Youth Guides

Another fun component of the tourism project has been a course designed to train young people to be tour guides. We hope that the young guides will take a special interest in Lenca history and culture and the training we’ve provided has been intended to furnish as much information on those topics as possible.

It’s been a rigorous 16-week marathon, two sessions a week, half a day Fridays and all day Saturdays. The demands of the course have caused some heavy attrition; the group dwindled from 30 to 15. Actually I was expecting much worse; I was figuring we’d end up with ten at the most.

The main components of the course have been:

1) Lenca history and culture

2) The Conquest, independence and “contemporary history” (that’s the euphemism for the civil war of the 1980s).

3) The tourism industry.

4) Guide techniques.

Different professionals taught the different modules according to their respective specialties.

It’s not a course designed to turn out professional guides. Its purpose has been to select a small group of young people with interests and abilities that could possibly lead them to careers in tourism.

Not all of the young people are all that young. Classmembers range in age from 15 to 61. By that criteria I, too, am a young person.

The class has generated much enthusiasm from those who’ve managed to stick around. A group from the class helped out during Perquín’s Winter Festival in August, orienting the many first-time visitors who arrive in Perquín for the Festival.

Danilo Vásquez, a crazy and charismatic Lenca from nearby La Unión, taught the module on Lenca history and culture and captivated the group. Danilo taught basic phrases in Lenca-Taulepa and generated interest in a class T-shirt which I helped design. On the front it says “yampáre” (“hello”) and on the back “akú-ki” (“good-bye”). The handprint is purported to be the first Lenca symbol and is one of a group of images represented in the cave paintings at Corinto, El Salvador.

Members of the class also accompanied me in search of archaeological sites that we hope might be of interest to archaeologist Marcelo Barraza, a Salvadoran scientist hired to assist with the project. My young guides led me to waterfalls, caves, bunkers where spent AK-47 cartridges and other guerrilla artifacts littered the ground, and sites where the founders of the community that would become Perquín processed coffee and sugar cane, made bricks, and tanned hides to produce leather goods. They taught me how to recognize the difference between an ordinary mountain pine and an ocote, a pine with a hard, resinous heartwood that Perquín’s early settlers used to fashion torches. In Lenca-Taulepa, Perquín means “camino de brasas” or “road of embers.” The name refers to the live embers left on the roads when the early settlers walked at night, lighting their way with ocote torches.

Those of you who know me best know that “youth mentorship” would not previously have figured promimently in a catalogue of my most noteworthy talents. So the students weren’t the only participants who learned and grew as a result of the course.

When the course ends on September 27, the remaining members hope to continue their training in a certified course for professional guides taught by the Ministry of Tourism or train as tourism specialists and assist in the development of a new tourist route, “Camino de Brasas,” that I and archaeologist Marcelo Barraza helped develop based on our excusrsions in search of preColumbian Lenca artifacts.