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The Usulután curse continues. In my training group, four of us were sent here to the department of Usulután. The other three have already changed sites, two for security reasons and one, well, I'm not sure exactly why, but she changed sites too. In the newest group of volunteers here in Usu, one of the girls has already gone home for good, also for security reasons. Usulután is one of the hottest, dirtiest and most dangerous parts of the country. And it is not a particularly safe country to begin with.
The Usulután curse continues. In my training group, four of us were sent here to the department of Usulután. The other three have already changed sites, two for security reasons and one, well, I'm not sure exactly why, but she changed sites too. In the newest group of volunteers here in Usu, one of the girls has already gone home for good, also for security reasons. Usulután is one of the hottest, dirtiest and most dangerous parts of the country. And it is not a particularly safe country to begin with.
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Luis, aka Viejo Lin, was crying on the stairs at Niña Blanca's house the other day as I was sitting on the patio. He cries a lot. The other kids are bigger than him, but he is confrontational and gets into a lot of fights, almost always losing. His family life is rough. His dad is not around nor in touch, his mom is an alcoholic, and he is really, really poor. Like dirt floor, not enough money to eat, rats chewing his clothes poor. Being considered poor in El Palmital is a level of poor unimaginable to most Americans. The richest people here would be below the poverty line in the USA. Like many of the poorer people in the village, he lives in a sheet-metal shack, infested by rodents, insects, and a lot of other nasty things, and his family's most valuable possession is a small, beat-up television and the antenna on top that gets signal from a few local channels. The electricity for the TV and one light-bulb comes form an extension cord running out of the window of a somewhat better-off neighbor.
Luis can be a sweet kid, but he is tough to deal with at times. He's missed out on learning a lot of things because of the instability of his situation at home. He doesn't respect anyone or anything unless it serves him, he likes to steal, and he always wants to fight. In the moment, it can be hard to feel sorry for a kid that behaves like that. It's easy to cast him off, avoid him, or lament his behavior. But there are times, like him sitting on the steps alone, crying quietly, that make you realize that it isn't his fault. No one at his house does anything to show that they care for him, except for his older brother protecting him at times. His mom doesn't give him enough to eat. She uses most of the little money gets a hold of on alcohol. No one washes his clothes for him. He doesn't get help on his homework, and might be repeating 3rd grade after this year. Luis probably won't graduate high school. Even if he did, his most likely future job will be long, hard hours working in corn or bean fields at $4 a day, or maybe an occasional job doing handy work for a slightly better rate. In short, things might not ever get much better for Luis. I was thinking about these things there on the patio, listening to him cry, the same kid I have seen cry dozens, if not hundreds, of times in just over a year. But he wasn't crying because of how hard his future might be. He wasn't crying because he was born in a broken country without opportunities for a person from his background. Nor because of the gang violence that may take his life to an even darker place someday. It was because someone had picked on him, kicked, punched, or pushed him, and he wasn't strong enough to fight back. How can a skinny little poor kid with an empty belly push back against everything that holds him down in this country? The sad thing is that I don't know if there is an answer to that question, and I doubt that anyone else has one either. Life isn't fair, and it can be heartbreaking to see what that really means sometimes.
