In 10th grade World History my teacher explained how during the Cold War all of the Soviet Union and its sphere of influence revolved around Moscow. How cool is it to think about so much significance swirling around one city? At that moment I decided: I wanted to be where things are happening. On March 15, 2009, things were happening in El Salvador.
So how did I end up in the most important place in the world on that day? It all started in the 1970s, almost 20 years before I was born. Every time I tell the story of my experience in El Salvador it becomes an exercise in backing up. The events that I experienced have been a long time in the making—Romero died, rebels besieged the oppressive government, the Jesuits were killed, the poor finally got political power while still lacking economic power, and in 2003 I jumped in to witness the rest of the unfolding narrative. That year there was a meeting at my church to see who would be interested in a youth delegation during what we were told would be historic elections. They said this was it—this was the year the FMLN would win the presidency and reform would begin.
Lots of preparation and our youth delegation made it to El Salvador in time for the 2004 presidential elections. Sadly for our friends and everyone else, ARENA won by a landslide. All the hope that the people there have all the time was momentarily dashed. We sat around by the martyrs’ wall in el Parque Cuzcatlan with tears in our eyes. Our friend Conchita was wearing black and she told us how excited she had been for the possibility that her children would grow up in a country under new leadership. We saw the names of all the dead on the wall and wondered how it was possible that twelve years later all that sacrifice was still in vain.
These are people who have been kept down long enough to know that if anything needs to get done they need to keep at it. Alex, the pastor of Iglesia Bautista Shalom in Atiquizaya, went to a meeting on election night to figure out what they were going to do better for the next election, how to make it happen between now and then. The day after their crushing defeat they had already bounced back and were ready to go again. The day after the Democrats’ defeat in 2004 we were whining about provisional ballots.
I had another chance to go to El Salvador between elections but this time it wasn’t as part of a large delegation. My parents weren’t all too sure about me going either. El Salvador is dangerous, you know. Forget the fact that I’d been twice and each of my parents had visited once, there was too much risk. Political tensions and whatnot, you understand. Finally I asked my Dad what would have happened if Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, and Jesus had been overly concerned about their physical health. On January 2, 2008, I was on a plane back to the tropics. Now as a student at American University in DC I had another chance to go to this country I’d come to love, this time to be an observer of the presidential election. On my other trips to El Salvador, I had become comfortable with a particular, far left version of the political climate in the country. This time I realized it wasn’t my place to have an opinion in a country where I don’t live on issues I can’t personally understand, especially when my role there was to be an objective observer. Somehow over the week I did get to that neutral place mentally and I believe I really was able to be impartial, but it was an interesting process. By the end of the week some of my fellow observers and I had gotten ourselves so worked up about the need to be fair that we were on the brink of buying ARENA gear to counteract all of the FMLN fanaticism. Then we realized that it was still the oppressive party that had controlled the government for twenty years and this was not the time to get indignant.
One day during the trip I found myself walking with an old woman who was carrying a shovel. I didn’t trust my Spanish to ask her if she wanted me to carry it for her, but I indicated that that’s what I wanted to do. She handed it to me and I carried it as we walked down the road. After 20 minutes of carrying a heavy shovel it got to be pretty uncomfortable. Not to say that I had a problem with it, I just had a problem with thinking about the fact that I’m 19 years old and I found it painful, while this woman who usually carried that shovel was significantly older and probably had a bruise by now from where it rested every day. The Share Foundation who helped organize the trip says their goal is to walk with the Salvadorans, but after three delegations that was the first moment I really understood what that could mean.
Another day we spent some time at the martyrs’ wall. I always find it shocking to see all those names up there. It reminds me of the Vietnam Memorial, except that instead of soldiers who can make some reasonable guess at what’s coming, these were civilians, children, families, men and women. I look at the names that are the same names that friends of mine have and realize these people could have been friends of mine under different circumstances. I like how Romero’s name is indistinguishable from all the others but for the slight discoloration from all the rubbings done of it over the years and the occasional flower taped beside it. He is remembered how he lived: modestly and among the people.
When it came time to observe the election, I feel like I witnessed very little fraud. There were some “irregularities” I guess, and some questionable practices, like the illegal copies of the voter registry, but there didn’t seem to be anything that would win an election for anybody. Voting in El Salvador seems so much more revered than in the U.S.. Each vote is counted by hand—one by one—and the people are so much a part of the process. Here it’s all mechanized and impersonal and my vote is a tiny piece of an enormous number that is then further mediated by some “electoral college.”
Oh, but the vote counting. That was it, the moment when I was where things were happening. These were real people’s votes that really elected a president and changed the course of history in El Salvador. The thing that most impressed me about the whole thing was the impartiality of even the people who were employed by the parties. Though they were there to advocate for one side or another, they knew that what was of supreme importance was the intention of the voter. Light marks and misplaced x’s counted as long as the intention was clear, because this is a people that doesn’t adhere to bureaucratic dogma in the same way that a more “developed” country feels it must. They aren’t impeded by a self-righteous desire to follow arbitrary rules. It’s down to earth and it’s fascinating and it’s probably a better system than we have, all told.
On the night Obama was elected, I went to the party outside the White House. It was insane. I have never seen such a big group of people, all dancing and singing and hugging complete strangers. That’s kind of what I expected in Nombre de Jesus, an FMLN town in El Salvador. Yet when we got back to the plaza everyone stood there still, waiting. Why weren’t they happy? Isn’t this what they wanted? We asked someone and they said they would celebrate after the acceptance speech. Didn’t want to get their hopes up if something went wrong, I guess.
Some of us followed into one of the houses and watched Funes’s acceptance speech. Sitting on the floor with everyone wearing their red shirts and smiles was an experience I could never have gotten here or anywhere else. Sitting on the floor with the children and the mayor and Americans and Salvadorans—that was where things were happening.
I wanted three things out of my year: Obama, Funes, and the Phillies to win the World Series. That night made it three for three.
RSS feed: RSS is a web feed format used to publish frequently-updated content. Use this feed in an RSS reader or browser (Safari 2, Firefox 2, or Internet Explorer 7 and higher)
ICS file: Use this feature to download an ICS file to use to import the calendar's event(s) into another program, such as Outlook, iCal, or Google Calendar.
ICS Feed: This is a live feed in the iCalendar format. To use this feed, you will need a program capable of subscrbing to a life iCalendar feed. Some examples include Apple iCal, Microsoft Outlook 2007 or higher, or Windows Calendar in Vista.
Lots of preparation and our youth delegation made it to El Salvador in time for the 2004 presidential elections. Sadly for our friends and everyone else, ARENA won by a landslide. All the hope that the people there have all the time was momentarily dashed. We sat around by the martyrs’ wall in el Parque Cuzcatlan with tears in our eyes. Our friend Conchita was wearing black and she told us how excited she had been for the possibility that her children would grow up in a country under new leadership. We saw the names of all the dead on the wall and wondered how it was possible that twelve years later all that sacrifice was still in vain. 
