Like any practicing speech-language therapist, I have often spent time helping people construct a narrative starting at the beginning. So the beginning is where I will start, and the beginning takes me back to my delicate, poetry-loving mother, and to my hard-working father, who bought me many books. It takes me back to my war-ravaged country, a land studded with volcanoes, lush jungles, dark beaches, house-sequined hills, gray lakes, coffee and sugarcane plantations. A world of great poverty and great beauty. A happy place; a tormented place. An enduring place; a place of contradictions. Close enough to dream about America's golden roads; far away to move to the beat of a Mayan song . In 2015, my native country, El Salvador, became the most violent nation in the Western Hemisphere , and in 2016, it was declared the deadliest country outside a war zone . Yet El Salvador has ranked among the top ten countries where people declare themselves the happiest . How is that for a contradi...