On the road

Just for the fun of it, I made a list today of what I encountered on the road between Suchitoto and San Martin, the nearest town. In the 18 miles of this pretty good two-lane highway I encountered:

kids, families, men, men on horseback, women, women carrying large bundles on their heads, people gathered at bus stops, people sitting on the edge of the road (this last I find unnerving since there's no shoulder, but it makes a good seat when the ground slopes away from the road)

dogs, chickens, goats, horses, oxen, cattle (I sometimes see iguanas, but none today), all of them occasionally moved to cross the road without reference to my car coming down it

cars, bicycles, motorcycles, trucks, buses, micro-buses, trucks carrying people, road work machinery, moto-taxis (the 3-wheel vehicles called 'tuk-tuks' in Guatemala)

a man with a vending cart - he seemed to be selling cold drinks of some kind

many houses, many milpas (corn and bean fields), cattle fields, orchards, several pupuserias (roadside eatery selling pupusas, the Salvadoran comfort food), a collection of small brick-making businesses, Catholic and Evangelical churches

many tumulos (traffic-slowing bumps - whatever do we call them in English? - which in El Salvador are essentially a pipe half buried in the roadway, and you'd better slow waaaay down or your shocks will be shocked.)

many baches - aka potholes. They multiply with the rainy season and may get fixed when the dry weather comes.

It's crowded, it's lively, and driving it is always an adventure. I sometimes have to pull off the highway in the U.S. because I get drowsy. Not here.

Birds of stranger feathers

I went to the nearest mini-mall on Saturday to cash a check and had to stand in line for a while outside the bank. A little come-and-look was set up across the parking lot, with appliances and a large inflated chicken holding balloons for the kids. At first I thought the chicken was simply a balloon itself, but no: on closer inspection, I could see signs of a human form inside. Now it was about 92 degrees and the guy in the chicken suit was standing in the sun, and it didn't seem to me that he could possibly be getting enough money to make it worthwhile to bounce up and down inside that rubber chicken suit and give out balloons. Got my check cashed, did some shopping, came back to take a photo, which I got just as Mr. Chicken was being led away from the pavilion and into the appliance store. If you look closely, you can see that his chicken suit is drooping and looking a bit pathetic. I peeked in the store just in time to see a young man, still alive, emerging from this bird of very strange feathers.

Speaking of chickens, do you know that they like to climb trees and perch in them for the night? Margaret Jane and I sometimes go to a favorite spot for pupusas, the ultimate Salvadoran comfort food, where we can watch the chickens in the next yard climbing up and disposing themselves among the branches of a small tree. Probably a place of greater safety than the ground, as long as a tree-climbing garobo (male iguana) doesn't come after you.

Gente de la caña

Cane in flower is a beautiful sight, and at this time of year the graceful cane stalks topped by their white banners are everywhere in the lowlands of El Salvador. Cane and coffee are the two main cash crops in El Salvador, both harvested at the beginning of the dry season, from November through January.

Workers burn the cane fields before harvesting to burn away the dry leaves, leaving the stalk easy to harvest and the roots ready to push up next year's crop. The harvesting is said to be the hardest work in this country filled with hard-working people. A planted field will produce cane for 4-6 years, and then must be replanted.

Burned cane leaves drift into everyone's house throughout the season, leaving little piles of soot in courtyards. Getting stuck behind a huge and very slow truck carrying cane stalks to the refinery where they are processed into table sugar (and molasses and rum) is another predictable misery of these months. Still, the cane is almost emblematic of El Salvador - a current advertising campaign - perhaps produced by the government (though I'm not sure about that) talks about Salvadorans as the gente de la caña, the people of the cane.

Between coffee and cane, and with the added help of yearly bonuses that most employers pay out in December, this is the rich time for Salvadorans, the time of fiestas and firecrackers, dances and gifts and parties.

Las Azulinas

Peggy, Margaret Jane and I headed to Santa Ana yesterday, where Peggy was picking up some 600 embroidered bookmarks from Las Azulinas, a small company founded and run by women that works with indigo dyeing. Indigo dye played a big role in El Salvador's history: indigo (the blue of blue jeans), known here as anil, was the big crop before coffee and sugar cane. In the 20th century chemical dyes replaced natural indigo, but -following the lead of Las Azulinas - there's been an indigo renaissance among Salvadoran artisans.

In the Las Azulinas workshop the women work with white cotton garments that have already been sewn, adding intricate knots and folds to create tie-dyed effects or they appliqué designs on dyed cloths. Their work is beautiful, well-designed and durable, a great contribution to the artisan traditions of El Salvador. It's a good example of a small business here, one run by and employing women.

PYMES

PYMES is the acronym here for Pequeñas Y Medianas Empresas - small and medium businesses. Often this gets expanded to Micro, Pequeña y Mediana - micro, small and medium businesses. Here's a good example of the micro businesses that are, in so many ways, the core enterprise in this very entrepreneurial country.

This is one of two small tienditas that serve the students in the government primary school here. Both put their tables right up against the school fence and attach their sunshade plastic roofs to the fence. This and almost all the micro-businesses that involve sales here are run by women, women who wear the characteristic market apron, with its rows of lace and zippered pocket for change.

This tiendita is probably the main income source for the family that runs it, a family that lives in a house right across the street, as I found when I walked by one afternoon when they were moving all the unsold goods back. There was a man of the family helping with that process.

I hope to learn more about how tienditas like this one purchase their stock. Perhaps someone from the family goes down to the tiendona, the huge wholesale marketplace in the old city center of San Salvador, or perhaps they purchase from a middleman (I suspect it would be a man) who sells to many micro enterprises in Suchitoto.

What do they sell? Snacks, candy, soft drinks, gum, stickers, green mango shavings in plastic bags... Prices, I'd guess, range from 5 cents to una cora, a quarter.

This little store is set up every morning on the city sidewalk, a public right-of-way, but no one would think of disputing this family's informal ownership of their spot. No one in the school would think of demanding that these women stop selling to the students (though you can easily imagine both scenarios in the U.S.)

This is how the informal economy is built in El Salvador, and it's a huge part of economic life here.

What Things Cost

Eleanor is back from her week in the United States, so we restocked at the supermarket today. Seems like a good time to talk about what things cost here. Depende, a Salvadoran would send: it depends on what you're buying. If you're buying foods imported from North or South American, the cost will be at least what it would be in the U.S., often higher. For example, a couple of weeks ago we bought 5 gorgeous, uniformly orange Valencia oranges from Chile for $2.83. (They weren't very good oranges, either). On the other hand, vegetables grown in Central America, often in Guatemala, are very much less expensive than in the U.S. The local oranges - yellow and green and brown and orange, spotty and unglamorous, unlike the ones in the photograph, are 10 cents apiece, and they make the most glorious fresh orange juice. I noticed a similar pricing difference between the big Chiquita-style bananas, with their uniformly yellow skins, and the smaller local bananas, called guineos or dactilos, which aren't so pretty, but taste just great.

Some other locally grown vegetables: beets, 0.73/lb; red and orange bell peppers, 0.55 each; broccoli, 0.57/lb. Gala apples from Chile were available for $1.10/lb, not bad. But 4 ears of fresh corn, out of season now, and so probably grown in South America or a greenhouse, cost $2.33.

Before you start feeling put out about the higher U.S. prices, consider that the minimum wage in El Salvador was just raised to $208/month for commercial workers, $174/month in maquilas (factories) and $97/month on the farm. And many, many Salvadorans working in the informal economy earn less than that.