El Tular News

It is another story about triumph over adversity or at least not letting it get you down. This will be the third year in succession that changes in the weather have reduced the crops to crisis point. One of the agronomists from the Balsamo Association, our development partners in El Salvador, drove us on the first journey to El Tular, and we asked him about this year’s maize crop. And he confirmed what we had heard that the cobs were on the corn just waiting for the seasonal rains to fatten them up, but there had been so little that the grains were drying and shrivelling on the stems. This is the third year in succession that freakish weather has seriously damaged the harvest. And they were back in the situation described by our friend Audelino last year, “We just have to manage with one tortilla for breakfast instead of two”.

But we had been invited to go and join in the annual Maize festival, which this year had been combined with “a welcome to Brian and his wife!” And we were still a bit depressed about the food situation when we arrived in El Tular, and found more or less the whole population, dressed in its Sunday best, laughing and clapping and thoroughly enjoying it. There were dancers, four- to seventeen-year-old girls wearing traditional Spanish costumes of red and gold and azure trimmed with white, and boys in traditional white sixteenth century suits, all made by hand and treadle machine. There were playlets, full of dire warnings about the temptations of wealth, and there was (very) amplified music, and speeches from the mayor and community leaders, and little prizes for the free raffle and competitions for the kids, the presentation of a memorial plaque for the young man whose death we reported in the summer newsletter. And there was food and drink made from the maize bought in for the occasion, strictly rationed, but there all the same.

And I wondered, not for the first time, what was there to celebrate? I suppose the answer is their collective survival. And a very simple belief in a God who never actually lets them starve. They will eat sparingly of whatever the harvest produces. Then later on there is the sorghum harvest, which is scarcely digestible animal food, but it augments the tortilla. Then the men will scour the country to work in the multi-national sugar cane and coffee fields for four dollars a day, and there’s the daughter who is a maid in the house of rich folk in San Salvador who brings every penny of her wages home. More recently, thanks in part to our efforts, the women can now make and sell shampoo from the aloe vera that grows profusely, and some of the young ones have finally learned how to make saleable jewellery from the products of the jungle, and at least a few of the students we have enabled to complete their education have been able to find work, and bring their wages to augment the family economy. So in a way we are part of what they celebrate and thank God for, and they made that very clear to us.

A New Perspective?

There are centuries of tradition behind the campesino way of life, and so long as there is just enough corn and beans to survive, with a few hens and turkeys wandering round the house for a little extra protein once a month, the people have a small cushion against the vagaries of the world economy. It is much better to be poor in the countryside in El Salvador than it is in the city where there are noprovisions against starvation, and the only options for the unemployed are begging or stealing. So the peasant folk are not going to give up the only security they have.

But the young people there, whose further education Wellsprings is supporting, encounter a highly commercialised university system offering dreams of a land of milk and honey, all delivered at a price by the electronic age. Hence some of the tensions mentioned in the last newsletter, where the new generation was causing anxiety by refusing to study anything remotely connected with the grinding hardships of peasant life.

Now suddenly, by one of those happy coincidences that have characterised the years of our commitment to El Tular, a new opportunity has opened up through our hosts this year in San Salvador. Norma, the director of Balsamo, whom some of you know from her visit to Manchester, and her husband Allan very generously shared their home with us for the length of our stay. And during our table talk we learned that Allan, is now engaged on a quite revolutionary project helping peasant farmers to use some modern business ideas in the management of their annual crops of maize, beans and sorghum. Questions like how to calculate what size of plot to cultivate in order to survive in a good year or a bad one, how to bargain over the rent or the price of fertilizer, buying collectively, ways of saving on effort and money, etc. The project is taking on in some of the areas where he is working, and bringing with it a feeling of control, not being totally at the mercy of outside forces, human and natural.

So thinking of El Tular, if we can run the course there, it will have the additional advantage that many of the things the young folk have learned at the Uni, the maths, the computer searches etc. would suddenly become relevant to their family lives by giving them the tools to get some control over their agricultural activities.

Allan said he was willing to do the training course in El Tular, and when I told our local committee members there they were really eager. And incidentally I was taught a little lesson. They were saying, with some enthusiasm, “Wouldn’t there be ways of working more co-operatively that would save money, time and effort?”. And I, in my cautious way, reminded them of how some of our efforts at co-operation in the past had come to a sticky end. So I was told, “Just because something hasn’t worked in the past that is not to say it can’t work now. Things are changing all the time, you know!”

You can see why I love them. Watch this space!

First Impressions

(Muriel’s note on her first visit)

“It was great to encounter for myself people and things I have heard about all these years.

By far the most important was the warmth and affection in the El Tular people’s welcome to me. The Festival had already started when we arrived, and there was a big fabric banner stretched across the road that said in English and Spanish “Welcome to Brian and his Wife”. Then all afternoon between events people were coming with hugs and handshakes and requests for my name and how to spell it and how to pronounce it. It was overwhelming. Normally I don’t like being the centre of attention, but it was all so sincere.

The crowning point was still to come. At the end of the formal parts of the Festival we moved to the community meeting place, where the women had prepared some food for us and the members of the local Wellsprings committee. Somehow people had heard about my strange phobia for all kinds of birds, and as we made our way along the muddy path laughing children and men were shooing turkeys and hens in all directions to create a feather-free path for me! I felt so cared for.

But the other side was I realised that I had never quite understood how very poor the region was. Dirt roads strewn with huge boulders took us into El Tular, with occasional glimpses of thin children and mums standing outside mud houses with spaces where doors and windows should be.

In the community itself there were dust coated breeze-block houses and some mud and wattle ones, all with earth floors and without windows. The furniture was home-made wooden stools or chairs and small tables and the occasional well worn hammock hanging outside from the overhanging roof. A big communal hand-pump provided the only visible supply of water and only a couple of homes were connected to the electricity supply.

But it was festival time with everyone beautifully dressed, and I simply couldn’t understand how they managed it.

Back to the city

If the houses in the country were something of a shock, houses in the towns and cities were even more so. With some you just wonder how they manage to hold together, bits of corrugated iron and wood and even cardboard crowded on spare ground, sometimes right next to virtual mansions with huge gardens. Just seeing it often made me feel quite guilty.

But all of San Salvador was like that, huge buildings and enormous hoardings everywhere and shopping malls and junk food outlets, and within yards of all that women cooking and selling the simplest of food on rickety stalls on the pavement, and children risking their lives begging from cars at busy crossroads. It’s heartbreaking seeing such hardship and such ostentatious, uncaring wealth side by side.

But I also had to discover that nobody can escape from it.

Hospital and Luxury

Sometimes we had to eat at roadside cafes and, even though we were very careful, I one day found myself in a dehydrated state with what was diagnosed as gastro-enteritis, and had to go into hospital. Not just any old hospital though, there was no way they would leave me at the mercy of the Salvadoran state system, and I spent two days in a huge private room, with a spare collapsible bed for my husband-cum-interpreter, and a bell-push that brought a nurse within seconds, and consultants who spent ages collecting information for diagnosis and carefully explaining everything to me. The kitchen which had all the information about what I could and couldn’t eat used the bedside telephone three times a day with suggestions for my meals etc. etc. All far more luxurious than I could ever expect at home, and a hundred years from anything the people of El Tular or the shanties of San Salvador could even dream of. What was I supposed to make of that? And a few days later there was to be another much happier bit of luxury.

The very hard working staff of the Asociacion El Balsamo treat themselves twice a year to a day trip to the beach, and they kindly decided to combine one of their trips with our last afternoon in El Salvador. Their favourite place to get to the beach is a small spa called Costa del Sol. It is a restaurant with a large swimming pool, private rooms to change and rest, and tables and chairs and hammocks arranged under sun shades and palm trees, with a long stretch of golden beach and breaking Pacific waves. It was perfect, and we enjoyed a lovely meal there and time to relax and meet the friends from the Balsamo organisation I had heard so much of. They could not have been kinder, speaking as much English as they could manage to make me feel at home. It was a great end to our visit.

But the downside to that was that, in order to get there and return to our lodging, we had to pass dozens of rickety stalls with women trying to get some kind of living from selling coconuts from the local palms to the passing trippers like us. We were told that their day started from gathering their coconuts at 5.00 am and they were still there when our day was ended.

We can’t help being among the ‘haves’ but I felt quite helpless being face to face with the ‘have nots’.

Martyrs for Justice

Wellsprings visits to El Salvador always include some of the places where people died as martyrs in the recent struggles for change. We went to the Memorial Centre in the University where the six Jesuit priests and their housekeeper and her daughter were killed by the army in 1989. The museum keeps books of photos of the bodies lying where they died, and many of their very personal possessions including the bloodstained clothes they were wearing, and other things like a bible riddled with machine-gun bullets. It was all very distressing and very real, but in some strange way I also had a strong the impression that, even as I was looking at the evidence of their death, these people were somehow alive.

From the University we went on to the Divine Providence Hospice where Archbishop Romero was killed. The hospice itself seems very basic but the hospice chapel where he died is quite beautiful, and it is kept just as it was at that time. And there too it all seemed very real, all too real even. I just sat and looked and it all sort of came alive. That altar was where he was standing, that door was where the soldier came in and killed him with a single shot, and it was all so recent.

And it was so wrong. He was such a humble man. We went to the quarters the people had provided for him during the struggles, with his simple car standing outside. There were just three tiny rooms with a shower room, with his little radio a bit like mine, and his typewriter and his books, and his little single bed and his family photos and a few pictures on the wall. I had heard about it so often but there was nothing like seeing it for myself.

If the Monsenor lived in simple surroundings, his last resting place could not be more different. San Salvador Cathedral is modern and large, and the crypt is huge. Romero’s tomb, which rests above ground there, is so striking it takes your attention the moment you go down the steps. It is a very modern work of art, and it is surrounded by a very modern Stations of the Cross, but the most interesting thing is that all around the crypt there are beautifully designed areas where groups of people can meet and do. When I was there, there was a group studying poetry, and the whole crypt was a place of peace in contrast to the bustle and chaos of the city just outside.

But of all the martyrs’ memorials the last one I saw was probably the most moving. In a public park in San Salvador there is a curved wall about two hundred yards long that simply contains the names of some 20,000 people who were killed or “disappeared” because they spoke out against the brutalities and injustices, or belonged to the wrong church or union, during the repressions of the nineteen eighties and nineties. The names are grouped in the year of their loss and then in strict alphabetical order. Nobody is special. Archbishop Romero said of the earliest of them “These are the real martyrs. We must cherish their memory”. And Romero, Oscar Arnulfo takes his place on the wall with all the rest. Families and friends come and fasten a little flower or note by a name as a personal remembrance. And I think it was these little gestures and the sheer size of it all that moved me so much.

Thanks

I want to thank Norma and all the people in El Salvador who made the visit such an important and thrilling occasion, and all the friends here who have been so encouraging.”