country to help other people around you – there are a lot of opportunities all around us every day.  I’m thankful that I was able to make this trip, and hope that I will have more opportunities in the future.

I guess I better say something about wine, since this is a winery blog…  A couple things that I noticed about wine in El Salvador; most of the wine was from Chile and Italy, and the few wines that I recognized were at least 2-3 times more expensive than they would be the U.S.  All the wine was served cold, even the reds, and they were brought to the table in an ice bucket.  As it turned out, that wasn’t a bad idea, as the wine quickly warmed up to serving temperature in the tropical temperatures!  (We drank a lot more of the local beer, which wasn’t bad at all, and Nicaraguan rum, which was quite delicious, and quite inexpensive!)

Lots more of my photos on my flickr.com account:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/18097654@N05/sets/72157604280281956/

-NRC