El Pícap

Transportation in El Salvador is a trip. It can be tricky, smelly, stressful, unbelievably unreliable, and the number one leading killer of personal-space bubbles.

Planning a trip, one needs to take in a myriad of factors, delays, and unforseen events in order to ever arrive. Some of my fellow volunteers, you know who you are, truly live in the sticks, in communities that one needs a GPS device to know whether they're in Honduras or El Salvador. For them, there is one bus, if that, a day that comes through at the least convienent hours possible, and if they miss that then they just need to get down right creative.

Such is not the case for me, Daniel Muldoon, Volunteer for Posh Corps El Salvador. I live next to one of my region's largest highways (read: well paved, two-lane road), making it easy for me to be in the big bad city of San Francisco Gotera or the mostly pleasant Perquín in the matter of a half an hour. About every hour or so, former school buses that look like they were recently on an episode with Xzibit barrel down the road.

But, being as posh as I am, every hour is not enough. What if I miss it? You really expect me to sit on the water pipe that serves as a secondary bus stop and wait a whole SIXTY minutes for the next bus. No way.

Luckily, every 15 minutes or so a pick up appears on the road. These are no average pick ups, these are pícaps.

Buy a pick up, rip off the tailgate, add a roll cage, a tarp, two benches extending across the bed, and a doorbell to signal stops and you got yourself a genuine pícap.

Not only are buses infrequent, they're not even dangerous. Thanks to the pícap I can get around AND get my daily dose of peril, a real two for one. Who said Salvadorans weren't effecient?

In most pícaps there are two benches that seat 12 uncomfortably but if you're not pregnant or severly old, forget about getting a seat. Sure you might get an opportunity to sit, but try to remain seated as you see a 8 month pregnant woman, hauling an impossibly large bag, struggle her way into the truck bed and being forced to stand. It's a guilt rodeo. How long can you sit there, knowing you're the worst human being in the world? Personally, I'm too ashamed to share my own record.

Speaking of records, the fullest pícap that I've ever been on, and I counted, was 36 people at once. That's three dozen people in the bed of one of those tiny 1980's pick up trucks. 12 seated, 15 standing, and 9 people hanging off the back. If you're struggling for a mental image, here:

In my life long struggle to live life on the edge, I sometimes choose to ride the bumper. The reasons for doing so are mostly reckless but there are problems with riding in the middle.  If you're over 5 feet tall, your head pin balls against the bars of the roll cage. Being sandwiched in between 15 people, the heat brings on some smells you have never smelt before. From a sheer logistic standpoind, it's nearly impossible to tell where you are while surrounded by a living, breathing, and sweating human wall. More than anything, you just dully stand their like a cow being trucked over to the slaughterhouse.

Conversely, the bumper is pure freedom. The wind frees your from the heat, your six cleared to notice (even enjoy) your surroundings. On the bumper you a free from most things, free from everything except gravity.

There are times when riding the bumper is the equivelent of doing a pull-up at 50 miles per hour. If you're someone that needs a lot of motivation to go to the gym, you need to try it. Sure you might think of giving in to your forearms tightening and aching, but a quick look at the pavement and that semi truck right behind you makes you dig just a little bit deeper.

For the 20 months that I have left here, my perfered mode of transportation and personal trainer will undoubetly be the pícap.

 (Before and after pictures coming soon)

The fight against boredom

To the untrained eye, El Salvador would seem like a incredibly dull, remarkably unremarkable country. However, if my last six months of being in country has taught me anything (other than how to fold origami and tie a hammock) it has been that "boring" exist in a infinity of dreary shades. 

I begin to think of what makes things boring. Poverty? Sure, rich people can't help but be entertained while spinning donuts in their jet-skis, but Brazil has much more than one serving-size of extreme poverty and they still do wild shit like this:

I guess the "richness" of a culture is the collective sum of random spurts of creativity that have been archived by its people. No one told this guy to put on a shimmery skirt and march down a drumline on stilts. Like a squirrel that enters into a nut-burying frenzy at the first sign of fallen leaves, this guy just knows it's the right thing to do. 

So what treasures does El Salvador have? Beyond the culinary wonders of pupusas and sopa de pata, it takes a damn good treasure map to find some more gems. Music? Hell no.Unlike some Latin American countries where it might be common to see a leathery skinned man blast elegance and soul out of a ratty old trumpet, brass bands are few and far between. My community might be an exception. One of my neighbors (our outhouses are pretty much touching) is known on a national level for being one of the original Torogoces de Morazan, the unofficial marching band for the guerrilla front during the civil war.

This is him looking like a badass with his accordion (yes, apparently that is possible)

Most music is either imported or is one of 10 traditional, Salvadoran songs that was recorded god knows how long ago by god knows who. The grainy recordings of these songs feature guitars, hand drums, and the occasional pan flute. But the true star of the show is the xylophone. Mallets bang onto wooden keys, resonating through bamboo pipes, leaving the listener feeling like they're playing some intense level of Diddy Kong Racing. Normally this music is played in tandem with a presentation of folkloric dance where men and women in colorful garb, prance around each other with insane grins plastered on their faces. Just watch.

I've been to many parties, events, quinceñeras over the past six months and the number of bored faces I've seen is neck and neck with the number of pupusas that I've eaten. I honestly believe that I've seen people get ecstatic, but truly ecstatic, only during two types of activities during my time here: watching soccer and piñatas. I say watching soccer because the faces of the players are always so stoic, wearing expressions that are a mix of constipation and manliness. Meanwhile people lose their goddamn minds with a goal of their favorite team. This happiness, however, does not even begin to compare with the happiness of child witnessing the cultural hate-crime levied against unsuspecting paper mache.


One cultural difference that I've seen here is that they do not blindfold children before letting them have a go at the piñata. This I don't particularly understand because I'm a firm believer in an even match. A kid gets not only a baseball bat but clear and unobstructed sight too? All the piñata gets is someone's drunk uncle yanking him up and down. It just doesn't seem right.


Back to the point. I just don't see people get that excited. Quinceñeras are supposed to be one of the biggest event in a woman's life and even she looks bored, awkwardly dancing with her egregiously shorter chambelan. Eventually she does cry, whether it's out of joy or the glacial pace of clock hands we'll never know.


My favorite moments are the conversations that I have with my family. My funky little doppelganger brother, host mother and I sitting around, talking about what ridiculous thing so-and-so did, and we all break out in laughter. Those are the moments that make life here exciting.