El Salvador

So I didn’t end up seeing much of El Salvador besides the airport, hotel, UN offices and 2 restaurants, one of which was a stone house built on top of a mountain looking down on San Salvador; Central America’s largest city. Everything was lit up at night and the whole city ran down the mountains like molten lava. Of course everyone in San Salvador thought I was Spanish and one guy told me it was because I look like a Mayan princess. Erm, I don’t really know what Mayan princesses look like but I know that they were sacrificed to the volcanoes so either way their lifespan was limited.

Oh yeah and the other weird-but-normal thing was when we were in front of the UN building buying a sandwich with a couple of colleagues, and an open pick up truck drove up, parked, and two guys wearing bullet proof vests jumped out of the back (from sitting on the rims) with submachine guns with the safeties off, according to my colleague, went into the store next door, came out five minutes later without looking anyone in the face, and roared off. El Salvador has the highest homicide rate in the world, a direct result of the large amount of small arms in the country due to the civil war that ended years ago. Ah, Sri Lanka- this is your fate.

I learnt a lot during the trip about housing the poor in Latin America; the challenges faced in post-conflict Latin American countries like El Salvador and Colombia and Nicaragua where oligarchs rule the regime and the poor are left to the mercy of guerrilla factions that inevitably end up devouring their young. I learnt too about the United Nations and the infighting that goes on with interagency turf wars, budget conflicts and staff egos clashing; national stakeholders (El Salvador just had a historic change in government and the whole Cabinet is going to be thrown out, but our housing deal was inked with them and now it looks like we will have to start at scratch; and what happens when donor-driven initiatives are enforced in a top down fashion onto the poor. Glory for all.

Adventureland

Every now and then, there is a movie that perfectly captures the mood of your moment. Not in a general, zeitgeist, kind of way, but the mood of the moment that your life is in. Adventureland is such a movie; a coming-of-age story of a young man who still believes in love (and not sex), and who still believes that life is an epic adventure waiting to be lived; the large ambitions, and not the small ones, not the minimalist outlook for him. And yet, at this point, he is still a creature of thought, and not one of action. The movie explores this hibernatory phrase, of the things that happen when dreams are broken, and patched back together again, oddly shaped, but somehow stronger than before. And of course, the culmination of the movie happens with the young hero wending his way to New York city, to solve the essential problem of himself. And to start again.