Some "results" of my "research" in El Salvador

As I mentioned back in May when I was getting ready to leave, one of my main "jobs" while I was in El Salvador was to learn about what the Salvadoran Lutheran Church is doing to prevent and deal with the violence.  It is still my intention to do my final project for my graduate program on the violence in El Salvador, and the informal research that I did while on my trip will be very helpful.  I have mentioned in passing some of what I learned about what the Salvadoran Lutheran Church is doing in response to the violence, but here is a focused and more in depth post on what I learned.

A couple nights after I arrived in El Salvador, I talked with Pastors Matias and Martina about the sort of questions I have about the violence in El Salvador and I asked them some of the questions I had about the role of the Lutheran Church in dealing with that violence.  I told them that I was especially interested what the Church was doing to prevent and reduce the violence.

(I think it is significant to note that when I was talking with the pastors, I did not specifically ask about gang violence.  In my questions I only asked about "violence."  They immediately started talking about gang violence which could mean that they assumed I wanted to hear about gang violence.  Or it could be that for them, as for many other Salvadorans that I met, the word "violence" is synonymous with "gang violence.")  Here is what Pastors Matias and Martina had to say about violence and the role of the Lutheran Church in addressing that violence:  There aren't really any official programs in the Lutheran Church to deal with the gang violence.  It's basically up to the pastors who are working in their own communities to form relationships with those who are involved or are likely to become involved in gangs.  It is through these relationships and speaking the word of God to those that are involved in gangs that the pastors try to reduce gang violence.  

Pastors Matias and Martina said that forming relationships and walking along side those who are involved with or affected by the gangs is far more effective that any official or formal program could be.  The pastors have had experience working with gang members in their pastoral work and they admitted that it is VERY difficult to work with gang members.  In one community in particular where they work, there has been some gang violence.  The pastors organized a meeting with the community members, the mayor, the police, and a few of the gang members.  Of course it wasn't easy to get all these people to agree to go to a meeting with the others, but the pastors stressed that the main objective of this meeting was simply to get all these people together to sit down and just talk with each other in a civil and calm way.  Again this wasn't an official program organized by the hierarchy of the Lutheran Church.  Rather this was the work of Pastors Matias and Martina who saw a need in a community where they work and they discerned a way to try to meet that need for something to be done about the gang violence in that community.  

In all the academic reading that I had done on violence in El Salvador, gang violence was THE violence they talked about with few exceptions.  The Salvadoran news websites that I periodically look at always have some story about gang violence.  Salvadorans that I knew from my first trip to El Salvador had suffered because of gang violence.  And so, almost all my thinking about El Salvador and the violence there was focused on the issue of gangs.  However, after almost two weeks with Pastors Matias and Martina, I was beginning to seriously question the focus of my research.  I had visited all of the Lutheran communities where the pastors work and I didn't hear or see anything that indicated gangs were a problem.  Granted I was in the communities for a limited amount of time and I didn't get to see and hear everything.  With the exception of the one community that Pastors Matias and Martina had mentioned in our first discussion, the gangs are not a problem as far as I know in their other four communities.  But there were many other problems facing the communities that seemed far more important and relevant to the members of the community.  And so I was about ready to give up and totally abandon my research.  Violence just didn't seem to be THE problem for the communities where Pastor Matias and Martina worked, and it didn't seem like working against violence was one of the pastors' main tasks.

But then I realized that it was a different type of violence that was the main concern of the pastors and their congregations.  It wasn't gang violence that they were directly trying to get rid of. 

The issues that members of the community were most concerned about were:

• Problems with schools such as not enough teachers, teachers who weren't properly prepared to do their job, kids misbehaving, kids getting bad grades, kids not being able to go to school because they couldn't get there or because they had to work
• health problems: illnesses, not having money to pay for medicine or to go see a doctor, not knowing what to do for non-serious things like colds, minor cuts, or diarrhea
• Poorly constructed homes, damage from rains
• Not being able to access credit to buy things like a well-built house or to start up a small business
• Not being able to adequately feed children
• Not having ready access to clean water to drink and cook with
• Missing men: the men were off working, have left for the U.S., they aren't going to church, the men are unfaithful to their wives, they don't help take care of the kids 
• No jobs and jobs that don't pay enough

I heard people talk about these sort of problems again and again when I went to the communities where Pastors Matias and Martina work.  And throughout the rest of my stay in El Salvador I heard about these problems again and again.  These issues aren't what we normally think about when we think about violence (we think about things like gang violence), but these issues are a form of violence: structural violence, the violence of poverty.  I was relieved when I realized that I didn't have to abandon my research of violence in El Salvador and the role of the Lutheran Church in addressing that violence.  I simply had to shift my focus from gang violence to structural violence.  Once I did this I started to recognize a whole slew of things the Church and its leaders are doing to address the various forms of violence in El Salvador. 

By no means do I want to downplay the problem of gang violence in El Salvador, because it is indeed a huge problem and it is even getting worse.  Gang members are doing horrific things and the lives of practically all Salvadorans are being affected by the gangs in some way.  However, there are many other forms of violence that must be addressed along with the gang violence if the people of El Salvador will ever have the chance to live in true peace.  Here are some of the things that the Lutheran Church is doing to address the violence of poverty in El Salvador:  

• The Church is helping to address the problems in the schools through: the scholarship programs which require that the students behave well and get good grades, finding teachers who are better qualified to teach, the Lutheran schools, providing a university education that is affordable for all who want to attend, building schools, and encouraging students to strive to get the best education they can
• The Church helps address the injustice of a lack of access to health care by: the pastors giving medicine (mostly donations from people in the U.S.), money for medicine or doctors' visits, or medical advice to the members of their communities.  The Lutheran Church facilitates clinics in the communities when volunteer medical personnel come from the U.S.  Some medical assistance is provided at the Lutheran run homeless shelter, the Hope House.
• Through donations of time and money from people in the U.S., some members of Lutheran churches have been able to construct homes that are sturdy and are worthy of being called houses.  The Church provides shelter for those who would ordinarily have no place else to go- refugees and other people who need a safe place to stay are welcomed at the Lutheran guest house (Casa Concordia) and some people have found shelter at the Hope House.
• The Church provides food to many of the people in communities where there are churches, dozens of people without homes are fed at the homeless shelter, and the Church helps provide food for those in emergency situations like after the flooding
• I saw and heard pastors encouraging men and especially boys and young men to be men of virtue, to go to church, and to provide for their families

The Lutheran Church is helping to provide for these direct needs which is very important, but the Church is also working to change the unjust systems that lead to these problems in the first place.  The Church is providing help to individuals when help is needed, but the Church also recognizes that fundamental change must take place or the injustices will continue.  It seems like the pastors working in their communities are doing the first sort of "helping" while the Bishop and others leaders working beyond the community level are working for this fundamental systemic change.  As my time in El Salvador went along I realized more and more that the Lutheran Church was working hard against the structural violence of injustice (in all its forms) and by doing so they are indirectly working against the gang violence.  I talked about the Church's campaign against violence in a previous post.  

These things give me hope, that life will get better for my friends in El Salvador.  While there may not yet be much specific evidence that things are improving yet, there are so many people who are committed to making things better and are actually doing something to make things better.