Day 2 – Thursday June 16
Slept well – a good 8 hours. Got ready and went downstairs
at 7am and moved to the patio with my computer. I figure 1 ½ hours of work
before the immersion day begins. I answer some email – uh-oh – a student says
they cannot see the homework assignments I set up the day before. I try to
check the course website to find out what is going on. The Internet connection
is soooo slow and I feel I am back in the 1990’s with a 56K modem. But the
assignments are there but I did not set one up correctly for the students to
upload their assignments. I fix the assignment on both class websites and email
the students the corrections.
We get on the bus at 8:45am and head down the hill to the
University of Central America, UCA, pronounced ‘ooka’ by the locals. We go into
a nice brick building and I am struck by how pretty it is inside, with an
atrium-style courtyard and breezeway. We go into a small classroom that barely
fits the 13 of us to watch the documentary Enemies
of War. The film brings to life some
of the people and images we read about prior to our trip, and we will meet some
of the people interviewed. The film includes the story and struggle of a
typical campesino (peasant) and his
family who fled the death squads and fought the rebels. Parts of the movie
brought tears to my eyes – it was moving and graphic, showing the dead
unsanitized as is usually the case back home.
We leave UCA and drive about 35 minutes to a squatters camp
called Oscar Romero. There we find a community of 75 families who are trying to
make a subsistence living on a few acres of land. We are regaled by several
leaders of the community of their tale of woe. Having lost everything in the
earthquakes of 2001, over 200 families take over a piece of government land.
They hear that the government will help build houses for landowners who lost
their homes in the earthquake. But there’s the rub – they lost their homes but
did not own the land. So they took over some government land in the hopes of
getting help. The story that emerges is one of corrupt government bureaucrats
and ever changing requirements. A large cement company is buys an adjacent
parcel of land for several dollars, yet the same government agency tells these
people that it will cost them over $8000. Evidently, the agency thinks they
will never come up with the money, but a foundation helps them and they come up
with the money. Surprise, surprise! The land is no longer for sale but is being
deeded to another government entity. After years of battles with agencies and
government committees, the group, now down to 75 families, buys the land. But
their troubles don’t stop there. Now the government is refusing to supply the community
with clean drinking water and children die of dysentery and other water-borne
diseases.
I leave with a greater understanding of how a nation such as
ours that is governed by the rule of law makes life and living so much easier.
How do you bring a concept such as the rule of law to entire peoples who have
entirely different traditions. Latin American nations such as El Salvador have
over 400 years of corruption, brutality, and a division of classes. Might makes
right, and I do not have any simple answers…
