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.