Aberdeenshire, Scotland

Finally, I have my voice back. After a long absence I am a student again, I can open my computer, look around for a second and begin to write. This is motivated by the fact that, by Thursday lunchtime, I shall be in America. My old blue backpack on my back and Blunstones tramping down upon the road, my destination will be Franklin Pierce University in the wooded border of New Hampshire and Massachusetts, close to where I boarded the white Shackleton school bus for the first time. Something obviously drags me back to New England and like Simon I find myself wondering every time I arrive into Boston’s Logan Airport quite why I’m there.
Things are different now from how they were, I no longer have quite the same mentality I used to. Yes I like to have fun, and perhaps I over do it on occasion but now I am determined to work. I am returning to the world of students, and this time I am ready to sit down and study, to stand out from the crowd in a positive way and become the best role model I can.

As I’m going to be working very hard I technically won’t have as much time to write the blog as I used to. Because of this I will be compromising slightly and, if I work on a piece for a class that is relevant or that I like, it will be included. If you, the reader doesn’t like the way this is working out at any point just fire me off an e-mail. Anyway…

I had to write an application letter for the school and helped get me in, I wrote it like I used to and put as much passion into it as I could. It was a small essay but it meant something to me, for I wrote about El Salvador. I let myself be brought back to standing in a hot room in shirtsleeves listening to the sound of children’s laughter and looking at the alost-jungle through the open hospital door.

Franklin Pierce Application Essay

It is hard to tell the age of a child or young person in rural El Salvador. One sees kids, playing in groups along the sides of dusty roads or standing quietly outside their mud-brick houses in little more than rags, but who knows how old they are. Many are so malnourished that in some cases that they could be mistaken for seven when they are in fact eleven, their arms spindly and their skin covered with a patchwork of rashes.
I realized this soon after arriving in the small Central American country for the second time, standing with sweat forming underneath the broken stethoscope slung around my neck, an old air-conditioner in the corner, vainly fighting back the tropical heat. A young girl, maybe fourteen, stood before me in a dirty red dress, pretty despite a strange blankness in her eyes, clutching a screaming baby that was in the process of emptying its bladder upon the dirty hospital floor. As the girl noticed the puddle at her feet she was embarrassed and quickly tried to mop it up with one shoe, though her efforts were in vain and the once-white tiles just looked even browner than before. As her attention was taken by this operation I turned to Dr. Perez, my boss, and asked some vague medical question about this girl and young girl and her baby sister.
‘That’s not the sister’ Perez replied, looking at me with his owl-like glasses and crooked yellow teeth, ‘That’s the mother. We try to stop them marrying before they finish school but it is very difficult’
Later that night, as I relaxed on my bed, looking up at the corrugated iron ceiling I thought about the young seventeen-year-old boy who shared the small breezeblock room with me. I had interviewed him the first time I came to El Salvador, as he was the leader of a socialist youth group, and even then I had realized that here was yet another young person without childhood. He had been born not in the village of Santa Marta where he now lives, but in a dirty refugee camp across the Rio Lempa in Honduras, soon after his whole family had fled across that thin blue line with government troops hard on their heels. Many of the very young and very old were killed by mortar fire or drowned in the river and those who survived either picked up guns and returned to their country as hunted rebels or eked out a living in the Honduran camps.
To have been born in the camps is normality for the teenagers of Santa Marta; all of them were. Now they and their families have returned to the village, where they must try to live again, reminded of their past most of the time but talking of it only in the quiet hours before bed, when the village is silent except for the wails of howling dogs.
It will be a little easier for those born now, there will be no memories of crowded U.N tents, swooping government helicopters or any of the harsh war memories that inflict so many of the older generations. Though their bellies will not be full, as I know too well from watching Perez drawing the line diagrams that show the progression of their malnutrition, their minds will be fresh and looked after, untouched by war. I remember watching them on my way to work, running and shouting with smiles on their faces and queuing for a check-up at the hospital in a long boisterous line. It gave me some hope for El Salvador, though at the back of my mind I knew there was a group of child soldiers guarding the road junction just up the valley, their faces placid and guns in their small hands.