Last year El Zachador and Yaneth showed me pictures of the salt rug they’d made during Semana Santa (Holy Week).  They live in Sonsonate, out west, the center of the salt rug tradition in El Salvador.  On Good Friday people take colored salt out to the street and make paintings with it, of Jesus on the cross or carrying it, the Divine Child, the Holy Family, the Holy Spirit (as dove), or whatever else they come up with.  The rugs in Sonsonate are detailed and quite beautiful. 

Last year I didn’t see any salt rugs in my village, although there was one crude sawdust rug.  They only recently started doing the full gamut of Easter ceremonies here in the caserío a few years ago, and they’re still developing them.  Every Friday during Lent there’s a procession through the Stations of the Cross, then several during Semana Santa, and a big one on the evening of Good Friday.  For this, the main procession, people made salt rugs this year!

To depart from rugs for a moment, I’ve realized that Latin American communities are set up according to a sacred geography.  In the center of town, of course, there’s the church with a park in front of it.  But somewhere along the edges of town there’s almost always a little chapel called El Calvario—the Calvary, or Golgotha, the hill where Jesus was crucified.  Sometimes the neighborhood around El Calvario is named after it.  During the Vías Crucis, the Stations of the Cross processions, the people make small altars for each station along the way from the church to El Calvario.  Thus they symbolically turn their own community into Jerusalem, with Calvary on the outskirts.  Here in my community I realized I live right next to El Calvario, which is no chapel, but rather a tiny knoll with a giant mango tree on it and three crosses at the tree’s base. 

My neighbor Niña Fermina takes responsibility for keeping the area around our mango tree Calvario swept and neat for the Friday processions, which I helped with.  And when I found out she was planning to make a salt rug for the Good Friday procession, I got really excited.  It turned out, though, to be more of a multimedia performance art rug than a simple salt rug.  I helped make it, following directions and being amused by the aesthetic arguments between Niña Fermina and her son. 

The central piece was a drawing of a dove done by a kid, which doesn’t show up well in the photo, although you can see the rays of brown salt extending out from it.  Above were mountains and water made with colored salt and green wood shavings.  Below it said “Christ / Light of the World” in red salt.  Scattered around were flowers and designs of soap foam.

Here we see the multimedia performance art rug in its full glory, with sparklers blazing and a walkway lined with flaming alcohol-soaked salt mounds, ready for the procession’s arrival.

Here is the centerpiece of the procession: Jesus lying in a tomb-like box, lit up from within, for some reason carried by the shortest men in the community (perhaps to afford a better view inside).  The guy in the black shirt is Chiky, whose name I like because it’s the name of a delicious brand of chocolate-enrobed cookies.

There were other salt rugs at most of the other Stations of the Cross.  Below is one example.  The text reads, “I am the bread of life.”  The level of elegance and expertise isn’t up to Sonsonate standards, but it’s a pretty exciting tradition to start in the community!  And perhaps the giant expenditure of salt will encourage the cooks here to go easier with it in their meals.

“Ahora tenemos presidente,” repeated my friend Haydeé, grinning after Mauricio Funes’s victory.  Now we have a president.  Her words captured both the satisfaction of the leftists in winning their first presidency and the calmness with which the nation has received the result.

My reporting is belated, but on March 15^th, in Latin America’s first election since Obama’s victory, El Salvador followed the North American lead.  Funes is a charismatic center leftist, often accused of being more radical than he seems, who comes from outside the world of the established political elite.  He based his platform on “secure change” and inspired a devoted following, especially among young people.  Funes’s party, FMLN (Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front), was the guerilla faction during the war in the ‘80s that laid down its arms in 1992 and became a political party.  They’ve been running socialist former comandantes since then, but this time around they finally got it and put forward this well-liked former television personality with no ties to the bloodshed of 20 years ago. 

This may partly explain why the campaign of fear that worked so well five years ago against Shafik Handal failed to swing the vote to the right in 2009.  This time the people just weren’t willing to believe, as ARENA (Nationalist Republican Alliance, the right wing party that’s been in power for 20 years) tried to tell them, that the moment the FMLN’s mild mannered journalist won the election he would call up Hugo Chávez and order a shipment of Kalashnikovs, or seize all private enterprise, or cut all ties with the United States.  The people wouldn’t be duped this time.  This election was a triumph over fear and misinformation.

Funes joins the emerging pan-American left of Obama, Chile’s Bachelet, Argentina’s Kirchner, Ecuador’s Correa, and Brazil’s Lula, among others.  His first visit after winning was to Brazil to get tips from Lula, whom he wants to emulate.  El Salvador could certainly further develop its social programs, and a laid-back samba vibe wouldn’t hurt either—perhaps Funes’s Brazilian wife will dedicate herself to that end.

Funes takes office June 1^st, and I can’t wait.  I hope it’ll go well for him.  A peaceful change in power and governmental shakeup may be the best thing that can happen to El Salvador right now.

 A few days after the soccer game, on April 1^st, I hiked the tallest and most recently active volcano in the country, Ilamatepec (7800’), renamed Santa Ana by the Spanish.  In 2005 Ilamatepec hiccupped and belched and spewed a bunch of ash.  Some people died and the coffee fincas on its slopes suffered a lot of damage.  The mountain looks intimidating—the forests abruptly end a couple thousand feet from the summit, and the rest is covered in multicolored ash raked with grooves.  This picture is from partway up the trail that starts in the saddle between Ilamatepec and Cerro Verde; from Lago Coatepeque several thousand feet farther down, the mother mountain seems to occupy a realm of its own in the skies.

 Once the forest ends—which happens just as abruptly as it looks from below—the vegetation is almost purely grasses and agave.  Soon the grasses end too, and there are only the big, spiky agave plants growing out of the rock and ash, some of them with 10-foot tall Dr. Seuss-like flower stalks.  It seems so crazy to me that such a thick-leaved, heavy plant is the first thing that can grow in the volcanic material, even before grasses.

The hike from the saddle to the crater rim—roughly 2,000 feet vertical—only took a little over an hour.  With ten minutes left the slope lessened and we found ourselves walking through a much more barren, gray landscape than the colorful, agave-dotted side of the volcano.  Clouds whipped past and everything seemed quieter.  Here and there were rocks that had been thrown out of the crater in 2005, including the truck-sized one below, with their own little impact craters around them.

Then all of the sudden the crater opened up below us, 1700 feet deep, with a turqoise lake at the bottom.  Bubbles rising from the middle of the lake and steam wreathing its surface indicated its fiery restlessness.  Hans, our volcano expert who hikes Ilamatepec regularly to monitor instruments he’s put up there, claimed the lake has a pH of 1.  He also introduced me to the term “nested crater,” which is now somewhere close behind “monadnock” and “peneplain” on my list of favorite geological terms.  A nested crater shows several episodes of eruptive activity.  In the picture below you can see a flattish plain halfway up the crater, which is the remains of an older crater floor.  At eye level and farther away you can see an even older crater floor. 

We enjoyed lunch and a volcanology lecture from Hans on the crater rim, then threw and slingshotted rocks into the crater for a while.  I figure it can’t do any harm in a place that’s still so geologically active.  We observed a small landslide on the inside of the crater at one point, not caused by us.

I wanted to hike around the crater rim, which is a 2- or 3-hour proposition, but our police escorts were getting restless about the weather.  It’ll have to happen another day, hopefully a clearer one.

Life in the Savior hasn’t been uneventful lately, I just haven’t been writing.  The blog merits an update.  You merit an update.  Thank you for caring.

Let’s go back two weeks, to San Salvador, Estadio Cuscatlán, where El Salvador played the U.S. in a World Cup qualifying game.  There was the possibility of a poor game between El Salvador’s less-than-mediocre squad (which hasn’t been paid in some months) and a strong U.S. team that had just dominated México.  There was also the possibility of getting hit with bags of urine; it had happened before.  Gringos make good targets.  Despite these discouraging factors, lots of volunteers were excited to go to the game.

I showed up with my PCV friends, most of us dressed in Salvadoran jerseys, to find that my ticket had been sold to someone else—confusion between the two Gabriels in Peace Corps El Salvador.  El Zachador and Jenny had just convinced the doorman to let them in for free, citing the rumor we’d heard that gringos got free admittance.  The rumor was bogus, but Jenny’s blond cuteness was not.  I tried the same thing, in bad Spanish, despite not being as easy on the doorman’s eyes.  He and his buddy flat-out denied me.  I switched to good Spanish and continued wheedling, to no avail.  But finally a third, higher-ranking doorman walked up and let me in for no good reason.  5% of my monthly budget saved!  A good start to an amazing game.

The game was amazing.  I sat with about six other volunteers, four rows up behind one of the goals.  We were in our seats over an hour before the game started, and the energy was already incredible.  Chants and waves flowed around the stadium as if governed by the sixth sense that controls flocks of birds.  I could look out at the crowd and count on one hand the number of people not wearing blue or white.  I thought it was loud and energetic already, but when the Salvadoran goalies came out to warm up, I could feel the roar in my whole body.  And when the American goalies came out, the chant of Culero! Culero! (roughly, “gaywad”) was intoxicating (apologies to my gay friends and readers).  The Salvadoran fans in front of us, curious to see our reaction, turned around, only to see us chanting harder than anyone, and doing the middle finger tomahawk chop.  We were their friends from then on.

We talked and joked quite a lot with the Salvadorans around us.  A cousin of Cheyo Quintanilla, El Salvador’s star forward, was sitting right in front of me.  There was also a man who’d flown down from Fairfax, Virginia just for the game; and a woman who joked with El Zachador and Jenny, who both live in the department of Sonsonate, about the reputation women from there have for being big-chested, waving her breasts at us in her hands.  Everybody bought each other beers.

When El Salvador scored, and then scored again, the celebration was incredible.  We were slapping fives and hugging each other in big knots and jumping around and screaming like the town crazy person.  By this point I was fully committed to rooting for El Salvador.  No more bullshit like I’d been telling people in my village, “Well, I’d like El Salvador to play well and preserve their pride, but they probably can’t beat the U.S.”  El Salvador was ahead 2-0 and I was thirsting for more gringo blood.  Take it to ‘em!  Bring ‘em down a peg, those arrogant North Americans!  Maybe the senior doorman had let me in because he could see in my eyes the latent potential for swearing a blue streak in Spanish at my own countrymen.

After the game I talked to a trainee who told me about cheering when the U.S. finally scored, and I immediately thought, “What a tool.  Only an idiot who’s just been in the country for two months would cheer for the U.S.”  But of course I normally root for the U.S., and I look forward to them doing better in South Africa in 2010 than they ever have in a World Cup.  I apologize for my reflexive thoughts to the trainee who didn’t know I thought them.

In the second half the Salvadorans who’d been playing their hearts out, and truly outshining the powerful U.S. squad, started to go down with cramps and injuries.  The gringos tied it up, but only on an offsides goal that wasn’t called back, and another goal that was scored while a Salvadoran player was down on the field.  Rooting for El Salvador really got into my blood in that stadium.  Ever since I’ve been wishing that the offsides had been called, or the U.S. had done the courteous thing and kicked the ball out when that player was down, or the ref had called a penalty for El Salvador when it probably should have been called.  They came so close to winning!  It would have been only the second time against the U.S., and everyone would have been so happy.

The headline in the newspaper the next day was so sad: ¡La tuvimos!  We had it!  …But we let it slip away…

Oh well, the rest of the evening was still fun.  El Zachador, Jenny and I met some rich young Salvadorans and went out to the Arab country club with them.  It was fascinating to me to see where the rich Palestinians who control most of the agriculture, industry, and politics in this country relax.  The pool was large, the tables were spaced discreetly, and the hummus was delicious.

A couple of recent variations on the conversation below have made me want to put it up here.  This conversation is all too common with uneducated people in the campo.  It comes in various forms—from strangers in a pickup or people I know well, from kids or old people, etc.  From a guanaco (male Salvadoran) or a guanaca (female Salvadoran), and hence I use the hip, gender-neutral “guanac@” in my script.

Guanac@:        Your Spanish is very good.

Me:                  Thank you.  It took a lot of work.

Guanac@:        Is it true that you can also talk in a different way?

Me:                  Why yes, it’s called English.  It’s actually a different language.

Guanac@:        And can your dad talk that way too?

Me:                  Yes indeed.  Not only my dad, but my whole family, and all my friends from the United States, and lots of other people all over the world.

Guanac@:        And when you talk that way your friends understand you?

Me:                  You bet.

Guanac@:        Really.

Me:                  Really.

Guanac@:        When did you learn to speak that way?

Me:                  Ever since I was a baby, just the way you learned Spanish.

Guanac@:        It must have been hard to learn.

Me:                  Not really.  It’s something every kid does, just like the kids here learn Spanish from the time they’re a baby.

Guanac@:        [pondering] …and when did your dad learn it?

Me:                  When he was a baby, just like everyone else with whatever language they speak natively.

Guanac@:        [mind blown, retreats into silence]

It’s amazing to me that people can compliment me on my Spanish, indicating that they have a concept of second-language-learning, but fail to grasp the idea that other languages can be first languages.

The other day my boss Rolando, a Salvadoran who’s worked for Peace Corps for 15 years, told me, “Your Spanish is excellent; in most groups there are a couple of volunteers who leave the country with virtually no accent, and I think you might be one of them.” Well shoot, that oughta show me there’s been no need to kick myself so much for never studying new verbs or reading books in Spanish. Although I still feel as if I’ve barely just hopped into the kiddie pool of fluency, and there’s still a whole ocean waiting for me, so I don’t think I’m over the self-flagellation for not studying yet.

But what Rolando went on to say interested me more: “It’s obvious you’ve been talking a lot with your community members, but what surprises me is that your accent is not a country accent.” We went on to talk about Meghan, a volunteer from my group, whose accent has become very strong—a Salvadoran equivalent of a backwoods eastern Tennessee accent, in my mind. She aspirates all her S’s, skips syllables, turns silent H’s and some unlucky consonants into G’s, and uses countrified little sayings. It’s almost shocking to hear such a strong accent coming out of a white girl’s mouth. It’s pretty cool, too.

Rolando was curious about how my accent has become excellent in such a different way—a sort of generic urban Spanish—and it got me to thinking about learning styles. Meghan must be more of an imitative learner, saying what she hears. I think my learning process is more convoluted. I can’t remember a word for the life of me unless I can envision how it’s spelled. If I learn a new word from someone with a strong country accent I repeat it back according to how I imagine it’s spelled, until I have it right. Then the image of the letters is there, burned into my brain and beginning to associate itself with the way the word feels to say. Luckily orthography is predictable in Spanish; I think learning English as a second language would give me more problems because of the lack of spelling standards.

I think my mind’s-eye dependence on spelling is part of what makes for a more urban, generic accent. Pronunciation in Spanish is even more predictable than orthography, and knowing the rules lets you know how to pronounce anything ‘correctly.’ So I do. But my generic accent also derives in part from a conscious avoidance of some of the more obvious distortions of Spanish as it’s spoken in the Salvadoran countryside. The biggest example is the slew of incorrect stem changes in verbs like aprender—people where I live conjugate it as apriende instead of the correct aprende. I like some of the common country verbs, like apiar instead of bajar to describe getting off a bus, because it’s fun to speak the local dialect and surprise a few people. But incorrect stem changes just take it too far in my book. With an eye to speaking Spanish in other parts of the world, I don’t want to sound like a total hick.

…but I realize I’m sounding like a huge square right now! I guess that’s part of it too—most other volunteers probably aren’t as predisposed to think very much about stem-changing verbs. The price of nerddom.

The day after Rolando’s compliments I got more, from someone who’s self-conscious about her own accent. This was a visitor from the States, a teenager we’ll call Nu Kiks because of her taste for shoes. She’s the niece of my friend Noé, in for a weeklong visit from Long Island. Her last visit here was three years ago, and it’s clear she’s not entirely sure what to do with herself in rural El Salvador.

I was in Noé’s store in town talking smack with him about the U.S.-El Salvador World Cup qualifying match next month. I was a little curious about the silent dark-eyed girl behind the counter with him, whom I’d never seen, but just assumed she was a friend or neighbor. After a round of good-spirited jibes about a game whose conclusion is pretty much foregone (ha! take that!) Noé and I moved on to joking about other things. I said I wanted to buy some honey, pointing to a bottle of whiskey for sale on the counter and asking faux-naively, “is that honey for sale?” The dark-eyed girl finally piped up, saying “it’s ALcohol” in a very North American accent, surprising the hell out of me. We expressed our confusion to each other.

“ALcohol! That was a surprise, hearing such an American accent!”

“You didn’t actually think I was from here, did you? I thought I looked different, or dressed different.”

“No, you definitely look like you could be from here,” I said, wondering whether she’d take it as an insult.

“Well, you confused me too. I was sitting here thinking, well, he doesn’t look Spanish, but he sounds like he is.”

“Thanks. Where are you from, anyway, someone who says ALcohol like that?”

It turned out Nu Kiks was not at all silent by nature. She grabbed at the chance to talk in English, and jawed my ear off for about an hour. She talked about how boring it is here (“There’s nothing to do! There’s electricity, and that’s about it”), race relations in her high school (“I’ll hang out with anyone, but I mostly stick to Spanish people. And Indians, but mainly the ones who look Spanish. I thought my friend Adid was Dominican for months!”), the latest fashion out of Queens (“Maybe you don’t know about it yet, down here, but it’s all about skinny jeans, Jordans, and tight T-shirts. All the white boys in the school are trying to do it, and I just think, please, just be white”), the one attractive guy she’d seen in El Salvador (“He knew how to match! And he didn’t look Salvadoran at all, more like a Colombian-Dominican mix. But wouldn’t you know it, he was the only one with a girlfriend”), how gossipy the people are here (“and I thought I talked a lot, but these people! They talk about every little thing! You can’t do anything here without your mom hearing about it! By the way, do you know about the crazy lady who lives down the block there? Supposedly she lured so-and-so’s husband away from her….”), and wanting to hike here (“I’ve been telling my mom, I want to go mountain-climbing, but she says we’re going to the beach this weekend, and I guess I feel bad my grandma couldn’t go anyway…”). And on and on. It was fun to listen to.

When someone asked Nu Kiks something in Spanish she answered, then turned back to me and told me she’s embarrassed of her accent so she tries not to speak too much Spanish. She thinks people make fun of it. It’s true, her accent didn’t sound Salvadoran, but it seemed more South American than gringo. I pointed this out, and it seemed to relieve her. She explained her three best friends are Colombian, so that’s where the South American sound comes from. I told her not to worry about being made fun of—it’s natural to sound different after spending a lifetime in the States, and the people who matter won’t mind, etc. etc.

She began asking me if it wasn’t hard to live here, saying a Puerto Rican friend of hers had found moving back to Puerto Rico for a year very hard. People had made fun of him for being a gringo. Well, I said, I don’t think I face the same issues of identity. I am a gringo, you see, plain and simple. I think it’s a lot easier for me, not being caught up between worlds like immigrants and children of immigrants. I told her to read Dreams from My Father and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the two books I’ve read recently that speak most to those identity issues. If she actually does read Oscar Wao I don’t know how much she’ll like it; she’s not much of a nerd.

2/15/09
After a solid evening of pickup soccer, teaching guys to throw a frisbee, running ten laps of the field, fast, and showering under the stars, I arrive at Niña Fermina’s, where she is watching a re-broadcast of the new archbishop’s swearing-in ceremony.

The former archbishop is there (not dead), looking old but healthy. Provoking curiosity about intra-Church personnel management. Did he decide he wanted a nice retirement at his coffee farm in the mountains, writing his memoirs to the sound of the beneficio machinery, perhaps burning off steam on deep-sea fishing trips with the president’s nephew (who once took a friend of mine on a date)? Or did the Church hierarchy reach their shepherd’s crook from behind the curtain and yank him out of the job? Perhaps both? Niña Fermina doesn’t know, but unequivocally expresses her distaste for him, a distaste she suggests is widely shared. My mind lopes into a realm of heavy conjecture: historically, priests loved by the people = priests detested by the government…so perhaps priests detested by the people = priests loved by the government? Maybe those fishing trips aren’t so fanciful? But I must hold my speculations in check.

The new archbishop follows President Tony Saca to the eagle-shaped lecturn. Blessedly, he is very easy to understand, although Niña Fermina’s first comment is habla un poco mudo (he speaks like a mute, or rather, sounds like he has a slight speech impediment). I rib her for making this her first comment on the new archbishop. Mudo or not, he loses little time, at least according to Salvadoran standards: after naming the many dignitaries there, which takes at least five minutes; then recognizing each preceding archbishop of El Salvador, who have all, it seems, achieved a condensed identity of five or six adjectives, surprisingly few of which are repeated (another five or ten minutes); and another five minutes of platitudes, he jumps straight into his role as adviser on national policy. To Niña Fermina’s approval, he doesn’t name a particular party or politician in his behests that the government more aggressively approach the problem of poverty. Good enough, poverty’s a solid place to start, especially in a country where Monseñor Romero’s image and memory are still rife. But then, to my delight, he moves straight into a condemnation of the proposed mines in several parts of the country. I still don’t know what kind of mines they’re to be (gold, said one guy, but I don’t trust anything until I’ve heard it at least 4 times), but the issue seems to be heating up. I see more and more NO A LA MINERIA! bumperstickers on buses (note for former opponents of Corridor H: every time I see these I convulsively reimagine them as white-on-blue LA MINERIA: MIERDA DE TORO! stickers, which amuses me), and hear more and more mentions of the mines in conversation. He links his opposition to the mines to a simple theological argument about our mandate to protect the environment, expanding the discussion in a nice way rather than getting into ugly descriptions of the contamination of water sources with lead which I hear have resulted from previous mines. Apparently all the parishes have sent in petitions against the mines. Closing ranks. I’m astonished this was the new archbishop’s first priority on the job, next to a shout-out to the poor. Bold. To the point. I like him already. So does Niña Fermina. But we’ll see, she says.

During the new guy’s litany of all his predecessors, a long applause erupts when he mentions Monseñor Oscar Arnulfo Romero. After finishing the litany, he makes another, special mention of Romero, invoking his spirit to watch over them tonight. I am reminded of my commentary in an earlier post about how odd it is that the commanders from the civil war, both sides, are now working with each other in the legislature. Here’s why: President Tony Saca, a pious Catholic, has just spoken to this crowd, and they have applauded him. He is the leader of the ARENA party, whose founder, Roberto D’Aubuisson, also a Catholic, ordered Romero’s assassination (according to broad consensus). D’Aubuisson is still commemorated on the T-shirts of people campaigning for current ARENA candidates. Am I crazy, or is this crazy?! Tony Saca could have on a D’Aubuisson T-shirt himself, right now! Ok, that is crazy…but, Does he feel any qualms? Does he talk about this in confession? Does he choke up? Or has he shut his mind to the cascade of contradictions and moral conundrums in favor of a both-and, let’s-bull-on-ahead approach, consigning anything suspect to the dark muck of himself, where he won’t have to remember it exists until he meets the counsel of his maker? His smile is certainly the smile of someone who could have done this. I can’t tell precisely what to think or feel about this whole situation, which is partly why it fascinates me.

Comments are welcome.

Now that you’ve met Niña Evangelina and her daughter Niña Fermina, I’d like to publish a one-of-a-kind document.  This is Niña Evangelina’s life story, as told to her granddaughter Angela, who recorded it and typed it when she was 14 or 15.  I attempted to translate it.  It came out a little rough.  I tried to keep the spontaneous oral quality but also smoothen it so it reads better.  In some places I erred to one side or the other.  There’s one sentence in particular that made no sense to me in Spanish, so I translated it directly for you to puzzle over in English. 

http://gabrielrogers.wordpress.com/nina-evangelinas-life-story/

The way she chose to tell her story fascinates me.  You could title this account “The Eight Falls of Niña Evangelina” or “Niña Evangelina’s life As Seen Through Its Accidents and Misfortunes.”  The chronology is held down by the order things happened in and the ages of her children, but nothing else.  Not contemporary historical events or her age or the year.  It’s hard to tell exactly when many of the events happened.

Much more fascinates me about this story, but I’ll keep this post short and let you read it for yourself.  Comment if you have thoughts on it.

December 9, 2008

The day before Thanksgiving I went to visit Niña Fermina’s mom, Niña Evangelina.  I like visiting her because she’s an assertive character and a prolific storyteller.  If I want, I can just sit and listen.  It’s also fun to see where Niña Fermina came from: they are obviously mother and daughter, but they represent two very different types of self-confident Salvadoran woman. 

Niña Evangelina lives by herself about a 10-minute walk away.  She is not the type to move in with a daughter or granddaughter and live out her days tranquilly.  My sense is that that might end in a meltdown.  Of course, like most old Salvadoran ladies (or old ladies in general, rather), she complains about her children moving away—to the States, San Salvador, and the other side of the village—and leaving her alone.  But on the whole she seems content to putter around her garden and hold forth for a slow but steady stream of visitors.

Also keeping her company are multifarious posters of Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero and Radio Segundo Montes, the leftist radio station based in Morazán.  During every visit her meandering narrative reliably comes around to stories of the brutality of Army and National Guard soldiers, and of the orejas (“ears,” or informants) that have come to keep tabs on her throughout the years.  Some of them she knows, and relentlessly lambasts, like this: “that Don Cheyo, he’s all right, a nice man, but his son is a dirty little oreja who came around one day to harass me, but I told him what for.” 

Many communities in Morazán, which was a rebel stronghold during the war, are still strongly leftist, but mine is not.  The valley of Corinto went back and forth and saw a lot of action especially during the rebel offensives in the last few years of the war.  Few people of the villages here, however, were involved in the forces of either side.  Many of them fled to the relatively calmer towns of La Unión or to Honduras to stay out of the way (not Niñas Fermina or Evangelina, though, who have a brave streak).  The dominant trend still seems to be to keep your head down; there are few vociferous partisans.  Niña Evangelina is a notable exception.

Between her and her daughter I’ve heard a lot of good stories from the war.  Between them they were harassed many times by soldiers accusing them of helping the guerillas, sometimes even threatening to kill them.  They did feed and house rebels when they came by, but they offered the same hospitality to Army soldiers.  But both speak more highly of the FMLN rebels, saying despite their ruthlessness towards soldiers and criminals they were more courteous and good-hearted to the people.  They’ve told me all about the various bombs that fell in the village, the huge rebel encampment in the pasture right in front of my house during the offensive of 1989, and the feeling of listening to gunfire and mortars while trying to cook supper.

Forming a fascinating contrast to this perspective of two poor, rebel-sympathetic campesinas were some stories I heard on Thanksgiving from a rich, rightist couple from San Salvador.  It may be the greatest and most humbling privilege I’ve ever had, the opportunity to interact openly with people from all levels of Salvadoran society, from heads of government agencies and members of the richest families to the most destitute, isolated country people. 

I spent Thanksgiving with an American couple who work in the embassy, in the luxurious house that comes with their Foreign Service package.  Protecting the house and its neighbors are two gates manned by armed guards, high walls topped with bales of razor wire, and a giant heavy metal automatic sliding door.  Their Nissan SUV has a backup camera on the dashboard that totally mesmerized me.  Due to the crime, El Salvador is classified as a “hardship post” for Foreign Service employees, a distinction which carries with it a 15% (I think) bonus from our gracious taxpayers.  Thanks, Joe Sixpack!  And thanks, MS-13! 

We enjoyed an INCREDIBLE dinner complete with everything I never imagined I’d get to eat until Thanksgiving 2009 at the earliest: turkey, delicious stuffing, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, pumpkin pie…I could go on.  Topped off with a Dominican cigar and a finger of homemade Croatian liquor from their last tour of duty in Zagreb.  We three PCVs felt a little coarse in such a…plush environment, but were equal to the challenge presented by the food; two hours of resting and chatting was sufficient to recharge for our third and fourth full plates and more pie.  We gave as good as we got in terms of culture shock, too, by wowing our hosts with stories of our daily lives in the campo.  JB took the cake, I think, by telling them he bathes in a stream of dubious cleanliness (I wonder why he’s sick all the time…).

Besides Rhett (http://myworldinelsalvador.blogspot.com/), JB and me, the couple had also invited a Salvadoran coworker from the embassy and her husband.  They were extremely friendly people, with great English.  They insisted I call them any time I spend the night in San Salvador, rather than staying at a hostel.  Or hotel, rather; “hostel” is probably not in their vocabulary.  He is now a pilot for TACA, but during the war flew planes and helicopters for the Salvadoran Air Force.  The day Colonel Domingo Monterrossa was killed in a helicopter in Morazán by a booby-trapped piece of FMLN booty, he was also flying in Morazán, but in a plane.  His father was a founding member of the ARENA party, a colleague of Roberto D’Aubuisson, and was targeted by the FMLN and eventually killed in his house in San Salvador.  For her part, her parents’ grand house in a neighborhood overlooking the city was once taken over by rebels while she was there.  She said the fighters were teenagers and expressed disgust at her memory of their glee and imperiousness upon seizing such a prize.

Their war stories went on and on, and were much different to listen to than those I’d heard the day before from Niña Evangelina and over the previous months from Niña Fermina.  To the pilot and his wife, the rebels were a bunch of dangerously misled, rabble-rousing upstarts who didn’t understand the first thing about the way the world worked, while the Armed Forces were valiantly trying to restore order to the country in the face of the rebels’ threat to take it to hell in a handbasket.  To my campesina friends, the soldiers were a bunch of thugs and the rebels a bunch of good-hearted folks who understood them better, but both sides were making life pretty unpleasant. 

The other notable difference is the social status (or literal rank) of the people they interacted with.  The pilot at Thanksgiving knew Colonel Monterrossa, and could feasibly have been flying his helicopter the day he died.  He also knew the Cuban-American CIA agent, Gustavo Villoldo, who supposedly buried Che Guevara, and later came to El Salvador to help put down the insurrection.  This guy kept his giant-killing streak alive by capturing one of the most notorious female rebel comandantes, Zoila Solís.  The pilot later visited her in the hospital for some reason, an episode she reproduced in the memoir she wrote in the ‘90s, badmouthing him.  She now serves in the legislature for the FMLN party (http://www.asamblea.gob.sv/diputados/zquijada.htm).  My American host, who’s only been in El Salvador for 4 months, listened to all of this wide-eyed.  He asked, “and have you talked to her since the war?”  The pilot responded, with the utmost aplomb, “I’ve run into her a few times, but I really have no interest in talking to her.”

Imagine if the Civil War had ended in a truce, and all the Union and Confederate generals lived in Washington, many of them serving together in Congress.  Here in El Salvador we’re at about where they might have been in 1881.  Tensions remain.

Intermission.  The day after Thanksgiving our host gave us a tour of the embassy.  It’s a huge compound with a pool, ballfields, and several large buildings.  We palled around with the Ambassador in his office, having our picture taken with him for no reason that he explained to us.  In the Commissary I bought one Sierra Nevada Pale Ale for a special occasion and a jar of Smucker’s peanut butter.  Ah, the most rich spice of scarcity!  End Intermission.

Moving on to my second recent visit with Niña Evangelina, indulge me by first pausing to consider a reading from Morinaga Roshi, a Zen master who died in 1995.

Consider this: Suppose that a person is in a very sincere and tranquil mood, with no anxieties, in a clear, healthy psychological frame of mind. (When one’s mind is distorted and hung up, that is another story!) Suppose that person is a housewife in the kitchen in the evening, and she hears the familiar sound of her husband’s footsteps as he comes home. Wiping her hands on her apron, she goes with the face of a wife, the voice of a wife, the body and movements of a wife—a wife greeting her husband.

Then, just as she reaches to take his coat, a voice from behind calls, “Mama!” She turns around and responds, “What is it?” And just in that instant this person no longer has the face of a wife, but of a mother. She looks back with the face of a mother, the voice of a mother, the gestures of a mother. Then, if a friend from the neighborhood comes to call, she receives her guest not with the face of a wife or of a mother, but with the face of a next-door neighbor. 

Perhaps as you read this, you imagine me in one form, as a monk. But tomorrow morning I will visit the grave of my parents. Standing before that grave, I am nothing more than a child. One appears before one’s parents as a child, before one’s child as a parent, before one’s husband as a wife, before one’s wife as a husband. At work, the face and form one takes on depend upon the position they occupy. This is our true form.

There is no clump called “I” moving from this spot to that spot, instant by instant. Rather, through particular encounters with particular people, within each encounter, within each transition, something called “I” makes its appearance. Thus it is that what seems to be an object outside yourself is, in reality, your complement, that which gives this instant of your life its glow.

-Soko Morinaga Roshi, From Novice to Master: An Ongoing Lesson in the Extent of My Own Stupidity, p. 126 (emphasis added)

This is a familiar concept in both Buddhism and postmodern academia.  The philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty writes in a similar way of the individual’s interaction with the world: “perception always involves, at its most intimate level, the experience of an active interplay, or coupling, between the perceiving body and that which it perceives.”  Anthropologists since the 1960s or so have occupied themselves just as much with studying the nature of intersubjectivity as the cultures of their subjects.  In physics, there is the Heisenberg principle.  I just mean to say, Morinaga Roshi’s quote is no uncommon wisdom, it is just uncommonly well put.  That line, “But tomorrow morning I will visit the grave of my parents. Standing before that grave, I am nothing more than a child,” carries such simple, deep power.  With those two sentences, the Roshi gets across in a very personal way a truth that can otherwise seem rarefied.

Where am I going with this?  Sometimes I just like to wander around in ideas, but at the moment I’m trying to work towards explaining a very distinct moment during my second recent visit to Niña Evangelina’s.

I’ve spent a lot of time with Niña Fermina.  I eat and chat with her nearly every night.  Her way of talking, her opinions, her sense of humor, the easy certainty with which she approaches life.  To me she is a consummate matriarch, defining the way things go on around her without overtly exerting her will.  She lives with a daughter and three grandchildren.  She is also a superbly balanced individual, non-confrontational, tolerant, but very self-assured.  At one point she was ill, and scores of people were showing up to her bedside, and she kept talking to me about her funeral, all of which increased my vision of her as an old, respected matriarch.

I’ve spent less time with her mother, but it’s easy to tell that they share many traits: the self-assuredness, lack of discomfiture in any situation, a certain way of talking.  But Niña Evangelina right off the bat comes off as confrontational, rigid, and strongly opinionated.  She’s often complained to me about not having any friends in the community, and it’s not hard to imagine why (although it’s precisely the things that may alienate her neighbors that tickle me about visiting her).  One projects that Fermina consciously rejected her mother’s rigidity in her adolescence.

It struck me for months that I’d never seen mother and daughter in the same place at the same time.  I began to think they didn’t speak to each other.  But yesterday I was sitting at Niña Evangelina’s talking about orejas when Niña Fermina showed up.

She sat down in the doorway, on the cool concrete floor, and in that moment I saw her as I never had before: the woman I’d always seen as a matriarch she had the face of a daughter, the body and movements of a daughter.  She didn’t even have to say anything, I could see it so clearly.  I saw deference, rebellion, respect, remnants of rage and acceptance, a little awe, the tentativeness of one who sees much of another in herself, and the comfort with all of this that comes from many years with it.  It was incredible.  I immediately thought of Morinaga’s quote.

Another woman of Niña Fermina’s generation showed up, and they spent much of the rest of the visit talking with each other and ignoring Niña Evangelina, much in the way of children ignoring an embarrassing parent.  It was a little sad, but it was also clear that Niña Evangelina is resigned to it and hardly cares a whit.

Walking back to our houses, Niña Fermina talked to me about her childhood, about how strict her mother was, how she burned her hands on the comal to desensitize them for making tortillas, and punished her for every little thing.  It’s no wonder she so distinctly had the face and body and movements of a child when she sat down in her mother’s doorway; it’s been a long, fraught relationship.

Three weeks since the last Superplush post, and a month to the day since landing once again on the Savior’s soil, it’s past time to wrap up the visit home wrap up.

I was in West Virginia from October 13 to 16, which meant the fall colors were stunning. What I love about seasons, which is also why I must live in a part of the world with four seasons when I settle down, is that a year is just enough time to mostly forget how breathtaking is the first snowfall of winter, how joyous are the green buds of spring, how sweet is the kiss of a summer night’s breeze, and how stunning are the fall colors. It is one of the triumphs of the human that he can forget the beauty of these things.

My Salvadoran friends were properly awed by the pictures I showed them of the gold, red, and orange mountainsides. I told them how I had to wear sweaters and warm hats, and how the night is crystal clear and you can see your breath. One old man told me about the first time he saw snow in person, when he was visiting his son in Pennsylvania; he was delighted to find out you can walk in it—he’d thought it would get you soaking wet just like water.

My best buddy Andrew and I spiraled down the big toilet bowl of Lincoln Tunnel’s New Jersey entrance and arrived in New York City from WVa at about 2:30 AM. We picked up a couple other friends to pass the time with while parking, which took about an hour. I was reminded of how living in NYC so often makes one think mathematically: what is the most efficient way to cover the grid of streets and find the closest parking spot to 82^nd and Columbus? The great success of our parking escapade was also its greatest downfall: a 16-backs-and-forths parallel job (with Andrew at the wheel and Joe running from one end of the car to the other to signal the gap like some sort of manly Vanna White), ending with no more than 2 inches on either end, which was punctuated by looking up at the sign that said “NO PARKING ANY TIME.” Getting out only took about 12 backs and forths.

Fortunately most of the other great successes of my visit to the city were downfall-free. One, surprisingly enough, was sushi bombs (a sake bomb but substitute a sushi roll for the cup of sake), which are somehow not repulsive at all. Another was tasty craft beer, especially Pennant Ale from Brooklyn Brewery, which tasted especially good while the Red Sox and Rays duked out the ALCS. Another gustatory success was delicious sandwiches, with a special shout out to City Sub on Bergen St. Most of their employees are Guatemalan, which means they look just like Salvadorans. And finally, in the category of downfall-free technological successes (which also includes touchscreen iPods and phones that flip open various ways, as mentioned in Superplush part 2), there was MarioKart Wii and BoltBus. MarioKart Wii may be as close to pure, distilled fun as a video game can get. And BoltBus deserves its own paragraph.

Apparently they sell one seat on every bus for a dollar. Mine was $18, bought online the night before, and never inspected by the driver. For this I not only got from NYC to Washington, DC in under 4 hours, I also enjoyed high-speed wireless internet the whole way. What?!? I signed into Gmail in the Holland Tunnel! Some sort of Harry Potter bullcrap is obviously going on here, by which I mean wizardry. And not only technological wizardry; there were only 4 passengers on the entire bus, obviously pointing to some very dubious economic wizardry. Possibly dark magic. But, as far as I know, I was not required to enter any sort of pact with Voldemort or Sauron, and remain Dark Mark free and quite pleased with the entire experience.

The girl sitting across from me had three books on the seat next to her (although she slept most of the way). It was surprisingly surprising to see this manifestation of an intensely literate culture. In El Salvador I’m normally the only one reading anything on the bus. Unless I’m sleeping, of course.

Speaking of sleeping, there exists a particular style of sleeping I got to enjoy almost every night during my visit that deserves mention here. In fact, this style of sleeping deserves mention most anywhere, and were my poetical abilities more considerable I would like to attempt an ode to it. It is called stooging. There is only one guideline for stooging: no stooge sleeps alone. Stooge classification is not an issue—anyone, particularly a friend, qualifies as a stooge for stooging purposes. So stooging is really a fancy way of saying, no one sleeps alone. It’s as simple as that, but in my mind the advanced stooging aesthete goes above and beyond, considering a single unified stooging superior to two or more concurrent stoogings (for example, four stooges sleeping together is better than four stooges sleeping two and two).

The reason stooging is so fantastic is that, despite perhaps sleeping less well, getting kneed in the groin, being pushed off the edge of the bed, and/or having all your covers stolen, you’re far more likely to go to sleep and wake up happy, if slightly annoyed. Stooging is togetherness at its most basic. Late night thoughts are mumbled, dreams are recounted, hilarity is shared. You wake up feeling you’re part of something. You spend the most creative and impressionable parts of your day with friends. I’m frankly astounded it’s such a rare habit.

Stooging frequently leads to noteworthy events in the morning, such as breakfast. One morning in NYC three other stooges and I were particularly excited about breakfast when my friend Jeremy started badmouthing it. He insulted breakfast up down and sideways. He tarred and feathered breakfast, which could never have done anything to him except be delicious and start the day off right, which is exactly what breakfast has been perfecting for millennia. We stooges fought back on behalf of breakfast. We branded Jeremy “Dr. Lunch” (think Dr. Claw, Dr. Evil, Dr. Octopus, or Dr. Girlfriend for the proper evil insinuation, and Dr. Atkins for the proper dietary crusader insinuation) and commenced a Manichean struggle of good versus evil all the way into an imagined future in which Dr. Lunch has his downfall. Eventually our black and white Manichean realm evolved into a dialectical one, and Dr. Lunch reformed halfway, becoming Dr. Brunch, a shade of gray. We celebrated with breakfast on the roof—bagels, cream cheese, lox, scrambled eggs. Jeremy, however, had Thai lunch food from Pukk (which is what it resembled), which a gust blew off the table into my lap. The evil of Dr. Lunch remains in him, thinly veiled.

Perhaps now I have given my readership an idea of stooging.

I returned to El Salvador to find that I’d missed the heaviest rains of the year. Thank goodness! Before leaving for my visit, the damp, the mildew, and the violent downpours had been getting to me. Hardback books, leather shoes and belts, and even my varnished wood tabletop would all submit to virulent strains of mildew if I didn’t clean them every day. Needless to say, my house was in a bit of a state after being away for two weeks. But it was worth it to have exchanged the rains for fall colors and clear, chilly nights.

Just as visiting the States wasn’t as much of a culture shock as I’d thought it might be, neither was returning to El Salvador. “Yep,” was my main thought. As in, “Yep, it’s still as Salvadoran as ever.” I walked out of the airport into the cloudy, muggy afternoon, sweated my way across several parking lots and through a misplaced garden before finding the inconvenient bus stop, climbed into the micro bus that had seemingly been designed using an Architectural Graphic Standards book written for Lilliputians rather than normal people, and enjoyed the ride to San Salvador. It started raining lightly on the way, and miniscule droplets of mist came shooting in the cracked window. It looked like a snowstorm in miniature. It was mesmerizingly beautiful. I was happy to be back.

Getting to Morazán the next day I found that the rains had destroyed the dirt road to my community so thoroughly that the moto-rickshaw I’d hired could only get to within a kilometer. I climbed out with my luggage and slopped my way through ankle-deep mud and a driving rainstorm the rest of the way to my mildewed, dirty house. It turns out that was the last rain of the season.

Since that day it’s been windy and cold. 55° or 60° may not sound so cold, but it is when there’s no heated home anywhere. In Jon and Katie’s site up near El Pital in Chalatenango it’s been getting down near 45°. The wind and change to the dry season are dropping leaves off the trees. The chilliness and sound of leaves crunching underfoot make it feel like fall. So I’m welcomed back to the tropics with a miniature snowstorm and the feeling of fall. It’s almost as if someone wanted me, with my love of the seasons, to be happy here, and is exercising some climatic wizardry. Now that’s some Harry Potter bullcrap.