Visiting “El Paisito”

And after all the difficulties we finally arrived in San Salvador and there was Don Fausto, waiting to drive us to the house that Monica and Laura share. And we celebrated our arrival with some wine and made ambitious plans for our two week stay in El Salvador, the smallest and most unknown country in Central-America. And according to plan, we visited some of the projects where Monica is working, we dived into the day to day life of this polarised country in which revolutionary politics is commonplace and we tried to avoid the numerous and varied dangers common to the region; the dangerous youngsters maras, the numerous gun robberies, the traffic accidents caused by the crazy bus drivers, the lethal gas from cars, the regular earthquakes, the volcanic eruptions, cyclones and various other natural disasters. And bravely facing all these dangers, we confronted what most probably was the riskiest action of our trip; the excursions in the old but newly acquired car of Monica, “rojito” or “little red”, on board of which, in a mere couple of days, we experienced a punctured tire, a broken radiator, a fallen bumper and a visit to the nearby police station for not carrying any documents…. As a souvenir of the many dangers of El Salvador, I personally carry a black eye from Matthew’s head-butt (accidental, if you can believe it), stomach-ache from all the delicious food and a soar throat from all the singing. Nobody can say that the dangers are not real!