Joel's Story

This is Joel's story. Joel lives in the village of El Carmen, in the Usulutan Department of El Salvador. To get to Joel's village, you drive down the highway from San Salvador until you cross the bridge at the Rio Lempa. This is the new bridge. You can see the stumps of the old bridge that was bombed during the war.

Not far past the bridge, you turn left at a little intersection, which is a good place to stop, meet the people who live and work there. The pupusas are delicious, but you are advised not to eat them until your gastrointestinal tract has adjusted to the local flora and fauna.

Then you drive down a dirt road which gets narrower and and steeper and rougher with each passing kilometer

You pass streams

You drive through streams

Until you come to the point where you can't drive any further.

From here it is a 30 minute walk to El Carmen

And it is here that Joel and the other people of El Carmen are building a bridge to their village across a stream that is otherwise impassable during the rainy season.

All the work is done by hand. First, they have dug two eight foot deep treanches below the level of the now dry streambed. The two trenches are 15 feet apart---the width of a roadbed. They started this work 5 days ago. They have completed the trenches and are filling it with boulders they have carried and rolled from the surrounding countryside, reinforced with cement that they are mixing on the sandy ground with shovels. Joel is leading the work. Everyone participates. The women carry the buckets of cement to the men working in the trench. Other men roll the boulders over to the trench. One woman who is pregnant helps mix the water with the cement and carries small small containers of cement over to the treanch.

Noah and trying to help by rolling boulders over, and throwing smaller rocks in to fill in the cracks so that so much cement does not have to be used. It becomes great sport to see how accurate you can lob a big rock into a crack between even bigger boulders on the other side of the trench.

When the boulders and cement are up to the level of the streambed, they will place two large pipes from one wall to the other. These will serve as culverts to allow the stream to flow through the bridge. Then the walls will be built up to a level 8 feet above the stream bed, the 15 foot roadway in between the two stone and concrete walls will be built up 8 feet, and voila!! a hand built bridge.

When the people of El Carmen take a short break, we gather on the hillside and share stories.