Lugares de Peregrinación

Lunes 16 de Agosto - 8:30pm
[Doña is sitting next to me on the couch, telling me stories of her many other ´hijos´ or host students. A bit earlier, Don found it howl-aloud hilarious to call my new cellphone from the kitchen. Though full from cena, I couldn´t resist a minute ago when mi hermana (who lives with us during the working week and goes to her husband´s coffee farm on weekends) literally tossed me a sizzling tortilla.]

This past week certainly opened a fire hydrant for learning (my fellow med students know the metaphor all too well). I have class at CIS in the mornings, with every word in Spanish. My placement test predictably started me in "Basic," with one other student (who has been here two months) and our maestro. Everything floods in together--trying to grasp the 8 parts of speech, fairly complex syntactical construction, regular & irregular (and reflexive) verb conjugation in four tenses...and of course a completely new vocabulary. I love it. I much enjoy the challenge of constantly thinking foreign words in foreign ways. It´s so unlike Kreyòl--which I´m trying to keep near, in a distinct brain compartment, though now realizing how limited my vocabularly is in that language. Spanish brings me back to Latin, reminding me how much I used to enjoy translating Aeneid,Ovid,Catullus...like code-breaking. Hearing and speaking the complexity is a new dimension, however, and I usually have to pause before answering Doña´s questions as my mind clicks to the right verb conjugation. Based on her often cocked eyebrows, I still fumble a ton.

Miercoles 18 de Agosto:
Last week also convinced me I want to be here, in El Salvador. I´ve questioned, wondering whether I should have landed in a more popular language school destination like Xela, Guatemala. Yet, CIS (cis-elsalvador.org) uses the Paulo Freire / popular education method, with lessons growing from our conscientization of the Salvadoran reality. In just the first week, we ve discussed some idigenous history as well as the formation of FMLN, and read a tribute to the diaspora by Salvadoran poet & revolutionary, Roque Dalton. I bought one of Roque´s books, along with a compilation of Romero homily passages, at the national University bookstore yesterday. Just this morning--based on my probably over-frequent cross references during class--my teacher brought in an article about Haiti. I am learning to listen, learning to speak. I think El Salvador has a lot to teach.

Someone told me that one should visit places here not just as tourism--though the country is promoting its tourist spots--but as "Lugares de Peregrinación," pilgrimage sites. Last week, I visited the UCA and heard the full story of the 6 Jesuit martyrs, for the first time; I will definitely return there. Also went to the war memorial in Parque Cuscatlán and Romero´s tomb in the Cathedral. I spent the weekend away, on a CIS-led trip to the towns of Cinquera and Suchitoto farther north in the country. They were both major war areas. Cinquera now has a forested national park where 30 years ago there was farmland, abandoned during the fighting. We hiked up the small mountain and swam in a waterfall. In Suchitoto, we spent the night at a wonderful centre run by a sister who has been here since 1987 (http://capsuchitoto.org). Heard live music at a local restaurant, and the next day explored the charming cobblestone streets and Sunday fair. [For latinoamerican-phytes, the place is often described as a smaller Antigua,Guate.] Climbed rocks around another waterfall. Visited two incredible projects: the Concertación de las Mujeres, and the Permaculture Institute [www.permacultura.com.sv is worth checking out, awesome example of supporting people´s natural problem solving skills and ability to "read the land" to counter the very real & worsening effects of climate change. Plus, foreign guests are welcome to learn the methods!]

Concertación is a collaboration among 5 local women´s groups that do...everything in the 45 nearby small communities. Literally everything. Training birth attendants, family planning, PAP smears, co-op style health insurance pool. Support for victims of gender violence--including a campaign in which families stamped a pledge outside their houses "en esta casa queremos un vida libre de violencia hacia las mujeres." Microfinance projects like a successful indigo-dyed clothing store and a creative cow-exchange cycle. Promotion of women in municipal politics. All of it...started and fully sustained by Salvadoreña´s. Local desire and effort far more important than any concrete accomplishment.

My highlight of the weekend, and time here so far, was a conversation in Cinquera with a man called Don Pablo. He started by saying he had to "leave in two hours for a meeting of the Communidad Eclesia de Base..." And then followed a flooring testimony in Spanish of the period leading up to the war, decades of economic and physical abuse which he emphasized as equally as (or more than) the war itself. The propaganda they were fed by the political and church authorities...

..The arrival of a new priest who asked them, "why don´t you have enough to eat?" and when they responded with the "God´s-will" fallacy they´d been taught, he promptly gave a Bible to each formerly illiterate campesino...and taught them to read with it. Then he gave them copies of El Salvador´s Constitution. Don Pablo explained, "Our resistance grew because the people saw connections between the Bible and the Constituion, realizing our oppression was ´pecado social´ and that through solidarity as a group, we could work for justice."

Don Pablo was captured multiple times and tortured; four of his children died in the fighting, and the fifth took his own life the year after it ended. Ending simply, Don Pablo passed around his copies of the Bible, Constitution, and Medillín and said "we´re still applying this to our life." And then he left for his meeting.