Never become twelve-years-old. Chava will soon have completed the first dozen years of his life. He’s going to become a teenager but no one can really looking forward to this. A crushing civil war is taking place in El Salvador during the 1980’s. The front between the military and the guerrillas runs straight through the small village where Chava lives.Machine guns perforate his family’s corrugated iron shack, with brutal regularity. The bullets are intended for the enemy but as usual the innocent are the ones who suffer. Joy and suffering go hand in hand in Chava’s everyday fight for survival, like Cristina María with the most beautiful eyes in the world and the dead found lying in the gutter every morning.The war continues and time is flowing away with the rain from the roof but no boy in the village wants to become twelve. At twelve you join the army.