5 months in El Salvador (Holiday Resorts in El Salvador)

Member Name: Cammij

Product:	Holiday Resorts in El Salvador
Date:	18/10/07 (132 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great people, low costs, beaitiful scenery

Disadvantages: angry people

I just came back from a wonderful five months in El Salvador. Ironically someone told me after I came back that the name "El Salvador" means the saviour in Spanish. It was one of those unplanned trips that I am open to taking now that I have retired from the police force after 25 years and I am still just 48 years young and feel like I have so much to do. One day me and my close friend Jim, who was also a cop but has been on disability for several years after a brutal attack by a citizen (she got what she deserved, she died in prison at age 71 aftere spending her last 4 years there for this horrible crime), Jim and me were watching the telly and there was a program about some footballers from someplace else who went to some other place where nobody spoke any English and taught the kids football and kept them from joining gangs. I guess they all join gangs down there or something, they seemed rather poor and dirty. We were both so inspired. We sat there giddy with excitement and drank a couple bottles of pink Catawba wine and talked about how we would use our retirement to go help young people. Oh how we clasped hands an pledged to each other that we would make a difference in the world.
There was a slight problem, neither Jim or me had any idea how to play Football nor speak Spanish. We tried watching some Footie on the telly but mostly it was just some spry lithe young men dandying about and pretending to be hurt kicking a ball. We were neither what you would call "Outdoorsy kids" I guess we were indoor kids and so sports seemed an unlikely way to reach the at risk youth. Then we realized that the solution was right in front of us. We would bring peace and harmony through four part harmony!!! We had both been in the Police Barbershop Quartet for years and we could go help kids in Peru or Samoa not join gangs by joining Barbershop Quartets instead. For those of yu who do not know much about barbershop quartets, they are an acapella group of four singers that harmonize. Evidently they arose from the barbershop being social centers of the latter part of the 19th century. We decided to call our mission the Vox Pax, voice of peace and we would teach the boys how to be part of this great activity. It is acapella so they would not need music or instruments although a few of the iconic striped costumes would be nice.
We had some fundraisers and it was simply amazing how many people that we never would have expected to help us dug deeply into their pockets to help us reach our dream. Even my own children, Sarah and Pete gave a lot of money for kids their age, and Pete was so kind as to review all my insurance papers with me, as he is an insurance guy. Even my neighbors guy who has been nothing but hostile, especially when I spoke to his teen age son, contributed a large sum of money to the cause. He used to make stupid jokes about how our music which is homophonic, oh never mind, but homophonic means that the chords are of one texture. We had car washes and bake sales, I enjoyed the car washes but Jims ex, Sabrina told me those six high schoolers from the church softball team did not need such close supervision despite the fact they kept spraying each other with the hoses and taking off their shirts and wetting them and snapping each other. It seems the whole community pitched in to help.
We decided to go to El Salvador. We flew down there in February when it was rather chilly up North where we live and found a lush paradise of merely 7 million people. At the airport in San Salvador, which is the capital we tried to get some of their money and had to trade our american dollars to get other american dollars which seemed sort of strange but the commission was a reasonable 7 percent. We fund out rather quickly that they must like coffee there, it is all over the place, absolute heaps of it. I had my firt negative experience with the people when I tried to get a cup of Kenyan Peaberry or Sumatra and they look at me like I do not know what I am talking about. I am like, "Hello, do you not import coffee into your raggedy country". Oh well I forgive them.
We found us a nice little quaint place out in a pleasent rustic area called Soyapango. We got a flat near a big mall called Plaza Mundo and found a little store front that had once been what they call a papusa shop. Papusa is the food they eat, all this meat and stuff wrapped into tortillas. All the windows were busted out and there were all these holes in the war and some dark black liquid had been poured all over the floor but we got it all cleaned up. We started cleaning our store front and a young boy named Miguel came and offered to help and we hired him on the spot. We explained that we were not so much into the foreign language thing and he would need to pick an english name so I think Miguel in Spanish is Jack in English so we renamed him Jack.
We introduced ourselves to the locals and we would sit in our store front and drink cheap local beer and grill corn on the cob which we gave out free to all the kids. One by one the local boys came and we spent a bit of of our money paying them a few dollars here or there to keep them around doing odd jobs. One by one we got to know these boys. We had my son Pete arrange to send some charity boxes from the states down there full of stuff from the second hand store. The kids liked that stuff. We found a decent lead and a mediocre tenor right away. I swear we could not find a decent baritone in the whole country and the bass was tough too. But we flourished. We met a lot of great guys and started to form barbershop quartets. It is kind of funny because their word they use for "four" sounds a lot like quartet I think it was quattro or something like that so you would think that they would understand that each group would have 4 members. Some of the barbershop quartets had only one or two guys and some had seven or eight but then some of the smaller quartets joined the biggest one. At times it really felt like we were reaching them and then at other times it felt like they were really not serious and were just taking our money. The largest quartet announced to us that they were now called themselves the MS 13 which stood for "Magic Singers" and the 13 was for the original 13 singers although there were like 25 of them. The did not want us to hire the one boy Who-lee-oh whom we called Julius, who had a grandma to have her make nice proper barbershop outfits, instead they wanted to wear their normal clothes with these red bandanas pulled down low over their eyes. The boys all called us "the Poodles" which seemed odd since I do not think we look like little dogs, and then the one kids dad came and hit me in the side of the head with a rusty monkey wrench and called me a "Merry cone" which seemed odd since I might be merry when I sing but I am not really conical in shape, except when I started wearing my belt above my belly after too many papusas and beer. The guys in MS 13 told us that we had to stay away from our shop so they could practice in private and not have to worry about us and they did not want us around much. The kids often felt insecure around the police and since we had made some generous donations to the local policia at their request, such as we got a few police departments in the States to send down some old equipment and stuff coupled with our being Americans the kids felt safe in the haven we provided. The odd thing is the guys suggested that the police would really appreciate some night vision goggles and bullet proof vests and armor piercing bullets and we begged some contacts we had back home to ship this stuff to us. It is strange but that stuff went missing from our store before we could donate it to the local police.
We planned several concerts but none of the kids could make it except our very best quartet. Quite a few people came to see it. But we had the kids sing some popular ballads such as "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" and the crowd got rather disruptive and raucous and threw things at us. It was a failure. All a failure. We tried our best to reach these boys and I think we did. It was almost like a movement we created. And when we would happen to see some of our boys on the street interacting with the locals we were so proud. It seemed the local stores would give our boys free sodas and even cash and the other kids seemed to have such awe and respect for our boys when they walked around in a large group. The boys convncd us that since walking canes were too frail for the rough streets in the city that they should carry baseball bats around in place of canes.

El Salvador really was a beautiful country. The beach was fab. So many tourists came there and our boys were so interested in having us drive them to tourist areas although they never wanted to sing for them. Our one good quartet did like to go to the beach resorts to perfrom for the touristas. Unfortunately we could not get enough of the boys to learn English and we did not have a good way to communicate. It was all good. there is only one airline that flies direct to El Salvador from Europe.

Summary: A wonderful meaningful experience.