Camiel Becker
May 2000
Reprinted from Salvanet
On the Streets of San Salvador

Camiel Becker is from Red Lodge, Montana. He is in El Salvador on a Fulbright Grant to do research on the rising drug problem. He lives in the marginalized urban community of El Paraíso and works with street children through The Olof Palme Foundation .

Sundays exaggerate all that I love about life here in El Paraíso, a Christian base community tucked into a valley within San Salvador. Life here is slow and, for me, fulfilling. Today is my day to sleep in and to get into the rhythm of this slow-paced life, which hides under the cliffs, protected from the noise and traffic of the city above.

In the afternoon I wash my clothes in the back jardín, the garden, alongside the chickens and dogs. I sit with the door open, as is done in all the houses in the community. Life flows in and out of the house. The smell of the streets mixes with the smell of frijoles and tortillas. Later I walk out and sit in the shade to escape the accumulating heat in the house. The dirt path outside my front door winds past cement-block houses and stray dogs. Women make pupusas, men fix their motorcycles, and the old man holds his post in the hammock under the ceiba tree. People linger in front of their houses watching, observing, joking with old friends. It’s as if the spirit of childhood penetrates the entire community.

For a new volunteer, whose hopes and optimism clash against the realness of the city every day, El Paraíso (“Paradise”) is truly a psychological sanctuary. I find comfort in its quaintness and identify with its small-town atmosphere. While the seeming wholesomeness of social justice work initially drew me to Central America, I often wonder how I, a rural Montanan, was ever able to hear that which called me to live in this crazy city. Nonetheless, in El Paraíso I’ve found enough familiarity to survive in this novel place I now call home.

Yet above, in that jungle of urban chaos, survival takes on another face. Speeding buses belch clouds of diesel in my face, followed by gusts of wind that peg layers of dirt to my sweaty skin. Among the endless race of microbuses and crowds of vendors in the center of town, I often find myself counter-intuitively pacing to the beat of the city.

Despite the disagreeableness of the city, an underlying pulse pulls me to explore its depths. I’m fascinated by the stark truth camouflaged amongst the concrete and metal of the city. While I still need the stability of El Paraíso in the evenings to bring myself back to some familiar ground, by day I adventure past any comfort zone I knew before my arrival to the streets of San Salvador. At this point the streets draw me in, capture my mind, and teach me about life, death and survival.

This pulsating truth, whether personal or universal, is not taught to me by a shaman or a priest. Rather, a group of vagabond street kids mentor my transformation of enlightenment. They, after all, know more about survival than I can imagine. Their street senses and reflexes respond to traffic and danger as keenly as a Cheyenne hunter searching for prey on the plains of the past. When we part at the end of each day they often find food and money for their vices before I get to the bus stop. These kids have shown me, among many other things, to look at their world through the eyes of survival.

Yet sometimes I am not sure what I am getting myself into. Everyday I feel closer to their reality and less identified with my former way of life. Images of street kids oscillate between my conscious and unconscious. I just can’t pull myself off the streets. That is, my mind and soul have been consumed by the streets. Some days I feel as lost as they appear. It’s as if somehow they are, for me, the glue (or crack) that keeps me mentally fogged and dazed as to where reality exists. These kids, my present opiate, have broken many schemes I had of what society is and what humanity should be. They force me to ask myself what life looks like and where to look for my spirituality. I’ve learned that sometimes we have to lose ourselves to find truth.

I’ve also realized that after my time here is up, I will still only be a person who learned a deeper truth from a bunch of vagabonds. I will not have saved them all from the harshness of the streets. I can only hope that I will have touched their lives as much as they will have saved mine.

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