By the time I met him, I already knew what a landmine could do. I had heard the explosion that killed another boy not long before, and for weeks afterward, his mother’s scream followed me everywhere. I thought I understood what war looked like. Then, I met a boy who had survived.

I was about nine years old when my mother sent me to stay with a family in Cantón Joya de Ventura, west of the center of San Jorge. She wanted me to learn how to work the land, as many children in rural El Salvador did during those years. School alone could not prepare us for the lives we were expected to live. We learned by following adults into fields, carrying tools, tending cattle, gathering firewood, and doing whatever work helped our families survive.

Every morning, we led the cattle into open pastures beneath the shadow of Chaparrastique. The volcano stood to the east, watching over the fields just as it watched over San Jorge itself. The grass moved gently whenever the wind descended from its slopes, and for a few hours, it was almost possible to forget that the country was at war.

That was where I met him. He was perhaps thirteen or fourteen years old, and he always arrived in a wheelchair. His family’s cattle........

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