My two months here have passed me by more rapidly than I could have imagined possible. The truth is that I arrived in February fairly naive to the reality of life in El Salvador. Yes, I had read books, studied some history, followed current events, and had even recently spent more than two months in neighboring Guatemala.

El Salvador’s brutal civil war raged for 12 years, finally coming to an end with the signing of the Peace Accords in 1992. It is estimated that over 75,000 Salvadoran men, women and children were killed. The parties in conflict were the government of El Salvador and the guerrillas of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN). The UN’s Truth Commission on El Salvador Report stated that, "This outburst of violence has deep roots in a history of violence in El Salvador that permitted political opponents to be defined as enemies and eliminated." According to the Commission’s Report, "For more than a decade a convulsion of violence seized El Salvador. The army, security forces and death squads linked to them committed massacres, sometimes of hundreds of people at a time. They also carried out targeted assassinations of many others, including the country’s archbishop and six Jesuit priests. The FMLN guerrillas also followed a logic of violence that led to grave human rights violations." While the Commission denounced the brutality perpetrated by the FMLN and urged them to renounce forever all forms of violence, "The vast majority of abuses studied by the Commission were committed by members of the armed forces or groups allied to them."

But it was not enough to prepare for what I was to see and hear. War had almost exclusively been nothing more than a history subject to me. Strategic battles, offensives and retreats, negotiations and peace treaties, all safely tucked away in the past and removed. I did not understand the immediacy of the war here, the degree to which it affected peoples lives and how it continued to shape the present. I heard of the fear that people lived with, that they were forced to live with, and that had stayed with them. Their struggles were inconceivable, but they survived them. One person I saw sticks out in my mind. He was a worker at the construction site in Copante for the new kinder. Fatima, a physical therapist, had been seeing him over several months and working with him to help him rehabilitate the use of his right hand. A government soldier had attacked him with a machete while he was defenseless and he suffered nerve injury in his right shoulder that resulted in a partial paralysis in his right hand. He had improved greatly during his time working with Fatima and was very excited about being able to work again. I just could not fathom being attacked by someone wielding a machete. This man and his story epitomized for me both the brutal nature of the war that had recently been part of every day life in this country, and also the strength and will that people had to move on and to begin to live as normal a life as possible again.

–Matthew K. Belcher, MD, March 1997

Contents:
• President's Letter
• In Loving Memory of Dr. Jonathan Mann
• DGH Locally: Talking to Children
• Promoter Profile: Ramiro Cortez-Argueta
• Volunteer Update: Jennifer Kasper
• A Day’s Life... Julie Taw
• Human Rights Around the World
  • Burma
  • East Timor
  • Nicaragua
  • United States
• Creative Fundraising
• A Day’s Life... Matthew Belcher
• DGH Announcements