Santa Marta

Part 2/2

Recently Ricardo and one of the group members who I practice with at boxing showed me around Santa Marta, a warren of brick and cement with beautiful views and children underfoot. During the Olympics the community saw hundreds of thousands of tourists pass through, drawn by the community's link to Michael Jackson and a certain ghoulish interest in poverty tourism. Ricardo wasn't opposed to the tourism as such, but disliked the flagrant exploitation of the community as tour companies, with no understanding or knowledge of the community or its history, took foreigners through Santa Marta and told made-up stories and outright lies to tourists who didn't know any better. It would be one thing if it was community members themselves giving a tour and explaining the community's history, showing some of its culture, stopping to buy handicrafts or lunch within the community, but that wasn't how it happened. Money flowed in to tour companies and none into the communities they visited. 


We passed the sport center, taken over by the police with all the equipment locked inside and a recycling center with limited incentives to recycle, took the funicular up to the top, then worked our way down. There are no streets in the community, only stairs, so the railings leading to the funicular are lined with bikes locked and waiting for their owners to descend. The landings are decorated in murals, tiles and painted brick-things, a bright face to greet passersby. At the top they talked about trouble with youth, with kids on corners toting guns as big as they are, bound by poor education, no vision to the future, no opportunities, absent parents and police harassment. As a mass of young, untrained labor, they are disposable to drug traffickers - an easy way to avoid jail time since kids under 18 who aren't killed are sent to detention centers then released. One step into the system leads to constant suspicion and harassment by police, turning a wayward youth towards crime as the only viable option for respect and protection. Parents work long hours or drink or abandon their parental duties, then throw up their hands when their child misbehaves, leaving the raising of their children to the street. One of the little under-ten boys we passed is motherless now, his eighteen year-old mother dead as a result of her involvement in the drug trade. We look out over the city panorama, seeing the chasm, more figurative than literal, dividing the rich with their mansions and swimming pools from the poor stacked one on another struggling to survive. Those houses are literally within walking distance of each other, but they live in different worlds. 


We passed by an unused space, hooked up to solar panels, partially bricked, that was once a workout area for the sport group but now only houses a few old trophies. Partially opened doors give a glimpse into life here - sparse furnishings, too many children, TV entertainment and cramped quarters, but life moves and flows as it does everywhere. Boys in open areas fly kites high above the sea of houses and light endless poppers whose bangs echo off brick walls. It looks a bit like Valparaiso above Avenida Alemania, though less organized as each tenant builds willy nilly with brick and corrugated tin around a few more established block apartments. It doesn’t feel like Chile, though. It feels like El Salvador, or at least more like El Salvador than anywhere else I have been. It’s the mix of wariness and openness, of having little but sharing much, of religion and violence and normalcy. More people live in a five minute walking radius here than in all of La Suncuya, but somehow it’s not all that different. The stench of open drains wafts up in passing and trash and building materials are littered here and there. People greet each other in passing and the fronts of houses boast tiny convenience stores where people gather to share news. Cats lounge in the waning sunlight. Dog barks mingle with TV announcers and music turned up to maximum volume. Looking out on the plaza hosting a Michael Jackson statue and mosaic commemorating his “They Don’t Really Care About Us” music video, we hear samba rhythms (pagode maybe?) urging everyone to dance. That’s not so much like the El Salvador I know - too much evangelical christianity brands dancing as sinful, and the "acceptable" Salvadoran traditional dance isn’t the most riveting thing ever. Brazilians seem to be born dancing, and Brazilian music and dance are rich cultural treasures. 

Waiting to attend a little nighttime festival, we make our way down winding sets of stairs and through a shadowed corridor to spend a few hours chatting over sweet popcorn. We talk about travel and I explain a bit about MS-13 and Barrio 18, though my Portuguese doesn’t do my knowledge justice. Popcorn made, Ricardo’s back and cautioning against idealistic community development, pointing to the mountains of projects that sweep in then fail. NGOs, the government, even individuals come into these communities pushing their projects without thought to need or sustainability. They don’t ask the community what they want, and they don’t build on existing structures to improve efficiency or expand effectiveness. NGOs that function have no funding, and those with “paper projects” that never become a reality are professional fundraisers, pocketing the money and telling pretty lies. The big NGOs sweep in to offer a project and if the community doesn’t like it or isn’t organized enough to manage it, they move on to a different community that will accept. Ricardo counts the failed projects in Santa Marta, telling me in no uncertain terms that idealism won’t make change, and coming in with your own grand plans does no one any good. The community lives there and has to live with the consequences of the project, not you. You will move on and work on other things and live in other places and get paid. 


I can see, despite our constant critiques in class about avoiding cookie cutter approaches to development, why big NGOs offer projects they have experience in. I don't necessarily agree with the approach, but it’s hard to show progress to stakeholders, use your specific organizational expertise and customize every program to a specific community dynamic. I despise the waste and exploitation that can surround such organizations and programs, though. I saw too much problematic "development" in El Salvador to trust any organization based on their pretty pictures. Ricardo is someone I would happily work for - motivated, organized, compassionate and smart. At one point he worked for a while in a micro-insurance test project, then switched over to micro-credit business trainings. Now he works for city hall and teaches dance and arts and crafts, among other things, and has the sports group. He cares deeply about what happens to these kids and is disgusted by corruption, frustrated by complacency, clear-eyed enough to understand the injustice of the world and big-hearted enough to fight against it anyway. 

Nighttime sees us climbing the maze of cement stairs to the little festival, easy to find by ear as the music blasts, which is mostly a gathering of children waiting in line to jump on the trampoline or blasting poppers off the open area jutting out over the hill. A few adults and teens eat slices of cake or skewers of hot cheese or chorizo and drink caipirinhas or beer. It won’t fill for dancing until midnight at least. I wish I had taken pictures of the stairs and of these new friends, maybe of the little girl with the chubby face and the winter hat tied too tight under her chin on this warm night. I never take the photos I should to remember a place - I felt like I shouldn’t intrude on the lives here, but I'm glad they invited me in. The fascinating angles of buildings and stairs, the colors and the simple moments of unremarkable living are things to remember. Our conversations and experiences remind me why I got into this field in the first place and who I want to work with to effect positive change.