Late update on eastern El Salvador

Amatitan journal entry

I found a place where the big goals-- food, health, sex, family-- have not been obscured by abundance and abundance of choice. Amatitan has faced war and earthquakes and whatever weather came and went, and has come to the other side of these years feeling something like the garden of Eden reborn and about to get the chance to fall again. Except that it’s less dull because it’s dry and the corn and beans don’t grow by themselves, because here, mostly, food doesn’t grow on trees, and because the people wear clothes so there is washing to take to the river, and so there is always work to do. Way out in Eastern El Salvador, in San Vicente, in the places that only have one road and two trucks, this life exists. And although enough people have family in the United States, and just about everyone has a television, and although the bus driver gets around a little bit, the sign above his bus’ front window reads, “Envy is worse than hunger.”

This is a major base for the FMLN, where the war happened in everyone’s corn field. The stories sound like the ones in war movies except they cut off abrubtly before the triumphant ending, closing special effects and red sunset. Here’s one from Alejandra:

During the war, the army captured five people, all from the same family. They were on a list of leftists that came from the capital. They always had lists. But these people hadn’t really done anything, weren’t really fighting. So all of the women of the area decided to get together and go to the army and ask that they wouldn’t send this family to the capital where they would almost surely be killed. We approached the soldiers where they were keeping the five and the five were all beaten and bloody, their hands and feet were tied, and we made our request. They told us that if we came back again, they would kill all of us. The five people disappeared, one a good friend of Chungo’s. We never saw them again.

I went to a Sunday football game with the men of Amatitan. We travelled in the bed of a big flatbed truck with metal bars to keep us in. The truck's population was approximately 25 young men, mostly players; Elisa, the ten year old neice of one of the players (it was her first away game, a big adventure for her, too); and me, strange white girl from across the sea. The men barked-- at one sort of self-aware moment, they literally just cut to the chase and actually barked rather than yelling and whistling-- at the women on the street, and at the men passing in other truck beds and were shy and curious around me. I was too close to them there in the bed of that same truck; they couldn’t yell and run. In Men of Maize, Miguel Asturias writes of the Indians, “Women far away in the firelight and close by in the shadows, men close by in the firelight and far away in the shadows.” I think I know what he meant.

The pitch was a little uneven, and had a cliff wall along one side so it was smallish, but no one minded much. The fans were drunk or deaf-mute or both and the players would play football anywhere. Amatitan won the JV game and tied the varsity. After the game, one of the footballers sat down next to me at the pupusa restaurant where we were all eating on the way home. He asked me what I thought of the place. He said that Amatitan was happy and peaceful now because the people had been through war and were ready for peace. I felt it, too. I felt it so much that I’ve contemplated moving there for a while after I finish school. Who knows. . .

However happy and peaceful the place was these days though, this young man is ready to take off for the United States to see what else there is to do besides sow corn. And Elisa, well she has a biological dad (long gone) who lives in the States and sends pictures and she wants to go, too. And Anna Ruth who fails a lot of her classes because she can’t read the exams, and who hasn’t learned to read because there aren’t many books showed enough interest in being able to read and write that I sent her a stack of used books. I sent what I could find on the street in San Salvador-- La Hojarasca, Metamorphasis, 1001 Arabian Nights and Jonathan Livingston Seagull among them. I hope they arrive.

There’s so much to say, and it’s still jumbled in my mind. There is also a river with net fishing and ancient ancient carvings in a rock shelter that apparently foreigners come to see sometimes and people camping there in FMLN hats who say in English (they are brothers and their dad was an English teach who named them American names like Jason and George) “The war is over! We’re not guerillas. FMLN is just a party!” when people look sideways at their camo pants and party hats (like FMLN party and not like in Go Dog Go when they say, "Yes, that is a great party hat!") and bed rolls. And there was a chicken that we killed and plucked and carved and ate. The woman of the house, tied its feet together with a broken cell phone charger to hang it upside down and cut it.

Sorry I'm letting the picture of Amatitan get so fuzzy and jumbled, but I am running out of time to write right this minute. I'm hurrying to wrap up and then in my next post, I'm going to throw a big monkey wrench into the cuddled picture called “they are planning to build a gold mine here.” More soon.