So it turns out it's extremely
difficult, in this wet climate, to set fire to a cardboard box
containing, in differing proportions, puzzle pieces and dead mice.
The rains have continued largely
unabated, a fact which has spelled disaster for many Salvadoran
families. A lot of coastal areas in the eastern part of the country
have flooded; several communities have been inundated to such a
degree that the authorities, such as they are, cannot even enter to
evacuate the residents and distribute aid. In Tejutla, Chalatenango,
large parts of the population have been relocated to an emergency
shelter as it appears that a the face of one mountain overlooking the
municipality is ready to give way in a massive mudslide. I have one
good friend from Tejutla, and I wonder if her family is one of those
relocated.
Another week of orientation has flown
by, and now we're almost ready to start our work in earnest. The
orientation process, contrary to what one might think, has in fact
been quite disorienting. More than immersing me in the reality of
this place, I´ve found that the process has
frequently served to pull me up out of it. There is a huge
disconnect between the rhetoric spewed by politicians of all stripes
in their air-conditioned offices in the Legislative Palace--where
we've had quite a few meetings now--and the day-to-day struggles of
normal people trying to eke out a living on the gritty streets of San
Salvador. The people at the top presume to talk as if in a vacuum,
where terms like “unemployment,” “extreme poverty,” and “the
Central American Free Trade Agreement” are little more than
intellectually interesting concepts for economists to probe with
their theoretical tools. I'll be doing no small amount of
theoretical probing in my own work, of course. But the trick, as Fr.
Ellacuría used to
urge, is to ensure that the academic endeavor always finds its
ultimate definition in the reality lived by the majority.
As long-term volunteers with the
Election Observation mission, we're in charge of paving the way for
the legions of observers to come for the elections in January and
March, respectively. In the immediate sense this means establishing
contact with local electoral authorities and instances of the various
political parties in the municipalities in which we'll be working,
and then elaborating in-depth profiles of those same communities. In
the profiles we´ll be taking into account various factors
linked to the electoral process itself and to the logistics of
bringing a sizeable group of observers in to moniter the election
process. I'll be working in various municipalities spread across two
departments, Cabañas
and Cuscatlán.
Cabañas is probably
the poorest area in El Salvador; it seems to go overlooked both by
the Salvadoran government and by the plethora of international NGOs
that come into the country with their local development initiatives.
In Cuscatlán we'll
be monitoring the implementation of a pilot program of residential
voting, in reality a sort of “acercamiento de las urnas.”
Under the current system, many Salvadorans have to travel quite far
from their homes in order to vote. Voting centers are centralized in
the large population centers, and people living in remote areas
frequently have a hard time getting to the polls. With the new pilot
program we're going to see a greater number of voting centers accross
communities in Cuscatlán,
however, not everyone will actually have the chance to vote in their
home community.
The other day in Suchitoto, having walked the long,
steep, slippery road down to the polluted banks of Lago Suchitlán,
I came to a marina where a family of fishermen have their home.
Piled on the banks and even floating in the water, in various states
of disrepair, were no fewer than eight large deep freezers.
