Mess

We've reached that awful state in the packing process when the cupboards and drawers and closets are empty, many boxes are packed, but there is a lot of stuff just standing around on every available table, ledge and counter. I keep telling myself that this is the FINAL stage in packing (I should know), but that doesn't mean I like it much.

Still, we've taken some good time to see friends, see sights, and have fun. The Memorial to Justice and Truth in Parque Cuscatlan was unveiled after Grace returned to the United States, so I took her to that moving memorial, where the names of some 30,000 (of the estimated 70,000) Salvadorans killed or disappeared during the Civil War are listed. In this memorial the names of the famous dead - Archbishop Romero, the murdered Jesuits, the North American Churchwomen - are simply listed in their year and their alphabetical order with everyone else. I believe this monument lists only non-combatants, the many, many who were killed by death squads or in massacres or who were disappeared.

And yesterday we went to Ataco, the last town in the Ruta de los Flores, a string of lovely mountain towns in the west, to buy locally woven cloth to make room dividers in the new house. It was lovely to get away from the boxes and the mess for a day, and to see such colorful places as the Pupuseria de las Gemelas (the twins' pupuseria). The cloth, by the way, is fuschia with stripes of green and blue and white woven in....definitely colorful!