volcanos, falling through roofs, etc.

Our group survived the Ignatian Silent Retreat, though not without injuries. Now who could get hurt on a silent retreat based on the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius? You guessed it: Ryan E. He's fine now, but he and a couple others decided to go on the roof over a walkway at the retreat center, and he proceeded to fall through the roof, probably about ten feet, onto concrete floor. He didn't break any bones (which impressed the doctors), but he got a pretty bad cut on his head and needed ten stitches. He's fine though, and he recognizes that he got lucky and I think he's going to cut down on the risk-taking for the rest of the semester. Oh, Ryan.

So, a little review of what I've been up to... It looks like the last "what I've been doing" entry was about praxis weekend. The weekend after that I went with a couple other students and a staff person (Elizabeth Looney, for the USF people who know her) to a place called Puerta del Diablo. It's a few short hikes to see really pretty views. Over all it was a great time, except for being reminded how out of shape I am, and for a group of guys that was kind of harassing us ("Hey baby I love you!"). After a little but Elizabeth asked them if they would please stop bothering us and go away, so then they were like "Sorry, baby, we didn't mean to bother you" and went a ways from us, but still yelled some stuff. Ugh. Machismo here is a huge problem, and other girls have experienced it a lot more than me. It ranges from whistles and calls walking down the street to being groped at a soccer game to a man and woman talking to one of our highly educated, very intelligent professors, and him only looking at the man when he talks. It's a difficult issue to deal with because it's deeply ingrained in the culture, and going up to someone and saying "Don't do that, you're objectifying me and that's not acceptable" isn't going to make much of an impact. A lot of the girls here have been very deeply bothered by it, and it's made me a lot more aware and sensitive to gender issues. It's hard, because gender and male dominance is even an essential part of the language - if there's a group of six kids, four of them girls and two boys, and you want to say "Are you ready?" the proper way is "Están listos?" That is, the masculine ending. The only way to get around it is saying "Listos y listas?" It's long and clunky, but a lot of people try to be more inclusive in their language. If you're writing you can use the @ symbol, which I think is awesome. List@s?

Every Thursday evening we have community night, which is usually a meeting for the individual houses. It's a time to have household discussions, if necessary, or just do community-building sorts of things. On the 15th we watched Voces Inocentes. It was the second time I'd seen it, but it was at least as powerful as the first time, now that I've spent time here. It's about a boy named Chava and his experience in the civil war here, based on a true story. He is eleven years old, and the army "recruits" boys when they turn twelve. It's about his struggle and his family's struggle and his friends' struggles. It's incredible. I wrote a response after watching it to post here, but I ended up not posting it because I didn't have time when I was online, then I thought maybe it was too emotional, but reading it over, I do want to post it. I want to put it on a separate page, and I'm short on time now, but I'll post it soon.

Moving on to that Saturday, I climbed a volcano! We went as a group, along with the Salvadoran students who live with us, to Izalco. I hope to never ever climb a volcano again. It was really really hard. Thank goodness there were a few other slow people and people kind enough to stay with us really slow people. It's wasn't just a hike, it was actually climbing, using our arms to keep us from sliding down. There were a lot of really small rocks and dirt/volcano dust, and when you would take a step, your foot slid back to where it started out. Ugh. It was terrible. And then when I finally got to the top I barely had any time there because most of the people had been up there a long time and were ready to leave. It's true that the view was gorgeous and now I can say that I climbed a volcano in El Salvador, but I won't do it again. Then to get down, we basically skied down the rocks. It was kind of fun, but only because one of the guides held my hand for the most slippery part of it. Our bus dropped us off a ways up a mountain right next to the volcano, so we had to go down a whole bunch of stairs to get to the base of Izalco. After we slid down Izalco, we had to climb up all those stairs again. That was the hardest part of all. But I survived. It reminded me of how after every single hike I've done I promise myself I'll never go on a hike again.

This last weekend, as I mentioned, we had a silent retreat. It was great, though it wasn't quite as silent as the other silent retreat I've been on. I think it's a lot harder to keep silent when everyone is friends with each other. It was really good though, and helped me clarify a little what my role is and what I am being called to do, kind of like I was rambling about in my one month reflection. Saturday evening was really powerful. We did Adoration, with the consecrated host sitting on the altar, and along with that a slide show of images from our praxis sites and of other Salvadorans who are involved with this program. The idea was to see God's presence both in the consecrated host and in the faces of the poor. It was awesome. In the beginning, the leaders read something called the Lord's Prayer for Justice. It's pretty cool, so I thought I'd share it.

Padre nuestro ... who always stands with the weak, the powerless, the poor, the abandoned, the sick, the aged, the very young, the unborn, and those who, by victim of circumstances, bear the heat of the day.

que estás en el cielo ... where everything will be reversed, where the first will be last arid the last will be first, but where all will be well and every manner of being will be well.

Santificado sea tu nombre ... may we always acknowledge your holiness, respecting your ways and not our ways, your standards and not our standards. May the reverence we give your name pull us out of the selfishness that prevents us from seeing the pain of our neighbor.

Venga tu reino ... help us to create a world where, beyond our own needs and hurts, we will do justice, love tenderly, and walk humbly with you and each other.

Hágase tu voluntad ... open our freedom to let you in so that the complete mutuality that characterizes your life might flow through our veins and thus the life that we help generate may radiate your equal love for all and your special love for the poor.

en la tierra como en el cielo ... may the work of our hands, the temples and structures we build in this world, reflect the temple and the structure of your glory so that the joy, graciousness, tenderness, and justice of heaven will show forth within all of our structures on earth.

Da ... life and love to us and help us to see always everything as gift. Help us to know that nothing comes to us by right arid that we must give because we have been given to. Help us realize that we must give to the poor, not because they need it, but 'because our own health depends upon our giving to them.

nos ... the truly plural us. Give not just to our own but to everyone, including those who are very different from the narrow us. Give your gifts to all of us equally.

hoy ... not tomorrow. Do not let us push things off into some indefinite future so that we can continue to live justified lives in the face of injustice because we can make good excuses for our inactivity.

nuestro pan de cada día ... so that each person in the world may have enough food, enough clean water, enough clean air, adequate health care, and sufficient access to education so as to have the sustenance for a healthy life. Teach us to give from our sustenance and not just from our surplus.

Perdona nuestras ofensas ... forgive us our blindness toward our neighbor, our own self pre-occupation, our racism, our sexism, and our incurable propensity to worry only about ourselves and our own. Forgive us our capacity to watch the evening news and do nothing about it.

como también nosotros perdonamos a los que nos ofenden ... help us to forgive those who victimize us. Help us to mellow out in spirit, to not grow bitter with age, to forgive the imperfect parents and systems that wounded, cursed and ignored us.

No nos dejes caer en tentación ... do not judge us only by whether we have fed the hungry, given clothing to the naked, visited the sick, or tried to mend the systems that victimized the poor. Spare us this test for none of us can stand before your Gospel scrutiny. Give us, instead, more days to mend our ways, our selfishness, and our systems.

líbranos del mal ... that is, from the blindness that lets us continue to participate in anonymous systems within which we need not see who gets less as we get more. Amen.


On Thursday we're leaving for Belize. We have to leave to get our passports re-stamped. It's just going to be a fun weekend. There's going to be an optional night hike (yeah, I know, hike) through the jungle and we can see SNAKES! I think I might do that, even though it's a hike. It's going to be mostly outdoorsy stuff, which is not my style, but we're not required to do anything, so it should be fun. Don't expect to hear anything from me Thursday-Sunday because I will be wandering caves and battling snakes.

caminando, caminando

Hola. I don't have much time online, but I realized it's been a little while since I've written, so I thought I'd make a brief entry, and I'll write a longer one soon. I'm still doing well and having a really good experience here. I feel like my praxis is getting easier, though still challenging. Classes are interesting. I just got out of history, where a woman named Olga Serrano came to talk to us. She and her family joined the FMLN when she was 13 years old, and she told her story. It was really interesting. The last two people who spoke to us have been from the right and center-right, and they emphasized communism and Russia so much, but she said they never thought of themselves as communists, and they weren't trying to create a communist government. People can see the same thing very differently. Perhaps the most exciting thing about her talk was that she was amazingly easy to understand. Everyone thought that, so I didn't magically get a lot better at Spanish. It was good though.

In other news, congratulations to Gene Palumbo (our history teacher) and Lupita (one of the women who cook for us) who are getting married!

Don't expect to hear anything from me in the next couple days because we have an Ignatian silent retreat this weekend. I'm soooo excited. And, those who know Ryan E. will get a kick out of the fact that he, the agnostic "If I did believe in God I wouldn't like him" loud loves-to-hear-his-own-voice Ryan, is doing this retreat. That'll be interesting.

One Month Reflection

I've now been in El Salvador for one month. I'm happy and confused and my Spanish abilities seem to come and go. I have faced and am facing some challenges, but for the most part they're positive or easy to look at as learning opportunities. Coming into this experience I didn't have very specific expectations, though I had the broad expectation of "It's going to be amazing." After a month I'm realizing that for me this experience will be a process of personal examination. How do I deal with my privilege? How can I understand poverty that I will probably never experience? What sort of responsibilities do I have as a result of my privilege? How can I live in a consumerist, capitalist, individualistic society and maintain the values of putting people before money? Should I give as much as I can? Is it morally irresponsible to live a middle class life? What does the preferential option for the poor mean for me? How can I keep from dehumanizing people who are distanced from me, geographically, socially, or economically? What should I do with my life?

In theology class a couple weeks ago, I think we were talking about a reading by Jon Sobrino where he talks about our complicity in putting up crosses and crucifying the poor. He said our job is to take people down off those crosses. It was this or something Sister Peggy (our teacher) said that filled me with this desire and passion and feeling of God's presence to do something, to take people off their crosses, or even better, to keep the crosses from going up in the first place. Then I thought about it and realized I had no idea what I could do or how I could do it. As we've been learning in sociology, as I've thought about in Smart Activism workshops, as I've read in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and as I have discovered personally, I don't have a clue what's going on, let alone how to fix it. A movement for change has to come from the people who are being oppressed. Where do I come into that then? I'm not oppressed. I am the oppressor, though I try not to be. It's pretty hard to avoid when oppression is built into the social and economic structure you live in. I can never know the poverty and limitations that the woman in my praxis site who can't afford the uniforms and school supplies to send her children to high school feels. I will never know the hunger of the kids who have to walk an hour to get to school so they have to skip lunch because they can't go home. The structures that are keeping them down are keeping me up. That's terrible.

I guess I'm just here to learn what I can, to gain as deep an understanding I can of la realidad, and to understand both my abilities and limitations. Hopefully I'll get a hint of what I can do to keep the poor off the crosses. They told us in orientation that most people leave with far more questions than answers, and to me that's clearly true.

praxis weekend

Hola tod@s. My arms are peeling off (rather, my skin, due to the sunburn from the beach) and I'm recovering from a cold, but otherwise I'm super. Mainly because I just finished an essay and that always feels nice. I'm writing this late Monday night/early Tuesday morning because I still feel awake and I'm sure I'll be short on time tomorrow because I always am.

Praxis weekend went well. I was talking to another student, Colin, on the bus on the way there, and he said what you want is to be outside your comfort zone but not in your panic zone. Throughout the weekend I kept thinking how that was a perfect description for the experience. I was definitely out of my comfort zone much of the time, but I never got to the point where I felt I couldn't handle it. Part of the discomfort was not knowing what was going on most of the time and not being able to communicate well, and part of the discomfort was being faced with the reality of how these people have to live, and the discomfort of feeling my own privilege and having to deal with that. The only way to bathe is standing outside and using the pila. It's like a big thing that holds water in the middle and has shallower spaces on either side where you can do your clothes-washing, etc. We use our pila to wash our clothes, but at Angelica's house in Tepecoyo, that's where all the water comes from. (Clothes, dishes, bathing, etc.) They have running water, but I'm pretty sure it's a single faucet which they use to fill the pila. The toilet is basically just an outhouse. Angelica has a stove and oven, but I think that's pretty unusual. At other houses we visited, people were doing their cooking on wood fires built on an outside structure. When we made pupusas at Angelica's (which was AWESOME), we did it over a fire. Making tortillas and pupusas was probably my favorite part of the weekend. That and little Angelica, grown-up Angelica's niece, who truly is an angel. She is full of love and her presence made the experience ten times better than it would have been otherwise. Also little Brayan (a nephew), who is one and a half and always running around, making funny noises, and falling over. He's a constant source of amusement. The family unit is very large here. At Angelica's house, there is very little distinction between immediate families, and all the aunts and uncles and cousins basically live together.

Praxis has definitely been a challenge for me, especially my lack of control over the situation and my usually not knowing what's going on, and most of all my inability to understand people. The accents can be really really strong and it's a major challenge. I know some of these challenges will get easier with time, but it can be frustrating.

Classes are going pretty well but my habit of procrastination hasn't changed, and even though I thought I would have lots of free time this semester, I definitely don't, so I'm behind on my reading, as usual. Ah well, that's life as a college student.

chivo

It's been practically forever since I've written here! Unfortunately I only have a few minutes before class, so I can't write one of my super-long entries. I'll write more in depth another time, but for now I'll just briefly summarize.I think I last wrote the Sunday before last. That Sunday night I got sick, as did a bunch of other students, and I could barely get out of bed Monday, so I missed my first praxis day. Tuesday I was basically better though still exhausted, but by Wednesday I was fine, and I went to my first day at my praxis site. We taught English in the morning, which was a bit of a challenge because we didn't know ahead of time, but it went fine. In the afternoon we helped out with a computer class (basically I just looked over kids' shoulders to make sure they were doing stuff right). It was a good day. Saturday we went to the beach, which was awesome except I got a really bad sunburn and my shoulders are just starting to recover. It was beautiful and the water was so warm. Sunday a few of us went to Mass at La Chacra, which is one of the praxis sites that a couple students are at. They spend their afternoons with the priest there, Padre Luis. La Chacra is urban and very poor. I loved the Mass there. Padre Luis is really nice and the parish seemed to have a great sense of community. I think I'll try to go there regularly if other people are. Monday was praxis again, and it was more frustrating because we did home visits to people in the community, and I had a really hard time understanding anything people were saying. I just sat there, clueless. It's frustrating because it's a lot harder to learn about the community and people's lives if I can't figure out what they're talking about. I need to have more patience. Yesterday's praxis was a little better because Wednesdays are our class days (English in the morning, computers in the afternoon). The kids learned how to use the application Paint, which was a lot of fun. This weekend is a praxis weekend, so we leave Friday afternoon and come back Sunday afternoon. I'm going to learn how to make pupusas! Yay.