Human Rights in El Salvador

Our flight left at 5:30 this morning which meant getting up at 3. At 3:10 I woke up with a start and got up, only to realize my parents were still in bed. The alarm had gone off, but it was set much too quietly for 3 in the morning, so it’s only because of luck (nerves, call it what you will) that we caught the flight at all. Travel was uneventful and we got in at 11:30 in the morning. Alicia from Comadres and her very kind son Jose picked us up from the airport and took us to the office. We’re staying the first 2 weeks with a f/Friend, Raul, and the second half with the family we stayed with last year. They still don’t know not to expect us, though, because we’ve tried and tried but haven’t gotten a hold of them. We only have their cell phone number and calling cell phones from land lines is very expensive here, so we need to buy a phone card before we can call her. Ah well, that’s just how it is. Tomorrow we’ll go back to the office and figure out a theoretical game plan (to be quickly abandoned, no doubt) and then we’ll figure out how to get back to Raul’s place outside of the city by bus.

That’s all for now because his mother is preparing dinner for us as I type this. Thank you, Rosa.

Well, I haven’t left yet for El Salvador. I’m going with my mom, so I’m working around her schedule. I’ve checked a few books out from the library; one is an Amnesty International report on death squads from 1988, the other is a general civil war history book. Also I’m trying to get through a really helpful book, El Salvador’s Decade of Terror, which starts out with a great general chronology.

Also, I’ve been working on transcription backlog. The first year there we produced one tape, and last year we produced 10. I got through 4 and a bit in August of last year and learned a lot about transcribing. The first thing I learned is that it’s awful. It’s boring and tedious and requires an incredible amount of focus. It’s very very frustrating and makes me wish I spoke Spanish better, or that I could turn the job over to someone who really knows the language. I spend so much time looking up words to see if I’ve heard right, and I’m completely convinced that if I just spoke the language as well as I pretend I do, it would take a lot less time because I’d just know the words they’re throwing at me. Although I’ve never transcribed anything in English, so I have no basis for comparison. Right now I’m at 10:1 (10 minutes spent transcribing to 1 minute of tape), but last summer I was down to somewhere around 5-7:1, so I’m hoping I can get there again. Here’s what I wrote about transcribing last summer (edited for language):

“Transcribing is so hard.

There are the obvious reasons– it’s in Spanish, it’s such a slow and tedious process, it takes so much concentration… I mean really, I don’t think I’ve ever concentrated on anything so hard for such a long period of time. It’s like when you’re trying to thread a needle, and there’s that one little bitty strand that’s [messing] it up and you keep trying and keep trying and it’s not working and you have to squint and get your face up all close because the needle is so small and the thread is so small and if anyone says anything to you you want to scream ’cause you were about to get it but they ruined your concentration and now you have to start all over… are you feeling sufficiently fidgety and drained? Okay, well it’s like threading the impossibly small needle, for hours and hours, every day.

Of course the other reason is that it’s just so damn depressing. Not only are you threading an impossibly small needle, you’re threading an impossibly small needle with a picture of someone being raped or tortured– and you have to keep looking at that little picture because if you take your eyes off the [freaking] needle, well then, how are you going to thread it?”