Special coverage sponsored by El Salvador Travel, #SurfCityElSalvador y Pure Surf 

Read this article in English (click here)

It is difficult to understand or process what is happening in El Salvador right now; it is not normal for an entire cabinet of ministers to attend the opening of an international surfing tournament, nor for the president of the nation to personally receive athletes and related persons.

It is also not normal for the Minister of Tourism to be present at the championship every day, at the beck and call of all the athletes, staff and journalists who were invited to attend. She should talk face to face with everyone and be ready to help in any way, without intermediaries or bodyguards or protocol or diplomacy.

It is not normal for a president to give surf journalists an hour of face-to-face time, answer all their questions and suggestions, with absolute generosity, without buts or rules; as it should be.

It is not normal that he defends skateboarding in his city and surfing in his sea, or that he understands that surfers like a simple and comfortable inn and not a 20-story building, and that in that exchange he finds out that that building is not good for the sea.

It is said, mostly in conversations between friends and in conversations with oneself, that life is better when surfing, that one comes out of the water a better person than when one entered, and it is not normal for a president to say that a nation is better if everyone is encouraged to go surfing, that this generates better health and prevents all the diseases related to a sedentary lifestyle.

It is not normal for a president to be involved in the well-being of his country's best surfers, nor to treat them as elite athletes, for their results and future to be supported and publicised by the president himself. How many presidents know the name of a surfer from their country?

It is not normal for a presidential candidate to have as one of his main campaign arguments turning his country into an epicentre of world surfing and then end up winning by an overwhelming majority.

It is also not normal for a president to be so young, to be 38 years old, to defend all this and to have never gone into the water to ride a wave (he said that if he does so, the board breaks and he breaks himself).

It is not normal for the president himself to reduce benefits for his ministers in order to lower the cost of the State.

It is not normal for the president himself to introduce himself as “Layla’s dad” on Twitter, instead of showing off his position as “president”, it is not normal for Layla to be the protagonist at the UN assembly, or to take a selfie in the middle of a speech to show the dinosaurs that the world works differently today.

It is also not normal that this young president leaves Maduro in a false position and that his disruptive comments end up pleasing a person who is not as sympathetic as Donald Trump.

Surfing is not “normal” (just ask those who wanted to surf in the sixties and seventies). On a football field there are two goals that don’t move, on a volleyball field there is a net that just sits there, the same applies to hundreds of activities. In surfing, everything moves, everything shines, frightens and challenges. And what is seductive is no longer the physical but the spiritual and mental.

Whatever the case, it does seem normal that an abnormal government adopts as normal the motivation for something as wonderful as waking up surrounded by waves, with the breeze blowing from the land and a whole life breaking ahead. Nothing could be more beautiful!

Don't let the charm be broken, El Salvador! Let all governments be more surfer-like, let us go barefoot to work, let salt water run over our bodies, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year!

RELATED: Nayib Bukele: “We want people to think about El Salvador and think about surfing”
RELATED: Morena Valdez, the surfer minister