Strip Malls and Street Urchins

At long last, I return to my online journal. Between slow connections in Latin America and blackouts in Bangladesh, it has been hard to keep posting entries.  Fortunately, I have scribbled down my adventures in a notebook for reference.  So here it is, my belated ES journal entry...

As in Ecuador, FINCA Int'l facilitated my interviews in ES through  el Centro de Apoyo a la Microempresa (CAM).  Walking into CAM's office on my first full day in ES, I came across that day's El Diario de Hoy, one of the two major papers in the country, which featured the results of a recent nation-wide opinion poll.  One of the most interesting poll findings was a discrepancy between the approval rating of the president andthat of the government.  The majority of Salvadorans supported the President, but were also dissatisfied with the goverment's management of the country.  While confused then, I gradually began to understand that seeming paradoxes -- such as president approval and government dissapproval -- typify ES.  My daily foot trek to the office followed a stretch of impressively modern strip malls that could just have easily been plucked from Southern California.  Just across the street, however, were beggar children baking under the sun as they slept on mattresses of cardboard and under blankets of filth.

Just across the street, however, were beggar children baking under the sun as they slept on mattresses of cardboard and under blankets of filth

The motif was manifest in my interviews as well.  I spoke with women who believed that most people do not try  take advantage of them, but expressed zero trust in their fellow citizens.  I spent a morning with new, energetic clients eager to leverage their newfound access to credit and then that  evening with older clients who seemed to be dispassionately continuing  with their village ban despite a lingering bitterness  from a group scar.  Are these attitudes and tendencies influenced by recent recent exit from a civl war? Maybe.  Are they more related to current politcal and economic conditions? Perhaps.  Or are the cases unique from the many other village banks I did not have a chance ot visit.  Possibly.  Whatever the case, it will be interesting to reflect on my ES interviews in the fall and try to make sense of the variance.

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(more to come)