About 5 weeks ago I moved to San Salvador, El Salvador, where I will be living and working for the rest of the year. We took a comfortable 12 hour bus ride from Managua, and looking out the window at my new home, I found myself happily surprised by what I saw of the city. San Salvador appears to be a city of contrasts – the poorer parts are dirty, crowded, crumbling, and dangerous, but the nicer areas of town are well-kept, green and modern. The Lonely Planet Guide says ‘if San Salvador were a woman, you would say she had a nice personality’. The city is the intellectual and cultural capital of the country and sports fashionable bars and restaurants, regular live-music performances, theater events and so forth.
One of the most striking things for me in San Salvador so far has been witnessing the Salvadoran obsession with American culture. One of the most quoted statistics I have heard since coming here is that 2 million El Salvadorans live in the United States, while the total population of El Salvador is 6 million, numbers that help to explain why the country’s economy is so dependent on
remittances (the money sent back to El Sal by those living in the US) and has been dollarized in recent years. Even making a cellphone call to the States is cheaper than calling within the country. The amount of American-style malls everywhere is almost scary – they show off American fashion, movies, and food, and they also are very safe areas to socialize. When people go out for a nice meal they often go to fast food restaurants, which aren’t the cheapest of eating places here.
Despite the eeriness of seeing the USA everywhere I turn, the everyday San Sal life is completely new and different. There are many mercados (markets) in the city where one can buy anything from fresh produce to furniture, and pirated DVDs of questionable quality for less than $2. Navigating the bus routes has also been a bit of a challenge. The high urban population means that there are a ton of different buses going practically anywhere you want and exhaling pollution all the way. My roommate and I both separately got lost one day trying out a new bus route. Luckily they drive around in loops and turn back around eventually, and after you take them many times, it is possible to figure out where they will stop. Last week, we experienced a bus strike protesting the government’s forbidding the raise of bus fare in the face of increasing oil prices. Basically, people walked everywhere searching for the few routes that weren’t striking and over-crowding those few buses like crazy, while people who owned pick-up trucks and taxi drivers were making lots of money driving people around.
As far as where I’ve been living, I spent my first two weeks in a hotel with 3 other AJWS fellows, Rachael, Tamara and Natahsa, until we could move into our little house. During those first hotel days we were unable to cook our own food, so we ate at the cheap ‘pupuserias’ along the road. The pupusa is a Salvadoran dish, a small fried tortilla usually filled with cheese and refried beans. Healthy, I know. Within the first week, I and 2 of my roommates found ourselves sick to our stomachs. Laboratory stool samples revealed the culprits: Amoebas! Antibiotics eventually took care of them, and since moving into our house stricter control of food intake can be enforced. Our little house is in a great neighborhood – close to a soccer field, a mall, a bakery, pupuserias… Many families live on our street with cute children fascinated by our every move. After drawing straws for rooms I ended up with the ‘maid’s quarters’ – a part of many Salvadoran homes – a tiny room separate from the main house with its own bathroom. Works for me! Though small, our house has everything we need including a kitchen, running water at night and wireless internet.
Great house stories include the time when Rachael and I flooded the kitchen trying to install a water filter to the faucet. The tap water here is contaminated with amoebas and all of their little friends. So one day we found ourselves trying to change the faucet heads so that the filter could screw on to the new one but we neglected to turn off the water. After I ran around the block in a very soaked state looking for help while Rachael plugged up the pipe with her fingers, neighbors came to the rescue, turned off the water, and later installed the filter. Yay neighbors!
Another day I was looking inside of our refrigerator where I suddenly observed a Coca-cola bottle rolling back and forth for no apparent reason. Simultaneously, I realized that everything was moving back and forth. As immediately as it started, the shaking stopped. I was completely disoriented for a moment. My californian roommate Natasha immediately understood what had happened, calmly informed us that it was an earthquake and made us all go outside. All of our neighbors suddenly appeared on the street, and Rachael who was in the shower, walked out in only a towel. I think was in a bit of shock from the sheer natural power and unpredictability of the experience, and it took a while for my jitters to go away. This was a light earthquake, a regular occurrence in the city, but I’m not eagerly awaiting a stronger one.
So it’s been just over a month since I arrived in El Salvador, and it’s been a packed couple of weeks. Looking back on it though, I think of a comment my mother made in a recent email. She said that in developing countries daily frustrations are often greater than in developed countries, especially when one is reliant on public systems like bus transportation. The contrast between rich and poor here is only enhanced by such dependencies – not having a car, not having private education or healthcare, not having the money to hire a somebody to fix the tap post-flooding, or the house post-earthquake. The past month’s experiences are a small step to appreciating the gravity of such situations, and feeling solidarity towards the people I will be working with and living with while I am here. Speaking of which, I haven’t explained my job yet, so look out for the next post.
