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.