Salvador's Children

"Salvador's Children tells the extraordinary story of a North American woman who adopts an eight-year-old orphaned girl from El Salvador in 1984 and, by this action, becomes a witness to the impact of the Salvadoran civil war on one child - her child." "From the moment the narrator meets Maria in a Salvadoran orphanage, she is compelled by her terrified silences, silences that seem to reflect on a private level the gaps and absences in the official writing of the decade's larger history. Through documentary research, through imagined conversations with the child's birth mother, and - most poignantly - through Maria's own stories as she begins to speak, the narrator attempts to reconstruct the reality and meaning of the child's young life. What emerges is a portrait of the everyday life of a young girl growing up in an extended family of landless Salvadoran peasants. The reader and the narrator come to know Maria's memories - of sleeping in a hammock, the birth of a sibling, carrying her father's lunch to the sugarcane fields - and also the terror and violence that tore apart the child's life and the lives of more than one million children in El Salvador during the 1980s. The narrator and her adopted daughter move from a five-day initial encounter in San Salvador - from orphanages through barrios, doctors offices, the American Embassy, and a luxury hotel - to the insularity of middle-class life in a North American city, a cross-cultural journey that intersects the polarities of North-South, brown-white, present and past, life and death." "Combining lyrical narrative, documentary material, and poetry, Salvador's Children explores cross-cultural relationships, identity, and responsibility. Both intensely personal and political, this powerful account will move anyone who cares about the rights and survival of today's children."--BOOK JACKET.