Dear friends and family:
Although time seems to ebb and flow strangely in El Salvador, it is easy for me to keep track of my days here because I arrived in the country on March 1st. Rabbit, rabbit! Luckily, it was an easy trip from Greensboro to Miami to San Salvador and I arrived to Comalapa International Airport on the afternoon of the 1st, all of my luggage in tow and full of bright-eyed gringa excitement!
Now, gringos/gringas (white folk… you know, people who know what snow looks like) are not too common here in El Salvador. Besides the handful of Americans working for the Embassy, NGOs, the Peace Corps, or college girls who are backpacking around Latin America because they loved Motorcycle Diaries, most Salvadorans have asked me wondrously,
“Why did you come here?”
I’m still figuring out a thoughtful answer to that question… just give me a few more months.
My first 19 days have felt transient. Until today, I was renting a room in a dingy, boarding house situation with a window right over an extremely busy street. San Salvador is big, crowded, smoggy city. Car horns are popular—mufflers are not.
I started looking for a better place to live immediately and was lucky to find a fully furnished apartment close to the university on a quiet, tree-lined street. It has big breezy windows and a little kitchen and is a tranquil escape from the heavy traffic a few blocks south. A brisk 15-minute walk will get me to the university and take me past a few fruit vendors along the way.
On March 10th, I began classes at the Universidad Centroamericana “José Simeón Cañas,” whose motto translated into English is “University for social change.” That’s a bold statement. Do any of our American universities have that kind of mission statement? It’s an interesting insight into some of the big differences between U.S. and Latin American universities, historically and politically.
I was lucky to have a woman named Claudia in the Student Life office walk me through the registration process at the UCA. As a history and social science junkie, I was thrilled to find open spaces in these excellent courses: Social Thought of the Catholic Church, Sociology of Development in El Salvador, The National Reality (a political science/economics course on current Salvadoran issues), and Spanish. Spanish, of course, because that damn subjunctive always gets me.
On an exciting note, my Social Thought of the Church class is with Father Dean Brackley, a well-respected Jesuit theologian and Christian ethicist originally from the U.S. This is an incredible opportunity for me to take a class with him!
In another step toward semi-permanency, I finally received my student ID card from the UCA today! I walked around grinning all morning. My face is on something with the UCA emblem! I can use the library and the gym! “Scott Robinson Emily” belongs here! (They did get my name a little mixed up, but like the secretary pointed out, my middle name is a surname so how could I expect someone to know the difference? Alas, only in the South.)
Reflecting on my first few weeks, I think it is an important experience for me to feel transient and invisible in another country for a period of time. Some of my biggest difficulties here in El Salvador have been not being able to buy a phone on my own, install internet, open a bank account, or cash a check because I am not a permanent resident. I am only now beginning the frustrating and bureaucratic process for getting my student visa.
The silver lining is this: when I feel transient and marginalized, I gain empathy for my fellow humans on the margins worldwide. Immigrants, refugees, and the poor are constantly denied access to anything that might stabilize their lives. I am highly privileged to have the resources, education, and citizenship that make life much easier for me. However, when my desperation and mangled Spanish are met with dismissal in Salvadoran banks and the Migration office, I feel lost in a system whose formal language and bureacracy are too difficult to navigate on my own.
I am extremely lucky to have the support and care of the Rotary Club San Salvador Noroeste! I have never met people who offered so quickly to take me in, show me the beauty of El Salvador, introduce me to their families, and help me in ANY way! It’s hard to know who to call when I have an emergency, since I have 35 cell phone numbers for Rotarians who’ve offered their assistance during my adjustment period.
The President of the club, Roberto Granados, checks in with me often to make sure I’m doing well and invited me to a lake with his family my first weekend here! My Rotary advisor, Ana Beatriz Sandoval de Morán, calls herself my “madrina” (godmother). In between running her own company and planning Rotary service projects, she finds time to answer all of my questions. The Rotary Club’s full-time assistant, Betty Cuellar, has helped me buy a cell phone, argued with bank tellers over opening an account for me, and co-signed on my lease for my apartment! And last Sunday, Tito Mencia and his entire family brought me along for the ride to Las Pilas, a mountain community, for an ocular campaign to diagnose and give out glasses to children who need them.
I am a VERY lucky gal.
That’s about enough information for one blog post, I’ll say! Thanks for reading! Much, much more to come. Hasta luego, y’all. “Que l’vaya bien” as they say down here.... I think the closest translation is “Have a good one!”
Emily
