The American Dream

There are almost two million Salvadorans living in the United States. Immigration and life in the USA is one of the first things many people talk to me about when they meet me. Salvadorans started moving to the United States in large numbers during the country’s civil war (which lasted from 1980-92) to flee the massacres and persecution, and many more left the country in following years to escape severe poverty or to avoid the new wave of gang violence that currently plagues the region.

Niña Morena is an old lady with light brown skin covered in wrinkles. She always has a lot to say and usually conveys just as much with her exaggerated facial expressions as she does with her words. She reaches out and touches my arm when she stops to chat. Talking about her son in the United States, she smiles proudly though she hasn't seen him in six years. He sent money, little by little, to build her a house made from cinder block and later sent more to buy a couch and a television. Nearly 10 members of her extended family live in the house, including her grandchildren, who also haven’t seen their father in six years. I don’t have to ask to know that their previous house was made of sheet metal, thick tree branches, and tarps. Many of her neighbors' homes still are.

Mauricio is in his second year of college. He lives in a small house with his older brother and his pit bull just around the corner from me. He hasn't seen his mom in person since she left for the United States when he was 10. He never knew his father. He and his older sister don’t talk anymore, ever since a fight they had when he was a lonely 12 year old who needed someone to comfort him and she was an overburdened teenager who didn't want to raise her little brother and had plenty worries of her own. It was hard growing up without his mom, but he knows he wouldn't be in school right now if she hadn't left him to look for work in the United States. Before long he’ll have a bachelor’s degree, thanks to the money his mom sends him from every paycheck she gets working as a maid in New Jersey. He doesn't know how long it will be until he sees her again.

Lupita works at a clothing store in the city. A few years ago, when she was about 20, she and her cousin borrowed money and paid a known coyote, or human trafficker, several thousand dollars each to help them make the journey to the United States; first into Guatemala, then the long journey through Mexico, and finally across the Río Grande and on to American soil. The Mexican police caught her before she’d made it very far and put her in jail for a few days before sending her home. She showed up back in El Salvador with a broken nose and no desire to tell anyone the details of how or why it happened.

Roberto is the owner of a popular bar and restaurant where I like to go to eat fresh mangoes, tender pork ribs, and crunchy, fried tortillas. He grew up selling fruit at the outdoor market in town and was too poor to afford shoes as a kid. After immigrating to Los Angeles during the civil war and working in construction for 25 years, he saved up enough money to buy a ranch and build the restaurant- a two-story building with an open balcony that has views of the mountains in the distance. His kids work on the ranch during the day and sing karaoke loudly and off-key at their dad’s bar in the evenings. Sometimes when they're singing, Roberto will take a swig of beer and then lift his bottle high into the humid, evening air and yell, "Esos son mis hijos!"

Those are just a few of the dozens of stories that my friends and neighbors have shared with me about their families’ experiences with immigration. Money sent to El Salvador from immigrants living abroad accounted for 17% of the country’s GDP in 2011.

It’s an oversimplification to say that immigration is good or that it’s bad. Immigration is broken families and living alone in a foreign country. Immigration is kids having enough to eat and earning college degrees instead of dropping out of school in 8th grade to work picking coffee. Immigration is suffering through the deserts of Mexico and Arizona, facing kidnapping, sexual assault, and death. Immigration is escaping war and indiscriminate violence when it invades your hometown.

At its core, immigration is about people taking risks and making sacrifices in hope of finding something better. I’m not wise enough to know if all of these trade-offs end up being a net positive or negative for each individual immigrant and his or her family. I don’t know if the things they gain make up for the things they lose. That’s for the people who live those choices to decide. But I do know that after seeing the other side of the story, the side we don’t see in the States, that I’ll always stand up for the rights of immigrants who have made such a difficult choice. I’ll always be on the side of people who are in pursuit of happiness and dignity for their families and themselves; people who are willing to sweat and sacrifice to improve their lives.

*names were changed to protect the privacy of those mentioned in this post*

Letters to myself

There I was in my cubicle, counting the minutes until my next break and the hours until the end of the day, earning more money than I had ever made in my life, yet finding myself bored, restless, and unfulfilled.

My Peace Corps service had been over for 6 months. I went to a few returned volunteer happy hours, kept in touch with Salvadoran friends and occasionally ate pupusas at a restaurant named after one of El Salvador's 14 departments.

I was working at a company whose mission I didn't believe in and whose leadership I knew to be dishonest and immoral. I looked for other jobs and put on a fake smile for 45 hours a week. Okay, so I put on a fake smile for about 25 hours a week and probably had more of an emotionless, empty gaze for the other 20 hours. Selling your soul isn't easy. Sometimes you just can't muster a smile.

I had ignored the advice of my most idealistic self. Advice from that version of yourself shouldn't be followed blindly, but it can't be ignored either.

A few weeks into my Peace Corps training in El Salvador, when my Spanish was offensively bad, my eyes wide open and my mind naive to all the charms and the warts of Salvadoran culture, I wrote a letter to myself. I can't take credit for the idea. Our program managers sat all 36 of us down and told us to write letters to ourselves; letters we wouldn't open until the end of our service. Some people wrote song lyrics. Others scribbled down jokes. Most of us jumped right in with an eager idealism typical of new Peace Corps volunteers. Most of my letter was uninteresting and rather naive, and I laughed out loud at myself a few times when I read it two years later. I had no idea what I was getting into and no realistic expectations of what I was going to achieve. But the last line of the letter stuck with me. "Whatever you do, don't sell out just yet!"

A few months after returning home and frantically searching for a job as my welcome wore out living in my Dad's guest room, I had just been invited for a second interview with an advocacy organization doing community organizing when I received a job offer from a company conveniently located in downtown Denver that would pay a nice salary with attractive benefits, room for growth and a CEO recently recognized as the greediest in the country. I politely cancelled my second interview, moved into a one bedroom apartment and started toiling away for the man shortly after.

I was enjoying all of the luxuries I'd gone without for two years and had a great new group of friends in Denver. I was sampling the local breweries and trying Vietnamese Pho and hanging out in Washington Park, but my decision to sell out for a bit more money and a nice health insurance plan was not sitting well with my conscience. Going against my gut, ignoring the advice from the idealistic place I was in when I wrote that letter; it had come back to haunt me.

I'd had jobs I didn't like before, but I'd never worked for an employer that I so thoroughly disagreed with philosophically. Every day wore me out mentally and emotionally. The company was built on deceit, dishonesty and greed. I began looking for another job before I had finished my first month working there and arrived home exhausted from the cognitive dissonance of it all.

I watched every movie I could find in Spanish on Netflix and downloaded many more. I listened to Calle 13 and Tego Calderon and Ricardo Arjona and made friends with some Spanish speaking immigrants that I met at a Peruvian restaurant in downtown Denver. I missed my friends in El Palmital and San Salvador and I missed my girlfriend, Krysia. I missed working for something I believed in, even if it meant coming up short sometimes, and I missed the unsanitized, unpredictable nature of life in El Salvador.

I missed the crazy, contradictory things people said sometimes and the way they sort of made sense once I understood the context and the culture.

I missed taking a bus with chickens and piglets and 60 strangers, knowing that any sort of madness could take place at any moment.

I missed the beaches and the mountains and carrying around a machete instead of a smartphone. I missed campesinos and capitaleños, and I missed mangoes and I missed flor de caña.

Sometimes people get crazy ideas about dropping everything and following a dream. I've had a million of them. Anyone with a bit of imagination and adventure inside them has. Usually the phone rings or the stoplight turns green and the daydream ends and we go back to the daily hustle, and eventually reality grinds that dream down, just a little bit more each time, until finally it's just a grain of sand being washed away by the undertow.

Maybe I'd already torn down some invisible filter in my mind regarding crazy ideas when I joined Peace Corps and ended up sticking with it for the whole two years. Maybe the universe knew I didn't really mean it when I ignored my own advice and was trying to give me a second chance.

Whatever it was, when one of those crazy ideas crawled into my mind during a video chat with Krysia, I knew right away it wasn't going away like so many of them do.

I was going back to El Salvador.

The next morning I sent out three emails to three different people asking if they knew how I might be able to get a job in El Salvador. Less than an hour later I got an answer. A job that was supposed to have been filled months ago had just re-opened and I was an ideal candidate. Less than a month later I stepped off of a plane, snaked through a long customs line surrounded by surfers and Salvadorans, and walked out the door into a dark, humid night just like I had two and a half years before.

The universe has continued to conspire in my favor during nine months that I've been back in this little country in Central America. A nagging leg injury that had been bothering me for years began to heal little by little and I started playing basketball again, rediscovering my love for the sport that defined my childhood. I've made so many new friends and had the chance to reconnect with people who made my first two years in the country such a rich and rewarding experience. I've helped train the newest group of Peace Corps volunteers in El Salvador, the first new volunteers to arrive in the country after the program was nearly cancelled due to security concerns.

I've had amazing times with my girlfriend, Krysia, moments I'll remember for as long as I live. Walking on the beach at night in Barra de Santiago. Talking about Dylan and picking out our favorite street dogs in the park in Chalatenango. Laying on the couch with her and laughing hysterically with tears running down my face as she demands that I stop laughing or tell her what I'm laughing about or just, at least, stop laughing!

I've been accepted to grad school almost everywhere I applied, been awarded a fellowship, and am in the process of arranging an internship with an organization whose mission I strongly believe in, a place I would be proud to work at.

In some ways this is another letter I'm writing to myself. I always thought it sounded corny when people said to follow your heart. I didn't really know what it meant, and I don't think you can really know what it means until you've done something illogical, kind of crazy even, because you knew in your heart it was what you had to do.

Desvio

I just got back to my community yesterday after a goodbye party with the other volunteers from my group and a close of service conference at the beach. I let my friends and neighbors know that I am leaving, and some tell me they will miss me. Some ask why I am leaving now instead of in March. Others go straight into asking me if they can have my iPod or my bed or my backpack or whatever else they think I might be leaving behind in El Salvador. People ask if I am marrying my girlfriend to take her back to the States, when I will come back and visit them, if we will hike the volcano one more time before I go?

I throw on my Salvadoran national team soccer jersey and a hat and start the walk down to the pueblo, planning on spending a few hours knocking out my final reports in English and Spanish and closing out some grants. I have two weeks left in my site before volcanoes and beaches, pupusas and pasteles, bichos and bolos, and all other things Salvadoran and wonderful are in the past and, for the most part, no longer my daily version of reality. Of course I will stay in touch with all the cheros and cheras as much as I can and plan on coming back to visit within a year or two. But it will never again be the way it is today.

I run into Niko, my neighbor and the coach of the soccer team that recently helped me organize one last tournament. He asks for a little backpack to keep his soccer cleats in as a recuerdo. Sure, I tell him. I will get it to you before I go. We slap hands and I continue walking.

I walk past the murals we completed in December and the MS graffiti on the brick wall just down the street. I see beautiful remesa homes and tiny, rusting sheet-metal shacks. As I pass the soccer field, I run into Esther, the volunteer in another village nearby, and her boyfriend Jorge. They tell me that Gabbie, who has been in Costa Rica, is coming back to town, and they convince me to head to the departmental capital, Usulután, to have lunch with everyone.

Jorge pulls out a cigar and we smoke it on the side of the road. Yes, a victory cigar, because I have mastered this language and found ways to succeed in a variety of community projects including organizing soccer tournaments, facilitating HIV prevention workshops, giving English and computer classes, painting murals, running a scholarship committee, starting a chess club, and all the while generally having a hell of a time in El Salvador over the past two years. Where did the cigar come from? Why did he have a cigar? After living here a while, you stop asking questions and just accept things as they come.

The bus pulls up and we hop on for what seems like the millionth time since I have been here. Like many times, there are no seats and I have to stand, my head brushing the top of the old, green school bus with tiny seats and low ceilings. Eventually, someone gets off and I cram myself into the freshly vacant seat like Shaq in a Kia. A guy hops on the bus wearing black suit pants, a dark red dress shirt, a black tie, and aviator glasses. His hair is gelled into a wall on top of his forehead. He carries the typical bus vendor man purse and greets us ‘good morning’ as he pulls a small bottle of pills out of his bag.

We pull up to the three-way intersection leaving the pueblo, and the bus heading north going to Santiago de Maria arrives at the same time. Although I am not going there today, the timing feels harmonious and gives me a sense of freedom. I think of the cool climate in Santiago, the coffee fields and the 18^th street gang graffiti.

We round the corner and a few people do get off of our bus and onto the other heading north to Santiago de Maria. We go south towards Usulután. The vendor starts into his spiel. The pills are daily vitamin and mineral supplements with a dramatically technical sounding name like Neurodromodoxin or something. The man introduces his product and starts into a long list of scary causes of death that seem to include just about everything other than deaths from car crashes and violent crimes. He lists strokes and heart attacks and kidney failure and brain-eating amoebas. The vitamins can prevent all of this. As far as sales pitches on moving buses go, it was impressive. About 15 people on the bus buy bottles of pills at $1 each.

We pull up to another three-way intersection. This time, there is a bus waiting on the corner about to leave going the other way for San Salvador. The drivers signal to each other and the San Salvador bus waits for those getting off our bus before departing. I am tempted to hop off and head straight to the capital. I have never had all the possible bus routes intersect perfectly with my trip before. There aren’t many times in life you get a chance to chase the rabbit like that, and I smile at the infinite freedom I have at my hands; to go where I want, do what I want, work how I want and hop on whatever bus happens to intersect perfectly with the one I'm on. Never again will my life be the way it is today, I think again.

In Usulután I work on some of my final reports, summarizing projects and compacting experiences into neat little paragraphs and statistics. I have lunch with Gabbie, Esther and Jorge. Gabbie has been in Costa Rica for a few months and was a volunteer here in El Salvadorbefore that. She's heading home to Seattle in a few days. Esther has 8 months or so left in the country. We have been here many times for lunch over the last two years, but not as much recently. One time Gabbie and I had beers over lunch and ended up putting back a few more than we meant to. We drew a map of Africa that day and labeled almost every country, and then got on the bus late in the afternoon to sweat the Pilsener out on the way back to her house where we padded our stomachs with greasy pupusas. 

Today we mostly reminisce and talk about our plans for the future. We hope to visit each other or cross paths somehow. We wonder whether we will find jobs and talk about the things we miss about the United States, the things we will miss about El Salvador, the things we won’t miss.

My life is at a strange intersection between memories and experiences, where this sweaty, quirky life I live in the smallest, yet most densely populated country in Central America is beginning to fade into the past. Things will never again be like they are today.

Violence and changes in PC El Salvador

Watching CNN today I saw a rare reference to Central America scrolling across the bottom of the screen. "Peace Corps scales back in Central America amid raging violence."

I wasn't surprised by the content, but did not expect to see this news get quite so much coverage.

El Salvador has been a really violent place for a long time. I have rarely felt threatened or unsafe during my 23 months in the country, but it would be foolish to deny that it is a dangerous place. Recently, my adopted home received the infamous title of 'Most Violent' in the world. Below is an excerpt from an article published a few months ago.

"El Salvador is the most violent country in the world with 60 deaths per 100.000 of population.

From 2004 to 2009 more people died in violent conditions in El Salvador than in Iraq, the second most violent country in the world, followed by Jamaica."

Foreigners are rarely targeted, and despite the high level of violence, most of my colleagues in Peace Corps have never been victim of anything worse than a robbery. There have been some more serious incidents, however, and a volunteer was shot in Honduras while riding a bus this month. This has led Peace Corps to temporarily evacuate the volunteers in Honduras and cancel the new groups of trainees who were scheduled to arrive in El Salvador and Guatemala in January. Here is a link to an article in the New York Times about the situation.

Like I said, I am not in any danger personally and do not feel unsafe in El Salvador. This will probably not affect my service. As I was originally scheduled to end my service on the 30th of March, the only likely change for me is that I might be coming home about a month before I originally expected, as the staff here is considering allowing more flexibility in our departure dates due to the security situation. Hopefully Peace Corps will find a way to continue working in Central America and, more importantly, that El Salvador and Central America will find a way to end the violence that plagues the region.

What's next?

Independence Day is coming up, on September 15, with parades and all that good stuff to celebrate. I have been all over the country lately-  for training at the beach with the rest of my group, another HIV workshop in San Vicente, and meetings in San Salvador.

In my site I'm getting started on a mural project at the school and working with a youth group doing leadership and gender equity activities mixed in with a bit of soccer here and there. These two projects are going to take up a lot of my last 6 months in site. Along with the camps and other things I have going on around the rest of the country, I will be happy if I am able to finish up everything I have planned before my COS (close of service) next March.



A new group of volunteers comes to El Salvador every 6 months, and my group is now the next scheduled to leave. Six months is quite a while, but time can fly when you are busy and that will definitely be the case for me until March.

Our scholarship committee WYD is throwing a halloween costume party to raise funds this year, and we will be awarding the next round of scholarships before the end of the year.

Being on the scholarship committee and working with the HIV prevention initiative have been two of the most successful parts of my time as a volunteer here. They have both been positive ways to collaborate with other volunteers and see more direct and big-impact results than some of the smaller-scale projects I do in my site. We have literally trained thousands of Salvadoran young men and women on HIV prevention through the workshops, and because of WYD, 25 people who wouldn't be able to otherwise are attending school. I definitely feel good about my service knowing that I have been a part of both of these projects in addition to the work I do in my site.


I realized the other day when I was in the capital that I know San Salvador better than I know Kansas City. And it's not even close.

I get a lot of questions about what my plans are for when I get back. Here is my short list of things to do when I get back: USA road trip, Brooke's graduation in May, write a book, get a job.