I smell the fire boiling water to soften the maíz for tomorrow’s tortillas, its smoke stinging my eyes… a trickle of sweat travels down my spine, the sweltering heat trapped and amplified by the cinder block walls around me… I smile at the explosive sound of laughter of the beautiful dark-skinned children playing on the metal playground. I recall the generous and lavish hospitality offered in the most inadequate of homes… the shy smiles and downcast eyes of the women whose pena prevents them from approaching me to start a conversation… and the earnestness and authenticity of being with a people with open hearts, struggling to survive and seguir adelante.
It is already difficult to take myself back to the transition of leaving El Salvador. But it only takes a few minutes of cumbia rhythms and reviewing sweet photos, or unexpectedly hearing from a Salvadoran bicha to transport me back to what seems like an entirely different world. I couldn’t be more grateful for my experience with the open and loving Salvadoran people that I have had the privilege to be with for four months. I am grateful that they included me in their lucha – their daily struggle. I am grateful that they taught me to make tortillas over the fire, took me to their families’ milpas where they grow the corn and beans that sustain them, taught me new words in Spanish, and were patient as I learned to wash my clothes by hand. I am grateful that they proudly shared their small casas and their simple food, knowing full well the different lifestyle that I come from but offering what they have anyway. Their openness and welcome has forever transformed my perspective of the world and what it means for us all to luchar together as one people.
How might I best communicate the deep impact of what I have experienced? A day comes to mind that I have mentioned before – the trip up to Las Nubes my the first week in El Salvador. It was the first community we visited that had no access to potable water, a trend that we would later learn was much more common than we imagined. As we visited with women, children, and chickens in a home made up of nothing more than mud and branches, thunder shook the volcano and signaled the unleashing of a sudden downpour. We watched in awe as the family’s homemade gutter system channeled the lluvia into a rusted metal barrel, replenishing their only affordable water source. As the water level in the barrel rose, so did their reassurance of their family’s continued survival – and as we all felt it too, our perceptions of rain and the gift of life-giving water were forever changed. Gracias a Dios por lo necesario para sobrevivir otra semana junt@s.
My Salvadoran housemates, Mari and Rita, showed me a level of character in their sacrifice to attend university and commitment to their families that dwarfs the challenges of my life. Moving to the city to study yet still taking the reckless 4-hour bus ride home every weekend, sometimes having to study in their lámina homes by candlelight, is a tough routine to keep up for six years. But they do it with grace and joy, and are some of the strongest women I’ve met.
Matilde Mendoza de Carballos is a dear friend who blew my standards of hospitality wide open. It is a complete joy to spend time with her, her husband Rodrigo, and their hysterical 8- and 9-year-old sons, Rudy and René. Matilde is just 25 years old, but because she had to drop out of school after second grade to raise her younger siblings, was acompañada when she was just 15, and already has 9 years of parenting experience, she feels like a peer and an elder at the same time. The Carballos family is blessed in the context of the Cantón el Cedro community – the four of them share a tiny three-room cinder block home. The first weekend I spent with their family, I was given one of the two bedrooms which, though it was a tight squeeze, contained a queen size bed that was all for me. Not quite sure whom I had displaced, the next day I asked Matilde about where the rest of the family was sleeping. She showed me that they were all squeezed into the other tiny bedroom, sharing one twin bed and a straw cot between the four of them while I rolled over to my heart’s content in the spacious luxury of the room next door. And she didn’t stop there – the whole weekend Matilde (over)stuffed me with wonderful food at mealtime and even gifted me a pair of her handmade earrings, despite the fact that some days her family has only tortillas to eat and her jewelry hasn’t been selling.
I soon found out that the Carballos family was just an introduction to the depth of hospitality offered by Salvadorans living with so little – scenes like this one continued to astound me as I met more and more families that opened their lives to me. In Matilde’s proud smile as she looked at her boys; in Rudy’s chubby cheeks and infectious laugh; and in the universal truth that for 25 cents, small boys world-over will find and mercilessly kill that scary cockroach that scuttled under your bed – I saw myself and my family in the mirror of the Carballos.
And the reflection does not hesitate to challenge me:
How much of what’s “mine” am I willing to share?
Sor Ana Rosa is one of the fiercest women I have ever met. She is the nun who works every day in the Cantón el Cedro community, bringing with her the only meager and insufficient support resources that the people in Cedro have access to. Along with the hard work of many volunteers in the community, Sor is responsible for the initiation of the comedor that feeds 125 malnourished children daily, two preschool classes, a housing project, and the community garden.
For months I didn’t think Sor and I would get along – she is an incredibly stubborn and determined woman, which I later realized is the product of a lifetime of the hard work of accompanying and defending communities in great suffering. My turning point with Sor was the day that I interviewed her about her view of liberation for the women of Cantón el Cedro. Her hard exterior melted as she held back tears describing her desire for the people of Cedro to have access to education, to become organized, and to be treated with dignity and respect. Her work and love for the people lives deep inside her being. It nearly leaves me speechless to reflect on my respect for the way she has exchanged her desires for her own life for a deep longing for the liberation of the poor and suffering. Her hospitality for Josiah and I in her convent and her hug and goodbye tears when I left were a wonderful honor. I aspire to let a lifetime of selflessness sink deep into my soul in the way Sor has shown me is possible.
Oh, Leonel Menjívar. If this little guy didn’t take over my heart, I don’t know what did. Just eleven years old, Leo has the sweetest smile and deep, rich skin – you can already tell he is going to be a real heartbreaker. He is one of a multitude of examples I saw of children working hard to help their parents without complaint. We walked down with him to the family milpa at five or six o’clock in the morning to harvest enough corn for a few days’ tortillas. As he goes, he carries a basket on his shoulder almost too heavy for me to lift as he skillfully maneuvers up the almost-vertical, muddy slope of the mountainside. The obedience and contentedness of the Salvadoran children I met is a stark contrast to what I have seen in most children in the States – a whine, complaint, or excuse was extremely rare to see. Kids are expected to function as an equal part of the family unit working toward survival, and seem to be healthy and happy for it. Their simple games of marbles, playfulness while swimming in the river, and mature understanding of hard work and service to the family made them so easy to fall in love with.
Oscar Romero said, “How easy it is to denounce structural injustice, institutionalized violence, social sin! And it is true, this sin is everywhere, but where are the roots of this social sin? In the heart of every human being. Present-day society is a sort of anonymous world in which no one is willing to admit guilt, and everyone is responsible.”
It would be simpler to reduce these vignettes and relationships to a common theme or overall lesson, but the truth is that they weave over and under one another in living motion as I continue to integrate these many different worlds. My joy and hope is in the way these people have sunken into my heart, breeding a fierce determination for justice and love that I couldn’t fabricate before. My prayer is that I will continue to encounter reality and let it change me – that my heart will be a soft and moldable instrument, oriented toward GOD by these wise teachers who know love best.
