El Salvador Delegation 2025: Day 3

June 19, 2025

I've had better night's sleep. But I've also had worse (like the night of June 16...). There were dogs barking a lot around bedtime. The roosters started around 4am; or at least that's when I started hearing them. Truck traffic started around 5am. I hear you can get used to about anything. Here's hoping.
Today, the rest of the delegation is going by van to the massacre site of El Mazote and the guerilla museum at Perkin, in the very northern part of the country. Perkin is not far from El Salvador's border with Honduras. It's about 3 and a half hours each way, depending on traffic and road construction. 
I opted to stay at the Casa because: 1) I’ve been there many times before and 2) the 7 hour van ride. My jobs for the day are: sort and inventory the health kit supplies we brought down, portion out the 2,950 Tums into 59 individual baggies, and other duties as assigned. So for much of the day it was just Idalia, Margarita, and me at the Casa.

Counting out 50 antacids to put in each baggie. One baggie for each of the 59 health kits we're putting together.

 

I had completed the sorting and inventory by maybe 9:00 and started sorting out the antacids. Idalia was sitting at the table by me working on something. At one point I told Idalia that if she needed to go to the market, I would be her burro (carry her purchases). She said she didn’t have much to buy, maybe just some fruit, but if I wanted to go with her, I could. So, when she was ready to go, I took a break from pill counting/bagging.
She had a cesta (a tote with handles made from woven plastic cord, ubiquitously used here for carrying things), which I carried. We walked a few blocks to the central Plaza where the street vendors start. Idalia paused at an Agroecologico table. There was a boy there and she asked him where his mother was. He said she’d gone to the market. So we walked on across the Plaza.

A medium sized cesta. They come in various sizes and are strong enough to hold way more than I'd want to carry

As we got to the edge of the Plaza, his mother met us and we all stopped to chat. We did introductions. Her name is Wendy and she’s from El Recreo. After a brief chat, we all walked back to the Agroecologico table where Idalia bought a guisquil (like a small, green squash that is often put in soups) and about half a  big sack of corn in the husk. She paid for her purchases and put the guisquile in my basket. We left the corn to pick up on the way back.

Idalia buying corn from the Agroecologico women's group of El Rescate

We walked on to a bigger store just past the Plaza. They had shelves of goods going up to the high ceiling around the perimeter, stacks of goods in the center, and a counter all around in front of the shelves. Idalia gave a list of items to a woman behind the counter who ran around confirming their quantities, which took quite a while given the number of things she wanted. She was buying items to put in the food packages we’d start delivering tomorrow. We didn’t have to carry this; the store would deliver it to the Casa.

The first store we went to, where Idalia ordered many things that I didn't have to carry.

We continued up and then down the hill to the Agromercado…it’s an open sided structure with a concrete floor and a roof. There is a row of produce bins on each side and one down the center. It’s a program run by the government where prisoners do the work of growing and harvesting the produce. The prisoners get paid (not much) and the produce is sold very cheaply at these markets. Later, Idalia told me that at the regular market, a couple carrots (admittedly very big carrots) would cost $1. At this market, she got a whole bag of carrots for $1.

Idalia waiting in line to get into the Agromercado run by the government with prison labor.

When we got there, Idalia told me to wait in a chair. She then got in line to enter the market. I looked at the other people sitting in chairs in the shade and all the others were children waiting for their mothers. It was just me and the littles. I felt like I was at the kids’ table.

Me, sitting in the shade with the kids

When Idalia got to the front of the line, she called to me and I joined her. We got a big plastic basket on wheels with a handle. That’s the reason for the line. You have to wait for a basket to be available to start shopping. We started our circuit of the mercado. Idalia would look at things, put some in the basket and some back in the bins. At the far end of the space, there was a meat and dairy vendor that shares the space with the Agromercado but is separate. Idalia got 3 ginormous chicken breasts (frozen) and paid for those. We then continued up the other side of the mercado, ending at the pay counter.

Idalia got some more guisquil, 3 bags of tomatoes, a bag of carrots, some plantains, a bag of onions, a pineapple, and a bag of green oranges; in addition to the chicken that she’d already paid for. She paid for the produce and it was put into a big, black plastic bag. 

“Maybe just a little fruit,” she said. What’s up with that?

We took the bag outside and tried to even out the weight between the black bag and my basket. It was still a lot as we trudged back up the hill toward the market. 

We stopped outside another store. Idalia left me with the bag and basket outside while she went in. While I was standing there, I was wondering how we were going to get all this stuff back to the Casa as it was quite a walk from there. I was feeling like a very weak little burro. 

Idalia didn’t come out with anything so there must not have been anything she wanted. We were standing right by a mototaxi stand and she said we’d take one back to the Casa. Hallelujah!

One of the mototaxis that zip all around Berlín

The mototaxi took us to the Plaza where Idalia picked up the corn she’d purchased earlier. It was a lot to get in the taxi but the driver, Julio, helped us get it all in. He then drove us to the Casa and helped unload the taxi.

Idalia outside the Casa with all the purchases we transported

It was a very successful Market Day!

But that was just the first part of the day. When we got back, I counted more pills for a while and then it was time for lunch. Margarita went to their favorite taquieria and got us beef tacos for lunch. Each plate had 4 street tacos with some carrot and onion in the middle. Not realizing that the carrots and onions were spicy and pickled, I popped one of the carrot sticks into my mouth and immediately regretted that. I did continue to eat them but more carefully and WITH taco.

Mmmmmm...tacos

 

After lunch I went back to counting antacids and putting them into baggies. When I finished, I went to help Idalia and Margarita shuck the corn that we bought in the morning. But they were already done. 

 

Then the really cool part of my day started. Idalia started roasting cacao beans to make chocolate. Last year, I bought some cacao beans and experimented with making chocolate. I was reasonably happy with my results but I hadn’t seen anyone actually do it before. I’d only read about it online, and gotten a lot of conflicting information. So I watched carefully and took notes!

 

She started by roasting 2 pounds of the beans on a hot griddle, stirring them around. As they start to roast they start to pop…it sounds like popcorn. The seeds inside their skins start to crack, but they don’t puff up like popcorn. They were roasted maybe 10 minutes.

 

Then the 3 of us started peeling the skins off the seeds. The seeds are still hot at this point, so we had to be a bit careful. While we were shucking the seeds, Idalia and Margarita were listening to a funeral Mass that was being broadcast live. It was someone they knew from Canton Virginia who died of cancer with 2 small children. They sang along with some of the hymns.

 

When we’d finished peeling the seeds, Idalia put them on the griddle again and roasted them until they were very dark. They smelled burnt to me, but she insisted that without the second roast, the chocolate wouldn’t be good. She didn’t know how long this second roast takes, she just knows it when she sees it. It seemed longer than the first roast to me, but I wasn’t actually timing it.

 

While she was doing that, Margarita brought in a tub of bananas and put them on the table. That makes them available to anyone who wants one. She said they came from Blanca’s milpa (small farm). There was a big storm recently that blew down a lot of her banana trees and they had picked them to keep them from just rotting on the ground. I had one with peanut butter.

 

When the second roast was done, Idalia dumped 10 pounds of sugar into a basin, then poured in the freshly roasted beans and stirred them around. Then she picked up a 600 ml bottle of water and the basin and we walked to the Molino (mill) about half a block up the street.

Roasted cacao beans and sugar

 At the mill, Idalia bought some cinnamon sticks that she broke up into the tub then poured in the bottle of water. That was all mixed together and then put by handfuls into the hopper of the grinder until all the sugar/bean/cinnamon mix had been processed.

The molinera cleaning the corn out of the grinder to grind the cacao

 

 

Idalia adding the water to the sugar and beans

 

 

Idalia breaking up cinnamon sticks and adding them to the sugar/bean mixture

 

 

The milled chocolate coming out of the grinder

 

 

Carrying the freshly ground chocolate back to the house.

Idalia carried our tub of chocolate as we walked back to the house. I asked her how much it cost to grind the chocolate. Our tub started out about half full and she said it was $2.40 to have it ground. I thought that sounded pretty cheap but Idalia said that if the tub had been heaped full of corn, it would have only cost $1. Cacao has to be ground much finer than corn for tortillas.

 

Back at the house, Idalia and I shaped the ground cacao, which was still pretty warm, into flat disks and logs. We had to get it all shaped before it cooled too much to work with. When it had cooled a bit, Idalia portioned them all out into 1# bags. Out of the original 2# of beans, 10# of sugar, 600 ml water, and a bunch of cinnamon sticks, there ended up being about 9-10 pounds of chocolate. There was some waste in the mill machine and roasting the beans drives off all the moisture in the seeds which makes them a lot lighter. But I have no idea if those numbers are typical. Idalia did use some of the chocolate to make hot cocoa for us. She melted the chocolate in boiling water and then poured it into mugs. It was rich, dark, and very sweet.

The shaped discs and bagged logs of chocolate

 

 By now, it’s almost 4:30 and the rest of the group are expected back about 5:30. I took a shower and got caught up with my trip journal. It was well after 6 by the time the group got back. Just before they did, a cold front blew in, turning the house into a bit of a wind tunnel. I went up to my room to put on long pants and a jacket.

 

Since Cecilia does the majority of the cooking and she went to El Mazote with the group, she still had to make supper after they got back. She made nachos with beans, a couple different kinds of cheese and I don’t remember what else. They were very tasty.

Mmmm...nachos

 

After supper, we started putting together the health kits we would give out tomorrow. We put each item in piles around the table. Then we started an assembly line. We lined up and each person would pick up a small black plastic bag then walk around the table picking up one from each pile and putting it in the bag. We’d tie a single knot in the handles and put the filled bags in rows of 10 on the far end of the table until we’d made enough for the families we’d visit.

LuAnn, Mike, and me on the health kit assembly line

 

 El Salvador Delegation 2025: Day 2

 June 18, 2025

I slept GREAT! Except for the car alarm across the street that went off 3 times in the night. I woke up about 6:00am to my bed shaking back and forth. I panicked a moment thinking that my alarm didn't go off and someone was shaking my bed to wake me. I looked around and there was no one standing there. It was a 5.4 earthquake 5 miles off the coast of El Salvador (and 21 miles, as the crow flies, from Berlín) that woke me.

I'd been asleep for about 9 hours and figured that was enough, so I got up and tried to get out of the room quietly. LuAnn was already awake but I think Natalie was still asleep.

Downstairs, Kathy was up and in the hammock on the patio. I went to the kitchen to get hot water for my tea then took a chair on the patio. Eventually, all the others came downstairs and we had breakfast in the dining room...scrambled eggs with onions and peppers, fresh mixed fruit, toast, beans.

Alfredo picked us up around 8:00 and we started our day of touring around San Salvador.

We started at the National Cathedral. Saint Oscar Romero is entombed in the basement, which is where we started. Back at the time of the civil war, the basement was dirt floored and very rudimentary. It's where the poor people would go to listen to the Mass upstairs. Now, it has been finished with tile floors, a small chapel area with pews and altar, and stations of the cross out in the large open area. 

The chapel in the basement of the National Cathedral in San Salvador. Romero's tomb is between the altar and the back wall.

Behind the altar area is the tomb of Saint Romero. Romero was assassinated March 24, 1980 while saying Mass. More on that later. His funeral mass was held in the cathedral upstairs. So  many people wanted to attend his funeral that the cathedral was packed and the crowd filled the plaza outside. His casket was at the top of the steps so that it could be seen. Then the military, who had been stationed all around the plaza, opened fire on the crowd and panicked people tried to press into the church. Romero's casket was passed overhead, hand to hand through the cathedral to the crypt below, for protection. And there it stayed. The tomb was built and installed in the late 1990s.

The tomb of Saint Romero, designed by an Italian artist in bronze. Every part of the imagery is symbolic of something. The 4 corner characters are Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, for example.

 

I think this was the first time there wasn't something going on when I was at the Cathedral. I'd never been able to actually enter the sanctuary upstairs before. We walked through the sanctuary to the doors that open onto the plaza. I'd heard about the funeral crowd and the panicked people in the plaza, but actually seeing the plaza from the church doors somehow made it much more real.

The altar area of the main sanctuary upstairs.

 

The plaza where huge crowds of people came to see Romero's funeral.

From the cathedral, we went to Divina Providencia...the cancer hospital run by the Carmelite order where Romero lived when he was Archbishop. We went to his modest home where a young nun named Reina told us about his life and work there while showing us his house. Then we went to the chapel where Romero was assassinated while saying Mass for the mother of a journalist. 

The altar where Romero was saying Mass when he was assassinated.

 A car pulled into the compound, turned around, then stopped in front of the chapel. A sniper aimed a rifle out the window and put a single bullet in Romero's chest. The car then sped away. The bullet was designed to enter cleanly and then blow shrapnel out the back. It missed his heart but immediately destroyed his aorta. Given that the chapel was full of journalists, it's probably the most well-documented assassination in history. There are many eye-witness accounts and photos of what happened afterward, but since Romero was the only one facing the door, he's the only one who saw the car. 

From Divina Providencia, we went to the UCA (University of Central America, but everyone calls it the UCA, pronounced like "ooka"). This is one of the massacre sites, where the military came in, shot 6 Jesuit priests, the housekeeper, and her daughter, then set fire to buildings and destroyed various items like portraits of Romero, bibles, books, etc. The garden where the priests were executed is now a rose garden, planted by the husband of the housekeeper to memorialize all of them.Our guide for this part was Manuel, as current student at the UCA. His English was very good but he talked very fast and kept moving, not giving us much time to absorb what we were seeing and hearing. But he really knew his stuff. We also spent some time in the chapel where the Stations of the Cross on the back wall are rather brutal, black-on-white line drawings from the artist's memories during the war. The artwork on the wall behind the altar were in a traditional, colorful style that symbolically tell the Salvadoran story of before, during, and after the war.

With that, our history lessons for the day were done and we headed to an artisan market for lunch and shopping. The lunch is sort of cafeteria style. They make a number of items each day and you tell them which foods you want. They put it on a plate for you, you select a drink, then take your tray to a table. We all went to the outdoor tables under a roofed area to eat.

After eating, we had some time to peruse the shops and get any souvenirs we wanted before heading to Berlín at 1:30. it's about an hour and a half drive, most of it on the Pan American Highway. Despite being the major highway in El Salvador, it's not exactly speedy. The road winds through mountains so it's steep and/or curvy in spots. It also carries many types of vehicles and the shoulders are covered with pedestrians and vendors. You also have to deal with turning traffic, school zones, etc.

We arrived at Casa Pastoral, the house where we will be staying for the rest of the week. Cecilia and Margarita were there to meet us. We unloaded the van and settled into our rooms.

The stairs leading up to the room where I stayed at the Casa Pastoral.

We had supper of cheese stuffed tortillas, casamiento (a traditional rice/bean dish), baked plantains stuffed with a different cheese, and cooked salsa for the tortillas. 

After supper, I did the dishes and taught Flossie the protocol for it. Then we all shared impressions of the day with  "high - low - buffalo" where we all shared a high, a low, and a what-the heck?!? from our experiences so far. My high was just being back in El Salvador. My low was the very hard history...the massacres, atrocities, and unbelievable cruelties of the war. My buffalo was that, according to my FitBit, I did over 3,000 steps while sitting in the van from San Salvador to Berlin. To be fair, I was in the back and the ride was really rough.