Adventures of a TwentySomething

For El Salvador´s elections, we got to be registered International Observers... incredible experience. We started at 5am and finished around 6pm, traveled all over the west part of the country, witnessed fraud and had some amazing talks with people. In Cuscatlan, a lady from the FMLN office found me and my friend (we had to wear special t-shirts to identify us as accedited) and spend an hour and half walking around the town showing us buses that she claimed ARENA had brought in full of people from Honduras and Guatemala to vote... supposedly ARENA (current party in power) was giving people 20 bucks to come for the day. We also went to the FMLN offices and has a discussion with the head of their party and talked to people in town. Given that these reports were coming from someone of the opposite party, it had to be taken with a grain of salt. But it was so frustrating to see this and watch and observe and know that if even a small part of what she was saying was true, there was fraud.

At the end of the day, we returned to the place we started and watched the counting of the ballots - also really intriguing. There was a guy at my table trying to scam the system and it was really interesting to watch it unfold.

All in all, it was an incredible and frustrating day. I was reading through Psalms the next day and came across Psalm 10, which talks about injustice and pretty much described exactly what we had seen and been a part of.