The Cronut and the American Nightmare

I don't think I'm meant for first class. Sitting in the front row I feel like the bearer of bad news for each person that passes.

¨Coach again, sorry. Move it down the line.¨

Do I make eye contact or not? Or do I give that face that loosely translates to "Well, bud, if you would have just gone that extra mile, maybe tried just a liiiiiitle bit harder, you'd be sitting here too."

In reality I'm just riding someone else's coattails. My family flies a lot for work and has miles saved up so they decided to make my momentary return to the United States as opulent as possible. As I sat there in 1C trading sips of bourbon with bites of my bountiful breakfast, I thought how I couldn´t tell any of my Salvadoran neighbors even a little bit about any of this. 

Salvadorans have this mentality that's sort of like social version of object permanence. If I was sick one time and politely declined one of Niña Maria's tamales de gallina, she will most certainly never offer me them again because clearly I hate tamales, especially hers. In a similar way, if I go to the United States and just so happen to go boating, stay in a resort, get a massage, and fly around in a helicopter (!!!), that must be what the American experience is. Always and forever. 

The closest I came to culture shock was repeatedly pulling out a $5 bill at the register and being surprised when the cashier asked for more.  In the brief time I was in San Francisco, I marveled at the lines. San Francisco is Disneyland, with lines around the corner for things as simple as a donut. Excuse me, cronut. You end up spending more time waiting for something cool to happen then you do actually experiencing it.

But it's not about the destination, it's the journey, man...

It's saturating even more. Soon everyone will be looking for condos in the North Bay.

Oakland is already fucked. Correction: Oakland has been fucked, just in a different way. When my brother drove me to his apartment I thought it was part of an elaborate joke. Corner, after corner completely boarded up and trashed. It looked like someone decided to sweep out every crack den in a ten mile radius and just left it there. I begun to question who in the car lived in a third world country. 

Is this America?

But three deadbolts and flight of stairs later I was on a couch, connected to wifi again. The rottweilers incessantly barking the only reminder of my true surroundings. 

I guess that this is America. It's easy to forget when in first class or in a small Salvadoran town where everyone believes that America's streets are paved with gold. I really wish that people from my community could make that drive with my brother and me. To see their faces as we'd drift farther and farther from the corners lined with patient customers and closer and closer to the corners lined with the dirty fucking truth. So they could see that there's not just the American Dream. Right down the road is the American Nightmare. 

Three Fires

They said Jonathan was walking home with his little sister in his arms, his mother by his side. They said he lived in an isolated area, that you had to walk through the woods in order to get there. They said that when they got home, four men in masks stepped out and told me to give his sister to his mother, that they had come to kill him. They said that his mother and and his sister saw everything.

I found out via text. A student asked me if we could postpone our meeting because he had a funeral to attend. The meeting was a chance for my youth group to prepare in order to replicate a workshop I had done with them about violence prevention. Here we were about to talk to students about the effects of violence and no one could attend because they had to lay a fellow ninth grader to rest.

Código cerrado
People said that Jonathan had been involved in some capacity with the gang Mara Salvatrucha also known as MS-13. Apparently he was seen crying the day after they killed his friend, another suspected gang affiliate. His friend was sleeping only a few blocks from where I live when they knocked on his door, claiming to be the police. When he came out, they ambushed him. Four weeks later, it was Jonathan's turn. Other people said that while it was true that Jonathan was involved in gangs at one point, he recently wanted to get out and even moved to escape but the gang found him.

It's known here as the código cerrado, or closed code. You can join the gang but you can never leave. Many times gangs recruit young boys because they know that they're impressionable and that the judge won't throw the book at a 13 year old. For many Salvadoran boys they do it out of fear, love or respect. Some have been left behind by their parents who emigrated to the US and are seeking a family or a bond to fill that void. Others are born into destitution, economically and socially isolated and see the gang as a way for them to be someone, to be feared and even respected. For whatever reason it maybe, they have to do something heinous to be initiated.

Someone told me that a few years back a bus driver was murdered in the nearby town of San Luis. Transportation business are one of the main targets for extortion here in El Salvador. If the company operates in a gang-controlled area they must pay "rent" to the gang. If they don't, one of their drivers' names appears in the newspaper the next day. Supposedly that's what happened in San Luis. Only the trigger man was a 14 year old who was handed a pistol and told to show his bravery. A police officer told me that he's still in jail. Maybe that's what happened with Jonathan. Maybe he was asked to do something that he couldn't bring himself to do.

They say that the gang leaders can turn the homicides on and off like a faucet. In 2012, the government negotiated with MS-13 and rival gang Barrio 18 to reach a truce which caused the murder rate to plummet. In return for making peace, the incarcerated gang leaders were rewarded with better treatment in lower security prisons. However since 2012 the homicides have returned and even surpassed the pre-truce murder rates. The government has responded by moving gang leaders back to maximum security. Now in retaliation it appears that gang leaders are giving the orders for more murders.

My community is in the department of Morazán which used to be regarded as the safest department in all El Salvador with barely any murders to speak of. However that has all changed as in the last few weeks there's been an explosion in violence, claiming the lives of close to twenty people, a good portion of them students. It appears that instead of murdering rival gang members, MS-13 is doing internal cleaning, killing those who are involved in MS13 but have failed them in some way. It could be that Jonathan's murder was nothing more than an attempt by gang leaders to inflate numbers, the thinking being that if the situation gets worse enough, the government will come looking for another truce and be willing to give concessions.

 Could be, maybe, no one really knows because no one really talks. It's common to see three words next to gang graffiti; "Ver. Oir. Callar." "See. Hear. Shut up.".

La sombra negra
There were whisperings that Jonathan's murderers weren't gang members. Some believed that it was the police. In recent months police officers and soldiers have been gunned down for wearing their uniforms. Even family members of soldiers and officers are targeted. Were as a few years ago gangs murdered each other mostly over territory disputes, now they are attacking the state , armed to the teeth with automatic rifles and grenades. There are those that say the police have become fed up with the government and the justice system's inefficiency and that they're taking matters into their own hands by eliminating gang members in the middle of the night.

Others say that it wasn't the police that killed Jonathan but rather it was a community vigilante group. On particularly famous example of this vigilante group is known as La Sombra Negra, or "Black Shadow, who tortured and killed dozens of gang members in the 90's. In other parts of the world it would seem crazy to think community members would join forces to kill other community members, but not here. In northern Morazán where I live, many of my neighbors where guerrilla fighters during the Salvadoran civil war. They are no strangers to the meaning of death, or the act of taking someone's life for the "greater good". Not only are they trained soldiers but the war left them unified and organized. Who would be better qualified to form a vigilante group than them?

But more sentences end with vague question marks than defined periods. Even what you read in the papers is confusing. Like Jonathan's friend's murder, there have been reports of gang members dressing up like police officers to kill their victims. People have said that police dress like civilians to kill gang members in the middle of the night. It's a masquerade of vengeful violence. I was talking to a community member about Jonathan's death and the how no one could agree on who did it, whether it was the gang, the police, or a vigilante group. He told me that it's like being surrounded by three fires. You don't know from which the heat is coming from but you do know that you're slowly burning.

Work
I decided to move sites after Jonathan's death. I realized that I had no idea what was going on in my community. In general, a volunteer should understand their community, the better they do, the better they can serve. But more specifically I was working on violence prevention. To do this I enlisted the help of community leaders, made in-roads with police officers and other related institutions. I compiled  loads of information on domestic violence, child abuse, bullying, conflict resolution, and gang violence. I immersed myself in it so much that I thought that I understood the situation. With Jonathan's murder I found out that I didn't have a clue. No one could even agree on who was the perpetrator. How could pretend to be an expert? I'm only trying to help but I'm not trained for this.

The other reason I left was because no one knows when it will end. It seems that with the rash of recent murders that the bottom has dropped out of Morazán. I know people that I'm certain are either behind some of the murders or who they themselves will be dead in the next three months. It's just not a healthy environment. The hardest part of leaving was thinking how easy it was for me to pack up and move when others in the community had no choice but to stay. When I told my host grandmother about my departure, we both stood in her kitchen and cried. She cried not only because I was leaving but she was also crying for her community. She told me how peaceful it used to be, that all the evils happened elsewhere, not in her community. People keep so hush when bad things happen that I think their anxiety grows. As she saw me leave maybe she could see how all those things have accumulated and destroyed what was once her sanctuary,

When I told people I was moving, they kept asking me why, that they only murdered gang affiliates. While that seems to be mostly true I don't think people realize the secondary effects. Fear is a very complex and messy emotion that finds its way into the nooks and crannies of our thoughts and behaviors. A fellow volunteer was telling me that she was seeking interest amongst the youth in her community to start a scholarship program so that they could attend a nearby high school. While many wanted to continue their education, they said it wasn't worth the risk of being targeted by gang members. They were safer at home, helping their family in the fields. Similarly, I've heard that people don't want to start a business because they don't want to deal with the extortion. The social and economic consequences extend far beyond the death of a few.

The Cost of Leaving
My institution experienced a crisis in 2012. The security situation got so serious in Honduras that Washington decided to evacuate all volunteers. Washington began analyzing the situation in El Salvador and were considering following suit. During their assessment, the number of volunteers dropped from well over a hundred to under twenty in the matter of months.Eventually new security measures were implemented and now we are around sixty volunteers currently serving in country.

On my way to the hotel after a difficult meeting in which I decided to change sites, I began to chat with the taxi driver who always drives for volunteers visiting San Salvador. I'll call him Diego. Diego told me that a few months before my institution's security reevaluation which caused a mass volunteer exodus, he decided to take out a loan in order to by more cars for his taxi company. Being that volunteers were a significant portion of his clientele, his business shored up over night. He told me that he lost everything, the cars and even his house. Shortly after, his son was diagnosed with some vision ailment and went blind. Then a driver of his was murdered for reasons he said were unknown. He told me that he's slowly working himself out of the hole. That's why I was stunned to find out that on top of all of this, he and his company are still charged thousands every month in extortions. When I asked him if he ever thought about doing something else he said he has no choice but to keep on driving.

My new site is on the other side of the country, in the north-western department of Santa Ana. When I was leaving Morazán everyone told me how much worse the situation was in Santa Ana. Since I've got here, I've heard nothing of gang activity here while Morazán is passing through possibly its most violent moment since the civil war. A Morazán volunteer recently left her site after a double homicide. It makes you wonder what the tipping point is. Will we reach a critical mass where all the seemingly insignificant deaths will accumulate in our departure? While we as an institution may leave and move on, the hardest working Salvadorans don't have much of a choice. Either abandon their family here to make the dangerous journey north, or stay and endure the dangers of trying to make the best of their lives here in El Salvador. I'm unsure which is safer.

Tino

I no longer know what to do about Tino. It’s easy when he’s sprawled out on the side of the street, drooling unconscious with the merciless rays of high noon beating upon his face. The children sidestep him like a fallen tree branch on their way home from school.

Sometimes I see him walking up the hill from our colonia, our paths due to intersect. As he wobbles towards me I tell myself I won’t even acknowledge his existence. He doesn’t even deserve that. But whether it’s guilt or curiosity, I often end up making eye contact with him. His glassy eyes brighten as a smile shoots out across his face. It’s a smile of desperation, a smile that seems forced yet somehow genuine. It’s as if he wants me to smile back like we’re old friends, as if he hadn’t burned his life to the ground and that he won’t die alone after all.

A greeting always escapes my mouth.

If he were to ever stand straight he’d be close to six feet tall. His jeans and sloppily tucked in buttonups do little to hide the frail figure that a lifetime of neglect and abuse has given him. A permanent gray and black scruff clings to his face, his sunken eyes hidden beneath the brow of his dirtied white sombrero.

I always wonder where he goes. How he manages to scrape his cents together to go and buy his vices. The woman I live with is named Catalina. One time she said he propositioned her, “I’ll give you $40 if you come to my house right now.” She scoffed as she told me this. “I’m worth much more than $40.” she exclaimed, only half joking.

All the houses in my neighborhood were donated after the civil war. They’re all identical tiny squares with black tiles, dusty gray cinderblocks and tired red and yellow tiles. Many times a family of eight or more will share the same four walls, yet Tino lives alone.

Our lives are intertwined by proximity. I could underhand a mango and hit the roof of his house from my front door. I can’t help but see him as I walk by, swinging in his filthy hammock, a blaring radio his only company.

Late last year his advances at Catalina became more persistent. With her husband having left more than a decade ago, he must feel like she’s an easy target. The propositions continued, along with the catcalls intermingled with outright insults until early one morning he found her alone at the restaurant where she works. It appeared as if he hadn’t slept but spent the night drinking instead. He ordered a liter of beer. He quickly drained the bottle and then tried to make an advance only to be told off. Enraged, he curled a fist and threw it into Catalina. In one swift movement she grabbed the bottle off the table and shattered it over the side of his head. Catalina called her brothers and sisters and as Tino stumbled, bleeding back to his house, they intercepted him. Fists and feet rained upon him until he managed to get away and lock himself in his house. He didn’t come out for two days.

It was then I decided to never speak to him again. And I didn’t. When he finally emerged with the tattered bandages covering the side of his head, I went by him without a word. And so did a lot of people. Drunks are normally ignored and ridiculed here, but Tino managed to find a level below worthlessness and moved right in.

Soon his unreturned greetings began to show pangs of desperation. With watery eyes and a child like expression he would call my name out. This gets me because very few people actually call me by my name, opting for “Gringo”. I don’t necessarily mind being called gringo but sometimes it irks me. Any American could move here tomorrow and they would call him the same name. It’s to say me living and working here for the past year has done nothing to embellish my identity in their minds, I’m just an interchangeable “Gringo” and not “Daniel” the person. So when Tino calls out my name it naturally makes me stop.

This man is a predator, a sleaze, and a drunk. In large part he is the author to his own demise. He has repeatedly hurt and terrorized one of the kindest people I know. So why is it that I can’t ignore him?

Maybe it’s like how I feel with my name. I dream of being more than the “Gringo”, for someone to recognize my humanity. Maybe by the same token, maybe he wishes to be more than the invisible bolo (drunk). Because despite all of his faults and all the terrible things he’s done, he is still a human being capable of feeling pain. Pain that is so palpable that when you look into his welling, sullen eyes you both know that the best he can wish for is that someone simply acknowledges that he’s still alive.

The End of Suffering

Note: I originally wrote this for the PC publication, hence it's geared to an audience of volunteers.

It took me awhile to realize it was there. Training is a steam whistle, continuous and intense until one day, it stops. You’re dropped off in your site with the ringing in your ears.

Homesickness, culture shock, doubt, isolation, and devastating boredom all hit in waves. But while these all come and go, this, it sits with you, hard and unmoving.

I don’t think I’m crazy to say that all of us have it. While we piss and moan about the stems and even the roots we can’t even seem to mention the trunk. What lays at the center of it all.

Because after the pages have fallen off the calendar, and as the time that I’ve spent with myself day after day has grown, I’ve finally begun to scrape it all away and I know now it’s been there this entire time.

It’s this overwhelming, all-enveloping and complete sadness.

I can already hear my phone ringing a few days after this is published. Also, I can see some eyes glaze over as this is chalked up to a pity piece. Trust me (staff), I am fine. I’m actually so good that I am writing this.

It’s that feeling when you look at trainees. After the initial exchange of pleasantries and genuine excitement. You look at their face and you think “You poor bastard”.

It’s laying in the hammock during a sweltering afternoon, your eyes fixed on a spot on the wall, lost in the screams of the chicharras.

It’s the bitterness, the feeling of being underappreciated, misunderstood and treated as “El Gringo” and not as a human-being with family, friends and emotional needs.

Yes, there are tremendous highs and we are all lucky to be here. I’ve just been feeling like we aren’t calling it for what it is. What’s at the base of cliches like “It’s the hardest job you’ll ever love!”.

Hard. Hardness.Hardship. Sadness. Pain.

I used to think that this was just PC, but I now know that it’s larger than that. Staring at that point on the wall, I’ve discovered two things:

1. Sadness is the foundation of life.
2. Pain is beauty.

Let’s see if I can express this without sounding like a brooding teenager, spilling his soul on his livejournal account.

Life is trauma from the first day. We spend nine months floating in the warm, secure darkness of our mother. Then, the fluid we’ve come to understand as an extension of ourselves is flushed from around us, sending us falling, mercilessly pressed through a tiny hole, impossibly large figures grabbing at us, the lights burning our eyes. It is then that we learn to cry.

It makes me think of the Buddhist belief of nirvana. Nirvana is unlike the pursuit of happiness, or the Christian belief of eternal bliss as the reward for terrestrial life. It is not learning to be joyful, it is learning how to stop the pain.

“The search for a spiritual path is born out of suffering. It does not start with lights and ecstasy but with the hard tacks of pain, disappointment and confusion. However, for suffering to give birth to a genuine spiritual search, it must amount to more than something passively received from without. It has to trigger an inner realization, a perception that pierces through the facile complacency of our usual encounter with the world to glimpse the insecurity perpetually gaping underfoot.”

-Chapter 1, The Noble Eightfold Path: The Way to End Suffering

To glimpse the insecurity perpetually gaping underfoot.

In other worlds, while we focus on how quirky our lives can be at times (Everyone laughed when I tried to eat a pupusa with a fork!) or our daily struggles (No one showed up from my English class...again) these experiences are secondary. At the core of this entire experience is an immense body of pain and suffering.

Feels good, don’t it?

But in our endless quest to find a Disney-quality happy ending, there is hope.

Which takes me to my second point: Pain is beauty.

Enter Louis Armstrong. On the checklist of the requirements needed to have a shitty life, Louis managed to hit all boxes. Abandoned by father, check. Born black in the United States, check. Mother is a prostitute, check. Lives in squalor, check. So how is it that this man managed to overcome impossible obstacles to become one of the most renowned and celebrated musicians of his time? (Hint: it wasn’t his happy-go-lucky attitude or his “go-gettem” spirit).

Like many black musicians born into a society designed to see them fail, he used what he had and what he had was an abundance of pain and misery. Slave hymns that turned into the Blues, Jazz, and Rock&Roll aren’t “happy” songs. They speak of devastating pain and desolation. Yet something happens when these songs reach the ear of another humanbeing. This misery set to tune resonates with the listener, fills them with those emotions. This experience can be so profound that the oddest thing happens. That misery beings to trigger feelings of pure, elated joy.

Just like crying your eyes out to a good drama, or swapping war stories with another volunteer, pain is beautiful when shared.

In a sense, that is why I am sharing this with you. So we can actually express ourselves and not fear that if we acknowledge the insecurity perpetually gaping underfoot that we are depressed or unfit for this job. Rather, the crushing lows that we all face should band us together, remind us of the foundation that we all share. Only through manifesting this suffering, sharing, can we begin to convert our misery to joy.

Whiney Masochists

Nobody wakes up in the PC.  You plan for years in advanced,  beefing up your resume to be worldly and worthy enough.  It's a tedious,  intentional process, something that can be easily forgotten at times.

Complaining has become our official sport as volunteers.  We brag about how horrendous conditions are in our sites,  battling for the superlative of "the worst site" .  Others complain about their indoor plumbing,  how it's robbing them of the "authentic PC experience". We're whiney masochists who stand tall and taunt "BRING IT ON,  WORLD",  and then later,  as we lay licking our wounds, we murmur to ourselves "... you didn't have to be such a dick about it..."

On one hand,  we've abandoned our cultures,  our families and loved ones,  let as at least hold on to our right to complain.  On the other hand,  we need to get over ourselves.

Like anything,  there are volunteers who are here for the wrong reasons.  I've heard some staff comment that today's volunteers are much more self-motivated than past generations of volunteers.  A ways of obtaining cheaper grad school,  learning a second language to better your future employment,  or having the opportunity to swaddle the third world in your first world blanket,  we aren't necessarily the altruists that Jack Kennedy had in mind.

And that's okay.

For whatever reasons volunteers do it,  every single expectation is meticulously pulverized within the first month of being here.  The other 26th months are the real journey,  to find out what you really are doing down here. 

People always bring up the physical challenges.  Nightmarish latrines,  the heat, and the pestilence can all become burdens that weigh very heavily. However, being stuck in sub par conditions isn't the biggest challenge I face.  It's being stuck with myself.  I've had to learn how to be alone.  How to accept the fact that no one in my community will truly understand me. How to be a spectacle, the sole embodiment of an immense country that triggers an equally immense array of feelings.

Over half of volunteers have some access to Internet,  it just so happens that mine is wireless and accessible from my bed (it's quite marvelous,  though I am being robbed of the true PC experience...). I spend a good amount of time on Skype,  talking to my family and my partner in crime Samantha.  Sometimes I feel like I'm speaking face to face with them, I feel their proximity and revel in their. company.  Only something happens when I skype with a large group.  The interactions between them remind me that in that moment,  I occupy a rectangle atop a coffee table. I can't smell what they're cooking,  feel their touch,  or see anything more than the camera angle permits me to see. It's an odd feeling being two dimensional. The man trapped inside the box.

I know,  let's all feel bad for me now,  even though I signed up for this sweet,  sweet torture.

What it is is a disconnect. You have no idea what you're going to feel until your far away in your strange corner of the earth and it's just you and your thoughts. 

Canela

I'm a dad now.

In my mind's eye, I see a sad sack, lost somewhere in his late twenties. There's an eighteen pound screaming baby strapped to his chest like a suicide bomber. He's sweating, multitasking, trying to defuse the explosives once again while attempting a conversation with an old friend. Inevitably, he's asked about his child, how that came about. Forcing a wincing smile, he explains that it "just sort of happened". Well I feel like it "just sort of happened" to me too.

Her name is Canela. She has glossy caramel-colored fur that's accented by stripes of white that cover her neck, belly, and paws. Her emerald green eyes look at you with this eternal dopey stare. Being that she's only 4 weeks old, I have no idea if she sees me or just a blurry mess of shapes and colors. She routinely hiccups, making her seize as she sleeps atop a discarded pair of boxers on my floor.

Despite being just one of a large litter, she's now an only child. Birthed into a shallow latrine hole, my host grandmother tells me that when they went to check on the pups one day, all the rest had disappeared. Something had come in the middle of night to take them and for whatever reason wanted to leave a witness. Only Canela knows what happened to her brothers and sisters.

Her mother's name is Princesa, who is by no means an exemplary mother. While the two were living at my host grandmother’s house she would leave Canela to sleep alone as she went out into the night to slum through the neighborhood, looking for love. Extremely emaciated, her leathery underbelly looks worse for wear. As she reluctantly lays on the floor, Canela pounces and pounces on her mothers chest, as if performing CPR on a teat that had died long ago.

I say that this whole adoption just happened because my host mother and siblings wanted a puppy too. It was a good sign that they said they really wanted to care for her and take her on walks, as most dogs here are kept behind fences and fed tortillas their entire life. So I decided to bring her to our house one day last week. I think I slept for about four hours that night as she whimpered and tried to escape the hodgepodge kennel that I had made with a guitar case, cardboard box, and a trashcan.

Let me just state that I have absolutely no idea what I am doing. I’ve become a manic parent that bombards Google with an endless stream of questions in the hopes of becoming a bonafide Puppiologist. My two chief advisors are my girlfriend Sammy (life long animal addict) and this guy:

Unsurprisingly, my ideology on how to raise a puppy drastically differs from that of my host family.  Most of this came about when my host mother became annoyed when she learned I had taken Canela to her old house so she could breastfeed, fearing that she’ll never become our dog if she keeps visiting her old house. I tried to explain to her that I had read extensively online that separating a puppy from it’s mother before 8 weeks can be damaging, but my host mother just scoffed and told me that was nonsense.  She then proceeded to deny that animal behaviorists are knowledgeable and then affirmed that she knew as much as anyone else about the raising of puppy despite the fact she’d never done it before. I envisioned Ted Cruz In a Hummer doing donuts on a melting ice cap while shouting about the great hoax of global warming.

Needless to say, rural El Salvador is not a culture that champions scientific-based facts. For instance, when I was cuddling with Canela one day, I was told that I shouldn’t hold her too much because she will get skinny if I do so. I’ve heard a lot of Salvadoran myths but this one was extraordinarily ridiculous. And this belief’s effect shows in the behavior of my host family. The youngest is the only one that actually touches Canela. The rest kind of admire her cuteness as if she was behind a show window.

Essentially the only thing puppies have going for them is their appearance, a living and breathing doll to gaze at. They are strapped to a poll and kept behind a fence, forced to watch as people come and go without much interaction. Instead of learning to be friendly with people, social deprivation makes them weary of any visitor and by the time they’re an adult they bark at anything and everything that comes close to their fence.  Like Russian orphans denied the simple pleasures of touch, dogs too become antisocial and violent.

I was talking to my brother and he was imagining what would happen if you showed a Salvadoran a well trained dog? You know, one that can do all those stupid tricks like fetch a beer. I’d like to imagine that it would make them realize how complex and dignified dogs can be.  In reality, the image that actually comes to mind is a rural Salvadoran in a hammock, throwing stones at an oblivious pooch, yelling “CERVEZA, CERVEZA!”.

The Sound of Democracy

One of the biggest complaints of Americans living in El Salvador is the noise. Roosters, trucks, dogs, children, and a laundry list of other obnoxious sounds tagteam your eardrums to the point were you can't take it anymore. I haven't decided whether Salvadorans have developed a super human strength at blocking things out, or they've never developed the concept of loud noises being annoying in the first place. I've yet to see it, but I'm certain that a Salvy baby could slumber peacefully while occupying the same room as a running chainsaw. They're that good.

This phenomenon is particularly relevant during the month of February. It's election season, and the cacophony is swelling. Sometime, long ago, a Salvadoran politician decided that there was a congruous relationship between political vitality and noise: the more noise a campaign makes, the more successful it will be. Candidates plaster pick up trucks with their own faces and party colors. In the bed of the pick up are two massive speakers, turned up to arena rock decimal levels, blasting their political aspirations and theme music into the head of any innocent bystander lucky enough to lie in their wake. You're sitting with your friends, having a nice afternoon chat when you're instantly transported to the front row of the worst concert of your life.

In order to eloquently state their political cause, many local candidates have resorted to the purest of all art forms: karaoke. Their ingenious political advisors have found the instrumentals to well-known pop songs like Darte un beso, hijacked the melody and superimposed their wild array of grandiose accolades and political promises. Living in a small Salvadoran town embroiled in a close political race is like owning an ipod filled with six of the worst songs imaginable, and being forced to listen to them of shuffle for a month straight.

But my question is, if Salvadorans are so good at ignoring the existence of heinous sound waves, why do candidates still blast their message to potencial voters in hopes of being heard? I think that this realization makes it all the more depressing. All this constant, aggressive, all-out audio assault and it most likely changes nothing.

As a representative of the United States government, I'm disallowed to engage in Salvadoran politics and I must flee any situations that could be considered even remotely partisan. On a certain level it's nice to see groups of people unified in a cause and exercising their right to vote, a right that many had to wage a long and bloody civil war in order to obtain. However, I can't help but find it all distasteful.

It's not just the noise. It's the combative partisanship, the impossible promises, the clientelism, and the naïve belief that, if elected, one person will single-handedly solve all of the community's problems that makes me feel disenchanted with the political process as a whole.

In a way, I find being a volunteer forcibly removed from politics quite therapeutic. Who ever wins on March 1st, whether they're left, right or ambidextrous, I must work with them, something that a lot of people here will not do on principle in order to show allegiance to their hapless political party. This leads to deeply partisan communities and increased inefficiency as large sections of the community are obstinate to collaborate.

Soon that will all change with the recent passage of the legislative reform known as Consejos municipales plurales,  or Pluralistic Municipal Councils. Under this reform, candidates who've lost the mayoral elections in their municipality will be afforded the opportunity to occupy a position on the winning mayoral candidate's council. The hope is that the integration of minority political parties with cut down partisanship and encourage political parties to work together for the good of their communities. It's an ambitious political reform that will no doubt create trouble and controversy when it is implemented next election cycle, but it's a creative approach to solve an obvious problem.

Who knows, maybe a less partisan political environment will even allow me to sleep at night.

Llano de Muerto

To say that I almost killed him would be an exaggeration.  

We had gone to Llano de Muerto, one of those fledgling tourist centers sprinkled about the roaming hills near the northern border of El Salvador. Going to these tourist centers is the American equivalent of visiting a modestly wealthy uncle's house: nice cut grass, a terminally ill trampoline, and at the center of it all, a pool.

I had just disgruntledly ordered food, having been denied the breakfast menu despite it being 10:30 in the morning with no other clients in sight. "You mean to tell me that all the breakfast ingredients have vanished?" I quipped, my entitled sense of indignation forbidding me to accept this injustice. I mean, what made them the culinary arbitrators as to what time breakfast ends and lunch begins? Who did they exactly think they were, McDonalds?

"Simplemente no se puede"

I order a chicken burger in defeat.

The family had congregated next to the pool, while many of the kids wasted no time to begin splashing around in the water. That weekend extended relatives had come from San Salvador to visit the patriarch of the family, Don Pedro. From what I gather, Don Pedro is the Salvadoran version of Johnny Appleseed, having produced an impossible number of children ranging in ages from 50 to 16. No lie. That's nearly four decades of babymaking. Don Pedro situated himself at the side of the pool and watched while his grandchildren swam about.

Still reeling over the transgression I had suffered, I noticed Erik mulling about the edge of the pool. Erik is this dopey kid, large eyes with heavy eyelids, outrageously proportioned ears, who never stops bouncing around. Before you begin hating me, let me state that horseplay is a large part of Salvadoran culture. Kids’ favorite games are ones that involve hitting each other, knocking each other down, it's hilarious! So me, ever culturally sensitive, decided to mess with Erik.

"Hey Erik, you got something on your ear, let me get it off for you", I said, laying the bait.

"Really?" said the prey, walking towards me, completely oblivious of his impending doom.

In one motion I picked him up and launched him into the air over the pool. I remember watching him, bewildered, sailing through the air, when a question popped in my head: Can Erik swim?

Him crashing into the shallow water and flailing about immediately answered my question. Fully dressed, I dove in and scooped him up. Naturally, a Catholic-sized wave of guilt washed over me. Did I, a social worker dedicated to youth development, really almost drown a kid in front of his entire family?

Now most kids would have been terrified, perhaps crying. Not Erik. His response was stoic. He dried himself off and proceeded to sit down and plough through an entire bag of potato chips (chips are crack cocaine to Salvadoran youth).

I reluctantly turned to the family, awaiting the swift and merciless swing of their axe. There was a long silence.

"Did you just throw Erik into the pool?" someone finally asked. A feeble affirmation was all I managed.

Then something unexpected happened. I heard a noise, a noise that sounded a lot like laughter. They were laughing! Here I was, the would-be murderer of their kin, and the fact that I put this child into the line of danger was amusing to them! With everyone laughing, Erik munching on a bag of chips, nobody seemed to care.

Soaked and confused, I pondered all of this while I consumed my stupid chicken burger. I imagined what would have happened if this took place in the United States. I imagined the headlines,"Youth Worker Charged with the Attempted Murder of Local Boy". There would be outrage, disgust, people wouldn't forgive me if it happened in the US. But this was El Salvador.

There's a strange relationship between pain and humor here. Slapstick humor is the highest form of comedy. Someone falls and you instantly hear the whistles and cackles. From an American perspective it seems blatantly cruel to laugh at someone who has just injured themselves, but here it's the punchline to the greatest joke ever told.

It makes me think about Salvadorans' relationship with traumatic experiences and death. There's a certain neutrality with which they talk about these experiences. Like the time a kid asked me where I was from and when I told him the United States, he nonchalantly said "That's where they killed my brother", with no expression on his face. Or the time I was talking about earrings with my host mother, a seemingly innocuous topic, when she told me she doesn't wear much anymore after a thief in Mexico had ripped her earrings right out of her head, thinking they were gold. Again, pure stoicism. And then back to the present, I had just put this boy through a seemingly traumatic experience of drowning and nothing. Just laughter.

A young man from my community was murdered this month. He was apparently the target of harassment from gang members in a town 30 minutes away from where I live. It went on for a while before they caught him alone on the street at night and they killed him. I was just happily returning from my trip to the US, my reality, and I guess it was only appropriate to be reintroduced to the reality here.

I went to the wake. There was his casket, flowers surrounding it on all sides, candles casting a solemn light in the room. There were people mourning, crying. But there was also laughter. Elderly women sitting nearest the casket were cracking up about something.  This young man's death wasn't comical, but it didn't stop people from enjoying each other's company and feeling alive in the presence of one another.

People always talk about this part of the world having a healthier relationship with death. Scenes of Dias de los muertos where families spend entire days in the cemetery lying atop their lost one's tomb, eating, playing music, spending time as a family. I really haven't worked it out but there's something here, the confirmation that death is just another point in one's life. The feeling that people's loved ones are laughing with them from the grave.