Last Weeks El Salvador

Hi everyone! 

I´m leaving Suchitoto in the next week and heading for Mexico, via Guatemala. To give you an idea of how small these Central American countries are, it takes 9 hours in a bus to cross half of El Salvador, go all the way across Guatemala and the cross the border into the bottom of Mexico. Of course, from there, its about a 346 hour bus ride up to the USA (Mexico is huuuge), so I´ll definiately be doing that part in a plane. 
  
 I have no idea where I´m going to stay in Mexico.  I had decided on a city but have since been told by Edy, who runs my house, that it is a den of people traffickers, illegal migrants, drug smugglers and Mexican cartels. (Poor Edy didn´t realise that this would just make the place sound more attractive to me...but since it is also stinking hot I think I´ll give it a miss). 

I had my last meditation classes this week, and one of the groups found out it was my birthday  and even had a surprise cake for me.  

At the end of the class I gave everyone a little embroidery, so there were surprises all round. 

Fly!

The meditation group at the Arts Centre, holding their little embroideries

Surprisingly, it has been the women in the other meditation group -- who all work at a local sewing cooperative and come from little villages around Suchitoto -- who have been the ones who have taken most enthusiastically to the idea of meditation. The other day I taught them a couple of little meditations they could do at home with their children. In one, you had to imagine that all your limbs were as light as a feather and you were floating up to the ceiling. After we´d finished, one of the women said, ¨I just floated up and up...through the ceiling and I could see the whole world and I was saying, ¨hello world!¨ and I didn´t want to come down again!¨ With this group, the wackier the meditation, the more they seem to like it.

Marina, one of the women from the sewing coop. (She just made this top for me).

I have been hanging out a bit with a refugee family from Mexico who are here for a few months trying to work out where they will go next. The dad is a lawyer and seems to have got into some trouble with a Mexican cartel. Sheila, one of the daughters, appeared at my window yesterday with half a banana and a pineapple...so cute! The day before this photo she had her hair cut - for the first time in her life!! 

Her elder sister, Dulce, is doing a bit of embroidery with me. They aren´t able to go to school here, so the mother is very keen on keeping the girls busy with little projects.  

Dulce and Leo in the ¨craft section¨ of my enormous bedroom

Dulce´s first embroidery

My friend Amy, who used to live in my house but is now doing volunteer work in the capital, also stopped by to get a little embroidery, and then we went out for pupusas - the national dish. I can´t get into it at all, it is just maiz flour stuffed with a tonne of cheese and pork rind, then fried. People here often eat these for breakfast AND dinner...the diet here is just appalling. If it´s not fried, salted, and stuffed with cheese then it´s not food in El Salvador.

The local pupuseria - this is where everyone eats. 

Talking about food, I was having lunch the other day with Edy and she was telling me that her brother died last year in his late thirties.  I asked what he died from, assuming it was something like a heart-attack or diabetes (very common here of course), but it turned out that he was murdered by four gang members. He was a farmer and was working, and the gang came to get money from him and ended up killing him. 

Other people saw it happen, and Edy said that by the end of the day all her family knew exactly who the killers were. I asked what the police did, and she said the family were all too scared to press charges -- her father works alone on his farm down by the lake and she has four teenage boys (and one of them goes to school with one of the gang members).  

But, there is some kind of ¨justice¨ in El Salvador: Edy told me that within three or four months two of the gang members had been killed because of internal fighting within the gang. She knew one of the boys quite well and asked him why he had killed her brother.  He told her he needed money; his mother and father were both in the USA and no-one was looking after him.  SUCH a familiar story here. 

This is Edy´s father, one of the original cowboys! 

Yesterday I came into town and there was a very raucous parade going on -- once a year the local school kids have an annual games day and they start it off with a marching band and lots of craziness.  (Check out the girl walking along with the xylophone strapped to her!)

There were also heaps of soldiers and policemen on the streets yesterday.  When I asked why, someone told me that a woman had be killed during the night a few blocks away, and one of her children went to the local school.  So, that gives a pretty accurate slice of life in El Salvador ...street parades, marching bands...and a bit of murder.

My favorite embroidery - this is a present for Edy

And, to finish, here are some photos from my going-away lunch...