A few photos from the first three days I was in El Salvador:

(Santa Elena: the marketplace.)






Children at our third clinic (at Strong Tower).


One of our organizers, Dr. Hamon, feeling his oats! ...I guess this is one of my favorite photos because Herb was usually so professional, while it was the rest of us cutting up and being silly. Our days at the clinic were so unrelentingly, overwhelmingly fast and chaotic that our silliness was really a very useful stress reliever.



THIS was all the fashion among the age 40 and up women in El Salvador...wearing pink frilly aprons! I think they have a clothing law that requires you to don one of these the moment you become a grandmother!

And here is the gate to the hotel compound we spent Sunday through Thursday morning at. It is "Hotel Camp Real"...but, the first night as our bus was pulling up to it's darkened, tightly locked gates...as we took in our first glimpse of the razor-wired walls, our bus driver began singing "Welcome to Hotel California", only he replaced 'California' with 'Campreal'! Actually, it was a very nice, welcoming place to stay. There were geckos in the bathroom and only a trickle of cold water (no water heaters) in the showers but the food there was better than ANYWHERE else in El Salvador and there was just a cozy warm family atmosphere there.

(If you click on this photo of the hotel from the street in front (to enlarge it), you can see the razor wire lining the wall around the hotel grounds.)
The first night, our group were the only guests present in the entire hotel. The owners of the hotel are Christians and on other evenings there were various groups that met there to dine or just assemble in the courtyard (including the equivalent of Vacation Bible School one evening). There was a pool there, and a pool table, and there was always icey cold pine-apple pop (my favorite!) waiting in the refrigerators next to the open dining courtyard. We had all our meals at the long tables near the pool...a roof over our heads, but no outside wall. Everywhere we ate in El Salvador was like that...open...every meal an outdoor picnic! When I came home to the States, everything just felt so CLOSED UP. Like living in little boxes and never seeing the sun or feeling the breeze upon your face! When I was a kid, I remember seeing an old black and white movie ("The Mole People"?) about an entire civilization of people that lived in caverns underground who had lived out their entire lives in darkness, never seeing the sun. The first few days home, I felt like I was living that movie! And the setting we normally keep OUR airconditioner on seemed unreasonably COLD!



This photo was taken our last morning at Hotel Camp Real. For the first time, we met the woman who had cooked all our DELICIOUS meals. She was an EXCELLENT cook and provided ALL our meals (even cooking and sending to us lunch while we worked the various clinics). Bless her heart, she SPOILED us. I just thought all the food in El Salvador would be that delicious. Wrong! Next we went to probably the FANCIEST resort in the entire country...I mean really snazzy...breakfast and supper every evening at the edge of the ocean...beauty everywhere you gaze fell, far out of view of the razor wire and walls, HOT water BLASTED out of the showers...and I nearly starved to death those last four days! Nothing tasted good. I don't know if it was because they were trying to appease American tastes and just didn't know how to fix the things they tried fixing or if the food was just universally horrible at that resort. I tried ordering "native" menu items thinking that surely at least THOSE would be decent...wrong! There were never tortillas available, just pre-packaged little hot rolls every meal (like you would get with a school lunch). And the beef was so tough it almost broke your teeth. The last evening there, I ordered the fajitas...well, the "fixings" came, but NO TORTILLAS to wrap it in. We asked for tortillas and they just shook their head and said they were sorry, but they didn't have any! Go figure! We are in Central America and we can't get one lously little tortilla?...even with FAJITAS on the menu! Instead, they brought us out school lunch hot rolls again! How I longed to be back at dear, humble little Camp Real!
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