El Pital: First Impressions

11/18/06

Hi Everyone,

I just got back into San Vicente after spending a few days in El Pital, and I´ve got a lot to write about. This site seems like the perfect fit for me, in so many ways.

On Monday morning, I headed out from the capital to Chalchuapa, the semi-large town where I´ll have to go to get supplies and use the internet from El Pital. Currently, the ruling party in Chalchuapa is the FMLN (the leftist-guerilla-force-turned-political-party), and now I understand their reputation for outstanding local government. There is not a single piece of trash to be found on the streets (a rarity here), the townspeople hang out in a beautiful, pristine central park, crime is low, and all the buildings newly painted. I´m not sure how they FMLN would run the country here, but it´s possible that we´ll find out in the next presidential election, as they´re gaining a lot of ground lately.

On the bus to El Pital, I became a little nervous about the aesthetics of my new site. The bus huffed and puffed its way through a narrow maze of 12 foot high sugar cane fields, and all was dusty and hot. It felt more like I was in the Central Valley of California than in El Salvador, but as soon as we started climbing in elevation, I began to feel better. When I arrived in El Pital, I was struck by the abundance of flowers of every color - even roses. In my experience here, the cultivation of plants is largely practical, but it´s clear that in El Pital, flowers are grown for pleasure.

When I got off the bus and headed into the school, I found a group of about 20 people waiting for me, cake and soda slowly warming in the afternoon heat. My counterpart, Don Isaac, introduced me to everyone there, and I gave a little speech introducing myself and my aspirations for the community. I was then informed that they had had problems deciding where I would eat because so many people wanted to cook for me. So they made a meal schedule for me, with each meal at a different house. This was really touching, but also a little intimidating, because with each meal I would have to discuss my intentions and win the trust of the family. Sort of like having 9 first meals with your girlfriend´s parents. To end the meeting, everyone came up to me individually and gave me a hug, which felt great after a month and a half of zero human contact.

After the meeting, Don Isaac and I made our way to my new house on the property of Don Victor and his wife, Niña Eugenia. They´re a couple in their late 60s with about 4 goats, innumerable chickens, rabbits, kittens, a dog named Oso, 10 kids and 30 grandkids, most of whom live on or near their property. I´ll be staying in a little house, all my own, although privacy is almost out of the question. As in San Antonio, I have a constant trail of little kids following my every move, hanging out in my house and sheparding me from one place to another. Some of them have even started to call me Tio Benjamin. I really do feel like I´m a part of their family already, which, as you know, is quite different than my first experience here.

I couldn´t stop thinking about the difference between this family and my family in San Antonio. In San Antonio, Miguel, my favorite host brother, often says, ¨Hemos sufrido¨ (we have suffered). Miguel is my age, with a wife and two kids (one of whom is not his). He works nights in San Salvador as a vigilante, armed with a shotgun in a shady section of the capital, guarding someone else´s business. For me, he has been the chronicler of the family´s history, and the one who speaks with me most frankly. Hemos sufrido not only speaks, in a nutshell, of what has happened to the family over the last few years, but also of the general tone of this family´s life, and the pall of death and dying that still hangs over that house. We have suffered, we are suffering. This is evident day and night in many ways, from Niña Antonia´s nervous, post-traumatic tremors, to the glazed, saddened looks that will suddenly appear on the faces of the three parent-less kids in the house, to the baby´s strangulated cries and labored breathing throughout the night. I am about to enter a different world.

Back to El Pital . . . This is one of several cooperativas here in El Salvador, which arose from the agricultural reform in the early 1980s. According to my hosts, land was taken from the wealthy coffee plantation owner and divided up among the campesinos who had worked on that land. El Pital was built from the ground up. All of the citizens pitched in and formed a cooperativa in which the huge sugarcane fields and cafetales (coffee fields) are owned by everyone. Once picked and processed, the profits are divided among each family in the cooperativa. Poco a poco, as they say here, things grew and grew until they were able to purchase bigger and better machinery for planting, picking and processing. Now everyone works in the fields and lives, relatively comfortably, off of the shared profits from the cooperativa. They´ve also banded together and, without governmental aid, built a water system derived from a spring in the mountain, meaning that no one pays water bills. This also is a very safe community. One can walk around at any hour without any kind of threat. And there is no police force in El Pital because, as far as I can tell, everyone is related to each other. There seem to be 4 major family groups who have intermarried, and now there is really no distinguishing. I asked about the politics here, thinking that everyone would be hard core FMLN supporters, but everyone I spoke with told me they were apolitical, that neither party comes through on its promises, and that if you want to get anything done here, you have to do it yourself, which they have clearly done well.

I´m running out of time and space, so here are a few more observations:

--They have a program where one family is given their choice of 6 goats, 6 chickens or 6 rabbits. When those 6 produce 6 more offspring, that family gives those 6 to another family, and so on. This works beautifully, and it´s free.

--It seems like part of country life entails bathing in front of everyone. We have a pila (a large tub of probably-not-potable water) that fills every other day from the faucet. This happens to be in the front yard, so bathing in boxers, and in front of everyone (Look at the funny Gringo bathe himself!), is the norm. This means those hard-to-reach areas are even harder to reach. Unless you´re my 65 year old host mom, in which case you´re bathing topless. In the front yard. Yikes!

--I can hear the stream when I lay in bed at night

--Many of the kids who have passed 9th grade (which is rare in itself) have no other option but to take their high school classes once a week on Saturday, in the Bachillerato A Distancia program. Teachers come in on Saturday to teach a class, and the kids do independent study during the week. Needless to say, this isn´t working, and the kids are getting restless, which means more potential to slide into less-than-wholesome activities. One of my main goals here is to solicit funds and facilitate the building of a Bachillerato (high school) in El Pital. Not sure if it´ll be possible, but I´m going to try.

--I think I´ll get a kitten or two to keep away the rats

Thanks for bearing with me on that one. It´s really hard to believe that 2 months ago, I living a different life in the states. I feel like I´m dreaming much of the time, possibly because I was snatched out of a such a comfortable life so suddenly and thrown into the deep end of this life. I wish you all could be here to see it.

Adios,

Benjamín