Life in the campo, El Salvador

Life in the campo revolves around corn, as it has done for millenium. Even the los marginalados who squat on wasteground in the capital, San Salvador, have little plots on roundabouts or the road central reservations where their elote grows tall and proud. What better way to eat it than baked on an earthenware comal over an open fire. No Salvadorean meal is complete without tortillas (above right). Tortillas are rolled by hand, it looks easy but isn't. All my attempts have ended up like maps of Australia. Here's some corn trivia: the Spanish word for football pitch is cancha, from the Quechua (Inca) word for a kernel of corn.

The Incas, who mastered the sacred architecture of the natural world, built villages shaped like cobs of corn, each house and courtyard representing a kernel of corn. The word travelled backwards across the Atlantic to Spain. The courtyards became courts, became pitches, became football pitches. Red kidney beans (right), are another meso-American staple dating back 9000 years, as are limas, black beans, pinto beans, white beans, green beans, kidney beans, even black-eyed peas. Our European word for them "haricot beans" sounds French but is actually a corruption of the Aztec word ayacotl, though these days in C America they are called frijoles.

In El Salvador they are soaked then boiled with spices and bacon fat, then mashed and refried. If you want to find facts on the history of food check out the Food Museum.

Bringing home the beans Beans don't fall out of tins in rural El Salvador. First they must be carried in a matata, string net, from the fields to the house where they can be dried and stored. Victor, pictured left with his younger brother, is our cleaner in San Salvador. By day he pushes a mop around our spacious office. Weekends and evenings he tends the family milpa, half an hour walk from his house in the pretty village of Chinamaquita. His working day starts at 4am. He lights the home cooking fires, gets a simple breakfast, then has a 90 minute bus journey to San Salvador. The firts part of the journey is over a bumpy but spectacular road that hugs the rim of an enormous volcanic caldera, now Lake Ilopango. It's a bit like looking into NgoroNgoro crater (I am constantly amazed by the beauty of El Salvador). Check out the machetes, used as all-purpose tools in the campo but also worn like swords for defense. All male campesinos carry a machette. Most also carry a few machete scars, but not usually as bad as Victor's dad, Navidad, who had most of one arm lopped off and the most horrific deep scars all over his body after a drunken machetero attacked him one night. Navidad survived, just. His attacker went to jail, but was murdered by persons unknown soon after being released. "I had it in my heart to forgive and forget," Navidad told me, with a twinkle in his eye. Clearly, someone else didn't.

Paradise, of sorts Victor's village challenged my concept of poverty. On the left his neice Esmerelda plays with broken toys on the earth floor of their basic bahareque (mud-walled) dwelling. On the right is the view outside, a tropical paradise of wooded hills with abundant natural resources such as firewood and bananas, here being head-carried, African-style, by village girls. With three generations of Victor's family, I helped collect kidney beans one by one from the dusty soil where they had fallen from the drying vines. Not one bean was left behind.

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