Losing All the Best Bits...Of Your Country

Soft spoken and rather unassuming, you wouldn’t really think much of Ron Brennenman. Until, that is, you find out one of the countless facts that seem to nonchalantly crop up, like when the FMLN guerrillas organised a major offensive on his kitchen table during the civil war. Ron (seen here modelling a very fashionable cowboy hat and the even more fashionable Whitaker Sisters) has seen El Salvador go to pieces during the 80s, and then try and pull itself back together again, with fairly lacklustre results.

This has, in a nutshell, prompted him to start Amun Shea, an educational project run out of Perquin up in the remote wooded hills of the North East. The project is an inspiring attempt to provide a heavily subsidised private education for the local children which is not subject to the fairly unsatisfactory rigours of the public school system. The short term aim, which is to generate significant academic success in comparison to national results and thus force education reform, is well underway. The much harder long term goal of building and retaining desperately needed community leaders to stop the incessant traffic of talented individuals out of the country (who mostly head to the US illegally looking for a better life) is proving much more elusive; results, if any, won’t be seen for years.

It is incredible to hear Ron describe what is happening in El Salvador, and to see quite clearly how the country is a shell, hollowed out by war, leaving the resulting wasteland of possibility for the population. With the option of living hand to mouth indefinitely in a country that stalls its progress of international development or leaving for faraway lands of golden opportunity, which would you choose?

Perquin, El Salvador
30th September 2009