Two girls from the El Salvadoran village of El Papaturro pose for a photo with a hat and sunglasses they borrowed from visitors from Lawrence. A concert tonight by folk musician John McCutcheon will benefit the village.

Brandon Utter, a Kansas University student, poses for a photo with a resident of El Papaturro during a visit in March. In the background is a mural depicting Argentine revolutionary Che Guevara.

Kansas University graduate Dana Pazauwski eats at a restaurant in San Salvador while on a trip to El Salvador and El Papaturro.

The town has a school, a one-room medical center and dozens of little houses laid out in one topsy-turvy loop surrounded by fields of corn and sugarcane.

The local tienda may very well sell the best chocolate-covered frozen bananas you’ve ever had.

And if you’re from Lawrence, you’ll immediately have more than 200 friends.

Welcome to El Papaturro, El Salvador.

The tiny village built from the ground up by refugees forced from their homes during a ruinous civil war is a sister of Lawrence, even if you’ve never heard of it or can’t find El Salvador on a map.

Since 1994, Lawrence has had a sistering relationship with the town, sending delegations and medical supplies to the village, which was formed in the aftermath of El Salvador’s civil war, a 12-year struggle that ended in 1992.

And tonight, voices will rise in support of El Papaturro from Lawrence’s First Presbyterian Church, 2415 Clinton Parkway, when seven-time Grammy nominee John McCutcheon performs a benefit concert for the village.

It’s village, that thanks to help from thousands of miles away is still with us.

“People in the community know it and have been touched so deeply by this relationship,” says Nick Brown, one of the founders of Kansan-Salvadoran Solidarity Action (KSSA). “And it’s really valuable to a lot of lives within El Papaturro.”

Lawrence’s relationship with El Papaturro began in 1994, when the two were paired through the U.S.-El Salvador Sister City Network and the Lawrence-El Papaturro Friendship Committee was established.

Ten years later, in 2004, a group of Kansas University students went to El Salvador to visit the community, working with the friendship committee to provide medical supplies during the visit, says Brown. After that, Brown helped to organize trips to El Papaturro through the alternative spring break program at Ecumenical Christian Ministries.

“For a lot of the individuals that have gone, that relationship developed into something longer,” Brown says. “People wanted to participate in the relationship more than they were able to just through the yearly delegations. The yearly delegations provided a great opportunity for new people to experience these things, but it wasn’t the same as doing long-term, sustaining work.”

From that, KSSA was formed in May 2008 by former student delegates, members of the friendship committee and other concerned citizens.

The two groups are co-sponsoring the concert, from which the proceeds will go to help fund a scholarship the friendship committee has formed and two trips being taken by the KSSA in 2009 to observe El Salvador’s elections.

Through the looking glass

The relationship between Lawrence and El Papaturro is an important one, not just because it helps the village’s people, but because it allows U.S. citizens to understand the power of its country’s policies and how its successes and failures affect the world, says KSSA member Sarah Birmingham.

“The struggles that they are facing and the issues that they are dealing with are issues are very similar to what we’re going through,” Birmingham says. “We have a lot to learn from each other and just seeing the interconnections of how people here are affected as in El Salvador and in other countries. How that’s something that we’re all struggling with together.”

El Salvador is an especially sensitive case because of its close ties to the United States – the best example of which is in the country’s currency. The country uses the dollar, meaning as our economy sinks and the dollar grows weaker, things quickly become worse for El Salvador. This is something stressed by the politically minded McCutcheon, who himself has a long-standing relationship with Latin America.

“If the United States sneezes, El Salvador gets a cold,” McCutcheon says. “And things like what’s happening on Wall Street, NAFTA, our presidential election, affects so much of the world. And especially in small communities as this one in El Salvador. You don’t even know what that power is, you just get the effects of it.”

This, says KSSA member Jennifer Kongs, is exactly why it is crucial to help places in need, even if no war is currently raging.

“More than anything else, what’s important to remember, is as changes are going positively or things seem to be going positively, that’s no time to abandon ship or to leave things,” Kongs says. “It would be like if you started exercising and then you started to lose weight and then you just decided to stop, because you started to feel better. You would want to keep going until you reached a goal. And I’m not sure if we’re even moving that way.”