Cinquera

Last weekend I hopped a bus with Raquel and her mom and headed an hour outside Suchitoto to Cinquera.  This village was another guerrilla strong-hold during the war.  We hiked through the forest that engulfs the little town.

This small church is the center of town.  The two bomb shells in front are two of many found in that area as the Salvadoran and US Governments dropped them from the air almost daily during the war.  These bomb shells are now church bells.

A few years ago, the right wing party came into power and decided to whitewash the mural on the church wall that remembers those who fought for the rights of the poor during the war.  The town's people rang the bells and met at the church the hour the government came to whitewash the walls.  They rang these church bells and stood in front of the wall until the people left.  Then, the village contacted El Salvador's Ministry of Culture and they proposed reasons why the mural must remain in place.  The village people ultimately won the fight.

I love how people just paint the exterior walls of their houses here.  Some paint advertisements for food or cell phone companies others paint pictures for fun and others make statements.  This house painted Che Guevara and Oscar Romero.

This is a typical house in Cinquera, surrounded by greenery, set in the hills.

We spent the afternoon walking the well-maintained trails and retracing guerrilla steps.

I love the greenery here.  It is like the Jungle Book!

We stopped in an area where the guerrillas cooked.  When the war first began, people died every time soldiers would try to cook food because the planes would see the smoke and drop bombs directly on point.  They then adopted a cooking style that American soldiers used in Vietnam.  They created stoves with pipes that sent smoke into the side of a hill.  This way, the airplanes could not see the smoke and the soldiers could enjoy cooked food.

This is a pila the guerrillas used to collect water and to wash.  Every house here in El Salvador has a pila.  

Our pila in Rosa's house is not overgrown like this one and it is bigger.  When standing next to ours, it reaches my belly.  Ours has a faucet and a flat, horizontal part beside the water where we can scrub our clothing and cut our vegetables.  But the structure is basically the same, a huge rectangular concrete area for water.


We use our pila daily to wash:

• Clothing
• Food
• Dishes
• Our Teeth
• Hands
• Many other things

Pila negatives:

• Sometimes insect eggs hatch inside.  We just add a little bleach until we have time to wash the whole pila...
• Mosquito's love the water as much as we do
• Sometimes we accidentally drop things in it but we can't fetch them because we want to keep the water as clean as possible.
• If something dirty drops in, we need to drain the whole pila and spend the afternoon inside it scrubbing.

Pila positive:

•  When the water goes off (fairly often), we still have water in the pila!