The road from San Salvador, El Salvador’s bustling capital city, to Carasque, a remote mountain village near Honduras, is potholed and hot. The climb is through jungles and farms, settlements and streams. Women carrying laundry in baskets on their heads, men herding cows, and carts toting vegetables are common sights along the way. When the sun hits its peak, the temperature nudges toward 100 degrees. The air is tight, and brown clouds waft up from the dirt road as a clunky truck carrying standing riders in the flatbed bounces into town.

The contrast with Bangor is stark.

Yet the road from Bangor to Carasque is shorter than you might imagine. By actual travel, it can take as many as three planes (17 hours) and a slow car drive (three bumpy hours) from San Salvador. But political and humanitarian activists in Bangor and community organizers in Carasque have worked to shorten that distance through cultural exchange.

In April, I visited Carasque to talk with its residents about their relationship with friends in Bangor. My host was Jesse Kates-Chinoy, a 22-year old who was born in Bangor and into, as he likes to say, “solidarity work.” His parents, Katherine Kates and Dennis Chinoy, met with me more than a month before my travels. They lived with Jesse in Carasque awhile back for nearly a year, and suggested Jesse take me on the trek to the village. Spanish is Jesse’s second language, and he’s the U.S. representative in the country for the Bangor branch of the U.S.-El Salvador Sister Cities network. The organization, which formed in the shadow of El Salvador’s civil war lasting from 1980 to 1992, has 29 such sister city programs in El Salvador. The link between Bangor and Carasque, which began in 1991, has been particularly rich for each city, say people on both sides of the map.

Although you would never call Carasque a city (its population is around 400) there is an informal town center. Take the smallest town you know in Maine, add jungle fauna, chickens in the road and an occasional passer-by in a straw hat, and you’ve got the picture, give or take a few degrees on the thermometer.

I met Jesse in San Salvador, where he works in a complex shared by Sister Cities and CRIPDES, the Salvadoran peasant federation of rural communities that supports the Sister City network and other projects. He pulled onto the sidewalk in a compact car with a roof fin depicting Che Guevara. We transferred to a pickup truck, driven by one of his colleagues, for the jostling ride to Carasque.

Despite the extreme differences between Bangor and Carasque – and possibly because of them – Jesse sees his work as bolstering commonalities.

“We have this sense in the U.S. that if you’re poor, you’re lazy,” the Bangor High School graduate said. “Here, it’s a community recognition of a common plight. But the poor people in El Salvador believe they can do something about it. And that’s different from the U.S.”

Just the day before, he had been at a press conference in which an organized community complained about a river being damned for a private fish hatchery, which would compromise their livelihoods. The poor people and Jesse marched in protest and were successful in re-diverting the river, he said.

I asked him about Carasque, which he considers, along with Bangor, to be one of the formative settings of his young life.

“It’s still a generation that lost brothers and sisters and parents in the war,” he said. “There is a process of recuperating their own history that is going on. And the economic conditions created by the war have still not ended.”

Jesse was gleefully greeted in Carasque with hugs and, from the men there his age, special handshakes. When the town council of about 10 people gathered in a cement-walled library with a corrugated tin roof, I was surprised to see a collective of members younger than my 25-year-old daughter. They expressed aspirations for their town, but also knew the stories of their elders, many of whom fled the village for periods during a war that was particularly harsh for civilians.

But Carasque is a stalwart town. Its citizens, some of whom fought with the rebels, defied the national army and returned to their village well before the war was over. Most of current town leaders were not yet born in 1985 when the council was secretly formed.

“During the war, our fear united us,” said Maria Celina Orellana, one of the elders of the town and, at 51, the oldest member of the council. She too fled the village, for nearly a year, but returned with both her fear and the courage to work with her neighbors rebuilding homes and family lives even in the face of danger and punishment.

Carasque residents take pride in the fact that their town is a model of community dedication. The members, including Orellana, who represents the women of the village, organize monthly workdays in which everyone in the village volunteers to repair roads and tend to farmland. They make decisions about resources, such as where to build the soccer field partially funded by Bangor. At the very center of town is the daycare center where the youngest children of Carasque go while their mothers work in a sewing cooperative begun with sewing machines from Maine.

When the Bangor-based chapter of Peace through Inter-American Community Action, which initiated the sister city project, sends annual delegations of residents, students and organizational leaders to Carasque, the visitors witness a community that asserted itself during a conflict in which their sons were killed and their daughters were raped.

While Carasque residents are friendly and welcoming, they also are worried about the effect of the looming Central American Free Trade Agreement, which promotes trade liberalization between the U.S. and several Central American countries, including El Salvador. In Carasque, which continues to be shaped by leftist leanings, CAFTA is unpopular. It does not, in the villagers’ eyes, come with the promise of jobs or improved living standards.

At the meeting of the town council that steamy day earlier this spring, villagers were shy at first but then, with translation help from Jesse, who lived there as a teen, they began to talk about their community, its history, goals and needs. Behind them on the wall was a poster from Maine’s Common Ground Country Fair. The shelves held books and board games from Bangor.

“For us, the meetings are about being united and working for the development of our community in terms of infrastructure and the group, not just as individuals,” said Jose Heriberto Orellana Franco, the 20-year-old president of the council. “We’ve learned about this in part from our parents and in part from our community. It’s a history of learning to take care of others and have rely on one another.”

For all the hopefulness and idealism, there is a feeling of waiting and stillness on the dusty streets of Carasque. It could be that the citizens are waiting to see what CAFTA will bring. Or it could be that they are waiting for remittances sent home from family members in the U.S. There is no work, the council members said, except for a few teaching positions at the school. Small farmers barely, if at all, make a living.

And there’s the issue of literacy and education, which, after grade school in El Salvador, requires tuition. As families strain to put food on the table, money to send teens to high school is not easily saved. Back in Bangor, Katherine Kates oversees a scholarship project for the youth of Carasque. With the help of local high schools, churches and other groups, she hopes to raise a mere $2,000, which can send a dozen or more students to school for the year.

Kates also likes to point out that, like Maine, Carasque faces uncertainties about its economy, work force and quality of life. In both places, farmers have watched as their goods are pushed aside for cheaper imports from elsewhere. Or jobs have been eliminated or so poorly paid that they are filled by immigrants who will work for lower wages. Mainers certainly have more choices than their Salvadoran counterparts, but Sister City representatives might say that the “solidarity work” Jesse spoke of early on is most fruitful in cultural exchanges.

No one knows for sure, but estimates are that remittances from the U.S. make up as much as a third of El Salvador’s economy. PICA estimates that the 2.3 million Salvadorans in the U.S. – 25 percent of El Salvador’s population – contribute $2.3 billion a year to the economy.

The remittances keep the fragile economy in balance, but they also come with a price (beyond the 10 percent banks and telegraph agencies shave off). Some Salvadorans tend to rely on the overseas checks rather than push for a more independent work situation in their own country.

Despite a strong commitment to community, each person around the table in Carasque that day said he or she would leave if the opportunity arose. That didn’t necessarily mean they wanted to go to the U.S., although two-thirds of the families in Carasque have a relative in the U.S. It mostly means they are eager to work for fair wages. But for the moment, the “remesas,” or remittances, pay for the North American-style clothes and hip haircuts – and here I speak mostly of the males in Carasque.

When I asked them how they afforded to dress in such expensive clothes, one young man shrugged and said: “Sometimes looking good is more important than anything.” You might hear something like that from youths on the streets of Bangor.

And that’s one way that the sister city relationship thrives. The sharing of struggles, challenges and even fashion trends binds the two communities, so distant from one another in so many ways.

“There’s a great word in Spanish – animar – that means to give spirit,” said Kates, who teaches Tai Chi in Bangor. “The best that can come from the sister relationship is that we ‘animar’ one another. We walk together to face the challenges.”