From whence do you draw your strength?

Thus spoke Sister Peggy, the most magical woman I have ever met (photo cred: Ryan, but the rest are mine). She came to work in El Salvador decades ago as a Sister of Charity, and has fought for peace and justice for the Salvadoran people ever since.  She's now settled in the small, war-torn town of Suchitoto and is in the process of transforming an abandoned school and nunnery into El Centro Arte para la Paz, an artistic, educational, therapeutic center that is finally allowing a wounded, oppressed people to express themselves.  

But after our all-too-brief encounter, it wasn't her story that left its mark on me.  It was her.  This 70+ year old force of nature radiated an energy the likes of which I've never experienced, an energy as soothing as it was strikingly intense.  When this woman looked into our eyes, she could see our souls.  "From whence do you draw your strength?" she asked us.  That was her "icebreaker" question.  Not the superpower we'd like to have or our favorite ice cream flavor.  In the 45-minutes we spent answering that question, I think I learned more about the people I'm studying with than I have in the last 5 weeks put together.  When she listened to my answer, I felt both deeply understood and loved, and by a complete stranger.  

I'm still not entirely clear what we talked about for the rest of those two hours.  She danced poetically between topics as disparate as the atrocities that occured there during the War to loss of faith in the face of atrocity to her dreams for the Center.  But it wasn't the content that mattered.  The sense of profound groundedness she provided was a necessary catharsis in the midst of the emotional roller-coaster we were only beginning in El Salvador.  When she hugged us all goodbye, there wasn't a dry eye in the room.

 

Anyway.

El Salvador.  Here we go.  More photos are up on Facebook, here. 

The shortest international flight I've ever been on (40 minutes).

Where Monseñor Romero, archbishop of San Salvador and national hero, was assassinated while preparing communion for speaking out against violence.

 

His tomb.  Because of complicated church politics, he's now in the basement of the cathedral instead of above.  As a kind of protest, a huge congregation meets for mass in the basement now while the "traditional" mass takes place upstairs.

 

One of the coolest parts of the way our trip was organized is that we would often eat meals in people's houses instead of in restaurants!  This was Doña Beatriz's digs in San Salvador, a single illiterate mother who's worked her whole life to make sure her children are educated.  She cooked us a rockin' veggie soup. 

More pupusa action.  

The view from "The Devil's Door" outside of San Salvador.

Walking an hour and a half from the "big city" of Victoria to the rural community of Santa Marta where we stayed for 2 nights.  We took the bus after that (yes, this tiny Salvadoran rural community had a very efficient public commuter bus system...the States could stand to learn something here).  During the War, the people of Santa Marta were being aggressively persecuted by the army, so they all fled to Honduras, where they lived in a refugee camp for 5 years.  They came back 22 years ago, and have been rebuilding their lives from scratch ever since. 

We were so close to the border, that my phone thought I was in Honduras!

During our time in Santa Marta, we got to help out at Radio Victoria, an inspirational community radio station.  Founded by a handful of young folk at the end of the War, they've been working for 17 years to make sure the people of Cabañas know what's really going on in their department.  For refusing to keep quiet about abuses of power (like the proposed gold mining operation that is almost guaranteed to pour arsenic into their only water source), they've received death threats, but they've kept up the fight against the Powers That Be.  Pictured here, Las Chelas a las Once (The White Girls at 11).

Ryan and I shadowed Pablo, a reporter for Radio Victoria.  We bused over to Sensuntepeque, the regional capital, and strolled into the office of the Chief of Police to interview him about...crimes against the environment.  That's right, we went to ask the man who 20 years ago would have been ordering unimaginable human rights abuses against his own people about what his men were doing about littering.  Love it.

Cheles v. Locals.  Guess who won?

The water only runs once every two weeks here, so my family needed to stock up.

Traffic jam.

We went to the Asamblea Nacional to talk with representatives from both major political parties.  In the wake of their recent electoral defeat (first time the left has won in elections in this country), a handful of representatives of the primary conservative party deserted.  This is a party that was founded by the guy who essentially created the Salvadoran Death Squads.  Hence, "Traitors to the Homeland."  They take their politics seriously here.

 A refreshing breath of Americana.  This mall was beautiful.  El Salvador actually has a good deal of wealth.  It's just really really really poorly distributed.

A group of recent high school graduates, celebrating by screaming in their uniforms in the back of a pickup in a gas station.  Yeah, we didn't get it either.

Our academic director (metaphysicist ex-guerrilla) gets down and dirty at a San Salvador disco.