A Mighty Purpose (18 page)

At a press conference, seated side by side in ornate highback chairs behind tall glasses of iced tea, Grant and Duarte looked oddly mismatched. Wearing big glasses, his face drooping, somber, dour even—Duarte was inscrutable. Grant folded his hands in front of him, telegraphing a quiet excitement. His
eyes glinted and his shirt pocket bulged—probably with a few packets of ORS.

“Señor Presidente,” Grant began a halting, heartfelt, pause-riddled address. “This is a great day in El Salvador—not only for the children of El Salvador … but for children throughout the world …

“Last year in El Salvador, more children died … from not being immunized … than died because of fighting in the country. To my knowledge, this is the first time … in the history of the world … when all parties … in a country like El Salvador today … agreed to fight a common enemy first.”

As his words staggered out, his hands swept in small circles, as though he were urging someone to hurry up and finish a thought.

He then thanked and congratulated the president, pronouncing his name “Dor-tee.”

Despite the mispronunciation, President Duarte liked Grant and even began emulating him. On a later occasion, before a televised press conference, Duarte stopped Kayayan in the hall and asked if he happened to have a packet of ORS, oral rehydration salts. “I don’t,” Kayayan told the president, “but Mr. Grant surely does.” Kayayan found Grant.

The executive director of UNICEF was tired and puzzled.

“Why does he want ORS?” he said. “Does he have diarrhea?”

“No,” Kayayan replied, perhaps stifling a chuckle. “He wants to do the same thing you do.”

Grant nodded, fished a packet out of his pocket, and handed it to Kayayan.

When Duarte addressed the television cameras, he declared that El Salvador would not only vaccinate children, it would save them from the biggest killer, diarrhea, by using oral rehydration salts.

Then he brandished the packet of ORS and held it aloft for all to see.

“He had learned this from Mr. Grant,” says Kayayan. “I looked at Mr. Grant, and his mouth is open, he can’t believe it … [The president] was imitating exactly what he used to do.”

On Sunday, February 3, 1985, at more than three thousand sites in nearly every corner of El Salvador—at health centers, schools, churches, and town squares, in the dense barrios of San Salvador and in remote villages of adobe brick homes—parents lined up to get their kids immunized. Many had come because their priests had encouraged them. Some had heard about the campaign on commercial radio stations or on the FMLN’s clandestine Venceremos radio channel. Others had read about it in one of the million leaflets air-dropped across the Massachusetts-sized country or even glimpsed the slogan
prevenir es … vacunar
on a lottery ticket.

Grant’s “social mobilization” strategy had once again paid off. Spreading word of the immunization drive in every conceivable venue was intended not just to let parents know about the free service, but to instill in them a demand for better health care for their children. In some places, the immunization teams—dubbed “life squads” by Bishop Chávez—were the very first contact local residents had with any kind of health care, ever.

On that first day, Grant went to the small hamlet of Corral Viejo, where a local volunteer told the Associated Press that residents had to walk ten miles to the nearest health clinic and that, as a result, most children there had never seen a doctor. She said that each year about half of the village’s small children died of preventable diseases.

Indeed, it was a big event for the village. Children had donned their “Sunday best” to get their shots. In Corral Viejo and many other places, the vaccination booths were adorned with balloons and streamers. Once children had submitted to the needle, they were given a bat and encouraged to break open piñatas filled with candy.

In guerrilla-held towns, rebel soldiers did some of the vaccinating along with Red Cross staff. A UNICEF photo taken the day of the campaign shows a female guerrilla, an automatic rifle slung over her shoulder, bending over to vaccinate a young child. In some places, government doctors allowed themselves to be “abducted,” so that they could be taken to rebel areas to administer vaccines; they were later released. Chávez recalls, in his essay, that guns were used on that day—but only to open bottles of soda.

At the end of the day, Duarte told reporters that his minister of defense informed him the truce had held. “For that I am glad,” he said, “because we have a day of peace, a day of life, a day of hope.”

The commander of the FMLN, Joaquin Villalobos, issued a similar statement: “We cannot in any way be in disagreement. The vaccination campaign is of great importance for our people.”

Kayayan was at the airport at the end of the day and called into the office for news. “No fighting anywhere!” was the exuberant reply shouted through the phone. Sitting next to an airport pay phone, the receiver clutched to his ear, Kayayan stomped his foot down triumphantly and yelled “Banzai!” This was, in part, for the benefit for a young female Japanese UNICEF staffer who stood nearby. And it worked—hearing the victory cry, she promptly jumped into Kayayan’s lap and hugged him.

When the results were tabulated, they must have produced a mix of elation, relief, and slight disappointment. The teams had immunized 217,000 children on the first day, far shy of the goal of 400,000. But the fact that the truce was kept—that they were able to essentially stop a war to save children’s lives—was a surreal triumph.

They got ready to do it again.

It wouldn’t have worked if they hadn’t broken the rules.

Kayayan used to give his staff members brown paper bags filled with cash, in case they encountered problems in the field. If, say, during an immunization campaign, a truck carrying vaccines got lodged in viscous mud—what were your options? You did not have much time to think about it. You needed a tractor. You asked a local farmer to borrow one. But he, of course, wanted to be paid.

“What do you do?” says Kayayan. “Give a check or credit card? For people to laugh at you?”

No, you give him cash. You keep the truck moving, so the vaccines don’t spoil in the heat.

This likely ran afoul of UN financial rules. But if UNICEF had followed those rules—if every expenditure had been formally approved and vetted—Days of Tranquillity may not have been possible, says Kayayan. “When you are doing something like this in El Salvador in the 1980s, there are some bureaucratic rules you cannot follow.”

Grant understood this, says Kayayan. “He cut the red tape for me … he was our friend in New York.” The head of UNICEF did not mind, he says, if you broke the rules “for a good reason.”

Grant himself flouted numerous procedures and protocols, including during the second or third Day of Tranquillity in El Salvador. He let the staff know he would be arriving in San Salvador late and needed someone to take him directly from the airport to the site of an immunization post in a guerrilla-held area at the other end of the country. It would be impossible to make it via car or truck.

UNICEF’s Guatemala coordinator Thierry del Rue, a plucky Belgian economist, had a plane and a license to fly it. He offered to take Grant himself, though he had serious reservations.

“It would have been very easy if someone wanted to shoot us,” he says. If the plane had gone down with the executive director of UNICEF on board, he adds, “it would have been a catastrophe.”

Del Rue met Grant on the tarmac, and they got ready to board his 1948, single-engine, four-seater Navion plane.
Someone standing nearby mentioned that such a flight was prohibited for security reasons.

“I don’t care,” Grant said. “We’re going.”

During the nearly two-hour flight, the roar of the engine was too deafening to allow conversation. Del Rue had to guide the plane very slowly between two mountains—this is where he felt most vulnerable. They were a tempting target up here, plodding along, pinned by the mountains.

He finally set the plane down on a short gravel airstrip at a dilapidated airport that looked abandoned. A caravan of UNICEF cars was waiting. After a short drive, the group was warmly greeted by the guerrillas. A government minister had also come, arriving in a car with darkened windows. The rebels welcomed everyone, says del Rue, offering coffee and cookies.

There were numerous last-minute hitches—and with them, bent or snapped rules. On a Friday afternoon before a later Day of Tranquillity, an urgent message came crackling through a walkie-talkie: “No ice!”

Ice was required, of course, to keep the vaccines cool. Without it, notes Kayayan, vaccines become “water with salt.” They become useless. Apparently, the ice supply had run out two days before the next truce. Hernan Jaramillo, the diligent Colombian who managed the logistics, picked up the walkie-talkie. He barked an order to staff: “Buy ice everywhere!… Go to stores, go to homes, buy all the ice you can.” He told them to first come to the office to get some cash.

Jaramillo was “the action guy,” says Kayayan.

He extracted UNICEF from a number of tight fixes. One evening, before the second or third ceasefire, Kayayan organized a press conference to announce the next impending truce. Earlier that day, he had reserved a reception room at the Camino Real Hotel and invited thirty reporters. “We were given assurance from the church it was going to be yes,” Kayayan recalls.

But as night crept across San Salvador, the “yes” had not come. Grant had flown down and was at the hotel. The thirty journalists soon started filtering in, and Kayayan found himself in a familiar position: surrounded by reporters with nothing to tell them.

“Just a minute,” Kayayan told the group. “Just a minute.”

Finally, he admitted he didn’t have confirmation from the guerrillas. “It was like a funeral,” he says.

Grant was calm and did not betray any anxiety or displeasure. As he chatted with reporters, Jaramillo sidled up to Kayayan.

“Don’t worry,” he whispered. “I’m going to the archbishop’s place.”

“Hernan,” Kayayan protested, “it’s nine o’clock at night. You don’t bother an archbishop at night.”

“I’m going,” he said, and left.

Kayayan then ordered in some food and drinks. Everyone politely sipped beers and sodas and waited in a stifling haze of unease. Del Rue, who was in the room, recalls a “moment of very high tension.”

In about forty-five minutes, Jaramillo bolted back into the room, an expansive smile splitting his face. He hurried over to
Kayayan and whispered that Deputy Bishop Chávez had confirmed that the guerrillas had once again accepted the truce. Kayayan quickly told Grant, who promptly asked for everyone’s attention.

“The truce is on for the weekend!” he announced.

Suddenly, the “mourning session turned into a wedding ceremony … the journalists had a party.”

On another evening, recalls del Rue, UNICEF staff were eating dinner in the hotel restaurant as the hotel band struck up a familiar tune: “We Are the World.” Featuring forty-five famous performers, the song was written by Michael Jackson and Lionel Ritchie to raise money for famine relief in Africa. Grant quickly shot out of his chair, bounded onto the stage, and started belting out the words (no doubt completely off key): “We are the World … we are the children … we are the ones who make a brighter day … So let’s start giving!”

He beckoned others to join him, and they did, scrambling onto the stage.

“It was very funny,” says del Rue, “all the staff of UNICEF singing in this hotel.”

The last two Days of Tranquillity were even more successful than the first one: 262,000 children were reached on March 3 and 241,000 on April 21. The truces again held, with one exception. On March 3, five immunization sites were closed because of government bombing, according to Grant’s handwritten notes. The notes were based on reports from the guerrilla radio channel.

The three almost entirely violence-free days were indeed remarkable and fleeting anomalies. In the weeks preceding and following each day, the killing raged, unabated. In his sermon on March 3, Archbishop Damas again appealed for peace from the pulpit, asking both sides to honor UNICEF’s ceasefire. According to a United Press International report, he also decried what he called a “cloud” of deaths that was darkening El Salvador, noting that eighty-six people had died in the last week alone.

Throughout the rest of El Salvador’s civil war, which ended in 1992, the Days of Tranquillity would be reprised year after year. No matter how bad—how sinister and cruel and blood-soaked all the other days of the year were—these days were sacred. Thousands upon thousands of children lived as a result.

“Holy Shit.”

The words came through the phone in a barely uttered whisper, after a pause—a pause long enough to make Marco Vianello-Chiodo think, at first, that he had lost his connection with Jim Grant.

But Grant was there, and he was listening.

In his hotel room in Boston, the head of UNICEF was absorbing what Vianello-Chiodo—sitting thousands of miles away in Rome—had just told him. Those two words were his response.

Vianello-Chiodo was in his native Italy in May 1985 to ask for money. That was his job as the director of UNICEF’s Program Funding Office. He had been visiting Francesco Forte, a Socialist government minister in charge of Italy’s foreign aid budget. The imposing Vianello-Chiodo, who stood six feet seven and wore a lush beard, had suggested that the government of Italy support UNICEF’s push for childhood immunization. Italy could
make an unparalleled impact, he had said. Forte had told him to write a letter making a specific request, and Vianello-Chiodo had decided to waste no time—he would write the letter right then and there. He asked to borrow a typewriter. It happened to be the typewriter used to write speeches for government officials, with giant characters between a quarter and a half inch tall. He threaded the paper in and hastily drummed out an official note in extra-large type, asking the government of Italy to give UNICEF $100 million.

And the government of Italy said yes.