Rachel Dizard

It all started with an earthquake.  Just a tremor, actually, as my coworkers at the National Committee of Cooperative Women (NCCW), a grassroots human rights and community organizing group in El Salvador, corrected me multiple times the following day.  As we sat in our musty office, dipping sugar cookies into our instant coffees and expertly swatting at mosquitoes, I couldn't help but bombard them with questions. "How common it is for the ground to simply begin to move of its own accord around here? No, really. How common?"  Perhaps I was hoping that if I continued to ask, the response would eventually change.  But, no, they refused to lie to assuage my anxiety, and repeatedly told me that it was, indeed, quite ordinary.   

In the immediate aftermath of the first Salvadoran tremor I experienced during my nearly year-long stint volunteering as a World Partners Fellow through American Jewish World Service, I tucked the experience aside and didn't really think much further about it.  But as time passed, and my week filled with bus strikes, a non-potable water-related illness, a flood in my kitchen and then total loss of running water to my home, I began to ponder what it means to experience life, on a year-in and year-out basis, without any semblance of control over your surroundings. For that was what life appeared to be like for the vast majority of Salvadorans I encountered.

This lack of control manifested itself clearly in the lives of the women that The National Committee of Cooperative Women works hard to empower.  NCCW organizes impoverished women living in rural Salvadoran communities, teaching them principles of cooperative living and empowering them to exercise the most basic of their human rights.  We worked with women who live under the strict limitations imposed upon them—by poverty, illiteracy, a neoliberal government, their husbands, fathers, and even children.  Given that, we always started at the very beginning: a workshop about self-esteem. 

These workshops revealed to me that Salvadoran women's spheres of control are often discouragingly small. Working with them, I saw the tentacles of uncertainty and lack of autonomy constrict almost every aspect of their lives.  I attended countless self-esteem workshops where I observed women who were too intimidated and shy, sometimes too unaware of their own self-worth, to participate in an all-female discussion about valuing themselves.  

It is no real wonder why. During just one year in El Salvador, I witnessed the government fail to protect women and children from intra-familial violence.  I saw men "choose" to take life-threatening jobs as the sole income earners for their large families. I saw women so enslaved to their families that they never had a single friend outside of their homes.  I watched as bus strikes repeatedly caused men, women and children—from both desperation and hopeless lack of caution—to stuff themselves in the backs of pick-up trucks, or inside and outside of micro-buses, placing their lives in the hands of infamously reckless drivers.  Communities bravely protested an illiberal government that was attempting to heavily tax a water system the village residents spent years constructing themselves.  Armed muggings occurred regularly, in seemingly safe areas, often in broad daylight.  Young girls around me got pregnant, some for lack of access to contraceptives, some for lack of knowledge, and some for lack of hope.

I could be describing one of any number of countries in the Global South; these problems are not unique to El Salvador. The majority of the citizens of our world lack the ability to construct lives for themselves in which they are able to exert control, or even to sustain the illusion of control, over their environments and their destinies.  The poorer one is, it seems, the greater and more frequent the uncertainty. 

Although I had spent considerable time studying human rights and development, I had to live in El Salvador to begin to understand what it feels like to lack control.  Living in a region with poor infrastructure, plagued by crime, and rife with judicial and political corruption, I had my first very small taste of what daily life is actually like without those essential rights.

Spending time in the developing world is rarely a simple experience.  At times I worried that my longings for the relative comfort, ease and predictability of my life in the U.S. somehow made me complicit in the injustices taking place all around me, complicit in allowing the realities of life in El Salvador to exist.  I felt guilty that I didn't want to stay there forever, to dedicate my life to doing the arduous social justice work, on the ground, to which my coworkers commit their lives. And as I left, I felt guilty that I was exercising my right to opt out of that world, a right that all of the women I worked with for almost a year distinctly lacked; guilty that the lottery of birth endowed me with such opportunity while it simultaneously robbed so many others of anything comparable.   

But now, five months later, as I reflect  further about my experience and my visceral reactions to it while I was still in the field, I know that guilt will not be the enduring emotion I associate with my time there.  Instead, the experience has inspired me to exert what limited control I have to help make a difference. I have decided to go to law school this fall on a public interest law fellowship.  Much of the suffering and injustice of El Salvador is rooted in a desperately weak rule of law, and I'm eager to work on law and development issues in the future. 

I have come away from my time in El Salvador with AJWS with a level and a quality of commitment to human rights and social justice that, perhaps, would never have become so fully integrated into my identity had I never gone.  All that discomfort, fear, uncertainty—and even culpability—that stems from not knowing if the earth will be steady beneath my feet, is actually exactly what I needed in order to choose a career defending justice. 

 

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