Western mindset is left at home

By SUSAN LYNN
Register Editor

Register/Susan Lynn Tim Stauffer is rarely without a hand to hold. As the day winds down he walks two girls to their homes.

Forty-eight hours in El Salvador was enough to establish that a far-away son is in a good place. Tim Stauffer was assigned to the Central American country last fall to begin his service to the Peace Corps. He is stationed in a rural village in the mountains that border Guatemala in the northwest.
El Salvador was one of the first countries to benefit from the Peace Corps, beginning in 1962. Service there was interrupted from 1980 to 1993 because of civil wars. The small country is still regarded as the most dangerous country for the Peace Corps to have a presence. It is a harbor of violence mostly from the illegal trafficking of weapons. Gangs are especially prevalent in the cities, which is why the volunteers are stationed in the rural areas, away from the more violence-prone urban areas.
My son Tim lives in a village of about 400 people that are primarily the progeny of two longtime families. When we were there in mid-December, Tim had been there only five weeks after having completed several months of training in San Vincente. Once training is done, the volunteers are separated and placed individually in villages across the country, whose identities, for security purposes, are kept private.
For the first several months Tim will work to learn the particulars of his village and how his talents can best suit the educational needs of their youth.
Though the World Almanac reports 85 percent of Salvadorans can read, that doesn’t describe the people of Tim’s village where poverty is endemic. A lack of resources has held the people suspended in time while they fall further and further behind modern day life.
In some ways, it doesn’t seem all bad.
Tim picks coffee beans and cuts sugar cane alongside the men of the village to get a grasp of their workaday lives. The workers earn an average $4 a day and Tim is paid similarily by the Peace Corps. Most families raise a few crops. Small plots of corn and beans dot the landscape. Chickens roam most yards and a cow or two is fenced nearby.
Tim lives with a family of six. The mother and her two grown daughters spend their days preparing food to cook. That includes taking a bowl full of corn to a nearby mill to be ground into a paste used to make papusas — a thick, handmade corn tortilla. The sounds of the pat-pat-pat of their quick hands shaping the corn discs dot their talk as they prepare each meal. Just about every meal consists of papusas and a protein, be it cheese, beans, or sometimes pork. A chicken will be killed only for a special occasion and made to stretch by using it as a soup base. Even less abundant is beef. Fresh vegetables and fruits are served sparingly.
It’s a patriarchal society. Tim and the men of the family eat first, being served by the women. Of the two daughters, the 22-year-old has a sixth grade education; the 18-year-old recently finished high school. Even so, their opportunities seem to be the same. No money through scholarships or grants exists for the high school graduate to further her education, Tim said. Though some of the young men have “broken away” to live in the cities or work in foreign countries, it would be rare for a single woman to do so. A big source of income for Salvadorans is the “remittance” their overseas family members send home from their higher paying jobs. The average Salvadoran makes less than $6,000 a year. Of the country’s 7 million, more than 3 million work abroad — legally and illegally. For those who benefit from the additional income, it’s creating greater economic disparities among the people and inflated values for real estate and commodities.
The coffee beans that they break their backs hoisting up by the sackfull are sold abroad. They never taste the dark-roasted aromatic coffee those beans produce because a cup of coffee sold in a restaurant would be half their day’s wages. Most Salvadorans settle for instant coffee granules for their evening drink.
The villagers drink the water that comes down from the mountains — untreated. It’s the same source for their washing, bathing, and other needs. At Tim’s home the people bathe outside around the corner of a shed using bucketfuls of cold water to rinse. Thus it was surprising that when we were packed into a bus on a trip into a nearby city to find the people immaculately dressed and clean-smelling.
The people there take great pride in their appearance, Tim said, because they have so little else to be proud of. To be sure, Tim’s home is sparsely furnished with a few of those ubiquitous plastic chairs and tables now found worldwide. The floor is packed dirt. They cook on a grill over a wood fire outside the house so the smoke doesn’t infiltrate their living quarters. Still, I think about the women and how for hours on end they stand in that small smoky room preparing food.
Their lifestyles are so different from ours here. Community there is everything. People while away the idle hours visiting, connecting. For reasons we failed to understand, the men were limited by the sugar cane and coffee cooperatives to work only in the mornings. Perhaps it was because the processing plants could not handle more of the raw foodstuffs.
At night, many homes are illuminated by the glare of televisions. But because they get only a few channels, the soap operas and government-run news station get old quickly. Lights are out by early evening. The next day stirrings began at 4:30 a.m.
The only public building in Tim’s village is a school that enlists four adults to teach K-12. All shopping is done in a town eight miles away, which on a Saturday morning took us 45 minutes by bus for two reasons: the dirt roads are so rutted, and the bus stopped every few minutes to pick up passengers. The fare was 50 cents. The women of Tim’s house travel there about two times a week.

TRYING TO GET our Western minds around what “should” be done for this impoverished village is the first mistake. Building passable roads, installing utilities, getting everyone educated, administering healthcare, etc., would seem to be the first diagnosis. But the scope of such projects is unrealistic and unsustainable in such a remote and impoverished area.
Even education seems to have its drawbacks. In a village where there are a handful of jobs, an advanced education is a sure ticket out of there which goes against their insular nature.
Like the Peace Corps volunteer before him, Tim’s job is to show how education can improve, not threaten, the villagers’ standard of living. There will be much learning — on both sides of the equation.