I awoke in the middle of the night again and realized that I am going to leave El Salvador without seeing what the capital city of San Salvador is like. When I came out for breakfast in the morning, I discovered that Marjo and Oli were making a trip to the city to pick up supplies for the hotel. I hitched a ride and we left after 10.
The drive was just over an hour, past many sights that are so utterly foreign to me. Two men riding a top a pile of old propane tanks in the back of a pick up truck. People of all shapes and sizes herded onto old school buses hitching a ride to the next town. All along the street, men, women, children and stray dogs making their way north or south with the familiar trudge of long distances. Many of the women carried baskets or large bowls of laundry or food on their heads, their backs perfectly straight, their hips swaying left and right like a pendulum.
As you enter San Salvador, the first neighbourhood you pass is the Slums. I will never again joke about Southside being the slums of Whistler. I have seen pictures of housing like this, but to view it in person, and see only glimpses of the depth of it....Some of the homes were only bits of corrugated sheet metal leaned against scavenged sticks and held together with discarded twine and cloth. Row upon row, as far as the eye could see, and every now and then an alley, offering a quick peek at a fashioned street, no more than a foot and a half wide, running off into the heart of these thousands of lives.
And then as quickly as the sight bore itself into my being, it was gone again, replaced by the monoliths of the largest malls in Central America. These malls are effectively built on the crest of small hills- they are very visible and ironically it is from the gorge beneath these malls that the slums rise up and out. The playground of the most wealthy and the homes of the least privileged clumped together in the nation's capital.
Can you fathom not being able to give your children clean water and food, yet waking up every morning to the sight of an army of brand new SUV's marching in and out of the Mall parkade? Hundreds of locals, fashionably dressed, spending money on shoes and clothes and electronics.
I have never seen malls like this. The one that we went to rose up level after level, and on a Saturday afternoon it was impossible to get a parking spot. Grandly painted archways, massive people walkers and escalators rivaling any airport. Everything clean, pristine and for sale.
All day long, while we shopped at Price Mart (Central America's version of Costco), and perused the malls for the different items on our list, my head tried to wrap itself around the obvious problem of local poverty and homelessness. What is to be done for these people? Are these are the type of children that you see on World Vision commercials- semi-naked, stomachs distended, flies crawling in and out of the eyes and ears and noses? Sad small coffee coloured faces mirrored by the defeat in the eyes of the adults around them.
The first remedy that Americans think of is, of course, money. How could that possibly help? So you keep these children alive- eating just enough food to survive, providing them with medical care, possibly a bit of education. Are you going to then make sure that someone pays for them to go to University? To help them buy a home outside of the slums? Teach them how to shop for fruits and vegetables? Teach them about reproduction and the history of religion in the world so that they have the freedom to choose if they would like to make a family or not?
Or, in the end, are these children sadly being kept alive to perpetuate the same cycle that produced them? Row upon row, spray painted, built low to the ground, the full view of the neighbourhood hidden from the tourists and buisness people by the thick bushes planted along the side of the road. How far does it stretch? How long will it grow before somebody finds an answer for these people?
Safe in my warm dry bed at the Eldorado, my heart beats in my ears when the occasional night time storm rattles the window panes and whips the trees outside. How must it feel to be under that small piece of metal, no more really than a loud, echoing newspaper over your head, when the tropical storms blow through?
In reading about El Salvador last night, I discovered that the hurricanes of 2001 and 2005 left hundreds of thousands without homes. In a country with the 34th most dense population in the world (5.5 million people in just over 26, 000 square kilometers) where do you build affordable housing? And what does that look like in this sort of a culture where people seem to take such pride in having their own small scrap of land? Apartments wouldn't work. You would be left with a more permanent slum that perhaps didn't leak as much, but would in time develop it's own set of issues.
Is that it then? There is no answer? No answer for these living breathing human beings? For the mothers with children? The husbands with wives? The brothers with sisters? The babies? The elderly?
And no answer for the survivors of Katrina.
And no answer for the homeless in Vancouver. Or Calgary. Or Toronto. Or, or, or....
What kind of a society is this that we cannot take care of our own?
All around San Salvador were the obvious saplings of Capitalism. Everyone wants a piece of that American Pie! They see the new cars, the big haciendas, the powerful jobs that pay so much money....the holidays. All over the city are towering billboards profiling vacations to Mexico and the Caribbean. Few of the people I have met here would be able to afford that. Ever. And yet every time they go into the city, this is what greets them.
No one is advertising the nightmare that comes hand in hand with that “American Dream”: chronic obesity, rampant addiction to perscription drugs, depression, substantial pockets of poverty, ghost towns like Detroit where a large influx of money became counted on and was then suddenly taken away.
I can't help but feeling that these people are being set up for a fall. The underlying truth of Capitalism, is that people who live in the pursuit of money do not share.
The other thing that stood out to me is the advertising. Toiletries, phone cards, baby food, tourism promotions- all of it larger than life, raised up high enough so that no one could miss it. All of these posters made with actors and actresses that have, for the most part, blue eyes, sandy hair, fair complexions. In a land of coffee and caramel and cocoa it is strange to see vanilla as the spokesperson.
The message is loud and clear. If you are white, light hair, blue eyes, then you get to drive a brand new Ford Ranger, and sell Avon like Reece Witherspoon and you will have two beautiful well dressed children and a large vacation house in a gated community on the ocean. When you are not living your fabulous day to day life, you will be vacationing in Mexico or the Caribbean, and you will be deeply, insatiably happy.
This is the root of the rotten fruit I see when I drive by the slums. This is what happens at the ass end of Capitalism. In order for people to be rich and comfortable, there have to be people who are without any means of wealth or comfort.
I don't pretend to have any answers, I am just left with this conviction that something needs to be done. I suppose that is a start, and it will likely help me to sleep at night when I am at home in my two bedroom town house in one of the wealthiest areas of Canada. I hope not. I hope that the sight of those slums keeps me awake and uneasy for a long time.
Near the village where I'm staying is a large town where we go often to check out the market or buy groceries and other necessities. There are two billboard advertisements in this town that always catch my eye. Larger than life, a full head shot of the lovely Reece Witherspoon sells Avon to the locals.
I wonder if Reece knows that there is a picture of her with her long blonde locks and perfectly airbrushed vanilla skin selling Avon products in the middle of a Central American town? “Buy Avon! Sell Avon! Avon will make you wealthy and beautiful and self confident like Reece Witherspoon!”
I'm sure that before that photo shoot, Reece enjoyed a hot shower with clean water, fluffy towels and a host of cosmetics and toiletries. I'm sure she had electricity and plumbing, a comfortable bed, a large wardrobe full of clothes to choose. I'm sure she has never wondered if she'll have enough money to give her children an education.
I wonder if she was in the midst of her divorce when that picture was taken. I wonder if she felt empty that day, if her smile felt forced, like mine did when I was going through that stage of my life. What concerns were on her mind? Her children? The future of her career? Was there a sickness in the family, or was it one of those pleasantly simple days where you wake up and everything just seems to be going your way?
What was behind that smile?
I'm sure that just like me, her pantry was full, her concerns much more topical than most of the people here. Yet now her profile is displayed in the heart of Central America, a poster child of the American Dream for everyone to see and desire to emulate.
Ironically, the other side of the sign, a mirror image of the perfection facing the street, has been vandalized. Half of Reece's pretty smiling face has been torn off and discarded. It leaves the effect of decapitated Barbie doll. A little silly, A little ghoulish.
It was under her watchful eye that I was first offered Chiclets by a small boy. When I said no and walked away, he followed me, chattering away in Spanish. I imagined that he was calmly telling me that I was an ignorant selfish American, but he could well have been giving me a full report of the coming weather cycles on the coast, “It will be stormy tonight, Senorita, make sure to close the windows in your hotel room.” I really must learn Spanish.
San Salvador freaked me out. I wish it wasn't true, but alas, I have to be honest here. I really did not like it. The noise, the smells, the poverty, the hopelessness. In all of the shops, people smiled kindly at me, “Ola,” “Ola!” and as much as I love them, the lovely round women, the stylish twenty-somethings, the heart-achingly beautiful children, the tiny men, I do not want to share their 26,000 square kilometers with them. And I'm sure they are thankful for that. As I read on a bumper sticker in Bubba's Burgers in Kauai, "Kauai is a beautiful place. Please don't move here."
I am embarrassed, but the fact is that I am used to a much more sterile environment, and I don't know that my constant fears of crime and parasites and disease would ever go away. But there are people in my own home town that I can help. And I can support those who travel to Central America and Africa and Mexico to help the humans that live in substandard conditions.
I can be aware, and raise awareness. Somehow simply knowing that an evil exists quietly stages war against that evil.
Maybe someday I will have the courage to return and roll up my sleeves and make a difference in someone's life.
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