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I went to El Salvador in January of this year to set up some technology for releif agencies there. Here’s my journal from the trip.

El Salvador

The smallest country in Central America, El Salvador is the only one that doesn’t have coastline of the Atlantic/Caribbean side. It’s about the size of Massachusetts and has a little over 6 Million people. The US has a long history with El Salvador, but like our history with all of Central America, it’s not a particularly proud one. When you think El Salvador, the phrase ‘death squad’ probably comes to mind. During the civil war that ended in 1992, the government and aristocracy employed gangs of vigilantes and armed them with American dollars. We supported the authoritarian government against the leftist FMLN. Most of El Salvador was caught in the middle, and untold thousands died. A powerful book that shows the conflict through the eyes of a poor woman is ‘One Day of Life‘, by Manlio Argueta. It was banned by the El Salvadoran government in the 80’s. I don’t think it is banned here any longer, which would be good, because I brought it with me.

El Salvador is rebuilding itself as we speak. There is much non-governmental organization (NGO) work going on here’road building, water system construction, home building, education, etc. We came down to help NGOs that are doing relief work use technology in that relief work. The technology we are going to help them use is called Pocket Survey.

What is Pocket Survey?

Pocket Survey is an application developed by Microsoft to allow field workers, case workers, and other NGO or non-profit staff members to gather information electronically in the field using a PDA (personal digital assistant) or desktop PC, and upload that information into a central database.

Designed to expedite data collection in the field, Pocket Survey allows NGOs to quickly assess field conditions in multiple locations. Data collected in the field can be easily sent to a central data repository where it can be analyzed with standard database tools. This functionality is designed to support relief efforts in areas of the world where Internet connectivity in not necessarily reliable.

Who is involved?

Microsoft Consulting Services, Corporate ‘ Pocket Survey was developed by Microsoft in an effort to create a tool for relief agencies. They have continued to improve the application, and will freely license it to any qualified nonprofits.

Aspiration ‘ The funder who has made the trip possible. Melissa Pailthorpe, Aspiration’s Executive Director, has provided resources and energy to spread the use of Pocket Survey. She continued that work by funding this project.

NPower ‘ NPower is a nonprofit technical assistance provider based in Seattle. Microsoft provided much of the funding and energy that brought NPower into existence. Since then, NPower has documented and helped direct the development of Pocket Survey to be more usable by nonprofits. Because of this experience, NPower was hired by Aspiration to run the exercise.

Save the Children International ‘ Nonprofit relief agency that worked with Microsoft on the original development of Pocket Survey

Save the Children El Salvador ‘ Host of this exercise, and a nonprofit that will learn to use Pocket Survey.
Save the Children Nicaragua ‘ A nonprofit that will learn to use Pocket Survey.
Samaritan’s Purse ‘ A nonprofit that will learn to use Pocket Survey.
CARE ‘ A nonprofit that will learn to use Pocket Survey.
Mercy Corps - A nonprofit that will learn to use Pocket Survey.
Microsoft El Salvador ‘ The Microsoft field office in El Salvador is interested in learning how to use and support Pocket Survey.

Why are we going?

NPower is going to El Salvador to do four things:
Deliver PDA hardware provided by Aspiration to relief agencies.
Install Pocket Survey on hardware provided by relief agencies.
Train relief agency technical staff in the administration of the Pocket Survey system.
Train relief agencies in the use of PS.

The Trip

1/8/03
Cefe Quesada and I left Seattle at 8:35 AM flew to Houston, then on to San Salvador. Had a bit of trouble going through security in Seattle with 2 laptops and 10 PDAs, but was not questioned extensively. Assume that customs leaving the US and entering SV will be tougher. I decided to carry on all my baggage so that loss of luggage would not derail the trip. We will see if that makes customs more difficult.

As we flew over El Salvador, the sun was setting. To the north, I could see a string of volcanoes, much like when flying into Seattle. One of the volcanoes, however, was active, and left a smudge of black smoke on the red sunset.

We landed and headed to customs where we paid $10 for a tourist visa. Our passports were stamped by El Salvadoran police (the customs officers were recently eliminated for budget reasons and their duties are now handled by the police.) From there we went to the stoplight. Each passenger walks up to a stoplight and pushes a button. The stoplight lights up red or green. If you come up green, you’re free to leave the airport. If red, you are directed to an area where your bags are searched. I came up red, of course, but the search revealed nothing surprising and I was released quickly.

Outside the airport we found David Fleisig of Save the Children El Salvador in a crowd of people waiting for disembarking passengers. He’s our host for the trip, and has been great. With him we waited 20 minutes for Alicia and Rui from Save the Children HQ in Connecticut. When they arrived, we made the 30 minute drive into town from the airport. The road from the airport is the newest in El Salvador, having been finished only a few weeks before. It was smooth and fast’the traffic situation is a bit chaotic, and you must be on your guard as a driver, that’s for sure. Along the way we encountered an accident where it appeared that a pedestrian had been hit and killed. David said they were probably hit by a car, but might have been shot, because El Salvador is second in the world for violent death (South Africa is #1). The personal security situation is the biggest problem, so we’ll be escorted most places we go, and given a contact at a trusted taxi company if we wish to travel alone.

Prior to the trip, Cefe and I had purchased calling cards that work from El Salvador to the US. We have yet to get these to work, however. I did use the hotel’s Internet connection to check email, but couldn’t plug my machine into the network, so I’ll have to wait till tomorrow to send out an update to friends and coworkers.

1/09/03

The paper this morning showed that protesters had taken the cathedral of San Salvador. They are protesting changes to the government employees’ health care plan. David said they have averaged about two protests a week for four months.

Masked protesters seize cathedral
SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador — About 20 masked protesters seized San Salvador’s main cathedral Wednesday during citywide demonstrations against plans for a free trade pact with the United States. Police surrounded the cathedral after the group stormed the building and ordered worshippers to leave.

David’s not too worried about things. Direct quote, ‘A civil war probably won’t break out tomorrow.’ The streets weren’t blocked, however, so we had a quick drive in to Save the Children’s offices. David’s the director of the housing project for STC El Salvador. They are building 1600 permanent homes for people displaced by a massive earthquake in January of 2002. Fully 25% of the population was made homeless in the earthquake’a truly staggering number. That equates to 1.5 M people. US government aid has built about 25,000 houses so far.

The STC offices are in two converted homes that are airy with nice courtyards. They have about 50 staff, half of which work in the housing group, which will sunset in the next year, I believe.

The weather has been beautiful’it isn’t too hot yet, but will probably get up into the 90s. Not a cloud in the sky, and pleasant, although I haven’t been outside since 9 AM.

I’m working now on building servers from the laptops left by the various agencies. Most are pretty low on the technology ladder, but I think Win2K will load on 3 of the 4.

David, Rodrigo and Elder from STC Nicaragua, Alicia and Rui from STC HQ, Cefe and I walked all of 100 feet to get lunch. There is a ‘restaurant’ on the same block of the STC offices. Just like the offices, the ‘restaurant’ is a converted house’apparently this used to be the ritzy part of town. There are 3 people who have put out some food on a few folding tables. There is roasted chicken, beef patties, and a kind of beef stew. To go with your choice of meat is salad, rice, tortillas, and steamed vegetables. To drink, there is juice or soda. And all for $2.

I spent all afternoon building Win2K machines. The laptops that were left for us to use were various shades of windows and needed to be upgraded. Meanwhile, Cefe worked at hacking the data export code to better report the results of Yes/no questions. He also started working on an Access report that will show the survey results for one person. This is a need for the folks here that currently isn’t a part of the software.

While we were working, the STC corporate folks and the STC Nicaragua folks went with David on a short tour of the city. It’s starting to heat up a bit in the office’I wouldn’t want to be outside right now, like we will be when we’re doing field work.

Kidnapping: All over Central America kidnapping occurs. In El Salvador, kidnapping is a well planned event, where the criminals stalk El Salvadorans who are wealthy (i.e. CEOs) and then nab them for ransom. David doesn’t know of any recent foreign national kidnappings in El Salvador.

Crime: Since the war, crime has skyrocketed. This is a trend often seen in post-war countries, a feeling that ‘during the war we felt safer’. In the civil war, the army or insurgents would summarily deal with people who broke the law. This deterrence by ruthless vigilantism made petty crime just about disappear. Created at the end of the war, the fledgling police force has been in charge of controlling crime. Here’s where an interesting US connection comes in. 10% of El Salvador’s population lives in the US. They fled the civil war, and many found them selves in cities like Houston and LA, trying to scrape by. The 80’s in the US were a time of increased gang activity, and the Salvadoran immigrants joined the trend, forming some of the most violent gangs in the country. When a Salvadoran gang member was convicted of a crime, they did time in US prisons because there is no extradition treaty with El Salvador. At the end of the sentence, they were deported. Once in El Salvador, they found the country ripe for gang activity, and established themselves. Currently, there are two major gangs in El Salvador that perpetrate much of the violent crime that plagues the country.

We worked until about 6:30, trying to get things ready for tomorrow afternoon, when we’ll begin training some of the IT people. A peer of David’s stopped by the office and they discussed local politicians, concrete contractors, concrete curing rates’all the minutia involved when you are trying to crank out 200 molded concrete houses for as little money as possible. It was interesting to hear some of the details of his job.

He drove us back to our hotel and we got into a traffic jam caused by a truck blocking one lane of a road. We spent about 20 minutes going about ‘ a mile. About 3 blocks from our hotel we passed a pupuseria’a store that sells pupusas, the ‘national food’ of El Salvador. Pupusas are corn or rice meal stuffed with beans and cheese. They are then fried on a griddle like a tortilla. We didn’t have time to stop on the way to the hotel, and unfortunately we don’t’ feel safe enough to walk three blocks at night. David said we could do it, as long as we only carried cash and didn’t take our passports’maybe later in the week we’ll feel easier about going out. Back at the hotel we ate dinner at the hotel restaurant, which has been quite good.

We also stopped at a drugstore so Cefe could pick up some Amoxicillin. He didn’t have a prescription, but that’s not a problem in El Salvador, where if you tell them the milligrams and the number of pills, they’ll sell it to you over the counter. He got 10 pills for $5.50. Guarding the store was a 20 year old man with a shotgun. He just stood, leaning on the counter, with the gun over his shoulder. That is standard security for businesses in El Salvador. David says that these kinds of places still get robbed, and that usually there is a big shoot out where the clerk, the guard and a few bystanders are shot. He also thinks that since the man only make about $100/month as a security guard, many of the robberies may be set up by the guards themselves.

1/10/03

I woke up at 6:30 and as I was getting dressed I heard what I would venture were gunshots. I haven’t heard many gun shots in my life, but it wasn’t a backfire or fireworks. There were two consecutive pops, then a slight pause and another pop. About 20 seconds later, a fourth pop. It seems to me that 7 AM is a strange time for gunfire anywhere in the world, but who knows.

On the way to the office we stopped for pupusas. They are generally served for breakfast and dinner, but not for lunch. And they are good. We bought them on a street corner. A woman set up a folding table and a propane griddle. I am sure there is no health department here’there hardly is one in the US’but we haven’t gotten sick yet. Cefe and I shied away from the uncooked tomato sauce, though.

Today we’re going to start training the IT folks and program leaders on Pocket Survey. The training is going to be relatively informal’most things are down here. We finished installing 5 servers today. All had to be reformatted, except the server brought by Rodrigo from Nicaragua’it was installed with Pocket Survey when Save the Children and Microsoft did a trial of the software there over a year ago.

The groups started showing up at 1 PM. We were frantically finishing up our installations. There were 2 people from STC El Salvador, 2 from STC corporate, 2 from STC Nicaragua, 1 from Mercy Corps, 2 from CARE, 3 from Samaritan’s purse. The room was very crowded (14 of us in all) and started to get warm after about an hour. About 7 of the 14 were fluent English speakers, 4 were very good at following an English conversation, and 3 had few English skills. We decided that I would give the training in English, speak slowly, and try to keep the language as simple as possible when talking about a web application that runs on a PDA with a SQL database. While Cefe is fluent in Spanish, the combination of his inexperience with Pocket Survey, and the difficulty of speaking technically in a foreign language made an English training the best option. I emphasized at the beginning that they should interrupt me for clarification or questions at any time, and people did.

For a group that had never even used a PDA before, everyone caught on very well. We started with the basics of the PDA, and then got into what Pocket Survey is, and how it would be used to do what they do. The first sign for me that things were going well was when people started to ask how Pocket Survey could help them do their work. How could it help with tracking materials shipped to building sites? Could it handle digital signatures? What about a GPS? The first step to getting nonprofits to use technology in their mission is to get them to realize it can be a tool to help solve their daily work needs.

By the end of the training, each group had build the Pocket Survey application onto a PDA, had created questions, understood how the translation features worked, and knew the benefit of sharing surveys between organizations.

David gave us a ride home. On the way we picked up his wife at work. She works downtown near the government buildings’not a real nice part of town. He showed us the holes in the street where protestors burned tires. He tells us some great legal quirks of El Salvador:

–Congressmen can’t be arrested. They can only be charged with a crime if the Congress votes that there is enough evidence to move forward.

–If you hurt someone, you can be charged in criminal court. If you kill them, or give them an injury that heals in less than 21 days, you can reach a financial settlement with the individual (or their families in case of death) and avoid criminal court.

An ex-Vice President of the country was pulled over for drunk driving by the police. The VP’s bodyguards got out of the car and informed the police that they had stopped the VP. The police realized their work was done, as the VP cannot be arrested. Before they could leave, however, the drunken VP grabbed a gun, leapt out of the car and shot and killed 3 police officers before his own bodyguards subdued him. Backup was called for and the VP was taken into custody, but released 45 minutes later, because he was the VP. Luckily one of the police officers had called a buddy with a video camera and images of the drunken VP were captured for posterity.

The second law came about when a member of one of the 14 ruling families of El Salvador was driving to his lake house and ran over 5 bicyclists, killing them all. He was arrested and it looked like he was going to go to jail for a long time. The families of the deceased said, ‘Great, he’s going to jail, and we’re still poor.’ So a law was written that basically said criminal proceedings could be avoided if there was an appropriate transfer of wealth.

We ventured out on our own tonight, if it was only 100 meters to the Super Selector grocery store. We realized after our tour that we’re in a pretty nice part of town. The most dangerous part of our journey was crossing the street.

10/11/03

This morning David picked up Rui, Alicia, and me for a trip to the ‘campo’ or countryside. David had a meeting with the town council of one of the municipalities where STC is building houses. On the way to el campo, we passed though a ‘free trade zone’ or maquilas. Maquilas are factories for non-El Salvadoran companies like the Gap, Nestle, etc. AKA sweatshops, these maquilas serve as a cheap way for a company to assemble their goods. Here are some stats:

‘ Most workers at maquilas are paid minimum wage’in El Salvador, that’s $140/month.
‘ Maquilas in El Salvador employ 200,000 women
‘ The President of El Salvador says he wants El Salvador to become the Taiwan of the Americas.
‘ Corporations can bring materials into a maquila, create a product, and send that product on to another country without paying any taxes to El Salvador.

Personally, I have always thought that globalization with ‘free trade’ is a bad idea. I think it is a system that will drive wages down for workers everywhere. With highly mobile capital, factories can always move to another country where the minimum wage is lower. It’s a price war between labor pools, where those who are willing to work for the least amount get the jobs. Coming to El Salvador hasn’t changed my thoughts on where globalization is taking us, but it has made me realize that it does provide jobs for people here. The country is so poor that anything can be seen as an improvement.

We arrived at our meeting with the mayor a bit early and drove around the town a bit. We saw the town church, or what’s left of it’it was destroyed in the earthquake. David told a story about the earthquake. He was going to have a town meeting in a village to discuss the housing project. The meeting was supposed to be in the church as it was the largest building in town, but no one could find the keys. Because they couldn’t get into the church, the meeting was held in the church yard. During the meeting, the earthquake hit, and the roof of the church collapsed’no one was hurt because they couldn’t find the keys.

In the town we went to, it seems this mayor has been difficult to work with. STC goes into a community and performs socio economic studies to determine who is eligible. The mayor has compiled her own list, and it doesn’t match the STC list. It does match the list of supporters of her political party, ARENA. ARENA is the ruling party in the government, and the same party that was in charge during the brutal civil war. ARENA is the party that received military funding from the US to the tune of $1 million dollars a day for 12 years. During the civil war, they were opposed by FMLN, or La Frente, the party of the poor, in the socialist revolutionary tradition of Castro, Ortega, and Guevara. The mayor’s district has many former guerillas and FMLN members, and she would like to deprive them of houses. She is also facing reelection in March and her council members have been caught promising houses for people who agree to vote for her. All in all, she is treating the project like it is hers to control, as if STC worked for her.

We sat in on a 2 hour meeting with the city council and the mayor, during which we saw David’s impressive diplomatic skills. It’s really too bad that she is trying to politicize the gift of houses, when STC is just trying to give houses to people who need them.

We saw the houses they are building and they’re really amazing. A house is built in 14 days. It costs, including all overhead and support staff salaries, only $3,700. The house is about 400 square feet, and will not fall in an earthquake. The houses are concrete, and poured in place in a form. Once the concrete is poured, the form can be taken down in 4 hours, because the concrete cures that quickly. Then a roof is put on the house, a concrete floor is poured, doors and windows are put in, and the inside is painted. A latrine is built, and an outdoor washing station called a ‘pilla’ is set up to handle the running water for the house. STC has a number of houses going at once, but the rate limiter right now is the existence of only one form for pouring the house. Still, they are cranking out houses’about 50 a month.

In el campo near the houses that are being built are some facilities that STC built last year with money from the Gates Foundation. We saw a health clinic that has a doctor on site 5 days a week. We also saw an early childhood education center where volunteers from the community take care of kids whose parents go to work. Gates is one of our funders back in Seattle, and it was neat to see the work they made possible in El Salvador.

Seeing this relief work is truly energizing. In a country that has little money, a little money can make a huge difference. When a normal salary is $100/month, you can change lives without spending $1 Million.

After our tour of el campo, we headed back to San Salvador’after a short errand. The architect of the STC housing project is a dog trainer. He has 2 rotweilers and 3 German shepards. Apparently, he heard from someone of someone else who was giving away 2 Dobermans and cocker spaniel puppy. David was interested in the cocker spaniel puppy, so we drove to the house that was giving away the dogs. During the process, David said something to the effect of, ‘I bet this dog isn’t even close to a cocker spaniel.’ Well, he was right. It turned out the puppy wasn’t a cocker spaniel and the Dobermans were badly malnourished.

That afternoon, I played basketball with Elder and Rodrigo. We got the basketball for free when we bought a large pizza at Domino’s. The Nicaraguans showed me a new basketball game, and we had a good time, even though we were all out of shape.

Diner was at Rinconcita Cubana, a tiny Cuban restaurant run by an anti-Castro Cuban woman. The walls of her restaurant were covered with Cuba posters and anti-Castro propaganda. The food was amazing! Most of us had pork, fried plantains, and Moros y Christianos. Moros y Christianos is rice and beans’a comparison of the skin colors of Muslims and Christians to black beans and white rice. This was by far the best meal of the trip. Aspiration picked up the tab, including the mohitos and daiquiris, a whopping $80 for 7 people.

1/12/03

El Salvador is a heavily Catholic country, so we decided to make Sunday truly a day of rest’we went to the beach. The Architect (as everyone calls him) has a beach house about an hour from San Salvador. He graciously let us all use it for the day. It’s a typical set up for a San Salvadoran who can afford it. The house is on the beach’out the front gate is the high tide mark. The house is painted concrete block with electricity and plumbing, about 700 square feet. Adjacent to the house is a large covered patio with 4 large hammocks. Between the patio and the house is a small swimming pool that is filled when needed from a freshwater well. The yard’about a half acre’is dotted with coconut palms.

It was about 90 degrees, with a 10 mile per hour breeze off the ocean. In the shade of the palm trees or the patio, the temperature was perfect. The beach was fine sand without a trace of larger rocks. The waves were 3-5 feet, breaking about 40 feet out a gradual beach. All in all, it was paradise. Oh, and the Architect bought the property for $3,000 10 years ago.

His $3,000 property has appreciated to $30,000 probably. This is on the beach, not near it, and only 1 hour from downtown. As I’ve mentioned before, El Salvador isn’t the safest country in the world. If you have a weekend house, you might think you’d be worried about it getting broken into when you’re not there. The solution to that problem is to build a small house for a family to live in. They live in the house, watch the property, and get about $100/month salary.

There’s not much to say about what we did at the beach house, but it involved playing in the waves, sitting in hammocks, and playing in the pool. We gave our lunch leftovers to the family’s malnourished dog’I think we made her month. The dogs in El Salvador are generally malnourished mutts that are beaten by their owners. They behave more like squirrels that want some of your food’sneaking around the perimeter, not daring to get close for fear of getting smacked. It’s pretty sad. As David said when he dies, he wouldn’t want to come back as a dog in El Salvador.

We learned a little bit about the beneficial tax status of an American expatriate working in El Salvador. You don’t pay any taxes in the US, other than social security, if you aren’t in the country for more than ~30 days a year. In El Salvador you don’t pay any taxes either. That means it nearly all take home pay, which won’t make you rich, but allows a pretty comfortable lifestyle.

After a rough day, we headed back to town where I fell asleep trying to work. The waves and sun took it out of me. Dinner that night was at Los Ranchos, a steak place in the nice part of town. After a number of days here, we’re starting to realize when things are safe and when they are not. After dinner we felt comfortable walking down the hill to catch a cab on a main street. I wouldn’t want to do it on my own, but going out as a group in the right part of town isn’t unsafe. The country is a dangerous one, but everyone still goes about their lives, they just do it with razor wire and iron gates on their houses.

Cefe and I were both up till about 1:30 working on different Pocket Survey issues. We’re trying to solve a feature problem that would make the tool much more valuable to the NGOs that use it. I won’t go into the details, but we are going to rearrange our schedule to do more work on that feature.

1/13/03

Today was another training for the NGOs. We spent most of the morning going over the use of the PDA, and then spent the afternoon on Pocket Survey specific training. There are no two ways about it, training is tiring. Some people are better trainers than others, but I think for everyone, it is exhausting. The people who came for the training did very well again. We spent a lot of time playing with the PDA because even more than in the US, the PDA is new technology down here. Everyone stayed with the training, and seemed to be grasping the concepts and was interested in the PDA. After a quick $1.80 lunch next door, we started working on Pocket Survey. When it came time to talk about exporting data from the system, I handed over to Cefe, because the concepts were more difficult, and we thought his Spanish might be better than my English. Also, he had been working on the export features fixing some bugs.

Cefe learned that he’s not fluent in technical Spanish. Talking about databases and computers takes a different set of vocabulary than the one needed for daily life. He did a great job, and asked a few times, ‘Como se dice ‘row headers’?’

Rui and Alicia are leaving tomorrow, so we all went out for dinner to a Mexican restaurant called ‘Tacos y Quecas’. We all know what tacos are. A queca is a lot like a taco, but with lots of melted cheese. Turns out this restaurant was all about cheese. The best dish I saw was made this way:

1. Put a half pound of grated cheese on a hot griddle.
2. As it bubbles, form it into a rectangle with a large putty knife.
3. When it has fried enough to hold together, flip it over.
4. When it’s brown on both sides, roll it up like a scroll.
5. Serve warm.

That’s right, a big roll of fried cheese. Being from Wisconsin, I immediately felt at home. Another thing about the restaurant that made me feel like I was in Wisconsin was the fact that most people eating there were pretty white. Like all of the Americas, there were Indians (Indios) here before the white people came. In most of Central America, the Spanish produced offspring with the Indios. These people are called mestizos, and they have Indio and Spanish features, and are varying shades of brown. Apparently, there were many Spanish families that never intermarried with Indios or mestizos, and they still look much like their Spanish ancestors. There are also a number of Germans who decided to move here after World War II. The whites tend to be on the wealthy end of the economic spectrum (surprise) and this restaurant was a nice part of town. Cefe said he felt like a minority again!

After a full day of teaching people (and dealing with the language barrier as well) I was ready for some sleep, so we said our goodbyes to Rui and Alicia and went to bed.

1/14/03

It is breakfast time in El Salvador’you’ve got to stop for pupusas. $0.45 later, we’re eating breakfast and waiting for the trainees to show up so we can go out into the field. Today was scheduled as a field day’practice using Pocket Survey on actual beneficiaries of houses in the Save The Children housing program. Training in the office is one thing, but interviewing very poor El Salvadorans with a handheld computer is completely different.

The plan was to drive the 1 hour to the field location (San Pedro Purulapan), have everyone interview 3-4 people, then drive back to the office to upload the data. Once the data was in the system, we were going to talk about the data and how to use it. El Salvador had a different plan for us that day, one that involved sitting in traffic for 5 hours.

First of all, there was construction. We’d driven through it on Saturday, and there wasn’t much of a delay. The affected area was only 400 yards’two lanes each direction went down to 1 each direction. Not necessarily a recipe for disaster, you might think. But as David said, ‘never underestimate the Salvadoran’s ability to create lanes of traffic.’ As the two lanes became one, people got sick of waiting in the backup. You might think they would start driving on the shoulder, but here there was no shoulder, only a ditch separating the lane of blacktop from the newly excavated area where the new highway would go. That newly excavated area looked like a construction zone to me, but in the eyes of a Salvadoran, that’s prime driving.

Our one lane eastbound became 7 lanes. One on blacktop, and 7 across the ditch and construction zone. Those 7 lanes didn’t move very fast, however, because only 200 yards ahead the construction zone went away, and all 7 lanes had to merge into 1 to get between some buildings. It was chaos, albeit a slow moving one. Everyone inching in to the left, toward the one lane of blacktop. We never left the blacktop, and spent the next hour trying to hold our ground, and not let people in front of us. All the traffic inching left forced the traffic in the one good eastbound lane to drift a little left. We all got close and closer to the yellow divider, narrowing the width of the one good westbound lane. It was still passable to most traffic, but a large bus got a little to close to the ditch and got stuck. So now the westbound lane is completely blocked by a bus hung up in the ditch. This does not bode well for the Pocket Survey exercise.

As the bus struggled to free itself, the westbound lane in front of it emptied of traffic. Westbound cars were slowly moving out of the traffic jam, and the bus was acting as a giant cork in the bottle of traffic behind it. And this is the point where I realized that in El Salvador, all pavement is fair game for driving. Eastbound traffic began to use the westbound lane. That’s right, and when the bus finally freed itself from the ditch, it was head to head with an eastbound truck.

Believe it or not, we eventually got through the traffic. I understood the veracity of the El Salvadoran saying, ‘In El Salvador your brakes last 100,000 miles, but your horn goes out after 20,000.

When we got to the field, we found the rest of our caravan waiting for us. They apparently had been some of the first cars to ditch the road for the construction area, made a little detour through a gas station, and made it to the field area a full hour before we did. Serves us right for following the rules.

We split up and started interviewing people. Everyone we talked to either had already gotten a house from STC or was in the process’they were all willing to talk to us because we were from STC. In general, there were few men around; I guess they were at work, so we talked to women. Mothers and grandmothers, with their kids and grandkids all over the place. I took a number of pictures of the kids and the survey taking process. The parents weren’t that excited about getting asked questions and having their pictures taken, but the kids loved it. My plan is to print out some of the pictures I took of the kids, laminate them, and send them to the families. Everyone loves pictures of their kids.

At the second house we visited, the grandmother wouldn’t look at Rodrigo when he was asking her questions. He was very cordial, and said that a lot of people have that reaction when he’s out in the field. You have to spend time talking to them and assuaging their fears’they are often afraid you are going to take their house or children away. These people have very little security in their lives. They often don’t have legal title to their land, and live in fear of losing the little they have.

We left the second house and headed back to the cars to meet up with the group. Halfway there, we saw three little kids running up the road to us. Elder had left his water bottle at the house, and the kids were bringing it to him. They are good people, they just happen to be poor.

We had to start back because we were worried that traffic might be pretty nasty. Cefe and I rode with Matt on the way back’he was the guy who went off-roading to save an hour on the way out to the field. When we got to the traffic jam, we sat for about 15 minutes. I looked over to the shoulder and saw a Salvadoran kid and he waved to me, and pointed out another way to go. Matt, always ready for an unorthodox route, shimmed his way across traffic to get into the construction zone. We went up about 50 yards and got onto the city streets of the small town of San Martin, adjacent to the construction area. One of the problems with traffic in El Salvador is that there is not an abundance of routes from one place to another. And it seems that many people knew of this alternate route, because after about 5 blocks of clear sailing, we were at the end of a line of cars that stretched as far as we could see.

Luckily Matt has been in El Salvador for a few years and doesn’t have issues with things like dotted lines and road signs. He moved into the lane of oncoming traffic, which was empty at the time, and headed off at full speed through town, in the wrong lane. You can’t help but get a little nauseas when you’re flying through a small town on the wrong side of the road. But we passed about 400 cars before we had to force our way back into the right lane. We even got whistled at by a cop!

After another hour or so waiting in traffic, we made it back to the office and everyone uploaded their data and then headed home in a traffic induced coma.

12/15/03

Cefe spent the morning working with David on his survey and on an Access front end that David could use after we were gone. I worked on adding functionality to the download/upload page. STC Nicaragua was going to take a 100 question baseline survey across the whole country. They were concerned that if they had to download the data from all those surveys, the PDA would either become very slow, or fill up the memory and become unusable. Their concerns were warranted, I thought, so I came up with a couple ways for the data to be cleared from the PDA. Elder and Rodrigo acted as my testers, putting the new functionality through its paces.

We broke for lunch and went to the famous El Salvadoran hot spot, Tony Roma’s. The traditional ‘Riblets’ were amazing, as was the French fries. OK, sorry about the sarcasm. We avoided American chains for most of our stay, but David wanted to go, so who are we to complain?

After lunch David gave his famous ‘morbidity tour’, where he drove us around the city pointing out where atrocities had occurred. The sites included:

‘ Former disco where FMLN killed 7 marines with machine gun fire and bomb.
‘ Former National Guard headquarters, now kindergarten, where bones were found under floor.
‘ Church where Archbishop Oscar Romero was killed by the army during mass.
‘ Cathedral where at Romero’s funeral, the military opened fire on attendees outside the cathedral. People were trampled to death as they all tried to get inside the church and away from the gunfire.

‘ Spot where two nuns were raped and murdered. The people responsible currently live in Miami. A US court just threw out the final attempt to sue them in criminal court.

‘ Spot where the FMLN bombed the Minister of Interior’s car killing him and his family.
‘ Multiple spots where FMLN bombed power poles, keeping some areas of San Salvador without power for most of the war.

When the peace accord was signed in 1/92, the Guarda Nacional was dissolved. Everyone above captain was banned from service in the new military. A new police force was created with 25% FMLN membership, and 25% National Guard membership, and a general amnesty was called. This was done in attempt to appear legitimate to both sides in the conflict. It has worked. Since ‘92, there have been no political assassinations. Hard to believe in a country that was so violent, and continues to be violent.

That night was the last night for Elder and Rodrigo, the two IT guys from Nicaragua. They were really fun to hang out with over the week. We all went out for Italian’what else are you going to do for a goodbye dinner in El Salvador? The Italian food was as good as you could expect for a country where you could either spend a fortune importing Italian ingredients, or make do with the meats and cheeses you can get at the local market. I had a pizza with prosciutto that looked suspiciously like Oscar Meyer ham slices. But we still had a good time, and over dinner we talked a lot about the future of Pocket Survey. We got some good input from everyone on what they think is necessary for Pocket Survey to become truly useable for their organizations. Being on the ground there for a week really helped us to see the gaps between what the tool currently is, and what functions these groups would need.

1/16/03

As we were waiting in the lobby this morning, there was a 4.4 earthquake. It would be a better story if we felt it, but we didn’t. After the last big earthquake here, they had aftershocks nearly every day for months’some 3000 aftershocks, some over 5 in size. It really freaked people out to have earthquakes every day.

Today was our last day for getting stuff ready to hand off to groups. The plan was for everyone to come in sometime on Friday and pick up their servers, PDAs, and documentation. Thursday was wrap up day, the day for getting everything working, the day for buttoning things down. So of course it was the day where everything went wrong.

But it didn’t start that way. Cefe and I made a number of code changes that fixed bugs and made Pocket Survey easier to use. We were cruising along and even though we knew we would be busy for the rest of day, we we’re feeling good. So good that after a quick lunch next door, we went to the Princess Hotel in a failed attempt to buy Cefe some cigars, and stopped at the Artisan Market so I could pick up some goodies for people at home. David married a Salvadoran from a small village so he knew some people who had a stand in the market. He got us some screaming deals.

When we got back to the office, we did some more development, and then integrated all our changes only to find that the PDAs didn’t work. We didn’t know what the problem was, and at that point we were a bit burned out from over a week of working pretty hard. I personally couldn’t think very well at that point. So we tried to fix the problem for the next 3 hours before we had to head to the hotel. Back at the hotel we spent another 3 hours on it and finally figured out the problem, and that some of Cefe’s fixes wouldn’t make it into the final release. But it worked, and since we were handing over the servers and PDAs first thing in the morning, that was good enough.

That afternoon and evening was not very fun as my worst fears stared me in the face: I was most worried that at the end of the trip we wouldn’t leave the groups with working systems. Very stressful. But by the next day, I was OK. Whew.

1/17/03

We set up bundles for the agencies to pick up: their server, 2 PDAs, cradles, AC adapters, documentation, Pocket Survey CD, and getting started booklet. At 10AM, Microsoft El Salvador came to meet with us as well as a reporter from El Diario, one of the major dailies in San Salvador. The meeting was pretty standard PR for a project like this. Nothing revelatory and a lot of background on the groups involved.

We headed to lunch and then to the Hotel Princess for Cefe’s cigars. He bought 6 and he and I signed up for massages later that night. The Hotel Princess is a colonial style hotel: leather, dark wood, stone lobby, etc. We felt a bit strange in there because it is so unlike most of El Salvador, but we also felt comfortable there’ah, the dichotomy of being American.

We went back to the office where Cefe worked with David on his Access front end, and I did a bunch of administrative stuff on the project. It was the day before David’s birthday, so they had pizza and a cake for him, and he thanked us and presented us with 2 CDs from the Fuerza Band, one of El Salvador’s most popular bands. 3 of the 4 front men from the band happened to work for David, so we got their autographs on the CDs.

When it was time for me to leave for my massage, Cefe was still working on the Access front end, so I went to the Hotel by myself. The massage was decent, and in the US I would have been disappointed, but in El Salvador, it was pretty good. Cefe had his massage after mine, so I waited for him in Churchill’s, the hotel bar. It was me and a bunch of cigar smoking American and Latin American businessmen. Again, it was pretty strange.

But it was happy hour, so I had a drink, and after a while I decided to support Fidel Castro’s economy for the first time in my life and ordered a Cohiba, the finest of the Cuban cigars. I’m not a smoker, and I nearly killed myself a few times, but it’s a smell from my childhood, so I enjoyed myself. When Cefe came down, he got a cigar as well. We had to hurry to get a cab back to the hotel so we could be picked up by David for dinner at his place.

David lives in an amazing house that is paid for by Save The Children. It’s a two story place with a courtyard in the back’a really nice place. We ate Chinese food and thanked him for everything he’d done for us. He was a truly amazing host.

Cefe, true to form, was developing on the Access front end at the dinner table. We left it all working and headed back to the hotel for a short night’s sleep and a ride to the airport at 5:30 AM.

All in all, it was an amazing trip. We were exposed to so much: El Salvador, International Relief, Pocket Survey, great food, great people. I’d go back to El Salvador’it’s a bit rough around the edges, but beautiful. I’d love to go back and help out in relief efforts. I’d also love to go back to the beach, and maybe get up into the mountains. We’ll see if that ever happens. But even if I never get back, I feel like I learned so much on the trip, and we got to help out some people who are doing really good work. It was a great experience and I’ll never forget it.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 18th, 2003 at 7:28 am and is filed under Technology. Both comments and pings are currently closed.