Rich and Poor.

Agreat story by Coco McCabe returning from a recent trip from san salvador whose first hand knowledge explores the poverty that is so prevalent here.

SAN SALVADOR -- What was it about El Salvador? This was my first trip to the country and I hadn’t quite analyzed the sweep of emotions -- disquiet among them -- that it had aroused since my plane touched down in the dark. I couldn’t see much as we sped away from the airport that first night, but I could feel plenty: the deliciousness of the air conditioning in the brand new van that picked me up, the smoothness of the highway -- as wide and well-paved as any in the US -- slipping away beneath us as we rolled toward San Salvador. Roads like this don’t come cheaply, I thought.

Soon, lights from the city -- about 1.6 million people live there -- flooded the sky and we were climbing steep hills past luxury hotels and San Salvador’s version of the World Trade Center, with a new, towering addition still under construction. Wealth seemed to shimmer everywhere.
But in the morning, I began to see a different El Salvador. We drove, first thing, out to the municipality of Santa Catarina Masahuat to visit a program Oxfam America had helped to fund on preserving indigenous knowledge. Up a rough road, at the crest of a hill, Cesar Donal Ascencio Reyes, a community activist, was waiting for us outside his house of corrugated metal and mud bricks. Though he knew nothing about construction, he had built it himself. That’s what you do when you don’t have money, he said.

And many people in El Salvador don’t: Almost 41 percent of the country’s 5.7 million citizens live on less than $2 a day, including 19 percent who survive on less than $1 a day. Many of the houses in Reyes’ neighborhood looked just like his. Light pricked through pinholes in the walls, ruts pocked the dirt floor, and the metal roof trapped the heat, baking the interior. Creature comforts included a latrine at the back of a chicken pen and a concrete tub -- or "pila'' -- for storing water. Water from the tap only runs twice a day, for one hour in the morning and another in the afternoon.

Reyes' house sat on a 2,500-square-foot plot -- a chunk of land he had managed to buy for about $2,000. Thirteen years later, he was still paying it off. But a dream has kept him going.
"I'm thinking about how I can split this up and leave a house for each of my girls," he said. "That’s my dream." Three daughters dividing one small plot would still be better than having no plot and no home of their own at all -- the fate his parents endured.

Back in San Salvador that evening, I thought about Reyes’ pila and its water with the greenish cast as I stepped into the shower in my hotel room. The water shot from the shower head, hot and without limit. Later, I flicked on the air conditioning, and slipped between the crisp sheets of the bed someone else had made for a restless night’s sleep. A couple of days later, in a semi-flooded field next to a small, Oxfam-built house in Animas Arriba, my colleague, Enrique Garcia, summed up what was bothering me.

"The main problem in Latin America is the inequities," he said. "The countries are not poor; the people are. In a very small country you can see the world. El Salvador is a good example: You can find the poorest and the richest."

The earth beneath our feet was spongy and water had pooled in the deep hoof prints left by grazing cattle. A few weeks before, the field had been a lagoon, swamped, as it was every year, with too much rain. And at its muddy edge lived Rogelio Ochoa, his wife Maria Eugenia Mendoza de Ochoa, and six children. The little house, with walls and a roof of corrugated metal built high off the ground on cement blocks, was theirs -- a replacement for the old adobe one that had collapsed the year before during unusually heavy rains. The flooding that ensued also wiped out much of the corn in the area that small farmers were on the verge of harvesting.Corn constitutes their basic staple and, if they’re lucky, earns them a small income.

In a country the size of Massachusetts, where for years most of the arable land was consolidated in the hands of a few, many poor rural farmers rent the land they till. And some, like the Ochoa family, don’t own the ground on which their houses sit. With nowhere else to live, the Ochoas had settled in marginal land that, at certain times of the year, was almost a bog.

The profile for El Salvador on the US State Department’s website says that country’s economy has been growing steadily since the civil war ended in 1992 and the poverty that once afflicted 66 percent of the people at the close of the war had dropped to 31 percent in 2006.

But numbers crunched by bureaucrats in the comfort of their office buildings are just statistics. They don’t tell the whole story -- the story we really need to hear-- the way a visit to the countryside can.

"If you go out of the capital and go to see a family, you can feel it, " Garcia said. "You can touch the poverty."

story referanced from
http://www.boston.com/news/world/blog/2008/11/el_salvador_fro.html