quality of life in El Salvador

It’s hard to imagine living anywhere but the privileged countries we know. We wake up every morning and brush our teeth, shower, and walk to school safely without even considering how many of the things we take for granted. We don’t realise how inaccessible what we have may be to others all over the world in countries like El Salvador.

El Salvador has a barely sufficient health care system. Some services are free and there are many health care professionals, however the quality of care received in public hospitals is not exactly satisfactory. El Salvador has a high death rate because with about one murder every hour and a lot of gang activity, many hospitals have too many patients at one time, so not all get proper care. In the country there are eighteen hospitals for a population of  approximately 7 million. This is a very low number compared  the 1,461 hospitals in Canada for a population of approximately 36 million.

Education In El Salvador is sparse. Schools are not well built and there are not very many school supplies available to students. Children can be educated for free until age 14, but only approximately eighty-two percent of students graduate from eighth grade. Though elementary education may be cheap, it may not be easily accessible. There are not very many schools in El Salvador so the distance for a child to travel to get there is not exactly an easy roadblock to overcome. It is very dangerous to be a child alone in the streets of El Salvador, so if your family does not own a car, public transportation may be your only option and can end up being very costly. This is one of the biggest reasons six percent of Salvadoran children never go to school. Only thirty-three percent of the children of age for secondary school actually attend and the adult literacy rate is seventy-nine percent for men and seventy-three percent for women.

        In El Salvador pay wages are low, if you compare them to a country like Canada you would see quite a difference. In Canada the average monthly income
a middle-class family would be $3808, but in El Salvador, the average monthly income is be approximately $361. The most popular jobs in El Salvador are Street vending and industrial work and neither of these jobs pay very well at all. Minimum wages differ by sector. Right now, minimum wage for maquila workers in approximately $188 per month. For industrial workers the minimum is a bit higher at approximately $220 per month.


      Learning a little bit about countries that are different from yours is very eye-opening, and my only hope is that you take what you learned here and wake up. Stop taking the simple privileges we never notice for granted. Next time you leave your house and the sun is shining, and you feel safe think about it, and be grateful you were born somewhere safe.