A long and terrible day of rain

Sixteen inches of rain - that's what's fallen in Sonsonate, in the west close to the border with Guatemala, in one long and terrible day. Three deaths have been reported, many homes have been damaged or destroyed, and 4,000 people have been evacuated. This disaster doesn't even get a name, unlike hurricanes: it's registered as Tropical Depression 12 E.

In addition to the communities in the west, all the coastal areas have endured huge downpours and are also endangered by flooding rivers. Here's a recent update from Voices from El Salvador on the current situation in the Baja Lempa area (where the Lempa, El Salvador's biggest river, rolls through flat coast lands on its way to the sea):

The Lempa River is currently flowing over the levee in the northern top of the Namcuchaname Forest and the levee in the community of El Marillo. The levee breech has sent a large current of water through the community and completely flooded the main road cutting off access to the communities downstream. As we reported earlier, the Lempa River has also breeched the levee in the Lotes and Babilonia communities. As of this afternoon, the focus of the evacuations is on the Lotes and Babilonia communities, which have been flooded since yesterday. However, the Civil Protection Agency and other government officials have called on ALL communities in the Lower Lempa, from San Marcos on down, to evacuate. Their plan is to move all residents to a shelter in San Marcos. When that is full they will take people to Tierra Blanca and then on to Jiquilisco. Civil Protection has set up a command post in Ciudad Romero where they are coordinating evacuation and relief efforts. According to our field staff, many government and international agencies are present, including the police, military, Red Cross, Comandos de Salvamento, the mayor’s office, and many, many others. The good news is that they are coordinating better than in past emergencies.

I'm worried about our friend Armando, a hard-working and ambitious farmer, whose farm lies in the area affected by these floods. I pray these floods will spare his house and family, his orchard and chickens and pigs. It's hard to be leaving for the United States tomorrow morning, before I can find out much about what's happened.

Here in Suchitoto, it's seemed like constant rain, but it's nothing in comparison - we had a little under three inches fall between October 11th and 12th. Still, all my friends have leaking roofs and sagging walls. In El Salvador, and in Central America, the people are so very vulnerable to disasters, and the disasters - storms, floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions - happen all too often. If you'd like to help people caught in Tropical Depression 12 E, the Red Cross and Catholic Relief Services are excellent places to send a donation.

photo from La Prensa Grafica

Dia de Independencia

September 15, last Thursday, Suchitoto and towns all over Central America celebrated the Dia de la Independencia - Independence Day, celebrating the day in 1821 when Central America declared its freedom from Spain. It was, of course, cause for a good fiesta! The party began Wednesday evening with the traditional procession of the students at InSu, the Instituto de Suchitoto, equivalent to high school, complete with floats and wild costumes. My favorite float, created at the Centro Arte para la Paz, was a version of the famous San Salvador statue of Jesus standing atop the globe, and it had to progress very slowly and carefully so that the wires could be lifted with a long pronged stick as it passed every house. There was an angel (photo above) followed by a corps of dancing angels, a 19th century cart and horse, followed by students in Victorian dress, and the Carreta de la Chillona - Martha tells me that a kind of rattle lets you know when la Chillona is hunting down the living, and her carreta was appropriately decorated with skulls.

The next morning all the school kids in town and many from the colonias marched through the town. We hung out the door and a window as they passed, almost every school with some students in costumes and a marching band. And then there was La Ciguanaba, the old witch who dangles her sausage breasts in vain attempts to catch a lover. And there were these little girls dancing up the street.

I've lived in cities most of my life where parades are very organized rituals with professional floats, and I can't tell you how much fun it is to be part of the crowd hanging out on the edges of these two happy parades. ¡Viva la Independencia!

Parsing a Lenten Fast

My Sisters of St. Joseph of Peace have suggested a Lenten Carbon Fast for 2011 and sent out a calendar (created by the Intercommunity Peace and Justice Center - you can find it here) with 40 carbon-fast options - one, you'll notice, for each day of Lent. I could happily incorporate most of the suggested actions or changes, but reading the calendar in the context of Suchitoto, El Salvador, Central America I saw that some changes had to be made.

So here are my Central American alternatives to some Carbon Fast ideas:

Turn down your thermostat. We don't have a thermostat or a heating system. Alternative: be sure to turn off the fan when leaving the room.

Check for drafts and seal leaks. Houses in El Salvador are built full of openings so the hot air can escape. Alternative: take a morning walk in the cool of the day.

Beware of hot water use today. Like most Salvadorans, we don't have a water heater. Water comes out of the tap at room temperature - which is sometimes quite toasty! Alternative: water plants by hand, not by hose, and use a jacal (tub) to do dishes.

Try travel without flying. Not a possibility for my trip back to Seattle in a couple of days - I can't even get from here to Seattle non-stop. Alternative: donate to a carbon bank organization to offset the heat I'll be adding to the planet.

Hang clothes to dry on a rack or clothesline. This one's no problem: that's the only way we have of drying clothes here (and they generally dry in 2 hours). Alternative: mark it done, and move on.

Turn down your hot water heater. See above: no hot water heater. Alternative: pay more attention to turning off the lights when I leave a room.

As you can see, there's only a few of the 40 that needed to be rephrased for Central America. Most of the Carbon Fast ideas will work anywhere - check tire pressure, pick up litter, unplug appliances, recycle, learn about climate change. My greatest challenge is to cut back on driving - especially now that gas has reached $4/gallon here. There's a certain amount of necessary driving that goes with my mission, but my goal this Lenten season and hereafter is to combine trips and get in that car much less often.

And climate change has certainly reached us here in Central America. The weather patterns over the two years I've been here have been more violent and less predictable than the norm. This year, we've had several big rainstorms already, though the seasonal rains aren't supposed to start until May. I can't do enough to hold back the changes, but I will do what I can.

We had a wonderful time

In Copan, Honduras, and we got there and saw the Mayan ruins and visited the birds and got back with no serious misadventures, though it turned out that we did enter Honduras without stopping at the border office (we couldn't find it) - but were forgiven by a very kind official on the way back.

Light footprints

I'm continuing to think about the difference in carbon footprints for people here vs. those who live in the U.S. Here are some of the reasons footprints are lighter here:

1. Houses aren't heated, for obvious reasons.
   
2. Very, very few people (only the rich) have air conditioning.
3. Washing machines are rare; dryers are rarer; sunshine is available almost every day.
4. Most people don't have computers, though everyone has a cell phone.
   
5. Most people don't drive a car, instead taking the bus or piling on to a pickup truck.
6. Most people have never been on an airplane.

The average Salvadoran, because of climate and because of poverty, is contributing far less to global warming than the average North American. Is this the way we should all be living?

And yes, I have the use of a car and a computer, and yes, I fly back to the U.S. a few times a year. It's hard to imagine doing without those comforts, but it's time to begin imagining how I and we might live differently, might leave lighter footprints.

Approaching summer

I'm back in Suchitoto at the beginning of summer, having left behind the winter rains of Seattle. It did rain night before last, quite energetically, but that was the first rain in a week. So summer, the dry season, is on the way. It's noticeably cooler, too, but "cooler" is a relative term - the high here yesterday was about 84 F, with a low around 76. Very pleasant!

This little guy was one of the dancers who performed at the parque central for a little fiesta honoring El Salvador's traditional customs. It was great to see the park full of people, especially because fears of crime have greatly increased here. One of our friends has an artesania store a block from the plaza. She worries that visitors are less and less willing to leave the visibility and safety of the plaza, and she has begun to leave her door locked during the day. A woman was killed recently in one of Suchi's outlying communities. Some neighbors have been extorted for la renta - not rent, but protection money. People are afraid to report extortion attempts to the police because they suspect many police are complicit with the gangs. When sensible people in Suchitoto, which has been a fairly safe community, are this worried it's a clear sign that the epidemic of crime in El Salvador and in Central America is growing much too fast.

A subject of some delicacy

...and the cause of a great deal of cultural misunderstanding:

What do you do with a used hunk of toilet paper?

If you're a U.S. or Canadian North American, you throw it in the toilet.

If you're a Mexican or Central American (or South American??), you throw it in the wastebasket that is carefully placed next to the toilet. If the wastebasket isn't there, you may throw it on the floor. Any place but the toilet.

Why? The drains here have much smaller dimensions than in the U.S./Canada, and toilet paper very quickly clogs them. [Later note: Sheila McShane, who runs a health clinic in Guatemala, reminded me that any drains at all are a bit of a luxury in Latin America - in the countryside toilets may flush, but the contents will end up in the river.] Latinos well understand how frustrating it is to deal with a clogged toilet, and considerately, carefully will place toilet paper elsewhere.

When Latinos follow their considerate and careful customs in the United States, North Americans are appalled at having to pick up the mess. When North Americans follow their healthful and hygienic customs and throw toilet paper in the toilet in Latin America, their hosts are appalled at having to pay for a plumber to get their drains working again.

And it all comes down to the practical necessities caused by drains of different sizes.

Settling and unsettling

I'm happily back home in Suchitoto after an excellent month in Antigua during which some clarity about verb tenses may have settled in. It feels good to be settling in to the house, good to be listening to the winter rains in the patio. Today's rains were fierce, creating little rivers on their way to the drain and big rivers out in the street.

What's unsettling is watching the U.S. attention span shift with such speed from the coup in Honduras to Michael Jackson's death and the affairs of Governor Sanford. Here in Central America what happened in Honduras, and what happens next, has huge repercussions. All the countries of Central America, except perhaps Costa Rica, have a long history of military coups, mostly backed by previous U.S. governments. But it's been 16 years since the last military coup in Central America, and it has seemed that stable democracy was finally here to stay. But a look at the front page photo in today's Prensa Grafica (above) shows something all too familiar to Latin American readers: the man who was selected, not elected, as President, Roberto Micheletti, ushered forward by the officer right behind him: there, you could say, is his backing!

What has happened so far in international and U.S. and central American reaction has been encouraging. Honduras finds itself isolated and threatened with the loss of financial aid and market access that will be devastating in this very poor country.

In Guatemala and El Salvador, there's been immediate notice and concern that a successful coup in Honduras could lead to others. What happens next will determine how likely that is. Tonight Manuel Zelaya, the elected President of Honduras, is here in El Salvador as the guest of President Mauricio Funes. And tomorrow?

A coup in Honduras

While I've been peacefully improving my Spanish in Antigua, a military coup has taken place in Honduras, El Salvador's neighbor. The President, Manuel Zelaya, was rousted out of his bed in the Casa Presidencial by soldiers with machine guns, taken to a plane, and flown into exile in Costa Rica. Meanwhile, the Honduran legislature elected another member of his party as President. Electricity was shut off for most of Sunday in Tegucigalpa, and the local TV stations are broadcasting only telenovelas and cartoons. Sounds like an old-fashioned Latin American coup, but this time the coup is being soundly opposed by - as far as I can tell - all the governments of the Americas, including the U.S. For the story to date, read the New York Times.