Earlier this week we crammed about 14 of my family members into our little living room and I showed all my pictures from my trip. I was pretty proud of my technological skills- I made a DVD with all my pictures and even added music. As my pictures (all 767 of them) were displayed I explained them and told a few stories. It took about 45 minutes to show all my pictures, but I didn't even come close to telling about everything I did on my trip, all the people I spent time with, and all that I learned. It was very nice to have a very good audience who was genuinely interested in learning about my experiences. They made some good observations and asked some good questions. It helped to have some "outside" perspective from people who knew very little about El Salvador and hadn't experienced what I have. They noticed things and made comments on things that I completely overlooked. Hopefully as I keep talking to other people about my trip and I keep telling my stories I will continue to learn from those that I am telling the stories to.
My uncle said something like "Gee, it seems all you did was go to things about death." I didn't realize just how many places and events related to death I had gone to. I visited the University of Central America where the 6 Jesuit priests and the two women were murdered, the chapel where Archbishop Oscar Romero was assassinated, Romero's tomb, I went to the march to remember the one year anniversary of the death of the mining activist, the march against violence in the town where the two Lutheran pastors were killed, we visited Jorge's tomb a few times, we went to El Mozote where about 1,000 people were massacred, we visited another little massacre site, I went to the funeral of the sister of one of the Lutheran pastors, and we visited the memorial for Father Rutilio Grande and the old man and the little boy that were killed with him.
I didn't realize how much of my trip was related to death in part because I hadn't looked at all my pictures all together like that before and in part because I did not feel "weighed down" by all of this death. Looking back now I can see that there was a lot related to death on my trip, but I never felt overwhelmed or depressed for long. Even when I went to these places and learned about the death that occurred, it wasn't very long before I was reassured and comforted by the hope and life of the Salvadorans. Again and again I was amazed by how Salvadorans could go on in spite of (or perhaps because of) all the death and suffering they had experienced. I'm pretty sure if I had gone through even part of what some of my Salvadoran friends have gone through, I would have given up long ago.
I mentioned that one thing that I learned about was having hope and a question that followed this was "Do you really see hope in El Salvador?" For me (and from what I gathered for my family who had just seen all my pictures and heard some stories) it is very difficult to have hope with all the extreme poverty and all the immense injustices in El Salvador. At the beginning of my trip I was very pessimistic that things could ever change or get better. I would think about all the problems and try to think of ways to fix the problem, but fixing one problem would only leave the other thousands of problems to be fixed. However, despite learning about more about all the problems in El Salvador, I left with a genuine sense of hope- I definitely left with more hope. I'm not really sure what it is, but Salvadorans have an incredible ability to have hope and faith that things will eventually get better. Unfortunately they have had to wait a long time (and probably will have to continue to have to wait) for a better life. But they keep hoping and believing. And they don't stop at just hoping and praying, Salvadorans take action. Even the Salvadorans who have next to nothing take whatever small steps they can to try to make their life better.
