“¡Hormigas!” exclaimed one of the girls, and it seemed she was justified in her apparent shock. Quite suddenly and quite completely, the house had come alive with ants. We were out on the porch playing UNO when they came, myself and a few kids from the community. A couple of the girls began stomping on them, killing as many as they could; “Pican duro,” warned another, standing well back. There were thousands of them, marching in dark bands that cris-crossed the walls and the floor. Myself, I didn't know what to do. Slowly I began to explore the house, trying to find where it was that all these ants were coming from. Oddly, there seemed to be no central point from which they were emerging; it was as if they were crawling out of the walls themselves. The children started to leave one by one, seeming to lose interest in the affair. To my relief, it appeared the ants were starting to leave, too. I went to the pila, grabbed a huacal, and began splashing water in the places where the insects were continuing to congregate. They are called agareadoras, my friend and neighbor Sylvia later told me. “Echeles agua y se van.h An good way to top off the week, I felt.
This has been the first of three weeks of intensive orientation with the Centro de Intercambio y Solidaridad's Election Observer Mission and it's been, well, intense. I probably know more now about the Salvadoran electoral system than I do about that of the U.S., and I've probably now met more Salvadoran politicians than United Statian (yes, United Statian; American, it must be known, is a very imprecise term in Latin America). I can't say that most Salvadoran bureaucrats leave me with a better taste in my mouth than their counterparts in the Empire. Perhaps it's partly because El Salvador's political circumstances are so largely a product of U.S. influence.
