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…
