This alternative Spring Break trip was organized through the Bronfman Center at NYU, and an organization based in New York called American Jewish World Service (AJWS), a Jewish-affiliated group that provides relief and aid for communities in need world-wide. The particular project that AJWS sent us to work on is in El Salvador, A Central American country just recovering from civil war, and coping at the same time with damage from natural disasters such as Hurricane Mitch. By teaming up with a Salvadorian organization, La Coordinadora, work is being done in El Salvador to empower the people both in terms of creating sustainable agriculture, as well as taking the essential issues of peace and conflict-resolution into their own hands.

What did we do while we were there?

The context of the trip was to learn about social justice and action from a Jewish perspective. Our main purpose for actually flying out to El Salvador for a week was to help with some of the hard labor being done in Ciudad Romero, as they are currently developing their community in an economically sustainable way. However, AJWS and La Coordinadora are not the types of organizations that simply go into a community, build a few houses and plant a few trees, and then leave; what makes these programs so unique and helpful is that they bring in specialists in sustaianable agriculture, or whatever issue is at hand, and empower the people to learn themselves how to restore their communities. In this way, the cycle of reliance upon others is not perpetuated, and the people can finally take it in their own hands to make the kinds of changes they want to better their communities.

At this point, you might be asking yourself, So what could a bunch of unskilled, city-hardened college students do to help a community such as Ciudad Romero, and in only one week no less? Well, even if this is not a question in your mind, it was certainly one that most of my peers and I began to ask as we settled into our daily routine in the village. Every day, we would wake up at about 6:30, eat breakfast with our host families, walk over to one of the work sites, and begin work around 7:30. At 11:30, we would go back to our homes for lunch with our families, and by 12:30, we would be back together as a group, usually to discuss social justice in a Jewish context, working from texts and our experiences thus far. By 4:30, we would be done with our afternoon of work, and would go home to "shower," eat dinner, and spend time with our host families. We usually met in the evening as a group as well, either to discuss more issues, or just to jam (there were a couple of guitars and drums on the trip with us) and party with our Salvadorian counterparts.

There were two work-sites which we were working at. The first was a tree nursery, where the members of the community were planting trees which will eventually be distrubted to the various residents of Ciudad Romero for their plots of land. At this site, our jobs consisted mostly of sifting piles of dirt, packing small plastic bags with the sifted earth, then wheeling the filled bags to the shaded part of the nursery, where seeds would be planted, and then watered. The second site was the construction site of a community restaurant that was being built for the women of Ciudad Romero, as an extension to their already-existing Women's Center. A construction crew of Salvadorians was working on the actual structure of the Commodore, so at this site, we mostly shoveled huge piles of dirt, raised the level of the floor, and dug holes for structural supports.