Enrique's Writings

 The rain came earlier than prior seasons. The rain that year appeared to be harder than before. Calling the storms, rain didn’t describe the storms anymore. The water fell in sheets that pounded the roofs until they buckled and carried off whole neighborhoods into the swollen Otonabee river.  That evening Anna pressed her forehead against the window, watching the streets vanish beneath brown waves. Only the tips of streetlamps marked where roads had once been. She remembered when spring used to mean planting season and flowers. Now it meant alerts and emergencies. All of a sudden, her father said: “Pack what you can,” his voice was calm and yet firm. It was the tone he always used in emergencies, as though his steadiness could hold back the flood. But Anna could see the fear on his face. Her father was aware she knew they were running out of places to go. The family had fled three times in the last few years. Each time they fled they were searching for higher ground, safer gr...

 Since the assassination of Archbishop Óscar Romero in March of 1980, El Salvador had been under a “state of siege.” The military dictatorship, through the Legislative Assembly, declared measures to suspend civil liberties, strip away basic rights, and instill fear among the population. It was enforced by a strict curfew from six in the evening to six in the morning. Anyone caught on the streets during those hours risked being shot on sight. That was the context in which I got married, and the context in which my first son was born, in December of 1981. It was around two in the morning when Ana Maria woke me up and told me the baby was coming. Neither of us had gone through this before. We were still newlyweds, and this was our first child. Her pregnancy had been healthy, but we had been worried early on due to a previous miscarriage. Under normal circumstances, labor pains might have filled us with nervous excitement. But the curfew, the soldiers in the streets, and the constant t...