[Inez] Getting famous!

I follow a few El Salvador-related blogs. I'm more likely keep up with blogs than one of the Salvadoran newspapers, so it's a good way for me to keep in touch with Salvador news and daily life when I'm not there. 


One of the blogs I follow is El Salvador from the Inside. It's written by a woman from the US who married a Salvadoran man and moved to El Salvador. She shares stories about her experiences as a "gringa in El Salvador" and like any transplant, is struck by things that may seem commonplace for a native. I appreciate this perspective, since of course I'm a "gringa in El Salvador" every time I go. We, perhaps, share a similar lens through which we view El Salvador and categorize our experiences.


I've never met Jenny in person, but today she was kind enough to share our CoMadres project with her readers. I encourage you to check out her blog (El Salvador from the Inside)! It's a great way to learn about some of the ins and outs of Salvadoran daily life.

[Inez] From 2008 (excerpt)

When I was in college I had the good fortune to receive a grant to support going to El Salvador to work with CoMadres. Part of the deal was that the program asked grant recipients to keep a blog about their trips or internships. Today I read through all my posts from that blog, written in 2008, for the first time since that year. Here is an excerpt from one of the posts about the day-to-day work we did:

Today we finally had a meeting with all the women to tell them what we wanted to do, and figure out a rough schedule. This is coming with 5 working days before Ruby leaves, but that’s how it is. By the way, I want to say something before I continue. I know I said I would put pictures up, but I think that probably won’t happen until I get home in a week and a half. I keep forgetting to bring my flash drive to the cyber cafe.

Anyway, we got a fair amount done today. I scanned about 15 pictures, and Ruby spent some time asking Alicia about them. I don’t know what Alicia told her because I was listening to Cloud Cult, but Ruby took a lot of notes, so we’re set. We also finished asking clarifying questions on the last transcription we have down here, so we’ve done as much as we can on that front. The next step is to reprint them (not sure where that will happen) and then go over what is okay to publish and what isn’t. For example, regarding one woman’s capture, they’ve told us that it’s okay to publish that the military was looking for a relative of hers, and when they couldn’t find that relative they took her instead; however, even though they told us the specifics of this incident, we’re not supposed to go into more detail in the book. I think we should spend some time talking to them about the situation today and how to protect them, because that’s the kind of thing that wouldn’t have occurred to me if Alicia hadn’t said, “But you’re not going to put that in the book, right?”

In other words, progress is slow, but existent. Tomorrow we’re doing an interview and making pupusas, and Thursday I think we’re going to a church that housed a refuge during the war with hopes that someone will still be there who was there in those days. We’re also going to go to the monument for the disappeared and assasinated. We visited it 2 years ago, but they’ve come much closer to completing it since then. Money is always a hang up.

Since this time they have completed the wall! CoMadres is a member of the Comisión de Trabajo en Derechos Humanos Pro Memoria Histórica de El Salvador (Commission of Work for Human Rights Pro-Historic Memory of El Salvador), the group that worked to make the monument become a reality. A large portion of the names represented on the monument are known due to the work that CoMadres did to collect and record denuncios (denouncements) of captures and assassinations.

The monument in 2006. They were raising money to complete the inscriptions.

Ruby and Madre Alicia (then Director of CoMadres; deceased 2010)