Feliz Cumpleanos and my first week at FESPAD

Soooo, it was my birthday yesterday :). It was a great day. My work threw a surprise party for me complete with cake and balloons, and in the evening I went salsa dancing with Leah, Rosie, Freddy, and a bunch of their friends. It was a great way to wrap up our first week at work.

The previous blog posts were written during my orientation week, which mostly consisted of learning bus routes, getting comfortable in the city, and attending cool social justice talks that would have been cooler if I had understood more than one word in ten. I learned a lot despite the language barrier, like that El Salvador is in the midst of developing specialized environmental courts to deal with breaches of environmental rights in the country, and that all of its gangs originated in Los Angeles. When Salvadorans fled the brutal civil war that raged from 1980 to 1992, many of them ended up as refugees in LA. They were surrounded by Chicano (Mexican-American) gangs and formed their own gangs to defend themselves. The American government dealt with the problem by deporting the Salvadorans (presumably they waited until the war was over before they did that). And once back in El Salvador, the gangs stopped being about protection. They grew more violent and vicious than they had ever been in the States, cornering the drug trade and committing terrible crimes with impunity. That's what I meant last week when I said that El Salvador actually has reasons to blame foreigners for their gang problem.

My work, FESPAD*, actually works with youth who ended up in prison due to participation in gang activity, teaching them about their rights and how to get help once they're let out (if they're let out) - that's not what I do with them though. Leah and I are working on a report on public-private partnerships (P3s). It took us all week to figure out what our purpose at FESPAD was, but we finally realized that nobody else had a clear ideal of what our purpose was beyond wanting to know more about P3s. The context is this new bilateral trade agreement that El Salvador signed with the US; it's called Partnership for Growth (PFG). PFG is basically a 5-year plan in which El Salvador cracks down on crime while trying to grow exports and attract foreign private investment and the US offers 'technical assistance' while opening El Salvador's economy even more for their firms. This page has links to the three documents that make up PFG if you feel like gouging your eyes out in frustration: http://luterano.blogspot.com/2011/11/us-el-salvador-partnership.html.

El Salvador signed the PFG this last November, and one of the first things the President has done is introduce a new bill regarding P3s. If passed, it would make P3s the preferred way of providing most public services and financing most public infrastructure projects. In many cases government ministries would not be given a choice - the law would oblige them to use P3s. The bill is being debated in the Legislative Assembly right now and everyone swoons over it. My boss is going to try to bring an alternative perspective to the debate, so Leah and I are researching P3s to give him ammunition. We're going to teach him about the theory and practice of P3s, when they work well and when they don't, the sorts of impacts they have on users of the systems and infrastructure they have created, and point out ways in which the bill is flawed. All of this means we have to learn a lot about P3s quickly!

It took us all week to figure this out and create a work plan, and we decided to meet with the boss on Friday afternoon to run it by him. But he came to us in the morning and asked if we could meet then. Then he asked us about how we liked El Salvador, whether we'd been to the beach yet, and even what we'd eaten for breakfast. Then all of a sudden he declared the meeting over and walked us back to our office. We turned on the lights and everyone yelled 'SORPRESA!' We were definitely surprised! It was very sweet and such a nice way to be welcomed to the office.

Today we woke up tired but happy after a night filled with salsa dancing, and went to a lake in a volcano crater. We swam and lounged in hammocks and suntanned (well, I probably haven't tanned because my skin is so white the sunlight just bounces off it). And I got some great pictures! But more on that next time...


*FESPAD stands for the Foundation for the Study and Application of the Law.