El Salvador Delegation 2025: Day 5

June 21, 2025

I was awake at 5:30 and just chilled in bed until about 6:00. I went down to the house and Cecilia was the only other person up, already hard at work on breakfast. Shortly after that, Blanca, Balmore, Idalia, and Alejandro arrived. It's the first time I've seen Balmore this trip.

The truck had made some alarming clunking noises on the way back from Tablon yesterday. It turns out the shocks had given up the ghost. Our departure was delayed a bit until Alejandro could replace the shocks. The truck is old and the mountain roads combined with the heavy loads are really hard on equipment. A new truck has been purchased but not yet delivered so we have to keep this one going a little while longer. After high school, Alejandro went to mechanic trade school. He's a very good person to have around when you have old vehicles. He also does some of the driving out to the communities.

Broken shock that Alejandro removed from the truck.

 

Alejandro replacing the shocks.

 

Today was much like yesterday. A community meeting with the El Tablon Centro directiva when we first arrived, then house-to-house visits in the morning, had lunch back at our base, did more house to house visits, then back to the Casa. So here are some random thoughts in no particular order.

Yesterday, I saw a torogoz (the national bird of El Salvador, google it, it's a lovely bird). Today, I saw 2 on the way to El Tablon. I had been to El Salvador many times before I ever saw one. Now, this trip, I've seen 3 so far.

When we first pulled into our base at Tablon Centro, I caught a line of brightly colored squares out of the corner of my eye. I thought, "Oh, how nice! They put up little decorative flags for us." Which is something they do for celebrations. But then I looked again and saw they were not little flags at all.

What I thought were brightly colored flags turned out to be a lot of little kids' laundry, hanging out to dry.

When we got back to the Casa, I REALLY wanted a Diet Coke but those are hard to come by here. The concept of "diet" or "zero calorie" is a real head-scratcher to the people here. "Why would you want that?" But Margarita knew of a store that had some, because she got me one the other day. I asked her where it was and if it were ok for me to walk there to get one. She pointed up the street and said "Aqui no mas." which is Salvadoran for "It's right here." meaning it's very close. Unfortunately, that didn't tell me much. Margarita went with me and picked up something for Idalia so it wasn't a wasted trip for her. Now I know where the one store in town that has Diet Coke is and it is, indeed, aqui no mas from the Casa. It's basically across the street from the molino where Idalia went to have the cacao beans ground.

I asked Kathy about the Agromercado where Idalia bought the very cheap produce. My main question was, if it's so much cheaper there than the rest of the market, why does anyone show anywhere else? She said she thought it was probably because people don't want to stand in line