During our tour, we were based at a guest house in San Salvador, the capital. Our trip was organized by a great non-profit organization there, called “Centro de Intercambio y Solaridad (Center of Exchange and Solidarity)” and we had a guide named Christie (www.cis-elsalvador.org). She was born in El Salvador and so nice and intelligent. She spoke great English but of course spoke none of that to us so we could practice our Spanish :) San Salvador is a very busy, crowded city (a lot like Guatemala City in some ways), but there was a lot to learn too. In 1980, when the army started massacring many of the indigenous populations to take their land (and also out of pure racism as well), the Catholic archbishop, Óscar Romero, stood up in protest against the army. Before and after his assassination by the army, he was a huge inspiration to the poor population – you see paintings and statues dedicated to him everywhere. Much of the history we learned focused around him. You can see a statue dedicated to him in one of the main churches in San Salvador…
Another highlight of this trip was definitely the food. At guest house in San Salvador, a lady named Carmencita made all our meals – complete with thick and fresh corn tortillas, fresh veggies and fruit, and of course, black beans! El Salvador is also famous for “pupusas” – thick, hand-made corn biscuit-like flat bread (made using masa de maíz, a maize flour dough used in a lot of Latin America) that is stuffed with one or more of the following beans, meat, or beans and cheese that actually are not a tradition of indigenous communities but rather just developed into something popular in recent years. Below you can see the ladies grilling tons of pupusas outside a great “pupusería” we visited for dinner.
Pupusas!
Hanging out after dinner at the guest house…
As I said before, one of the most emotionally charged parts of the trip was the visits (two of which were overnight) to the rural communities. We brought lots of piñatas for the kids and were lucky enough to sit and listen to their stories of economic and emotional hardship throughout the civil war and recent years. In a community called San Antonio, the community is fortunately semi-self-sustaining with a new bakery and a small association of people who give prescriptions to people who are sick, but they do not have the capacity to change their status much more. The family we stayed with for the night had 6 people (2 young children included) living in one room filled with their four beds and a small kitchen attached. Raquel and I sat with the family for a couple hours that night in their house (everyone stayed with different families in pairs), and the father told us about how the community has the capacity to grow food and sell it, but in El Salvador today, there are not any buyers. Most of the rest of the rural population is similarly struggling to self-sustain their own communities and are not going to buy goods from the others.
A couple pictures of one of the houses in a rural community (called “Cinquera”) where we stayed for the night –
…In this room, there are 3 beds are on the other side of the room and you can see one of their babies sleeping on the floor.
And unfortunately, there is not much government relief for these communities but rather more challenges. In the first community we visited the community leaders told us about their recent struggles just to keep their land. The government wants to charge them inordinate amounts of taxes (basically to take their land away). What is even more unjust is that the taxes that they might charge to big international companies is much lower – there is a lot of government corruption related to business and personal interests mixed. But despite all these depressing issues, I was very touched by the optimism, compassion, and wonderful personality these people had. We had so much fun breaking piñatas, eating traditional lunches, exploring the country side, playing games, and just talking casually to all these people.
A short hike in one of the first communities we visited –
And afterward chilling by a waterfall
¡PIÑATA FUN!
…he has his candy in his shirt, :)
The people of “La Loma” put on a show for us…
Then we played “duck-duck-goose” or “pato-pato-ganso…”
At one of the communities where they sustain themselves by dying and designing clothes with indigo dye, we got to learn how they make the designs – they sew the white cloth before dying it to produce some beautiful patterns.
The original sewing…
And the final product
All-in-all, my experience in El Salvador was a very special one. We finished off the trip by meeting with the leftist political party, FMLN that gratefully, just got the presidency a few weeks ago! It was so interesting to hear from the FMLN advisors about their possible plans to extend health care and education. Hopefully, little by little, this is a step in the right direction to helping stop corruption in government and redistribute the resources to the poorer populations.
On the very last day of the trip, we had a conference at a Jesuit private university, “Universidad Centroamericana” in San Salvador with Dean Brackley, a professor originally from the United States who has been working in El Salvador for many years. He has a really great perspective of the history and current problems facing the majority of the population in El Salvador. If you want to read one of his famous articles, it’s called “Ruined for Life.” We talked to him about the trials with the Catholic church during the war, immigration (In Central America, El Salvador has the HIGHEST percentage of its population living in the United States, sending remittances back to the country), and we had the opportunity to reflect on having saw such depressing poverty. It was tough seeing all these kids living in such tough conditions. It depresses you about the state of the world, but at the same time, it motivates you to do more in your life. I have definitely changed my feelings about what specialty I may choose in medical school – I’m thinking of choosing a specialty more related to the third world. I never thought about it much before, but some specialties are not as applicable in the third world – countries like this do not really need advanced cancer therapy research, but rather, they just need basic surgery and primary care of their daily colds and infections. Anyway, we’ll see what happens in the future. It all depends on how I decide to focus my career.
Anyway, Dean Brackley helped us tie up our thoughts and impressions of the trip up well. Reflecting on the experience of facing poverty he told us one of his famous quotes, “It’s the great gift of the poor to break your heart and make you fall in love and return you ruined for life.”
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