5. Resurrection in El Salvador—Under a Corrugated Tin Roof with Beatriz

El Salvador provides the norteamericano with a hot and muggy welcome. After one day, I had settled in quite well. I was speckled with bug bites and accustomed to my frail cold shower, noisy fan, and springy cot. I knew to brush my teeth with bottled water and to put used toilet paper in the waste basket to avoid clogging the toilet. I was ready for some serious education...and I got it. I was shocked to learn how amazingly blind I was to people’s daily reality just a short plane ride south of the border.

Local experts briefed my educational tour group on the state of El Salvador's economy. The minimum wage was about $1 an hour ($144 a month). While in the US, minimum wage is considered a starting point, most Salvadorans aspire only to minimum wage...and that’s all they get.

When coffee prices crashed in the early 2000s, that crop went from providing 50 percent of the country’s export earnings to about 3 percent. With legions of coffee workers suddenly unemployed, their children were hopeless and directionless. Many teens were left with little to do but roam the cities in gangs and cause better-off people to build even higher walls. The maquiladora industry (sewing clothing for the rich world corporations looking for cheap labor) moved in, and now makes up 25 percent of the local economy.

To make ends meet, most Salvadoran families struggle to send one person abroad to earn money. Seven in ten families have an immediate member in the US—about two million total. In 2005, remittances (money sent home from these expats) brought $2.5 billion into El Salvador—or 16 percent of the country’s entire economy. “Refugee aid” like this is big throughout the developing world. In fact, in 2004, the total amount of money that refugees working in the rich world sent home to their families (an estimated $75 billion) was fifty percent higher than all foreign aid combined ($50 billion).

In 2001, two huge earthquakes killed over a thousand Salvadorans (in a nation of about six million people). They destroyed or badly damaged a quarter of the private homes in the country, leaving 1.5 million homeless. Of course, in a big shake, it’s the poor whose homes crumble—seismic safety is a luxury only the privileged can afford. An earthquake of the same magnitude hit my hometown of Seattle that same year, and no one died. The best those living in a shantytown can do for protection is to live in what they call “miniskirt housing”—cinderblocks for the lower half of the walls, and then light corrugated tin for the upper walls and roof. If a miniskirt house tumbles down, it won’t kill you. And when it’s over, you just scavenge a few two-by-fours, reassemble the frame, and nail your sheets of tin back in place.

In the midst of such relative affluence, Americans seem to operate with a mindset of scarcity—focusing on what we don't have or what we might loose. Meanwhile, Salvadorans I met, with so little, embrace life with a mindset of abundance—thankful for the simple things they do have.

Our group dropped in on Beatriz and her daughter Veronica, who live in a miniskirt shack on El Salvador’s minimum wage. The place was as clean and inviting as a tin-roofed shack with a dirt floor can be. Beatriz sat us down and told of raising a family through a Civil War:

“The war moved into the capital, and our little house happened to sit between the police headquarters and the guerillas. At night I hid with my children under the bed as bullets flew. For ten years, the war put us in never-ending fear. Mothers feared the forced recruitment of our sons. Finally, we arranged a peace. But the peace accords didn’t benefit us poor people.” She explained how this "peace" is no more than an acknowledgement of the futility of a continued struggle. To this day people are unhappy. In some regions, there is even talk about taking up arms again. Beatriz said, “If war started again, I think some of us would die from the stress.”

About her life, she said, “My house becomes a lake in the rainy season. Still, we are thankful to have this place. Our land was very cheap. We bought it from a man receiving death threats. He fled to America. While we make $144 a month in the city, the minimum in the country is much less—only $70 a month. Nearly half the families in our country are living on $1 a day per person. To survive, you need a home that is already in your family. You have one light bulb, corn, and beans. That is about all. Living on minimum wage is more difficult now than before the war. Before, electricity cost about $1 a month. Water was provided. Today electricity costs $19 and water $14—that’s about one-quarter of my monthly wage. My mother has a tumor in her head. There is no help possible. I have no money.”

Beatriz’s 22-year-old daughter, Veronica, was as strikingly beautiful as one of the Latina stars so hot on the popular scene. She dreamed of going to the US, but the “coyote” (as the guy who ferries refugees across Mexico and into the US is called) would charge $6,000, and she would probably be raped before reaching the US border as a kind of "extra fee."

As a chicken with a bald neck pecked at my shoe, I surveyed the ingenious mix of mud, battered lumber, and corrugated tin that made up this house. It occurred to me that poverty erodes ethnic distinctions. There’s something boring and uniform about desperation.

Beatriz and Veronica prepared for us their basic meal: a corn tortilla. As I ate a thick corn cake hot off the griddle, it felt like I was taking communion. In that tortilla were tales of peasants who bundled their tortillas into a bandana and ran through the night as American helicopters swept across their skies.

For me, munching on that tortilla provided a sense of solidarity—wimpy…but still solidarity. I was what locals jokingly call a “round-trip revolutionary" (someone from a stable and wealthy country who cares enough to come down here…but only with a return plane ticket in hand). Still, having had the opportunity to sit and talk with Beatriz and Veronica, even a round-trip revolutionary flies home with an indelible understanding of the human reality of that much-quoted statistic, “Half of humanity is trying to live on $2 a day.”