Delivery

I had a couple of missions today.  The first and easiest was delivering a Christmas basket to Rosita and her daughters and taking them to El Paraiso, the nearest town, for a little shopping.  Then came the serious mission.  When I was in the Northwest in November I sat down for coffee with Theresa Edwards, daughter of my friends Lisa Dennison and Karl Edwards.  Theresa was with the youth delegation from Seattle's St. Patrick Church that visited Nueva Trinidad in July,   When she returned, full of energy for continuing to study Spanish and planning for her next visits to Central America, she painted a picture of St. Patrick's as a gift for the people she'd met and loved in Nueva Trinidad.  And would I take the picture to them?  Oh yes, I said, nothing to it.

And that was today's second mission.  I headed toward the town of Chalatenango from El Paraiso, thinking that it wouldn't take me long to get to Nueva Trinidad, perhaps 30 kilometers further up the road from Chalatenango.  Sounded simple.  Wasn't.  The map shows the road proceeding smoothly through Chalatenango, but Chalatenango is a frustrating grid of very neatly laid out narrow streets that somehow do not get you where you want to go.  On my first try, I followed a bus that said "Chalatenango - San José" knowing that San José las Flores was on the same road as Nueva Trinidad.  I followed the bus as it twisted and turned through the streets, and I almost followed it into - alas - its parking area.  And then I returned, sheepishly, to the Texaco at the entrance to the town, filled up on gas (this was a brilliant move) and asked them how to get to Nueva Trinidad.  Clearly the guy at the gas pump had never heard of it.  "Arcatao?" I asked, knowing Arcatao is the last town on that very same road.  Oh, he said, you mean Arcatao?  - giving it, I swear, almost the identical pronunciation - yes, yes, Arcatao.  Well, you just go up this street and keep going up.....

I've learned to ask women for directions, and so when I thought I might be headed for the road out of Chalatenango (deeply desired after about 1/2 hour of threading through narrow streets full of trucks unloading and Christmas shoppers) I asked a woman selling fruit.  Ah, she said, you're on the right road, but just give a ride to this woman, she wants to go to las Flores (it's the first of the three towns), and she'll show you the way.  Great idea!  So I invited Roxana into my car and she asked if she could take a few minutes to get some lunch.  A few minutes later she came back with lunch and three other women who needed rides to San José las Flores, and we were off.

Shortly after we left Chalatenango the road got pretty bad - big potholes and crumbled pavement.  I remarked on how "feo" - ugly - the road was.  Wish I'd listened more carefully, because I'm sure I could have learned the Salvadoran version of "You ain't seen nothing yet."  Soon I was shifting into 4-wheel drive and negotiating a road in the process of being built.  I'd heard about the new highway that was being constructed in Chalatenango, but it hadn't occurred to me that it went through Arcatao, Nueva Trinidad and San José las Flores and that it was being constructed under us.  We bumped through gravel, dirt, dirt interspersed with big rocks, work sites with flagwomen directing traffic, patches of pavement, patches of wandering trail, surrounded on all sides by steep hills and steep slopes.  It seemed to take forever, but we did arrive at San José las Flores, where I left my helpful guides (who told me to take the left at the first Y and the right at the second, or was it the other way around?).  The next stretch of road was finished highway, smooth and new and beautiful, but still a mountain road with impressive curves.  And then, abruptly, I was on dirt again, and then on a semi-paved road, and then - milagro - at Nueva Trinidad. 

Theresa told me to ask for Julio Rivera, so I stopped at the Alcaldia and asked a young woman where I could find him.  Oh yes, she said, he's over there at the biblioteca (library), and there he was, blessedly, delighted to receive Theresa's painting, which he said will be placed in just the right spot.  Meanwhile the young woman, Karina, and her cousin Kenia (or that might be spelled Carina and Quenia) asked if they could have a ride back to Chalatenango with me, and I said of course.  We had a grand conversation going back  - I learned how much they appreciated the help that St. Pat's has sent over the years - and they saved me from a couple of wrong turns. 

When I finally got back on the familiar road to the Troncal, the northern trunk road, I felt as if I'd been gone for a couple of weeks, but the journey only took about 3 hours, and it was great fun. And now Nueva Trinidad has a picture of St. Pat's and I have a picture of the path to Nueva Trinidad.

Celebrations

My days in the north are drawing to a close with memorable celebrations and life-giving conversations. After several trips when my timing was just wrong, I was able to join the monthly lunch with other women from Queen Anne High School's class of 1959, and, bless their hearts, they brought me lots of vitamins which we'll be giving out to people in San José Villanueva in February. Here's a photo of Marlene and Sue, looking good, looking lively, as aren't we all, even though the class of 1959 is busily turning 70...

Then yesterday, 11/11/11, we celebrated five birthdays with brunch at Prospect House on Capitol Hill in Seattle, where I used to live and am still part of a group that meets for dinner on Wednesday evenings (on those rare Wednesday evenings when I'm in the Seattle area). Eight women celebrating five birthdays meant lots of presents and lots of laughter and an elegant fritatta and three of us taking photos at the same time, which meant that I have lots of photos of folk taking photos (see the bottom photo).

Along the way, I've had time for some wonderful, long, heart-to-heart talks with old and new friends (you know who you are) that replenish me and fill me with joy. I have friends I cherish in El Salvador, but my Spanish, while workable, doesn't have the subtlety and flexibility and shared reference points you need for a great heart-to-heart talk.

Finally, last night was the best celebration of all, as Susan Francois made her final vows as a Sister of St. Joseph of Peace. What a joy to celebrate this friend and sister who has been walking with us for seven years now! It was a beautiful eucharistic celebration - Father Terry Moran, CSSR and CSJP Associate, was our presider; Margaret Byrne, our Congregation Leader, received Susan's vows; and I was very honored by being asked to give a reflection on the readings. Our chapel at St. Mary on the Lake was filled with Susan's family and many friends, and the celebration continued into the evening with cookies, wine and dancing. Check out our CSJP website for photos and story to come.

So tomorrow I head back to El Salvador, with the memory of all those feasts and conversations going with me, very concerned to learn how my Salvadoran friends have come through the floods.

Occupy Seattle

I've been back in the northwest U.S. for a busy week, mostly spent in Eugene, OR selling Salvadoran crafts in the PeaceHealth hospitals and talking to former and potential members of our mission teams. This weekend I'm back in the Seattle area, just in time to join CSJP Sisters and Associates at Occupy Seattle in the Westlake Park. I've read so much about Occupy Wall Street and the companion Occupy movements that it felt very good to be able to be part of one, though briefly.

We found a lively and cheerful group - people of all ages and several races - occupying Westlake Park. No tents in evidence - I think these may have moved to City Hall Park. A group of drummers made the time vibrant and some wildly assorted dancers kept the beat. We were enough of a distinctive group, with our Community Seeking Justice and Peace placards, to get noticed and photographed a fair bit - one man was quite surprised to hear that nuns still existed. And we do: seeking justice and peace.

Sitting in Starbucks and remembering Steve Jobs

I'm sitting in Starbucks in Santa Elena, and I've got mixed feelings about this. Starbucks is such a familiar sight for a Seattleite, and everything here looks just right, the cups, the Starbucks mermaid, the comfy couches, the internet access and (sigh) the prices. So I'm pleased to find this comforting combination. (Here's a photo of Kathy Garcia in front of the Starbucks in the Galeria - another northwestern tickled to find this familiar place.) But - on the other hand - I do wonder if Starbucks is chasing out some of the local coffee places - Viva Espresso, the Coffee Cup, Ben's - where you can get great espresso and buy a variety of Salvadoran coffees, among the best in the world.

I remember what a great hangout Starbucks was for the women who lived in Rose of Lima House, transitional living in Seattle, when I worked there. They'd go around the block to 1st, buy a cup of the coffee of the day, and sit and talk for two hours. It was the closest thing they could afford to being in a nice restaurant, and I always loved Starbucks for being a place where you could just be, even if you were homeless. It doesn't feel at all like that here, of course - clearly the folk who go to any coffee house in El Salvador are doing pretty well. They tend to be the folk who dress up in suits, if just so everyone will know that they work in air-conditioned splendor.

So my feelings on Starbucks here are mixed. But it's a good place to remember and give thanks for Steve Jobs, who's put such liveliness and fun into people's hands. I bought the first Macintosh in the spring after it was introduced; it cost an outrageous amount, you had to swap disks to go from the operating system to the writing and drawing programs, and I loved it. I remember those great fonts - imagine, being able to have fonts on a computer - New York, Chicago and quirky San Francisco - it was such fun for someone who'd been using a very dull word processor. And that, of course, was only the begionning, and now I sit here typing on my iPad on a the wireless keyboard, still having lots and lots of fun (and getting a bit of work done too) thanks to Steve's singular genius and vision. Gracias.

July in the woods

Next Monday I return, joyfully, to El Salvador. But these two months at home have been wonderful, both in recovered health and also in a chance to spend time with friends and family and in the beauty of western Washington in July. I've been celebrating my improved breathing with long walks - these photos are from a walk with Patti Moore on a river trail near Orting. We'd thought of going to Mt. Rainier, but even though it's July, the snow is reported to be still high there (the northwest has had an extra cool spring and early summer). So we walked the river instead, ate salmon berries, watched a crow kill a garter snake, rejoiced in foxgloves in full bloom, and listened to the river, white with glacier runoff, sing its song. One of many lovely days in this beautiful country before I return to that other beautiful country, so different in every way.

Winter

Winter is officially here. We had a gully-washer of a thunderstorm a few days back, and since then nightly rains. The rains are late this year, and the heat had become almost unbearable, but the regular rainfalls help keep temperatures reasonable.

It's hard for someone from the Pacific Northwest (where it is still 50 degrees and raining on June 1st) to think of El Salvador's rainy season as winter - but this is the season when travel gets difficult because of mud and floods, when you have to look at the sky before leaving the house, when the mosquitoes and flies and toads come out to play, when - a little further on - absolutely everything gets damp, mildewy, soggy. So it's reasonable enough to call it winter, the more challenging of the two seasons.

Meanwhile, we are in the transition period, which is the classic time for catching a cold in El Salvador...plenty of sniffles all around. Farmers have started their corn crop, and have been waiting anxiously for the rains to catch up with them. Now they have: primero Dios, this year's crop of corn and beans will be big and healthy, unlike those of the last two years when dry weather came at the wrong time.

April is the hottest month

No, that's not quite as T.S. Eliot had it ("April is the cruelest month..."), but it is certainly true for El Salvador. On Sunday night I left cold, rainy Seattle-in-April and on Monday morning got off the plane in hotter-than-hot Suchitoto-in-April: a shock to the system, that. Roberto Hernandez picked me up at the airport, and by the time we got back to Suchi my ankles had disappeared into puffs of swollen flesh. They're looking a bit more like familiar body parts now, and the rest of me is remembering how to sweat the way through the afternoons. We will all be glad when the rains come and bring some coolness into the afternoons and evenings. Meanwhile, we swelter.

Coming from the Seattle area where the nights are now longer with daylight saving and twilight is a long, slow dance, I was startled to remember how quickly and fully the dark comes here. At 6 pm the sun goes down, and then it is dark. Suchitoto, with its well-lighted streets, is a safe town to walk around in the dark, and the regularity of sunrise and sunset is comforting. But no long summer nights here - and no short winter days - just 12 hours of blazing sun (in April) and 12 hours of warm darkness. It's good to be back!

Four generations

Last November my great-niece Amy gave birth to Addyson Kayanne Skalisky, the first of her generation in my family, and on Saturday we had a family gathering to meet this 4-month-old charmer and take a photo of four generations: in the group photo, Grandma Joanne, Great-great-aunt Kathy (my sister), Amy, Addy, and Great-great-aunt Susan. Shocking though it is to become a great-great-aunt, it sure was fun to meet the newest and to think about all that lies ahead in her life! May she have many joys and many adventures.

We also got to visit with Addy's Aunt Cara (above with Addy) and Uncle Jacob, with Great-Aunt Sally and Great-Uncle Gary and first cousins once removed Corina and Katie... And we had the fun of revisiting family baby songs and games, of catching up with each others' doings, of applauding Corina in her gorgeous prom dress and seeing Katie's drawings, of being family. I'm grateful, always, to belong to a family that loves and enjoys each other. What a blessing, and what a blessing for Miss Addyson.

Excess

The first day after coming home to Bellevue, I needed to make a trip to Bellevue Square, our local mall, to get a new battery compartment for my Macbook laptop. Now Bell Square is not just any mall - it's full of high-end luxury stores, and I've heard that it makes more money per square foot than any other mall in America. So you can imagine.

The first thing I saw as I walked in was a store called "Free People." "Free People" - I'm not even going to look up the URL - features fluffy dresses for teenage girls. The next thing I saw was a giant poster at a store called Oakley: "Join the Rebellion!" said the poster. "Join the Rebellion" was surrounded by photos of a guy in swim trunks and sunglasses (sunglasses being what they sell: Join the Rebellion, wear expensive sunglasses).

What would Libyans and Tunisians and Egyptians think of those notions of freedom and rebellion?

After I got my new battery, I walked over to the nearby QFC supermarket and marvelled at the sheer excess of offerings in any category. In El Salvador, I can find three kinds of flour in the supermarkets: white wheat flour, corn flour, rice flour. Period. In QFC, there must be 65 different kinds of flour - rye, barley, amaranth, quinoa, teff, red winter wheat, and so on and on. There was a display case with 23 different varieties of gourmet chocolate bars. Mind you, it's grand fun to shop there: you can find anything and everything. But for someone who's been living in Central America, it's beyond excessive.

I know I could find grocery stores in the Seattle area that would look a lot more like my Salvadoran supermarkets, and I'd feel more at home there. The flashy wealthiness of Bellevue, apparently untouched by three years of economic collapse, imagines a world full of people who think they should have anything they could possibly want. I hope and believe that is not the truth of my Bellevue neighbors - but it is the truth of the merchandizing that surrounds us.

It's raining vitamins

On a wonderfully typical rainy spring day in Bellevue I joined the monthly lunch of women from my Queen Anne High School (Seattle) class of '59 and got showered with vitamins they had collected for our medical mission. What a bounty! I figure that on our San Juan Opico mission we gave out over 50,000 vitamins, so our demand is always huge. We'll use these during our follow-up eye clinic in Opico this November. Thanks, dear friends! The photo above is with Kari Black and Jo Wiltse, two of the 16 or so sharing lunch and news.

Springtime

Springtime in Seattle is glorious, a four-month-long extravaganza in which each week has its specialty and each bush and tree and flower finds its moment to unfold in splendor. A pleasure to be back for three weeks of this long season: we're in daffodil and forsythia and cherry blossom season, shortly to be followed by the tulips, magnolias, rhodedendrons. Lenten festivities of the warming earth.

Springtime and fall aren't part of the seasons of El Salvador. We go from the rainy season, winter (May through October) to the dry season, summer (November through April). I haven't figured out the rhythms of the plants yet, when different plants lose their leaves or put on new growth. The nance tree in our patio seems to lose leaves all the time, and puts out flowers and new leaves while it's losing the old ones.

Here, I understand the rhythms, and I can name the trees and I know which flowers to look for next. What a gift at this time in my life to be learning a new rhythm and order of this planet. And what a gift to come home to the familiar beauty of the cherry trees.

Strange company

Sorting through a lifetime of papers, I came across a yellowed copy of the Seattle P.I. from February 4th, 1959, something I'd kept because I was featured - on page 3 at that - as one of the winners of an English Achievement Award . Never noticed before today, but the column next to the one that features the seven of us, high school kids looking unimaginably young, is headlined "3 Rock 'N' Roll Stars Die in Plane Crash." And, of course, it reports the deaths of Ritchie Valens, Buddy Holly and J. P. Richardson, aka The Big Bopper. Those deaths, of three young and rising rock stars, have become the stuff of film and legend. Strange company, those singers early dead and we hopeful writers setting out into the world.

One of the other winners featured in that 1959 photo is my lifelong friend, the Hawaiian artist Roger Whitlock, who painted this watercolor of a building in Honolulu's Chinatown. Roger taught creative writing at the University of Hawaii for many years before discovering his great talent as a watercolorist, and I taught English for a few years at the University of New Mexico before setting out on the long and winding path that led me to the Sisters of St. Joseph of Peace. Good thing for us both that - unlike those lost stars - we've had plenty of lifetime to unfold our callings!

24 days to El Salvador!