A campesino stops to chat while tilling his milpa , or maize plot, on Isla de la Tasajera . The mangrove pole plough is powered by two oxen, a common sight in El Salvador where rural life outside the cities and towns is basic.

This milpa is less than forty minutes drive and a twenty minute boat ride from San Salvador , the capital, which is abounds with McDonalds, Burger King, Pizza Hut, Wendy's, Biggest Burgers, Fried Chicken, and you name it.

But maize still remains the staple diet for Salvadoreans, as it has done for meso-Americans for thousands of years. Mostly it is eaten as corn flour patties - tortillas - sometimes filled with delicious tidbits of cheese or meat, called pupusas , virtually the national dish. Tortillas are so much part of the national culture even quite posh restaurants will plonk a few on the table whether your order them or not. For rural people, tortillas with a pinch of salt may be their only food in times of hardship.

With its rich volcanic soil you would expect El Salvador to be abounding with fruits and vegetables. Not so. Much productive land is given over to coffe plantations which is the country's main cash crop. Many vegetables in the markets are imported from neighbouring Guatemala, though high "luxury" taxes on foodstuffs have recently stemmed that trade. Vegetables in supermarkets are as expensive as Europe or North America.

That's a shame. The people of this continent were/are among of the greatest growers on the planet. I once read that 70 per cent of the varieties of vegetables you can buy nowadays in a London Safeways were originally cultured, hybridised and cultivated by the people of central America and the Andes. Tomatoes, capsicums, squash, zuchinni, watermelon, potatos, yams, sweet corn, maize...Hey, any lawyers out there up for "retrospective gene patenting" to give the Mayan people intellectual property rights over jalapeņo chilis? Suppose not.

These simple brick structures are a great leap forward for communities without toilets.

A latrine is a deeply unpleasant poo hole in the ground which you drop your wallet down on camping trips. But in lowland areas like El Salvador, latrines can quickly overflow and pollute drinking water wells in times of flooding, such as during 1998's Hurricane Mitch.

This "dry" latrine sits a atop a twin cement chamber. Every six months the family switches chambers, and the poo in the old chamber dries out to form safe composted soil which can be shovelled out and used for fertiliser.

The chambers must be well sealed and the latrine kept dry and clean in order for the composting process to work. Hence the education posters, as depicted in the picture here, to promote good latrine practice.

In rural communites we try and build one latrine per family. It works like this: we provide all the materials, loan the tools, skilled engineers and bricklayers. Each community has to provide labour to help build the latrines. The head of each family must sign (or thumbprint) a document promising they will look after the latrine and not convert it into a chicken coop, corn store, drinking den or small shop.

Our first contact with communities is through our team of "educators", field workers who hold meetings. Then the engineers and bricklayers arrive and erect a "model" latrine, which the villagers help build. The villagers then disperse to their own plots and build their own latrines with our materials and with help from the engineers and brickies who oversee the whole process.

The construction stage takes about a month.
Though simple in theory, projects like latrine-building must be carefully thought out. El Salvador's rural people are extremely poor and families often literally don't have two pennies to rub together.