In August, a group of Eastern Michigan students and faculty
spent 10 days in El Salvador exploring the social systems
that conspire to keep people poor and underserved. And
though the trip represented the culmination of their Poverty,
Human Rights and Health course sequence, for some students
it was just the beginning.
Sophomore Cindy Bedrosian and senior Andrew Stefan were
so inspired by the Salvadorans' hope and determination
that they're going back in March 2009 to play a role in
the country's next presidential election.
 |
IDLE IN ITA MAURA: (above, from left)
Eastern
Michigan University sophomore Cindy Bedrosian,
EMU
professor Judith Kullberg, and EMU students
Regina
Royan and Maria Powell, take a break in
"Campo" or
the rural community of Ita Maura, in
El Salvador. The
EMU group traveled to the Central
American country
in August to study that country's
social system and
election process. Bedrosian and
another EMU student,
senior Andrew Stefan, plan
to return next March to
report what they see at the polls to the
Salvadoran
Supreme Electoral Tribunal. |
Bedrosian and Stefan will serve as observers for the March
15 election. As part of a Center for Exchange and Solidarity
contingent, they'll report what they see at the polls to
the Salvadoran Supreme Electoral Tribunal, then return
to EMU. They will share their experiences, along with their
year-long study of different aspects of Salvadoran elections,
at the Undergraduate Symposium, March 27, 2009.
"I think experiential learning, in general, is tremendous," said
political science professor Richard Stahler-Sholk, one
of the faculty who made the August trip. " Just reading
alone doesn't give a student a passion for the issues.
And just going without doing the reading won't necessarily
do that, either. But having done all that background work
and, then having gone to interact with the people, just
opened up their horizons."
El Salvador, home to about 7 million people, is roughly
the size of Massachusetts. The small Central American country
is bordered by Honduras, Guatemala and has 307 km of coastline
on the North Pacific Ocean.
El Salvador was engulfed in civil war from 1980-1992,
and the conservative Alianza Republicana Nacionalista (ARENA)
party has been in power since the country's first elections
in 1994.
ARENA, which has been supported by the U.S. government,
has benefited from a history of fraud and voter intimidation.
Bedrosian talked to people whose jobs were threatened if
they voted for the opposition candidate. A family she stayed
with had to hire a lawyer to fix an error on their son's
birth certificate before he could register to vote. The
$80 lawyer's fee for that service cuts deep when a third
of the country's workers earn about $2 a day.
The country's voter registration system is complicated,
messy and fraught with red tape, Bedrosian said. About
one-sixth of the voting-age population isn't registered.
New voters had to register by July of this year for the
elections, which are held next March. Voters who turn 18
in the eight-month interim can't vote.
This election cycle, the more liberal opposition party,
Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional
(FMLN), finally has a strong campaign and a young, energetic
candidate, running on a platform of change. The stakes
are extremely high; a FMLN victory would lead to the country's
first peaceful alternation of power.
"I'm excited to go back," Bedrosian said. "One of the
main things was we all wanted to stay in solidarity with
the Salvadorans we met. I know my presence as an election
monitor will help keep the elections free and fair this
time."
In August, the EMU contingent split their time between
the capital city of San Salvador and a rural village, Ita
Maura. Each student stayed with a host family - Stefan's
was a woman raising her five-year-old daughter alone, andsurviving
on the money sent back by her husband, an illegal laborer
working construction in the U.S.
"She, along with the rest of the community, was terrified
about the immigration policies in the U.S.," Stefan said. "She's
worried about her husband's safety, and a lot of the community
is worried about their friends and family in the U.S. as
well...While we were down there, we learned a lot about how
U.S. foreign policy has generated conditions that are really
abysmal for Salvadorans. That really struck me and made
me interested in going down there for the election observation."
In San Salvador, the EMU group drove past a beautiful
new mall built by the government. It had jewelry stores
and a Mazerati dealership, but the mall was empty, Bedrosian
said, because no one could afford to buy what its stores
were selling. Across a four-lane highway from the mall
was a slum, where people live in tin shacks with tarps
for roofs, next to a trash-filled ravine.
"For them to live in this slum and have this huge mall
across the street is kind of El Salvador in a nutshell," Bedrosian
said.
And, if that's a snapshot of life in El Salvador, Bedrosian's
experience before the August trip illustrates the average
American's awareness ignorance of El Salvador. She called
her bank to let them know that she'd be taking her debit
card on her trip, paving the way so that, if she used
the card abroad, it wouldn't cause a panic.
The woman on the phone said, "Oh, OK. El Salvador. That's
in Mexico, right?"
"Everyone we talked to was really excited for a change," Bedrosian
said. "Everyone was really hopeful; it was inspiring. Our
bus driver, Santos, he was kind of like our father while
we were down there. He said to us, 'Remember, when you
vote (in the U.S. presidential election), you're not voting
for the president of your country, but for the president
of the world.' Everyone is so aware of the influence of
U.S. policies on them. Then, you come home and people don't
even know where El Salvador is."
