April miseries, April beauties

For me, "April is the cruelest month" here in El Salvador - not because of the lilacs that T.S. Eliot wrote about, but because the combination of heat, dust and the smoke from burning cane fields makes moving and breathing heavy, hard. 

April is the month before the rains start.  Everything is dry: the big trees still keep their green, but the fields and sides of the road are dust-colored.  It's the sixth month without rain.  Besides the burning cane fields (they are burned to clear away the tough out leaves and leave the juicy interior stalk to be cut and carried off for processing into cane sugar), trash is burned and spontaneous fires start on hillsides and volcano slopes.  They never seem to turn into wild fires: I suppose there must still be  deep moisture under the dry surfaces that keep them from exploding.

One of the pleasures, then, in this cruelest heat, is getting into the air-conditioned car and driving down the road to San Martin and San Salvador, encased in a bubble of cool.  And one of the great pleasures along that drive is the new face of San Bartolomé Perulapía, the town just before San Martin.  When I first moved to Suchitoto, Perulapía was no fun to drive through.  Lots of gang graffiti, signs that suggested deep quarrels between political and religious sectors.  But since a new mayor was elected in 2012, a beautiful change has come upon Perulapía.  All along the main street, house fronts have been turned into vivid, lively murals, like this one honoring San Romero of the Americas:

Or this one, where I caught the painter in the act:

And Perulapía, which once seemed dangerous and drab now invites visitors and makes a high point for my escapes from the heat of April.

Ojala que llueve

¡Ojalá que llueve! - if only it would rain! That's how we're all feeling now at the end of the dry season as it gets hotter and hotter and hotter, with no rains to provide a bit of divine air-conditioning. The water around is coming out of our bodies instead: it's hard to drink enough to replenish what I'm sweating out. I'll confess that these temperatures have made it really pleasant to get into the project car (air-conditioned) and drive to the city to make those last-minute preparations for our surgery group, arriving on Saturday for a week of cataract surgeries at the almost-new and very welcoming Hospital Nacional de Cojutepeque. That's the national hospital for Cuscatlán, the departamento we live in.

¡Ojalá que llueve! I love this phrase because it recalls the time, centuries ago, when Spain was a Moslem country. Ojalá was a petition to God, O Allah, and is one of many Arabic words that are inextricably woven into the Spanish language. I'd also want to say tonight "¡Ojalá que todo vaya bien con nuestra misión!" - may all go well with our mission, with the group and their work next week for the people of Cuscatlán.

April is the hottest month

No, that's not quite as T.S. Eliot had it ("April is the cruelest month..."), but it is certainly true for El Salvador. On Sunday night I left cold, rainy Seattle-in-April and on Monday morning got off the plane in hotter-than-hot Suchitoto-in-April: a shock to the system, that. Roberto Hernandez picked me up at the airport, and by the time we got back to Suchi my ankles had disappeared into puffs of swollen flesh. They're looking a bit more like familiar body parts now, and the rest of me is remembering how to sweat the way through the afternoons. We will all be glad when the rains come and bring some coolness into the afternoons and evenings. Meanwhile, we swelter.

Coming from the Seattle area where the nights are now longer with daylight saving and twilight is a long, slow dance, I was startled to remember how quickly and fully the dark comes here. At 6 pm the sun goes down, and then it is dark. Suchitoto, with its well-lighted streets, is a safe town to walk around in the dark, and the regularity of sunrise and sunset is comforting. But no long summer nights here - and no short winter days - just 12 hours of blazing sun (in April) and 12 hours of warm darkness. It's good to be back!

Sizzling summer

I'm back in Seattle, which oddly enough was hotter than San Salvador for the last two days - hot enough at 103 to make Seattleites grumpy and crazy in a way they won't be again until the winter rains start in November. I thought it was fine, which is proof that I've acclimated to hot weather. It helps that Saint Mary-on-the-Lake in Bellevue, where I live when I'm in the states, is right on Lake Washington. Swimming in the lake is one of the very best ways to enjoy a heat wave.

Driving around and going into stores here feels very strange. I had forgotten that streets in American suburbs, like Bellevue, are almost empty of people. Driving around I saw other cars, some joggers (not too many, it was too hot), almost no pedestrians. A startling contrast to Salvadoran streets which are always full of people, mini-restaurants, sellers of gum and blankets and cell phone covers and artesania, dogs, parked cars. In the supermarket, the gleaming array of 34 different varieties of anything you can imagine was startling because so many varieties had appeared that I'd never seen before - new shampoos in elegantly shaped bottles, new kinds of soft drinks, new magazines, all of which seem to have blossomed during the severest economic crisis in a generation. I'm struck by the overpowering display of goods. It feels excessive, out of control, as if all we can corporately imagine doing is dreaming up yet one more variety of yet one more product.

All of which made it very good to get back to the clean simplicities of Lake Washington.

Following up

Today was dedicated to follow-ups of various kinds. Kathy Garcia and I drove up to Suchitoto to take a look at the new house and discovered that LOTS remained to be done before a move in would be possible. I sent the landlord a list and we had a good conversation about it all via Skype (he lives in San Diego) and I'm expecting a lot of action in the next two weeks.

Writing a follow-up report on our work for the year to date was a lot easier, except that it's April, the hottest month of the year here, and I kept dripping sweat onto the keyboard. We had a brief, intense rainstorm this evening without much cooling. I'm eager for the real rains to begin. I'm a bit homesick for the tulips and rhododendrons that should be blooming around St. Mary's now - but a strange and beautiful flower, a lily relative, has poked its head out of the earth bed in the patio of my soon-to-be-home, and a handsome lime tree shades the patio. New things to learn to love.

In Three Weeks

In three weeks I'll be in the tropics, looking at fruit stands filled with bananas and mangoes, wearing summer clothes. I have to remind myself, because at this moment at the end of a long chilly gray day the tropics seem unlikely.

I was in a meeting today where I kept opening the windows because I was hot, and one of the men at the meeting asked me how I was going to manage the heat of El Salvador if I was being stifled by a warm room in Bellevue.

Good question. I'll take lots of naps, I said. Ah, the siesta! Not, in truth, a custom in El Salvador, but then, I won't be working in an office, and if I get my day's tasks done in the morning, who's to say no to a pleasant siesta in the heat of the afternoon?