San Salvador

San Salvador, The Bahamas—a tiny strip of land southeast of Nassau. There is one road that snakes around the island, one lane each way, encircling the uninhabitable marsh inland. The coastal regions consist mainly of small settlements that at the time totaled a population of less than 1,000. The nearest medical facility is hours away on a different island. Cockburn Town boasts the international airport on the island, but there is only one international flight in and out, a charter plane that flies directly from France to the island specifically for access to the Club Med resort, a relatively new addition at the time of my visit. The only other flights are island hoppers, mostly from Nassau, and the airport reflects that—the nearest bathroom is located in the bar across the street.

It was to the island that I found myself heading in early 2010 for an anthropology class. The class was for sophomores and upper classman. I was a freshman, the youngest student by at least two years, and pretty visibly out of my league. As the course began, the confident young woman that had emerged during my first semester at college had started to crawl back into the shell of the quiet, awkward little girl that had struggled her way through high school. Later in my college career I would realize that my professor had seen my potential and taken the gamble of including me in the international course, but at the time I felt out of place, believing with both pride and shame that I had manipulated my way in on a credit technicality.

All of the students were white, while my professor was black. We had discussed beforehand how her blackness gave her an unspoken advantage with people in the West Indies that we, as white people, did not have and would never have. She had tried to give us an idea of what it would feel like to be a minority within a population, as every resident of San Salvador was black, but I was not concerned; having been raised Jewish in a largely Christian society, it would not be my first time being the odd (wo)man out.

I had been to 30 states and eight other countries before my 18th birthday, so although this was my first trip without family, I was at least prepared for the traveling aspect of the course. Even the little 10-seater plane, bouncing its way along turbulently over the Lucayan Archipelago, couldn’t shake my nerves. Unlike my professor and most of my class, I had been on these types of planes nearly a dozen times, exploring the glaciers of Alaska, flying over the Rocky Mountains, or taking a shortcut to the furthest reaches of the Costa Rican rainforests. My family’s wealth and my affluent upbringing had allowed me to experience traveling in a way even my 60-year-old teacher had not.

None of my family trips around the world had prepared me at all for life on San Salvador, however. The Club Med resort that provided the lifestyle I was used to was a stark contrast to the way the San Salvadorians, and now us, lived. We were staying at the Gerace Research Center, a small laboratory primarily meant for geology and biology students, and, more importantly, one of only a few places on the island with indoor plumbing. The Center, deemed luxurious by San Salvadorian standards, compared more to camping or living off the grid in my mind; the number of insects in each situation certainly seemed comparable. But I had wanted the adventure, and so I tolerated it.

We spent two and a half weeks on the island, learning about all aspects of the culture. Our professor took us to restaurants, churches, schools, the cemetery, even the one trash dump on the island. We analyzed, made inferences, wrote papers, read articles. Day after day we studied from sunrise to sunset and then some, with occasional breaks for caving, beach time, and hitting up the local bar.

Our last day in San Salvador, our professor had arranged for us to sit in on some classes at San Salvador’s elementary school. Unlike the other students, I had not been looking forward to this visit. I do not enjoy being around kids, and I am not good at working with kids, so even though I was going in as an anthropologist and not as myself, a school full of young children was not my preferred area of study. I was going on about two hours of sleep from the night before; I had spent nearly the entire night trying to prevent my excessively drunk classmate from choking on her own vomit and running around the island naked, an ordeal that my naïve, goody-two-shoes self had never experienced and found quite traumatizing.

I was assigned to a classroom of five- and six-year-olds. The classroom itself was nicer than the one we had been assigned at the Center…but not by much. The furniture was falling apart, and the roof leaked. About half the students lacked shoes, and most of their uniforms were worn and were either too large or too small, clearly hand-me-downs from siblings or friends. The crumbling concrete walls were covered in cheerful posters, all proclaiming aspects of a Christian ideology, a sentiment that was echoed when the day began with a Christian prayer. It took a minute for my application of cultural relativism to kick in over the automatic return to the fight against forced Christian prayer in public school that, as a member of the Jewish community and a student in said public schools, I had been involved in for my entire childhood.

The children were energetic, happy, and excited to see us. They actively participated in and seemed to enjoy the lesson I taught them, despite it being painfully obvious that I was making it up on the spot, having been told that we would be teaching the class not five minutes before it was my turn to teach. They seemed eager to play with us and ask us questions. The room was full of laughter.

As my classmates and I prepared to leave after our time at the school, I felt something hit my arm. I turned to see a young student standing there, looking inquisitive and mildly guilty. “Did you just hit me?” I asked, and he nodded. I stared for a second, a little confused and unsure of how to proceed, when he spoke, innocently, in a manner that can only be mustered by a child.

“I never touched a white person before.”

I stared at him, bewildered. This boy was mature enough to understand that we were different, could understand what white meant and what black meant. And yet he was seemingly unaware of the world of racial politics that were constantly in play on the island. He was simply curious what a white person felt like. I held out my arm, deathly pale after spending a long winter in the sunless Midwest, and he traced it gently with his fingers. After a few moments, he grew bored, unable to feel anything different or special, and ran off. It was a pure, sweet moment, and it stood out in my mind in stark contrast to the sentiment that had followed us around the island for the entirety of our visit.

From the moment we first went into town after arriving at the Center, word of our presence on the island had immediately spread. The locals were used to the white people on the island either staying behind the walls of the resort or spending their days studying flora and fauna on the coast; white people straying into the settlements and actually interacting with the residents was newsworthy, to say the least. The vast majority of the people we met and talked to were outwardly kind and welcoming. The pastor at the Baptist church service we attended spent most of his sermon making continuous jokes about how we “lightened up” the room, much to the amusement of the congregation. But everywhere we went, even when interacting with the nicest of people, there was a lingering feeling of suspicion, hostility, and general anger.

The construction and operation of the Club Med resort, built in the shadow of slave plantations, with its largely white population of tourists, was yet one more wrong committed in the centuries of injustices the black populace of San Salvador had endured. The tourism was meant to bring money to the impoverished local populace, but other than through the meager salaries of the hotel employees, the people of San Salvador had not seen the cash flow they were promised. Meanwhile, the culture of the resort clashed dramatically with the modest Christian culture of the island. The battle most actively being fought during our stay between the population representatives and the resort owners was regarding the placement of the resort’s nude bathing area, which happened to be in direct view of an elementary school bus stop. As white people in a society with an all-black demographic, we attracted both attention and the negative feelings associated with whiteness.

The more I learned about the history of the island and its people, the more I understood the anger and the bias directed towards us because of our skin color. And yet the feeling of not fitting in due to my race was excruciatingly uncomfortable at times, and more surprisingly, lacked familiarity. I had thought I was prepared to face this, and I was wrong. Being Jewish in Christian America certainly makes one a minority, and I had experienced my share of difficulties. But the difficulties only came when I was vocal about my religion, the religion that I made an active choice to believe in and practice. At the end of the day, in America, I was a white girl in a classroom full of white students, another white face in a white, upper class neighborhood. Now my whiteness made me feel like an outcast.

My trip to San Salvador lasted three weeks. Three weeks of enduring whispers and stares, three weeks of being stereotyped, all due to the color of my skin. Three weeks of struggling with self-doubt and social anxiety. And then it was done. Upon our return to the States, I had the luxury of being able to return to a community where my skin color allowed me to blend in rather than stand out.

To me, this experience was life-changing, so memorable that as soon as I read the “Social Shock” challenge prompt I knew exactly what I wanted to write about. In introspect, however, it was nothing. In the years that have passed, I have been educated by patient friends, acquaintances, teachers, and community leaders about the struggles that racial minorities face in this country. My three weeks in San Salvador, where the worst I had to endure was a snide comment or a crude joke, is incomparable compared to the trials and tribulations that millions of Americans face every day due to the color of their skin and their nationality. The rise of xenophobia in this country terrifies and saddens me, and the burden of beginning to understand how systemic the racism truly is makes it worse. Sometimes it seems like it can never be fixed.

But then I close my eyes and remember the young black boy who touched his first white person, expecting to be able to feel the difference between them, and found that they were the same. And I know there is still hope.