Buying pins

Last week José knocked on my door and introduced himself. He's a farmer in one of the small communities that are part of the Suchitoto municipality, a former guerrillero and a man with eight children. One of those children, his son Geovany, had been hit by a car in June, and was in Zacamil hospital in San Salvador after being concussed and breaking both legs and an arm. José came to see me, on Sister Peggy's suggestion, because his son's legs needed to be pinned surgically and that could only happen if the family came up with $800 for the pins and rods.

This is a story I've become all too familiar with here: good hospital care and surgery is available without cost, but if healing requires any kind of medical equipment - a heart valve, interocular lenses, surgical pins, special tests, medication the hospital doesn't stock - the family will have to try to find the resources to buy what's needed. For poor families in El Salvador, like José's family, that's often completely impossible.

We were able to help José and Geovany, thanks to some generous donors, so yesterday José and I drove into the capital to make the purchase from Sistemas Biomedicas. We found the address without too much difficulty, but no one answered the doorbell in an office building that was far from the city center. Finally a man came along and explained that the company had moved down into the San Salvador medical center. He called for the address and gave us excellent and clear directions to 124 Boulevard Dr. Hector Silva. Following his directions, we found a likely street, but the street proclaimed that its name was Avenida Maria Elena. And we didn't see #124 anywhere. I drove to the Archdiocese of San Salvador office, not far away, to ask my friends there for some help. They looked up the street on the internet and gave me directions to, yes, the street apparently named Avenida Maria Elena. So we tried again, and this time we rang the bell at the building that seemed most likely to be #124, though it lacked a number, and yes, it was the new home of Sistemas Biomedicas, and yes, they could sell us the rods and pins.

Then we went to visit Geovany in the hospital, and I hoped to take a photo, but that turned out to be against hospital rules. I'll hope to include his photo when he's out of the hospital, working through his physical therapy to get back on his feet. Meanwhile, I'm glad we can help make his recovery possible, and I'm glad to know that Avenida Maria Elena really is Boulevard Dr. Hector Silva.

To and Fro

Yesterday I got full use out of the car and out of the mapping center in my brain. My errands began with a trip to Comasagua (on the opposite side of the capital from Suchitoto) to take our regular donation to Nubia's family. It was fun to be met by Nubia's little sister, Veronica, as well as by Nubia and her mother, and I was happy to learn that Nubia's brother, Miguelito, is also in school, in 6th grade. Nubia just turned 13, and has grown a little this year.

That was the fun part of the day. Then I went, as quickly as the complicated pathways of San Salvador permitted, to:
The El Arbol de Dios gallery to arrange for lunch for our group on Feb. 20th;
The supermarket for plastic utensils for our Feb. 20th pizza night and - most important - for chocolate syrup to go over the coconut ice cream.
Office Depot for envelopes;
The bottle store, to buy 50 bottles for cough syrup and rehydration syrup;
The bank, for some cash for the mission week;
A medical supply store for cytology slides and scrapers;
The Archdiocese of San Salvador offices to check on our medications permission;
PriceSmart for more beverages for the week;
POPS for 3 half-gallons of coconut ice cream to go under the chocolate syrup;
and Leslie Schuld's house to deliver the ice cream, chocolate syrup, plates, napkins and spoons for Feb. 20th (Leslie is kindly hosting us for the traditional pizza and ice cream evening).

Then I drove back to Suchitoto in the dark.

Now this may not sound like all that much, but Eleanor Gilmore, who did this work before me, will be able to follow in her head the complicated pathways I mapped out to get these stops in the right sequence. San Salvador traffic is hopelessly complicated because left turns are illegal almost everywhere in the city, the pattern of streets is interrupted by deep arroyos, quebradas, traffic is always heavy in the capital, and legal parking almost non-existent. And more: landmarks are known by their former use (the ex-embajada and excuartel), streets in the capital's generally sensible numbering system get renamed (so 75th Avenida Norte, a major street, appears on street signs and some, but not all, maps as Napoleon Viera Altamirano), and the big signposts tell you what street you'll get to, eventually, if you turn right - not what street you're turning on to. I regard learning Spanish and plotting the pathways for a full day's worth of errands in San Salvador as good medicine for my aging brain.

Home

I'm a fortunate woman to have two homes - though not in the real estate sense. I've spent the last two weeks in Bellevue and Seattle, seeing friends and family and community What a feast of friendships! And what feasts - Thai food, Indian food, glorious gourmet home cooking.

When I'm in Bellevue, I live in a room in Cusack Hall at St. Mary-on-the-Lake. It's been great to have a little room I can call my own when I come home, with my books and my winter clothes and my bed all set up. I left it with some empty drawers and closet space so a visitor or retreatant can use it when I'm not around. And yesterday I got up very early to go to the airport to leave home and to come home. All my motley collection of suitcases arrived in good order with the computer for Walther and the prescription eyeglasses for Comasagua and the vitamins for Nubia's family and the camera/printer for El Centro Arte para la Paz and assorted finger puppets and balls for children and a few more books for me. Fortunately the soccer jerseys didn't arrive, because both of the bags being checked were stuffed to the gills and close to the weight limit.

The immigration forms ask what your country of residence is, and this time, for the first time, I said "El Salvador," which led to a long conversation with the man at the immigration desk. Yes, I live here. And here, as I came back to the San Salvador house, to my summer clothes and more books, to the mail Francisco and Alex saved for me, to my bed all set up, here feels like home.

Maps and being mapless

I love maps. When I got my first job with a decent salary attached (I believe it was the grandiose amount of $7,500 per year - this was a very long time ago) my first big purchase, before furniture or a better car was a huge folio-sized atlas of the world published by The Times of London. I loved that atlas and pored over the names and exotic shapes of places I would probably never see - including, no doubt, the tiny country of El Salvador. After years as a city planner and historic preservationist, I'm oriented to maps as a fundamental tool and way of finding myself in the world.

This will not work in El Salvador. Texaco used to put out a pretty good map of the main parts of the city of San Salvador, but two years ago they said they were reprinting it to put in the new ring roads....and now it's just not available. I cling to a much-folded Texaco map on which I am very carefully entering key places - Archdiocesan offices, lawyer's office, landlady, water bill. Google Maps turns out to have an exquisitely detailed map of San Salvador with all the latest roads included, which is comforting. But no one here uses maps. Street names are shown for major streets at major intersections: otherwise you have to know or guess. Directions are mostly given by landmarks or stores.

I've learned a few landmarks, but as yet I have no reliable sense of direction in this city, and all the streets and all the businesses and all the houses look remarkably alike to my gringa eye. Driving is an extra challenge, because there are very few places where you can turn left onto or off of main streets. Some left turns can happen in roundabouts, but in many cases you have to plan an intricate path to get where you want to go. There's nothing but experience that will help you: forget about the map.

Today I walked to the city's biggest mall (and the largest mall in Central America), Metrocentro - it stretches out like an octopus, a wing here, a third story there, a leg to the side: it's immense and intricate and always full of people (who mostly aren't carrying any purchases, just walking and looking). Know how there's a nice map of the mall inside every U.S. shopping center, with a list of stores by type and a "you are here" dot? In MetroCentro there's no map, no directory. But there's lots of helpful people who helped me find a feather pillow and printer ink.

So it seems that I'm going to have to spend a lot of the next weeks getting lost, asking directions, doubling back on my tracks, wondering where I am, asking directions, getting lost. I'll still mark everything on my map. I just know that it's not going to help me much.