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.

The Relentless March of Time

There is this immense anxiety inside of me. The feeling of having a million tasks to complete but realizing your calender is utterly empty. You sit with the feeling of running. I sit here, but my mind is vaulting, parkouring up the walls of my skull, searching an escape.

Even though it feels like anything but, I suppose traveler's anxiety is normal. My nearing homecoming has flooded me with thoughts and emotions. What if I miss my plane? What is it going to be like to look into the eyes of the one I love? How cold is Minnesota? What does it even feel like to be cold? Is my head going to explode? Could I consume two Chipotle burritos in one sitting? Am I ready?

People here have been asking me about my trip. Some are fascinated with the idea of flying, others with the fact that one can be transported in a matter of hours to a forbidden place that has served as the fabric into which so many Salvadorans have sewn their individual threads.  Others express the seeming injustice of my facility to come and go as I please, while their undocumented family member has been denied the luxury of visiting their loved ones for decades. 

It makes me think of my experience as the mirror reflection of the typical Salvadoran-US experience. Many find it absurd that I would leave country where I can make more than $10 an hour, to come live in a place where unemployment is as ubiquitous as cornfields. 

"But why are you here?" they ask while squinting and raising their palms upwards in gesture of confusion.

I am partly here because I have been privileged enough to have been born in a country whose passport enables me to go most anywhere. But I am also here because my government received permission from this government that I come and live here. There are many Salvadorans like this in the US, that immigrated as refugees during the civil war. However there are many more that have since gone clandestinely in search of economic prosperity. 

While living in San Francisco I befriended a young Honduran line-cook named Jose. He had made the journey to the US only a couple years back and was still in the infancy of his American life. I enjoyed talking to him and learning about his personal experience and perspective. I remember I asked him if he was afraid of being deported. He quickly snapped back with a "Naaa" while protruding his lower lip with indifference. He reasoned that he understood his fellow immigrants' fear and indignation about deportation, but he also said he knew the rules of the game before he went to the US, so how can he be mad if it actually comes to pass?

I think there's a lot of truth in that, but it's never so simple. Jose was 22 and had only been in the US for less than 2 years. Life hadn't become complicated for him yet. 

Sure many undocumented immigrants come in knowing the rules, but their lives are not static. They fall in love, have kids, and take on more and more financial responsibility for their family back home as the years tick by. So what happens after a decade in the US, when you've put down roots, have a job, house, car and family only to get stopped on a traffic violation and get sent back home? It's infuriating, heartbreaking, an injustice. You knew the rules the whole time, but your new life, full of new family and friends and experiences, has clouded the reality that technically you're not supposed to be there. People change everyday, but US immigration policy rarely does.

All this to say that I do view my ability to travel with ease with some guilt. Guilt for those that long to see their families, their children who they wouldn't even recognize. But I also view it as only a logical extension of the current geopolitical landscape. Everyone knows the rules, as unfair as they may be. Some just forget that they're not playing by them. 

Like many Salvadorans I have a significant other in the US. Long distance relationships are a challenge, but if they were an Olympic sport, El Salvador would take home gold every time. Oh, you miss your girlfriend that you haven't seen in six months? I'll be sure to tell my husband who's been living uninterrupted in the US for the past twelve years. In a way it's consoling, because I know it could be much worse. Like Salvadorans, work has taken me away from the ones I love, but unlike them I know when I'm going home. I can visit. I don't live with their uncertainty. 

In my host family, the father has been in the US for almost thirteen years now. They tell me that he's always saying he's done with the US, he doesn't want to be there anymore and that he'll be home come Christmas. And Christmas rolls around, and instead of him, presents arrive at their doorstep. Next year, I promise, next year. 

I can't imagine what he must feel. Each year he's sent back more money, more gifts, but he's missed milestone after milestone of his children's growth. They talk on the phone at least, but what could it possibly be like to go back and meet your twelve year old son who was a fetus the last time you you were home? What are those first seconds like? What do you say? Where do you begin? 

I think that that's why five years becomes ten, and then twelve and then thirteen. The fear must be crushing. The guilt and uncertainty snowballs and snowballs.

I'm sure things seemed a lot simpler when he first crossed the border in 2001. Make money, get in, get out. But just like life doesn't stop moving in the US, it never stops moving here. Birthdays, deaths, holidays fly by and you wonder how much of the life you left behind is still there.

Who are you now?

An Open Letter for Alonso

As I approach my one year mark here in El Salvador, I have grown to know and love the community where I live. People here are humble and giving despite not having a whole lot to give. I have been a witness to their charity as they have opened the doors to their community to me and taken me in as one of their own. I often think about, as I guess it is my job to do so, the ways I can give back to the community that has given me so much. 

With only three seconds on a Google search of El Salvador, you can tell the situation is anything but good. The unemployment rate, extreme poverty, lack of education and widespread gang violence makes living in this country a near impossible task for many people. If you’ve watched the news within the last year you know that this reality is causing El Salvador to hemorrhage youth, who leave to make the dangerous journey to the United States for the promise of a better life.

In this environment, education means everything. With so few jobs available not having finished high school, something that many youth are not able to do for financial or other reasons, automatically takes you out of the job market. So it stands to reason that Salvadorans instantly view any college graduate as an honorable and respected member of society. This college love-affair goes as far as calling anyone with a college degree “Licenciado” (Licensed) as a surname instead of Mr. or Ms., making me "Licenciado Daniel".  

College is perhaps viewed in this sacred light because it is so inaccessible for most Salvadorans. It came as a great shock to me to find out actually what it costs to go to college in El Salvador. As Americans we are so accustomed to price tags in the tens-of-thousands, and in some cases the hundreds-of-thousands range that discovering that a college education here costs $3,000 not just for one year, but for the entire degree is outrageous. Three-thousand dollars is the price to change someone’s life. Seeing the great discrepancy between the relatively low cost to Americans and the monumental impact of a degree for Salvadorans, I know this is where I, where we, can make a difference. 

AID El Salvador is a NGO started by former Peace Corps volunteers to provide scholarships to Salvadoran youth. Many Peace Corps Volunteers set up accounts with AID El Salvador as an easy way to fundraise money for youth in their community to go to school, with many of the donors being family or friends of the volunteer. 100% of donated funds go to the youth for whom it is earmarked, and it is the responsibility of the Peace Corps volunteer and the AID El Salvador case-worker to make sure the funds are being appropriately by the youth. Having seeing the success of these scholarships firsthand I have opened my own account with AID ES. 

What has most inspired me to do this has been a youth in my community named Alonso. I first met him because he would come over to my house and tutor my host-brother multiple times a week. At first I thought he was family or in the same grade as him but after asking I realized that he was doing it because he liked to tutor and help others out. I got to know him more from his participation in my English class. He’s very humble and quiet, which first came off as being disengaged, but as I began to know him and his participation in my class I began to see he is an extremely gifted student, and that he is  absolutely fascinated by English. He’s told me that the only thing he’s ever wanted to do is go to college to become an English teacher, but as a son of a single mother with 8 kids, it’s just not a reality for him. What surprised me most about Alonso is his academic achievement. I’ve seen his transcripts, and this is a kid that has gotten A’s throughout high school and is embarrassed to ever admit that he’s gotten a B. This November he finally graduates from high school. For many students this is the end of the line, but it doesn’t have to be. 

So I am asking you to help me change the life of someone who I know will take every opportunity afforded to him, and use those opportunities to better the lives of others. I’m reminded of the saying “It takes a village to raise a child” and in the increasingly globalized world we live in, that village can be expanded to cross borders. No matter our religion, nationality, or background, we all can recognize the importance of supporting our youth. Together, we make Alonso’s dream come true, I implore you to help make this happen. 

Alonso is just the start, it is my goal to send as many youth to college as possible here. I know that the long term effects of more college-educated professionals in my community will be the greatest and most sustainable change I make within my time here. Listed below are the ways you can donate today. 

Thank you, 

Danny Muldoon 
Youth Development Volunteer 
Peace Corps El Salvador 
________________________________________________________________
By check made out to Aid El Salvador and sent to:

2688 Pala Mesa Court
Costa Mesa, CA 92627

(The check memo MUST indicate "PCV Daniel Muldoon Los Quebrachos") If you would like to remain anonymous on the donor list, please include a note with your check stating so. 

Online by going to www.aidelsalvador.org, clicking on “Donate Now” and using PayPal to make a donation. Paypal is a secure website which safely handles monetary transactions online. 

1) Go to www.aidelsalvador.org 

2) Click on the "Donate Now" link on the right side of the homepage, under “How to get involved”

3) Click the yellow bubble-shaped "Donate" link

4) Enter the amount you want to donate in the blue box at the top of the page

5) Create a PayPal account by filling in your credit card and contact information (or login to an existing PayPal account) to make your donation. Then click “Agree and continue” or the “Log in” button

6) You’ll automatically be brought to the "Your Name, please review your donation" page. On this page, please type " PCV Daniel Muldoon Los Quebrachos " in the "Add Special Instruction to the Seller" section/box, which is a small blue section on the left-hand side.  

7) Confirm your donation and click “Donate $ Now” button 

Culto

Culto. It seems like a relatively short word, but in reality, each one of its letters represents 60 minutes of in-your-face, soul-salvaging, devil-bashing sensationalism.

I grew up Catholic, went to Catholic elementary and high school. I spent a good part of 13 years going to mass, memorizing prayers, and wearing my WWJD bracelet. It is exactly because of all of this that I am not Catholic today. The boredom, the rules, the uniforms, the discovery of how awful bread can be when you skip the yeast, the uncomfortable feeling of kneeling on wood, sermons that brought me closer to God, but only in the way they made me beg for mercy, that the Father would finally say "The Lord be with you" so I could let out a hasty "And also with you", make my way home, put on some sweatpants and play Pokemon.

While not Catholic, a Catholic upbringing has done a lot to sculpt my views on morality. It left me with inner voice that quietly guides me to make the "right" choice. That voice is also known as an overwhelming and sickening sense of guilt. I feel that many times I do not do the right things simply because it's the right thing to do but rather out of pure guilt. Try as I might not to make eye-contact with the obese elderly woman who just stepped onto a packed bus, something inside of me makes me hate myself for sitting in my seat while this plump woman stands there jostling around. I don't eventually give her my seat because I'm a good person. No. I reluctantly and resentfully give her my seat because by stepping her fat ass on my bus she has completely robbed me of the opportunity to sit there, blissfully zone out, and enjoy my ride. The nerve of some people...

Besides guilt, Catholics posses another endearing quality: lethargy. In my time in this country, this quality has saved me my sanity. The community where I live is mostly Catholic, meaning, while some go to church on Sunday, and occasionally talk about God, the majority of people are completely unwilling or uninspired to live a religious life. Why worry about eternal damnation or original sin when wearing a crucifix necklace suffices? Exactly.

But not all of us are so lucky. I've heard absolute horror stories about my fellow volunteers being forced to go to Culto, or evangelical mass. One hour turns into three and then four, the pastor starts screaming, and then your neighbor starts speaking in tongues, and people surround you to lay their hands on you in an attempt to save your soul. This is multiple hours, multiple times a week. At least Catholics have the decency to pack all their praise into one hour, one time a week so that they can get home and begin committing the sins that they'll be absolved of come next Sunday. Nine months in and I thought I had dodged the bullet, that I wasn't going to ever have to put myself through such an ordeal. That is until I stupidly stepped onto a local bus. When I heard the screaming, I know I had made mistake.

Normally buses play bachata, ranchera, or 80's power-ballads, but on this particular day, the bus driver was in the need of some G-O-D, and decided to play a CD of an evangelic sermon, most likely recorded somewhere in hell. It seemed that as time went on the pastor on the recording was progressively losing more and more of his shit. His booming voice turned into a scream, his breaths into gasps, his words into unintelligible tongues. After diving into a medley of tongues, he would reemerge and wheeze something about purity and the need to cleanse his church.

As this man was seemingly having a mental breakdown at full, deafening volume, I looked around at my fellow passengers, hoping to find solace in the annoyed face of another passenger, but nothing. I knew that Salvadorans had an uncanny ability to block out any and all annoying sounds but this was impressive. I was alone in this torture.

The minutes progressed and I felt that I would lose my sanity along with the pastor's. Yell, gasp, tongues. Scream, gasp, tongues. Yell, gasp, wheeeeeeeeze. Imagine the screams of a toddler whose balloon you just popped, but amplified to the volume of a freight train.

If I had any respect for Evangelicalism before, I lost it right there on that bus. I couldn't help but find it absolutely absurd that a full-grown man would resort to a nervous breakdown to prove a spiritual point. To me, Jesus wasn't some guy wailing in the middle of a street, clowning, trying to literally shake some sense into people. Moreover, religion and spirituality should be a calming, introspective journey into the depths of ourselves, not a god damn public spectacle.

It got me thinking about how Evangelicals must see the world. It must be like a WWE cage match, Jesus and the Devil going head to head, grappling eachother. Jesus stuns the Devil with two sucker punches, climbs the ropes, and launches himself off the corner post into a backflip and lands a punishing elbow to the Devil's groin. It's the job of all of us to scream as loud as we can, fervently holding up our "THE DEVIL SUCKS" posters, and wait while Jesus tries to eternally pin the devil in a monster chokehold.

It's probably something like that.

The bus ride eventually did end when I got back to my community, where such cosmic battles aren't felt or seen. It's people just like me, trying to do the best they can with the day that they're given. It sounds a whole lot more relaxing and reasonable, doesn't it?

Cakes and Coyotes

As a volunteer specialized in working with youth, I spend a lot of times with kids. Effectively having done the same type of work in the US, I know that I have a love-hate relationship with working with kids. They can be heinous, rude, incredibly inconsiderate and oblivious to the fact that you aren't trying to make they're lives more difficult but rather trying to help them. But also they can be tremendously sweet, simplistic in their show of affection by running up to you and showering you in hugs. One of the best things about working with youth is their innocence. They are just reflections of the people around them, only beginning to forge who they are, before they reach adulthood and cement their personalities and lose their sense of wonder of the world around them. Like my father told me once, children are great because "their cake isn't baked yet". It's still in that primordial goo, sweet and unsure what shape it will take. I guess that makes me the baker by profession.

There is a sense of honor in being a volunteer working on youth development in a country like El Salvador simply because the situation is so dire. Along with police officers, students are one of the principal targets of gang violence whether it be for the people in their social circle or their unwillingness to join gangs. Kids are abandoned by their parents,  who journey to the United States, only to send remittances back. Or you have parents that suffered great tragedies during the civil war, entire families being murdered, who are still on survival mode, uneducated and unaware that by not making education a priority with their children, they are effectively condemning them to the poverty that they all know too well. On top of all of this you have one of the largest humanitarian crises of the 21st century.

It's difficult to unpack all the things wrapped up in the recent US immigration crisis of unaccompanied minors. There are so many statistic, story-lines, differing reasons and motivations on a person to person basis that it's almost impossible for me to talk about these things in general terms. Let me be clear that my feelings on this are based on my small community in the Northeast of El Salvador, a community I still struggle to understand.

From my school there where about 9 out of 250 children who emigrated within the last year. This statistic is much higher in some of my colleagues' sites where it seemed like everyone under 18 was disappearing overnight. I say overnight because the number of unaccompanied minors from El Salvador skyrocketed from 5,990 in 2013 to 16,404 this year alone. This spike seems bewildering until you start looking at the mechanics. By nature the black market is clandestine. People here talk about going "mojado" to the US by they don't say more than they have to. Hopeful emigrants don't know any more about the journey than what they're told by family and friends in the US. The United States until this year had kept quiet on their deportation policy for unaccompanied minors. They never openly said that they didn't deport minors, that they let them stay. But from one-word-of-mouth to another, this fact got out. Pretty soon, it seemed all undocumented immigrants with children in El Salvador knew. And then, boom, you have yourself an immigration crisis.

I remember in April I was participating in a training at our regional office when my colleagues and I were visited by the US Deputy Chief of Mission of El Salvador (the second most important person from the embassy after the ambassador). He brought us doughnuts and wanted to talk. He was there because like everyone else, he had no idea what to do about the immigration crisis and was looking to us for insight, to dissect this monolithic problem by looking at the collective parts of our individual experiences, the stories we knew from our communities. We all shared our anecdotes, the reasons why youth were leaving, basic information on the prices and structure of human trafficking. It was an extremely rich dialogue but I think all of us left with more questions than answers.

And that's the thing, when you have so many lives wrapped into one massive humanitarian crisis, you can only talk about what you've seen.

You read a lot in the news how children are fleeing El Salvador because of the gang-violence, that it's life or death. While it's true, there are cases like that, I wonder if that's the norm or the exception.

In my community, there isn't gang violence to speak of, but there are a lot of kids with parents in the US. You instantly know who they are because of their iPhones, Levi jeans, nice shoes, and other possessions. You don't even have to ask. Their parents have left long ago, making their children trade the experience of growing up with their parent for financial security and nice things.

"Going to the US is the only way for me to provide for my family"

You here that a lot. On face-value it seems like a no-brainer. Parents risking their lives to make the dangerous journey to the US for their loved ones. And it is courageous, selfless, but only to a certain extent. Only until you consider what actually happens to their kids. I've heard a lot of stories about kids being left with relatives only to be neglected, their wellbeing treated like a secondary job by family members who wait for the next remittance check to come. The kids they grow up knowing their parents as an old photo, a voice on the phone, and presents in the mail. There are obvious psychological effects of not knowing your parents but I'd argue that the social effects are greater.

Partly out of guilt, partly out of wanting to give their children everything they never had growing up, Salvadoran parents living in the US shower their kids in gifts. Unlike other kids, they never have to worry about money, it just materializes in front of them. Now, if you're used to money literally showing up at your doorstep, are you going to force yourself to support yourself? No. You become dependent. Your well-being is already taken care of, why work or even go to school for that matter?

This is the remittance-kid's mindset. They become dependent, lazy, unambitious. If you're a parent you might pat yourself on the back, thinking that you've done your job. You've fed your child, clothed them, given them everything they ever wanted. But what you've actually done is ruined them. Like a animal born in a zoo only to be released into the wild, once the sustenance stops, they are left vulnerable and clueless in self-preservation and autonomy.

So when undocumented parents heard that they could bring their kids to the US with no legal repercussions, many didn't think twice, they want to give there children everything after all. It costs anywhere from five to seven-thousand dollars to pay a Coyote (human trafficker) to take you to the United States from El Salvador. Many times parents pay the same Coyote that they used to get them to the US to try and cross their children.

There are many horror stories of crossing the border. Women and children raped, literally sold into slavery. I remember one of my colleagues telling me that a little girl that they lived with was going to be smuggled to the US by a Coyote. They told me they tried talking to the girl's grandmother about the dangers, all the terrible things that could happen to her granddaughter. But in the end, the risk was worth it for all of them, even the girl. Of course a little girl is going to take the opportunity to see her mother for the first time in a decade and not think of the risks. That's what's wrong. These adults are making decisions, possibly life-altering decisions, for their kids, as if them, the parent, coming home is completely out of the question. The kids must go find them. I just can't agree with that.

Poverty is a reality here, much more for some than others. A lot of Salvadoran parents see going to the US as the only way for them and their families to survive. But there are also parents that struggle, selling baked goods, fruit or whatever they can find in order to support their kids. Sure their kids are going to grow up poor, but they'll at least know their parents. They'll never have to risk their lives to get to meet their parents. I guess that's what it comes down to for me. No amount of money can ever replace the presence of parent.

On a personal level, there is no doubt in my mind that this is where I belong. The timing of me living here couldn't be any more perfect. I'm a volunteer when volunteers are needed most. When kids need someone the most. I'm unsure what my time here will accumulate to but I am grateful for the opportunity to try and help.