Another great day in El Salvador. I hear that things went well at the work site, but I wasn’t there, so I can’t report. I was in the mountains today, visiting our new friends in La Concordia. This will bring the tale I started earlier about our trip to Tacuba full circle.
La Concordia is a village a few hard miles outside of Tacuba, which is ten long miles from Ahuachapán (where the little girls of the San Jose orphanage live). La Concordia is a coffee cooperative of 29 families who live in pretty primitive conditions on the side of a mountain. The power lines don’t reach there and there is no running water or sewer. I did get a pretty strong cell signal though. It’s an amazing age we live in. The cooperative has started selling their crop to our friends at Café Campesino in Americus as free traders. The coffee, incidentally, is very good.
It was through Café Campesino that we learned of La Concordia and the need there for decent shelter. Some of the houses are built of adobe brick, but most use a system called bajareque, which is a variation of daub and wattle. Bamboo lath is nailed horizontally at about 6 inch intervals on wooden posts that are driven into the ground. The space between the laths is filled with an adobe mixture that hardens in place. The roofs are generally galvanized steel. This provides for a fairly solid structure, but the adobe fill has to be replace every 4-5 years making in an incredibly labor intensive way to keep a house. The floors in most of the houses we visited were of pounded earth.
Another iffy feature of the houses is that the kitchens are indoors and the stoves burn wood but have no chimneys, creating homemade respiratory problems. It’s amazing to find technologies that are thousands of years old unchanged in today’s world, especially technologies that are clearly unhealthy.
We visited a few homes, one that was severely damaged during the rainy season when the hillside behind the house turned to mud and broke through the walls. This particular house is owned by Don Antonio and his wife. Don Antonio is 83 years old and worked actively in the coffee harvest until last spring when a falling branch caused him injuries that he hasn’t yet recovered from.
After the visit to La Concordia we returned to Tacuba and met with the cooperative’s board of directors. Despite their poverty these guys think like businessmen and their questions were insightful. The situation there is similar to one that we face in other places—replacing a standing house with a more solid one of similar size would be unaffordable. One of the options we discussed was building a much smaller unit that could serve as a kitchen and storehouse that could be attached to the existing structure. This would allow us to address some of the health and safety issues while still providing them with a more comfortably sized, and affordable, home. They’re going to be meeting to discuss options and come up with some ideas on what they’d like to see. In the meantime we’ll develop some house plans and cost them out.
After the meeting we were treated to a delicious bean and rice soup and fresh tortillas. The tortillas here are different from the ones in Mexico—they’re only about four inches in diameter and much thicker—more like gorditas. But they are very good.
After lunch we headed back to Ahuachapán and visited the orphanage. That’s always a treat. The girls there are between three and twelve and they are full of life and love. The sisters take excellent care of them, giving them the closest thing they could have to a good home. Many of the girls have been taken from an abusive family situation and are experiencing a loving environment for the first time. We dropped off some yarn for the crafts class and got treated to freshly baked cakes and rolls from the girls’ home ec kitchen. Despite the inherent sadness of a place like San Jose I always leave there feeling a little better about life.
We got back to La Libertad at about 5—too late to go the work site. So for the first time since I got here I went a day without visiting San Luis Talpa. I’ll fix that tomorrow. (The photo is of the kitchen in Don Antonio's house.)
La Concordia is a village a few hard miles outside of Tacuba, which is ten long miles from Ahuachapán (where the little girls of the San Jose orphanage live). La Concordia is a coffee cooperative of 29 families who live in pretty primitive conditions on the side of a mountain. The power lines don’t reach there and there is no running water or sewer. I did get a pretty strong cell signal though. It’s an amazing age we live in. The cooperative has started selling their crop to our friends at Café Campesino in Americus as free traders. The coffee, incidentally, is very good.
It was through Café Campesino that we learned of La Concordia and the need there for decent shelter. Some of the houses are built of adobe brick, but most use a system called bajareque, which is a variation of daub and wattle. Bamboo lath is nailed horizontally at about 6 inch intervals on wooden posts that are driven into the ground. The space between the laths is filled with an adobe mixture that hardens in place. The roofs are generally galvanized steel. This provides for a fairly solid structure, but the adobe fill has to be replace every 4-5 years making in an incredibly labor intensive way to keep a house. The floors in most of the houses we visited were of pounded earth.
Another iffy feature of the houses is that the kitchens are indoors and the stoves burn wood but have no chimneys, creating homemade respiratory problems. It’s amazing to find technologies that are thousands of years old unchanged in today’s world, especially technologies that are clearly unhealthy.
We visited a few homes, one that was severely damaged during the rainy season when the hillside behind the house turned to mud and broke through the walls. This particular house is owned by Don Antonio and his wife. Don Antonio is 83 years old and worked actively in the coffee harvest until last spring when a falling branch caused him injuries that he hasn’t yet recovered from.
After the visit to La Concordia we returned to Tacuba and met with the cooperative’s board of directors. Despite their poverty these guys think like businessmen and their questions were insightful. The situation there is similar to one that we face in other places—replacing a standing house with a more solid one of similar size would be unaffordable. One of the options we discussed was building a much smaller unit that could serve as a kitchen and storehouse that could be attached to the existing structure. This would allow us to address some of the health and safety issues while still providing them with a more comfortably sized, and affordable, home. They’re going to be meeting to discuss options and come up with some ideas on what they’d like to see. In the meantime we’ll develop some house plans and cost them out.
After the meeting we were treated to a delicious bean and rice soup and fresh tortillas. The tortillas here are different from the ones in Mexico—they’re only about four inches in diameter and much thicker—more like gorditas. But they are very good.
After lunch we headed back to Ahuachapán and visited the orphanage. That’s always a treat. The girls there are between three and twelve and they are full of life and love. The sisters take excellent care of them, giving them the closest thing they could have to a good home. Many of the girls have been taken from an abusive family situation and are experiencing a loving environment for the first time. We dropped off some yarn for the crafts class and got treated to freshly baked cakes and rolls from the girls’ home ec kitchen. Despite the inherent sadness of a place like San Jose I always leave there feeling a little better about life.
We got back to La Libertad at about 5—too late to go the work site. So for the first time since I got here I went a day without visiting San Luis Talpa. I’ll fix that tomorrow. (The photo is of the kitchen in Don Antonio's house.)
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