Volunteer Missionary Movement - USA

      We are crammed into the weaving minibus, about forty of us in a space meant for twenty, sitting or standing as our luck allowed. Strangers to each other, we are riding route 44 through San Salvador evening traffic; and, judging by the many heavy eyes and slumping shoulders, work has taken its toll today. In usual minibus etiquette, the driver zooms frantically around stalled traffic. He somehow finds (or forces) enough holes that he maintains a speed of nearly 50 miles per hour on this narrow city avenue crawling with cars. The deep bass of our blaring reggaeton music shakes the bus’s wobbly metal side panels. I watch with eyebrows raised as the cobrador—the driver’s assistant who stands at the side door to take passage fares—leans impossibly far out the open door and knocks on the roof of the minibus flying beside us. He waggles his tongue at the competing driver. I hear the two old and abused motors heave as accelerators jam to floorboards and the race begins. I laugh softly: the closest thing I know to this moment is my little brother’s car-racing videogame. I am distinctly aware that I have no control of my fate until my feet touch ground again.

     In my US culture, control of my circumstances worked in the same way that many things do in lives of relative privilege—it was something to enjoy in moderation, and for something not to obsess about having. It’s bad to be a “control freak.” Read: control was like chocolate. Easily accessible to me, and something I had the luxury to deny myself. I compare my quiet, sturdy family car to the thumping beasts that transport most Salvadorans to the grocery store or to work. Many Salvadorans cannot afford to own a car. They must risk the real-life video game. Gripping the seat-back in front of me on the 44 is a lesson for me in losing control—oftentimes to the point of injustice—as a daily experience.

     There are many aspects of life here that leave Salvadorans with little control. For instance, my friend “Roberto”[1] is a 28-year old construction worker in the countryside. He operates a large and complicated paving machine, which few are trained to use in this tiny country. On a regular basis, his boss refuses to pay him. Roberto has lately been thinking of immigrating North via coyote because he knows there is no recourse for him here. The justice system operates on impunity, he explains to me. In fact, just 4% of cases ever make it to court[2]. He is struggling to support his wife and two young sons, and the likelihood of finding another job is slim. Roberto does not want to leave his family, so in one last effort, he and his wife have opened up a tiny store in their sheet-metal home. They see a local source of snacks, soap, and telephone cards as a way to support their community as well as to make a small profit. 

    Roberto’s story highlights not only lack of control, but also the response that I’m finding is common to Salvadorans facing injustices like this: seeking a solution in community. In another example, when a Canadian mining company called Pacific Rim began to explore northern El Salvador for possible open-pit mining for silver and gold, communities reacted. They know that open-pit mining requires the use of cyanide and the rerouting of major water sources in their tiny country. Experts tell them that after about five years of mining they would be left with environmental damage lasting hundreds of years, chemically-caused diseases in people and animals, and only a small percentage of the profit. The majority of the money would flow to Pacific Rim’s coffers.[3] Salvadorans know that this is what happens because it has already happened to their neighbors in Honduras, who were not able to keep foreign companies out. Salvadoran countryside communities, churches, schools, and families have protested time and time again since Pacific Rim began exploration in 2002; and in 2008, they achieved a true miracle: the free trade-addicted Salvadoran government proclaimed that it would not allow open-pit mining in its territory.[4]