Speaking about El Salvador

On our last day in El Salvador, we stayed in the Sheraton in San Salvador. (The Sheraton, according to our research, is in the safest part of El Salvador. And it's upscale. It has everything you could ask for--even a workout room -- I was in bliss!) Working out in the morning, I sweated away next to a man who is a human rights activist and works for an NGO (the name I can't recall), who told me how he suspects the ARENA party (the right wing party) might rig the next election, that he suspects them of all kinds of corruption and worse, that he wonders what will happen next, now that the FLMN (the left wing party) has a viable candidate . . . He went on to tell me how many people in El Salvador have no hope, no jobs, no way out of poverty . . . How when the economy is bad in the U.S., it's many many times worse in El Salvador. He kept talking and talking.

He asked me about the Peace Corps, and when I said that the Peace Corps doesn't allow the volunteers to be involved in the politics of El Salvador, he made a few jokes about the P.C..

Listening to him talk, I suddenly noticed I wasn't feeling well at all. I spent the rest of my day making trips to the bathroom, feeling eternally grateful I wasn't in one of the latrines at my daughter's Peace Corps village. I wasn't sure whether it was the overwhelm of worry I felt when I listened to this man talk-or if I had somehow managed to drink some of the water. (Politics, I do think, is sickening-here, there, everywhere.)

After a day or so, I realized it was the latter. Thank goodness for Cipro.