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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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