Swatting Flies

Another entry from Chris' experience...


Saturday, September 17, 2011

Swatting Flies

Early on in my stay in El Salvador, I was fumbling my way through the daily newspaper.  I came across a startling headline that placed the Salvadoran unemployment rate somewhere in the seven percent range.  The old saw still holds true.  There are three types of lies: Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics.  While there a small number of Salvadorans are without any work, a large number are dramatically underemployed, so the seven percent rate is misleading.  Official employment numbers include work in both the formal and informal sectors of the economy, and it is in the informal sector – which accounts for something like half of all non-agriculural employment in El Salvador – that so many people can be categorized as “underemployed.”

The informal sector is broad, and includes street vendors of all types.  Young men hop on and off buses selling gum and candy, or canvas cars at stoplights with any number of wares.  One item being heavily “marketed” when I was there, I noticed, was the battery-powered flyswatter.  The zapping power of those big old purple bug-killing lamps folks in the US used to hang in their back yards during the summer, but in the shape of a small tennis racquet.

For my first couple of days in El Salvador, before heading out to the community of San Ramon for two weeks, I had the opportunity to tag along with a delegation from Cincinnati (including the Executive Director of Crispaz, Dennis O’Connor) as they visited a few of the country’s significant organizations and cultural sites.  One of these visits was with Comadres, La Comite de Madres, Mons. Romero.  The organization was founded in 1977 as a means of uniting the relatives of people who had been “disappeared” amidst government repression.  The women there spoke for hours about the traumatic events that led to their own involvement in the group.  One woman recounted the details of her search for her daughter – whose corpse she eventually found – as if had all happened in the past week, not in 1979.  Without melodrama, she frankly admitted that she did not believe that she would EVER get over the pain of those events, but that she knew she had to share them nonetheless.  That was a motif that shot through my entire visit, in fact.  The enduring legacy of trauma for so many people has not been wiped away by a couple of decades of (comparatively speaking) peace and stability.

We all sweltered in the humid July afternoon air.  The heaviness of the air, though, was nothing compared to that of the reality being recounted.  Amid the intensity of the long afternoon, Alexis, the delegation leader from Crispaz who translated the proceedings, asked to take a break.  If we thought that the hiatus would provide much respite, though, we were wrong.  It simply gave us the opportunity to view some of the hundreds of graphic photos of murdered, often mutilated, victims of the repression that Comadres had managed to collect.

As we ground through a fascinating, exhausting, perhaps disheartening afternoon, someone would occasionally pick up the bug zapper and swat at a fly.  In most instances, I would hardly have noticed such an action at all, but on this day it seemed filled with importance, however unintentional.  It gave ME a tiny jolt, too.  Juxtaposed with a picture of a power structure that had systematically engaged in the wanton killing of thousands of people, the casual swat at a couple of flies became for me a startling symbol of what happens when we slip into thinking of others not as human persons but as pests.

-Chris Welch SIPPIE '11