Gringas, Easter in El Salvador, Love and Death

I don’t know if anyone reads my blog anymore, but for those of you that do, sorry I haven’t been keeping up very well. I’ll try to do a better job. So almost a month and a half has gone by and a lot of shit has gone down. I’ll kind of just start where I left off in my last entry.

So every spring a delegation of Masters Students in Public Health from Yale University come to stay in Isla de Mendez. They stay with families and work on a variety of things including health education, reproductive health, sanitation and water treatment. This year a group of 13 female students came and stayed for about 10 days. I was kind of worried it was going to be weird to have a bunch more gringas around but it was actually really nice, I think especially because of a special surprise that came with the group.

Kristi and I

I met with the group on their first day here, and was surprised to see a high school classmate of mine, Kristy Anwuri, from Bishop Montgomery in the group. I was shocked to say the least. It was totally a movie moment…we looked at each other, kind of did a double take and were like….KRISTY?.....NATALIE? It was so weird. But we got an opportunity to catch up on things and talk a lot. It was great to talk to someone that I actually knew and not just people that I was meeting for the first time.
Planting mangroves.

So I hung out a lot with the group while they were here. I helped explain a lot of the situations in the community as far as health care and health problems go. I helped with some charlas and just general information. It was great because with the youth, we had just started out artisan work, and all these girls came and bought a ton of stuff. It was awesome and a real incentive to the youth group to keep working. Also with the delegation, I went to plant mangroves as part of a reforestation project, we went to the beach and had a small party at the end of their stay. They were a great group of talented, intelligent and inspiring women, so that was great for me to be around.


planting mangroves.


Next came Semana Santa(Holy Week)…the big week of vacation in the country. It was nice to have a break from teaching in the school, but I decided not to go anywhere because too many people travel that week. Instead I decided to stay in my community doing activities with the youth group and helping out at the restaurant/tourist center. With the youth group we continued making jewelery and I also planned a cultural event with the youth group as a fun activity in reward for their hard work in the last few months. I hosted Easter egg dying and an Easter egg hunt (thanks to the bitch club for sending me the materials). We dyed over 60 eggs; I hide over 60 plastic eggs filled with candy. The youth loved it. They were kind of out of control, but only out of excitement I think. haha

Youth group making artisan jewelery.

So during Semana Santa I ended up helping out in the restaurant a lot. We had some tourist come and stay in the hostels, others to take boat tours and others just to eat. In the weeks before Semana Santa we worked hard to get the place fixed up. We still didn’t get the showers completely done, but it was better than nothing. We got some good compliments on the place and hope the word gets out about us. On the Saturday of Holy Week, we were super busy and that night we hosted a dance and it was a hit. We had a lot of money and sold everything in the restaurant. I didn’t get much of a break this week, but on Easter Sunday I went to a water park with my boyfriend….yes I said boyfriend. (see the details below).

Painting Easter Eggs.



The week after Semana Santa I had some visitors. The couple I had Thanksgiving dinner with in San Salvador, Luke (the British) and Cynthia (the ex-Peace Corps volunteer) and their two-year-old daughter came to visit me. They stayed with my grandma (mi mama Nena), hung out, went to the beach, swam in the bay and went to help with my English class one afternoon. Their daughter got sick so they were only able to stay one night and I felt really bad about it, but they are really friendly people and it was good company.

Ok, so the boyfriend details. I recently started dating a guy from my community. We have been friends for months, and I finally just gave in and said yes; that I’d be his girlfriend. His name is Alfredo, and he is Tania’s (my best friend in my community) brother. He is a really sweet guy; goofy; intelligent; he sees me as an equal and not like some superior American.
With this relationship however came a lot of gossip in the community, a lot of nasty comments, and a lot of anxiety and grief on my part. I knew what ramifications having a relationship could have on my, my work in the community and the relationships I have with people in the community (we were warned a lot about this during training). Well apparently someone in the community disagreed with it so much that they felt it necessary to call my boss about it. So I had to talk to her about it, she came to my site to visit and it was just blown way out of proportion. The person that called her didn’t identify himself, so I have no idea who it was. But I have openly talked with the community leaders I work with about the situation and the fact that I now have a boyfriend, just so that they hear the truth coming out of my mouth instead of whatever the people feel like inventing (and trust me, they invent a lot of crazy shit to talk about). The situation has calmed down and I don’t think it will have as many negative effects, as I was afraid of.

IN MEMORY OF MY FRIEND, DAVID ALEXANDER RAMIREZ CASTILLO



Lastly, I had a very close friend of mine die two weeks ago. He was my friend and my host brother, from the family I lived with for the first four months in my community. His death was very shocking and very unexpected, and thus, all the more painful. David was left paralyzed from the waist down after a car accident over four years ago. He had withstood many hardships and pain, but always pushed on. Now in the states, living that kind of life is not impossible and is even aided by many accommodations such as handicap ramps, handicap bathroom stalls, handicap lifts on buses, etc. Those luxuries obviously do not exist here.
Well, as a result of him being handicap, he spent a lot of time in bed. He had a wheel chair but only used it when he was going to school, going into town or going to church. As a result of spending so much time in bed, he frequently had bedsores and two in particular had a hard time healing. Sometimes they would get infected and he would be sick with a high fever for a couple of days, but nothing I thought that was ever major.
Well, in early March this sores got infected and he got sick. When I went to visit him one day he had a really high fever and was pretty sick, but that was common so I didn’t think too much of it, but a little over a week later he was in the hospital. He couldn’t keep food down, the infection was getting worse and he had lost tons of weight.
He spent about 8 days in the hospital and his mom told me that he was not getting good medical attention. He was in a room with 40 other patients; they weren’t hooked up to monitors; he was not given an IV even though he couldn’t keep food down; they only checked on him every two hours; visiting days were only three days a week; a patient in the bed next to him just died one day and the staff didn’t even notice until later, when they came to do check ups. David wasn’t getting any better and he didn’t want to be there anymore, so they brought him home on a Monday. At this point his body was immune to all antibiotics, so the infection just took over his entire body. He had fiercely high fevers and still couldn’t really eat anything.
I went to see him on Thursday morning, but it was already too late. He could no longer talking, he could barely move his arms and his eyes. He had gone from being a healthy 26-year-old to a skeleton in the skin of my friend just struggling for breath. I have never seen anything like this in my entire life. I whispered into his ear that I was there and that we were all there for him, but I honestly don’t know if he heard me or recognized my voice because he was almost in a comatose state by then.
I went back in the early evening and he was worse. He could no longer move any part of his body and was not responding in any way whatsoever. His breathing was very labored and only worsened as the night went on. His mom told me that in the afternoon his eyes had turned a bright, bright red like fire and that tears fell from his eyes that were almost boiling hot she said. A lot of community members were coming and going to see him before he died. The room was constantly packed with people looking at him, touching him, praying over him and talking with the family. I stood by his bed watching his chest heave; up and down with each labored breath for about two hours. I eventually sat on the bed and held his hand while his sisters took turns rubbing his arms and rubbing a wet rag over his forehead, which was burning hot.
I stepped out of the room to catch some fresh air and to get a drink for about 30 minutes. When I reentered the room, he stopped breathing and his mother let out a huge cry and starting slapping his hand. I made my way to the edge of the bed as people said that he still had a slight pulse; when I reached down to feel, I didn’t feel anything; not the slightest beat. He died at 9:10pm on Thursday, April
One by one the family members entered to cry over the body. I sat there with a friend just stroking his arms and his face, trying to keep his eyes shut. After a while they asked everyone to leave so they could change him while they waited for the coffin to arrive to put him in the coffin.
That night we had the vela, which is like the funeral. They have a religious service with prayers, singing and sermons; afterwards they hand out coffee and pan dulce and most people stick around talking.

The burial was held the next afternoon. We had a procession through town and out to the graveyard; there were tons of people there. At the cemetery, people were allowed to view the body while the religious service was going on. Then, between 8 men, the coffin was slowly lowered into the hand-dug hole. People, one by one, threw a handful of dirt onto the coffin and with the closing prayer, a team of friends and family finished burying the coffin and then we arranged all the flowers on top.

Salvadoran burials are very beautiful but not any easier. David was a very close friend of mine and I miss him dearly. I have never been this close to death before; as in literally watching a loved one die, and that has been the most difficult part. I would always go to hang out with him in his room to just chat, play on the computer, watch soccer games. He was a very loving and caring father to his two daughters, Alison and Monica, whom I love dearly. He was such an inspiration and spark of hope in a world that can be so dark sometimes. Despite his handicap, he never ceased to dream. In a wheel chair he graduated from 9th grade and went on to get his high school diploma just last November. He was learning how to play the piano, was very active in his church and would talk about how he wanted to continue studying and go to college. I learned a lot from David and he touched my heart; I just hope I was able to do the same in the short amount of time that I knew him.