Something curious happened on my way south
There’s something odd yet ordinary that happens 35,000 feet while you’re on the way to San Salvador’s Saint Oscar Romero International Airport from Houston, Texas.
A cabin-wide announcement is made instructing everyone on how to fill in the customs and immigration declaration, question by question, line by line as well as how to use the toilets and the proper disposal of toilet paper in the same.
The toilets all lock, and toiler paper goes inside the toilet bowl, and not the bin. Please do not put it in the bin! The toilet also flushes, to flush it use the blue FLUSH button. It’s right next to the toilet. To use the button you have to press it and hold it for a second or so.
After all of that, the passengers aboard the United Airlines 1441 Boeing 737-900 Passenger BBJ3 (with winglets) are invited to follow along with the purser and complete the disembarkation form together.
We weren’t in Kansas anymore.
The announcement, delivered with a dead-pan tone that said ‘I can’t believe I have to do this’, might seem comical - like instructions on how to chew food or to use shampoo. However, the literacy rate in El Salvador is about 79% for men and 73% for women, hundreds of thousands of children are often working to support their families instead of being at school.
While the majority of the population (over 80% or so) has access to sanitation families, these are at best, just basic.
This isn’t some anomaly, if you have a flushing toilet, or at least access to one, you are in the minority. Only 31% of the global population used private sanitation facilities connected to sewers from which wastewater was treated. For many, a flushing toilet is a luxury and we would do well not to forget that.
Regardless of who you are or where you live in El Salvador you have to put your used toilet paper in the bin and not in the bowl. The sewerage pipes are so narrow and so under-developed that it can cope with poop or paper but not both at the same time.
I digress.
As you’d expect the clientele of the Boeing Business Jet configuration 737-900 (with winglets) was noticeably more Salvadoran, aggressively more Salvadoran than any of the previous three flights I had taken that week.
There were women wearing frilly aprons out of custom not necessity. Women with mantas on their heads, smiles full of gold teeth - in the plural, always in the plural. Sombreros but not the Mexican-type, and so many of those three piece ensembles that Salvadoran women of a certain age and class own that are simultaneously beautifully simple and gaudy.
And those laughs, a Salvadoran person laughing like they mean it is the most beautiful sound.
Sitting next to me, El Salvador bound, was an old lady: gold teeth, frilly apron, manta, gaudy but simple three piece and a carry-on bag that was overflowing with tchotchkes and trinkets gallore.
The announcement about plane etiquette and formal immigration procedures didn’t appear to mean anything to her, she sat there looking at the back of the seat in front. She reminded me of my own grandma, and even though we barely looked at each other, I loved her with the tenderness of a grandson.
She called the flight attendant over and asked her for something I didn’t manage to hear, the attendant told her she would be back soon to help, but she would make her way down the plane and since we were sitting in the last row she would be helped, but eventually.
My flight companion was illiterate, in fact everyone around me was illiterate.
In the three back rows of a Boeing aircraft arranged in a 3 x 3 configuration, I was the only person who could both read and write. How could I not be the one to help here? How could I keep the 25 years of formal education I’ve had all to myself?
And so I did, it was not just my duty, it was my honour.
My own grandmother had taken that same flight many times before, she was both illiterate and surprisingly well traveled. I do hope that whoever was sitting next to my grandmother when she too gave that customs paper a blank stare also offered to help her.
So I filled out this customs form, and then another, and then another. I lent people pens, I helped others make sure they were filling it out properly. I became a one-person community legal centre.
It was my duty, and my honour.
