SCORES Stretches to El Salvador

This past week a handful of SCORES staff descended on El Salvador to run a week of programming at a school in Las Minas, a small village in the rural district of Chalatenango.

Roberto Gil, Director of Programs in West Contra Costa, organized the trip. Gil has returned to his native El Salvador to run soccer and writing classes for the last six years.

“This is not a trip of charity,” Gil announced on the first day in front of fifty eager Las Minas students, ages six through fifteen. “It is one of solidarity.”

Ernesto Efrain Menjivar Alas, the Vice-Principle of Escuela Canton Las Minas, shows a group of students what a "caballero" looks like.

Gil’s words echoed throughout the week as Las Minas students shared their stories, their food, their families, and their beautiful town with visiting SCORES staff. In turn, SCORES organized activities that involved sharing stories, identifying community problems, and creating solutions.

“Every morning we would start with a problem that kids needed to figure out creative ways to solve together,” Shannon Burns of SCORES said. “The first day the kids needed to figure out how to pass a balloon to teammates without using their hands.”

Shannon Burns swarmed by her new best friends in Las Minas

Each year, SCORES programs in Las Minas get a little more robust and professional. This year, Gil used a series of activities in Peace Education developed by Kathryn Crawford as part of her doctorate at the University of Toledo. Crawford and Gil collaborated in delivering the lessons to a classroom of about 35 students.

“You’re really making us work!” one student cried to Gil in the middle of a class. 

Lessons challenged students, who are on Winter Break until next week, to express community problems through drawings, poems, and acting. Students then worked in groups to talk about and present solutions. 

“They thought a lot about it,"Gil said. "And many of their solutions were to have activities for kids to be engaged.”

Every day after class, all of the students descended a muddy slope behind the school to the town's beloved field of dirt and rocks, where they spent the afternoon playing soccer drills, games, and scrimmages with SCORES staff. After the soccer finished, players and staff covered in a layer of sweat and dust, most of us took to the gentle river that runs along one sideline of the field. Players washed off the dirt and cooled down before a late lunch. As a Las Minas tradition, the winner of the late-afternoon scrimmages gets first dibs on bean and cheese papusas fried by the school's cook. 

-Cyrus Philbrick

Program Manager

America SCORES Bay Area

PS. Teaching soccer and writing in Las Minas gave me a new perspective on the tiny country where hundreds of thousands of people in the Bay Area claim their roots. It also showed me what the simple game of soccer means to the people of El Salvador and Las Minas. Mostly, it represents a balance of the same values it does in San Francisco: individuality and solidarity. But in Las Minas, people seem to cherish these values, among many others, a little more than they do in America. They work for them. One afternoon I returned to the town soccer field with SCORES staff to find a crew of men digging out an embankment of rocks and earth that threatened one goalmouth. I'd cursed this embankment a few times when it stole the ball from me during joint player and staff scrimmages.


When the men stopped removing rocks the size of power wheels to start the village's bi-weekly "Men's Soccer Games", a group of first graders picked up the men's shovels and continued to remove wheelbarrows of earth and rocks. The children worked while dodging defenders and inswinging crosses. They did so until dusk. The next day we played on a flatter and less dangerous soccer field.