SPRING EQUINOX 1996 - Issue Number 35
Weather was the biggest news in the four Salvadoran villages we visited. This strange year brought a rainy season that ended in January instead of its customary November. Unending waters rotted the corn and beans on the stalks and vines. "I guess we'll be putting up with some hunger this year", was a comment I heard several times. Several men from El Higueral have already gone off to San Salvador, where they found work on a construction site. They come home every other weekend, carrying in their pockets the c300 ($35) earned in two weeks, enough to buy two sacks of corn. Meanwhile the fields go untended, the adobe home construction some wanted to complete this dry season gets put off for another year.
This situation put me in a huge quandary. One reason I was there was to continue work on developing library collections in each of the village schools, and to begin work on a scholarship program for students to finish high school. We are starting with two girls from El Higueral, one of the towns hardest hit by the crop failure. It was difficult to justify a fund to benefit two of the brightest, when a whole village was facing possible hunger in the upcoming season. The town is facing the possibility of having to sell some of their cows to buy corn, which they don't want to do, because milk provides nutrition for the children. Also, when there is a crop failure, everybody sells cows, and cattle prices hit bottom. And so they struggle on. "It can't be any worse than during the war", is another way I heard people trying to make sense of hard times.
There were several families I knew from this area of El Salvador, who in 1994 had moved to a lowland province called San Vicente, where the government was offering refugees and ex-combatants land sales on the fertile banks of the Lempa River. Some of their relatives, who still live in the villages where we visit, told me a terrible story of their family members' weather predicament in that faraway promised land. The unending rains swelled the river, and backed up the government-run hydroelectric dams to dangerous levels. The floodgates were opened in the middle of the night, without any warning to communities downstream, killing several people, destroying crops, animals, devastating entire communities of resettled refugees. Many had to be rescued from trees and rooftops. A high-level decision was made, which in almost any other country would have had criminal consequences. But this is El Salvador. Some say it was an intentional attempt to break the will of the beneficiaries of that land, so that they could not pay their loans, and the properties would revert to the banks, or to the former owners.
We had a wonderful time getting acquainted with folks in Izotalillo. It's a town of 75 people, just a few families who resettled this place four years ago. Our group had provided funds to help purchase a piece of land where the town's water comes from. On this trip, we worked on construction of a storage tank that will insure water to all the houses. We found out that Izotalillo's high altitude makes for good coffee cultivation, unlike most of the surrounding area, whose soil is rocky and depleted. Orchards of trees planted by the grandparents before the war, once cleared and pruned, are producing coffee again, though not nearly like the yields of a commercial plantation. It is organic coffee, not by design but by reality: they have no money to afford chemicals to fertilize the trees. They want to plant more coffee. It's a cash crop, more dependable than corn. We brought back lots of coffee: Sister City Brand? Available at my gigs? Not quite there, but soon. Stay tuned.
We saw Elba, the child from El Higueral who had open heart surgery in Boston in Oct. '94. I took her and her father, Martir, to visit a cardiologist in San Salvador. Martir had tried to have her seen at the public Children's Hospital, an all day trip to make the appointment, and another on the appointment day, to find that the doctor was not in. So we arranged for a private visit. The doctor's secretary asked Martir why his surname was not the same as his daughter's. In front of an office full of people, he had to explain that she was "illegitimate", because the parents were not married. When they first got together was during war time, there weren't priests available, and you couldn't just come in and sign up for a marriage license at the town hall, because you were from the remote places where everyone was suspected of being a subversive. What's more, the mayor charged you money to register marriages and issue documents. So after Elba was born, they eventually got a birth certificate that had the mother's maiden name first, customary for children of unwed parents, forever branding her as a bastard child. It happens all the time, and is a stigma that has to be borne by many poor people in situations such as doctor's offices, any kind of government proceedings, etc.. Meanwhile, I was thinking, when will the world understand that there is no uglier oxymoron than "illegitimate child", that every child is precious in the eyes of its creator, regardless of the doings of governments and churches, or the rantings of bureaucrats and preachers. Elba is fine, she looks really healthy and big. Her mother says, "She even goes out with me to gather firewood".
I flew on to Nicaragua, to spend a week in San Ramon, Matagalpa with ten eager high school students from Henniker, New Hampshire. It was almost February, and there were still rain showers falling. We helped paint a schoolhouse, and a new baseball stadium. San Ramon is a town of several thousand, with a high school, a library, a health clinic, an eloquent mayor who is running for national office. San Ramon has about 60% unemployment. Unlike El Salvador, Nicaragua does not have an economy fueled by a million expatriates in the US and Canada sending money home to their families. Nicaragua is in a deeply desperate economic situation. San Ramon is probably in better shape than other parts of the country, because of its coffee economy, a commodity whose price is high right now. But it's hard to see that high price actually benefiting poor people. Coffee pickers make 40c (US ) for picking about 5 gallons of coffee. This is less than a third of what is paid in Costa Rica, which is where I flew next.
...See you on the gig trail. I'll have more stories. I hope you have some for me too. ...Write me for information about upcoming trips to Central America.
Dean Stevens
P.O. Box 368
Boston, MA 02134
(617) 783-4244
Dean Stevens is a folk musician from the Boston area who has entertained us many times at the Neahtawanta Inn. He is involved with the Sister City project of El Higueral.
Return to the Index of Synapse 35, Spring Equinox 1996