Old News: El Salvador

As a way of testing the photos function on this thing (and also as a way of procrastinating on my homework), here's some info on my February trip to El Salvador:

I went to El Salvador with a group of 10 other students from Middlebury, through an alternative breaks program run by the Civic Engagement Office. I was a little leery of the concept at first ("Oh great, so a bunch of rich college kids will have a feel-good winter break, huh? Fabulous."), but it turned out to be very rewarding and I met some great people.

We fundraised a good chunk of the expenses of the trip, and went down to El Salvador with little idea of what we were going to do, since the organizations we were volunteering with worked on projects where we could be the most useful on a particular day. We worked with the Foundation for Self-Sufficiency in Central America, and its partner organization in El Salvador, La Coordinadora. We stayed in Ciudad Romero, a small dusty town of about 900 people that is located near the Rio Lempa, southeast of San Salvador. It is impossible to find on maps both because of its size and, we had the sneaking suspicion, because the government may not officially recognize it. The town was only about 15 years old, having been built and populated by El Salvadorians returning from exile in Panama after the civil war. We stayed in a nice (i.e., clean but not ostentatious) dormitory complex with some other volunteers. We met few white people while in El Salvador, but nearly all those we met were there to engage in volunteer work. This is the only map image available, thanks to the far reach of Google:


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We were there primarily to work with potable water, and spent most of our time either working on this big long ditch out to a small shrimp fishing village:



Or, alternately, building new water lines at a school:




The school project was particularly satisfying because we were able to do the whole project during our time there, from digging to cutting and laying the plastic pipes to actually turning the water on.

Those weren't the only projects we worked on, of course. We also helped to build a dam in a shrimp pond (a muddy and stinky but squelchingly fun afternoon) and on another day, we worked on a hurricane and flood shelter that the community was building with the help of the UN. One evening, we even went to the beach and released sea turtles:




Another day saw us on a hike in the hills and in a market town that you can find on a map, Zapotecoluca:




All in all, it was a very positive experience and, though we obviously didn't make a huge dent in the country's problems, we did feel like we did some real and useful work.

You can find some more pictures and info about the trip on the College's website, here.