Laughter.

“I don’t like serious people,” she says to me. We’re standing along a night-time two-lane highway next to the smoking Ford Ranger, hood propped open. We’ re three hours into our road trip. We just called the police to see about getting a ride to the nearest big city, San Miguel, but they tell us they have no gas. This is no place to be stuck, but here we are. “Hay que reirse o no vale la pena,” she says. You’ve gotta be able to laugh or it’s not worth it.

Her name is Gloria, but she goes by Negra, and she is 25. She studies physical therapy at the National University. Six of us are accompanying Negra this weekend in an annual pilgrimage with her community back to a parcel of land in Honduras. The UN High Commission on Refugees built a camp there to receive them as they fled the Civil War, and for nine years her family lived in exile. Negra was born in the refugee camp. Her history has led her to this night with us, when she's standing on an abandoned stretch of dangerous highway next to a totaled truck, and laughing.

We finally arrive to her home community of Segundo Montes in the department of Morazan late that night, and our sunrise awakening comes too soon. A quick cup of coffee and then we're driving the winding rock road to Honduras in the back of a rollicking cargo truck bulging with the people of Segundo Montes, kicking up Negra's memories along with plumes of dust. “We lived well here,” she says. “We always had beans, corn, tortillas, bananas from the trees.”


Life inside a refugee camp is highly regulated. Refugees cannot leave the territory; enforcement soldiers roam and shoot on sight of an attempted escape. The only supplies available are those that are shipped in by the United Nations. Thus, Negra didn’t taste soda until she was six years old and returned to El Salvador. She didn’t know what potato chips were. Negra remembered, “Hondurans would cross into the camp with fruit that didn’t grow inside our area,” she said, “and we were like the damn natives forking over gold to the Spaniards: we handed over pounds of beans and corn to the Hondurans for a few pieces of fruit.” I gaze out. These are the same hills that greeted the sea-legged Spaniards hundreds of years ago.


Negra brings me back. She's talking about how a kid lives cordoned off by rifles instead of picket fences. “One day, a bunch of us decided to play soccer in a flat patch, but it was a little outside the camp territory. Suddenly the soldiers appeared with their guns, poised to shoot, and we ran like crazy people. We got back inside and fell down laughing. Whoo! We made it!” We drive past a thick bunch of trees on the crest of a hill: “Oh, there! Daniela, the kids used to do theater shows, reenactments of natives running out of those trees with painted faces and sticks for spears.” A little further on: “See there? That was the health clinic. And there? That was the school.” All I can see are flat patches of land stuck suddenly among the hills, overgrown. We're driving through Negra's past.

When she was five, Negra experienced her first car ride. She had seen the four-wheel drive UN beasts but didn’t know what they were. Once, an official invited her to ride with him as he distributed grains around the camp. As the jeep shifted into gear, she exclaimed to the man, “The trees are moving!” She and friends spent all afternoon riding around, savoring the wonder of this new thing, but had forgotten to tell their families where they were. “When we got home, boy, were we in trouble,” she says. “They had given us up for dead.”

We arrive at a cemetery and hop off the truck. This is Negra’s principal reason for returning here every year: to clean her mother’s grave. Her mom was seventeen when she died in an accident in the camp, when Negra was one. We begin to pull weeds from the simple mound topped by a circle of stones and a wooden cross. Negra’s constant joking banter quiets, and instead, she's grabbing at each fleck of weed as if it were a premature gray streak in her ebony hair. She places and replaces the rose arrangements she has brought to adorn the grave, her aunt and younger cousin chiming in from behind: “No, tie it against the cross, it’ll be more balanced that way.” Negra steps back. Raises her finger to her lips, hushed, concentrating. Steps forward to pluck out the shiny plastic heart that the florist placed in the center of the bunch, blows the dust off the top, puts it back in. Steps back, finger to her lips. It’s ok. She sits in place, crosses her legs, gazes at her mother’s mound. She doesn’t look sad, but she does look connected to this place, serious. Pulled into the moment.


Then, the spell breaks. She’s back to her banter. We crack open the fresh tortillas and cheese for lunch, wash it down with Pepsi.

Some members of Segundo Montes decide it's time to take a walk. We wander the mountainous green hills that surround the camp. A few women who were guerrilla fighters during the war are accompanying us. They laugh when they spy a familiar tree that was a landmark, a meeting space. One of the women hasn't been back to this land since the end of the war. She left her family and picked up her rifle when she was fifteen, living bunkered in these hills for ten years. Today upon returning, she is sobered, even while flanked by playful Negra and friends. The women navigate the unmarked paths through the endless corn and brush. They look like they also sprouted from this land.

"Where are we going?" I ask, wading through green. Negra laughs, "We're just walking." She pauses, nods her head. "Yeah. We lived well."



- 20 December 2009

(Photos courtesy of photographer Pat Flajole. See more of Pat's work at http://picasaweb.google.com/PFlajole. Thanks also to Pat and Dan Nemes for editing help to get this little adventure down on paper.)

Happy International Mining & Impunity Day.

(I repost this article written by Grahame Russell. See my former ActionAlert post for more information on the Marcelo Rivera case. As we come together with family this holiday season, may we be reminded of the power of our unified voices to ask that the cost of business not be human lives.)

December 10, 2009

INTERNATIONAL MINING & IMPUNITY DAY:
CANADIAN MINING COMPANIES MAKING A KILLING IN EL SALVADOR, GUATEMALA, CHIAPAS, …
By Grahame Russell

Across the world, December 10th is celebrated as “international human rights day”. For the global mining industry, we commemorate “international impunity day”.

Below, summaries of three recent assassinations related to community-based struggles in resistance to Canadian mining companies.

Just three stories, of many stories of repression that occur, worldwide, against community and indigenous leaders working in defense of community-controlled development and in protection of their community health and environment; local men and women who are educating and organizing their communities to resist the harms and violations caused by global resource extraction companies.

PACIFIC RIM & THE KILLING OF MARCELO RIVERA MORENO (EL SALVADOR)

In early July 2009, the body of Marcelo Rivera, a teacher and community leader, was found dumped in a well. He was “disappeared” on June 18. Torture signs were found on his body, including burn marks and missing toe and finger nails. Before and after Marcelo’s disappearance, torture and murder, he and other community leaders have been receiving death threats. For years, the Rivera brothers and many Salvadorans have been working hard, at risk of obvious repression, to prevent Pacific Rim, a Canadian gold mining company, from operating an open-pit, cyanide-laced gold mine in the Cabanas state, near the Honduran border.

No justice has been done for the death of Marcelo Rivera. Pacific Rim denies any responsibility, or that this death squad assassination is linked to their now aborted mining plans. The previous ARENA Party government of El Salvador blamed the murder on gang violence.

Meanwhile, Pacific Rim is trying to use a World Bank “mediation” procedure (the World Bank is a major investor in global mining companies) to sue the government of El Salvador for millions of dollars in “lost profits”. (No, the family members of Marcelo Rivera cannot use this World Bank procedure to seek justice or remedy – it is only for corporations and investors.)

HUDBAY MINERALS & THE KILLING OF ADOLFO ICH (GUATEMALA)

On September 27, 2009, Adolfo Ich, a Mayan Qeqchi teacher and community leader in El Estor (eastern department of Izabal), was shot and captured by security guards in the hire of HudBay Minerals. Hours later, family members found him abandoned in the company building where the HudBay guards had detained him. He died soon after of his gunshot wounds and beating.

Adolfo Ich, and local Mayan-Qeqchi villagers, have long been resisting the harms and forced evictions caused by Canadian nickel mining companies. The first wave of evictions, killings and repression occurred in the 1970s, early 1980s. Evictions and repression began again in 2006 (by Skye Resources), through to today. No justice has been done for any of the earlier killings and abuses, nor in Adolfo’s case. HudBay Minerals denies any responsibility and continues with efforts to “relocate” potentially thousands of Mayan-Qeqchi villagers, living on these lands since long before the first nickel miners (INCO) arrived in the 1960s.

BLACKFIRE EXPLORATION & THE KILLING OF MARIANO ABARCA ROBLEDO (MEXICO)

Mariano Abarca Robeldo, a community leader from the state of Chiapas, was known in Mexico for his work in promotion of community development and the environmental, in opposition to health and environmental harms and human rights violations caused by mining.

On November 27, 2009, he was assassinated in the town of Chicomuselo, state of Chiapas, near the border with Guatemala. The alleged assassins are employees of and/or linked to Blackfire Exploration Inc, a Canadian mining company, … that denies any responsibility for the crimes.

IMPUNITY – LOCAL TO GLOBAL

These are not exceptional cases. They are stark snap-shots of repression, let alone environmental and health harms that are common in communities (usually poor, often indigenous) where many mines operate.

Neither is the impunity exceptional. Companies operate with effective impunity from prosecution or accountability in many countries where they operate mines. They operate with impunity in the sphere of international law. And, above all, they operate with impunity in Canada where they are headquartered, where all the major corporate and investor decisions are taken. There are basically no criminal or civil laws to hold Canadian companies accountable for environmental and health harms or human rights violations (including killings) that occur related to their business operations elsewhere.

There are efforts in Canada to pass legislation - Bill C-300 – that would provide an administrative framework for government oversight and possible economic sanction (withdrawal of public funds a particular company might be receiving) in the case of mining company wrong-doing. If passed, Bill C-300 would not provide for criminal law punishment, in cases where crimes were committed; it would not provide for financial or other remedies to the victims of mining company harms and wrongs, if proven.

Even at that, Bill C-300 is being strongly opposed by the mining industry and supporters in the Conservative and Liberal parties.

Their opposition to enforceable laws, remedies and punishment is hypocritical and cynical. I wager that all the mining company executives and politicians opposed to the enactment of binding and enforceable legislation swear by the values and accountability mechanisms of democracy and the rule of law – just not when they would and should apply to their corporate activities abroad.

I wager that were these company executives and politicians themselves (and their families and home communities) victims of environmental and health harms, or human rights violations, they would expect and demand nothing less that full political and legal accountability for the harmful actions, and full remedy for the harms and losses.

Happy international impunity day to the global mining industry.

(Grahame is co-director of Rights Action, info@rightsaction.org, www.rightsaction.org, that funds and supports community development, environmental defense, disaster response and human rights projects in Guatemala and Honduras, as well as Chiapas, El Salvador and Peru.)

For the Time Being.

I carry these Annie Dillard quotes on a folded and well-worn sheet of paper in my journal. They guide me to a place of clearer perspective. Ive been thinking about how, lately, I have spent time merely putting down problems and not offering many answers about life here. Flooding, drugs, murder, unhealed war wounds, trapped furry creatures-- you know, feel-good stuff. You all deserve some sort of medal for continuing to read this little blog.

But for me at this moment, crashing headlong through the calamity and trying to jettison it--to mix it up into some sort of answer-- isnt honest. (Trying to weave everything into an answer, a work plan, a budget, is actually a very US-American gut reaction, Ive learned. Thats not to say that there isnt a place and a time for proactivity. Its just nice to start to see your roots from the outside-in.)

There may come a day when I do shift my focus. For now, I appreciate reminders like these from Dillard about where this all fits in a universe that is thousands of years old. You know the tired adage, "Its the journey, not the destination"... What does that really mean? To me, it says: You can live on this stuff. You are. The universe always has. And its not pretty, but it is achingly beautiful.

Without further ado, I introduce you to Annie, "For the Time Being." I hope these lines care for you in your days like they do for me, in mine.

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"A hundred years ago, Americans saw frenzy consuming their times, and felt the whole show could not go on much longer. Those people had seen electricity come and buffalo go.... Surely theirs were apocalyptic days. Rushed time and distance were converging on a vanishing point before their eyes. They could, by their own account, scarcely bear their own self-consciousness. Now they seem innocent; they sang "A Bicycle Built for Two" and endured their times' moral and natural evils. Since these evils no longer threaten us close to home--neither slavery, civil war, nor bacterial infections-- they do not, of course, seem as vividly terrible as our own evils." 32

"On December 1, 1931, Anna MacRae came to life. How many centuries would you have to live before this, and thousands of incidents like it every day, ceased to astound you?" 36

"(Teilhard) spent twenty-three years of his adult life far from home in China, almost always in rough conditions. Why knock yourself out describing a dream? 'If I should lose all faith in God,' he wrote, "I think that I should continue to believe invincibly in the world." 44

"Ecstasy, I think, is a soul's response the waves holiness makes as it nears." 138

"We are sent into the world of contradiction; when we soar away from it into spheres where it appears fathomable to us, then we evade our task." 141

--28 November 2009

Cocaine/ Cats/ Imaginary Conversations

On Sunday morning 13 September 2009, a man drove to the street corner up from my house, parked his white sedan with silver rims, got out, closed the door, and walked away. In the trunk, he left behind three bodies. Another body he left in the back seat. No one knows who he is or why he did it, though connections to the drug trade and gangs are suspected.

What people do know is who the victims were. María del Carmen Lino, found in the trunk, was 12 years old. Her two friends, Katherine and Evelin, were 13 and 17. Along with a colorful beach bag toting towels, they were found wearing swimming suits and with electrical wire wrapped around their necks. Their fourth companion Carlos, found in the back seat, was 24. They say that the girls were from an inner-city community that is often used as a pit-stop for drugs on their way to consumers in the United States.

When figuring up the price of cocaine, remember to factor in these kids’ lives.
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On Monday evening 14 September 2009, my roommate Juan and I came across a group of four people standing around a drainage grate outside the supermarket. Normally, a circle of people here means a crime scene; a dazed robbery victim, a body. These folks were staring at the ground. Juan and I joined them and looked down to see two yellow eyes wobbling underneath the street in the drain: a cat, trapped in the dank darkness, begging the lot of us to save him. Several men had already tried to lift the metal grate with no luck. It was nearly cemented in with settled street debris. One guy approached and slowly shook his head, saying, “He’s been trapped down there for two days.” There are murmurs from the circle of onlookers: “aye dios (oh my god),” “pobrecito” (poor thing). A living creature trapped in a drainage pipe during rainy season is one of those unbearable things. It has to do with locking eyes with something doomed that wants to live, and being powerless to save it. In a moment of cynicism fed by the past days’ events, I mutter, “Geeze. This is El Salvador in a nutshell.”

A short man on my left whips out his cell phone to call the firefighters, but they just hang up. (“This isn’t the United States,” a round man in a red FMLN ball-cap explains to me, “there are no protections for animals here.” And far bigger problems to worry about, I think.) Someone produces a wooden cane to try to pry open the metal grate, but it threatens to snap under the metal weight. We’re thirty-five minutes in now and not making much progress. People are beginning to lose hope, and everyone has somewhere they were supposed to be. Last ditch efforts begin. Juan calls a friend to come with his tools. A middle-aged man in a black oxford and khakis kneels and begins to dig out the crystallized debris with his hunting knife. The circle of unlikely lifeguards all shuffles about nervously, trying to mentally prepare to have watch a cat drown.

Then, magically, the grate jiggles. Someone lifts it. With not a second’s hesitation, the man with the hunting knife slides into the infested narrow drain. He hunkers low and talks softly to the cat, who is by now cowered far into the pipe. He coo’s it forward a few steps, makes a deft swipe at its scruff, and—like the climax scene out of any number of Lassie-esque blockbusters-- lifts the cat to safety.

When a Salvadoran man eats a stack of pupusas, the goopy national food stuffed with refried beans, he leaves the plate inexplicably, crystalline clean. When a Salvadoran woman passes you on the 5pm walk home from work, her makeup is in place and she leaves behind a waft of perfume. Perhaps to compensate for the overpopulated, underfunded, generally dirty streets they walk, San Salvadorans are hyper-clean. Add this to the unfathomable violence that is part of the daily reality here, and one would assume that a Salvadoran confronted with a stuck mangy feline would write it off as just the way life goes. But this middle-aged man in dress clothes just jumped into a drainage pipe for a street cat. The group claps him on the back.

For my part, I feel that I might uncontrollably kiss his dusty cheek. I want to burst out something ridiculous, something like, “Thank you for being kind!” I want to thank every person in that circle who overcame the cynicism that can come of living in this reality. We’ve all seen so much evidence of the opposite—too much—and kindness seems like too much to ask even of yourself sometimes. I feel like that man pulled me out of the concrete hole. Which sounds ridiculous, but it’s true in a way. The hope in the circle that day resuscitated the part of me that went numb when I heard about three mutilated young girls’ bodies tossed on my street. This has got to be one way to keep yourself truly alive in a place this violent.

By this time, the thin and shaky little rescue is nestled into my arms. He needs a home. A young man wearing a SuperSelectos Grocery polo, who has been watching the whole scene a few feet away, notices this too. He's just gotten off his shift. His face bright, he asks if he can take the cat home. He's never had one, he says; and based on his expression, he's lived life until now with a small cat-shaped hole in his heart. Street cat-turned-pet and his proud new dad turn and walk toward the bus stop.
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The high of the Great Cat Rescue lifted me all through the next day. The following evening on my way home from work, I was walking down the street where they found the white sedan. I had to leave late from the office because a rainstorm hit at 5 and I had no umbrella. As I’m walking, I see a white sedan parked ahead to my right. My memory of the front page of the newspaper gives me an eerie feeling. Of course it can’t be the car; but at 7pm on a drizzly night, it’s certainly not comforting. My jaw muscles tense as I approach.

Suddenly in my left-hand peripheral vision I notice a pair of baggy jeans. A man in the shadows. I jump about two feet in the opposite direction. “Buenas noches,” the man offers, who turns out to be young and has a gentle voice. “Buenas noches,” I sputter in return. And secretly in my mind, I gasp to him, “You scare the shit out of me.” His presence reminds me that I’m a young woman walking alone in a world where violence wins. As I continue on, nearing the coffin-car look-alike, my better half kicks in. “Discrimination,” it insists, “How would you like it if passing folk took one look and decided you were up to no good?” And how does that contribute to a society where we trust each other? I apologize to the kid in my mind.

But until I’m safely beyond the crime scene, my fears play a tough offense. I settle the matter by considering that, ironically, this may be one way to stay sane amidst violence. In some dark corners of this city, the only place to talk to each other as fellow human beings is outside the grocery store, or in our imaginations.

-- September 2009
(Photo courtesy of Veronica Reyna.)

After the Storm: A Photographic Journey of Comunidad Las Cruces

Comunidad Las Cruces is located about thirty minutes from San Salvador. It consists of an estimated 30 families and is an incredibly green, rural marginalised community. In the storms two weeks ago, Las Cruces suffered long-term crop loss, damage to multiple family homes, and the loss of one family, who were killed when their house collapsed atop them.

Las Cruces sits atop land that is almost entirely second-growth forest. This means that older trees and vegetation with strong roots-- which normally stabilise top-soil-- have been cleared for logging or new housing here, in Central America's most densely populated country. El Salvador is the second most deforested place in the Western Hemisphere after Haiti.

Please read more about relief efforts and the group who accompanied me on this visit on their blog, http://friendsofsantamaria.blogspot.com/




Sam and Brian make relief bags to hand out in Las Cruces. Each bag includes items like matches, candles, rice, beans, pasta, toothbrushes, soap, a potable hydration solution akin to Gatorade, and cookies for the kids. Nine of us visited the community on Saturday to bring these basic necessities, and to bear witness to the devastation wrought by four hours of rain and years of incompetent management of the country's wealth.








Emilio, FMLN representative from the local party, addresses families who have come to receive relief packages. We bought the supplies at the grocery store that morning in San Salvador with money donated by many generous folks in the US. Since there are no NGO's that work in this particular community and the ARENA mayor has been accused of corruption, we had to rely on representatives of the other main party, the FMLN, to provide us with their knowledge of the area and connections who could point us to the families in most need. This dynamic demonstrates well the extremely polarized nature of Salvadoran daily life.


One family who received a package, standing in the doorway of their home. The littlest in the family, Abigail, leans on the door and shows us with her fingers that she is 5 years old.







The mayor's office has sent the Ministry of Public Works (MOP) to clear the dirt road that runs through Las Cruces. The road had been flooded with mud. The mayor in this region is from the ARENA party, and is being accused of hoarding relief resources in his office and distributing only to political friends. Disasters are often seen by Salvadoran political parties as a strategic time to win votes for the next election-- a practice that ranges from relief goods distributed in bags with party logos to corruption and aid-hoarding. It was thus a pleasant surprise to see a state organ functioning for the good of the people amidst the crisis.



Observing one of the multiple minor mudslides that happened in the community. The ground juts like giant natural stair-steps down the side of the basin in which Las Cruces lies, with various houses built on each "stair." Here, Maggie and two men from the community inspect the debris and rock that fell from above and took off the corner of the roof of the house below, owned by a man named Luis Alfonso. Had it rained much more that night, Luis' house would have washed away, along with those above his, which have now lost much of their foundation as the loose earth tumbled downhill. In the second photo, Brian and Sam listen to Roberto Alexander as he points out his house above, which now has one corner jutting precariously off the “stair step.” His three children peeked at us from above.



Walking up a pyramid of stairs that leads into the higher sections of this community, built almost vertically on lands of constant high risk for disaster. Most marginalized communities in El Salvador are forced to build substandard housing--the only affordable shelter-- on lands that no one with financial resources would want. The best (read: safest) land in the country is sold off to be used to build gated communities and luxury shopping malls that, as Jesuit Dean Brackley says, "look like they dropped out of outer space," given the pervasive poverty in which 65% of residents live. This man totes two bags of relief packages weighing about 10 lbs a piece, and a 10lb jug of drinking water.




This is the one wall left standing of a house that was completely demolished in a landslide. Its cracked pattern resembles delicate china that has been damaged; and indeed, the house shattered something akin to that under the weight of the rushing earth. The family of four who lived here were buried in their sleep and found at 7:00 the following morning. Their names: the father, Carlos Alberto; the 26 year-old mother, Mirna Guadalupe; daughter Azucena, who just celebrated her 9^th birthday; and daughter Guadalupe Lizbeth, 10 months old.



Mirna's wooden bed-turned-coffin. She was unearthed with her arms around little Guadalupe.





The community knows that they live in constant danger. They try to minimize that by building retaining walls to catch mudslides. Here, we see the wall that protected Mirna and Carlos' house. It was made of cinderblocks laid over a skeleton of iron pipes, and the latter provides the majority of the strength in a wall. Unfortunately, iron is very expensive, and though the community put in as much as they could afford, the landslide of water and mud easily wrenched the wall's beams into an awkward zig-zag and rushed on, finally slamming into Mirna and Carlos' house.




Here, Las Cruces representatives show us the direct cause the family's death. What you see above is a cemetary, and then a sharp drop-off. A local Catholic Church had recently cut into the ground at the cemetary's edge to begin construction of a small retreat house, here at one of the highest points of this vertical community. They told us that the church had sent four men and their equipment to cut into the hill just days before the storm passed through, and they left the ground exposed. Unfortunately, no one among the four was a construction expert, and El Salvador has no zoning laws that require construction to be legally approved and thus reviewed to ensure safe and responsible practices. The way that the ground had been cut created a small basin in which the rain gathered during the four hours of the storm, until the weight of it was too heavy. The water cut a divot in the ground (visible in the photo at the right) and rushed down, smashing through the retaining wall about 100 ft down and then into the home.

Below, Mirna's brother shows us photos he has set up in a 24-hour shrine to the family, with a statue of the Virgin Mary and candles. One photo features Carlos, Mirna, and Azucena after her recent dance recital.

-- 23 November 2009

Of the Talmud, and his Rifle.

"Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it." -- from the Talmud

She is a toothless, chubby cherub of an old woman, her worn floral print nightgown overflowing on her 4.5 foot frame. Her basset hound eyes are barely visible beneath thick round 1960's headlight glasses. She sits at a metal table outside the Mug Cafe. I see her every time I make the short walk here from my office for an afternoon jumpstart, because this table is her office. She sells rosaries. The plastic kind-- lime green, dusty black, made-en-mass. She is one of so many here trying to eek out an honest living selling plastic nothings on the street. As I sit in the cafe and gaze out the window, I notice how she and the khaki-suited guard have built an easy camaraderie, passing a lazy afternoon with her head tilted up toward him, his tilted down, resting on the handle of his rifle. They chat.

I leave my espresso wonderland and pass her table, and the conversation between them halts. I dont have to look at her face to feel those basset hound eyes cajoling me. “Señorita,” she squeaks, “Comprame algo, por favor.” (Buy something from me, please.) The words lilt, automated, just another day of asking for a little to survive her lot in life.

Two evenings ago, the city of San Salvador had a one night stand with psychological terror. Someone sent emails to the major media around the country claiming that, that night, the gangs were going to attack the civilian population. Salvadorans live in one of the most violent countries in the world, and they're aware that life outside high walls and barbed wire is an undeclared street war. A rumor like this is thus real whether or not it happens because it strikes the fount of our fear. It must be taken seriously. At 5pm, it was. People got into buses and cars in a thinly controlled flee for home. Public spaces became ghost towns. Footage on the nightly news of the biggest mall in Central America, Metrocentro, showed one solitary woman dashing for cover between the pillars in the mall´s sparkling central plaza. At the time, I was in a taxi on my way to meet a deadline, bound to a standstill behind miles of taillights. I began to imagine jumping my nervous tapping feet from roof to roof along this continuum of paralyzed cars.

It happens that on this night, not many more people were killed than normal, which means it illustrated El Salvador well. For instance: 6.30pm. Upper-class area of town, outside the Jesuit University of Central America. He was in his mid 30's and he worked with my roommates in an outsourced telephone help center for US companies. While talking on his cell phone with his father, walking down the sidewalk, a car pulls up beside and shoots. His dad, having heard it happen, tries to call back. His son is already dead. When my roommates told me this story they couldn't help but bleed into reminiscing about the multiple other workmates they've lost to random violence. “…Oh, I remember the day we heard about Nelson. That was the day before they promoted me.” In fact, whenever the conversation turns to violence, it becomes a slippery slope of friends, neighbors, family, acquaintances. One aspect of these deaths is clear: they are as normal as promotions. In all places in the world, death is a part of life. What I'm hearing from my roommates is that here, it is a part of youth.

I return to the present moment, and hear her plea. I am Jesuit-educated; I grew up in a place where everyone is to be treated as neighbor; and I believe, desperately, in humanity. Yet the rifle in the crook of his khaki arm gleams in my peripheral vision. I don't even look at her cherub face as I abandon her, and tumble back to the office.

-- October 2009

Yellow Roses

When I was seven years old, I found a forbidden place in Target. My mother did most of her shopping there and most times toted us along. One day while she was trapped in the check-out line, I wandered to a bulletin board near the door and was caught by a crop of young black-and-white faces: square photos from a school yearbook mounted on a flyer that proclaimed, “Missing.” It didn't make sense. These children were born in the same year that I was, and they looked like normal kids. They looked like me. I was mystified, horrified; the fact that they were not necessarily dead, but missing, was something I couldn't comprehend. In that very moment, they were possibly alive somewhere and doing something normal like buttering toast. Or possibly they weren't. Grappling with “possibly” was like trying again and again, futilely, to push the plastic square block into the circle-shaped hole in my Fisher Price toy. Where were these normal kids? I knew I had walked into something that even mom couldn't explain, and therefore, it was somewhere a seven year old doesn't belong.

Seventeen years later, I found that forbidden place again in the tiny country of El Salvador. I was in a green park, surrounded by about 250 Salvadorans celebrating a holiday called the Day of the Faithful Departed. For Salvadorans, this day is a celebration of life and of death. Families gather in cemeteries to repaint sky blue or pink headstones and leave fresh flowers. Food vendors offer traditional tamales, and dogs and barefoot children run amok amidst it all lapping up sweets that have fallen to the ground. That is how they celebrate the people who have died. Here in the Cuscatlan Park, they remember those who disappeared.

A hunched woman steps to the center of the crowd and gently reaches for the microphone. A yellow rose and a lit candle sprout from her other hand. Gray whisps frame her face and her rickety voice rings clear: “I dedicate this rose to my daughter. In 1980, one month after her high school graduation, the soldiers took her off a bus and we never saw her again.”--A pause--“I remember her always with her books in her arms.” She turns to find her daughter's name among over 35,000 others on a black granite wall behind her. The wall is about 8 feet tall and a half a football field in length, and it is divided into sections by year and by situation; for instance, “1985 Homicides,” or “1987 Massacres.” She finds her daughter's name in the section that says, “1980 Disappeared.”

Her daughter may have been reading on the bus the day that she became one of over 10,000 people who were forcibly “disappeared” during the Salvadoran Civil War, and were never found. The war officially ended sixteen years ago. Her family is one of over 10,000 families who are still searching.

I feet hushed inside, grappling with this woman's brief story. The crowd, however, doesn't react like me. The whole place is alive with movement. I notice one woman crying and another wiping away the firsts’ tears with a bandana. Two teenaged girls click by on high-heels, one sending a text message and the other carrying a framed black-and-white photo of a young man. Someone is buying ice cream from a vendor who has a cooler on wheels, and a woman’s dyed brunette hair bobs animatedly as she whispers to a friend. Two large movie cameras snake about the crowd followed by a crew. I get the feeling that sixteen years has been enough time to build a life on waiting.

One woman in a highlighter-yellow tank-top takes the microphone: “I dedicate this rose to my mother, to my husband, and to my three children, who disappeared in 1985. All I want is to bury them.” The woman is about my mother's age. I am one of three siblings. I feel like I am seven years old again.

A grandmother in navy blue comes toward me as if magnetized. I'm enveloped by her smile, and then her hug. “Peace to you, my precious child,” she whispers, and then moves on. They're reading more names in the background, and now there is a woman singing a verse from her lost son's favorite song. The whole crowd begins to sing. The refrain goes like this: “We’ re still singing. We’re still dreaming. We’ re still waiting.”

-- 8 November 2009
(Photo courtesy of http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Clpc02bTSoQ/Svr_ZsaxkHI/AAAAAAAAABs/IXOErsG2neo/s1600-h/el_salvador_children_war.jpg)