Planting Apples

Hello friends and family,

Again it has been a rather long pause and there is so much that happens here in each of my days that deserves to be documented and shared, but as always I get so caught up in living here that I never find the time to get to my friends house to steal her computer and update blog entries taking advantage of the fact that she has internet.

As usual there are unbelievable levels of violence in this country, more so because it is December and there’s always a spike in crime. There are 12 homicides a day on average in this country smaller than most states in the US. On Tuesday night I got home from our end of the year holiday dinner only to find out that there had been a shootout right in front of my house between the police and a man that was running from them for having been caught robbing. Ironically, this happened when the mayor, prospective mayor, and all of their friends were around because they were inaugurating a monument in the roundabout in front of my community. There were hundreds of children outside to see the fireworks for the inauguration, as well. Luckily no one was injured but everyone ran for cover and needless to say, the mayor and prospective neighbor didn’t stick around for long.

Since he has been incapable of providing anything but continued repression and criminalization of youth, it is no wonder these things happen all over his district. For once he got a taste of it out side of his sheltered politician’s life. Ironically enough, the inauguration was at the site of another one of his great failures, where Walmart has butchered one of the only remaining forests in the district in order to construct a huge shopping center that will put all local vendors out of work and greatly increase flooding in the region when rainy seasons come. However, since Walmart representatives made sure to paint a few schools and appease the masses with Christmas toys this season, the population is largely accepting of their arrival because a divided and ignorant people are always in the best interest of these huge multinational businesses that will soon be profiting off of their heightened poverty.

While this violence exists all around me, it is my time spent in prisons that has really allowed me to come face to face with this reality and sit in wonder at its complexity. Several weeks ago Maria (fellow Crispaz volunteer) and I did our first pilot project of art therapy in a male minor’s prison and I was brought face to face with 20 youth with an overwhelming capacity for sincerity, beauty, destruction, and cruelty. It would take me a lifetime to write about all of the lessons they taught me in just a week’s time, but I will try to reflect on a few of them.

When we passed the military revision and entered the prison, I was greeted by all of the stereotypical images… men covered in tattoos all over their bodies, reaching out to us through the bars to talk to us and proceeding to bark and whistle at us once we had passed. Despite this reception I didn’t feel nervous at all, just excited, about beginning to work with this population, because after working with incarcerated young women for a year I know that I can never, ever judge a book by its cover.

We worked with 20 youth between the ages of 16 and 22 throughout the week doing icebreakers and ridiculous games, meditations, yoga, paintings, and trying to provide a space where they could wake up their creativity. They were able to get out of the mindset that art has to be perfect, and into a realm of self-expression through the process of art’s creation that was really amazing to witness. We painted with background music, with our eyes closed, with our left hands, silently in groups…. and opened up a safe space in the middle of an otherwise empty and harsh environment. Every day the youth thanked us profusely for coming to spend time with them, and for accepting them as they are without judging them and fearing them.

As I sat with these youth I couldn’t help but think that so many of them will likely be killed when they get out. This isn’t the work where you can promise people that everything will be ok, that God will provide. If these youth are able to change while being locked up (unlikely given that they are not “recapacitated” in any way, as the center’s name insinuates, rather they are kept out of sight and out of mind of a society that, on average, would rather they cease to exist) they still get out to a context that has not changed. They will not be able to find work because of their tattoos, they will always be feared and discriminated against and their gangs will likely pull them back into the only space that still accepts them, active gang membership. When I spoke with one youth that told me he would certainly get out and continue being an active member, he explained to me that if he does not, he won’ t know what’s going on and he’ll likely be killed even more quickly. But if he’s in the “jugada” (game), he can at least know when to look out, so as not to leave his 2 year old daughter orphaned.

Many of these youth regret having made certain decisions as 5, 8,11, 12 year olds that have now affected their whole lives. These decisions were more often than not made out of spaces of neglect and violence, though not every youth in these circumstances decides to join the gang. Rather than continuing to ramble, I will close with a little excerpt from one of the youth in our workshop, “Jose.”




“I know what awaits me, death or the jail cell. I have sinned far too much. If I have planted lemons my whole life, how can I expect to harvest apples? If I want to harvest apples, I have to plant them. Honestly, this has to be a secret, do you want me to tell you what the gang has brought me? Nothing. They offer me nothing. When you’re outside you think your homeboys are everything, but once you’re locked up you realize family is all we have. Yet when we get out we can’t live with them again because others will kill them to make us hurt. And we do hurt. People see our tattoos and think that we’re the shit, that we don’t feel. If you pinch me, it will hurt me just like it’ll hurt you if I pinch you. People see us as assassins, delinquents, troubled youth. Most people would have liked to see me dead by now. But we feel, we have hearts that hurt and long to love freely. Some days I wish I had never been born. Or I think that when I’ll get out I’ll just lift up my shirt for the contrary gang to kill me and get it over with. But you, I promise that I will care for you from above, so that no harm ever comes your way.”

2 weeks later

I have 8 missed calls on my phone and I know it must be him.

I bet my brother 10 bucks that it’s him and call the number back.

“Jenny! I got out this morning! I’m on the bus with my mom going to court so that they can give me my restrictions. Please take care.”

I couldn’t congratulate him enough. Just before my phone minutes ran out I made sure to remind him to start planting apples.

When he doesn’t call, I wonder anxiously if he’s still here, or if he’s already watching me from above. I have no way of ever knowing.

Most violent country in the world...

Hello!

This past week the Crispaz board was in the country, and though I did not get to share as much time with them as I would have liked to, I do want to express my gratitude for their continued support of my work and life here in El Salvador. One of the board members asked particularly that I write more so as to be able to stay in touch with the reality here, so I´m writing for her and others who desire to stay up to date on what is going on here.

About a week ago, the United Nations named El Salvador the most violent country in the world as far as violent crimes per capita. This weekend, 46 people were killed in less than 72 hours. According to the UN study, there have been more violent deaths in El Salvador than in Iraq between the years of 2004 and 2009, the heart of the US offensive in Iraq.

These numbers startle me and leave me feeling at a loss. I work here in violence prevention but there seem to be so few working in this area and we are up against such an entrenched network of violence here in El Salvador that so often is chalked up to "delinquent activity" but has roots in those with wealth and power who will never have to serve prison time for these crimes. The scene here is unbelievably complex and the people here, by and large, respond with "the situation is really awful, all we have is God" which at first seems very wise and grace filled, but is also an exuse for inaction and resignation to the way things are.

This coming year in January we will be starting a new violence prevention initiative in San Marcos, a very violent sector of the country, in hopes to pilot a new project with the goals of creating youth leaders in violence prevention and community development. We have been planning this project for months now and it is quite tricky, seeing as how we have to first get permission from the gang to operate in the area, then from the police and from the mayor´s office. However, since the Anti-gang law was passed last year, it is illegal to work with a group of gang members here in any capacity. Thus, if we accept youth that are in any way connected to the gang´s activities (the majority of youth in the area), the police have informed us that they would have the obligation to arrest us for "agrupaciones ilicitas" (the meeting of ilicit groups).

We are trying to work within loopholes of this law as we plan for next year, but it is infuriating to me that given the startling amount of violence here, it is prohibited to work on any rehabiliation initiatives with those involved with gangs (even those who are not official members). The same goes for prison work and for those who wish to aid the transition of prisoners back into a society that has never accepted them and is far from willing to do so now.

In working in the girls prison with young women who have a million dreams for their future, I often lose hope knowing that they will never be given jobs in this country since they have tatoos, and they will not be given the chance to partake in rehabilitation programs because it is against the law. Even if they have changed, this society and its governance has not changed in its views towards them as the root of all problems (rather than a symptom of a disfunctional economic/political system which excludes youth and offers them no opportunites for development). Thus, they will inevitably end up choosing the path familiar to them, the path of the streets, when they are repeatededly denied the chance to gain an honest living because their past has marked them irrevocably.

Within this extremely frustrating paradigm, there are still a few of us working day by day to listen to and validate the experiences of these youth who struggle to turn their lives around, as well as those who are teetering on the edge of giving into the gangs and their appeal of belonging and permanent financial stability. On a very small, relational scale, I see advances every day that I take the time to accompany and listen to these voices, which I will share with you in future entries. At the same time, however, I am continued to be overwhelmed by my smallness in the midst of this system that resists this type of non-judgemental accompaniment and quest for sustainable transformation.

Those are some thoughts for today... I will try to keep this updated even if I can only write a few uncompleted thoughts at a time. I hope you are all well and I miss you!

Crispaz Volunteer

Hello friends!

After a long hiatus, I am now going to get back into the swing of updating my blog and sharing the many rich experiences this life rewards me with any and all who wish to listen.

Having finished my allotted grant period, I have been blessed with the opportunity to be sponsored by Crispaz (Christians for Peace in El Salvador), a non-governmental organization that has been working in El Salvador for years on various peacebuilding and international solidarity building initiatives.

Thanks to Crispaz´s support, I will be able to continue the work I have begun in El Salvador.

For any new readers, I graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 2010 with majors in International Peace Studies and Anthropology. I have spent time doing peacebuilding work both in Uganda and El Salvador, where I am currently collaborating with Fundación Quetzalcoatl, Ideas y Acciónes Para la Paz.

In El Salvador, I volunteer teaching environmental education to youth in a violence prevention and job skills training program. Additionally, I work with a community-based youth group on a variety of peacebuilding initiatives to strengthen community unity and prevent the integration of the community´s youth into the ever-present gangs. Finally, I accompany female youth in the country´s only juvenile detention center for women, teaching poetry and learning from their wealth of wisdom and experience.

I will do my best to update this blog once a month at the very least, so stay tuned!

Resurrection?

Hello,


I realize it’s been a long, long time since I’ve written. Somehow I get so wrapped up in life here and in working 7 days a week that I don’t take the time I need to write, reflect, and share my experiences here. Given the lapse between my last entry, there is obviously much, much more to say than can fit in a single blog entry, so I want to focus on the story of my Easter here, in order to share with you the life and death of a martyr, one who now inspires me and hopefully will do the same for you.

I’m often amazed here, by the way that life/God/the birds of fortuity work in such a way that I am frequently invited difficult crevices of this world, yet in these places I often find the most overwhelming grace and faith. Holy Saturday was one such day, as I made my way back from Guarjila, a small rural mountain town, to San Salvador in order to go to the Easter vigil with the youth group I work with here. Since buses do not run in small towns here on Holy Saturday, a friend of mine offered to take me on his motorcycle. No sooner were we 15 minutes out of the town, however, that we got stuck in a muddy mess along with many other travellers, because the road is a wreck given that it is under construction to become a highway for business and mining activity at the expense of those who will suffer the landslides, poisoned water, and displacement that this will inevitably bring.

Several trucks passed and refused to give me a ride before my friend Santos drove up in his pick up truck headed to the city. I jumped in his truck along side Hermana Mila, a Sister of the Sacred Heart who lives and works in Guarjila. On our journey to the city she shared with me that she was going to San Salvador to attend the wake of her 18-year old nephew who had been assassinated on Good Friday. I asked her where the way was being held and she said, “In Lourdes, we can go, if you want.” I told her that I had a commitment with the youth group and couldn’t attend, but the rest of the ride I had this nagging feeling that this was one of the times when I had to say yes to life’s invitations, because our lives are a series of possible images/potential presents and every image could be drastically different, depending on the choices we constantly make.

As we were soon to arrive, I told Mila that I could accompany her. As we waited for numerous buses in the rain, on our way to Lourdes, the story of her nephew unfolded. Oscar was 18 years old, the 2nd of three boys in an extremely Catholic family. His family lives in a historically violent neighborhood that is currently not controlled by either gang, although surrounding territories are controlled by one of the gangs. Oscar was the leader of the youth group at his Church, and played guitar at Thursday and Sunday mass every week with his brothers and father. His dream was to start a music school for children from his neighborhood. He had recently begun working at a construction company, with the dream of adding on a room to his house to call his own. His job required him to drop off deliveries of materials in neighboring districts, which is inherently dangerous given that he is a young male entering gang territories, coming from a community that is yet to be controlled. Life here works on an invisible grid system, where youth know which territories they can enter and which are strictly out of bounds, strictly based on their home communities, regardless of whether or not the youth have anything to do with the gangs.

Oscar woke up on Good Friday and began to make the “Alfombra” (salt relief type of carpet that communities make on streets here to celebrate holy days) in front of the church.


He and other youth finished the first Alfombra and were invited to make another a ways up the road. On the way, the police stopped all of the youth, searched them, and threw Oscar to the ground to pick up the money they’d thrown from his pocket. Just another example of the way youth are criminalized here, regardless of who they are or the fact that they’d obviously come from making an alfombra of the crucified Christ on Good Friday.

Further up the road, Oscar worked on the 2nd alfombra together with adults, children, and youth from the community. He erased Christ’s face twice, because he wanted to make sure it was perfect, and at 2:50pm just as he was finishing the image the third time two 14-year olds drove by on bicycles and shot him twice in the back of the head. He died instantly, at the side of his brothers, children, and many community members and his blood poured over the alfombra, over the face of Christ. His parents were alerted and his mother ran to him and fainted on the way. His dad, Hugo, reached him, held his head in his arms and said later that his fingers touched his son’s brains, since the bullets had gone through the back of his head and come out just above his eyes, leaving a gaping hole. Neighbors later told me, I saw the crucifixion this Friday in person, not of Oscar, but of Hugo, he died with Oscar that day.

Community members and police proceeded to catch the 14 year olds and beat them nearly to death. One ended up in critical condition in the hospital, and I do not know if he survived or not.

I arrived in Lourdes to an indescribable scene of grief, fear, and disbelief. Oscar’s body lay amidst hundreds of flowers, propped up in empty coca-cola bottles in the community center. His brothers, cousins, neighbors, and parents cried uncontrollably and told stories of their dear loved one. We accompanied his body all night, as is the custom here, with the songs of those whose tears ceased for long enough to stutter out worship songs and strum Oscar’s guitar. I froze when I saw him in his coffin, looking so handsome, with his hair gelled up, just beginning to live his life. All night I sat in the frenzy of fear of gang retaliation at the wake (for what the community had done to the youth responsible), desperation, and indescribable faith. Women told me stories about how in their neighborhood, their children live as if they were in jail, because they can never safely leave the house. One woman told me that gang members arrived to take photos of her restaurant, and that she was filled with fear but repeated, Lord, you know this is your store, please do with it what you please. She wants to leave the neighborhood with her two adolescent boys but has nowhere to go.

Oscar’s aunts, uncles, and family brought him back to life as they talked about his shy, kind disposition and the way he’d wondered just days before his death “do you think I’ll ever get married?” Hearing about his dreams cut short made me wonder when this will end…. this cycle of endless violence.

One of the most difficult parts for me to swallow of the whole weekend was the way in which everybody spoke about the 14-year olds responsible for the murder. I realize that pain and grief can blind people at times, but nonetheless it broke my heart to hear Oscar’s uncle say he had run to get his machete to stab the boys in the heart but hadn’t gotten back in time…. To hear the Catholic sister say that the problem with boys like those is that they have no heart nor soul…. That they should all be locked up for life because youth in this country have been poisoned.

I kept quiet, knowing that it was not the time to argue but inside I was torn apart, knowing that it’s not so simple. I spend most days with those 14-year old killers, with different faces, different victims, and different crimes but with them nonetheless. I listen to the lives of 12 to 22 year olds every week who are trapped in jail for up to 15 years and have no hope for their own futures. These youth open up their lives to in ways that never cease to amaze me, and invite me into the tragedies that have formed their paths to prison. The solution will never lie in killing or shutting away these 14-year old offenders who are recruited by the gang to murder, knowing that they will serve shorter sentences than adults who commit the same crimes. I don’t know what the solution is, but I’m working towards discovering it between glimpses of restorative justice, tomato plants planted side by side by 60-year old women and veteran gang members, and growing capacity to listen deeply without judging.

On Easter Sunday morning we walked towards the church through the dirt roads of Lourdes behind Oscar’s body singing “Lord, with your eyes set upon me, gently smiling, you have spoken my name, all I longed for, I have found by the water, at your side, I will seek other shores.” We reached the packed outdoor church and people flooded to the casket to spend a few last moments with Oscar. His father, Hugo, opened the mass, kneeling in front of the alter with his head down, speaking chillingly into the microphone. Tears streamed down all of our faces in the packed church as he spoke in a steady voice that filled the space, “Lord, on this day of your resurrection I hand my son over to you. You gave me such little time to be with him, and his only crime was singing to you, worshiping you with all of his days. I hand him over to you with the hope that those who killed him will have a change of heart and search for you.”

In El Salvador, I am usually less than impressed with the Catholic church, its mission, message, and hierarchy, but on this Easter Sunday, Father Luis’s message shook me and inspired me. As I sat in this church filled with crying Christians on Easter Sunday, the one day when we are supposed to be filled with hope in the resurrection, not only after death but here on this earth, of course, I thought, in El Salvador this day would be accompanied by the casket of an 18 year-old martyr. Of course this crucified people wouldn’t even get one day of joy…. rather, more killings, more fear….

Father Luis talked about the way in which Oscar is indeed, another martyr, whose innocent blood poured out over the face of Christ at the hour of Christ’s death. His is the innocent blood spilled today, begging us to work for peace. He begged the congregation to not allow there to be any space in our hearts for vengeance or rage, rather only for prayers that those who perpetrate such violent acts will be changed. He spoke about Oscar’s example of devotion to youth, the Church, to his family, and about the way in which his life and death must serve for us as motivation to plant seeds of peace wherever it is that we are, if we are to work for a world in which 18-year olds will not die with their barely breathed dreams still on their tongues.

I cried through the entire mass and thought about how at the very least, I wanted to share Oscar’s life and martyrdom with you. So that you, too, may feel the urge wherever you are to work for peace in his name. I returned to my community Sunday night feeling exhausted, but grateful to the workings of this life for allowing me to have known Oscar’s story and to have shared in the celebration of his life and mourning of his death. He and his family’s example of unfaltering faith and commitment to each other and to their community inspire me in my work here and ignite me with courage I did not know I had before.

I hope that wherever this finds you, you can pick up where Oscar left off to work for peace, music, youth, and love in this world that so desperately needs it.

A week without rose-colored glasses

Hello again!

I’ve started writing this several times now and never seem to finish it because something always comes up or a bunch of people come home and my few moments of silence are again interrupted.

When I started to write this I was listening to the haunting chords my friend invented on the guitar. He is 15 and sometimes comes over just to have to have a space away from the chaos and abuse that has characterized most of his life. He didn’t want to talk this time… just cry below the snow hat he’d pulled down over his face and strum a sorrowful series of guitar chords.

Perhaps it was out of this space that this reflection (warning it’s not very up-beat) was born…. Or it was more likely born out of the reality that people live and I encounter here (though always with one degree of separation from the threats and fear by nature of the fact that I have a US passport and the means to leave).

I didn’t write about the violence here in my first reflection, mostly because I know that’s what’s all over the news about this tiny country, nor did I want to worry those who tend to do so :) El Salvador has recently named by the UN the most violent country in the world as far as homicides per capita are concerned. Yet there is so much more here beyond, between, and beneath the violence that I didn’t want to start there, but I’ve had so many encounters with it, especially in this past week, that to neglect to write about it would be to deny the magnitude of the violence here that is entrenched everywhere yet enveloped in silence.

First, here’s a very generalized attempt to contextualize the current violence a bit, for those of you who aren’t extremely familiar with El Salvador.

Violent repression has been an ongoing occurrence here since Spanish colonization. Indigenous persons have always been treated as if they were less human, and their existence essentially became a crime in 1932. In response to a farmer’s movement uprising (led by Farabundo Martí), there was a massive massacre of thousands of indigenous people. At this point, indigenous clothing, customs, etc. became punishable by death. In the coming years, a series of US backed military regimes then ruled the country, slaughtering anyone involved in resistance movements, be it university students, priests, or pregnant mothers. In the late 1970s the five resistance factions organized under the single banner of the FMLN (Frente Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front) and fought against the US backed Salvadoran army from 1980-1992 when the civil war officially “ended”.

Over 70,000 people were killed throughout the course of the war, and thousands more were disappeared. Despite the thousands of human rights violations perpetrated during this time, the peace accord package included a general amnesty, leaving Salvadoran army officials free to live their lives on beach resorts in Miami and thousands of Salvadoran farmers with open wounds and no hope for justice.

In addition, those between 20 and 40 years old in this country  lived childhoods where violence was the norm.

In the early 1990s, as Salvadorans from Los Angeles began to be deported back to El Salvador, having sought asylum during the war, they brought with them influences from both the MS 13 and 18^th Street gangs. The combination of this influx of gang members, the abundance of arms in the country, and a high level of unemployment following the civil war provided an ideal breeding ground for gangs and organized crime. Yet some attempts to bring peace to post-war El Salvador have largely been based on retributive justice and shaped by polarized political attitudes. Despite these attempts, violence has persisted and now stifles Salvadoran economic growth and creates a culture of fear in which 3 million Salvadorans have emigrated from the country in search of security and employment opportunities.                   

                 

The previous right-wing ARENA government’s approach to dealing with this violence has been to instate the Mano Duro (hard fist) and Super Mano Duro laws

which essentially made it legal to arrest anyone with baggy clothes, or any male youth in a group (including the pizza delivery man on his motorcycle in the community where I work) to hold them for 8 days and beat them in cold cells without food while their records were checked for past crimes. Meanwhile, the people in the legislative assembly, police force, security companies, and armed forces who are making huge profits off of the insecurity and drug trade here continued living their lives as youth were criminalized for their supposed involvement in gangs, the puppets of those higher up who profit from their crimes.

This past year, despite all of their talk of violence prevention and creation of employment opportunities, the first leftist government in the history of this country has passed the anti gang law.  Side effects include NGOs pulling out of violence prevention work in prisons for fear that their work could be considered under this new law as the “financing of gang members”….woo! President Mauricio Funes has also militarized the streets and the prisons, forcing mothers to strip naked each week and be fingered in order to visit their sons who may very well be serving their 2^nd year of prison time without having had a single trial, because the supposed witness (who was killed shortly after the supposed crime) has surprisingly not showed up to testify, and the case has been continually suspended (this is the case of my friend’s brother… Witnesses are everything here, since scientific crime scene data isn’t used and less than 3 percent of crimes are ever brought to justice).

It is really complex, and I could write about this for pages and pages and still never unravel it because I certainly don’t understand all of it….

So there’s a scrambled look at the big picture. To speak more about my experience of how this plays out every day here would require a Lord of the Rings style series of chapter books since I haven’t written about this since August. Rather than attempting that, I’ll just give a glimpse of my past week, as it relates to violence in this country, though I usually hate blogs that give a play by play of each day…

Last Monday I went to visit a friend of mine here who we’ll call Samuel. I first met him last year via the letters that we exchanged while he was being detained in Texas. He lives with his sickly grandmother, other-abled cousin, and her 10-year old son. His home is situated in the middle of a concrete labyrinth of homes… I could never find it on my own. Samuel is 24 years old and has lived more heartbreak and tragedy than I can imagine. As he explains, where he’s from (a very rough part of San Salvador), when you turn 18 you have three options: you can join the military (and provide the gangs with arms), join the police (and cover “rent” money for the gangs), or join the gangs themselves. What these three parties do not want to see is that someone should succeed in life and not join their forces. Samuel, however, had studied through high school with the help of scholarships and did not want to take any of these three routes. Beyond that, he began to work with youth from the area on karate and violence prevention projects.

Shortly after his decision not to join any of these three options, his sister was kidnapped. Samuel was later taken from his house and told that there was a “surprise” waiting for him. He was held down and forced to watch as 150 men raped his sister, including uniformed police officers, uniformed army officials, and neighbors in the gang.

They then tied her to the back of a pick up truck and scraped her around the whole town as an example of what would happen to those who did not obey the gang’s orders. They cut her open from her chin to her vagina, and threw her over a bridged as they laughed and forbid the family from having a wake or a burial for her. 

            When he denounced her killing to the head of the police at the time, he was nearly murdered later that day.  He decided to join the army to protect the rest of his family, after various other family members and friends were killed. Various members of the police and the gang escorted him to enlist, and they made sure he was in the right cartel to assist with their corrupt operations. When he was going to be forced to participate in arms trafficking, he left the army, denounced publicly all of those he knew had been involved in this corruption and with the killings of his sister, aunt, and friends, and was subsequently shot twice.

He fled to the US as a last resort to file a political asylum case where he spent two years and seven months in prison waiting for the case to be processed. He was finally given a work visa in prison, but was deported two weeks later when his asylum case was denied. He was told in court that the conditions he described could not possibly be true because El Salvador is now a peaceful country with a leftist president.

He’s now back in this country with a warrant not to leave because they want his head, since it holds too much knowledge, according to telephone threats he’s received. He continues pushing for his asylum case as well as his sister’s case, yet legal organizations here have no witness protection programs and he continues living in the same home surrounded by the same fear. He has to pay rent for his family’s protection yet can’t get a job for having “deserting” the military on his record.

 If I were to express my rage at an asylum system that lets individuals like “Samuel” be deported in spite of the imminent dangers that await them upon their forced return to their countries, I would just end up cursing for pages on end, so I won’t do that here….. But it infuriates me and is yet another of countless examples that leaves me feeling angry and shameful about the country of my birth and its egotistical immigrant policies that literally mean death to so many people fighting to survive. If anything, the way I’ve told this story has drastically under-exaggerated the intensity and gravity of Samuel’s struggle, resilience, and current danger.

I left Samuel’s house in disbelief, having finally heard his whole story in person, and closed my eyes to a night of violent dreams. Tuesday I woke up and decided to walk up the volcano behind my house, since part of my job includes walking up the volcano that rises above this city in order to try to recruit youth from the volcano’s rural outskirts to become involved in our youth programs. I love doing this and I go much more than I am told to (actually I’ve never been told to go, I just decided that this was going to be part of my job and no one has stopped me yet). It’s really shocking that just above my neighborhood there are so many families without light or water who live in conditions of abject poverty, yet if people stay in the barbed wire concrete world below they’ll never have to think about this reality that sits just above them on the volcano (the one that has landslides every rainy season because promised works of mitigation just never seem to happen year after year in the dry season, and landslides just get chalked up once again to unpreventable acts of God….).

Anyway on one such walk up the volcano two of the kids from the current group that is a part of the vocational training/life skills/community collaboration project accompanied me up the volcano. Somehow as part of the small talk on our long journey up one of them shared the fact that he’d gone shopping with his cousin and while his cousin waited for him on the corner, he’d been shot in the face and killed. Edwin went over to him and told him to wake up, thinking he’d passed out, until he saw the blood covering the concrete. He says he’s been traumatized ever since. Carlos chimed in with the fact that his little brother was shot and killed at age 11 for supposedly gossiping about the gang. The normalcy with which these topics emerged and disappeared from conversation shocked me. Everyone is affected by the violence here and with its normalcy it’s as if it’s seized to be chilling.

Wednesday I went to the girls prison, where I have been spending time two days a week with some really amazing women who have anywhere from 1 to fifteen year sentences. Shortly I’m going to post a poem that one of them wrote about justice that is quite telling and compelling. My friend Maria and I work with the girls individually to assist their creative process as they write poetry or prose. In the process we are invited to bear their stories and accompany a tiny fraction of their time behind bars. There are about forty girls and a one-month old baby who live in the detention center…. and each of their stories shocks me and breaks my heart a little bit more. 

This particular day I spoke with one of the girls whose sister is next door in the women’s prison, two of her brothers are in prison, and one of her brothers was already died because they wouldn’t attend to his bullet wounds at the hospital because he had tattoos, so he died in his fathers’ arms outside. She told me that she felt so much for her brothers, and that she wishes she could serve the 35 years one of them has been sentenced to for him so that he could get out of prison. I’ve found that if someone is in prison here, chances are they have multiple siblings, lovers, parents, etc. in jail as well. They likely come from communities like Samuel’s with few alternatives economically or socially to joining in on criminal activities. Others admit they had good upbringings, and that they just messed up.

One of my friends in prison is serving 2 years for using false papers to be able to see her boyfriend in prison, since due to the recent law changes only family members over 18 can visit inmates. Even so, many don’t have the money to get the paperwork done that they would need before visiting a prison in any event. As a sidenote, there is about a 1 social worker to 2500 inmate ratio (in prisons with 5000 inmates with a capacity for 800)… It’s no wonder no one leaves prisons transformed and the recidivism rate is through the roof.

Thursday rolled around and just when I thought I’d gone the whole day without getting rocked by the intensity of the violence in this country, I came home late and my neighbor was sitting on our front stoop. I asked him where he’d been, since I hadn’t seen him for so long, and he explained to me that his cousin had gotten shot and killed when leaving his birthday party, and when they went to find the body there was a letter by it stating that he (my neighbor) was next. His eyes filled with tears and he told me how furious he is that they’d go after someone like him, who’s just a kid, who doesn’t have anything to do with the gangs, just because they know that if they go after each other there will be consequences.

He goes to school in his friend’s tinted car now and stays in his house otherwise…. He’s 18 and now lives in hiding. He explained to me that his only sister is in the States when he needs her support the most, and he can’t tell any of his friends for fear of the word spreading. All I could do was hug him and let him know once again that I am always willing to listen to him whenever he needs anything….

We’re almost through the week if you’re too depressed by now you can stop…. This is exhausting retelling but it’s obviously nothing writing or reading it compared to those who live this each and every day.

The sun rose once again on Friday, and I went back to the prison. On the bus on the way home we saw a woman juice vendor doubled over with caution tape around her. She was a chubby elderly lady with her apron still strung around her neck. She’d been shot and killed at her juice stand in broad daylight… The news article the next day said they didn’t know why since she’d always paid rent to the gangs in charge of that territory. The most unreal part of the whole incident for me was the way in which everyone on the bus looked over for an instant as if it were a dead bird on the side of the road, and then focused back ahead. As I got off the bus I asked a woman getting off ahead of me if she’d seen the woman and she said, yes, but that’s really common, especially in this area. I remembered the words of a taxi driver here that have stuck with me…. He said that we are in a war here, but it is so much worse than the civil war because there is no defined enemy and there’s no way to be uninvolved. There are more arms in the country and homicides per day than there were during the war, and there is chilling a distrust between neighbors, families, friends…

Saturday was a really beautiful day because we went on an outing with the youth group in the community where I spend my weekends. We went for a two-hour walk to a river where, thankfully, we didn’t have cell phone service all day long. After a great day of rest and play with some youth who had never been to a river before, the calls began to come in. My friend Yuma was ahead of me and as she hung up the phone her face her eyes filled with tears as she said, guys, they killed Koki.

Koki is one of the kids from the community who had just turned 18. He had been in my English classes years ago and had been in the youth group as well. His family is huge and so we spent the rest of the walk keeping the news from his cousins who are in the group until we got back to the community. Arriving back to our urban reality only to prepare the community center for the wake was surreal. What a welcome back to reality from the day at the river. Welcome back to the senseless violence that consumes this place. Welcome back to the familiar scene of men playing cards and drinking heavily outside all night, awaiting free coffee and sweet bread, while all of the women inside say rosary after rosary for the soul of the deceased and prepare food to feed the whole community.

Koki was shot twice in the face and killed, but he’d been killed a week before and it had taken that long to find the body. His fourteen-year old sister recognized him in the morgue…. Luckily his was the only body they hadn’t thrown into a mass grave mid-week, as is customary with the bodies that no one has yet claimed.

I have seared in my memory the image of Koki’s mother opening up the casket to see the bag over his head, since they wouldn’t let her see his face because he already had worms…. I held his youngest sister Sandy’s shaking body so that she wouldn’t fall as she gripped the iron bars on the window peered in to watch her entire family hold her mother’s falling frame.

In between her shaking sobs I’d hear remarks like, well, he was gay, the Lord always punish hardest…. Which filled me with such deep sadness. Instead of using this experience of shared pain as a time to reflect on the fact that no one had ever accepted Koki as he was … that he was the butt of every joke… Instead it becomes a justified killing under hushed breath.

Later on as we were singing Hail Marys I noticed that they’d propped up a picture with a lotion bottle on the top of Koki’s coffin of the two of us smiling wide with our arms around each other years ago. This image hit me so hard, and I couldn’t stop thinking about how I had be the last thing he’d said to me was “you don’t talk to me anymore, do you?” because I’d barely been present to him in these past few months. His death for me is an invitation to dive more deeply into the margins… to seek out and accompany those who I know are suffering, even if I have no idea how their situation will ever change in the context of this country… this lifetime.

We accompanied his body all night long, which is customary here, until we marched behind him in the burial procession to the cemetery on Sunday morning. I will never forget holding Sandy up as she sobbed at the gravesite screaming, “I love you Koki, please don’t cover him with dirt!” Every shovelful of dust swirled back upwards with the wind and the morning light’s tracked it’s upward journey. Not even the earth wants to bury him, I thought. He’s too young. He’d just begun…

As I held Sandy, wondering why no one else in her family seemed to worry about her, the youngest sister.  As I stood in this mix of grief and exhaustion, I froze the faces of all of those around me and felt a deep, gritty gratitude for the opportunity to still accompany this community, three years later. To be alongside of them even in the most difficult times… I saw kids from the youth group who previously served to disrupt English class as many times as possible in a day, who put their arms around crying cousins, nephews, aunts, sisters and held on.  I saw nearly the entire youth group stay up all night by the family’s side and donate to Koki’s family all of the remaining group funds they’d raised ($25). In this crazy mixture of emotions gratitude whispered her way in… for the chance to be, and be here, in the midst of this chaos. To take part in the growth of so many young lights who tiny bit by tiny bit are (or at least know they are capable of) altering the patterns of relationships that have proven to be so destructive in their family, community, and country’s histories.

If anyone finished reading this, they get a gold star. If not, at least I finally took the chance to sort through a week of my time here and unpack it a bit, so as not to just coast along the surface of it all here without acknowledging the pain, desperation, and flashes of gritty gratitude that fill many of the pages of my days here.

First Entry 5 Months In...

Hello friends and family!

   Five months into my time in El Salvador I’m finally forcing myself to take the time to start a (much needed for self reflection purposes) blog. I feel incredibly selfish for having lived here for so many months without sharing any of this experience with anyone but the 2 girls I live with and my immediate family, and I am going to do my best to update this blog at least every few weeks to share some of the wisdom that Salvadorans continually astound me with here. I feel as if these months have given me lemons every single day, yet I have yet to squeeze all of the meaning out of them by writing and processing them, so they’ve ended up whole and rotten in our struggling compost pile rather then in a pitcher of life-given lemonade.

In a way, I feel like so much wisdom here is found between the lines, so to speak. In thinking about it one day, I remembered the expression “reading between the lines” in order to pick up on meaning that doesn’t appear in the text. I often feel that I often do, and certainly aspire to, live between the lines. Throughout the past five months it has been the 2-hour conversation with the girl crying at the end of her street waiting for her brother’s corpse to arrive, the equally long conversation with a stranger fleeing from the gang he’s been involved with for 9 years, searching for a different kind of life…. It’s been the tears I’ve shared with these people, due to the availability I learned here and was challenged by Father Mark Ravizza to adapt as a lifestyle, that has taught me and challenged me the most. Had I continued on to the market caught in my time schedule as I do most days, I would have missed these pieces of lives inviting me to live between the lines of the urgency of routine and to share a few moments of their journeys. Thus, I’ve titled this blog “Living between the lines” as a reminder to myself to continue to live with this spirit of availability that invites me more deeply into the wisdom, despair, and resilience of the people whose lives border my own.

In a certainly futile effort to sum up the basics of my 5 months here in a short paragraph…

I live with two amazing Olivias in a small green and purple house (nicknamed by kids on our street as the “casa de barney”) on a tree-filled, carless lane in San Salvador. We started a youth group with kids from our street that meets in our house every Monday (last week the youth made up skits about immigration’s effects on the family and the resulting reflection was a huge breakthrough in terms of vulnerability and trust building in the group). I work as a volunteer for Fundación Quetzalcoatl, ideas y acciones para la paz… which is a really amazing NGO that works in prisons and with hundreds of youth on various non-violence initiatives throughout San Salvador and in a few rural towns in Usulutan. I told them I’d do anything they needed, upon my arrival, which has meant spending a ton of time with youth both in rural and urban El Salvador over the past 5 months, voice recording over 50 interviews of youth who have gone through a 5 month vocational skills/life skills training/community development  process, and composing a 120 page book in Spanish (and English thanks to many wonderful friends who helped me translate it in time) that shares pieces of the life stories of 25 of these remarkable youth. Youth featured range from those who spent 11 years in a gang roaming the streets of San Salvador before beginning to turn their lives around, to girls with 8 siblings who had never left their homes and farms until the Jovenes Constructores (youth builders) program began. Now that these months have passed and the book is hopefully awaiting publishing, it seems like a lot, but it has been a slow, day-by-day process with many challenges, doubts, and blessings along the way.

As I type this I’m laying in my bed looking up at the faces of kids on my wall which cover the same tapestry I hung above my bed in my freshman dorm room at Notre Dame (when my random roommate thought I was a child molester… thanks Betsy!) When these pictures were taken I hardly knew these kids… now they’re 6 years older. Their mothers are in the US and they’re being raised by their grandparents. Others mothers’ left with other men and they’re being raised by their grandparents. One is struggling through the public school system though deaf and still does not know sign language. They have held my hand and walked with me to swim at the waterhole countless times and we’ve played in their dim kitchen lights until we were too tired to continue. I know them and love them much more deeply…. Half of them, that is. The other half of the pictures are from Nigeria and I’ve never seen these kids again. I have no idea where they are six years later, what fills their worlds, or where life has led their small steps. I guess that’s part of the crazy shifting nature of this life, but it doesn’t make it much easier for me when I’ve invested pieces of myself in many places.

Rather than focusing on the work I’ve been doing with Quetzalcoatl, I’m going to write about the most life-giving part of these few months for me, which as been the resurrection of the youth group in a small community where I worked 2 and a half years ago as a Casa de la Solidaridad student. I’m sure what follows will be anything but organized, so if you’re still reading this good luck following along…

It is such a blessing to be in that community—to be able to just love freely and be loved back and held by so many hands. I feel like I’m most authentically me when I’m there—knowing and loving so many people in such a small space (there are four lanes and 40 families that make up the whole urban community, located along railroad tracks between a highway and a polluted river on what used to be a landfill… thanks Arena government for giving refugees such a great space to live after the war…). I love being able to walk into a house and embrace a blind ninety year old grandmother only to step outside and have a 3 year old jump into my arms yelling “tia!” (aunt!)

On Friday I was sitting with Niña Toña (who is one of my many mothers in the community) and thinking about zooming out… as if on a camera. I zoomed out of the home to overlook the tiny four-street colonia, then to overlook the thousands of neighboring colonias in this city and all of the rural towns in the country…. then to the whole region of Central America and even further out until I was in space looking down at this tiny girl in a tiny community in the middle of so much….

As I did this in my head I felt filled with gratitude for the birds of fortuity… nada es casualidad (nothing is chance) as they say here… I felt gratitude that such a series of invitations and yeses had brought me to this community, to this home, and to this chair where Niña Toña has sat for a year now, not knowing if she’ll ever walk again but repeating that she’s so happy to celebrate the new year without a single problem to complain about (I’m thinking… you have 7 children… you still can’t walk… you sit in the same chair all day long…..) yet she seeks the blessing in the midst of the pain and this undoubtedly holds her through the days where all she can do is cry.

One thing I’m learning in this community is the value of going somewhere and staying… of planting roots and being a consistent presence in a community in order to begin to belong and peel back the layers of complexity, suffering, and grace that line the lives mixed within a place. I think back to my time in the community when I was a Casa student three years ago and think of all of the people I hardly knew at the time…. The kids who I only knew as the noisiest troublemakers in my English classes who I would send upstairs to have private classes with Andy just to get them out of my hair… I now love each of these boys immensely, a love that comes with having stayed the night at their homes, having read between the lines and invited them to share with me the childhoods of alcohol and drug abuse that they have been surrounded by their entire lives thanks to their father figures and fiercely strong yet submissive mothers.

I think of the shy boys and girl on the corner who have since become a family for me and I’ve spent hours with each of them learning to love them deeply, to laugh often, to understand them, and to work with them to break down some of the machismo (macho sexism) that leaves the bulk of the work on the shoulders of the only daughter in the wake of the mothers’ stroke.

I think of the virtually mute 4 year olds at the time who wouldn’t get anywhere near me who now call me “tia!” and run to greet me and dance to regetón/sing/play with me for hours. Since my focus has always been on the adolescents in the community with the youth group, I have neglected these little ones in many ways. There have been many times when I’ve promised to play with them only to have a meeting get out past their bedtimes, yet every single time they see me they still run out of their houses to jump on my back and ask when we can play. In many ways I feel like this must be how our loving, life-giving God must be…. No matter how many times I promise that I’ll take time for silence and prayer and end up rushing on to the next commitment in my life instead, the joy-filled invitation never ceases. The sun continues to rise every day, the birds still sing and ask me again and again to greet them, play with them, sit in gratitude for them and for all living beings, inviting me to take part in their renewal rather than in the continuation of their pollution…of their drowning in plastic and their lead pollution which leads my friends to die at 21…

Yet these little people I too often ignore are full of wisdom and their lives filled with strife reproduced over generations. Last week our youth group organized a Christmas party for the whole community and I had the pleasure/challenge of organizing all of the little kids to sing Christmas songs in a choir and to do a Christmas skit that involved Christ visiting a rich home three times in the form of a street child, a pregnant mother, and a hungry man but the woman was too blind to see that Christ had come in these forms. Spending so much time with these kids preparing this was such a gift, yet an extremely heavy experience as well. The way tiny people insult each other, make vulgar jokes, and reproduce generations of distrust between neighbors astounded me. I really hope some of the older kids in the youth group will start a group with me for the youngest kids in the community who certainly need a similar space to work towards the construction of a culture of peace in their lives, families, and community.

This past week I came down with a nasty sinus infection that left me with swollen glands and with no desire to go anywhere. Interestingly enough, I spent the week of sinus infection in Guarjila and Calle Real, the two communities in the world where I know the most people and tend to run from house visit to house visit, always trying to see everyone before I leave. Though it was no fun, my sickness invited me to stay, to sit in one place for awhile and see what comes of it. This staying left me incredibly grateful and humbled by the people that surround my life here. In Guarjila my “mom” bought me Gatorade, made me food and both and she my dad caught me up for hours on how they’d been doing since my brother (their son) was kidnapped by the Zetas in Mexico. (He finally escaped from them after paying the money they wanted and still not being released… but he’s being detained for security reasons by migration officials in Mexico… you may have seen him on the news if you’ve been following these kidnappings). My little sisters gave me a manicure and braided and rebraided my hair…it was such a gift to sit still and be amazed by the Christic imagination of so many Salvadorans I know… an imagination that goes above and beyond what I, having been raised in a given culture, would even imagine doing for my neighbor. (see the writings of William Lynch for more on the Christic imagination J)

  I left Guarjila and went to Calle Real still feeling sick, and I sat on a couch in the house where we have our youth group for a number of hours… and the entire time I sat there people flowed in and out and sat on either side of me or on top of me for the whole 3 or so hours; there was not a single moment where I was alone on that couch this flow of friends left me filled with gratitude for every life I have been gifted to take part in here, for every young person who for some reason opens up to me and allows me to enter into their lives. As I sat on that couch, in came reports of bits and pieces of so many lives…

           

“Ever since my dad was deported he only spends time with his new family… he doesn’t support us anymore” “no I don’t have a crush on José! We’re just friends….” “My dad just demands that we do everything in the house yet he never does anything at all… I’m working now and I still do housework but he stays at home and does nothing… he just laughs when I tell him he’s an awful example for us kids…” “I want to give my scholarship to my brother… he deserves it more than I do…” “Jenna why are you still in the same place? You have to set off more fireworks like I taught you to on Christmas” “Jenna are your legs falling off yet from my weight?” “Fine! I promise I wont try to go to the States again, at least for awhile….though my parents really need the money. Last time I went it was so scary when the Zetas chased us off the train… they only killed a few people and the rest of us got away…” “Somebody go serve the icecream left over from the Christmas party!” …….. These lives came and went (just as they weave into my life here every weekend I spend in the community) and I had the blessing of receiving it all, bearing it all with an open heart, a hand to hold, and a body that forced me to stay put for once.

As I’ve already said…I have fallen much more deeply in love with all of the young people in our youth group and I continue to be grateful for the windows of their lives that they open up to me. However more time I spend in the community sharing more with these kids, the more I think I could never be a social worker, as defined by the rules and norms of the profession. Since I began to stay at different kids’ homes every weekend, I’ve found on multiple occasions that it isn’t until the lights are off and the rest of the house is asleep that the tears begin to flow and these young people I love so much begin to open up and share with me all of the things they carry with them each day. I’m pretty sure that sharing a bed/bedroom (in the case of the guys in the group) in tiny homes is not allowed as a social worker and I just don’t think a half hour session in an office building would lead to the same level of trust and vulnerability that allows these youth to share with me (and vice versa) and opens up avenues to seek help where help can be found. So maybe I’ll just be a professional youth group facilitator/sleepover friend or maybe I’ll never be a professional anything… I’ll just be me.

Being in Calle Real for New Years made me think back to last New Years eve in Uganda which I spent in our village home in Ssenge with my friend Jess who was really sick with malaria and a number of boys from the African Hearts programs who love her a lot and had come out to Ssenge to take care of her. At midnight those of us without malaria jumped on the trampoline and watched over the vast expanse of elephant grass as fireworks exploded across the horizon overthe distant city of Kampala. My friends (and I soon followed) kept screaming “tuli mulamu!” (we’re alive!) What a simple truth that I so often forget to shout, and only remember when someone I love is no longer alive.

This year I am still alive for new years and I found myself in another country, with another community that I love dearly. Midnight, this year, was much more solemn that last years, however. At 11:45 the mom of one of the families that I’m closest to called her kids together in their grandmother’s house to say a rosary to welcome the New Year. The boys talked back to their mom angrily saying that she could do her prayer if she wanted to but that they wanted to be with their friends for midnight. The daughter knelt down and put her sleeping baby on a bench behind her and the grandmother and uncle prayed along with the mother (who was by this time in tears). She prayed for all of the people in prison (her husband has been there for 4 years…) for all of the people in prison to their own vices, and in thanksgiving for my presence in the community.  She asked her children to pray and none of them said anything. fireworks exploded literally at the roof of the house interrupting the silent tension within.

These moments of a mother trying to hold her family together in prayer at the foot of a new and undoubtedly challenging year brought tears to my eyes. Having been so close to her children I was the only one who knew why one of their faces looked like he wanted to kill someone when his uncle who had sexually abused him for his whole childhood gave him a forceful new years hug. The cycles of violence and neglect mixed with those of desperate prayer and desolate hope as this family united in all of its brokenness to usher in the New Year.

  I’m going to wrap this up finally to jump on two buses and head to that community. Hopefully tonight’s meeting will lead to our collective realization that firework wars are really dangerous and not something that youth leaders need to be involved with on New Years Eve… As usual I’ll leave it open ended and trust in the conclusions that come out of the experience of 25 youth in a circle because at the end of the day my opinion is just another one and holds as much weight as any of theirs…