Introduction to El Salvador

Photo credit: Paul Bettings

It has been a long day, the twelfth hour of it just winding down now though it feels like I have put in 18 at least. In a good way. There is so much to see, and my enthusiasm for EATING ALL THE THINGS! is tempered by the volume of information I have also been consuming, some of it difficult to stomach.

El Salvador is by turns beautiful and devastating, and I have only been handed glimpses of it so far. Today I visited World Vision’s El Salvador Head Office where I met the Canadian team as well as a number of people from the communications, sponsorship and development teams. I do not remember everyone’s names, but most people hugged me and there were sandwiches so I felt very welcome.

Kind and capable people are helping.

This was to be my orientation day, and so I was given a fairly thorough lesson on the culture and climate of El Salvador, as well as an introduction to the work World Vision is doing here. I’ll get into that in the next post. For now, here are some quick facts about El Salvador.

Quick facts:

• El Salvador has a population of nearly 6,000,000 people
• 70% of the population live in densely populated urban areas
• 40.6% of the population is considered poor; 12.2% live in extreme poverty
• Minimum wage is $175 per month, though unemployment is high
• An apartment in the city of San Salvador costs $200 to $300 per month to rent
• Half of the population of El Salvador is under the age of 24
• El Salvador ranks 10 out of 173 countries in the UN’s 2012 World Risk Report; 88% of the nation’s territory is at risk for natural disaster, and 90% of its population lives in those at-risk areas
• Due to flooding, El Salvador lost 80% of its crops in 2011
• In 2011, El Salvador had one of the world’s highest per capita rates of homicide
• The wealthiest 10% earn 44 times what the bottom 10% earns

The next few days will bring these statistics into context; the main problems are gang violence, high unemployment, and lack of access to education and healthcare. Investors have been leaving the country as a result of the gang-related extortion and violence.

The disparity between the wealthy and the not is very apparent, and there is no “trickle down” effect. What this means for El Salvador’s most vulnerable population is being shown to me in pieces, and tomorrow we begin another part of the journey.

But this is not a hopeless place. Kind and capable people are helping, both on the ground and from afar. Tomorrow we will talk about that.