When you´ve been in El Salvador for a month...

After being in El Salvador for exactly a month, I was starting to get comfortable and almost bored with El Salvador, but then Saturday happened.  There simply are no adequate words to describe what I saw and experienced.  But I´m going to try as hard as I can to convey what I saw, heard, and felt.

On Friday, Julie, Mari, and I took a bus about 2 hours away to the south and east part of El Salvador.  We went to a town called Concepcion Batres.  We stayed with David and Nancy who are missionaries here for 2.5 years from Wisconsin.  They have a nice house (except for the bugs, mold, and leaking roof).  They have been in El Salvador since November and have been in their house for a month now.  They are teaching a bunch of English classes in communities near where they are living and they are working on trying to figure out some bigger projects that they can work on with members of the communities.  Concepcion Batres is a really cute town and it is in a very safe area.  After dinner we were able to walk to the town center to get some ice cream, and even though it was dark we didn´t have to worry about our safety.  It was almost like being in a completely different country- everything was just calm, nice, and safe.  It was refreshing to see that it is actually possible for this to happen in El Salvador.  I can only hope that this can happen in other cities as well.

Friday afternoon, a pastor that works in the area where David and Nancy work stopped by for a visit.  Pastor Ana Rosa told us that the next day she was going with another pastor, Pastor Alejandro, to visit the communities in the department of La Union where he works and to see some of the destruction from tropical storms Agatha and Alex that came through about a month ago and a week ago respectively.  Since we didn´t have any plans yet for Saturday, Julie and I asked if we could go with and Pastor Ana Rosa graciously agreed.

Pastor Ana Rosa picked us up at 6:30 on Saturday morning and we headed father east and south down the highway.  We drove for about 2 hours on the nice highway.  On the way the views of the landscape were beautiful- mountains, volcanoes, farmland.  We even got to see the ocean and Honduras.

Eventually we stopped to pick up Pastor Alejandro who is the pastor of the communities we were going to visit.  We drove a little bit farther and then turned off on to a ¨road¨.  We didn´t have to go very far on the ¨road¨ but we did have to go through a pretty big river.  During the rains in the tropical storms the the river flooded practically the whole community that is located here along the river.  The houses are at least 10 feet above the level of where the river is right now, and the river came up 15-20 feet during the flooding. 

We parked the truck where the road ended and went to see the first house.  The woman who lived in the house welcomed us in and eagerly showed us how high the water had gotten (about 4-5 feet up the walls of her house), she showed us where the walls had cracked from the force of the water, and she showed us how they had tied the beds to the ceiling so they would be off the floor. 

We went and saw the neighbor´s house which had fared somewhat better.  While Pastor Alejandro went with Julie and I on this little tour, Pastor Ana Rosa had set up a table and chair and a line of people was beginning to form.  The main reason why the pastors had come was to get a list of everyone´s name and their identification number so that the Lutheran Church knows how many people are there and in need of food and assistance.  Pastor Alejandro seemed to think that there wouldn´t be enough aid for all the people, but he promised to do what he could to get them food and medicine.

While Pastor Ana Rosa continued with the paper work, Julie, Pastor Alejandro and I went to see some other houses in the community.  Julie and I had no idea what we consented to when we agreed to go see some more houses.  We went down to the river level and then went back up the bank of the river.  Everything was still very wet and MUDDY.  I´m still not sure what would have been appropriate clothing for this adventure, but a skirt and sandals just wasn´t working out for me.  The mud was the kind of mud that that is squishy and you have to pull up to get your shoes out of it.  Julie and I struggled along.  At first I was trying not to get dirty, but I soon gave up on that and just tried not to fall into the mud or water.  Julie and I were pretty helpless when it came to walking in the mud.  Pastor Alejandro and a woman from the community helped each of us by pulling us along through the mud.  Julie and I laughed at ourselves and Pastor Alejandro and the woman laughed with us.  It´s a good thing we were able to laugh about the mud and our helplessness because there was very little else to laugh about in this community. 

Early on in our adventure I got too close to one of the barbed-wire fences and I scraped my arm and it was bleeding.  The woman who was helping me just wiped off the blood for me and we continued on.  The community has no roads, just paths between the houses.  We went up and down hills, through streams, and even through a field where cows were grazing.  At one point we had to go through one of the fences.

Some houses were damaged so much that the families could no longer live in them so they had to stay with another family.  There was a variety of qualities of houses in this community.  There were a couple of houses that had been built through the Catholic aid organization Caritas.  These houses made of cinder blocks with a cement floor held up well in the flooding, but their belongings that they weren´t able to move got wet.  There were some houses that were made with bricks and mortar and they were still standing but we saw some that had been cracked from the force of the water.  Then there were some places where people lived that you really couldn´t call houses.  Some were just sticks with plastic.    It was unclear to me what made a house uninhabitable- to me they all appeared to be unfit for a family to live in.  I think some people were able to clean out the mud, little stones, and garbage that had come into the house with the flooding water.  Those that weren´t able to live in their houses stayed with others in the community.

7 people lived in this house:

The woman from the community that was with us told us she wanted us to see her mother who was sick.  When we finally made it to her house we went in and we were offered a seat on a bed.  The house was about 10 feet by 20 feet.  There were two beds and three hammocks hanging.  They had some shelves, dishes, things to cooks with, and a few other things.  In one of the hammocks was the woman´s mother. 

 She was probably in her 60s, maybe older.  She had a hernia and was in constant pain from some other ailment.  She had also broken her wrist or arm some time ago and she wasn´t able to go to get it fixed.  It had healed in such a way that it looked like her hand was dislocated from her arm bones and the hand was almost perpendicular to her arm.  They told us for $300 she could have surgery to fix it, but this is far more than they could ever dream of having.  As we were sitting there another woman came in and showed us her hand that had been severely burned quite a while ago.  She had it covered with a towel and I highly doubt that she had received any medical assistance.  As we sat there it the house and witnessed the lack of access to health care, Pastor Alejandro and the woman in the house told us about other ways in which this community suffered.  Pastor Alejandro described how young children cry from hunger: their cries are weak because they do not the energy to cry loudly.  They don´t have clean water to drink.  They have to wash their dishes and clothes in the river and I´m guessing that most of them also bathe in the river.  The river is muddy and Pastor Alejandro said that the river is often contaminated leading to skin rashes.  There are no jobs.  They have no transportation to get anywhere.  These people had next to nothing, they recognized their own poverty and suffering, and they were desperate.  They were desperate for help of the most basic sort- food, medicine, water, and shelter.

The reality of the immense suffering in this place hit me hard while I was sitting in that house.  I cried.  The full reality of the suffering of this community hit hard.  My heart has been broken before, but as I was sitting there my heart was ripped apart, and I´m not sure that it will completely heal.  I guess when you´ve been in El Salvador for a month, your heart gets broken beyond repair (not quite as nice as getting to go to the pool when you´ve been in El Salvador for a week, but I wouldn´t have traded this day for anything).

The people in the community were very eager to show us their houses and what had happened because of the flooding.  Again and again Pastor Alejandro told us to take pictures of the damage and of the people living in the community.  Pastor Alejandro and the members of the community knew the power of Julie and I taking those pictures.  A picture is worth a thousand words and they knew those pictures would convey the words of truth about the damage of the flooding and the immense struggles the people live through even when they aren´t dealing with the damage of flooding.  They told us again and again to take pictures so that people would believe what happened.  I´m not sure if there was some history of people not believing what happened to them, but they were very adamant about us taking pictures and then showing them to whoever could help them.  They told us to show the pictures to our churches, to show the pictures to our pastors, and then they told us to bring our church members and our pastors to this community.  More than anything the people in this community wanted people to know that they are there and they are suffering, and they need help.  They knew that Julie and I and all the people we know back home have the power and the ability to help them.

Julie and I wanted so bad to give them something, to give them everything they needed.  We didn´t have anything with us to give them, but my mind immediately began thinking of ways that I could help this community.  Their needs are so immense, immediate, and numerous.  Julie said that the ideal situation would be to help them start up something that would be self-sustaining and empowering to the people in this community.  However, it seems that they are so far from this.  First they need food, water, medicine, and shelter before they can even think about doing something long term.   

As Pastor Ana Rosa finished up the paperwork, Pastor Alejandro spoke to the members of his congregation who were gathered.  He told them to pray for the things they needed and he told them to remember that God has not nor will God ever forget or abandon them.  It was clear that these people felt completely abandoned and forgotten by the whole world, and I´m sure in their situation it would have been very easy to question again and again where God was in their suffering.  More times than I would like to admit, I have found myself questioning if God was really with me.  I can only imagine how much stronger that questioning must be for the people in this community who have essentially been abandoned by everyone. 

Pastor Alejandor gathered all the kids together and they sang a couple of songs for us.  There were some pretty darn cute kids.

We left this little community and then we drove a little bit to where more of Pastor Alejandor´s congregants were gathered.  We saw some more houses that had been flooded.  They recorded names and identification numbers again.  When we were finished there we tried to go to another little community, but we couldn´t get to it because we couldn´t make it across a river.

Some houses were completely destroyed by the flooding.  Here is all that´s left of one house:

I thought I had seen the worst of poverty at the Hope House and in Pastor Matias´ communities and I had seen poverty.  But I hadn´t seen Poverty.  The people living in this community told us they had nothing and it was true.  They had nothing before the tropical storms, they had less after the flooding, and the will have even less after the next time their community floods.  These people are vulnerable.  The flooding may be a natural disaster in the sense that it was nature that brought the rains, but it is a man-made disaster when we consider the social injustices that will keep the members of the community there to suffer flood after flood.  They have practically no chance of ever being able to break out of the cycle of poverty and suffering that they were born into.  Again and again the community will flood, they will rebuild their houses as best they can, and they will continue to just barely survive.  Children will continue to cry of hunger, people will continue to go without basic health care, they won´t have adequate houses.

The cycle of suffering will continue unless something changes for this community.  The needs of the community are far beyond what they could possibly provide for themselves at this point.  I´m sure there are just as many ways to help as there are problems.  I don´t yet know even where to start, but I´m determined to find out.  As I sat listening to the children sing and as Pastor Alejandro prayed, I knew that God brought me there for a reason.  Looking back now, I can very clearly see how God worked to get me to this community