Day Two: Coffee farms, chicken busses, and new friends.

Day Two: Concepción de Ataco to El Tular 

A sea of coffee.

Saturday morning found Jordan and I making the short trek to a local "finca de cafe", or coffee farm. We were at the farm by accident; the three of us were already supposed to be on a bus headed to Jed's Peace Corps site. But after staying up late the night before, we had accidently slept in. Since the next bus didn't leave until that afternoon, we decided to go out exploring instead. We spent a half hour or so walking around "Cafe Ataco," admiring the neat rows of coffee plants and huge piles of beans dring in the sun. After buying some souvenirs, the two of us headed back into town where Jed was waiting to introduce us to yet another Salvadorian delicacy: pupusas. Corn tortillas, beans, and rice are big in El Salvador, so it stands to reason that a corn tortilla filled with beans, rice, and cheese would be just as big. For a grand total of $2.40, the three of us had our fill of pupusas and left Ataco satisfied and happy.

The infamous 'chicken bus.'

Throughout El Salvador (and the rest of Central America), public transportation is provided by a myriad of retired American school buses. These buses have been completely transformed from their glory days, repainted in bright pastels and adorned with everything from stickers of half-naked women to statues of the Virgin Mary. Some companies have even taken the liberty of decking out their buses with fancy stereo systems and flashing neon lights, an investment I found a little funny since it was those buses often looked to be in the most disrepair. We boarded one of the brightly colored buses near Ataco's central market and began our gradual decent from the highlands.

Volcanic vista.

As we sped past coffee farms, colonial towns, and volcanoes, Jordan and I began to realize just how good we had had it so far. The weather, which was pleasant and dry in Ataco, became hot and muggy. The bus filled up quickly, and we soon found ourselves standing shoulder-to-shoulder in a stuffy, overcrowded cabin. At one point, a lady got on the bus carrying a large chirping crate. It dawned on me that even though I had been to Central America and ridden the "chicken bus" many times, this was probably the first time that I had ever shared a bus with actual chickens. (Some say that the term "chicken bus" really comes from the way people are packed on the bus like chickens. In either case, this truly was a chicken bus.) At last, after approximately three hours and a bus change, Jed indicated that we should start making our way towards the exit.

Children in El Tular

The bus let us off at the intersection of two dirt roads, a spot that appeared to be the middle of nowhere. We trekked another kilometer past sugar cane fields and over a series of small creeks (roaring rivers in the rainy season, Jed assured us) before we began to see the first signs of Jed's Peace Corps site of El Tular. As we easily crossed the trickling streams of water, Jed explained to us about how, during the summer months, these "streams" would sometimes rise above the roads and pedestrian foot bridges (which were somewhat unreliable to begin with). When this happened, residents, including children going to school, were forced to carry their shoes, pants, and other belongings above their heads as they forged the rushing waters. Apparently, whoever who called 'trudging uphill through three feet of snow to school' bad hasn't been to El Salvador during the rainy season.

One of the wells.

El Tular is a small town of just over 1,000 people located in one of the poorest municipalities in El Salvador. Many of of it's residents are agricultural laborers who bring home less than $6 for a day's work in the local fields. El Tular has two churches, a small school, and a solitary "tienda" (store) which is actually part of someone's home. The town has access to electricity, but few other creature comforts that Westerners are so accustomed to. Fresh water must be hand pumped from one of three wells located throughout town and then carried to where it's needed. There is no internet, cable tv, or natural gas. Cellular reception is marginal at best; some residents hang their cell phones in trees to avoid missing calls. Cooking is done almost exclusively on wood burning stoves and bathing takes place in the river.

Having fun isn't about what you have...

Through all of this, the people of El Tular seem incredibly content with life. As we walked around town visiting local families and talking about their lives, I sensed a tremendous sense of joy, happiness, and community. They focused on, and were thankful for, what they did have, not the things they were living without. As we watched the children play with the toy airplanes and frisbee that we had brought for them, we realized that even the smallest pleasure made their entire day. Everyone in El Tular seemed to truly care about one another as if they were all one big family. It was a refreshing sense of community that is often hard to find here in the "civilized world."

A typical house in El Tular.

Making our rounds through the village, we heard stories that were both heartwarming and saddening. One resident in his mid-20's told us proudly about the full scholarship he had received for a community college in Wisconsin. He studied English and computer technology there, learning skills that allowed him to get a job working at a call center in San Salvador. While this job paid much less than any call center in the United States, it provided him and his family with a major economic boost that would have been very difficult for an average Salvadorian citizen to obtain.

Music: A simple pleasure in life.

Another resident, a gentleman in his late 40's or early 50's, had a much more typical - and grimmer - story for us. Almost every day he would wake up at three o'clock, eat a simple breakfast, and while it was still dark, begin the long walk to the main road. There, he would board a bus filled with other laborers and travel for two hours to a sugar cane field located almost 50 miles away. He would work for 8-10 hours in the hot, humid sun, arriving home just after 6pm on most days. For all this effort he received approximately $10, "on a good day." He explained to us that there were many sugar cane fields closer to El Tular, but that the fields near the airport paid the best and he had been lucky enough to get a job at one of them.

 

As I reflected on my time in El Tular, I had a renewed appreciation for how lucky most Americans are. I also thought about how wealth isn't just a function of how much money someone has or how nice their possessions are. Perhaps we can all learn something from the termendous sense of community and sharing that still exists in places like El Tular, a sense that seems to have fallen by the wayside in our portion of the world.

Click here to read about our adventures on day three.