¡Bienvenidos! My fourth night here in El Salvador has come already. The past three days have blown by in a whirlwind of meetings, lectures, long conversations both serious and sarcastic, card games, jokes, mosquito bites, Spanish both slow and fast... I arrived at the San Salvador airport two nights ago. The heat hit as soon as I got into the airport and the humidity began to cling to my skin soon after. I don´t remember it being quite so intense in the DR, maybe because my family in Santo Domingo lived on a bit of a hill and we got a nice breeze in our house and then I was in the mountains for the rest, or maybe I just don´t remember. I do remember it being like this in Nicaragua though. My flight got in early and I made it through immigrations and customs, or aduana, quickly. When I reached the airport, however, there wasn´t anyone there waiting for me, which it turns out was because my flight was early and I made it through customs quickly. In any case, I thought that someone was supposed to pick me up, but I wasn´t entirely certain, especially when most of the other arrivals and people gathered waiting cleared out. I had the address of the CRISPAZ office and my orientation packet said how much taxi fare from the airport to the office should be, so I decided to take a taxi. While I had supposedly flown into El Salvador, the airport was actually about a forty-five minute drive away. When I arrived at the CRISPAZ office, it was locked. The other SIPPIES were there, but they had instructions not to open the gate. After a phone call to one of the CRISPAZ staff, however, things got cleared up and the others let me in.
For the first week, we´re doing a mini-delegation which means we´ve been hearing lots of speakers and visiting various different places. On Wednesday we started off with a taller (workshop) on water privatization/the water crisis in El Salvador (Whitney, hope you´re reading this part), which was really quite incredible. The environmental destruction caused by the war has had a profound impact on water quality and access. Before coming I´d read that only 2% of the trees before the war were left standing afterwards, and our speaker confirmed that this was so. During the war, the guerrillas were often in mountainous, forested areas and one of the tactics the army used to combat them was to set the forest on fire, sending guerrillas, rabbits, and everything fleeing. As a result, there´s a significant amound of erosion and the soil has lost much of its capacity to absorb water. And the wood remaining continues to be logged because it is one of the natural resources Salvadorans still have, reduced and degraded though it may be.
While El Salvador receives three times the world-wide average rainfall, 89% of the rainfall is polluted. 58% of the population has access to water through the public water system, however they might only have access for an hour a day or once every three days. Maybe 2% of the population has access to water 24/7. So while the public water system doesn´t charge much, the people complain because the water doesn´t necessarily arrive. The fear with water privatization is that companies would charge more than people can afford for a vital resource that is quickly becoming scarce. Salvadoran rivers provide water for houses, for agriculture, and producing electricity, but there is an increacing tendency for permanent rivers to become rivers only in the winter and to dry up in the summer. Also, in San Salvador there are no water treatment plants whatsoever. People´s water in their houses comes from the River Lempa andafter being used goes directly to the River Acerguate (I think) which is (definitely) a tributary of the River Lempa. Yay for sewage in drinking water! In fact, there are only four water treatment plants in the country, and three of them are pilot projects and serve communities or villages, not cities. Many Salvadorans know little about the water cycle or how water becomes contaminated. I find this fascinating and devastating all at once. It´s something that things really could practically be done about, but like almost everything would take a lot of work and dedication and right now it´s something the government virtually ignores.
Well I´ll write a bit more later. There´s so much to tell/share, but I don´t want to put so much into one blog that it becomes overwhelming to read.