Dignity, Despite it all. (Moments III)

A friend tells of a recent experience leading a workshop for children in inner-city San Salvador. The children were asked to draw pictures of what they like about their community, and what they don't like. My friend asked a nine year old girl what she planned to draw for “dislike.” She replied in a soft voice: “I don't like that they kill people.”

There are implications for this in a child's life. One: living in entrenched violence, you cannot leave the house after sunset. How many times has she seen the stars?
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On January 16th, El Salvador celebrated the 18th anniversary of the signing of the Peace Accords, which ended their civil war. In this nine year-old girl's community, the kids thought about their streets. Their next step seemed obvious to them. They decided: we will write and sign our own Peace Accords.

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Last weekend, I went with the Friends of Santa María to a community called Joya Grande that was affected by the flooding of November. We bounced in Beth's blue Ford Ranger down miles of dusty pock-marked roads, sharing the truck bed with black plastic bags of donations from far-away people: shampoo, soap, food, clothes, toothbrushes. We parked next to the Joya Grande communal house, a large room with a concrete floor and a sheet-metal roof. The donations are for the six families who are squatting there, their houses destroyed in the landslides. They survive together the days of no control over where meals come from; of no access to medical attention for a broken ankle; of constant questioning over which neighbor to ask this time to share her well water so they can bathe.

The families encircle the truck and help us take inventory to ensure that everything is equally distributed. One man is pacing. He's bounding from group to group, then trying to catch my eye. Searching to be helpful.

When the donations have been unloaded from the bed, only bits of trash remain: chip bags, water bottles, cigarette butts. He springs into the truck, reaches for a plastic bag. “You can't go back to the city with garbage in your car,” he insists. “I'll clean it for you.”
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We interview the people of Joya Grande about their situation. I've been talking to a community leader for an hour about logistics. He's tall, in his mid-30's, and sports a recently-ironed oxford shirt. He gives me names of people who legally own the land in Joya Grande; people who live in large houses, far from here. He gives me numbers of community members homeless, the numbers left cropless. He lists names of government representatives who have visited with news of new houses they will build; construction has begun.

I thank him for filling me in-- for briefly welcoming this white kid with a square notebook and a sunburnt face into his world. He cuts me off: “No. Thank you, thank you for coming... It’s just that every day is so hard… We don't expect you to come all the way out here with gifts from people we've never met...”

Then he can't continue. His eyes fill, and his hand instinctively flies up to touch his throat, to distract. Campo men never cry. It's a violation against maleness. He turns away and walks down the dusty road toward home.

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On January 28, the US Embassy sends out another of its warning messages to US citizens living in El Salvador. Just so you know, it says, you may be a victim of a grenade attack. Twelve killed and sixty injured in the past three months for refusing to pay extortion money, the email says, which someone wrote on a computer barricaded behind the Embassy's high white walls. Be aware in open-air markets, malls, police stations, and pediatric clinics, it says.

Meanwhile, also on computers inside the Embassy barricade, they're rolling full steam ahead with an assembly line of trade policies and aid packages and multinational corporation connections.

Meanwhile, these US-made products continue to come with extra features: five dead because they oppose multinational corporate mining; a two-hundred million dollar lawsuit against the cash-strapped Salvadoran government in a court in Washington, DC; ever-deepening poverty; increasing violence in desperation.

Meanwhile, I feel lucky to have not been a nine year old girl when I found out that sometimes the world works like this.

-- 28 January 2010