Beach weekend! Ok, well, beach day

We had it all planned out: the timing, the driver, the accommodation... and then nothing happened as planned, obviously.

We wanted to go to the beach.

With Rosie in the States attending AGMs for her NGO, nobody living in 292 Calle Estalmoco was both willing and able to drive her car to the beach. Let me tell you a little about Rosie's car. His name is Pitufo (Smurf). He is a tiny, dark blue hatchback of uncertain origin. His age is undetermined. If you light a match near him when his engine is running I won't vouch for your safety. He is held together with duct tape, promises, and Rosie's love.

Fredy was willing to drive Pitufo to the beach, but unable to do so because he doesn't have a full license yet. I was able to drive Pitufo, but definitely not willing to (a) work his rickety clutch, especially given that, (b) everyone in El Salvador drives as fast the French on roads as twisty as Roger's Pass through the Rocky Mountains. Luckily everyone loves the beach, and Rosie's friend Marion was more than willing to drive us down there. Driver: check.

Fredy had called some friends of his, a lovely couple named Rene and Sandra who have a beach house on playa San Blas about an hour south of San Salvador, and they graciously agreed to spend the weekend at the beach and allow us to join them. We were going to head out Saturday afternoon at 2, get there around 3:30, and have most of the afternoon and evening at the beach and all of the next day. Accommodation: check. Itinerary: check.

On Saturday morning Fredy took Leah and I to see the church where Monsenor Romero was shot in 1980, the event which catalyzed El Salvador's civil war. It was moving, and I think it deserves its own blog post so I'll write another one later. As we were leaving the church, Fredy got a call from Rene and Sandra saying that some small nephew had broken a bone and was in the hospital. It wasn't serious, so they didn't cancel the beach trip, but they needed to spend most of the afternoon by his bedside in order to fulfill family obligations. Our departure time was pushed back to 7pm.

The hours in between were filled with an impromptu guitar lesson and Beatles sing-along. I think we probably sang for two hours. At 6 o'clock Rene called to say they had left the hospital early and were coming over right away! Seven o'clock came and went, and there was no sign of Rene and Sandra. Marion drove us to the grocery store to get food. At 7:30 we finally got a hold of them. Apparently their cousin had decided to join us and they had gone to get her swimsuit. They arrived at 8:45, apologizing for having made us wait. They really are nice people, they just have a small punctuality problem. 

Any residual annoyance was forgotten when we got to their adorable beach house. A small swimming pool sat surrounded by palms and banana trees, complete with a table built into the water. The house was spacious and airy, with an outdoor kitchen and a hammock. It was a five minute walk from the beach.

Sunday morning was hot and sunny with clear blue skies. The mosquitoes were so vicious that we spent most of the morning submerged, hippo-like, in the pool. We emerged for food and then went straight back into the water. After lunch we went to the beach. I thought it was beautiful, and apparently it's not even the nicest beach in El Salvador. For the surfers out there, it has one of the best right-point breaks in the world. Don't ask me what that means, I don't know. What I do know is that the rip tides were strong and the waves were big! Each one crashed in a perfect arc and we spent hours jumping over them and diving under them. Small boys were doing tricks on surfboards that I could only dream of. The beach itself is partly black sand because El Salvador has so many active volcanoes. It also has a lot of flesh-coloured driftwood. For one horrible moment, I thought that a log was a naked fat man half buried in sand.

Not this log; another one

Fredy and Leah

Me and Leah

Daredevil children

We went back to the house and decided that the weekend wouldn't be complete unless we got pina coladas. Rene and Sandra's beach house is part of a gated community with a fancy club house that makes a mean pina colada for $3.50. Rene and Sandra came with us to let us into the club and we all drank on the terrace by the beach as the waves rolled in. 

Up to this point my sunscreen had worked great, but my luck ran out around 4pm. I didn't reapply because in Canada, after 4pm is the safe time for the melanin-less freaks that walk among you. There is no safe time in El Salvador, apparently. I managed to get a burn that looked like a racing stripe up the front of each thigh, and another one on my stomach that starts so high it looks like I was wearing granny panties (I wasn't, I swear). That one is also mottled because I had drops of seawater all over me. I took pictures of everything on this trip, but not that. I will leave it to your imagination.

We left around 6:30pm to avoid the traffic on the highway back to San Salvador. Dark was falling and a full moon hung low over the misty jungle canyons as the highway wended its way along the mountain side. It was a really beautiful beach day.  

Lago Coatepeque, the Playboys' Playground

Last weekend Leah, Rosie, Fredy and I all drove into a volcano crater and went swimming. You'll be happy to know that the volcano was long extinct and a lake has formed in the giant crater - Lago Coatepeque. As we drove down the unpaved switchbacks into the crater, we glimpsed manicured lawns and terraced gardens behind the high walls of the mansions on the side of the road closer to the lake. It's called the 'playground of the wealthy' and their playboy sons were out in force on their ski-doos and other obnoxious watercraft. On the hilly side of the road just a few feet away, people lived in homes of corrugated tin, wood, and plastic. With the government trying to build El Salvador's tourism industry from the ground up, I'm not sure how long it will take the Tourism Police to knock on their doors and ask them to get rich or move (this country with 99 gang problems actually has a Tourism Police. I saw them ski-dooing around the lake protecting us from Ogo Pogo or something). If that happens, at least Rosie will be there to help them organize.

The water was really beautiful and clear and would have made for great pictures, but I was swimming while the sun was out and didn't think to take pictures until the skies opened. It's still beautiful, but you'll have to imagine the dazzling sunlight. This coming weekend we're off to the beach!

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.

Chocobananas and Other Dangerous Things

Chocobananas are the most delicious things I have ever eaten. They are even more delicious than liquados, and that's saying something. To make them, you take a banana, put it on a stick, dip it in pure dark chocolate, sprinkle with nuts, and stick it in the freezer until the banana becomes sweet but not so hard that you can't bite it. Chocobananas are sold by the tiny elderly couple that lives across the street from our guesthouse. Leah and I have named them Choco-abuela and Choco-abuelo (Choco-grandma and Choco-grandpa). Every time they sell us a chocobanana - which is pretty much every day because they cost 35 cents - they tell us that we are beautiful and should be very careful because the streets are dangerous for blonde girls.

Warnings like this have been a constant theme since our arrival in El Salvador one week ago. As a result, we've both been very cautious - we don't take the bus at night and don't walk far after dark. But the truth is that we're not in much danger, and the colour of our hair has very little to do with it. The main source of violence in El Salvador is gangs. They dominate the trade in the drugs that travel overland from the suppliers in South America to the lucrative markets in North America. As far as I know, there are two main gangs. They are called the Maras and Calle 18, and the violence for which El Salvador is known is largely a result of turf wars between them. They kill each other, they kill police officers, and very, very occasionally they will commit acts of terrorism to make a political point. At night, they and/or smaller criminal elements will mug people and extort businesses. But they don't target foreigners here the way that they do in Ivory Coast. The Ivoirien government had a habit of blaming the French for all its problems and whipping up anti-caucasian sentiment to distract the populace from its own corruption and incompetency. Hence, it is very dangerous to have white skin in the Ivory Coast whenever there is political unrest, and there has been a lot of political unrest in that country.

Here, the government has good reason to blame the gang problem on foreigners, but it chooses not to (more on the history and evolution of Salvadoran gangs in another post). As a result, foreigners aren't targeted in a xenophobic frenzy for the purpose of hurting them. Here, a foreigner might be targeted because a mugger thinks they'll have a nice cell phone. It's easy to avoid this kind of problem by not wearing flashy jewelery, taking trusted taxis after dark and not carrying a nice cell phone or large amounts of cash. I bought my phone in Burkina Faso for a pittance. It has no bells and whistles and if a mugger took it from me he'd probably give it back in disgust. That actually happened to an American NGO worker I met yesterday, and her phone is nicer than mine. The really good thing about San Salvador is that so many people are willing to help. Through Rosie, we're plugged in with all the ex-pat NGO workers and the knowledge they've gained from living here for months or years. And Salvadorans are super nice to us too. Yesterday Leah and I asked a woman for help in getting off the bus at the right stop, and she helped us cross the lane of traffic to get to the bus, paid our fares and made sure we got off safely. Her name was Norma and I'm sad that we'll probably never see her again.

To tell you the truth, I'm probably never going to encounter violence during my time here. The Salvadorans who warn us to be careful are right to do so and we take them seriously, but I trust more in the lived experience of other foreigners since I'm likely to get the same treatment as them. They have consistently reported that things are fine as long as you're careful, and that traffic is way more dangerous than gangs or muggers. The thing that is actually the most dangerous is crossing the street to get my chocobananas.

To my adoring followers,

I know that you've been waiting a long time since my last blog. So have I. It's been a long time since I traveled anywhere more interesting than Toronto (sorry, Torontonians). But now I'm on the road again, and you can read about my inane observations and daily misadventures right here! 

I'm spending the next two and a half months in El Salvador, a small, beautiful, and somewhat troubled country on the West Coast of Central America. I've come to volunteer at a small and progressive legal research organization called FESPAD, which stands for Foundation for the Study of the Application of Law. Don't ask me what they want me to do yet; I still don't know. I'm sure someone will tell me before I'm supposed to start... 

I have not come here alone. My school set up the volunteer opportunity and I've come down here with a fellow first-year law student, Leah. She's eager to climb all the same volcanoes as me and we're already planning our first trip to the beach.  

The trip began eventfully. As might have been expected, my flight out of Toronto on American Airlines was delayed for 2 hours due to mechanical troubles and borderline incompetence. They did not feed us or let us off the plane. When we finally got to Miami, I had exactly 15 minutes to get on my connecting flight. First I was stuck behind an old lady getting off the plane, then behind a very slow man on the gangway as the seconds ticked down before my gate closed. I was tailgating him like crazy, but if he noticed he didn't care. I burst into the airport and heard them announcing, 'Could passenger Erica Stahl please report to gate D12 for check in to San Salvador,' 'Paging passenger Erica Stahl, this is the final boarding call for flight 925 to San Salvador.' That's the worst sound you can hear when travelling no matter what, but I had forgotten to write down the phone number of Rosie, the woman who was picking me up. If I came in on a later flight, I would have to pay the Miami airport for internet time so that I could find her number, and then find a payphone so that I could call her. Payphones seem to have gone the way of monocles, snuff boxes, and other quaint things, so basically I would have been screwed. I ran so fast my shoe nearly came off. Sweaty and breathless, I arrived at the gate as the attendant was packing up to leave. She let me on, and the plane took off minutes after I took my seat.

When I arrived in San Salvador, I realized that my bag had not been as fortunate as me. It was still languishing in Miami and wouldn't arrive for at least a day. Luckily I had foreseen this eventuality and packed some clothes in my carry on. I registered my bag with the lost luggage people and went outside to find Rosie.

The drive to San Salvador from the airport is very beautiful. The airport is on a coastal plain, while San Salvador sits in the mountains several hundred feet above. The highway is well maintained and smooth. We drove through foothills covered in lush rain forest, river valleys opening below us. 

San Salvador itself is really comfortable. Most people have cars and I have seen very few people begging or sleeping on the streets. There are definitely signs of the civil war and gangs, but the violence that this country is known for is very targeted, and probably something I will never see. I've been learning about it though, so I'll write about that in a later blog post when I know some more.

Since I arrived on Saturday I've spent the time hanging out with Leah and Jessie, who is showing us around. We're getting to know the bus system and we often duck into tiny restaurants to avoid the downpours that occur at random times during the day (it's rainy season). We've eaten the national dish, pupusas, and I've discovered liquados, which are smoothies in a bag for $1. I plan to have one a day every day for the rest of my time here. 

Oh! Before I go, here is my number just in case you ever want to call me: (503) 7464-8939