As I write the rain continues to pound the tile roofs of the campo cottages of Caserío Papaturro, drowning out the sound of my tapping fingers on the keyboard. “Vienen las lluvias siempre a la misma hora,” Doña Esperanza commented tonight over dinner, “The rain always comes at the same time.” It's true. At 6:00 every evening, when night falls like a dark blanket over the thick atmosphere of the village, the rains come falling, too. The pathways downhill to the center of the community become fast-moving streams and the center itself a pond of ankle-deep water. Such is winter in El Salvador.
I've been here only since this past Sunday, September 28, but the experiences I've had in the intervening time make it feel like much longer. The community has accepted me with open arms, my way having been paved by the goodwill garnered by my friend Patty Lawless, who has generously lent me the use of her house here in Papaturro. With new friendships comes the careful navigation of the confianza so critical to social relations in El Salvador. Confianza—impalpable, elusive, indispensable—that indefinable exchange of trust without which there cannot be real sharing. With the confianza granted me by my new friends has come the disclosure of stories, many of them painful.
Papaturro is a new community, settled by refugees returning from the massive encampment at Mesa Grande, Honduras, as El Salvador's civil war came to a close. Theirs is a sorrowful story to be sure, but in it there is much hope to be found, I think. Having fled the department of Cabañas in northern El Salvador in order to escape the military's scorched-earth operations of the early 1980s—“scorched earth” meaning the deliberate decimation of El Salvador's campesino population by government forces in an effort to undermine the popular base of the guerrilla movement—they subsequently suffered seven years of malnutrition and other hardships in the refugee camp before being able to return to El Salvador. But return they did, and the beauty to be found in the story of the people of Papaturro, I think, is in the fact that they did it together. Even as their homes in Cabañas were destoyed and even as they suffered massacres, starvation and disease, the people of Papaturro did so together, and so it is that they have endured as a community.
And so I am honored to be invited by the people of Papaturro to share in that community, in what measure I can.
