stuff and things

¡Hola! I wrote a blog entry on my laptop, but I think maybe my thumb drive wasn't all the way ejected when I pulled it out, so it didn't show up when I opened it in the internet cafe. Està bien. It wasn't spectacular. Classes were good last week. I was able to understand the Spanish in my sociology class because the teacher spoke really slowly. Theology and history seem cool too.

Saturday we went to the last two praxis sites, which were fun. Lots of adorable children.

Today I went to a service at a Christian Base Community we visited last week in San Ramon. It was neat, but it would have been a lot better if I could understand what they were talking about.

Tomorrow is our first praxis day. It's exciting, but I'm nervous. I think it'll be good though.

In general, I'm happy and doing well. Eek, I think maybe the internet cafe is closing down. Hasta Luego...

más y más

Hola tod@s.

Long entry today.

On Monday we visited a couple more praxis sites. In San Ramon, first we visited a school, then a Christian Base Community, and a soy project. This Christian Base Community was originally affiliated with the local parish. However, when the supportive Maryknoll priests left and a new conservative Salvadoran Diocesan priest was installed in the parish, he wanted to keep the laity, especially the women, from being so involved as they had been. He wanted to be treated like Jesus, they told us. The community had a theology based on justice and peace, and de did not support them, so they split off from the parish, and they now hold their own church services, without a priest. They still call themselves Catholic, but they don't attend the masses at their parish. They do have priest friends who consecrate the Eucharist for them, but because they feel the consecrated Eucharist leaves some people out (those who haven't received first communion, those who aren't baptised, etc.), they also like to have something else, like fruit or a pupusa, that they split and share, that all can take part in, because to them the point Jesus was making at the last supper was not just about the bread and wine being his body and blood, it was also about sharing food in his memory. I can't explain it very well - they did it a lot better. It's hard for me to capture their theology, especially since I'm writing this a while after being there, but it was very interesting. We're going to one of their services on Sunday (it's optional, but I'm going to go). I'm looking forward to seeing what it's like.

We also went to Mariona, the site of the women's artisan cooperative. I loved it there. They told us about the organization, and they told us about Silvia Arriola, after whom the cooperative is named (as is Casa Silvia, one of the houses the Casa students live in). Basically all I know about her is from what they told us on Monday, but she was a nun and she was devoted to working with the poor. She made the decision to go and minister to the people in the mountains, many of whom were the guerrillas - the leftist forces in the civil war. She was also a nurse, so she was a religious presence and was able to take care of people medically. She wasn't doing it with political motivations, but with a desire to serve people who needed help. She was killed January 17, 1981, in an offensive by the military. She was in a hospital, and they came to the hospital, killed everyone inside, poured gasoline on them, and lit them on fire. The woman who told us this story lived in a small community with Silvia, and Silvia was her mentor. She started crying as she told the story, and she said it's always difficult to share the memories. She and the others helping her talk about Silvia said when they remember these things it's like they're reliving them. They also said that when Silvia and so many others were killed, they weren't able to cry. Part of it was that there was almost no time, but the real reason was that if they were seen crying, they would become targets themselves because the military would say they were siding with the guerrillas. She said that's why she cries now, because she can now, and she couldn't then.

Tuesday we didn't go to any praxis sites, but it was an intense day. We started by watching Roses in December, a movie about the four American churchwomen (three nuns and a lay woman) who were murdered in 1980. I definitely cried when, at the end, they played the song Be Not Afraid, which we had sung in our prayer group the night before. That song is so beautiful.

Be not afraid
I go before you always
Come, follow me
And I will give you rest

We went to the place where the bodies of the women were found, and a woman who knew Jean Donovan and Dorothy Kazel spoke to us for a while.

In the afternoon we went to the Hospital Divina Providencia. It's a hospital for terminal cancer patients. Romero chose to live there and spend time with the Carmelite sisters there while he was Archbishop, and he was killed while he was saying Mass in the chapel there. They have converted the place he lived into a little museum, so while we were waiting for some people ahead of us to leave, one of the sisters (I think her name was Bernadeta) spoke to us. She spoke English (with a heavy accent), and she told us that she wasn't there when Romero was there, but it was thanks to him that she spoke English. She said she lived in the U.S. for a while, but she was moved to Guatemala for 10 years, where she spoke only Spanish, and then when she was moved back to El Salvador and started working at the hospital, she knew a lot of English vocabulary, but couldn't speak English, so she prayed to Romero to be able to speak English and it worked. She talked a lot more about Romero, but I'm not going to go into it here. (By the way, if you haven't seen the movie Romero, you definitely should.) One more thing to note though, is she told us that when they were embalming Romero after he was killed, they put his internal organs in a box and gave it to the sisters. They buried it, but three years later they dug it up again (I wasn't really clear why, but I think it was to make sure they knew where it was). His organs were in the same condition as when they buried them.

Tuesday evening Fr. Dean Brackley, an American Jesuit who came down to work at the UCA after the six Jesuits were killed in '89, came to speak with us. He is one of the founders of the Casa program. He gave some good advice, and one thing he said struck me in particular. He said that when we feel helplessness, to understand that that is probably the closest we'll get to solidarity with the poor, and understanding their feelings of helplessness.

On to Wednesday. We visited three praxis sites: La Chacra, Amatepec, and Colón. In La Chacra we visited a school called Fe y Alegria, and a nun spoke to us. She told us (in English - she's from Ireland) stories about the students and the community. Up to this point we've heard that the situation here is bad, but this was the first time we heard real details. It was intense. There was one story and quote in particular that I wrote down while she was talking to us. She said there's a big problem with alcoholism and drug use, and often the children have to go out to find their parents lying drunk in the street. One student always had to do this for his father, but he didn't get mad about it. He said, "I try to see in him the broken Jesus." How beautiful.

The other places we visited were good, but I'm short on time and they weren't that special, so I'll skim over them. In addition to Fe y Alegria, we went to the parish in La Chacra, which has a lot of programs for the community. In Amatepec we visited an Episcopalian parish that a couple students will be working with. It's in a neighborhood primarily populated by refugees from the war - people who were displaced from the countryside because of the fighting. Colón was a more rural area. The students will be spending a lot of time with members of the community, especially playing with a whole lot of kids. Everyone seemed really nice, and I think it will be a fun site.

Bueno. Classes started today (I think I told some people they started on Monday because I was confused before). I had Spanish this morning. We took a test to evaluate our level of Spanish. It went all right. The choices are Advanced Spanish or Conversational, which is super-advanced Spanish. I only tried for Advanced because I know I still need to work on grammar stuff. This afternoon I have my sociology class (in Spanish - eek!). I need to go now so I can get to class. Adiós.

La Javia, etc.

Hola a todos y todas. I'm writing this on my computer rather than at the internet cafe so I'll have more time. It's weird to be on this computer and not have internet access. I looked at the clock and it said 7:42 AM, and I got confused, and then I realized I'm going to have to manually change the time. Ooh, I just opened up my system preferences and clicked on the map where I thought El Salvador was, and sure enough "Closest City: San Salvador, El Salvador" popped up. Yay for me and my geography skills.

Yesterday was a lot of fun. We visited two praxis sites: Tepecoyo (specifically La Javia - I'm not sure if it's part of Tepecoyo or just nearby, but it's a small rural community, and everyone just says Tepecoyo) and Jayaque. On our way to Tepecoyo I was a little nervous because it's my praxis site, and I'll be spending a lot of time there. Trena (one of the program coordinators) had told us ahead of time that our visit to Tepecoyo would be a little different because it was the inauguration of the new sala de computación (computer lab), so a lot of the community would be there. When we arrived I was struck by the natural beauty and all the trees. I knew this was in a relatively rural area, and my perception of rural is huge open fields, pero aquí es muy diferente. There were a fair number of people there, and we introduced ourselves and a group played some music, which was really good. In La Javia there used to be a comedor (soup kitchen) that fed 60 children and 10 adults, but for a number of reasons it got closed down, so the community worked with an organization called ConnectEd (run by two Casa alumni) and the Casa program to bring computers into the community. This is a very poor community, and as they told us, they don't have social mobility. One interesting thing is that very few people from the community go to the United States (one of our leaders told us that 700 Salvadorans leave El Salvador every day), which means that they don't get money sent back to them. Remesas are a huge part of the economy in El Salvador, so in La Javia their resources are especially limited. It's really exciting to have computers there. Patrick and I will help teach people, mostly kids I think, how to use the computers. We'll also be teaching English and doing home visits. I liked it there but when I tried to talk to people I had a really hard time, in part because I couldn´t understand them, and in part because I didn´t have much to say. Hopefully communication will get easier though.

Then we went to Jayaque, which is nearby. We visited the Martín-Baró Cooperative (for those of you who know Ryan E., that's his praxis site). I went there last time I was in El Salvador, and the people are so nice. They talked about what they do (there's a dental clinic, a natural medicine program, a sewing academy, and a bakery) and the development of the program. They also give scholarships, and the scholarship students help with the projects in the Cooperative.

For the next part my mom has to close her eyes: We got into the backs of two pick-up trucks (standing up, holding onto railing) and drove up into the mountains. We stopped at a finca (coffee farm) briefly and got to see a bunch of unroasted beans. We drove up really high and the view was gorgeous. For a stretch we could actually see the ocean in the distance. Except for the bugs and dirt in my face it was really really fun.

You can open your eyes now.

We drove back to the Cooperative and had a little birthday party for Amy, one of my roommates, whose birthday is today. Then we drove back to the Casa and had dinner and a reflection. There's a group of us who have started doing a prayer thing every night, so we did that after reflection. A student named Adam brought a missal with the daily readings in Spanish, so the way we've done it the last couple nights is we open with a song, we read the readings in Spanish and/or English, we read something short (last night it was by Mother Teresa, the night before it was by Oscar Romero) and have a little reflection, then we do petitions and have some sort of closing prayer. I love it, though I'm not sure how long it'll last once classes start. We'll probably shorten it, but I really like it the way it is. It's like mini-church.

Today is a free day. A bunch of us went to Mass in the morning, which was nice. I went early with another girl, and the priest talked to us for a little while. He's from Italy and speaks English. He spent 10 years in the U.S. He seems nice. During Mass I was able to follow along pretty well.

A lot of people are going to the beach today, but I decided to stay here, relax, go to the internet cafe and the store, and maybe do my laundry. We're going to the beach as a group in a couple weeks, so I'll have more opportunities.

Hasta luego...

¡Estoy aquí!

Hola a todos. Aquí Blogger.com es en español. Y el... uh... keyboard es diferente. Still working on the Spanish here. I arrived safely and happily. I´m living in Casa Ita, which is the smallest Casa (there are three). I live with four other American students, Amy, Monique, Graham, and Zac, and two Salvadoran scholarship students from la UCA, Teresa and Lupita, as well as our Community Coordinator Linda. She did the Casa program a couple years ago, and she´s working with it now. I share a huge room with Amy and Monique. We have our own bathroom and a little balcony.

I´m very happy. The food is awesome. So far we´ve been doing orientation stuff. Our classes don´t start until the 22nd. Yesterday we visited the Romero Center at the UCA, which has a museum wth stuff about Romero, Rutilio Grande, the six Jesuits, and the American churchwomen. It´s in the building where the Jesuits lived. We also visited the rose garden, where the Jesuits were killed. I had been to both places before, but it was still pretty powerful.

The Spanish is a challenge, but I´m doing better than I was afraid of. There´s a guard that stands outside near our Casa, and last night a group of us spend about a half hour talking to him. His name is Esteban. He was very nice and very hard to understand, but we made it work. I had a nice conversation with a woman named Griselda who helps coordinate something called the Romero Program, which helps the scholarship students. Scholarships pay for tuition, but for most poor students that´s not very helpful because they still can´t afford books and transportation and other expenses, so the Romero Program helps with that. The becari@s (scholarship students) in our Casas are part of the Romero Program. Through orientation we´re doing a lot of stuff in English, but then we´ll have to speak a lot more Spanish.

We officially signed up for our classes today. I´m changing one of the classes I planned to take because there´s another one that sounds really really good. I´m taking the sociology class instead of the literature class. I hadn´t realized what the sociology class was like - turns out it´s basically a media studies class. I think it´s called Sociology of Public Communication. Apparently the teacher is amazing, though it is a hard class. I´m excited though. It means I´ll have to take a literature class at USF to finish my core, and I might have to take something else to finish my Latin American Studies minor, but I can manage that fine.

The weather has been gorgeous. It´s hot, but when you´re walking around or sitting in the shade it´s fine. It´s hot, but it´s not too uncomfortable. And it´s good that it´s hot because we don´t have hot water in my Casa, so a cold shower feels kind of nice once you get past the initial shock.

There´s an internet café really close to the Casa, so I´ll probably be able to access is pretty frequently. Yay.

Over the next week we´re visiting all the praxis sites, and we´re going to mine tomorrow. Exciting.

Praxis site

Hola. We were e-mailed our praxis site placements a couple days ago. I got my first choice. Here's the description we were given before we selected our top choices:

La Javia (Located in Tepecoyo)

Tepecoyo is a rural community located about 1 hour from San Salvador in the department of La Libertad. The area of Tepecoyo historically has been a coffee growing area. Other crops that are grown are corn, maicillo (a small corn-substitute grain), beans and tabaco. There are some people who raise livestock such as cows, pigs, and chickens. Primarily, the people have dedicated themselves to the cultivation of coffee, brick making, and the production of milk products such as cheese. However, with the recent fall in coffee prices, many of the land owners are no longer producing coffee, leaving most people in the area without work or income. As a result, many families do not have means to survive and many children go without education because families cannot afford the basic costs (uniform, food, school supplies, transportation, etc.). Another challenge the people face is lack of water (especially in the countryside where many natural springs have dried up or are contaminated because of improper disposal of garbage). La Javia is a nearby rural village just outside of the small town of Tepecoyo and is made up of 3 zones.

Role of Casa Student: Students participate in several newly developed programs including teaching English classes for the youth of the community, offering computer classes for all members of the community (children to elderly), tutoring students, and getting to know members of the community in their own homes through conducting home visits. Also, students participate in a soy project where they have the opportunity to assist in the making of soy milk and also participate in the distribution of milk to children on a daily basis. These programs are all new to the community of La Javia.

I'm very excited about this. I'll be going to Tepecoyo twice a week with another student, Patrick, who also has an El Salvador blog.

¡Necesito repasar español!

What am I doing?

I should be packing or studying Spanish or cleaning my room or something virtuous like that, but I thought writing another blog entry would be much more fun. I am the queen of procrastination. So here I am going to explain what I am doing with myself this coming semester and what this blog is going to be.

As you probably figured out by now, I am spending a semester studying abroad in El Salvador. I will be living in San Salvador and I'll be taking classes at the Universidad Centroamericana "José Simeón Cañas" (UCA). I'm doing a program called Casa de la Solidaridad, organized/coordinated by Santa Clara University. Here is the mission of the program, as laid out in a Pre-Departure Handbook we were given:

The mission of the Casa is the promotion of justice and solidarity through the creation of a meaningful academic experience by integrating rigorous academic study with direct immersion with the poor of El Salvador. The program draws inspiration from the lives of the six Jesuits, their housekeeper and her daughter who were murdered at the University of Central America (UCA) on November 16, 1989 and from all the people of El Salvador who suffered during the civil war, especially those who were killed in their struggle for solidarity and social justice.

We invite you to immerse yourself in the "classroom" of the people of El Salvador. Dedicated to fostering "men and women for others," Casa de la Solidaridad is a unique living and learning environment. Here you can develop your intellectual potential, strengthen your ethical and spiritual values, and learn to become a socially responsible global citizen.

OUR DAILY LIFE INCORPORATES:

Living in Community:
We choose to live in community in order to share with and learn from others.

Living Simply:
We choose a simple lifestyle, uncluttered by materialism, in solidarity with the marginalized of our world.

Focus on Learning with an Emphasis on Justice:
We choose to integrate rigorous academic study with the experience of the marginalized of El Salvador in the hopes of committing ourselves in the world to justice.

Cultural Sensitivity:
We choose to live in the context of another culture and context, honoring and learning from Salvadorans whom we are visiting.

Integrating Faith:
We choose to invite our spiritual journey into our daily experiences as we seek to understand the world with which we live.

Here is a brief description of my understanding of what it will be like. I won't be a regular student at the UCA. There are special classes for students doing the Casa program (some of which are in English, fortunately for me). We take five classes, including Spanish and a fieldwork course. The fieldwork is what I was describing in my entry on my top choices for praxis site. Two days a week and some weekends, I will go to my praxis site (I still don't know what that will be). I will help them in whatever ways I can, and I will learn from the people there. I've taken two "service-learning" classes at USF, and while they've been good experiences, this to me is the epitome of service-learning. This is what really drew me to the program. SCU describes it well: "Through this learning environment, you will become more aware of and sensitive to the realities of those who are struggling to end social injustices while working to promote human dignity. You will become part of the Salvadoran society not as a volunteer, but as a learner." In addition to Spanish and fieldwork, I'm planning to take Salvadoran Literature (in Spanish), Religion in Latin America (in English), and El Salvador's Civil War (in English).

There are a total of 24 American students (including me) doing the program. We'll live together in three houses (Casa Romero, Casa Silvia, and Casa Ita), all very near each other and near the UCA. Most of us are from Jesuit universities. In each house there will be a Community Facilitator, who lives there full-time and is usually a graduate of the Casa program. Also, two UCA scholarship students ("becarios") live in each house. That gives us a connection to the Salvadoran students at the UCA. I'm really happy to be living in community with the other students in the program. I was in living-learning communities my first two years at USF, and I like them because it gives me a chance to get to know people both social and academic arenas. It allows us to get really close. And assuming everyone is as nice as they seemed in their e-mail introductions, I'll be leaving El Salvador with at least 21 new friends (plus my two old friends who are going).

The purpose of this blog is for me to share my thoughts and experiences with my friends, family, and whoever feels like reading it. I'm giving this URL to a wide range of my contacts, so it may be more formal than if I were just writing for my close friends and family, but I hope I don't get too caught up in thinking about what people will think of me. I want what I learn to reach as many people as possible. I spent two weeks in El Salvador in 2005, and that was a very powerful experience, and I remember someone telling us that the best thing we could do to help them was share what we had learned. I want to do that. Speaking of which, I recently ran across a reflection I wrote after my time there in 2005. It's over six pages single-spaced in my word processor, so I'm not posting it in the blog, but you can read it here.

I think my main challenge in keeping up this blog (besides laziness and lack of commitment) will be that I won't have internet access at home. I'll have to go to an internet cafe, so I won't have as much time and flexibility to write as I would like. I am bringing my laptop with me though, so I might write entries on my own computer, put them on my shiny new thumb drive, and bring them to the internet cafe. Still, I don't know how often I'll have internet access, so entries may not be as frequent as I would like.

If you want to contact me in El Salvador, I'll be using my regular puella at pacbell dot net e-mail, which also receives my armcchesneyyoung at usfca dot edu e-mail. My mailing address will be:

Amber McChesney-Young
Casa de la Solidaridad
Apartado A-179
Antiguo Cuscatlan, El Salvador
Central America

We may never see the end results,
but that is the difference
between the master builder and the worker.
We are workers, not master builders,
ministers, not messiahs.
We are prophets of a future not our own.

-Archbishop Oscar Romero

Rufina Amaya

Rufina
Originally uploaded by Bel Vezer.

I was browsing Flickr for pictures of El Salvador (thanks to Prof. Silver for revealing this goldmine of photos to me!), and in searching for El Mozote, I found this photo, which I thought was beautiful. Rufina Amaya was the only survivor of a massacre in 1981 in which the entire town of El Mozote was wiped out, with the exception of her. She went on to tell her story, but for a long time people refused to believe her. The U.S. was funding El Salvador's civil war, and it was our tax dollars that paid for this brutal massacre. The Massacre at El Mozote by Mark Danner is a very good book about this. You can also read the New Yorker piece by Mark Danner, which I believe is what the book was based on. It's because of things like this that I'm going to El Salvador.