Migration meditations, pt. 2

 Hi all --

Toreras' situation remains unchanged and I'm afraid I don't have much new analysis of it that I did not convey in my previous, morose post. I do, however, have a dreary tidbit to share that illustrates the difficulty of working in community development with a community that has utterly given up on itself. 

About two weeks ago, Peace Corps staff organized a workshop on gender and sexuality for volunteers, who were to bring one counterpart each (a counterpart in Peace Corps parlance is any community member with which is PCVs collaborates on a project). The two-day workshop was to be held at a hotel overlooking the Pacific on El Salvador's beautiful Costa del Sol and promised to be both an educational experience and an enjoyable opportunity for volunteers and counterparts to relax and exchange ideas with new people engaged in diverse activities in their communities. 

The counterpart I invited was one of the two young women in my community to have acquired a university degree. She is significantly less shy than most young women in my community and, while not actively engaged in any formal leadership positions, has the potential to be a formidable community leader in Toreras. My decision to invite her to the workshop was based on my hope that the activities would familiarize her with various topics related to gender equality (as these issues are never discussed in Toreras and a minimum of outside information manages to enter the community) and animate her to want to address the problem of gender inequality in Toreras. With her newfound motivation, I could push her to take a more active role in the women's group I am attempting to organize in Toreras, my thinking went.

The workshop went great and I think that in just two days my counterpart became significantly more conversant in gender issues. While the workshop did not inspire a ferocious passion in her to tackle gender inequality in Toreras, I felt as we were traveling home from it that I had made the right choice to invite this particular woman and that maybe I would be able to cultivate her into a valuable work partner who could help me propel the women's group forward.

Four days after the workshop, she, like many Torereños before her, left for the U.S.

If you're picturing a young Salvadoran woman dutifully boarding an airplane, eager to embark upon an adventure in a new country, stop. Like most people who emigrate from El Salvador to the U.S., she is traveling por tierra, placing her life in the hands of a coyote, or human smuggler, to whom her family paid somewhere between $6,000 and $8,000.

Her case is not at all unique. Six young people from Toreras--or 3% of its population--have left for the U.S. in just the last three months, and a great many more are hoping to leave as soon as their situations permit, just as hundreds have since the the 1980s. Having dwelled on this topic in my last post, suffice it to say that the the constant exodus of young people--some with genuine leadership potential--is starving this country of the human resources it needs to overcome its tremendous challenges. As I identify unexploited opportunity after unexploited opportunity to generate income right here in Toreras, I question more and more the refrain that illegal migration from Central America to the U.S. is borne of economic necessity and desperation.

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In a small bit of encouraging news, I have discovered that getting kids to enjoy reading books is not as difficult as I had expected in a community where reading for pleasure is simply not done. A side project of mine is to form a little book club with a group of fourth, fifth, and sixth graders to teach them to appreciate books, improve their reading skills, and expose them to new ideas. As such, I have been spending about an hour a week for the last six weeks reading children's books donated by the U.S. embassy with between four and seven kids. They keep their focus and seem to have fun, and I am hoping later on to train them in basic literary analysis and perhaps to assign them projects to help them develop some creativity, a faculty that the public schools utterly fail to nurture.

That's all for now. Feel free to send me emails with questions or comments.

UPDATE: Here are a couple pictures of book shopping with some girls from my site. The books were purchased with a $500 grant I received to start a book collection at the school in Toreras.