The Sunday Scene

Sunday is the one day almost everyone has free in Suchitoto, and on Sunday morning people from town and people in from the country enjoy the central square, head for the Catholic church or one of the evangelical chapels, and shop for a bargain among the merchandise laid out on rugs or plastic sheets. It's a great scene and I finally remembered today to take my camera and capture a bit of Suchitoto Sunday morning. In addition to the buying and selling and trading and chatting, today there were clowns (clowns are beloved here), adding their zany vitality to the fun.

Fresh food

In a recent meeting of a group of Sisters and Associates, we talked about our carbon
footprints and what we might be able to do to reduce them. It’s a conversation I’ve had many times in the United States, but the whole subject looks different when you’re living in El Salvador.

When I lived in the U.S. I sometimes tried to eat locally – one summer I talked some friends into buying a farm share with me and we all drowned in greens. Another summer I decided to buy my vegetables only in the farmer’s market. Very satisfying, but costly!

Here, nothing is easier – or cheaper – than buying vegetables in the mercado, which happens to be in the next block. Tomatoes, onions, beans, broccoli, squash, huisquil (a pear-shaped green vegetable), cauliflower, garlic, cabbage, parsley, cilantro, carrots, and much more are available year-round. Mostly these vegetables come from Guatemala or Honduras, not quite local, but close enough. If you want to buy them at their freshest, you go to the market early in the morning, when the trucks have just come in from the Tiendona, the big wholesale market in San Salvador.

The glorious fruits – plantains, bananas, granadillas, oranges, lemons, watermelon, papaya, mango, coconut, nance, arrayan and many, many more - are more often local, I think. So are the local wild greens, mora and chipilín, ginger root, natural medicines. And the cheeses, eggs, chicken, fish and beef I’d guess come mainly from close by. You buy corn and beans, the staples, in the nearby farm stores.

The other possibility is a supermarket, which in the case of Suchitoto is a 40-minute drive away. The Supers have imported vegetables and fruits – like bell peppers, sweet potatoes, apples – that you can’t get at the mercado.

You’d think with such abundance close at hand (and very reasonably priced, by U.S. standards) Salvadorans would have super-healthy diets – but the other things that are available in the block next door pull in the other direction: potato chips and plantain chips, packaged snack foods, deep-fat-fried goodies, sugary confections. Hamburgers and pizza are beloved. Still, fresh local food is abundant here, and it’s easy to eat right.

Mercados and minor disasters

Here's a bit of the beauty and abundance of the market in Antigua, which goes on and on for blocks. Rosa Maria, my teacher, took me over to the market for atole blanco (a hot and salty corn drink made with white cornmeal and black beans) and tamales. Delicious! I'm also enjoying the food at Doña Thelma's house - she is a wonderful cook, and has made many local specialties while I've been there. Lunch, almuerzo, is the main meal of the day here, as it is in El Salvador. Breakfast and supper are both accompanied by a plate with a large fresh roll and a big leaf-shaped cookie, called an hoja (leaf), perfect for dipping into tea or coffee. I have probably gained a pound or two, because the hojas are very hard to resist.

My minor disaster was what must be a typical accident here. I walked out of an internet café and walked on down the sidewalk, thinking over something or other, and WHAM, walked right into one of the projecting stone window sills that stick out into the sidewalks all over Antigua. I soon noticed that blood was dripping down from my forehead and concluded that I had a little head wound. As you may know, nothing bleeds like a head wound! I walked toward my house looking like the survivor of a violent attack. A couple of very nice men insisted on giving me a ride, and when I got back to the house, Don Carlos, Thelma's husband, provided cotton and iodine. A brief headache, well deserved, but after a couple of hours I was back to normal, promising to pay CAREFUL attention to my surroundings. The next day, on my way to school, as I was scanning the horizon for window sills to avoid I managed to step into a fresh heap of dog poop. Sometimes you just can't win.