Fregados

Travelling to El Salvador with a group of fifteen fellow students through Habitat for Humanity was the first legitimate service trip I’ve ever been a part of. Our trip took place in early March, but we’d started fundraising a year in advance, to cover the immense cost of the trip and the lump deposit we had to give to Habitat.

We had been warned that El Salvador was a very dangerous country, especially for foreigners, and that as a result we needed to dress conservatively. So when Jake showed up to Wawa, our carpool meeting place, in a sleeveless fuschia crop-top with the words “80’s Girl” emblazoned in bright yellow on the chest, everyone began hooting and laughing uncontrollably. We had already started singing raucously as we cruised out of the Wawa parking lot, heading towards Dulles International Airport to begin our adventure.

When you think of a third world country, “lush” isn’t the first word that comes to mind. Maybe “trash” or “dysentery,” but certainly not “lush.” When I first walked out of the airport into the dry heat of the suburbs surrounding San Salvador, however, I was shocked to see massive amounts of green absolutely everywhere. Palm trees lined the sidewalks, and I could see large masses of tangled ivy and rich bold flowers curling out of every crevice available to them. Giant drapes of deep green leaves covered several of the houses, pouring over and around the windows and doors. Even when we got into the center of the city, the green splendor was still abundant everywhere I looked. The richness of El Salvador’s plant life was in stark contrast to its impoverished residents, almost mocking to the overwhelming poverty of the country.

On the bus drive into the city, our trip coordinator “Patty,” who had met us at the airport with a “Habitat para la Humanidad” sign, described the logistics of our stay in San Salvador. We’d arrived a few days early, so we had some time in the city to explore and get to know the area before starting construction on a house. Patty informed us that in these first couple days we would be spending the day at a giant volcanic lake as well as going ziplining before leaving for the village of Zacatacaluca where we would ultimately build our house. Several of my teammates let out yelps of surprise and exuberance, since before Patty told us our exciting itinerary, we’d had no idea what was in store for our time in San Salvador.

As we continued the hour drive into the city, I pressed my nose eagerly against the bus window, sucking in everything we passed like a thirsty sponge. The lush vegetation continued along the highway, and was suddenly joined by merchants every few yards selling giant green balls, the likes of which I’d never seen.

I poked Patty to satisfy my curiosity.

“What are those giant green things they’re selling?”

“Coconuts!” she replied with surprise. “Don’t you have coconuts in the United States?”

“Yeah, but ours are brown and fuzzy.”

“Brown!” she cried incredulously.

Having exhausted that shallow topic of conversation, she turned around to face the front of the bus and I went back to peering hungrily out the windows....

As we traveled hundreds of kilometers around the country and I peered out the windows of our van at our surroundings, my mind kept flashing back to my knowledge of the bloodshed and violence that had taken place here only a few decades before. I had learned about the twelve year El Salvadorian Civil War, which spanned from 1980 to 1991, both in several classes and during our pre-trip educational meetings. My knowledge of the bloodshed, massacre, and torture that had taken place on the same land we were driving across to various points of diversion kept popping up in my mind and made it hard not to reflect on the terrifying history of El Salvador. It also gave me a greater appreciation for the bravery of the people we met and interacted with, especially Carlos [our bus driver] who grew up during the Civil War.

After reflecting on El Salvador’s horrifying history, our last day in the city before leaving for Zacatacaluca to begin building a house was a welcome transition. The theme of that last day was more somber and focused on human rights violations and the El Salvadorian Civil War. On our last morning in San Salvador, we visited the church where Archbishop Romero, a champion for justice and a protector of the needy and impoverished, was shot while delivering a sermon to his congregation. We saw his robes, still bloodstained, hanging in the small house where he lived.

Next, we moved on to the University of Central America (UCA), the most prestigious university in the country and also the site of a ghastly massacre of several students and teachers in 1989. We walked into one of the classrooms, and there were several albums, full of pictures of dead and butchered bodies in unnatural poses, lying in classrooms and on lawns. I glanced quickly at one of these grotesque picture books, and immediately felt my stomach lurch with both despair and anger. We strolled into the chapel, and saw sketches of women and children, their hands tied and their mouths frozen in twisted expressions of agony. Carlos told us that these sketches represented the way officials found many of the bodies in the aftermath of the massacre.... 

Our last stop of the day was the national monument dedicated to the El Salvadorian Civil War. Its design is very similar to that of the Vietnam War Memorial: Just one long, curving line of smooth stone completely covered with the names of the dead and missing. Someone pointed out that several of the names were highlighted in some way; a few had been rubbed over with what looked like whiteout, and others were outlined in red marker.

That night, just like every other, we all met to discuss our “highs and lows” of the day. Everyone agreed that even though our visits had been somber and depressing, they were very moving and thought-proving, and a good way to transition into our service work. “I remember looking at the wall with all the names of the missing and dead children, and seeing some of the names outlined. And I thought, oh wow, that’s someone’s person. That person belongs to someone,” pointed out Althea. “But then I realized that all these people, every single name on this wall, is someone’s person. Every single one has a family, or kids, or someone who misses them. That realization was definitely my low for the day.”

Several other people said their low of the trip so far was saying goodbye to Carlos. He had really made the trip special and personal up to that point, and even though he was given a very specific and rigid daily itinerary of places to take us, he showed us a few of his own favorite places in the city as well, saying “This is my part of the tour now.”

We all went out for a last dinner together in San Salvador, at a restaurant that Carlos recommended. After we told the wait staff it was his birthday and they brought him his free flaming cake, somehow the topic of the Civil War came up. Adam and Carlos began discussing the ramifications of the war on the country, in a mix of broken Spanish and English. We were all surprised when Carlos told us that he wasn’t planning on telling his three-year-old son about the war at all.

“You don’t think it’s important to educate him about what happened?” Adam inquired.

“No. It was horrible, but it would be bad to remember those times,” he responded. “It was too painful. I don’t think my son should learn about that part of his country’s past. Nothing can be changed now.”

After dinner, Carlos drove us back to our hotel one final time. We gave him a card in which we had all written, thanking him for showing us so much of his city, and for being so generous and helpful. Kaz, one of the most genuine and caring people I’ve ever known, had come up with the idea of giving Carlos his soccer ball, with all of our signatures on it. When Kaz handed him the ball, Carlos’s face lit up and he smiled widely. “My son will be happy. He always asks me for a ball, but I can’t pay for one. Thank you so much.”

That night we all went to sleep, thinking of Carlos sadly, but also anxious to start a new phase of our trip. 

Zacatacaluca was about an hour drive from San Salvador. After a crammed morning ride, we pulled up to the Christian community center that would be our home for the next six nights and piled out of the van. There was a courtyard in the center of the complex with a giant mango tree shading the ground, and rooms on the second story surrounding its perimeter. As soon as we arrived, we were immediately ushered into a small, sticky room and forced to endure another hour-long lecture about Habitat for Humanity and the work we would be doing for the duration of our time there. We also met Juan-Carlos, our caretaker at the center, and his chipper bird “Pepito,” who sidled onto fingers and arms by first grabbing skin with his beak to anchor himself, and then following with his scaly talons.

During the whole trip, we had been extremely open about having diarrhea, discussing the likelihood of each of us getting it, and wondering who would be first. Turns out that person was Hadrian, who spent our first day in Zacatacaluca in his room alternating between sleeping and vomiting. At the end of the day, he reported he had suffered from twelve separate bouts of diarrhea in the previous twenty-four hours alone. Hadrian’s early but fierce battle with diarrhea gave the six boys on the trip the idea of keeping a “diarrhea-golf” score sheet every day, by marking down each person’s individual number of diarrheas for the day. Hadrian’s early blunder placed him in last place, but by the middle of the week several of the other boys had begun to catch up.

Before we started construction, we met the family we would be building the house for. There were three of them: Saira, Heraldo, and Arrianita. Saira, the mother, had a warm, friendly smile and protectively held their daughter, Arrianita, to her hip. Arrianita looked exactly like a living porcelain doll, with smooth buttery skin, luminous eyes and small perfectly curled pigtails that brushed the very tops of her tiny shoulders. Although Arrianita was one of the most adorable children I’ve ever seen, I found the father the most interesting of the three. He was an exceptionally handsome man, and was meticulously dressed. His beaming smile radiated in every direction, and when he was introduced to our group, he went around to each of us individually to shake our hands, and placed a warm hand on each of our backs.

Our days on the construction site started out new and completely unfamiliar, but by the end of the week the days of cement-mixing, dirt piling, spackling and lifting heavy, cumbersome cinder blocks began to run together. At first los albañiles, or “masons,” were extremely unreceptive to our presence on their worksite. They refused to provide us with more than a monosyllabic response to any question we asked, which was frustrating and tiresome. The work they gave us at first was also incredibly inefficient. We created an assembly line to pass a massive pile of bricks from one side of the worksite to the other, intermittently asking ourselves why on earth the block pile hadn’t been dumped where it should have been in the first place. They also asked us to shovel an entire pile of dirt three feet to the left, which took several hours and seemed absolutely pointless.

Each night, exhausted and coated in mud and grime, we returned to the complex to shower, have dinner, and relax and recover together from a grueling but rewarding day at the construction site. I remember these nights just as vividly as our nine-hour days on the work site, because it was so rewarding to relax with friends who became better and closer every day. We went on expeditions around the city to explore our surroundings, and purchase snacks from the nearby supermarket. We played various card games, made friendship bracelets, and sang countless songs on the balcony and in the boy’s room, where they had pushed all their bunk beds together to create a giant, intricate slumber fort.

Every member of our group offered something different but necessary and incredible to the mix. Althea, born in Guatemala, had the best Spanish skills of all of us, which made her a valuable resource, and Adam’s high-pitched squealing laughter and absurd stories kept us giggling the whole trip. Jake’s sardonic drawl and unexpected bouts of hilarity, Kaz and Hadrian’s singing and general antics, and Sarah’s unfailingly adorable positivity were only a few of the awesome components that kept us united and happy to be together. I really cannot imagine another group of sixteen people who could live in such close proximity for so long with practically no tension or real arguments.

One such night, after drawing and listening to music with Max, I was walking downstairs to fill up my water bottle for the next day when I ran into Juan-Carlos. We stopped, and began talking. He was excited to have someone to communicate with, even if my Spanish is far from perfect, and we sat and talked for nearly an hour about his life in El Salvador.

“I really appreciate what you all are doing,” he told me in Spanish. “You have good hearts.”

“We’re excited to be here,” I told him. “You live in such a beautiful country, but I don’t understand why everyone here is so amazingly nice when you have suffered so much loss. I have never in my life met people as gentle and accommodating as the people I have met here. Why is everyone so happy?”

“They smile on the outside, but they are actually fregados,” he told me, uttering a Spanish word I was unfamiliar with.

“Fregados?” I inquired.

“It means we are sad. We are unhappy and destitute. The situation in El Salvador is horrible, and everyday it worsens. I have thought about leaving illegally many times, but it costs $7,000 to pay a coyote to get you to the border, and once you’re there the chances of making it across are slim.”

“Wow,” I replied, taken aback by this injustice.

“I had a friend once,” he continued, “who left for the United States. He was gone for many months, and I didn’t hear anything about him at all. I ran into his wife and asked her where he was and she said she had no idea and began to cry. Even today, if you mention her husband, she begins to cry because he is probably dead.”

“Oh my God,” I whispered, lacking the adequate words in Spanish to say anything more profound. We sat in stunned silence for a few moments before he began to speak again.

“There’s just nothing I can do. I feel so helpless. I’ve been paying for a plot of land for seven years, but here you have to pay for fifteen before you own the land and can start construction on a house. I only make six dollars a day, which is more than many people here, and that’s just not enough to support myself, much less my family.”

I left our talk feeling shaken and disturbed by his words and his dire situation. I will never forget asking him why the people of his country were so warm and friendly, and his response that they are merely putting on a brave face as they watch their country struggle helplessly.

By the end of the week, the masons had warmed up to us substantially, and we felt much more integrated into the worksite. Jill and Hadrian took it upon themselves to begin teaching English to Juan, the most accessible of the masons. They created a vocabulary sheet for him, and spent hours talking with him in both Spanish and English, listening to his stories and sharing their own.  Although we didn’t finish the house, we did add on several layers of cement blocks, and finished the entire floor, an extremely time-consuming activity. It wasn’t expected that we would come anywhere near completing the house, and the masons were extremely impressed by our progress.

Our sense of satisfaction at the work we did was further amplified at the farewell lunch we had with our family and the masons. The grandfather of the family, “Cruz,” who had been showing up every day to provide us with support, cryptic fast-paced Spanish riddles and words of encouragement, gave a speech about how much of an impact we’d made upon him and his family. After only a few words into the speech, he became so choked up with emotion that he couldn’t speak, and had to pause before continuing. Seeing that we had made that much of an impact on even one person made me swell with happy pride. 

We spent our final night in Zacatacaluca sneaking onto the roof of our complex and staring out over the small, impoverished city we had come to change. Even though what we’d accomplished while in El Salvador seemed miniscule when compared to the abject poverty across the country, I realized that it was not about coming down and changing El Salvador in a week. There’s no way a group of random college students, or apparently even a whole government, could ever accomplish that. It was more about affecting single lives and making individual connections with people who are just like us but stuck in crushing poverty.

Coming back to Williamsburg at 3 AM and immediately transitioning back to classes and American life was a jarring return to reality. Despite the many bug bites, frustrations on the worksite, a week of cold showers and being covered in cement and mud for the majority of our days there, I have no doubt that each and every person on that trip would jump at the chance to return to Zacatacaluca and make new friends and connections all over again. Even with the knowledge that the final diarrhea golf tally ended up at over seventy-five instances for the group. Infinite bogey.