Who says Falcons and Marauders can’t get along? This summer, Christian Brothers and Jesuit each sent two students and a teacher down to the Latin American nation of El Salvador. The Christian Brothers delegation, including Sr. Maria Campos, junior Robert Rivas, and myself, along with the delegation from Jesuit, left from the San Francisco airport late on July 14 to embark on a journey of education and goodwill.

July 15, 7:00 am, the humid air hit us like a brick wall, and I almost choked on the first breath. After months of planning, we had finally made it. Mr. Rivas, Robert Rivas’ father, picked us up from the airport. He drove us, following the kind of dirty exhaust-belching cars you can only encounter in third world nations, to our hotel in the capital, San Salvador.

The other students and I settled into the hotel quickly and easily because we were so tired. We would not cease to be tired for the remainder of the trip because that very day we started the meetings.

Ask any member of the trip . . . the meetings we went to to get information were "extensive" to say the least. We learned about the transfer of land from the rich to the poor. The resulting debts which the poor were left to deal with totaled about $150 thousand in American dollars. We spoke with Maria Navarette, a legislator and former guerrilla soldier, about the political corruption so vile that dead people have been found to be voting in elections. The information we received about the land transfer came in handy when we finally set out to visit the community of San Bartolo.

El Salvador is a beautiful country. On both sides of the main freeway lay corpses of huge conic volcanoes, once violent and raging, but now plush and green. It was a fitting symbol of the country, as we were about to see when we entered San Bartolo. We were warmly greeted in the small hamlet by Juan Crisostomo, who we simply referred to as "Choto." His family would feed us and show us around the town. He was a short man with curly hair, but his most obvious characteristic was his charismatic personality. He helped coordinate all the activities that we participated in with the community including meetings and a soccer game.

The goal of the trip was not to solve all of the country’s problems, but to give the students on the trip a better understanding of the political and economic situation of the people of El Salvador.

What about getting to know what the peoples’ lives were like? The group that organized the trip had considered some sort of work project. However, they thought it would only be a burden for San Bartolo to set something up for us to do. Made sense, right? We helped Choto weed his field one day. For about an hour I walked, stooped under the saw-like blades of sugar cane, chopping, with a borrowed machete, through vines that stung me and stuck to me like the tentacles of a jelly fish. I thought, "These people do nothing but work, so there will always be something for us to do."