During an exercise called "The Five Senses" (one of the more reflective of the conference) we were asked to talk about the most memorable sight, sound, smell, feel & taste we experienced in El Salvador. My "sight" was either the Jiboa Valley from the Panamerican highway or the moment when Lake Guija peeks through the rugged edges of the cement plant by-pass in Metapan. Roosters crowing was the "sound", that was everyone's sound. My favorite taste was fresco de arrayan, a strange fruit unlike anything we have in the States but is absolutely delicious on hot Salvador afternoons. I don't recall what my "feel" was, but surely mosquitos were involved.
As yes, finally, the segue... my "smell"- burning trash.
I could tell my Salvadoran experience through trash anecdotes and cull from them cross cultural and adaptation lessons. Here, I'll only tell a few.
The Comalapa international airport is a few kilometers off the Pacific Coast and roughly an hour east of the capitol city. When you walk through customs and out of the airport the heat smacks you right in the face. Upon arrival in El Salvador, Peace Corps trainees are hearded through the masses and in to a delightfully gaudy school bus whose been granted a second life as public transport in the third world.
My first hours in El Salvador were spent weaving north toward the Training Center and soaking in the sights from the window of this colorful, noisy, very smoggy bus. What is it that I remember most vividly from this ride? That's right... burning trash! There were piles of it everywhere along the highway- some of it brush scooped together, some of it plastic bottles and paper doused with kerosene. I don't believe I had ever smelled trash burning before and it was a scent, obviously, that stuck with me.
When I got to my village, it took me a while to figure out what people did with their trash. Globalization in all its wonder and mystery had brought to my little hamlet Doritos style chips, canned soda and plastic bags- things that didn't exist in Salvador pre-war years. All of that stuff had to be burned.
Remember, I was sent to be a Water & Sanitation Volunteer so it took weeks for me to drum up the courage to gather up my bags of trash and well, light it up. I set my alarm for 4:30am, before day break and snuck out to my back patio where I heaped the bags up one on top of the other. In a Starbucks Iced Coffee bottle (my last purchase on US soil) I stored kerosene purchased the previous day from Don Tono's store. A generous douse, a lit match and in moments the trash was ablaze! Oh how I wish Johnny, my little brother had been there. He's a true pyro and would have excelled shamelessly at torching my waste.
That kept on for weeks until finally my conscience couldn't take it any more and I emplored community leaders to work with me on a trash pick up service which, miraculously, is still in place today and also has a composting/organic trash component. I haven't burned a lick of trash in a good 5 years now.
Once I finished my service I moved to San Vicente, a department capital and certainly a "big city" by village standards. In San Vicente I would hang grocery bags full of trash on the front fence and the truck would come by to dutifully pick it up a couple of time a week. It was there that I learned about another trash phenomenon.
One evening after putting the trash out I could hear a rustling near the front door. Street dogs abound in Salvador so I assumed the worst- that one had ripped in to the trash and was strewing it about the street. What I opened the door to see was far worse.
I flung the door open and prepared to growl stamp and kick the animal that was ripping through my trash. An old man, probably in his seventies, with dirty white pants and top was picking through the trash for food and anything salvageable. It was weeks later that an ILO rep took me to the near by dump at 3:30pm when the municipal trucks arrive and I watched entire families do the same.
Now I live in a neighborhood called Escalon, one of the most affluent in the capital where beautiful houses are hidden behind fortress-like walls rimmed with curly barbed-wire. Trash continues to be a problem.
A few months ago, the mayor of San Salvador a leftist by the name of Violeta Menjivar couldn't find the municipal funds to continue the trash service. For 16 days, trash piled up on the wide, beautifully paved streets of Escalon and legislators, doctors, lawyers, entreprenuers and ex-pat gringos like myself had to steer their big SUVs through the massive piles lining the street.
The richies had had enough! Led by their campesina live-in maids, they took to the streets and torched the trash, just like was custom in my village. Miraculously, trash pick up resumed the next day.
The trash truck really doesn't have a schedule. It just rolls through when it does and rings a bell and you're supposed to run out and give them your trash. This works well for everyone else in Escalon who has a full time live-in maid who can listen for the bell and rush out to dispose of the family's trash.
Its a little more complicated for me seeing as I and my roomates work full time and a few nights a week we travel and don't come home at all. So our trash accumulates. In the garage. And it reeks. In the heat.
One day I finally had it and hung it from the dwarfed palm tree out front. The trash truck didn't pass that day, but the dogs, the impoverished and even the chickens dug, pecked and ripped through my trash bags full of coffee grinds, rotten huiscuil and left-over pasta.
Burning trash in heaps in the backyard appeared at that point to be a better alternative.
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