Yes, there is crime, poverty, and disease in this country. But it can generally be avoided. That said, please don't take my word for it. Stay home and keep these pristine beaches empty for when we come back. And we will definitely be coming back.
One of the many, many perks of being embassy staff is membership at a small beach club. It was almost certainly the first time I've gone through an armed security checkpoint in my bathing suit, but it was worth it.
Isaias and Donyel, both also dads, reminding me that I have no excuse.
Aimee, Cicely, and Alicia immediately picked up where they last left off, and were immediately back in Nicaragua remembering stories from twelve years, three weddings, and six kids ago.
It was a delightful afternoon, and very much intentionally not an authentic El Salvador experience. This was where diplomats go to escape. The person on the lounge chair next to you could be the first grade teacher at the British school, or could just as easily be the French Ambassador. But odds are pretty decent that it isn't someone who grew up in El Salvador.
Like most of Central America, El Salvador has money (we passed the Porsche and Mercedes Benz dealerships on our way out of town). The money is just stratified and tiered. And we all knew how lucky we are to be able to weave in and out of those tiers as we please. But after an international flight with two small children, this was the right tier for today.
This was the first time that Aimee and I had put our son down for a nap and then immediately realized that falling coconuts could potentially be a sleep hazard.
So we moved him out from under the tree (slowly), but then had to weigh the risks of sun exposure vs. coconut exposure.
But I think we worked out a reasonable solution. Beach napping will be its own chapter in our forthcoming book on parenting entitled, "We Probably Should Have Left Them With Grandma and Grandpa."
But aside from being a sweaty mess, he didn't seem to mind.
And one more for good measure.
While Quinn was napping, Mimi was hanging out with the big kids.
They found and adopted "a baby coconut" that would bring them hours of joy, further proving that money spent on children's toys should really just be put towards traveling to El Salvador.
Coincidentally, one of the families at the beach club that day were embassy coworkers of Cicely and Donyel who had a high-school age daughter that would be babysitting our kids later in the week. It required traveling to Central America, but Aimee and I would be going out with only adults for the first time since becoming a family of four. Best. Vacation. Ever.
Our future babysitter was the type of squared away high-schooler that you immediately felt comfortable leaving your kids with. But already we knew we didn't need to worry, since our kids would be with Cicely and Donyel's almost seven year old who had the maturity of someone twice her age and the immediate, undying love of our kids after just being with her for 24 hours.
But we didn't need to wait until Wednesday to go out with our friends. The embassy community is family heavy, and there is a small army of trusted nannies that everyone uses. Since Cicely and Donyel's kids are school age, they don't have one of the live-in nannies that we learned are surprisingly common among embassy staff. Cicely told us that one family has two nannies every weekday, and a third one that comes on the weekends. Aimee and I, with eyes popping out of our heads, noted how happy we are to just have a daycare close to our house. I felt not-that-sorry for the families that had to recover from their childcare addiction when their next assignment sent them to a high-income country.
But I (jealously) digress. Even though Cicely and Donyel didn't have their own nanny, it was easy to find one on short notice. So Cicely made a few phone calls, and locked down Teresa for the evening. Teresa, or Tere, is what you would get if Mary Poppins was a super-charming El Salvadoran grandmother.
In contrast to the high-schooler who we felt safe leaving our kids with for the night, we felt unsafe not leaving our kids with Tere all day every day. We were doing our children a disservice by only leaving them with her for one night. I hope they can find it in themselves to forgive us when they're older.
We were a little interested in what would happen when Mimi was given bedtime directions in puro español, but in no way were we willing to stick around long enough to find out.
Our first stop was the United Stated Embassy in San Salvador. A storied, imposing campus that also happens to have very good mojitos at the pool bar. Cicely wanted to give us our first view of the embassy, and knew that a Saturday night, when most of the staff was home, would be a good time to go through the security processing and learn the rules for visitors on the property.
I was like a kid in a candy store. I looked around with wide eyes at the three rows of reinforced vehicle barricades, the two-inch thick security glass, and the Marines on patrol, all with Rick James' Super Freak playing on the loudspeakers by the pool. I imagined that it wouldn't have been much different had I walked through the embassy during the Central American civil wars of thirty years ago. The scene called back images from Graham Greene and Tom Robbins books about semi-artificial paradises created inside of war zones.
That said, these are stressful places to work, and it's hard to fault people for creating a little semblance of normalcy. My understanding is that there are pockets of Iraq and Afghanistan that look strikingly similar. Thinking of this phenomena as either right or wrong misses the complexity that I surely wasn't going to appreciate over a poolside mojito. But I sure did appreciate the poolside mojito.
Since I wasn't sure if we could have cameras in the embassy, my only photos from that evening are surrepticiously taken selfies that are mostly of my thigh. I'll spare you those images; we'll be back plenty more this week.
Quinn got his first "first" of his young life, though. He wears Mimi's clothes, uses Mimi's carseat, and chews on Mimi's toys. But he's the first Stone child to hang out by the pool in a highly secured United States Embassy. We had only been in the country for 24 hours at that point, so Aimee hadn't stored up enough excess milk to leave with Quinn for the night. So he got to come with. We also thought that it was a little excessive to ask Tere to watch five wired toddlers while also feeding an infant. Not that she wouldn't have been up to the task.
Dinner was raw fish and fried octopus at what was easily one of the nicest restaurants I had ever been to. In the US, I would have spent more in a drive-through. But in El Salvador, I was having a delightful Peruvian meal in the company of wonderful friends while most of our children were singing about una cucharada de medicina and traveling to magical lands courtesy of Tere's magical umbrella.
Or so we imagined. It turned out that they were jumping on the couch and tossing around their baby coconut. Being that it was not a school night, we gave Tere the green light to keep a soft agenda regarding bedtime. And unsurprisingly, five toddlers did not spontaneously put themselves to bed. So when we got home around 8 pm (we're still parents of young children, after all), we herded our exhausted kids off to bed, with most of them falling asleep before we even made it out of their rooms.
The evening was capped off with more back porch stories about diplomat life with a cold beer in one hand and a second draft of my resignation letter in the other.