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uwaterlooca
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Last updated: 08 May 2002
So here I am in El Salvador and I'm settling in for the next few months. I've been here for about two weeks now, and I've decided to write now because until getting here, I haven't had all that much to say. My two months of studying Spanish in Guatemala before this were great, but very different; almost like a vacation in comparison. I mean, I was in classes or doing homework at least 35 hours a week, and also made time to do some volunteer work at a local community centre on the side, but I also had time to sample the local beer with other foreigners and all in all it was pretty cozy. El Salvador has been pretty different, mostly because of where I'm living. I haven't seen a foreigner yet (other than one guy who's been living down here for about thirty years now), and overall the country seems much poorer.
Land is very scarce here; El Salvador is a tiny country with a high birth rate and very high population density. The main export is cheap labour; that is, the largest component of the GNP is money sent to people by relatives who have gone to the USA or Canada to work. As far as I can tell, the only growth industry here is the maquilas, or sweat shops, which are also considered an export of labour since most of them only assemble parts produced elsewhere into finished products (most commonly, sewing cut out cloth into clothing). A job in a maquila is the best hope for many of the people here. In fact, the local organization I'm working for is currently building a training centre to capacitize people for work in a maquila. Don't get me wrong; anti-sweatshop activism in rich countries still has a purpose, but only someone who's never been here could shout a knee-jerk slogan like "Nike out of country X". Outside pressure to protect the basic human rights of sweat shop workers is badly needed, but the reality remains that their wages are at about the same level as that of local employers and it's the only steady work available to a great many.
Learning that I'd be aiding and abetting the sweatshop industry was just the first of many culture shocks I've had since coming here. I'm getting used to showering with a plastic bucket and the fact that it's 30 degrees here all day every day. I'm even starting to accept that it's not really safe to go out after about seven o'clock at night (I should have mentioned that armed robbery is the other big growth industry here). However, I still get surprised when I see someone arc welding with just a cheap pair of sunglasses on, or fixing a carburetor by taking it apart in their lap, filling their mouth up with gasoline, and then blowing through each part in turn. And I don't think I'll ever fully get used to Central American driving habits (for the uninitiated, every last driver on the road acts like an amphetamine addict having a bad day). The fact that the roads here are more pothole than road doesn't help, either. They're also covered in trash: nice Canadian that I am, I put plastic bags in garbage cans, which pretty much just means that some guy with a truck will dump it on the side of the road for me later on.
Everywhere I go, I see after-effects of the major earthquakes El Salvador in January and February of this year, which killed about 1100 people and left around 1 person out of every 6 in the country homeless. I also see a lot of new buildings and housing projects dealing with the catastrophe, but many people have been forced to downgrade from, for example, a house built of cement bricks to one made of corrugated tin, and they probably won't be leaving those any time soon. In fact, there's still buildings closed from the last big one, which was in 1986, and from bombings during the civil war, which has been over since 1992.
I'm working for a local non-profit called Programa Esperanza Recuperación Comunitaria, which was set up about a year ago and is operating at the moment with some money from the Canadian NGO World Accord, which hired me for this CIDA-sponsored internship. Their mandate has four main parts. The first is education, which includes basic literacy, and light industrial training, mostly in using industrial sewing machines but also basic electrical work. This latter project is in co-operation with an established local Catholic organization. The second is economic development, which at the moment takes the form of small, short-term, low-interest loans, and hydroponics projects, with which participants can grow vegetables in their back yards and sell them for a little bit of extra cash. The third goal is community development and organization, which is integrated into other projects: an example is the workshops given on forming a collective to manage the hydroponic gardens in groups. The last goal is health projects, but to date these are still in the planning stage, although since the participants in the hydroponics projects only sell about half of what they grow, and use the rest to feed their families, that project is part of their health programming as well.
The extremely dedicated staff (consisting of a mother and daughter who get paid and a brother who doesn't) have huge plans for the future and it's really fun to be working with them. They make fun of my Spanish but also help me with it and I can usually get by without my dictionary. They each have many years of experience in this sort of work in their various ways. They've also all had to survive state persecution during the civil war: social workers and everyone else trying to help the people were state enemies then, and even today the government isn't exactly going out of its way to help them out.
The program here reminds me of nothing more than the community centre I was working in before coming to Central America. Grass-roots community development doesn't look all that different in different countries. Myself and the few other staff sort of sit around the office a lot working through various incomprehensibly legalistic paperwork, most of it concerning future sources of funding, and stop this to deal with whoever walks in the door looking for help. I give classes (in Canada I taught basic computer literacy, here it's just basic literacy) and try to lend a hand when it's needed, which at the moment means helping in the construction of the new teaching centre. It's kind of fun learning about Central American construction techniques, they're very different than in North America and it's a nice break from the paperwork.
A few people have written me wondering what I think should be done by rich consumers such as ourselves with regards to sweatshops. I've been talking to my coworkers here about that a lot, and in general they agree that if sweatshops pulled out tomorrow, the country would be in worse shape than it is today. However, they also all agree that workers in sweatshops are badly exploited and underpaid. The minimum wage here is 40 colones a day ($1 USD = 8.75 colones), which is at least half what a living wage would be, and anti-union pressure is intense. (In good news, of late would-be union organizers have just been blackballed, and not shot instead.) Most major anti-sweatshop organizations agree on this, and instead of asking Nike, for example, to pull out of poor nations like El Salvador, they ask them to sign codes of conduct promising to pay a fair wage, allow foreign inspectors, and permit unions, among other things. My co-workers here think that's great, and tell me that North Americans need to continue working in that way.
If you're interested, there are lots of web pages with specifics about codes of conduct, what they contain, why they're needed, and who's signed them. For starters, you could browse the Open Directory's sweatshops category.
Question: Has being in El Salvador spared you from the media hysteria over the imminent Third World War?
Answer: It's inconceivable that the attacks in the US and their aftermath could not have any affect on this country. The US is the largest trading partner for imports and exports, the legal currency here (since January 1st of this year) is the US dollar, and all that's missing is the US flag flying over national congress and an official request for statehood.
And so, like the rest of the world, I saw the towers fall live on television, and the fallout from the attack has been on the front page of every newspaper here since then. The official response has been beyond belief. The news coverage for the first few days consisted solely of statements from various politicians expressing their condolences for the deaths of the victims of the attacks, statements which later included the names of the salvadoreños who died when the tower collapsed, "killed for daring to follow the American Dream".
September 15th is Independence Day for most of Central America, and the most important secular holiday here. All of September is "month of the fatherland", and blue and white flags fly everywhere, along with other national symbols. Children in every school of the country practice for parades for months in preparation for this date. But this year, the first since independence from Spain in 1821, the celebrations were cancelled, "in solidarity with the people of the United States". Instead, various student activists held a protest in the capital against US imperialism, in which a few members of congress from the FMLN (former guerrilla group, now a political party) participated. All of a sudden every other politician and every major union in the country put out press releases decrying the "terrorist sympathizers" and calling for the ousting of an FMLN delegate from the party (which has now occurred). Since then, the FMLN has split itself on the issue of whether or not to ideologically support American military actions in Afghanistan, although the split between orthodox and reform factions had been brewing for a while. As well, the local government has admitted that an FBI team, alarmed by the burning of the flags of the USA and its friend Israel, have come here to investigate the protest. What actions they will take here are yet unclear.
In the United States, broad new laws have been passed impinging the ability of religious fanatics in Afghanistan to function by removing various civil liberties from its citizens. This, perhaps, was to be expected. However, the government of El Salvador has also declared that the ability of terrorists to successfully strike targets in the US demonstrates that civil liberties are too broad here as well, and thus passed some legislation here recently which, I must state, is even more alarming for its political rationalizations than its content. I know that at least one Arab man was beaten by a mob in lynch-mob happy Guatemala following the attack, but as far as I know to date that's only happened here in political cartoons, op-eds, and letters to the editor. (Typical letter: "in response to these attacks El Salvador should stop issuing any tourists visas to Arabs".)
Of course, presidential speeches don't have all that direct of an effect on the local population, and so life as normal has been pretty much being going on as always. Independence day may have been cancelled, but the "Personifica a Betty la Fea" competition ("impersonate Betty la Fea", main character of a popular telenovela) went on as scheduled. What's likely to have a larger effect here is the looming global economic slowdown which the attacks seem to have accelerated, as their largest trading partner in exports and imports stops buying quite so many Nike baseball caps.
I had one of my more disturbing moments of culture shock this morning while stepping into the back patio to use the toilet. One of the rabbits the family is breeding died last night, apparently of natural causes, and its corpse was lying outside the door to greet me. What really got to me, though, was that the family's cat had taken advantage of the rabbit's death for a little late-night snack last night, leaving a gaping, bleeding hole in the side of the body. I really freaked out. And then, the family started laughing at me, and someone said, "Hey, that's nothing. You should have been here during the war. There were people like that all shot up by the side of the road all the time." I finally regained my composure and ability to walk through the doorway when one of them put a page of a newspaper over the body, but nothing in the world could cover up the comment about the war from my naïve foreign mind. I am still such a foreigner in this country.
Recently, a group of six Canadian volunteers were here for a few weeks to help with the construction of the training centre. They worked very hard, spoke very little Spanish, and asked questions about the culture which were almost as dumb as those I asked when I first got here myself. Their work really helped the project a lot, but the story I'm going to tell is about one of their days off.
On the weekends, the staff and I took this group to see some tourist sites nearby, which were very interesting. Or at least, they were to me, as I've always loved a good museum. Then, on the day before they were to fly out of the country, we took them to Cerro Verde, a park on top a mountain.
After fixing a flat on our truck, we drove out to the base of the mountain, which took about an hour as we watched the cone grow larger in front of us. "Cerro" means "volcanic mountain with a collapsed cone", and Cerro Verde in particular is very old and completely covered with lush vegetation and coffee plantations, although most of the fields in the flat lands surrounding it are in sugarcane. The day was very hot, but as we entered the shade of the trees which covered the mountain and the road began to rise, the air cooled down and we saw the vegetation changing, until at the top pines dominated the landscape. The coffee trees were in a well-defined belt around the cerro, as they only produce the best coffee between specific altitudes.
The Cerro Verde National Park sits on the very top of the mountain, and is, we discovered, closed "due to earthquake damage". I found it strange that a wilderness preserve could be closed by an earthquake, but the park ranger and police officers were met at the gate assured us that it was. A scenic lookout with a good view of Volcán Izalco, however, was accessible. This volcano was known for years as the "Lighthouse of the Pacific", as it erupted steadily for over a hundred years and was visible from the sea. It ended in the 1950's, leaving behind an impressive funnel and a half-built luxury hotel planned to give visitors a good view of the eruption, and now only smokes. From the summit we watched a huge flock of vultures spiral and pass overhead, no doubt in search of garbage dumps. (Vultures do very well in Central America.) And then, as we were relaxing on the lookout (a wooden construction with a sign that read, "Warning: no more than 12 persons at a time"), someone noticed that our tire was flat again.
Fortunately, we had a spare tire. What we didn't have was a tire iron or a jack. There were some assorted tools under the seats from our construction build, so we took those out to take account of our situation. We had one large spanner (about twice as large as our wheel lugs), one tire iron (for much smaller wheel lugs), two rock hammers, one heavy mallet, and a large pair of bolt cutters. The latter solved our first problem, which was that the spare was chained to the back of the pickup and we didn't have the key. Removing the wheel proved to be more difficult, however.
Our first recourse was to ask the police at the gate for the loan of the tire iron from their truck. They, typically of local police, would neither loan us a tool nor let us use their phone. They suggested that we wait for someone else to come up the hill and help us, although traffic had been extremely slow that day. (Apparently, we were the only ones who didn't know the park had been closed for most of a year.) So, after waiting for half an hour or so, we headed down the hill on the flat to find someone with a better selection of tools than we had. We met one man driving an SUV full of children who stepped unsteadily out of his vehicle holding an open bottle Corona, but he couldn't find a tire iron in his truck. Next, we came to a small town of coffee pickers, where a man told us that he would be happy to lend us his jack and iron, but they were in his truck out in the finca. He sent a child off to fetch it, and in the interim his neighbour fed us some pupusas she had just made, and showed us her garden of high-altitude plants.
Waiting truly is an art, and Central America is an excellent place to acquire it. At home I was upset if I had to wait more than a few minutes to catch a bus, but that attitude won't get you very far here. Really, what else did we have to do that morning? We were there to enjoy the scenery, and we could do that just as well with our tire flat as otherwise. I'll never forget how friendly and helpful those villagers were, and I'm glad to have met them. I was very content to sit on the side of that road for most of the day. Nevertheless, after twenty or thirty minutes, the children came running back up the mountain with the tire iron, and their owner promptly removed our tire, and replaced it with our spare. His jack turned out to be broken, but we had enough people to lift the truck onto a log to hold up the front end. We insisted with difficulty on giving him some money for his trouble, and then drove back home through the cane fields under an intensely blue sky, where we proceeded to buy a new spare and a tire iron, and settled in for a dinner of more pupusas.
That evening, some of the group talked about how terrible their day had been. Some people really can't appreciate how good their life is. I saw gorgeous scenery, met friendly people, and ate a great pupusa in the crisp mountain air, but all they can remember is the frustration of having a flat tire and not having the tools to fix it. One must make more of life than that.
I feel the need for some semblance of closure to this journal. It's now early May, and I've been back in Canada since December, so I might be ready to look back on my time abroad with some degree of perspective.
Almost immediately upon my return, I felt as though my travels had happened a lifetime ago, or to someone entirely different. Or, as another former CIDA intern put it: "the evidence of my existence seems like a fascinating adventure had by a stranger whom I'd someday like to meet."
Although I had spent a lot of time in El Salvador missing my family, upon return I felt completely lost and out of touch. Even my amazing family wasn't able to live up to the expectations and idealized memories I had constructed of them for myself, and I sorely missed my home in El Salvador, where I understood the world and my place in it. Christmas in particular was a disaster, as I hadn't been able to do all the things that make it meaningful for me due to flying in just shortly beforehand (mostly making homemade gifts and baking a lot).
For the first week or so, I was happy to be back, but reverse culture shock soon hit in a bad way. People who study this sort of thing say this happens because you've changed a great deal as a person, but this new you doesn't know how to relate to your old friends and family, who haven't gone through the same process. Eventually, you learn to find common ground and communicate with these people again, helped in part by the skills you learned when dealing with culture shock at the beginning of your trip, and you process your memories of your time overseas to become again someone who knows how to relate to the people you know back home.
This isn't to say that there are no permanent changes, of course. I've noticed a new perspective on many of my old acquaintances as I can glimpse them at least temporarily with a Salvadoran mindset and form a different opinion about them than I did when I just thought like a Canadian. I don't want to get too personal, but the biggest difference in my attitude now is a low opinion of people without ambition or goals in their lives. Everyone needs some purpose, be it raising your kids or becoming a nurse. I no longer understand people who just subsist day to day without even trying to make something of themselves.
(I suppose that having said that, I'm obligated to say just what it is that makes my existence worth the oxygen I extract each day from the finite global supply, so here goes: I want to raise a family, and make the world a better place to live in for them than it was when I found it. That's very broad and open to interpretation, I know, but it's a start. Right now, I'm doing contract work for the NGO that sent me to El Salvador as an intern, plus the usual volunteer activism stuff, and that feels good for the time being. I really do think I'm helping people here, despite the inherent patronising of the development industry.)
Anyway, leaving aside the meaning of life for a moment, the reverse culture shock had mostly worn off after about a month and a half. Starting work immediately after my return both made this process more difficult and forced it to happen at a rapid pace. Then, at the end of January, I attended a debriefing session for returned interns hosted by CIDA in Ottawa. Most of the people there had been back for less time than me (in some cases, just a day or two), and looking around I noticed that I had already gone through most of the problems they were describing, and seemed pretty well adjusted compared to them. It reminded me of what it was like to facilitate a visit from a group of Canadian volunteers a month into my time in El Salvador: they showed me how far I had come already, and demonstrated that I was capable of making significant progress.
It still isn't quite over: I miss speaking Spanish, and have an annoying habit of telling anecdotes about my life Central America to friends with little interest. I feel deep pangs of nostalgia when I look at my small collection of curios brought back as souvenirs, and miss the friends I made in El Salvador. But although I'd love to travel more and experience more of the world, I feel that Canada is my home and I'm very happy to be here for now.
We shall not cease from exploration,
and the end of all our exploring
will be to arrive where we started
and know the place for the first time.
— T.S. Elliot, "Four Quartets"
no es
el fin