Sometimes we have experiences that are different. We encounter them, and their presence alone makes us pause. Listen. Bow our heads in reverence because we suddenly realize that they could be everything, or at least something. There is change on the horizon.
So instead of speaking, we wait. For the first time, or maybe the thousandth time, we learn patience, bumbling clumsily through the tranquil word. We observe as the experience daintily exposes itself, one toothless smile, one half of an avocado, one tiny-armed hug at a time. As the clouds build in the heated sky, we are suddenly drenched in the tropical rain, laughing. The experience is no longer external. In the wait, we become it.
For me, Turkey was Turkey. It was a semester of bright colors and foreign odors, bazaars and pink pomegranates. I watched the people, I tried speaking the language, I learned their cooking, I swam in the Mediterranean and scrambled over castles. I took pictures of Turkey, studied its history, wrote about it. It was exactly what I needed at the time it came.
And then I went to El Salvador. On my first day, as I drove in the back of the taxi cab through the countryside, something shifted, and I knew I needed to be fully present and wait.
I took about ten pictures the first month, wrote maybe one email, and stopped blogging. The structure and focus of Santa Clara University’s Casa de la Solidaridad program, located in the country’s capital, San Salvador, was different from the program in Turkey. Both small, intensive, and equally but distinctly exhilarating, my time at the Casa was spent submerging myself into the present day realidad of the Salvadoran people. What does this mean? It was the Casa’s way of encouraging students to be attentive to the lives of the Salvadorans, a people whose strength and persistence through their recent civil war and current poverty astounded me. It also meant recognizing how interrelated we all are. I soon discovered how much the lives of the Salvadorans were intertwined with my own.
This might sound like hippy jargon or some new-age philosophy, but it’s really not too foreign. It was simply a matter of letting go of the fast-paced life that I often lead in the United States and recognizing another culture. It meant napping in a hammock, eating mangos, listening to a Salvadoran’s story, or telling my own. In this way, without really realizing it, I paused and listened. The experience of El Salvador let me in, allowing me to open my own heart to it.
In other words, these blogs are coming four months past their due date, but to me, at exactly the right time. I needed to fully be there for those four months. My hope is that I can now somehow share a piece of El Salvador with you. “Come,” my host mother would say, “Eat.” Share a hot tortilla, drink a little coffee. It is all we have, but it is enough.
Let’s start with Hello.
On day one of English class, we talked about the word Hello. Eight sets of dark brown eyes stared back at my teaching partner and me, two twenty-year-old American girls dubbed teachers the week before. We smiled ridiculously at the kids, trying to hide our nerves.
“Hello, me llamo Clarita,” I exclaimed. “Can we introduce ourselves using the word Hello?” I asked in Spanish.
Each student, ranging from ages 6 to 15, took the chance. Some eyes glanced down timidly while others sparked with anticipation or glee as Hello tumbled out.
I took a red-eye to get to El Salvador. I arrived at 6 in the morning. My entire first day resounded with the Salvadoran Hello. Contrary to what I learned in my Spanish classes in the States, Salvadorans rarely greet each other with hola. Instead, they smile at each passerby on their walks down the dusty cement roads and offer a buenos. Short for buenos dias, buenas tardes, or buenas noches, the word is rich and round. When I walked into Casa Romero for the first time, the house I would be living in for four months, two of the cooks looked up from chopping onions and fish. Ready to smother the first student of the semester in warmth and hospitality, their faces creased with excitement and they reached out their arms for an embrace. “Buenos!” they spoke into my ear as they squeezed my jet-lagged body. Buenos, or as I started to loosely translate in my mind every time a Salvadoran spoke it, Good, Goodness to You, Hello.
Days
In my first weeks, El Salvador covered my heart in these Hellos. It introduced me to the screams of the tropical birds hailing down from the tops of the fruit trees in our courtyard every morning at 6 am. Hello. I met the community of American students that I would be living, reflecting, and growing with for four months. Hello. I tasted hot and greasy pupusas, thick tortillas stuffed with cheese, beans, or meat. Hello!
During our week of orientation, I also visited the eight praxis sites students would be consistently going to throughout the semester. In the Casa de la Solidaridad program, students spend three days a week taking classes with other Casa students in both English and Spanish on the University of Central America campus. The remaining two days are spent at a praxis site. Essentially, a praxis site is a location where Casa students spend time in order to accompany and learn from Salvadorans. Praxis sites vary drastically. Some are in the city, some are rural, some are organized schools or children centers, and others are neighborhoods. It’s a chance to be immersed in realities that are often affected by poverty, inequality, and injustice. Circumstantially different, the essences of these realities often resonate with our own experiences from the United States.
Two or three students are assigned to each one, but in the first week we had the opportunity to see all of the praxis sites. Intended to give us a context for our fellow students’ growth over the semester and an introduction to El Salvador’s many sides, this orientation was not just logistical. It was my first interaction with El Salvador’s depth, complexity, sorrow, and joy. It was the start of the transformation of my own understanding.
My praxis site was at the foot of the San Salvador Volcano, directly situated in a mudslide risk zone. It consisted of two separate housing clusters. One line of houses is made of tin, opening up onto a dirt road cluttered with garbage and a coursing stream of sewage. The other group is higher up the volcano, barely escaping the intensity of urban conditions. These houses were built with cement and are shaded by mango trees. In the spring the air was warm and sweet with the smell of rotting mangoes.
These neighborhoods house my most resilient and loved friends.
As the weeks passed, the families living here invited my praxis partner and me into their homes. They started to share their stories and burdens. The moms made us coffee and we taught English classes. We spent a weekend at one of their houses and felt what it was like to sleep without glass or bars on the windows. Three young girls held us hostage for makeovers, covering our faces with bright blue eye shadow and crusty lip gloss, and our host mom braided our hair. We learned how to pat out tortillas and our students taught us how to kick a soccer ball, our team members showing no traces of resentment when I missed a goal for the third time. We went on mango hunts and got to see family photographs. They gave us hugs that lasted longer, we started to laugh at clumsily translated jokes harder, and I found myself loving deeper.
Stories Spoken, Stories Seen
When you spend time with someone, really spend time with them, you get to see their life beat out its rhythm. Sometimes it’s gentle, sometimes pounding, sometimes broken. It’s a privilege to listen to what the rhythm speaks.
At school, I easily forget to listen. I let school work, activities, and stress prevent me from sitting down with others and noticing what is happening around and within us. In El Salvador, this was our focus every day. At Tuesday Spirituality Nights, we would share stories from our week or talk about the relationships that strengthen our lives. Every academic class incorporated our praxis experiences into the material, and Thursday Community Nights gave us the chance to share our life stories with our housemates. Reflection fortified our perspectives and my world blossomed with a third dimension.
Gleaning from our house visits at my praxis partner and my site, we watched as time worked through the family’s stories. In January, one woman shared her frustration over her husband’s infidelity and abandonment. A few weeks later, he returned. We shook his hand, only to notice his frailty and yellow tinge. He had returned to his wife unemployed and with cancer. Her eyes showed complicated waves of varying emotion, happy that she was needed, hurt by his condition, unsure of how she would manage to support her entire family with this extra burden. Her son and our student, an avid drawer and big dreamer, carried on with his enormous hugs and wild smiles, exhilarated that both parents were home and oblivious to the fact that things might have been different and will eventually change. Another woman, with a striking shot of silver hair and ailing eyes, allowed us to visit with her grandson, who hurt his leg in an accident halfway through our stay. Each story was carried with an openness, vulnerability, and grace. As the silver-haired woman pressed three avocados into our hands, giving us a portion of the little food she had, I was reminded that we share in this life, the pain-staking and the sweet.
The community itself breathed life. Family members went in and out of hospitals, baby chicks grew into chickens ready to be slaughtered, work was good and work was scarce, a family celebrated a quinceañera. The government passed out free uniforms and notebooks out to students for the first time, one of our students started skipping school more often to help her mom complete errands, while another of our students, a 15 year-old boy, started attending meetings about youth rights, proudly sharing with us that men and women should be treated equally. The government decided to come through on its 30 year-old promise to move the families living in the risk-zone to new apartments. The government fell through on its word, pushing out the date yet again.
One of the most beautiful rhythms that surfaced during our time there was young to the communities. Because our praxis site was new, the families had to work together to decide how and where my praxis partner and I would spend our time. This communication started to forge new relationships. Each praxis site has a ‘guide’ to escort Casa students during the entire day. The guides, who are Salvadoran and familiar with the praxis site communities, are important not only for safety but also help curb language barriers and cultivate trust between families and American students. At my site, our guide was a woman of immense strength and a gentle presence. Born and raised in a near-by neighborhood, her faith and belief in human rights had inspired her to accompany us to our community. She became one of the many mother-like figures that my praxis partner and I shared at the site. Passionate about women’s rights, she began to talk with the mothers at our site about their own situations, using her membership to a national women’s rights organization to start meetings for the women in the community.
One day mid-semester as we played fútbol with the kids after lunch, I looked over at the kitchen table. The women, young mothers and grandmothers alike from both communities were leaning back in their chairs, resting in the shade and talking about their lives. During our stay, because of our guide’s own leadership and the other’s responses, the women began to share each other’s burdens and support one another. In the midst of poverty’s injustice and bleak cyclical nature, these women’s dialogue, one filled with challenge, encouragement, and companionship, pushed forth a young, green shoot of hope.
If this was casually unfolding on a Wednesday afternoon at the foot of a volcano, the world must be covered with a hopeful harvest, waiting to break soil, yearning for sufficient sun and a little hydration. Everyday more is sewn when stories are shared and solidarity is stirred.
Sit With Me
One weekend, my friend and I visited a family living in the rural part of El Salvador, or the campo, which makes up the majority of the country. Life in the campo is different. Like any urban-country comparison, it lilts a little. Tortillas are crisped and chicken heads lopped off in the kitchen as the sun comes up. Local soap operas drone on in the background if the family owns a television, children wander up and down the street, and dogs beg for scraps. There is an intimacy with nature in the campo, where stars pierce black night skies, and there is also an understood contentment in sitting. Work is hard and in the summer heat is intense. But being occupies life here—an occupied life doesn’t dictate being.
Traditionally, men spend their days laboring in the community’s farm land. On this weekend, our host grandfather offered to take us out with him to his family’s plot of land. We followed him in silence as he casually pushed branches aside with his machete. Short, built, and clad in tight worn jeans, boots, and a rancher hat, his limping walk conveyed some peaceful covenant with his land. When we finally reached his plot, we found ourselves surrounded by rolling hills covered in dried grass and enveloped in a living silence. The trees were crooked and bowing, but hid delicious fruits. And suddenly something inside of me clicked. In a place where corn tortillas are so central to the meal, gifts are shared so willingly, and people are so close to their land, my emotional understanding of a Salvadoran budged. I felt a little less foreign to their pattern of life, values, and customs. This land was so special because it was allowed to speak to the people who still worked with it. In this way, sitting down in the campo was not the absence of working but a meaningful, human, emotional response.
In this way, listening to a friend, reaching out to a neighbor, caring for something bigger than myself, is not a task to be completed, but a natural surrender to the very core of my humanity.
A Pocketful of Questions
When May came and I walked away from El Salvador, my suitcase was filled with construction paper hearts, a dirty Winnie the Pooh and smudged Monsters Inc. stuffed animals, a yin yang bracelet, a hand-painted coconut, and a flattened paper snowflake. My memory was filled with the faces of my Salvadoran students, friends, and family who gave them to me. My being was impressed with these questions, forever answered and unsolved. I invite you to share them with me…
How are our hearts bound, and how can we continually let them free?
How can we become ourselves a little more each day?
How can we listen, how can we sit and be?
How can we give fully to each other, especially when there is little to give?
Did we receive the world’s Buenos! today?
Did we share it with the next person walking by?
They are simple, and they are challenging. But as a very wise taxi driver once told me as we drove to the airport, we are each so lucky. You have a heart, and you have a conscience. What beauty is exuded by their embrace.
