Pictures!

Here are some pictures for your viewing pleasure: 

Here is part of the ¨road¨ going up to Loma de Ramos.  The picture really doesn´t do it justice though.

Here is the church that is being built in Buena Vista.  The first picture is from last week, and the second picture is from this week.  They made some good progress in a week!

Since I arrived in El Salvador, everybody has very warmly welcomed me...except for one person: Emmanuel (Martina´s 1.5 year old grandson).

Sure he´s cute, but for the first couple of days he refused to even look at me!  I was so looking forward to being able to play with him, but he didn´t want anything to do with me for almost a week.  He wouldn´t let me hold him or play with him and would run to him mom or dad whenever I was around.  We think that he just isn´t used to white people.  Finally after more than a week he is letting me play with him, but he is still a little uncertain about me.  He is fine when his mom or dad or grandma or grandpa are around, but if it is just me he´s still a little afraid.  He is such a troublemaker!  He is constantly getting into something or touching something he isn´t supposed to (e.g. the fans, the TV, the stove, the remote control).  He is so entertaining though!

Especially the past few days I have been appreciating just how beautiful El Salvador is.  The past two evenings we were driving home as the sun was setting and it was just gorgous.  As we drive up and down the roads and the ¨roads¨ there are some incredible views of the mountians, volcanos, and the valleys.

When you´ve been in El Salvador for a week, you get to go to the pool!

So, it has been over a week now that I´ve been in El Salvador.  It partly feels like I just got here and it partly feels like I´ve been here for a long time.

I have now been to all of the communities where Pastors Martina and Matias work.  They are all unique and beautiful in their own way.  I´m looking forward to returning to some of them a second time in the next few days. 

Thursday is the day that Pastors Martina and Matias have off.  Martina says that Matias has a difficult time taking a day off because he is so dedicated, but after living with them for a week, I can tell that they really do need that day off.  So, on their day off we got to go the pool!  Matias, Martina, Martina´s daughter, Martina´s daughter in law, Martina´s two youngest grandkids, and the wonderful lady who helps Matias and Martina with all their work all came with to the pool.  The pool was about 30 minutes away from their house.  The pool was beautiful!!!  There were three big slides, a bunch of different pools of different sizes and depths, an area for little kids to play, waterfalls, picnic tables, hammocks, and lots of tall palm trees.  It was SO wonderful to just be in the nice cool water!  We stayed most of the day, just chilling in the pool.  It was fun to watch the little kids play in the water.

When Jorge (Martina´s son) got home from work on Thursday, he was pretty jealous of all the fun we had at the pool.  Then he told me (as if it was a fact) that when you are in El Salvador for a week, you get to go to the pool.  So, I asked him what I get to do when I am here for two weeks.  He didn´t have an answer for that, but that´s ok, I´m sure week two will bring just as many adventures as week one.

Last night, Martina started talking about her experiences during the war.  She doesn´t really like to talk about those experiences because it brings back so many emotions and the fear and pain that she felt when she first experienced it.  However, she recognizes that as a person who survived the was, she has an obligation to tell her story because there are many others (about 75,000) who did not survive to tell their stories.  She also feels that to some extent talking helps release built up emotions and pain.  I felt privileged to hear her talk, but at the same time it was very difficult for me to hear her talk about these experiences that were obviously horrific.

Martina was a teenager when the war first started to affect her and her family.  Her family´s house and all their belongings and their fields were burned to the ground by military soldiers.  After that they simply had to travel from place to place trying to escape the military.  They would travel at night and then hide during the day in caves, in holes in the ground, in the trees or brush, or where ever they could.

Martina lost many family members during the war- her mom, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins, and others. 

Martina recounted one instance when she had her three little kids and was trying to escape from gun fire that was coming from a helicopter above her.  She laid on top of her three kids to protect them and prayed.  She prayed that they would all survive.  She didn´t want to die and leave her kids without a mother and she couldn´t imagine losing one of them.  The bullets (big ones that were about 4 inches long) fell all around them, but none hit them.

I just cannot imagine.

She attributes her survival to God´s protection.  She reasons that this is the ONLY way that they could have survived such an attack.  God permitted them to survive because he had a plan for each one of them.  And it is sure amazing to see how that plan has worked out.

¨Roads¨

I have very quickly realized that there is no way that I will be able to relate everything that I am doing.  I don´t really want to just list the things I have done because that is boring and doesn´t really tell you much.  So, I think I will just write about the most significant or exciting things that are happening. 

Today Pastors Matias, Martina, and I went to the church community of Lomo de Ramos.  This morning when we were eating breakfast and getting ready to leave for the day, Matias twice told me that we were going to go up a mountain almost to the sky and he asked me if I was ok with this.  I said ¨of course!¨ (having very little idea of what I was consenting to).  I was a little confused about why he would ask me if I was ok with this, but as I have done a lot throughout the past days, I just go with the flow and do as my wonderful Salvadoran hosts do.  We left in the pickup truck and traveled on the highway for a while and then turned off on a ¨road¨ to go to the community.  I have put road in quotes, because this was a road only in the loosest sense of the word.  It was passable in the truck, but only barely.  We did exactly what Pastor Matias said we were going to do: go up the mountain almost to the sky.  The ¨road¨ went steadily up and in some places it went up very steeply.  There were sharp turns, big rocks, huge holes, water going across the road, and my favorite (cows in the road).  A couple of times Martina got out of the truck to make sure the tires were still ok.  We climbed up the mountain on this ¨road¨ for what seemed like 45 minutes.  A few times we had to back up a little to get a running start to make it up some of the steeper sections.

For 8 years before Pastor Matias bought his truck he had to walk up to the community once a week.  Pastor Matias only has one lung due to an injury he suffered during the civil war, so climbing up the mountain was very difficult for him, but he still did it.  Every week.  I heard that it takes about 1.5 hours to walk up there.  I don´t think I want to try.  For $3 each way you can pay for a ride in a 3 wheeled taxi vehicle, but there aren´t many people who can afford this.  So, most people walk.

Thanks to God we made it up that mountain!  There are only about ten families that live up there in this community (I can guess why!).  Even though it is a small community, the presence of the Lutheran Church there is very strong.  They have a huge, beautiful school built through donations of time, labor, and money from churches in the U.S., and they have a nice little church.  I got to meet the students at the school and then we headed to the church which was next to the school. 

After the church service, we headed back down the mountain.  On the way down we made quite a few stops.  We stopped at a few church members houses to drop things off or to pick things up.  As we passed people walking down the road, we picked them up and they rode in the back of the truck.  We also made a detour to the community where the Brisas del Valle church is.  I only got to see the church from the road, but it looks beautiful!  I can´t wait to go back and see it, hopefully on Friday.  We had to go to the school there so that Matias and Martina could talk with the director of the school.  And then headed back toward the highway and to home.  I was SO glad be back home, but I am also very glad that I got to go to see this community.  The school kids were pretty darn cute and the all church members were very friendly and welcoming!

So, it turns out that when I wrote the last post about the road to Buena Vista, I had no idea what a bad road looked like.  I guess it´s all relative.

Yesterday it RAINED.  Starting at about 4:00 in the afternoon it POURED on and off until about 3:00 in the morning.  The good news about the rain is that it really cooled things off and I didn´t have to go out in it.  For about an hour at a time it would pour and then let up and then stop and this repeated quite a few times.  In my bedroom I have a nice metal roof.  I very glad to have this nice roof because it doesn´t leak a drop, but it was VERY loud when the rain poured down.  But that´s ok, because I was dry and cool.

Dusty, Muddy, Buggy, and HOT

I should have mentioned in my first post how HOT it is, I´m not sure how I forgot to mention it.  Today is even hotter than the past few days.  I´m pretty sure that it´s over 100 degrees.  We don´t have air conditioning, but there are fans which helps some.  At night it has been cooling off nicely (i.e. it goes below 80), so I have been able to sleep well.  The heat just wears me out though.  I am continually sweaty and I smelly.  I very much look forward to my cold shower at night (it´s cold because I have no other option!)

So here´s what I´ve been up to despite the heat...

Matias and Martina are pastors in five communities in the area surrounding the town where they live.  Each week they visit each community at least once.  On Friday, Martina, Matias, and I were supposed to go to one of the communities they serve, Brisas del Valle, but we got word that it was raining really hard there so people wouldn´t be able to get to the church because the rain would make it too difficult to travel on the road.  And so we didn´t go. 

Yesterday, Saturday, we went to the communities of Buena Vista and Colón.  We (me, Matias, Martina, Martina´s son(Jorge), his wife (Erica) and their 1.5 year old son (Emanuel))  left the house around 10 and we traveled about 45 minutes to get to Buena Vista.  The first part of the trip was on the ¨highway¨ and then we got to the road leading up to Buena Vista.  One wouldn´t usually think that a 4 wheel drive pickup truck is required to be a pastor, but for Pastors Matias and Martina there is no way they could get to the communities they serve without their truck.  The road to Buena Vista was unpaved and went up and down, there were large rocks and large holes in the road.  There was water running across the road in some places.  At one point we had to wait for about 6 cows to get out of the road before we could continue on.  We went bumping down the road at about 5 miles per hour for about 15 minutes, and then we finally arrived in Buena Vista.

They are in the process of building a church in Buena Vista.  Pastor Matias gave me a muddy tour of the construction.  There will be a sanctuary, a sacristy, and a multi purpose room.  The walls are pretty high, so I´m thinking they should be done with the walls soon.  Then they need to level out the floor in places and then put on the roof.  The church service was held in the shade of a tree in front of where the church is being built.  We carried plastic lawn chairs from a church member´s house and the altar was also carried into the shade of the tree.  The men who were working on the church continued to build while we worshiped.  It was very cool to think that very soon this congregation will have a building where they can meet.  Then it was back down the bumpy road and on to the next community, Colón.

We stopped for lunch at a little restaurant on the way to the community of Colón.  It took about 30 minutes to get from Buena Vista to Colón.  There is a much nicer road going to Colón, but Colón doesn´t yet have a church.  The congregation meets in the yard of a church member.  They are lucky to have a metal roof over most of the yard that protects them from the sun and the rain.  Once we got there people started to come and set up chairs and the altar just like in Buena Vista.  I´m not really sure if there is a set time that they are supposed to start church services.  To me it seems that the pastors show up and then church members start to trickle in and then when it seems like no one else is coming they start.  Time is very flexible, and doesn´t really matter much.  Stuff happens when it happens, and no one really worries about being late or if something takes too long.

I have to admit that I tried so hard to pay attention during Pastor Matias´ sermon at Colón, but there were SO many distractions.  There were the little boys playing with stones and pieces of bricks left over from some construction project.  There were the dogs walking around looking for food.  Pickup trucks, people walking, and bikes passed on the road.  There were the flies and other bugs.  There were chickens walking around looking for food, and I´m pretty sure that the chicken in one of the corners was dying.  Kids came and went to get water.  A couple of times during the sermon, fruits fell from the trees above, loudly hit the metal roof, rolled off, and luckily missed the people that were sitting near where the fruits fell to the ground.  I was also distracted by my dirty muddy shoes, the dirt on my feet and lower legs, and my sweatyness. 

As I tried again and again to pay attention to the sermon, I started to rationalize my not paying attention by thinking that perhaps the things I was paying attention to was a different sort of sermon.  It was very obvious to me that God was present in this place and in these people.  God was there in the bugs, the dirt, the mud, the dogs, the dying chicken, the boys getting dirty playing with the stones and bricks, the kids coming to get water, and the lovely elderly woman who almost got hit by the fruit falling off the roof.  I´m very used to worshiping in my nice clean air conditioned church, but God doesn´t need a nice building to be present.  God was there in the distractions just as he is everywhere.  The dirt, mud, bugs, chickens, dogs, etc. are the reality for Salvadorans.  While I may never be able to feel completely comfortable worshiping with the ¨distractions and inconviences¨ hopefully I will be able to learn from the Salvadorans to accept these distractions as part of life and part of God´s beautiful creation (even though the dirt, sweat, and bugs don´t seem so beautiful).  

Today, Martina and I went to the community of Guycume, while Matias went to Brisa del Valle.  Then we came home and had lunch.  Martina´s daughter and granddaughter have been here most of the day and we are all just trying to stay cool, watching TV, and watching the kids play. 

I made it!

I´m in El Salvador! 

I made it here safe and sound.  My flight from Houston to San Salvador had to be rerouted a little because of bad storms over Guatemala so we were a little late.  I went through customs without a problem and Pastors Matias and Martina and their granddaughter were outside waiting for me.  We drove back to Apopa (the town where they live) which took about an hour.  I was somewhat pleastantly reminded of the crazy roads and the crazy way Salvadorans drive.  The traffic signs and stoplights mean very little which means it´s always an adventure!

I spent most of the afternoon relaxing, reading, and rearranging my stuff in my suitcases.   I was very tired after my journey and from leaving my house at quarter to 4 this morning.

For dinner Martina and I walked down the street a little ways and bought some pupusas from a very friendly lady.  They were just a delicious as I remmber them!!  Pupusas are thick corn tortillas stuffed with some combination of beans, cheese, and meat.  I had ones with beans and cheese.  You dip them in a tomato sauce and it is so delicious and filling.

I don´t really have much else to write at this point, but I just wanted to let you all know that I made it here fine and it´s good to be here!

I'm leaving on a jet plane...

I'm leaving tomorrow, so here are a few final comments before I get on the plane which leaves at 5:35 am (!):

My goal is to post something here at least twice a week.  Depending on activities and how much time I have it may be more often, but I'm going to try as hard as I can to write at least twice a week so that you all don't worry too much (yes, I'm talking especially to you Mom and Grandma).

I know you are out there reading my blog, so PLEASE let me here from you!  It makes it easier for me to write if I know who is reading and what you think of what you are reading.  I especially appreciate the positive feedback I've gotten so far!  I would also like to hear what's going on at home so I don't feel so far away.  So leave me some comments on the blog or send me an email or Facebook me.

You may have also noted that I have created a page with prayer requests.  The link to it is on the upper right side of my blog.  I'll be updating it as necessary during my trip.  I would VERY much appreciate your prayers!

I'm pretty much all packed- it sure has been a long process trying to get everything together.  Hopefully I'm not forgetting anything.  I have half a pharmacy in my suitcase and I have all the essentials- passport, money, anti-malaria medicine, my bible, duct tape, and peanut butter.  So, I think I should be good.

I'm feeling much more calm and collected than I have in this past week and I think I'm ready for the adventures to come.  It is with great excitement that I can say: the next post will be from El Salvador!!!!!!!

Faith and Theology

My Christian faith is perhaps my primary motivation to go to El Salvador and my faith will strongly influence the way I see and understand my experiences on this trip.  So, I think it is important for me to let you know a little bit about my faith journey and how that affects the way I think about El Salvador.

In my Pastor's wonderful sermon yesterday, he talked about the spiritual continuum and I find this extremely helpful in looking back on my faith journey.  It is useful to be able to give names to the various phases of my faith journey, and I hope these phases will help me describe my faith journey to you.  The four phases are: exploring Christ, growing in Christ, being close to Christ, and being Christ-centered.

Exploring Christ: I grew up going to Sunday School and church.  I was very fortunate to always have two great examples of Christian women in my life- my mom and grandma- and there have been many others along the way who helped me first explore Christ and have helped guide me to where I am today in my faith journey.  However, up until about halfway through middle school, God was very low on my list of priorities.  Then as I went through Confirmation classes and I learned more, my faith began to take on a more important role in my life.  As much as my little teenager mind thought I could do everything by myself, I realized that life was far too difficult, painful, and complex to deal with on my own without God.

Growing in Christ: In high school, I really started in earnest to seek to understand what it means to be a Christian.  I fully accepted that Jesus was the path to salvation.  When I went away to college, I had so many wonderful opportunities that really allowed my faith to flourish such as Bible studies, retreats, classes, and lots of great friends who challenged me to strengthen my faith.  My faith grew.  Prayer, reading scripture, and worship became integral parts of my life.

Being close to Christ: Then I began asking "so what?".  I found that my faith was "empty" and without much purpose.  Sure, it was wonderful to fully believe that God sent Jesus to die on the cross and then rise again for my eternal salvation, but I can remember thinking that there had to be more to Christianity than my personal salvation (by no means am I dismissing how amazing that is!).  And there is indeed more to Christianity.  It was about this time that I began learning about liberation theology and it changed my life.  Liberation theology is a way of thinking about God that began in Latin America in the late 1950s as a response to the extreme poverty and suffering there.  Liberation theology teaches us that Jesus is a liberator- he frees us from sin, suffering, injustice, poverty, and anything else that oppresses us and prevents us from being the human persons God intended us to be.  In liberation theology, praxis (action and reflection on the connection between that action and scripture) is emphasized over doctrine.  So not only does liberation theology assert that the injustices of the world are against God's will and we do not have to accept these injustices, but more importantly liberation theology declares that everyone must take action to address the injustices.  While I recognize that liberation theology has its shortcomings (as does any theology), it has offered me a radically different way to think about God, Jesus, my faith, and my role as a Christian.

Especially after learning more and more about liberation theology, I have come to believe that as a Christian, it is my obligation to respond to the love that Jesus showed through his sacrifice on the the cross.  Every Christian's response will be different depending on his or her God-given gifts and passions.  Being a Christian is much more than just believing- it is acting in ways that Jesus would act.  So, I have focused more and more on finding ways to put my faith into action and serving Jesus through serving those in need (see Matthew 25:35-46).  I think I will forever be trying to determine exactly how it is that God wants me to serve in the world, but I have no doubt that I am indeed called to be Jesus' hands and feet in this world.

Being Christ-Centered: I feel that perhaps I'm getting closer to being Christ-centered, but I recognize I'm still far from it. I very much would like my relationship with Jesus to be the most important thing in my life, but there are just so many reasons and excuses why I'm not yet able to risk everything and fully surrender my life to God.  However, more and more my identity, beliefs, and actions are based exclusively on my relationship with Jesus.  My relationship with Jesus has certainly guided me to go on this trip. By no means is going on this trip risking everything, but over the past few days especially I have thought about and felt just how much I am risking and giving up.  I'm giving up time, money, all the comforts of home and the comforts of living in the U.S. and I'm risking my safety. I am making sacrifices and stepping out of my comfort zone. I write this not so that you'll think I'm a selfless saint but rather to expose the apprehension and anxiety I'm feeling.

I have felt God tugging on my heart for what feels like forever now to go back to El Salvador- to be with God's people there, to walk with the Salvadorans on their journeys of life and faith, to help where I can, to listen to their stories, and to then bring their stories home and work to address the injustices their stories illustrate.  To be perfectly honest, as I'm about to leave on this trip I'm feeling just how hard it is to live a life that is Christ-centered.  I'm also sure that during the course of the next 6 weeks my spiritual journey will be challenged even more.  The good news is that it's a journey and with God's help I'll keep moving in the right direction which is all that matters.