El Salvador

If scalpel and suture are the only surgical instruments you know, you need to meet my friend Karina. She manages a hospital sterile processing department. This means she assures that thousands of different instruments used in surgery are sterile. For more detail on what Karina does, see here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FkYd8YK2KE

What does Karina have to do with El Salvador? Karina’s mother is Salvadoran, her father Mexican, so in high school she was called Salvitrex. For this blog, I am honored to visit Karina’s mother’s home country. You might remember Karina from my blogs on Armenia, Colombia, and Cuba. You will see her in many more blogs as we have eaten great food from all over the world together. Karina doesn’t limit herself to virtual trips however. She goes on real surgical mission trips. On these trips, she scrubs for surgery all day, providing the sterile equipment to the surgeon. Then at night she sterilizes everything again for the next day. Her first trip was to Haiti after the earthquake. Since then she has been to Guatemala, Nicaragua, Ecuador, India, and Cambodia, some more than once. She also went to Papua New Guinea for a clean water mission.

I asked Karina if she could give suggestions to those who want to participate in a medical or community development mission trip. She recommends trying at least one in your life. She only goes with groups where the participants pay all their own expenses, but, if you donate, choose a group that is transparent about how they use their funds.

When Karina and I set a date to eat at El Salvador Del Mundo Restaurant in Victorville, we planned it carefully because of the pandemic. We ordered masked from each other and behind the clear plastic screen from the hostess. Then we waited for the food outside and each ate in our own car in the shade with the windows rolled down and a parking space between us.

I thought I had Latin American food figured out, but no. El Salvador is different. Ensalada (in Spanish, this usually means salad) is a drink with chopped fruit in it. Empanadas, which usually are a kind of little turnovers, are a dessert of fried plantains stuffed with either beans or cream and rolled in sugar. If you want the thing you normally think of as empanadas, ask for pastelitos. I never would have thought of ordering the salpicon, which is beef and radish diced very small with mint and lime. I’m glad Karina pointed it out because it is like nothing I have had before. Everything is delicious!

Another Salvadoran food option is the street market in Two Guys Plaza on Vermont Avenue between 11th and 12th Streets in Los Angeles. Even if you can’t make it to L.A., pupusas, the national dish of El Salvador, are easy to find. There are probably 15 pupuserias within as many miles from my home. This is because there are more than 450,000 Salvadorans in California, so many that in 1998, California set up a sister state relationship with San Salvador. If you’re not going out at all, try cooking some of these Salvadoran recipes: https://www.whats4eats.com/central-america/el-salvador-cuisine

I have blogged on other countries where it is hard to find well rated books in English, but this is not true for El Salvador. There are many books! I had a hard time choosing just one non-fiction and one fiction. I was lucky to get Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and Revolution in the Americas by Roberto Lovato. It was just published in September and already there is a waiting list at the Los Angeles County Library. Lovato is the director of the Central American Resource Center (CARECEN) in Los Angeles (https://www.carecen-la.org/?locale=en). In Unforgetting, he demonstrates almost a century of El Salvador’s history with personal and family stories which outline the traumas (genocides, civil war, gang violence) faced by El Salvador while presenting the complex identities of the people working to overcome those traumas. He hopes that breaking the silence will show the next generation why they carry so much pain, and that this will allow healing. The novel I chose is Bitter Grounds by Sandra Benítez. This book won the 1998 American Book Award and concentrates on women’s stories about the same events.

Karina loaned me her DVD of Voces Inocentes about an 11 year-old in El Salvador who would be forced to join the army when he turned 12. It is also available at the L.A. County Library. I also watched the documentary Monsenor: The Last Journey of Oscar Romero on Kanopy. Both are painful, powerful stories. I would not show the second one to children due to the graphic images.

Salvadoran music and poetry are both easy to find. I listened to a variety of Salvadoran music through the Los Angeles County Library and through Hoopla. My favorite was the mellow sound of Cutumay Camones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_RsV3DfE-k

The poetry I found translated into English is diverse, some revolutionary, some for children, some just loving their country. Here are samples from some well known Salvadoran poets:

· Claribel Alegria https://poets.org/poem/flowers-volcano

· Jorge Argueta: http://gottabook.blogspot.com/2011/04/jorge-argueta-las-dos-piedritastwo.html

· Roberto Armijo: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/03064227808532780

· Roque Dalton https://bombmagazine.org/articles/five-poems-15/

· Javier Zamora: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/90979/el-salvador

The Culture Trip has a gallery of the ten most beautiful spots in El Salvador: https://theculturetrip.com/central-america/el-salvador/articles/the-10-most-beautiful-spots-in-el-salvador/. If you go, check in with your travel advisor. Shout out to my favorite travel advisor, Kaitlin Darnell at Laura's Travel in Redlands. May the travel industry survive and thrive - may we all survive, thrive, recognize our mutual humanity, learn to deal with our conflicts, and allow peace and health to flourish in El Salvador and throughout the world.

Photo Credit: https://theculturetrip.com/central-america/el-salvador/articles/the-10-most-beautiful-spots-in-el-salvador/