You have to ford the river six times and hike up a mountain cowpath to reach my village.
Seriously: it’s a seventy-minute tramp that would rate as “moderately strenuous” in a U.S. guidebook. And it would be there, in the book, because it’s gorgeous: lacing through stands of banana and mango trees, grazing by ancient cows with curled horns, descending into dark, musty jungles before cresting out into panoramic vistas of El Salvador’s north-central highlands.
But this is not a trail that people take on the weekend to grab some fresh air and exercise Pooch. No: this is the path my villagers use to get home. And anything you can picture yourself unloading from the trunk or back seat of your car after pulling into your driveway, well, the people here strap it on their back, or balance it on their head . . . and start walking.
I’ve been told that during the six months of rainy season the river grows ferocious enough to steal your baby, so you’re forced to say a prayer and twinkle-toe-it across the less-broken boards of the “hammock bridge.” I crossed the bridge during dry season and admit that it’s already prayer-worthy.
I can also confirm that the trail is steep: your back begins to itch with sweat about sixty meters after leaping off the bus, and by the time you stumble out into our dusty plaza you’ve drenched your shirt and the top quarter of your pants. The first villagers who see you will smile gently and ask if you’ve been swimming.
And you’ll smile back, knowing that they’ve hiked the trail hundreds of times before, and that they’re proud to see you sharing their lifestyle, and that they’ll probably follow up the question by asking you over to their house for lunch.
If they do ask, you should. He will have harvested the corn, beans, and rice from their fields, and will have cut and hauled the firewood used to cook them from land an hour away. She’ll have hand-ground the corn, patted out the tortillas, and roasted, milled, and simmered the coffee beans they grew in their garden. He’ll have constructed the chicken coop; she’ll have collected and scrambled the eggs. They’ll both have tended the vegetables and filled their woven shoulder bags with the fruit. Other than the oil and salt, the meal will have come from their own hands, their own land, and the sun that we all share.
See, I’ve landed in a subsistence farming village nestled atop a mountain ridgeline — this will be my home for the next two years. There are about 200 people here, and they breathe with the rhythm of the land and each other. These villagers don’t use much money — the going rate to work on some big boss’s land is 5 bucks a day, and there aren’t any stores in town anyway. Instead, they work their own land, the community’s shared land, and the land of their friends, relatives, and neighbors. And every year around September they harvest the food they will eat for the next twelve months. Which is to say, food that’s not from the supermarket, that wasn’t shipped across the globe, and that carries no additives, chemicals, or plastic wrappers. It’s nature’s offering, sowed in and reaped from that soft hillside right over there, behind those avocado trees.
But yo, there’s more. This is an impoverished mountain farming village without cars or a strong rate of literacy . . . but it’s more organized and proactive than any community I’ve known in the States. No joke — I’m not romanticizing this. The village was massacred and leveled to the ground on Valentine’s Day by (U.S.-funded) government troops during the civil war in 1981, sending survivors fleeing to the mountains for the next eight starving, horrific, corpses-filled years. Then three of the original families pulled together the courage to move back and rebuild their lives here, and over the next twenty-one years their intelligence and pluck have transformed a burnt-out hillside into this bustling, self-sufficient community. Check out this sampling:
- Every week, each family here devotes one morning of work for the benefit of the village, helping with development projects or simply doing public space clean-ups.
- Despite the lack of any stores or banks in town, there are seven different savings and loans groups: three women’s, three men’s, one youth. These groups keep clean books and meet bi-weekly in a big circle of chairs in front of the communal house to collect money for saving and offer microloans. The financial scale here is small: people save a buck or two a month, and the loans are to the tune of $15. But those $15 can buy a couple tools he needs for the harvest, or some fabric she’ll sew and sell for profit, or, or, or…. And because they are borrowing the money of their friends and neighbors, every single loan so far has been paid back.
- The school goes through ninth grade and has only two teachers, but in the past few years a dozen youth have been committed enough to their education to apply for scholarships and hike down the pre-dawn mountain to take the 119 bus to high school.
- The village has a legally-recognized non-profit association that has helped land and ferry through dozens of intricate development projects: clean, free mountain water taps outside every house, two different sources of electricity, a collectively-run fruit export farm, a health clinic, a youth-directed computer lab, a town hall, composting pit toilets, tilapia farming pools, a communal kitchen and pupusa-vending stand, land ownership rights, a communal corn and coffee mill, countless trainings on topics such as how to make soap or fertilizer, and so many many other things.
Again, all this is happening in a village whose houses are made from mud bricks and have dirt floors, and whose families will go months straight with almost no source of cash income. They are ignoring any handicaps and carrying out a conscientious and savvy plan of development: staying true to their roots and traditions while not allowing themselves to fall behind the global curve. They are picking and choosing what aspects of modernity they want: solar electricity (yes), consumerism (no). Organic farming innovations (yes), a hurried pace of life (no). Democratic collaboration on projects (yes), guarded privacy and individualism (no). Community-based micro-financing (yes), anything less than several relaxed hours spent with loved ones everyday (no).
It’s more complicated and nuanced than I’m making it seem, of course. People are poor, the sun is hot, and many of the younger generation here would choose our lifestyle if they could. But — unlike us — these villagers were not born into a situation that offers them that choice. And instead of complaining, instead of moving to the city where they could emulate the West, they’ve created their own little haven right here, along this ridgeline, seventy minutes up from the nearest bus….
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So, for the record, this is what’s going down in the forgotten, impoverished corners of the globe. ..or at least in this little subsistence village in El Salvador. No naked babies with bloated bellies: just a few dozen families joining hands insightfully to work the rhythms of nature and live their tranquil lives.
