More Soccer and Dia de los Muertos

While I had been organizing consistent practices and had entered tournaments with the girl’s soccer team that I started and am now coaching, last Saturday I took my new boy’s team to their first tournament.

The day started in typical Salvadoran fashion—despite the fact that 15 or 16 kids had told me they would be coming, only 7 showed up. It is an aspect of Salvadoran culture that Volunteers here just have to consistently remind themselves of—Salvadorans are very non-confrontational, especially with Volunteers who they definitely don’t want to disappoint—and will basically tell you whatever they think you want to hear, regardless of its truth. I had accounted for this by optimistically predicting I would end up with 11 or 12, conveniently just the right amount for a soccer team. Unfortunately, I clearly was going to have some work to do on the way to the tournament.

After our first bus ride, which got us a few miles, our second bus mysteriously never showed up, so we ended up walking about an hour to the community of another team entering the tournament. Once there, I retrieved the jerseys we would be borrowing, since I definitely haven’t had time to secure sources of grants or money for uniforms for my newly formed teams.

From San Sebastian, we walked another hour, where we discovered the next bus we were planning on riding had just passed, so we, with still unfettered confidence, took off for another hour and a half of walking. Finally, after about three and a half hours of walking (and two hours late for the beginning of the tournament), we had arrived.

However, I had not wasted those precious 10 or 11 miles we covered by foot—I had found enough soccer players along the way in various other communities so that we did arrive in Los Pozas (the site of the tournament—it is in Ahuachapan, another department—which basically means we walked to the equivalent of another state before our first game had even begun) with a complete squad.

We managed to gut together a pretty impressive first game, which started about 5 minutes after our arrival (since much of the tournament had, well, sort of been waiting on us). Although we ended up losing, it took a 5-4 loss in penalty kicks after 90 minutes of 1-1 soccer to deliver us the loss. Although I’ll be first to admit by soccer-coaching acumen still has a ways to go and my Spanish half-time pep talk skills are well beyond comical and most likely not remotely inspiring, I do still think we thoroughly outplayed the other team but just weren’t able to capitalize and struggled with some bad luck. I’m certainly looking to organize a rematch in the near future.

The second game wasn’t as pretty—at that point I think the first game and the virtual half-marathon, “Trail of Tears”-style hajj to the tournament had taken its toll and we never had a chance.

But that certainly wouldn’t be where the adventure would end. Thanks to the fact that a majority of the kids hadn’t brought the $1.50 I told them they would need and the fact that about half the team had bought cigarettes at half-time of each game (another Salvadoran tradition I’m still struggling to understand—hopefully, as my half-time pep talks improve, I might be able to curb this habit), mostly all of my Little Giants were now broke. That meant nothing but more walking.

While I did manage to bribe one bus driver with a few apples to get the kids a few miles in a bus, the team undoubtedly covered at least another 7 or 8 miles by foot in their return trip to San Luis.

Leaving early in the morning and returning around dusk, we had totaled about 6 hours of walking, 2 games, 2 losses, but undeniably had scored a big success in the words of my young soccer players, which left me pleased with the relative “success” of my first tournament with them.

After spending the weekend praying my legs would recover from all the walking while celebrating Halloween with a group of other Volunteers (its tough to celebrate Halloween with Salvadorans—they don’t exactly do Halloween down here), for one night in San Salvador then a second at a beach house in Costa del Sol, I returned to San Luis for Dia de Los Muertos (Day of the Dead for the English-only crowd out there) on November 2nd. I really went into the day with no expectations (besides a few faint memories of “fiestas” in my high-school Spanish class featuring guacamole, chips, and queso—these could not have proven to be any farther than the truth) knowing virtually nothing about how it was celebrated. I rose early in the morning (a definite pattern that has emerged in my life) and hopped on the bus with essentially all the people of San Luis to Chalchuapa, the closest big city, and in turn, the closest cemetery. While Dia de los Muertos is a celebration of the dead, it is very unlike any holiday in the United States and is really an idea that I enjoyed. Basically, the cemetery, which is huge and serves a very large area, had been turned into a literal fairground overnight. There were carnival rides, food vendors, roving musicians and clowns, political-party spokespeople, and just about anything else you could dream up in the cemetery, packed-in along with the families of just about everyone buried there. As per tradition, I visited the graves of all the family members of my host family who had passed away, cleaned them off, and decorated them with all sorts of things, ranging from real flowers or fake flowers, to food, to candles, to fresh coats of paint, to basketballs and packs of cigarettes. Seemingly, nothing was out-of-bounds. It struck me as a great way to remember the dead. While a few people had tears while cleaning tombstones, in general, it is a very festive holiday and supplies an opportunity to return to the cemetery and remember all your family members, but while surrounded by all of your community and in a spirit of general joy, focusing on the good memories instead of the fact that your relatives are no longer living. Just walking to and from the cemetery is a true adventure as the streets are packed full of food and flower vendors starting ten or twelve blocks away. In fact, I think in all my four months in El Salvador, Dia de los Muertos has been the most pleasant surprise and definitely one of my many favorite differences between El Salvador and the United States.