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Builders
Delegation - February 2012
Help us
celebrate the 20th anniversary of our sister city relationship with El
Charcón by joining our very first Builders Delegation. Scheduled to
travel to El Charcón in February 2012, we will be working side by side
with our friends in the community to enlarge their casa comunal. This
simple social center consists of three outer walls made of adobe bricks
topped by chicken wire (for ventilation in that tropical climate)
reaching to the roof. The inner wall currently encloses a small
community library and storage space.
The casa
comunal, regularly used for small group meetings (committee
meetings, the youth group, training sessions, etc.) is no longer big
enough for larger events. When we first proposed coming down with a
builders delegation, we asked the community to suggest a project we
could work on together. The reply came back quickly: let's enlarge the
casa comunal. So that's what we plan to do.
Doing
hands-on work with our friends in El Charcón is a lot of fun,
and enormously rewarding. They have the tools and the skills. We add
muscle power, money to pay for the building materials, our own skills,
and friendship. It's a powerful combination.
If you are
at all interested in joining this delegation and would like
to learn more about it, contact Beth at 785-0869 or <elzbossong@aol.com>.
A Summer 2006 Arts Delegation Goes to El Charcón
by Suzanne Geoghegan
This past July a group
of talented people from Apalachin, Windsor, Binghamton and Vestal spent
just over a week in El Charcón. Bi-lingual storyteller Gregorio Pedroza
spent most of his time in the elementary school offering programs to
children of various ages while sharing with their teachers creative
approaches to education. Artist and
engineer Alexis Dugon and her son Jason (Windsor H.S.), together with
Kaite Chesebrough (Vestal H.S.), Laura Howland (U. of Vermont) and
Candace Schenk (BU) created a mural with the El Charcón Youth Group. In
addition, Candace offered the Youth Group a workshop on wire jewelry.
These projects were fun and immensely satisfying but they were only
part of what we did.
Within hours of our
arrival we were taken on a tour of the community. The junta
directiva, El Charcón’s governing board, had scheduled a meeting
with the local mayor that was to take place a couple of days later.
Before accompanying them to this meeting we needed to see for ourselves
what the community was so concerned about. Down
at the river that runs through El Charcón, we inspected the remains of
the hanging bridge destroyed October ’05 by Hurricane Stan. Walking
further we saw how the river has changed course due to man-made changes
upstream. The new direction of flow is causing severe erosion of the
riverbank that already affects several houses and the soccer field. Of equal concern: the lack of adequate
latrines. Of the 175 families in the community, only 75 have latrines,
many of which need repair. There was another basic sanitation issue,
namely the absence of any system for collecting garbage.
Finally, though not part of that initial tour,
in the following days, some of us became acutely aware of the desperate
lack of water (potable or otherwise) for families living too far up the
hill or too far up the road from the water pump.
In addition to the
mural and jewelry project and Gregorio’s work at the school, there were
other activities. We helped the community dig holes for anchoring the
cables that would support the new hanging bridge. We made a day trip to
Cinquera, a town to the north with a grim history and a promising
future.
As the delegation
discovered, beyond all the doing, there’s the living - the wonderful
interaction with children, young people, adults. There’s learning how
to bathe without running water, trying new foods, accepting the
incredible generosity of people who make room for us in their tiny
crowded homes. There’s discovering that the child you thought was eight
is actually fourteen. There’s learning how many young people have left
the community for jobs in the States. There’s dancing till midnight and
walking to the beach. It’s becoming part of the community, living their
reality and, after we leave, it’s their knowing that we care.
The Arts Delegation is
part of the larger Arts Initiative of the Binghamton - El Charcón
Sister City Project. In addition to making
it possible for people in the arts to travel to El Salvador, the Arts
Initiative hopes to arrange a visit to Greater Binghamton by Ricardo
Sorto, chair of the Arts Department of the University of El Salvador.
The hope is that this cultural exchange will enrich our communities
north and south while providing artists with new material for their own
work.
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