Salvadoran Dogs

Salvadoran chucho taking a nap on the frijoles.

Just a short observation here.  Many families in El Salvador have dogs, and most of the dogs that I saw roamed freely, without collars, tags, or leashes.  Sometimes I noticed them in packs, but often alone.  Only rarely did any seem menacing; most seemed more or less indifferent to people.  Curiously, they also seemed more or less indifferent to the poultry.  In the countryside and even in San Ramon, many families had a few chickens around.  I suppose I expected these lean dogs to see the chickens and ducks as food, but everyone I asked insisted that it was not an issue.



My brother Frank with Praline.  Granite, the dog next door, was visiting.



I wonder if their freedom mellowed them, made them less territorial, less jumpy.  Of course, I might just have a skewed idea of what dogs are supposed to be like.  Praline, my brother’s bad little yellow lab mix, sets a high standard for nervous energy. 



Hospitality and Communication

In the early years of the Christian Church, hospitality was a virtue greatly esteemed.  This virtue – for good and for ill – finds abundant expression in El Salvador.  One of the challenges of being a short-term visitor in somebody’s home is the danger of being treated with an excess of hospitality.

One evening, Maria Teresa and Gustavo took me to visit a family in San Ramon.  Even before we arrived, six adults were crowded into the two small rooms of the house.  In the middle of the living room, an elderly woman was curled up in bed.  Maria Teresa rubbed her back a little, and the woman cried.  She has cancer, her son told me, and she wants to die.  Even in these crowded conditions, even with so much pain, as soon as we arrived, everyone jumped up and insisted that we sit in the chairs.  The would not tolerate our standing.



Julio Cesar with a balloon



I felt discomfort around this hospitality when I spent a couple of days visiting Francisca and her family in La Ceiba, a village in Chalatenango.  In one room, Francisca lived with two of her sons and a grandson.  Although there was one extra bed in the room, Francisca suggested that I take the grandson’s bed instead, since it was the only one that had a mosquito net.  I tried to insist that I did NOT want to remove 4-year-old Julio Cesar (the little emperor, I called him) from his bed, and that I would be happy to sleep in the empty bed.  At least that’s what I thought I said.  That night, though, Francisca brought me down to the little shop down the street and. over my protestations, bought a mosquito net for me to hang up over the bed.  So Julio Cesar and I, apparently, were the only two who needed mosquito nets.  The whole thing was awkward and a little bit infantilizing, but Francisca was very worried that I, as a guest, might be less than satisfied.

The next day, after a little begging, I got Francisca’s older son, Hector Antonio, to allow me to go with him to pick some corn in the family’s plot above the village.  He tried to dissuade me, saying it was far (it’s a good 45 minute walk up a steep trail to get to their field) and muddy and that I did not have proper footwear.  I was wearing an older pair of running shoes, but to him, they were far too nice for the muddy walk to the milpa.  “Proper footwear” meant flip-flops.  Below you see the easy part of the route.  The field was at the top of the hill.

When we got back from the field, Francisca was asking me what size flip-flops I wore; she wanted to buy me a pair!  I was able to head that off, but only by promising thoroughly to scrub my sneakers.  I could not convince her that bright, shiny sneakers were not a symbol of a status to which I aspired.  They are, apparently, kind of important to Salvadorans.  I was too embarrassed to mention that I was planning to leave them for the students at Nuestro Ahora when I went home.

Dependence

Visiting the Christian base community of the Pueblo de Dios en Camino in San Ramon at the end of July and beginning of August afforded me some opportunities for travel.  It is a time of year for local celebrations, memorials of martyrs, and reunions among the networks of Christian base communities.  For one such celebration, some dozen or so of us packed into a van and headed up to Alta Vista, a beautiful drive of maybe an hour.  Even as we started, I had misgivings about the van.  At the anniversary celebration of the Christian base community in Alta Vista, a round of storms only mildly dampened the proceedings.  As people milled around towards the end, Don Chepe, our driver, looked nervously at the skies, and then herded us into the van for the ride home.  The windshield wipers on the van, he said, did not really work right, so he wanted to be home before the next round of storms.  Also, he mentioned to Hector, his eyes weren’t as great at night as they used to be.

Naturally, by the time we reached Soyapango, the skies had opened, and streets were beginning to flood.  Negotiating a roundabout in front of a service station, we SLAMMED into a pothole hidden by the flow of water.  The axle was bent, the van rendered undriveable.  Adults and kids piled out of the van and sheltered under the overhang at the Shell station.  Several pickup trucks pulled in as well, beds crowded with identically-clad young women.  They were an evangelical Christian group, they told me, and their spirits clearly were undimmed by the downpour they’d just driven though.  I noticed that they were riding in Datsun trucks.  Readers, correct me if I am wrong about this, but I believe it was about 1983 or so when Nissan stopped putting the Datsun brand on their trucks.

While we tried to straighten the axle by, well, basically pounding on it with stones, it struck me how calmly everyone was handling the delay.  While I worked hard to suppress my impatience and frustration, even the children in our group waited patiently or looked for little things they could do to help.

Transportation delays are an expectation in El Salvador.  Indeed, this was hardly the only transportation glitch of my visit.  I was tired of unreliable, overcrowded, unsafe transportation, but that, said Hector, was simply a normal experience of community transportation.  It was one of those experiences that, in a small way, reminded me of the “utter dependence” of which my Salvadoran friends can only be all too aware.  Crowded into microbuses, needing rain but fearful of flooding, slamming into potholes, waiting for repairs, hoping for buses to arrive, this is a community that is dependent. 

Of course, therein lies one of the great mysteries of the spiritual life – whether we can live in abundance and yet still be spiritually dependent.  I hope it’s possible, that we can have good roads and reliable cars and still understand that we are utterly dependent on God.   I kind of doubt it, though.  At least sometimes we need to experience frustration and helplessness to remind us of that dependence.

Magdalena and Vickie taking the Nuestro Ahora van to the auto mechanic school for some repair advice.

Theologia en la Milpa

Part of what made Jesus of Nazareth such a provocative teacher was the way his parables used images that would have been part of the experience of his audience – likely an agrarian experience for many of them.  (In fact, scholars seeking to identify the actual words of the “Historical Jesus” prioritize sayings and parables that exhibit clear “Palestinian coloring.”)  Jesus described the Reign of God in similes to which the listener could relate, using experiences with which he would likely have had some familiarity himself.

It should not have come as a surprise to me, then, when my Salvadoran hosts, taking me to work in the cornfields, spoke about the theological premises of their work using the images of soil, corn, and beans.  The bean plants had sent out their tendrils, which had, in many cases, begun wrapping themselves around the nearby corn.  As we unwound the beans from around the corn, Gustavo explained that plants, like people, need to be set free, not strangled.  Our service, though, did not end with the liberation of the corn.  We planted stakes next to the beans, stakes that would support the plants.  Instead of strangling the corn, the beans would wind up and around the stakes.  In this way, both corn and beans would flourish.

Gustavo said quite a bit more too, about preparing the soil and so on.  I’ll include it down below.  If your Spanish is any better than mine (which is NOT a high standard), it’s worth a couple minutes of your time.

An Evening -- and Morning -- at Nuestro Ahora

When I first visited El Salvador in March of 2011, with a Crispaz delegation from the Boston College School of Theology and Ministry, one of our first stops was at a program called Nuestro Ahora.  University students who are coming from orphanages or shelters live together in community at the program’s rented house near the University of Central America.  They welcomed us with a couple of ice-breaking games, told us about the program, and then we all went out for pupusas.  Despite my limited Spanish, the students in the program were eager to chat – about music (Don’t let anyone tell you that Michael Jackson is not relevant to youth around the world!), sports (Vladimir is a Messi fan), travel (Maricela would like to visit Greece someday), Salvadoran culture (“Without the sauce, they aren’t really pupusas,” Manuel told me), and their studies.  The visit was brief, but, for me, memorable.

Once I decided to return to El Salvador over the summer, I asked Vickie Cavanaugh, a 2007 BC grad and founder of the program, if I could come back and visit.  I had been thinking a lot about the issue of how, in our moral formation, it is virtually impossible genuinely to feel global concern if we do not have real connections with other parts of the world.  I was hoping that maybe we could arrange some sort of cultural exchange between my own high school students and the students at Nuestro Ahora, a chance to make El Salvador and the United States more real to each other in some small way.  Vickie told me that, in addition to the university program, she hosts two dozen high school students on Friday evenings and Saturdays.  On Fridays they have some spiritual or personal enrichment programs, and on Saturday they attend academic enrichment programs with volunteer tutors from the university.  She invited me to join them for a Friday dinner and to do the reflection with them.



Brian and Coca discuss futbol.



On that day I was joined by Brian Rhodes, who teaches high school Spanish at St. Ignatius Prep in San Francisco.  At dinner with the high school students he quickly discovered, and exacerbated, a rift in the house: FC Barcelona and Real Madrid were playing the next day, and there was no such thing as neutrality.  He made everyone at the table declare their loyalties!  Ice broken.



The Friday Evening Reflection



Fortunately, and under some duress, Brian agreed to translate for me during the reflection time.  He was not sure that he had the chops for it, but, in fact, he is a gifted translator and added immensely to the evening.  In groups of about five, the high school students reflected on empathy – times they had felt it, times they wanted someone to empathize with them, and how they might cultivate practices of empathy in their own lives.

Two of the university students, Vladimir de Jesus and Manuel, asked Brian and I if we would stay over that night and go for a jog with them the next day.  It sounded reasonable enough, and we were both enjoying ourselves, so we agreed.  We chatted some about music – Vladi had recently discovered “Down Under” by Men at Work, and was amused when I confessed that it had been my favorite song when it came out – when I was like eleven!



Manuel, Vickie, and Vladi run at 5!



At quarter of five the next morning, Vladi and Manuel were prodding me awake.  I thought there must be some emergency, but, no, that was not it.  Perhaps they had mentioned it and I had not understood because of the language, or perhaps they purposely “forgot” to bring it up at all, but they go running, usually with Vickie, at 5.  In the morning.  “We like to run before that sun comes up and it gets hot,” they explained.  I guess.  Fortunately, the pace was OK for those of us whose fast days are behind us, and it was on this day that I particularly enjoyed the coffee back at the Crispaz office.



Anyway, I was wonderfully impressed by Vickie and the students, and was fortunate enough to be able to visit a couple more times.  I am still hoping to work out an intercambio between my students and the Nuestro Ahora students.  I shall post about that if we are able to make it happen.

Beauty and Trash

El Salvador is a country of stunning beauty.  The same fault-line placement that renders it susceptible to seismic activity and landslides created a collection of volcanoes now covered by lush vegetation.  Juxtaposed with this natural beauty are tremendous quantities of trash.  In parts of San Salvador, I saw bags of trash piled on roofs of corrugated metal.  Heavy rains in the evenings swept a flow of garbage into the streambeds on the side of the volcano.  Even high above the town, where I could not imagine much refuse could gush down from above, the sheer quantity of litter surprised me.  In San Ramon, plastic wrappers, cartons, even clothing littered the streets.  This problem’s causes are not strictly meteorological and geographic – nor are they simply attributable to a lack of services.  Anita, who hosted me for a couple of weeks, lamented that such litter is the norm even though some parts of San Ramon do have sanitation services.  And of course the plastic that protects and preserves our stuff so conveniently and cheaply does not disintegrate back into the earth in short order.

On my first day in San Ramon, Hector had me hauling buckets of dirt, mud, wood, and even garbage with him as we cleared and leveled the floor of an outdoor kitchen behind the tiny house of a single mother of two children.  The rains that bring garbage down the mountainside had also deposited enough dirt and mud to make her kitchen unusable.  We toted the buckets up the street and dumped them onto a broken-up part of the road, filling in gaps where the pavement had crumbled or washed away.  I kept expecting someone to holler at us for dumping trash on the street, or for someone official to come ask for our permit.  No such thing.  I guess that as long as we were covering more trash than we were dumping, filling more holes than we were creating, nobody minded much.

A couple of years ago, I bought a kite.  I went to an actual kite store on Nantasket Beach and bought a kite that is designed to be taken apart and stowed in a small sack.  Well, it’s designed to be flown, but when you aren’t flying it, you take it apart and stow it.  It’s marketed as a kite for backpacking, believe it or not, but I was attracted by the idea of being able to carry it easily while riding my bike.  Pope John Paul II Park in Dorchester, MA, not far from me, tends to have great breezes for flying kites.  Some weekend days, kiting clubs fill the sky there with all manner of different designs.  If I recall correctly, I spent $27 on this kite.    Once I got it going, it was pretty relaxing, actually, and to be honest, I had never really flown a kite before.  (Whatever the Sunday comics might try to tell you, my North American childhood did not entail packs of kids running down to the sandlot with our homemade kites of various designs.)  I rode over to the park and flew it maybe a dozen times, perhaps twenty, but now the little plastic tubing that houses the shock cord is splitting.  I am not sure how easy it will be to salvage.  To tell the truth, my first instinct is just to replace it. 

Back to that first day in San Ramon, after a morning hauling dirt, in the afternoon we walked up the volcano to Las Nubes, “to visit some friends of mine,” said Hector.  I asked him why he didn’t have any friends who lived closer!  We reached one house just as the heavens opened.  Hector artfully arranged scrap pieces of corrugated metal, Rube Goldberg style, to direct water into empty oil drums.  In a house without running water, the downpour was an opportunity.  We stayed until the rain cleared.  As we walked on to our next stop, we met three children, about eight years old, playing in the road.  On the shaded, almost windless road, they were trying to fly kites, kites that they had fashioned out of sticks and the plastic bags that had washed down the gulley at the side of the road.  Hector helped the boys secure string to the sticks and launched the kites into the air.  They stayed airborne for a little while before they fluttered to the ground.  The kids were delighted that they had stayed up in the air so long.  Hector launched their kites one more time, and we walked on to visit another family.

Coffee

Like Jerry Seinfeld, I’ve never been much of a coffee drinker.  For some reason, in El Salvador I always felt a need to explain this.  Perhaps it came across as an oddity, or perhaps it smacked of rejecting hospitality.  Whatever the case, I did feel a need to explain it, although my fractured explanation generally seemed to satisfy whatever suspicions or wounded feelings may have existed: When I was a child, my parents used to say that coffee was a drink for grown-ups.  I still feel like a kid in a lot of ways, so I’m not ready to be a regular coffee drinker.



Gustavo cleans up after making some coffee.



As I traveled with Gustavo, Hector, and Maria Teresa to visit people in the community, we were always offered coffee.  They always accepted.  As often as not, Gustavo would take it upon himself to gather some wood, go out to the kitchen, and boil the water.  It took a few visits for me to understand that it was not simply that Gustavo likes coffee.  (He does.)  Making and drinking coffee gave the visits some structure and some rhythm.  There was never an awkward dynamic that I could sense, no feeling that “we have come to bring you a little food, and now we’ll stay for a while on top of that.”  We visited and were offered coffee.  Of course, since that took time to make, we could chat.  (Well, they could chat and I could try really hard to look like I understood the conversation.)  Drinking the coffee left more time for chatting.  In the course of that time, Gustavo, Maria Teresa, or Hector would have the opportunity to hear the stories of the people we visited, and sometimes to learn of particular needs that had arisen.  When the coffee was done, we could amble out without a sense that we had worn out our welcome or overburdened our hosts.

Coffee planted on steep terrain above San Ramon

Nestled here and there above San Ramon, in communities like Las Nubes, are coffee fields.  We are not talking about large and lucrative estates here, but fields large enough to be profitable for somebody.  That somebody does not, apparently, live in the community.  The men and women of the community sometimes have opportunities to work in these fields, especially when it is time to harvest the beans.  When I was there for a brief trip in March, we saw a group of youngish men heading into the field with one of those canister-backpacks.  They told us it was full of pesticides.  I don’t know what it was or if it was toxic to humans, but they certainly were not wearing anything protective.  In July, I did not see anyone working in those fields, and the beans were not ready for harvest yet.  One family that we visited – one of the highest up the volcano – lived near such a field.  Maria Teresa told me that the mother in the family would work in the field at harvest time, picking what she could and carrying the load down the steep hillside.

In recent years, coffee has been one of the products most visible in the much towards fairer trade conditions.  Coffee is not just a drink; the conditions of its growth, harvest, and sale are intimately related to issues like international trade agreements, urbanization, and migration.  Even absent trade regulations, Fair Trade coffee, while not required, is at the very least often available to US consumers.[1]  As with most agricultural products, I don’t think much about where coffee comes from.  It comes from Dunkin’ Donuts, that’s where it comes from.  So, it is always good to be reminded otherwise.  Seeing the lives of the people who would be harvesting that coffee is a goad, reminding me that if I do get coffee, I should be concerned about where it comes from. 

Crispaz grants space for artisans to sell their goods, and in addition to handcrafted clothing, bags, and woodwork, they sell small bags of fairly traded coffee.  Elisabeth always had it prepared in the mornings, and finally, one morning when my energy was low, I decided to have a cup.  While we have established that I am no connoisseur, I am willing to say that it was the tastiest cup of coffee that I have ever had.  I suppose that if I had grown up with that coffee, I might be a regular coffee drinker today.

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[1] See for instance Clawson, Julie A.  Everyday Justice: The Global Impact of Our Daily Choices. (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Press, 2009), 31-52.

Crime and Fatigue

Awareness of crime – especially violent crime – is pervasive in El Salvador, a country with one of the highest homicide rates in the world.  Houses are surrounded by walls topped with razor wire.  Armed (which is not necessarily the same thing as “trained”) guards stand outside banks, jewelry stores, even ice cream shops, and security is big business.  A people that clearly prizes hospitality as a virtue (more on that in a later post) seems also hesitant to open doors.  When in a car, we drove with doors locked and windows up.

When I visited in July, the newspaper reported that the Department of Sonsonate with a population of about a half million people, had already endured 300 homicides for the year.  While I was not directly affected personally, my visit to Chalatenango was complicated by violence.  Apparently a refusal (or inability?) to pay extortion fees to organized crime led to two workers on that bus route being assassinated.  The drivers’ perceived reluctance on the part of authorities to protect them adequately, which led to a bus drivers’ strike that lasted a few days.  I was fortunate that Crispaz was able to arrange for a driver to get me there and back; most people do not have that luxury.

The US State Department calls public transportation “risky and not recommended.”  On the other hand, buses, though hardly comfortable, are frequent, convenient, and inexpensive – within San Salvador, fares are 20 cents.  Tens of thousands of people ride the buses daily, the vast majority without incident.  I first took some bus rides with Salvadorans, then alone – and also without incident -- but always to friendly warnings that I should keep my pack on my lap, be home by dark, and, if mugged, just cooperate.  Standard advice, I suppose. 



A dirt road up the gorgeous volcano of San Salvador rises up out San Ramon, through the community of Las Nubes – still without safe drinking water in 2011 – and high above the capital.  I mentioned in passing that, if time permitted, I would love to walk to the top.  Several people – both Salvadorans and North American expatriates alike – told me that it would not be safe, and the likelihood of being mugged, even up there, would be very high.  My friend Gustavo eventually offered to take me up with a group, but more out of generosity than because he thought it was a good idea.  So, we never did go all the way  up.



Maria Teresa, Sarai, Gustavo, Hector, and Sylvia took me part way up the volcano.



All of this kept me wondering just how cautious I should be.  Was I too worried?  Not worried enough?  I certainly did not feel worried on the 20-minute daytime bus trips to San Ramon.  On the other hand, when my poor sense of direction left a couple of women who had escorted me taking the bus home after dark, I was desperately nervous until I got their call that they had arrived home safely.

I started to think that maybe my worry had been overblown, that I had listened to the warnings too attentively.  I thought with some shame of my undergraduate days in New Orleans.  As a freshman, I had been warned not to take the bus downtown, but to stick to the streetcar – which, by the way, is considerably slower.  I followed that advice for three years before I was willing to brave being the only white person on the bus downtown.  I was self-conscious and nervous.  You can bet that I kept my pack on my lap, planned to be home before dark, and was prepared to cooperate with any muggers.  Nobody on the bus, however, seemed to have any reaction to my presence whatsoever.  I felt stupid, alarmist, and racist.

On the other hand, the risks about which I had been warned are all too real in El Salvador.  The fact that Salvadorans face them daily does not make them less dangerous, just common.  I had the chance to put this dilemma to Brian Rude, a Lutheran minister from Canada who has been working in Salvadoran prison ministry for years.  He related that he has been mugged a number of times, and his apartment robbed on other occasions.  He addresses the situation by having a policy of never carrying with him anything he is not willing to give up.  I thought of St. Francis of Assisi, who justified his order’s vow of corporate poverty on the grounds that if they owned property, they might feel the urge to defend it, and therefore to harm those who were trying to take it.

So, there is legitimate reason to feel concerned about security in El Salvador.  It also must be, I would imagine, really exhausting to maintain that level of vigilance over the long haul.  The long-term effects of this vigilance cannot be good for the psychological health of individuals or of society as a whole.

Swatting Flies

Early on in my stay in El Salvador, I was fumbling my way through the daily newspaper.  I came across a startling headline that placed the Salvadoran unemployment rate somewhere in the seven percent range.  The old saw still holds true.  There are three types of lies: Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics.  While there a small number of Salvadorans are without any work, a large number are dramatically underemployed, so the seven percent rate is misleading.  Official employment numbers include work in both the formal and informal sectors of the economy, and it is in the informal sector – which accounts for something like half of all non-agriculural employment in El Salvador – that so many people can be categorized as “underemployed.”

The informal sector is broad, and includes street vendors of all types.  Young men hop on and off buses selling gum and candy, or canvas cars at stoplights with any number of wares.  One item being heavily “marketed” when I was there, I noticed, was the battery-powered flyswatter.  The zapping power of those big old purple bug-killing lamps folks in the US used to hang in their back yards during the summer, but in the shape of a small tennis racquet.

For my first couple of days in El Salvador, before heading out to the community of San Ramon for two weeks, I had the opportunity to tag along with a delegation from Cincinnati (including the Executive Director of Crispaz, Dennis O’Connor) as they visited a few of the country’s significant organizations and cultural sites.  One of these visits was with Comadres, La Comite de Madres, Mons. Romero.  The organization was founded in 1977 as a means of uniting the relatives of people who had been “disappeared” amidst government repression.  The women there spoke for hours about the traumatic events that led to their own involvement in the group.  One woman recounted the details of her search for her daughter – whose corpse she eventually found – as if had all happened in the past week, not in 1979.  Without melodrama, she frankly admitted that she did not believe that she would EVER get over the pain of those events, but that she knew she had to share them nonetheless.  That was a motif that shot through my entire visit, in fact.  The enduring legacy of trauma for so many people has not been wiped away by a couple of decades of (comparatively speaking) peace and stability.

We all sweltered in the humid July afternoon air.  The heaviness of the air, though, was nothing compared to that of the reality being recounted.  Amid the intensity of the long afternoon, Alexis, the delegation leader from Crispaz who translated the proceedings, asked to take a break.  If we thought that the hiatus would provide much respite, though, we were wrong.  It simply gave us the opportunity to view some of the hundreds of graphic photos of murdered, often mutilated, victims of the repression that Comadres had managed to collect.

As we ground through a fascinating, exhausting, perhaps disheartening afternoon, someone would occasionally pick up the bug zapper and swat at a fly.  In most instances, I would hardly have noticed such an action at all, but on this day it seemed filled with importance, however unintentional.  It gave ME a tiny jolt, too.  Juxtaposed with a picture of a power structure that had systematically engaged in the wanton killing of thousands of people, the casual swat at a couple of flies became for me a startling symbol of what happens when we slip into thinking of others not as human persons but as pests.

A Short Introduction to a Month in El Salvador

In March of 2011, I made my first-ever visit to El Salvador as a member of a Crispaz delegation from the Boston College School of Theology and Ministry.  In fact, it was my first trip to Latin America at all.  We visited significant sites and met with people and organizations doing the kind of work that interests Crispaz – Christians for Peace in El Salvador.

Crispaz emphasizes the concept of “reverse mission.”  A delegation trip is less about doing some kind of social service or missionary work than it is about meeting people and being moved by their realities.  The hope, then, is that delegation trip members, on their return home, will look for ways to teach others about the Salvadoran reality and engage in activities that allow them to accompany the Salvadoran people.

After my delegation trip, I, like the rest of my group, spent some time thinking and praying about what a next step for me would be.  How could I take this experience and let it affect my daily life as a schoolteacher, student, and person?  In fact, I was at the Easter Vigil Mass about six weeks later when I experienced a strong urge to ask Crispaz about returning to El Salvador for a longer trip.  (I think Ignatius probably would have called it an experience of “consolation without previous cause.”)  Having had such a positive experience with Crispaz for a one-week delegation trip, I decided to ask them about their Summer Immersion Program.

When I got in touch with Dennis, the executive director of Crispaz at their office in Cincinnati, I laid out some of my practical obstacles to doing this: my Spanish is poor for one, and I was going to have to take a summer class that would only leave me 4 weeks for the visit.  The Summer Immersion Program is generally designed more for a seven or eight week stay.  Dennis reassured me on both counts – I had enough Spanish to get by, and four weeks was long enough to have a meaningful experience accompanying the Salvadoran people.

Crispaz set to work organizing people for me to accompany, and I prepared by starting to watch soccer (futbol) on the Spanish channel.  It did not help.  I only learned how to say “foul,” “corner kick,” and “Gooooooooooooool!”  In any case, I did arrive in San Salvador in late July and stayed for four weeks.  Herein I’d like, somewhat belatedly, to reflect on some of that experience.