Migration meditations

Good morning –

As usual, the pace of life remains slow in my small community of Toreras, even slower than usual this past week due to the Easter holiday. New rumors have begun circulating that the Ministry of Education will soon close Toreras' one-teacher school, the community's only institution with a physical presence, as a result of a drastic decline in the student population over the years. Migration has begun to pick up now that the North American winter is over, as young people test their luck reaching the U.S. by land via coyotes (professional human smugglers).

Migration is one of the more interesting topics I occasionally discuss with community members. Some are alert to the dangers the journey involves (murder, dehydration, and rape, to name a few), while others seem only abstractly aware that migration entails many risks. All know that crossing the border, usually across the Rio Grande into Texas, is no guarantee of successful passage; immigration authorities could promptly detain a border crosser upon arrival in the U.S. That being said, the impression I glean from my conversations is that many migrants from Toreras still manage to successfully reach the United States, where they quickly reunite with their family members residing in Pennsylvania or New York and find employment in the construction, manufacturing, food service, and hospitality industries. Some are able to migrate legally (negating the need to employ a coyote) with the help of family members who fled during the civil war and have since obtained American citizenship, but the majority travel sin papeles.

My experience in El Salvador will influence my views on immigration, probably for the rest of my life. The question of 'how' is still unclear. Before sharing some of my thoughts, I find it befitting to acknowledge that migration is a global phenomenon existing under a diversity of regional, political, and economic circumstances, and as such, I am careful not to universalize the observations I make from my tiny corner of El Salvador.

Having lived amid such poverty now for almost seven months, I have developed a great deal of sympathy for those who leave their loved ones, countries, and cultures to live on the fringes of a much richer society to provide financially for their families. Observing the circumstances into which they were born, their desire to migrate is easy to understand. That being said, among those they leave behind, the mentality that remittance dependence begets carries many negative social and economic consequences. Under remittance dependency (at least as far as I observe it in Toreras), children and their parents perceive little incentive to place importance on education, basic opportunities to generate income go unexploited, and people never experience the dignity and fulfillment of earning one's own living. Additionally, migration starves Toreras of valuable human capital, a reality compounded by the tendency for the more enterprising and ambitious young residents tend to be the ones to make the journey north, while the less-motivated stay behind.

I often wonder what Toreras would be like today if migration to the United States had never implanted itself into the community's DNA. For guidance we can examine Toreras' circumstances before El Salvador's civil war of the 1980s. Young men left Toreras during the war years not because fighting directly threatened the community's safety, but because of promises that the prosperous U.S. was offering asylum to Salvadoran migrants ostensibly fleeing the war. This exodus marked the beginning of the formation of Toreras' diaspora in the United States (concentrated in Hempstead, New York and suburban Philadelphia) and its inhabitants' financial dependence on their stateside relatives.

Unlike the strictly subsistence-level agriculture of today, before the war Toreras families produced more corn, beans, and other staples, and sold substantial portions of their harvests at markets in nearby towns (they arrived on horseback, as in these days there were no roads connecting Toreras to larger population centers). Back then, people worked harder and life overall was more difficult, but every colón (El Salvador's currency before dollarization in 2001) was earned and how hard each family worked was commensurate to its prosperity.

It is beyond my capability to prove counterfactuals, but I find it quite conceivable that Toreras would be richer today had migration and its corresponding remittances never become a factor in community life. Perhaps if residents flush with remitted cash had not abandoned their image of themselves as commercial farmers, they would have one day embraced more lucrative crops like coffee and cacao, or adopted new technologies to make their farming and commercializing of staple crops more productive and efficient. Unlike before the war, Toreras now is connected to roads, electricity, and cellular signal, three advancements that would have stood to benefit commercial agricultural activities. Furthermore, without migration, Toreras' population (currently about 200) would likely stand at more than twice what it is today, and as such would boast far more human capital. Lastly, Toreras would not suffer from a crippling mentality defined by its dependency on the fruits of faraway labor and its resignation toward its own economic potential, an improvement upon today's situation with potentially profound implications.

Of course, the practical application of the above thought experiment is limited. The reality is that Toreras does depend on remittances as its economic lifeline, and that young men and women grow up here expecting and hoping to leave one day to toil in the U.S. and build a better life there. In fairness, I should not fail to mention that remittances do spare people here the worst of poverty; children don't grow up barefoot and practically everyone gets enough to eat. My main point is that migration and remittances seem to preclude this community from dreaming — from asking itself what it wants to be and summoning the motivation to realize the answer to that question.

Late March updates

Hi everyone –

On Thursday I got back from my first trip to the U.S. since starting Peace Corps eight months ago. It was great to spend eleven days with people I care about and miss, and to enjoy amenities that I do without in El Salvador. A particular thanks to Hope for making my visit perfect.

I am convinced that when I finally return to the U.S. after Peace Corps, I am going to be profoundly grateful for all the wonderful conveniences and pleasures my life will offer: abundant connectivity, bountiful opportunity, diversity of all sorts, and brilliant, inspiring peers, to name a few. I still recognize that it is completely unfair that I was born into such favorable circumstances and have enjoyed such a privileged life, but Peace Corps is unexpectedly helping me come to peace (no pun intended) with my luck.

Now that I'm back in Toreras, I'm once again focused on helping the new women's group to find its footing and coalesce. So far the group has had two general meetings, learned how to make pineapple cake, and carried out a successful fundraiser selling pupusas. I'm still more in charge of the group than I should be, but I intend to begin gradually passing leadership responsibilities to the women over the next few months.

I am also going to begin teaming up with a community member to explore the possibility of starting an agriculture cooperative in Toreras. Agricultural cooperatives are groups of farmers who share a piece of land to grow crops for sale, dividing labor responsibilities and profits equitably. The community member I'll be working with has experience working in a cooperative in Honduras (he is Honduran, like many people in my site) and thinks that Toreras could sustain a successful operation. Soon we're going to visit houses to gauge the interest level of the community. If we encounter substantial enthusiasm, we will invite the Ministry of Agriculture (MAG) to come to Toreras to provide training and help legalize the cooperative, a service MAG provides free of charge.

I have some other small projects in the works, which I'll discuss in future posts when they've taken greater shape.

That's all for now. Feel free to email me if you have any questions.

Dictionary definitions

Hi everyone –

With every coming week I'm feeling more accustomed to life in Toreras. During the first few months the high days were very high and the low days quite low. Now the peaks and valleys have begun to moderate. No more are the days when I question why those sadists at Peace Corps El Salvador put me here, of all places, as are those when an encouraging conversation with a community member leads me to conclude, naively, that the task of reversing Toreras' inexorable decline is a straightforward undertaking. The reality has set in that Toreras will be my home for the next twenty months, and while I'm unequipped to reverse the trajectories of its demographic and migratory circumstances, there are areas in which I can add value that I must exploit to my greatest ability.

Women's empowerment, broadly speaking, is the area where I have identified the greatest promise. Last Saturday, I convened the first of a series of meetings to form a women's association in Toreras. I was quite pleased with the turnout—about twenty-four women—and the level of participation the attendees delivered. In the meeting I briefly introduced the concept of a women's association, then led the women in a couple of exercises asking them to identify skills they would like to develop as part of the group. The women enthusiastically generated a diverse list of skills, such as leadership, how to make different foods (cake, pizza, and candies, specifically), and English.

A scene from my first women's group meeting

For the time being, my plan is to allow the group to coalesce around fun and accessible (remember, most of these women have little formal education) educational activities based on the skills the women expressed that they'd like to learn. I'll be able to facilitate some of the sessions myself (with the help of recipes taken from the internet, to be sure), and I'm hoping to co-facilitate some sessions with women from the community who already have a skill that the other women want to learn. I also hope to pull in support from organizations operating in El Salvador that specialize in providing trainings to groups of women (there are several).

Eventually, once the group has developed a loyal membership that feels a genuine affinity for the group, I hope to start to steer it toward devising a mission statement, adopting by-laws, and forming an executive board. From there, I would provide the training and support necessary to shift the group from being a PCV-led operation to a fully community-led organization. The idea is to have the group fully empowered to survive and thrive by the time I leave Toreras in the late summer of 2015. We'll see how it goes. I'm fully expecting obstacles and challenges to emerge, but for now we're off to a promising start.

On a less optimistic note, the situation at the little K-6 school in my community is abysmal. As I explained in my previous post, the Ministry of Education (MOE) relocated one of its two teachers, leaving only one behind. The remaining teacher has to attend at least one MOE meeting a week (usually on Mondays), and almost always skips work on Fridays in order to travel back to her hometown for the weekends (no, this is not legal). As such, class will usually be cancelled at least two days a week for the indefinite future.

Furthermore, the instruction the children receive leaves much to be desired. It consists almost entirely of students copying definitions from the whiteboard into their notebooks. There are no class discussions or activities to bring the words to life and develop cognitive skills such as critical thinking. In a particularly grim example of this tendency, the other day I arrived at the school mid-day to find the students copying down the definition of “dictionary”. This, in a school that doesn't have a single dictionary for the students to utilize. A person more removed from the situation than myself could probably have a field day with the image of children copying the dictionary definition of “dictionary” in a school without dictionaries, but its affect on me was to add to my indignation.

Last week I pressed the teacher to hold a meeting with parents to explain the situation thoroughly and give the parents an opportunity to opine. I figured that even though a meeting wouldn't ameliorate the situation, it would at least provide an opportunity to press concerned parents to organize around the common goal of rectifying the educational injustices their children were suffering.

Sadly, only six parents attended the meeting, and I quickly registered that of all the people in the room, I was the most upset about the dismal state of education in Toreras. The parents, apparently accustomed to years of neglectful teachers and an unresponsive educational bureaucracy, seemed resigned to the situation as it stood. The lack of jobs in the area is another factor that leeches urgency out of the school's predicament. When there are no jobs to compete for, why bother with school?, goes the thinking for at least some students and parents. It is hard to blame them for this mentality.

I don't intend to give up on the school issue altogether—the low parent turnout could well have been a fluke—but the meeting left me cognizant of the reality that if I am to motivate parents to be strong advocates for their children's educations, I am going to have to convince them of the severity of the present situation (as well as the feasibility of parent pressure carrying any potential to improve it, which even I am unsure of). Given how vastly different my frame of reference is from theirs (my elementary school had a freaking kiln, for God's sakes!), this task may be beyond my reach.

I'll leave it there. Feel free to email me directly with any questions.

End of January updates

Hi all –

Things are feeling a little more upbeat in Toreras, for the moment at least. At last week's meeting, I convinced the ADESCO to do away with the silly monthly membership fee that I derided in my previous post. They seemed to respond to the argument that participation in community decision-making should be a right, not a privilege that one purchases. I am not expecting an automatic increase in the number of people attending ADESCO meetings, but I think the cancellation of the fee gives the ADESCO a good launching point for a membership drive to pull in people who have historically viewed the ADESCO as exclusive. The ADESCO members were excited to replace the lost revenues by sponsoring weekly pupusa dinners at houses in the community, which will hopefully carry the added benefit of improving community morale (Toreras is possibly the only rural community in El Salvador where people don't get together to eat their country's national dish).

At the same meeting, the director of the school in Toreras, Niña Carmen, announced that due to the drop in enrollment (the number of students at the school has halved since 2010, from 70 to 35), she would be relocated to another school, leaving just one teacher to run the school and teach kindergarten through sixth grade. At first, she delivered the news in her signature poised and confident way (as the only person in the community with El Salvador's equivalent of a bachelor's degree, she is well respected and has a very dignified manner of speaking), but her voice soon started to break and she promptly began to sob. Just managing to let out a, “Don Frank (which is how people address me in my site) please take it from here,” she stormed out of the room in tears.

Alarmed as anyone to see the normally-composed Niña Carmen break down to the point of losing her ability to speak, I immediately registered the twenty sets of mostly middle-aged Salvadoran eyes peering at me, expecting me to put the aghast room at ease with all of my twenty-two years of wisdom. It was one of those moments, probably typical of any Peace Corps service, when it hits a volunteer what an outsize sum of responsibility and credibility he commands.

I managed to improvise a decently befitting monologue about how the community would need to pull together to adapt to the new situation at the school, and that (badly lacking) parental involvement was now important as ever.

I've scheduled a meeting for February 8 to form a women's group in my community. I'm not entirely sure what to expect, but I'm preparing for as many contingencies as I can conceive of. Most of the women in my site have never participated in any kind of formal organization, but they're all the CEOs of their families, and are likely unaware of all the skills they employ as part of that job. One of my tasks will be to get the women to become aware of their strengths and how they can be applied in the context of a community organization. As far as the precise purpose of the group goes, I'd like to help them arrive at that decision on their own.

In other news, there is one exceptionally smart sixth-grader at my school. A few days ago I gave her an almanac that I came across the last time I went into town, thinking back to my own childhood when I used to spend hours with my almanac absorbing country statistics and memorizing state flags (I still enjoy doing the former). I wasn't sure she would take to it, due to the utter lack of any reading culture here. Much to my delight, when I arrived at school yesterday morning, she was huddled around a world map with two other girls and the almanac. We spent the next hour matching countries profiled in the almanac to their locations on the map and talking about the different languages spoken throughout the world. It was wonderful how interested the girls were, but at the same time profoundly sad to observe how little knowledge of the outside world their classes and circumstances have imparted on them up to this point.

That's all for now. Tomorrow I get to go to San Salvador to greet the newest group of Peace Corps trainees as they arrive at the airport, then help out with two days of orientation activities. It'll be ironic to be the “in-the-know” guy for forty-eight hours before returning to my site where I'm still very much in the process of wrapping my head around the situation.