Making My Way Back To A Forgotten Country

This story has to begin with the people that came before me. My parents. Both of my parents were born in the tiny country of El Salvador in the early 1960’s during a time of relative societal calm. At least, in the parts of the country where they lived it was calm. Isolated from the major cities and mainly confined to family owned farms, they avoided encountering the political conflicts of the time.

They weren’t rich, but they also weren’t poor. Much like the majority of people in the United States, they were doing just okay and getting by.

Much like myself though, they also attended school, they had home duties and they spent most of the daylight hours playing outside. For the most part they lived pretty normal lives.

In 1979 tensions between the then military led government and the leftist organization, the Farabundo Marti Liberation Front (FMLN), finally erupted into full on civil war, in what would eventually lead to a decades long battle taking many lives. Before things escalated to critical levels though, my grandparents made the tough choice to send their kids to a safer place to seek some form of shelter and asylum.

And so they first came to the United States in the early 1980’s. Not so much by choice. But more so by necessity and by fear. The fear shared by hundreds of thousands of…