When we moved to El Salvador on 12 August, 1975, it was so overpopulated that citizens were forced to farm land inside the rims of not so dormant volcanoes.

We were told sixteen families control everything in El Salvador, and I wondered about that particular number being so random – I mean, sixteen? Why not five, or ten, or even two dozen? Whatever the true number of owners of the country, it was clear and obvious that El Salvador’s wealth was not being shared equally.

And yes, the civil war had already begun, so landing in that tiny country was like jumping into a caldera full to the brim with roiling rage and violence the voltage of lightening.

My husband and I were newlyweds straight out of grad school. After being hired to teach at the American school in El Salvador, we had to locate the place on a map, because neither of us had ever noticed it before. We certainly knew nothing about its civil war, a toxic little secret, until we landed in the capital city of San Salvador, when the person who met us at the airport filled us in on all the ongoing unrest and both military and paramilitary atrocities.

As bad as it was the first year we were here, with us both sabotaged by stress and walking in fear every day, I made things worse by taking a job at La Universidad de San Salvador in August, 1976. I was hired by the Foreign Languages Department to teach beginning composition to a large undergrad class, and British Literature in a graduate seminar.

When we left El Salvador in June, 1977, we were lucky to be alive, for which I was profoundly grateful. We had jobs to go to at another overseas American school in Katmandu, Nepal, for which I was also grateful. If we had been forced to return jobless to the States and start the application and interview process from scratch, I’m not sure I could have secured another teaching position.

The problem, besides the fact that the University campus exploded one night while I was attending a faculty meeting? The problem was, there was no one left alive whom I worked for there. All my bosses were suddenly among the dead or the disappeared, so they could not provide the recommendations required in such a job search. My department Chairman was assassinated. Soon after his murder, his boss, Dean of Humanities, was assassinated. And then the Dean’s boss, President of La Universidad, was assassinated.

Of course, more were dead than the entire administration of La Universidad de San Salvador. Many of my students also disappeared, some keeping away from campus, and some actually gone, poof, for ever. My best girlfriend there, Ana Margarita Gasteosoro, born in El Salvador but educated abroad, became one of the disappeared, and her body has never been found.

I met that President. Outside of being President of the University, he was a dentist. He kept exotic birds in his clinic in an old part of the city. He hand fed them, cooing to each one, and Novocain did not seem necessary when he worked in my mouth.

I imagine somewhere there is proof of my employment at La Universidad Nacional de San Salvador, where I taught British Literature and Composition classes in the Foreign Language Department for two semesters. But, I did not get letters of recommendation from my bosses there before they were assassinated. Without letters of reference, who in this modern world would hire me?

By the way, a funny thing about life in El Salvador was no one in our neighborhood needed hot water heaters. Because the city sprawled up the side of El Boqueron, one of those napping volcanoes that pockmarked El Salvador, all underground pipes were heated from below. In the 1970s, a seismically active decade, our problem was getting any cold water at all.