George Washington University
A fellow El Salvador traveler kindly offered to capture this moment as we tried on our Winrock hats before our flight from Washington Dulles Airport. After many hours of travel and an unexpected stopover in Honduras, we arrived safely in San Salvador to balmy weather and the sounds of tropical birds.
As soon as Ricardo picked us up from the airport, our fieldwork began. We drove from San Salvador to our hotel in the town of Sonsonate, the closest lodging to the region where we would be conducting our first interviews – San Pedro Putxla. It was fascinating to watch the scenery change from densely packed urban storefronts to winding, dusty roads.
After lunch we arrived at the FUNDESYRAM (The Foundation for Socioeconomic Development and Environmental Restoration) office in San Pedro Puxtla to learn about the organization’s objectives, meet the technicians, and begin planning our interviews and focus groups for the week. FUNDESYRAM has been working in three regions of El Salvador – San Pedro Puxtla, Tacuba, and Comosagua – to promote their eco-community program. The program aims to contribute to the eradication of poverty and hunger, improve the status of women, and enhance environmental sustainability by empowering local communities.
Our first interview was with a female chicken producer in the community of Santo Domingo de Guzman. As we quickly discovered, chicken production was a common livelihood for many women in the region, partly due to the training and support provided by FUNDESYRAM. The organization has been teaching women and youth groups how to build coops, grow natural chicken feed, acquire vaccinations and vitamins, mix organic fertilizer, and keep records of production inputs and outputs. The women we spoke with said the income earned from raising chickens greatly contributes to their financial independence and family wellbeing.
We spent the majority of our first week driving through the hills of San Pedro Puxtla to visit smallholder farms and businesses. It was impossible to ignore the natural beauty around every corner, in addition to the multitude of flowers and trees, our day wasn’t complete without a hen, dog, pig, or rooster crossing our path.
One of the most inspiring individuals we met was a young potter in the community of El Carrizal. He wasn’t ashamed to admit that he started learning about pottery from his mother to avoid working on his family farm. Surprised at his own talent and community demand for his wares, the potter has been able to use his profits to buy a plot to store raw materials, build a showroom, secure a larger oven, and train other youth in his community. In the picture above, he is sitting in front of framed photos that detail his involvement with the government’s Agriculture and Tourism Committee (ATC). ATC provides artisans with online marketing tools and connects them to distributors and travel companies that organize tours of the crafts and culture of El Salvador.
After an exciting first day Ricardo took us to one of his favorite seafood restaurants on the coast. We ate fish, lobster, avocado-shrimp salad, and ceviche as we watched the sun set over the Pacific.
This interview under a mango tree was memorable not only for the setting, but also for this woman’s story of how joining her community’s women’s group changed her life after her husband died last year. The group gets together twice a month to exchange knowledge about horticulture and animal husbandry and tackle community problems from a united platform. The woman noted that it was this group that motivated her to start a home garden, which has provided a secure source of nutritious food over the past few months.
The group of women pictured above started a savings group with the help of FUNDESYRAM training in the community of Durazno. The group of 19 women saves and provides loans to its members at an interest rate of 5% per month. They have used their collective savings to rent a plot of land where they grow organic cucumbers, beans, and tomatoes to sell at the market in Sonsonate. The group said they felt empowered to call a piece of land their own and to have income to invest in their own household farms.
The savings group from Durazno also took us on a walk through their plot of land and described how they split the tasks amongst themselves. This division of labor allowed them to still be fully involved with their own household tasks and family responsibilities. We also learned that these women received conditional cash transfers from the government of El Salvador for sending their children to school and getting necessary vaccinations.
Capstone Project in El Salvador 