I’ve Changed Countries

Chiclayo.

I’m not in El Salvador anymore; now I’m in Peru.

How did that happen? Actually, that was always more or less the plan. The job with Peace Corps in El Salvador was supposed to last eight or nine months. I made it last for ten months by requesting a brief extension. Meanwhile, I asked Peace Corps Peru if they had any positions for volunteers in Lambayeque, where I worked from 2010–2013. They didn’t; however, we collaborated in the creation of a position in Inkawasi (sometimes spelled “Incahuasi”), at 10,000 feet in the Andes, about four hours from Callanca, the community where I volunteered previously.

So how did things end in Perquín? Very well. I helped write a job description for a replacement volunteer, a volunteer with a specialty in archaeology; that person should be arriving sometime between yesterday and January and will continue the work in which I was involved in Perquín. He or she will work with the group of young people which we were training to be tour guides. He or she will accompany the Salvadoran archaeologist who has been investigating Lenca sites in the Perquín area. He or she will work on a documentary film about the project which was in the works when I left and on the website which we were also beginning to design and implement.  He or she will help equip the new sala in the Museum of the Revolution which will house Lenca artifacts. With luck some or all of this will actually happen. I’ll let you know how lucky we are.

As frequently happens when one is about to leave a place, two days before I left Perquín great things happened that made me wish I could stay. Specifically, we found this:

It’s an obsidian arrowhead. This is absolute ironclad proof that a preColumbian civilization existed in Perquín. The Spanish, who had steel and iron with which to slaughter people, had no use for obsidian weaponry and, even if they had had a use for such weaponry, never used arrows. Previous to the discovery of this arrowhead, we’d found only chunks of obsidian, which led us to believe that there should be arrowheads and spearheads as well; however, this arrowhead was the first that we personally discovered.

So I left beautiful and green Morazán to come to dry and dusty Lambayeque. The work here surely will be as fun and as exciting as was the work in Perquín. I’m going to be helping to market the artesanía (“handicrafts” would be the clumsy translation of that word) of an association of weavers from the aforementioned Inkawasi. I’m living in Chiclayo, the capital of the deparment of Lambayeque, but will be traveling frequently to Inkawasi. My main job will be to find stores in Peru willing to sell the artesanía of the Inkawasinas and to look for opportunities to export their weavings.

Some of you might remember that I wrote about the Inkawasinas when I was living in Callanca. Here’s that entry from my Callanca blog:

http://theunbloggedlifeisnotworthliving.blogspot.com/2012/05/incahuasi.html

I’ll be starting another blog about Inkawasi or perhaps I’ll create a Facebook page. It depends upon what kind of internet access I can scrounge here in Chiclayo. Manuel is supposed to come by tomorrow and run a wire from a neighbor’s house to my house which will allow me to share the neighbor’s internet. In exchange I’ll pay part of the neighbor’s montly bill. I’ll send everybody a link to the blog or the Facebook page when one becomes available. Or maybe I’ll have Manuel run a wire from my computer to yours. If I can get enough of you on board with that idea we could split the monthly charge 150 ways and it would only cost us thirty cents each.

Over and out.

A friend from Perquín.

Archaeology

Participating in an archaeology project that forms part of the larger tourism project on which I’ve been working here in Perquín, I learned to spell the word correctly.

The tourism project aims to increase awareness of the culture and history of the Lenca—the preColumbian ancestors of the current inhabitants of Perquín and Morazán—and to make Lenca history and culture a part of the tourism offerings in Perquín.

I’ve gotten to go for long grueling walks with Marcelo, an archaeologist from the Ministry of Culture in San Salvador, and with locals who are familiar with sites where vestiges of a preColumbian civilization might be present. The prehispanic civilization that would have left evidence of its existence in this area would be the Lenca culture. The Lenca arrived in the area about 4000 years ago from South America and settled eastern El Savador, western Nicaragua and southeastern Honduras.

The Lenca left behind a signficant number of cave paintings. The best example from our region would be the cave known as La Cueva del Espíritu Santo (Ti Ketau Antawinkil in Lenca-Taulepa), located in Corinto, about an hour from Perquín.

We’ve found pieces of ceramic and obsidian in caves and on trails here in Perquín. Obsidian is a mineral form of lava. There are many volcanos in El Salvador but none large enough to produce what the Lenca might have called “weapons-grade obsidian.” That means that the obsidian we’ve found must have arrived via a trade route from what is now Guatemala and Honduras. The Spanish had no need for obsidian since they brought steel and iron with them. So by deduction we know that there must’ve been a preColumbian presence in Perquín. PreColumbian cultures were the only cultures that made use of obsidian in the production of arrowheads and spear points.

The figure below represents Balám Colóp, a Lenca prince who, according to legend, brought language to the culture. It’s said that the Lenca goddess Ish-Manahual called together all the princes of the regions controlled by the Lenca. She placed upon the tongue of each prince a leaf from a sacred tree called “Tanawapate” and commanded the princes to return to their villages. All but one spat out the leaves after leaving Ish-Manahual’s presence but one kept the leaf upon his tongue as she’d instructed. That prince was Balám Colóp. When he reached his village he found that he’d acquired the ability to speak a language.

Balám Colóp then instructed all other princes from all other Lenca villages to seek out the tree called Tanawapate and to bring back a leaf to their villages. That’s how the Lenca languages were born. The painting represents Balám Colóp and the staff or stick in his hand the Tanawapate tree.

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.

The House of the Thousand Days

A health organization, PRESANCA (Regional Program for Food Security and Nutrition), came to Perquín to build a small facility designed to promote better nutrition among pregnant women and their children in the first two years of life. That’s when our brains and nervous systems develop and if one doesn’t receive proper nourishment during that period, many problems with lifelong repercussions ensue.

The little house, called “Mi Casita, la Casa de los 1000 Días,” was to include various ecological features as well, including a water filtration system, organic gardens, and a bed of vermicompost (earthworm castings). They signed me up because I knew how to build cocinas mejoradas, the improved cookstoves that we built in Callanca when I was a volunteer in Peru.

PRESANCA came to town promising that they’d finish the house in 15 days using all-volunteer labor.

Some of us were skeptical.

The volunteer part was no joke. The first day of construction 25 kids from ages 5 to 16 showed up to help. Most of them just got in the way but much enthusiasm was generated. The rugrats mainly played games, sang songs and painted plastic bottles that would be used to outline the organic gardens. The older kids helped haul wheelbarrows of fill dirt and begin laying the cinderblock foundation.

The total budget was $5,000 and they allocated $150 to the “ecofogón”—the Salvadoran term for cocina mejorada. That seemed like a fortune to me since in Peru we used to build them for $50–$75 apiece.

Fortunately, I’d brought the plans for the stove with me from Peru to the U.S. and  then from the U.S. to El Salvador. I put together a materials list and Melvin and I—Melvin was the engineer assigned to the project by the Mayor’s Office—submitted the list to PRESANCA.

It took about two weeks for all the materials to arrive. First people kept losing the materials list so I’d have to rewrite it again. Then they told me that the materials list had reached the Mayor’s Office and that they’d order the materials when they ordered the materials for framing the house.

PRESANCA kept telling me, “We’ll start tomorrow!” or “We’ll start the ecofogón next Tuesday!” Then I’d show up on Tuesday and still no materials. Work on the house continued.

Finally the bricks arrived, 200 of them, which was a treat because in Peru we’d used adobe—big chunks of dried mud mixed with straw—to construct all parts of the stoves other than the surfaces that came into direct contact with the fire. “We’ll start tomorrow!” the PRESANCA team told me.

Since they’d told me that four or five times previously, this time I didn’t pay any attention but when I showed up a couple of days later they said, “Where were you? Fifteen kids from the high school showed up to help build the stove.”

The fifteen highschoolers came once again and we did in fact begin building the ecofogón. They were great workers! They mixed mud to mortar the bricks together, learned quickly how to use a level and a plumb and managed to complete the base of the stove in around six hours—the amount of time it took us to build an entire stove in Peru, but still pretty impressive for beginners. Because their hands were covered with mud nobody could answer their cell phone.

The volunteers building the “Little House of the Thousand Days” (those would be the 9 months of a mother’s pregnancy and the first two years of a child’s life) continued to arrive, daily a different group of volunteers. German, a professional carpenter, directed the older volunteers capable of handling tools and laying bricks. Manuel and Brenda of PRESANCA directed the younger volunteers.

The group of highschoolers and I finished the base of the cookstove, the “cámara de combustión” (combustion chamber, where the burning of the firewood takes place), the basic armature of the stove body, and set in place the “losa”—the heavy, concrete stovetop that Melvin and I had fabricated one day during the weeks we were waiting for materials to arrive.

German then helped me finish the stove. We erected the chimney and German applied a coating of concrete with a smooth finish to the entire stove to improve its appearance and correct some of the eccentricities introduced by the highschoolers’ sometimes creative use of the level and plumb. We spent less than $100 of the $150 budgeted.

The house that was to have been built in 15 days took 50 days to complete. To be fair, we could’ve probably finished it in a month but Perquín’s Festival de Invierno intervened and construction was put on hold for more than a week.

The inauguration took place on August 15. The heads of the institutions who’d provided volunteers and those of us who’d been the foremen of work crews received certificates of recognition. I was waiting in the audience for the Mayor to call my name when a little girl named Diana, whom I’d talked to a few times in town, dragged a plastic chair over to where I was sitting, climbed onto the chair, grabbed my hand and held it tightly. When the mayor announced my name Diana and I came forward together to accept the award.

Diana was fascinated by the certificate, to her it was the equivalent of The Presidential Medal of Freedom or a Nobel Prize. I figured that Diana deserved it as much as I did since her class of kindergarteners had also put in their time as volunteers, painting plastic bottles, so later that day I went to her house in Perquín and gave it to her.

Maras and Migration

El Salvador suffers from a couple of problems that I didn’t see in Peru, the country where I served previously as a Peace Corps volunteer.

There are an estimated 60,000 young men involved in street gangs (“maras”) here in El Sal. Another 250,000 Salvadorans are the gangbangers' dependents. The word “mara” comes from the word “marabunta”—army ant. The largest gangs are Salvatrucha-13 and Calle 18. The gangs virtually run many neighborhoods in San Salvador, the capital, charging “renta” to every business owner and engaging in drug activity, robbery, murder and mayhem in much the same way that their counterparts in L.A. and New York do. That’s no coincidence. Many of the leaders come from L.A. They’re young people whose families once migrated, legally or illegally, to the U.S. or who themselves migrated illegally. The young people lived in bad neighborhoods, found no employment opportunities, turned to crime, were imprisoned, deported, and put the skills they’d learned on the streets in the U.S. to work on the streets of San Salvador, San Miguel and Santa Ana. 

As a result, El Salvador has one of the highest murder rates in the world, averaging 10–15 a day. This is mostly gangbangers killing gangbangers. Even so, innocent people often get in the way or else die because they didn’t keep up with their renta or otherwise crossed a gang member.

Where I live, in Perquín, in northeastern El Salvador, maras still aren’t much of a problem. That’s changing, however. There are now active gangs in San Francisco de Gotera, about 30 km from Perquín. Three Salvadoran soldiers dressed in camouflage and carrying AK-47s patrol the streets of Perquín every night. Imelda, the proprietor of the pupusería above which I live, feeds them breakfast, lunch and dinner. They say that they’ve been assigned to Perquín because mareros from Gotera are attempting to establish themselves here and because the distribution of drugs—mostly marijuana—is becoming a problem at the local high school.

With so many Salvadorans in gangs or dependent upon gang members—nearly 5% of the population—it’s difficult to predict what might happen here in the future or how the country could ever possibly rid itself of the problems of gangs and gang violence. Some people say that the situation can be rectified only through the equivalent of another civil war like the war that tore the country apart in the 1980s. Except this time it will be a war between ordinary people and mareros.

As I mentioned previously, many of the gang members are imports from the U.S., which brings us to the other apparently insurmountable problem facing El Salvador. Every year 54,000 Salvadorans—nearly 1% of the population—abandon El Salvador to enter the U.S. illegally via Mexico. One out of six Salvadorans is now living in the U.S. In other words, 1.5 million Salvadorans live in the U.S. and 6.2 million Salvadorans live in El Salvador! If that same percentage of Americans fled America to look for work in El Salvador, 50 million Americans would be residing illegally in El Sal. And I haven’t even mentioned the hundreds of thousands who’ve left El Salvador for Canada or Europe or other countries in Central or South America. 

Consequently, many talented people who could be helping to solve El Salvador’s gang problem and other problems are not here to do so. The Salvadorans who live in the U.S. save up money, send it back home, and other family members use this money to hire a “coyote” ($5,000 will get you from San Salvador to El Paso or Tucson) who accompanies them to the border and provides the contacts and pays the bribes necessary to allow the family member to enter the U.S. Recently, the twelve-year-old daughter of an acquaintance of mine and two even younger cousins left Perquín with a coyote and two months later sent word back to their family that they’d arrived safely at the home of a family member in Miami.

It’s that easy and that “safe.” That’s because the coyotes many times aren’t the dark, anonymous, reckless characters, preying on and exploiting the desperate and the helpless, that we imagine them to be. There are a couple living in every town the size of Perquín in all of El Salvador. Everybody knows them. Nobody mentions their names. Nobody would tell an outsider like me who they are, because one never knows when one might need or want the services of the local coyote, who’s really nothing more or less than a dude with connections, experience, and an unusual, somewhat perverse form of entrepreneurial spirit, who moves people the way Red Ball Flyers move freight.

So what one frequently senses in El Salvador is a kind of dormancy—kids not really trying very hard in school but instead waiting for their turn to come to pack their duffel and head for “el otro lado”; families waiting for their “remesa” to arrive at the Western Union: the money that many family members send back home every month from the U.S. Sometimes there’s a sense that 6.2 million people have taken a number and are standing in line and waiting, not all that patiently, to get the hell out of here.

It’s not a pretty scenario. And it makes you wonder how even one, let alone both such immense roadblocks to development can ever be removed. Think about it. One-and-a-half million gone to the U.S.; another million in Europe or elsewhere; another 60,000 in gangs. That’s more than 3 million people pulling the country down while only 6 million—and many of them not very enthusiastically—struggle to build it up. It’s a tug-of-war and the team in the black Spandex has two fat guys on its side.

But let’s try to end on a positive note here. Entropy is our friend. What tends to happen in most situations is that apparently unbeatable entities beat themselves. Either the gangs will kill each other off and save the government the trouble or they’ll overplay their hand and commit so many atrocities (or else commit a single atrocity against someone of the wrong nationality and economic status) and international resolve will take over. If there’s less violence and insecurity in the country and more economic opportunity, more people will stay home; some of the Salvadorans residing in other countries will see that there’s a chance to make money here and they’ll return. 

More likely perhaps, it will be a combination of both factors that will lead to a solution. The gang problem will be partially resolved and the economic problems will be partially resolved and the majority in the middle—because there are always more people in the middle than at either extreme—will decide to cast their lot with the home team. Gang members who were never that enthusiastic in the first place will move into the economy. Ex-pats who weren’t that enthusiastic, either, will come home. The ordinary Salvadorans who never left and who never tattooed, goatee-ed and undershirted themselves to pledge allegiance to MS-13 or Calle 18, will cast their lot with what was always much more appealing and much less scary: they’ll get enthusiastic about opening businesses, making and spending money in El Salvador. At that point El Salvador will cease being a suburb of Miami and Houston and return to being its own country.

Sounds good to me. Let’s try it.

Coffee

We’re at 1,000–1,300 meters here in Perquín, around 3–4,000 feet, so the conditions are very good for growing coffee.

Since the early 1800s coffee’s been grown successfully in El Salvador. But in Honduras and Guatemala the production is much more advanced and there they sell more of their coffee to buyers capable of reselling it to Starbucks, Trader Joe’s, or one of the local independent retailers of gourmet coffees in your town. They grew good coffee in Peru, but not where I lived when I worked there—a desert at sea level. There you were as likely to get instant coffee as brewed coffee if you ordered a cup in a restaurant. The coffee is very tasty here in Perquín but we still have a ways to go to bring our coffees up to the standards required by the previously mentioned buyers.

Why is that? Mostly it’s the processing of the beans. The growers here have access to the same coffee that growers plant in Honduras, which, after all, is only 32 km from Perquín. However, the manner in which the coffee is harvested, dried, and roasted, and the quantity of beans produced by an individual grower or cooperative make all the difference.

As you can see from the picture below, the plants are beautiful—rich, dark green leaves which in May begin to produce “uvas”, what we call “cherries,” inside of which reside the coffee beans. The rainy season begins in May in El Salvador and so the coffee flourishes for seven months and in November comes the harvest. But fine coffees begin to distinguish themselves from mediocre coffees long before the harvest.

For nearly 200 years, producers in El Salvador grew arabica, an “indio” or wild, native coffee with a rich, full flavor. But the fact that they mainly grew that one variety led to their eventual downfall. Because they neglected to genetically differentiate their plants, diseases adapted and spread. Eventually one plant disease, “la roya” (leaf rust), wiped out virtually the entire Salvadoran coffee industry. 

These skinny, white, naked sticks were formerly coffee trees.

The growers are just beginning to emerge from this crisis. They’ve planted disease-resistant strains, especially “cuscataleco,” which supposedly comes from the Salvadoran department of Cuscatlán but really originated in Honduras, where it was bred to resist leaf rust. Leaf rust had also decimated the Honduran coffee plantations. Another resistant variety is lempira, a tasty hybrid readily available in gourmet shops in the U.S. However, these varieties produce for only about 20 years, whereas some of the arabica trees destroyed by leaf rust were 100 years old. Also, unless the growers genetically diversify when they plant, some other disease will gain a foothold and again devastate their plantations of cuscataleco and lempira.

Genetic diversification doesn’t necessarily require that you grow several varieties of coffee. You could grow 4 or 5 clones of one variety and graft your plants. A graft offers the advantage of a robust rootstock plant—disease resistant, good root system—and a scion that produces flavorful beans but that if grown by itself would be disease-prone or otherwise unsuitable to local growing conditions.

And if you diversify and if you care for your plants well and fertilize and fumigate with chemical or organic pesticides and fungicides, are you guaranteed a good harvest and coffee beans that will bring top dollar? No, you’re not even close; not yet.

Perhaps the biggest mistake that growers make is poor quality control at the time of harvest. This part shouldn't really be that hard. All you have to do is pick the red cherries and shun the green cherries. The red cherries are the ripe cherries and the ones that produce the most flavorful beans. However, there's pressure on the grower to pick as much coffee as possible and there's a desire on the part of the seasonal pickers to pick as many cherries as possible since they get paid by the sack. So what too frequently occurs is that red cherries get mixed in with green cherries, which assures that the entire harvest, when processed, yields beans with a poor appearance—small, light-colored, broken beans mixed with large, whole, dark beans—and more importantly a compromised flavor.

The drying of the cherries is also a step that must be carried out carefully and correctly. The cherries need to be spread evenly on drying patios or African “camas”—raised beds; they need to be kept out of the rain; they need to be turned at regular intervals; bugs and animals need to be kept away. The beans can then be sold as “oro”—“gold” so-called, due to their color: the coffee beans before they’re roasted—or, in order to fetch a retail rather that wholesale price, can be roasted first. Roasting is an extremely exacting process and most coffee is ruined at this stage—the equivalent of fumbling the ball on the one yard-line. 

Here in Perquín much of the roasting is carried out in a decidedly “artisanal” fashion. In larger quantities the beans are sometimes roasted in roasters that resemble something you’d see at a backyard pig roast in Iowa—an oil drum cut in half with a mechanism inside for turning the beans continuously. Alternatively, small producers frequently roast beans on a comal—a flat, round ceramic griddle. If done correctly, the coffee roasted thusly is delicious. Imagine walking out to Prudencio’s finca in Pueblo Viejo, watching Prude’s wife roast beans before your very eyes, seeing Prude grind the beans by hand in a big, silver funnel-shaped mill, then taking the coffee home and brewing it! But this process can’t be carried out on a large scale and the results are unpredictable when Prude and his wife aren’t in charge.

And if you've managed to dodge all the bullets up to this point in the process you're still not done. You have to produce at least a container—around 250 sacks or 33,000 pounds—of beans or an international buyer won't even talk to you.

How does one reach that level of production? Most producers in Perquín own 1–5 manzanas of land. (A manzana is .7 hectares. A hectare is 2.47 acres.) On one manzana of land it’s possible to cram 1,200 or more coffee plants. One coffee plant, once it’s three years old, produces about 2 pounds of “oro”—dried but not roasted beans—a year. That means that one would need to be raising, harvesting and drying the yield of 1,100 plants (about what would grow on a manzana) in order to produce a metric ton of beans (2,200 pounds). It takes fifteen metric tons to fill a container. So realistically the only way farmers can hope to reach that level of production iis by organizing themselves into cooperatives. I’m working with a cooperative here in Perquín—La Asociación Cooperativa de Productores Agrícolas Cafés Especiales de Perquín (The Perquín Cooperative of Producers of Specialty Coffees). Let’s hope the number of integers in their bank balance someday matches the number of letters in their name.

So the next time you savor a cup of fine coffee at Northampton Coffee or whatever the name of the source of the best cup of coffee in your town happens to be, give a thought to where it came from and who produced it and why it tastes so good. And don't worry about running out; somewhere a cargo container full of the same beans is waiting for you.

Alfombras

“Alfombras” (carpets) are a Salvadoran Easter tradition brought over by the Spanish when they colonized El Salvador back in the 1500s.

Alfombras are sidewalk mosaics made out of sawdust, salt, flowers, cut-up newspaper and other found materials. Alfombras decorate the streets where Easter processions are held and act as metaphorical adornments of Jesus’s path to the cross. (It’s probably no coincidence that the chief material used in creating an alfombra is sawdust.)

Families, neighborhoods and friends as well as municipalities and large organizations create alfombras; so some of them can be intricate, elaborate and systematically planned and executed, while others look more rustic and improvisational. Vendors sell wooden molds in the form of Saints or other religious symbols that can be filled with sawdust dyed different colors to create a neat and well proportioned alfombra. Or you can throw down a layer of sawdust, draw figures into it with a finger or a stick, and create your own design. The colors are achieved by adding anilin dyes to the sawdust.

Below I include a photo of the elaboration of an alfombra from Perquín, where I live. This one depicts Monseñor Óscar Romero, the “Liberation Theology” cleric who was murdered in El Salvador during the Revolution of the 1980s. He’s still a hero to Salvadorans, young and old, and in fact is rumored to be close to qualifying for Sainthood alongside recently Sainted John Paul II and John XXIII.

The alfombra below was created by Gloria and Edith of the tortillería where I buy my daily bread. Their alfombra won first prize in the yearly competition that takes place in Perquín. The symbolism is complex and includes Christ’s path to the cross (on the left), Calvary (top), three crosses and three candles, plus homages to the aforementioned Monseñor Romero, who—the alfombra’s symbolism implies—sacrificed himself for his people in a Christlike manner.

As you can tell, the values of the Revolution are still very much alive here in Perquín. Perquín and Eastern El Salvador were the main battlegrounds during the fighting. Virtually all of Perquín was destroyed by bombs and artillery, including the Catholic church, which has since been rebuilt to resemble the original church. Every year in August the community organizes a Winter Festival that celebrates the Peace Accords that ended the Civil War. It’s said that the rough outlines of the accords were negotiated in the shade of a mango tree in back of what is now The Museum of the Revolution, Perquín’s chief tourist attraction.