El Salvador: Education beyond schools: Experiences from El Salvador

During 1981, an average of 700 people was killed monthly in El Salvador. Today, 34 years later, El Salvador is not that far from such figures. The month of May ended with 641 people killed, thus becoming the majority violent month since the war ended.

Check out Part I of Clara’s Experiences from el Salvador!

El Salvador has passed from suffering a civil conflict to suffering a social one. It is a country characterized by legitimated violence, well established in each sphere of the daily life. On my initial day volunteering in San Salvador, I met a 14 year old girl who asked me and my colleague if we had a boyfriend.

My colleague answered that she just broke up with hers, so the teenage girl asked “did he hit you?” – No, responded my colleague – “again why did you break up with him?” asked the little girl in return. This short and apparently meaningless conversation made me think – how can these figures be reverted in a country characterized by a culture of violence?

According to Lindsey Wright (UNESCO), even though it is significant to understand the ways in which to prevent violence, considerate why humans are (or become) violent is just as significant.

Actually, there is little evidence that proves whether humans are innately violent, but rather, a harsh environment creates conditions in which violence is necessary to ensure both personal and cultural survival.

Research has shown that at the same time as exposed to violence, individuals must as well be taught to price or at least not to engage in violence as part of the social learning process.

For instance, children who behave violently are usually the product of a home in which one or both parents’ model violence. Thus, violence is a learned behavior in any culture or environment and is not proven to be a natural trait in humans.

In El Salvador only 18 out of 100 people get to finish Secondary school and only 4 out of 100 get to finish University.

However, part that 4% of educated people, around 70% says that they would leave El Salvador to go to the United States and look for a better life.

This means that El Salvador has passed from being an agriculture exporter to a human exporter, thus losing its most prominent human capital. Compulsory education starts at the age of 6 in El Salvador, however there is no public support to the early education; thus making the parents the only ones responsible for the children until they turn 6.

The CINDE Association was born back in 1989 with the firm intention of changing the Salvadorian society from its basis by educating the next generations.

Its founder, Marisa Martínez, opened a daily care center aimed to host the children of the street vendors – single mothers with several children and no financial support who worked on the streets carrying their children.

The idea was not only to provide these children with a healthy and safe environment, but as well to release the mothers from the burden of taking care of their children while working.

Today, next 25 years of continued and hard work, the CINDE Association has 3 daily care centers attended by 300 children, 3 programs for school support, secondary and tertiary scholarships, a parents’ school, a micro-credit program and a program for social and community intervention. Carmen is one of the best examples of how education changes lives.

She was one of those children supposed to grow on the streets, with no luck for an education, with no luck for a better life.

I am not sure if she found CINDE or CINDE found her, but next benefitting from all its programs and initiatives she decided to pay it back. It is not that she was on deficit with the Association, but she knew that she had been lucky enough to become that 4% of the people enabled to fight social injustice.

She decided to become a social worker and today she works as Coordinator for the CINDE Association. Quoting Nelson Mandela: “education is the majority powerful weapon you can use to change the world”.