Bureaucratic tangles

Last week I had two brushes with Salvadoran bureaucracy that left me both crazed and awestruck.

Darren and I came out of a meeting at the Ministry of Health - I'd been pleased to find a place to park my car right in front of the building - to find a ticket on the windshield.  I saw that I'd parked by a yellow-painted curb, and down at the other end of the block was a small sign saying that parking was only available for official cars.  Ooops.  It had been raining and the ticket was soaked, so we put it to dry on the back seat.  A couple of stops later we noticed that the car no longer had license plates.  Our first and natural assumption was that they'd been stolen - a good possibility, as the Ministry of Health is in the historic center of town where thieves are said to abound.  Darren called a lawyer friend to ask how we should report this crime, and the lawyer asked if by chance we'd gotten a ticket.  Well.....yes.  And when we looked more closely, we discovered that the ticket - which was listing this parking mishap as the heaviest possible level of transportation crime and assessing a fine of $54, astronomical in Salvadoran terms - had a little checkmark noting that the plates had been removed.

So we called Darren's lawyer friend again and he sent us to an office of the transportation police.  When we got there, the guard at the gate refused to even let us enter; instead, he gave me a one-page paper telling me that I couldn't pay the fine and get my plates back for 24 hours.  I drove back to Suchitoto hoping I wouldn't have to explain myself, and then back into the capital the next day, 24 hours later, to pay the fine.  In Sertracen (where one pays fines and renews licenses) they happily took my $54 and told me to go around the building to the Vice-Ministry of Transportation Office to collect my license plates.  When I got there, the officials on hand looked at my paperwork and looked at their files and informed me that my plates were....somewhere else.  I would have to come back the next day.

And so I drove back to Suchitoto (this time at least I had paperwork to show I'd paid the fine, and a good thing too, as finally the police did stop me to ask why I was driving with no license plates) and back to Sertracen the next morning where I finally got the plates, but not the nuts and bolts that had held them on the car - those had apparently been discarded on site, or in someone's pocket.  I'm still trying to figure out why parking in a forbidden parking space is a crime more heinous than speeding (ticket of about $15 if I remember correctly, and no tinkering with the license plates) or any of the other really dangerous tricks that Salvadoran motorists get up to daily. 

That same day, after retrieving my plates, I went to the Migration office where I'd paid for my year's Residence Visa in January, but had yet to receive it.  I've had to purchase two 3-month temporary visas so I could leave and re-enter the country.  But the best moment in this particular bureaucratic hell was in August when the office called me to come in, and told me that I had to get a letter from the embassy to say that I am really who I say I am because the version of my name was slightly (very, very, very slightly) different in my birth certificate, my police check, and my passport.  Never mind that all three showed the exact same place and date of birth and that the difference was between Susan Vera Dewitt, Susan Vera De Witt, and Susan V. Dewitt.  Not only did I have to go to the embassy for a letter ("we see this all the time," they said, tiredly), I had to pay to have Salvadoran staff in a special little office not far from the embassy to put an apostille on my letter from the embassy to certify that it was genuine.  I had, of course, to pay for that, which may well have been the point. 

This time, in October, I didn't get past the front desk of the Migration office.  The receptionist kindly informed me that my card wasn't ready, and probably wouldn't be, and they were changing the whole process somehow, and things would be different next year, but meantime...meantime....

And then I went home, asked Alcides to attach my license plates, and tried very hard to stay peaceful.

New clothes for a hard day

Just before I flew north from San Salvador to spend 5 weeks in the U.S. I learned that the husband of a new friend had been picked up by the U.S. ICE Border Patrol and is being held in a Texas detention facility.  Last night she e-mailed to ask if I could buy and mail some clothing for him to wear on his flight back to El Salvador - apparently the clothes he'd been detained in were pretty awful, and the alternative is either to return home in a prison uniform or to have someone supply a going-home outfit. 

Juan had trusted himself, and no doubt his and his family's hard-won cash, to a coyote who said he was a trustworthy Evangelical.  Not so, apparently: the journey was brutal and he witnessed his "trustworthy" guide raping a woman.  He was picked up almost immediately on the U.S. side of the border and whisked off to detention, where at least he's safe and my friend has been able to talk to him a couple of times.  

I called the facility and found out that what I could send for a going-home outfit is quite specific: 1 pair pants, 1 shirt, 1 pair underpants, 1 pair socks.  Shoes could also be sent, but apparently Juan has those.  So today I went shopping for the clothing, which I'll send tomorrow.  Challenging to buy clothes for someone you've never met, especially when it comes down to figuring out whether you think the guy would prefer boxers or briefs.  An odd assignment for a nun, but I enjoyed it.  And I picked boxers, on the simple grounds that they were less expensive.

So Juan will be able to take the long flight home in new, clean clothes, a scrap of dignity for a hard day. 

I woke up in Suchitoto this morning and it felt natural. The only things that kept waking me from time to time during the night were lemons dropping from the lemon tree onto the tin roof over my tiny bathroom (sounds VERY alarming) and a cricket that sounds all too much like my alarm clock - by tonight, I'll be tuning him? her? out. Didn't hear the cocks crowing or the morning buses going by, woke up to the sounds of the doves (and roosters).

I talked to a lot of friends this morning, and so far have found only one, our friend Armando, whose home and crops were seriously damaged in the torrential rains and floods of October. Suchitoto was spared the worst of these rains, though I'm sure all the roofs were leaking after ten days of rainfall. The damage is very visible in the roads here, and I would expect that they are far worse in parts of the country where the rains were heavier.

I also learned that one friend from this area is on her way to the United States, and I am praying that she will get safely through the grave dangers that migrants face in Guatemala and Mexico and will make it through the border, though I'm also very sad to think of the damage and loss her going causes for the family she left here. I wonder if people who get angry about illegal immigration into the United States ever think about how desperate people become because of lack of money and lack of opportunity in their own countries. I wonder what they would do in similar circumstances?

Fortune

This has been an extra-beautiful fall in western Washington: something (a sharp cold spell? hot days in the summer? wind from the south?) has made the autumn colors more vivid than usual. I've walked around St. Mary's, happily taking photos.

I've been thinking today, while I took those photos and talked to friends - including Patti Moore, who visited me in El Salvador this summer - how undeservedly privileged I am, able to come up here a few times each year and return to El Salvador with no difficulties. I'm particularly aware of this because a good friend has been having a hard time getting her visa back to the United States from Kenya approved, though she thought all the paperwork was in order, and she has lived lawfully in the U.S. for the past many years. She's about to make her third visit to the embassy there.

Just before I left El Salvador, a new friend, Blanca, told me about the four trips she had made to the U.S. Embassy there to get a visa so she could attend a family wedding. Each time she had to pay a large sum of money, in Salvadoran terms, for her interview - I think about $190 - and each time she was told to bring additional information and come back again. After the fourth trip she was denied a visa, but none of her money was refunded.

By contrast, my paperwork to get a resident visa for El Salvador was reasonable and fairly minimal.

Why do we, as a country, believe that we have the right to treat people from other countries, particularly developing nations, so badly?

Missing mothers

Yesterday in conversation I started telling some of the many stories I've heard about families in El Salvador where the mother is living in the United States and the children are living with relatives. A Salvadoran friend recently visited her mother, whom she'd not seen for eight years, in the central US. The mother of a young girl I know lives in Virginia with her new family; her Salvadoran daughter is being raised and loved by her grandmother, aunts and cousins. Another Salvadoran immigrant became a mother after she was raped on her journey through Mexico, something that happens almost routinely to undocumented migrant women: she sent her son home to his grandmother, who is raising him.

These are just a handful of what must be thousands and hundreds of thousands of similar stories, only the ones I've heard from the Salvadorans I know well. Imagine the toll it takes on children to know that their mother has chosen to live in another country, even for good economic reasons; imagine the toll on the family, that most central institution of Latino society, that so many mothers and fathers are connected to their families only by the telephone and wired money.

Imagine how these broken families may connect to a new report from the United Nations Development Program saying that Central America is the most violent region of the world, "drowning in violence."