Yesterday morning I went over to my friend Juani's house to learn how to make "arroz con leche." In the middle of washing dishes, Juani called me outside to peer over the neighbor's fence at the scandal that was erupting on the other side. One of the family's many children had just fallen out of a very tall mango tree, and the mother was carrying the girl back to her house. We rushed over to the neighbor's house, along with a large group of people who had just witnessed the accident. Juani started applying alcohol to the girl's stomach, which was hurting. I was relieved to see that she was moving and thus was not paralyzed and hadn't broken anything, meaning she was probably going to be fine. Nonetheless, I called the mayor, who rushed over and took her to the hospital right away.
The girl who fell was 13 years old and was part of a band of 4 sisters who are always out playing in the street and are quite out of control. Their hair is always unkempt and their clothes dirty and they always ask me for a quarter when they see me, but they are truly very sweet and always rush to give me hugs and yell "elli!" when I pass. I've made each of them little bracelets, and they constantly ask me for another one. The girl was the oldest of this band of sisters, and was probably a little slow. I remember she could never understand what I was saying and that her sisters called her "africana," which is slang for stupid here (a strangely racist term of which I'm not sure of the origins). She fell out a tree while trying to collect green mangos to sell. The reason why she and her sisters are always running wild is that they are part of a family of 12 children, the parents give them almost no supervision and they are extremely poor.
Anyways, after the girl was taken to the hospital, I finished my arroz con leche and left for the capital where I had planned a meeting that afternoon with fellow PC volunteers to organize a girls' camp this year. As I left I asked Juani to text me any updates of the girl's condition, confident she'd be fine. Juani walked out the door with me and immediately repeated the scandal to the neighbor across the street and I was amused at how quickly sensational stories spread from house to house in these small towns.
Later that day, after the meeting I got a text from Juani saying that there was something wrong with the girl's liver and they were taking her to Rosales, the hospital in San Salvador. I began to realize that the condition must be quite serious. An hour later, she wrote me to tell me the girl had passed away.
I was in shock and didn't know what to do. I called my friend Claudia, who had spent the past year in my town fulfilling her "service year" requirement to become a doctor. She knew the girl, because her aunt was their neighbor, and she was currently working at Rosales, the hospital where the girl had died. She agreed to go with me to the hospital to see if there was anything we could do to help the family.
Going to the hospital was quite overwhelming. Rosales is probably the best hospital in El Salvador, but it is so acutely under-staffed and under-funded. Patients are held in giant, dreary rooms, which smell bad and carry a strong air of sickness. There are so many grieving families who have obviously come from the countryside so far away.
I didn't know the elder brothers or sisters who were there, but identified them by their conversation about the girl. They were waiting beside her body, which was only covered by a sheet. I will never forget that girl's pale face, which I had just seen alive earlier that day. Her body was one of three on stretchers in the entryway, awaiting pick up. The elder siblings were waiting for their mother to arrive, who was en route with the mayor, who was not only driving her but had bought a coffin for the girl, who he hadn't even known. Though I've had problems with him in the past, the generosity the mayor showed yesterday is something I will always remember.
Finally the girl's mother and an older sister who I knew arrived to take her away. The whole thing was so sad, so tragic. It made me think a lot about death and the differences in the way people deal with it here and in the U.S. In America, death is such a foreign concept for a lot of us. When it happens, it comes as such an extreme shock; I think in some ways we believe ourselves immune to premature death. Here, death is more common, less unexpected. I've seen more funerals in the time I've been here than in my entire life in the United States. Funerals here are a lot less sad, sometimes they feel just like any other lively gathering of people with cake and coffee.
I didn't go back today for the funeral, but I did give the family some money to defray the costs, I didn't really know what else to do.
I can't stop thinking about that girl, and I wasn't sure if posting about it was a good idea, but I wanted to do something to perserve and share the memory of yesterday, a day I will never forget.
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Welcome to my blog! My name is Elian and I'm a municipal development volunteer in El Salvador from 2008-2010.
El Salvador
el salvador by department
la quinceniera
The contents of this website are mine personally and do not reflect any position of the US government or the Peace Corps.
3 comments:
i vividly remember her running out into the street with her sisters, calling out your name, hugging you and me and asking us for money and things, part of the background music of Dolores.
i think you're very right that in the US we are shielded from premature death, and its hard for us to understand how a young person so full of life can leave this world so quickly, without forewarning or reason. i have no idea if that means that it is easier for her family to grieve that it would be for ours, but i hope for their sake it does, and for our sake that we can learn something from their tragic loss...
I feel much of the same emotions here, you would think that in a country were more than half of the population is under 25 due to a genocide 30 years ago,there would be few deaths as almost everybody is young. But death here is constant, just the other day 3 people died in a motorcycle crash outside my house, I was on the balcony with some friends (peace corps incidently) and we heard the crash and looked down to see people blood all over the street, the smell of blood was there for days.
Eli- I have just been reading "al-ayyam" the autobiography of Taha Hussein - the first Minster of education after the revolution in Egypt and the precursor in that position to Sayyid Qutb- and in one of the early chapters he remembers being an extremely poor child, one of 13 and blind from the age of three-anyway, the oldest boy in the family has just passed his entrance exams into medical school, is charasmatic and essentailly the pride of the villiage and he is helping to treat an outbreak of cholera when he falls ill himself and Taha narrates the whole death seen just based on what he hears as a small boy hovering in a corner of the bedroom. He says that from that day on he never heard his mother laugh again. It made me hug Rahma a little tighter when I tucked her into bed.
I think that sometimes when people die prematurely they may have a sense that their time is coming-my brother died prematurely and he seemed to have a sense that something was going to happen to him. I was not close to him at the time, but this is what his close girlfriend had said. I certainly think it is possible.
Thinking of you...
Peace, Celene Ayat
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