The Bridge That Held Us Together

In 1988, a dog with rabies bit me in San Jorge. I do not remember the bite as clearly as I remember what came after it: the buses, the hospitals, the bridges, and my older brother sitting beside me while we crossed a country that felt as wounded as I was.

Vaccines were scarce. At first, we went to a local clinic. They gave me one shot and told us we would have to look elsewhere for the rest. Then we went to Hospital San Pedro in Usulután, where I received another dose. After that, we were sent to San Salvador, to the Benjamín Bloom pediatric hospital. The journey from San Jorge to San Salvador took hours. I no longer remember exactly how many; I only remember that it felt very far.

My brother traveled with me because there was no one else who could take me. He was old enough to be recruited, which meant every trip carried an underlying danger. At any military checkpoint, soldiers could have taken him. I was too young to know how to travel alone, too young to understand bus routes, and too young to find my way back home if he suddenly disappeared. That was one of my deepest fears. It was not only the painful injections or the looming shadow of the disease itself; it was the terrifying certainty that they might take my brother, leaving me entirely alone in a city I did not understand.

To reach San Salvador from eastern El Salvador, we had to cross the Lempa River. Years earlier, during the civil war, the original bridges spanning the river had been destroyed. Temporary wooden bridges had replaced them, but they carried traffic in only one direction at a time. Traffic moved sluggishly in one direction while the other side waited under the punishing sun. I remember the waiting—long lines of buses, pickup trucks, and cars stretching endlessly along the dusty road. People stood outside their vehicles in the heat, talking, sweating, and watching for the precise moment when it would finally be our turn to cross.

And I remember the women. They walked between the stalled vehicles with heavy baskets perfectly balanced on their heads, selling tamales, pupusas, yuca, drinks, and whatever else hungry travelers might buy while waiting beside a broken country. I was a child, and I did not understand economics or the politics of war. I only saw women moving through the heat as if they belonged to that liminal place, as if even a destroyed bridge could be converted into a bustling market when people still needed to eat.

Sometimes the temporary wooden bridge had to be closed for repairs. On those days, traffic crossed over the old railway bridge. Trains had stopped running years earlier because the guerrillas had fired on them, so the tracks no longer carried steel cars; instead, they carried buses packed with people trying to reach medical care.

Waiting became part of every journey. None of us complained because there was nothing anyone could do. We simply waited our turn, as if patience had become another form of transportation.

The structure that impressed me most was the bridge Salvadorans came to know as the Puente de Oro (“Golden Bridge”). Of course, I did not know its history then. I had no idea that it had been inaugurated in 1952, or that it had been built by John A. Roebling’s Sons Company, the engineering firm famous for the Brooklyn Bridge. I did not know that, for many Salvadorans, its towering silhouette recalled San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, giving rise to the name by which it became known.

As a child, none of that mattered to me. I only knew that its towers seemed impossibly tall. I had never seen anything like them. While we waited to cross, I would stare up at those enormous steel towers and feel very small beneath them. They seemed too magnificent to belong to the same country where we were traveling from hospital to hospital in search of a vaccine that no one seemed to have enough of.

When we finally arrived at the Benjamín Bloom, I saw more sick children than I had ever seen in my life. Some had severe burns, some had bullet wounds, and some had no hair. Years later, I understood they probably had cancer. At the time, I only knew that they looked fragile in a way children should never have to look. The hospital itself had been heavily damaged by the devastating 1986 earthquake. I remember hearing that its operations had been moved temporarily to another building—perhaps an old school—while the main structure was being rebuilt. San Salvador still carried the raw, open wounds of both the earthquake and the war together. Buildings stood broken, streets felt crowded and tense, and everything seemed entirely temporary.

Even help felt temporary. At the pediatric hospital, they gave me another dose but told us to look elsewhere because their vaccines were strictly limited. We went to a municipal clinic in San Salvador, but they sent us back because I was a child. We went to Hospital Rosales, but they would not treat me because it was an adult facility. Again and again, we returned to the Bloom. Each place gave us a sliver of hope, and each place promptly sent us somewhere else. At one point, we even considered fleeing to Guatemala because someone whispered that vaccines might be available there. The idea of crossing an international border every day for a shot seemed impossible, but in those years, impossibility had become part of ordinary life.

I do not remember how many injections I finally received. I think it may have been around fifteen, but memory does not always preserve numbers. It preserves fear. It preserves my brother sitting steadfastly beside me. It preserves the image of women selling food beside the rushing river. It preserves the towers of the Puente de Oro rising defiantly above a country held together by nothing more than repairs, patience, and sheer necessity.

Years later, I understand something I could not have understood as a boy. War does not destroy only by killing people. It destroys by dismantling the fabric of daily life. It destroys bridges, it empties hospitals, and it makes life-saving medicine scarce. It turns a child’s vaccine into a dangerous odyssey across half a country, and it makes an older brother risk forced military recruitment just because his little brother needs another dose.

Jewish tradition teaches that saving a single life is among the highest human obligations—an act that supersedes almost all other laws. But in the midst of war, even the simplest act of saving a child’s life becomes an agonizingly complicated puzzle. A vaccine requires a bus. A bus requires a bridge. A bridge requires hours of waiting. Sometimes, waiting requires courage. And courage, sometimes, looks like an older brother sitting quietly beside a frightened child, refusing to let him go.

I survived the bite. My brother was never taken. We always found our way back home. But when I think of that time, I do not remember only the needles. I remember a country trying desperately to keep its children alive with broken bridges, makeshift hospitals, scarce medicine, and women carrying baskets of food through the heat.

I crossed the Puente de Oro before I understood what it truly represented. To me, it was simply the tallest thing I had ever seen. Now, I think the country itself was exactly like that bridge: deeply damaged, entirely improvised, and frightening to cross, but still holding just enough weight for us to reach the other side.