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.