Processing with palms and donkey

I have finally, by accident, figured out how to do Palm Sunday right here in Suchitoto.  In previous years, I've skipped the procession of palms in favor of getting an actual seat in the church, which you can only do if you're there before the palm-bearers arrive. 

This year I went to Mass Saturday night, not realizing that it would be the Sunday readings - but it was, a Palm Sunday Mass minus the palms - and plus songs and ¡Que Viva! for Monseñor Romero.  That left me free to walk down the street this morning to the Capilla la Cruz where we all gathered on the cancha (basketball court) and where I bought a puny bunch of palm leaves for a quarter.

Most everyone there had glorious palms, interwoven with flowers and a seedhead that looks like baby corn.  My puny bunch would have looked impressive in Seattle, but here ... not so great.  It felt as if everyone in Suchitoto was there, whole families and children, like this charmer:

You might notice that she has woven and beaded bracelets on both wrists.  These must stretch back to the days of the Lenca and the Pipiles: each red bracelet is threaded through a small, smooth stone, and their purpose is to keep the baby safe and whole. 

After a few songs, the padres came down through the crowd and sprinkled us and the palms and anything else sprinklable with gallons of holy water.  No tame drops here.  The acolyte holds a huge tub of water, the padres have thickly-leaved branches, and they scoop the water up and fling it out into the crowd with a will:

In truth, in the hot sun of March, it's a joy to be drenched with holy water!  My camera was also blessed, and survived the blessing.

We were all ready to go after that, and Padre Jesus had to remind us that we were supposed to hear the Gospel for the procession first.  And then we formed into lines - as always here, and it makes my gringa heart a little crazy, the men marched in the middle after the donkey carrying the statue of Jesus, and the women marched in two lines on either side.  I'd just once like to see the lines reversed, women in the center, men on the outside.   But perhaps that's not yet an image our church can stretch to, at least not in Latino America. 

Una Vida Libre de Violencia

There's a motto that you see all over Suchitoto - it's stenciled on many, many houses, the outline of the national bird, the torogoz, sitting on a flower (Suchitoto means bird-flower in Nahuat) and underneath these words: En esta casa queremos una vida libre de violencia hacia las mujeres.  In this house, we want a life free of violence against women.  (It's not on my house, alas, but only because the outside got repainted in December and I haven't been able to find anyone who could stencil it again for me).

This motto - it also appears on a big billboard at the entrance to the town - is up on our walls for the sad and necessary reason that there's far too much violence against women in El Salvador, and in our beautiful, apparently tranquil town of Suchitoto. For the wider perspective, there's an excellent recent article on Femicide in Tim's El Salvador Blog, and every day the terrible stories show up in the newspaper and the news shows.

Recently, over the long August holiday weekend, brutal violence almost took the life of a woman I know, a woman who's part of the fabric of Suchitoto, living and working here with her family and among friends.  I don't know the details, except that the assailant was not a stranger, but Luz was stabbed many, many times and only survived thanks to heroic immediate work in the Suchitoto hospital and long weeks of intensive care in the capital.  She's been in a coma through the past month, and has just begun to emerge, facing terrible pain and months of slow work to return to life.

I am praying for Luz, and for all the women, for my friends and neighbors, that here in El Salvador we may begin to find a path out of the brutal violence that haunts every woman's life and every woman's nightmares.  Una vida libre de violencia: this should be the birthright of every woman, man and child.  Until that day, the work continues.

Bienvenidas

I was alone in this huge house for a short time after Margaret Jane returned to New Jersey, and I felt like a small marble in a very big box, just rattling around.  Peggy O'Neill introduced me to Maria del Carmen, who wanted to move to Suchitoto and was looking for a place to stay, and I am so glad that she's moved in.  Here she is in the patio, in the shade of the lemon tree:

A Salvadoran, Maria del Carmen was once a Hermanita de Jesus de Carlos de Foucauld (Little Sister of Jesus of Charles de Foucauld), has been a peacemaker and community organizer in Chalatenango, and supports herself by creating beautiful cards with dried flowers and leaves.  She's my new Spanish teacher - and it makes a great difference to be speaking Spanish at home.  She'll also be volunteering with children at the Centro Arte para la Paz.  And she has amazing stories to share. 

We're going to be joined tomorrow by Melinda from the University of Santa Clara, an artist who's also volunteering at the Centro Arte para la Paz over the next couple of months and who will live here.  Happily she speaks Spanish - I understand her parents are from Mexico - so that will be the language of the house.

Que alegría, what happiness, to share the house with Maria del Carmen and (prospectively) Melinda, to create a new community in this beautiful space.

Chickens, eggs, and the Guacotecti women

I've been waiting for quite a while for the Guacotecti women to get their chicken farm up and running - and so have they!  They found a great property and were able to purchase it with help from some Sisters of St. Joseph of Peace (you know who you are!), but then they had to wait to get the paperwork completed, and wait to negotiate electricity, and wait to be approved by the appropriate government agency.  It's been a long slog, but today I visited them with Leslie Schuld and Iris Alas of CIS, and there's a real chicken farm rising up from the dirt, soon to be home to some 600 cackling hens.  The foundation and walls of the henhouse are in place; a man is coming today to erect the metal framework and roof that completes the structure.  A new well is being dug for the community just a short distance away, and piping will bring water to the farm. 

The women were all there working hard as we bumped up the road - working with pick and shovel and wheelbarrow in the blazing sun, with a couple of guys helping out.  The guys are being paid.  The women have to wait until the chickens come and start laying and the eggs get sold, and they'll keep working hard together every day to make their dream a reality.

We had a short meeting - in the shade by the side of the road - to go over progress and next steps.  They'll be purchasing the hens next week.  It's going to be a real chicken farm.  And I promise to go back for more photos with actual hens involved.  Meanwhile, here's the whole gang, including Leslie and Iris and me and a few kids -

The chicken or the egg?

That old and worn-out question, - Which comes first, the chicken or the egg? - got new meaning for me on Thursday when I accompanied Leslie Schuld and Iris Alas of CIS (Centro por Intercambio and Solidaridad) to meet a group of women in Guacotecti, in the Departamento of Cabañas, who are about to start their own chicken-and-egg business, with the help of a grant from the Hilton Fund for Sisters. CIS asked me if I would be involved - the presence of a Sister in the program is a requirement - and I jumped at the chance to experience the beginnings and growth of a community micro-enterprise.

I surely wasn't there as a poultry expert! I learned a lot in a few hours: the women will be buying about 1000 young hens (they cost about $9 each) and those young hens will lay like crazy - an egg a day is the expectation - for about a year. Then they start slowing down (understandably) and it begins to cost more to feed them than than be recouped in egg production: then it's time to sell the hens for the cooking pot, get new youngsters, and start the cycle again. This is NOT a romantic business!

But it seems to be a very possible good business for the eight women who are the initial group. There are no egg producers nearby, so they should have a good chance to become the main egg source for their area. According to the women, Cabañas is a fairly poor district, with little economic opportunity. They hope that their enterprise will lead to others and to more at-home possibilities for women and families. They've taken courses in poultry raising, they've found land they can lease for minimal cost, and they're ready to go.

Meanwhile, they fed us lunch: would we like an avocado and a tortilla? they said, but what came out to the table was sopa de gallina india, (country hen soup) the afterlife of one of the local chickens that pecks around the yard - not one of their special laying hens, those haven't yet been purchased. Sopa de gallina india should be the national dish of El Salvador, next to the pupusas. It's delicious, full of fresh vegetables, and always served with the grilled gallina on the side. A true gallina india doesn't have a lot of flesh, and that flesh is tough - but delicious. This sopa was a good promise of futures to come from this venture and from these women.

Across the generations

Over a hundred years ago my grandmother was widowed in rural California with three young children, a tiny pension from my grandfather's service in the Civil War (we have long generations in my family), and the skill as a seamstress she'd learned in England. Working as a seamstress and taking in laundry when she had to, she managed not only to make a life for her little family, but to send each of her three children through college and on to graduate school. She's one of my heroes, Catherine Gibson Hahn, Cassie.

I thought of Cassie many times yesterday, as Dina Duvon and I had the joy of helping Sonia, a single mother of four, get a really serious sewing machine. Sonia has been surviving by selling used clothes, and sometimes has used her old treadle sewing machine - which Cassie could have used - to make clothes. With the help of a couple of wonderful donors, I have been able to bring groceries to the family for a few months, and when I asked Sonia what could help her to make the family more stable, she said she would be able to make much more money if she had a really good sewing machine.

So yesterday we went down to El Centro, the downtown core of El Salvador, and while the gringa stayed in the car (I had a feeling that my presence would raise the price instantly) Dina and Sonia found an amazing machine which we crammed into the 4Runner and installed in Sonia's tiny hut of lamina (sheet metal) with the help of the store's mechanic - here he is in the photo, putting in the finishing touches.

This is no fairy tale: we are still hoping to find better housing for this family, which lives on the edge of a zone of lead contamination and in a battered and unhealthy setting. One of Sonia's daughters has a serious autoimmune disorder, and the others have parasites from the bad water (they'll get a water filter when we bring more down in November). There's no telling whether the sewing machine really will help Sonia to lift her family out of direst poverty. And Sonia is only one among the many, many single parents, mothers mostly, who struggle endlessly to keep tortillas on the table, who love their children and hope for a better future for them. But remembering Cassie, I choose to believe in Sonia and in the strength of women.

Un Círculo por la Justicia

Ten years ago I was working at the Intercommunity Peace and Justice Center in Seattle, developing an empowerment program for women called Justice for Women in which groups of women meet in Women's Justice Circles for 8 weeks to learn about each other, to give voice to their dreams and realities, and to join together to take an action for justice . That program, the brainchild of IPJC Director Linda Haydock, SNJM, has had a long and lively life, and now - to my considerable surprise - it has followed me to El Salvador.

Giselle Cárcamo, who coordinates the program, got a Justice Circle started in Peru (or un círculo por la justicia - the program was translated into Spanish from the beginning, and there have been many Spanish speaking justice circles) and when I was last in Seattle, in March, she talked to me about the possibilities of starting a Justice Circle in El Salvador. I went back with the materials, but when I looked at them I was a little dismayed to remember that the stories that illustrate women working for justice came from the context of the Pacific Northwest. I assumed it wouldn't make much sense to use these materials in El Salvador without having Salvadoran stories, but I shared the program workbook with Leslie Schuld, Director of the CIS (Center for Interchange and Solidarity) and with Iris Alas, CIS community organizer for San Rafael Cedros. And I got absorbed in other work and, quite honestly, lost track of my intention to work on some local stories.

But Iris took the workbook home to read it, and she got excited. She's been working with a group of women who live in a community that has grown up around abandoned railroad tracks. They long to own their homes, and Iris decided that Justice for Women could help them organize to ask the government to deed them the land they have lived on for many years. She called a group together, and they start meeting this Sunday. Like so many great Salvadoran women I know, she just got going. May this Justice Circle be the start of great plans and strong action for these women!

And I will be working on those local stories! It seems quite likely that Iris and her circle are creating one of them.

We desire a life free from violence

Peggy and Pat answered my wish to have the Suchitoto bird-and-flower motto stenciled by my door, and here it is. The motto says: En esta casa queremos una vida libre de violencia hacia las mujeres - In this house we want a life free from violence against women. You see this stencil all over Suchitoto, a town where women's organizations and women's organizing thrive. But I'd like to amend it slightly as my wish for the new year: In this house we want a life free from violence. In that wish, I join all my Sisters of St. Joseph of Peace, working and praying to make non-violence the touchstone of our lives.

There has been news of terrible violence in this week's papers - two men ran into the waiting room of a pediatric clinic in Cojutepeque, the town that's the capital of our district, threw a grenade and ran out. Two children were killed, others badly hurt. There's been news of organized violence against the people who have been opposing mining interests in the neighboring district of Cabañas - two community activists have been killed, and the day after Christmas a woman environmentalist eight-months pregnant and carrying a two-year-old baby was shot and killed. Little seems to be done in any of these cases to bring the guilty to justice.

So, on behalf of the people of El Salvador who enter this new year full of hope and full of fear, in this country in 2010 we desire a life free from violence.

Hilda

I had a great visit today with Hilda Calles Nuñez, a community organizer and single mother of six who lives in the village of Huisisilapa (took me quite a while to learn to spell and pronounce that, but Hilda says I've got it right now).

Hilda has received wonderful support over the years from a group of PeaceHealth volunteers who wanted to make it possible for some of her children to go to college. She told me today, with understandable pride, that one son is about to graduate with a teaching degree and another is studying for the licenciate in sociology. Three other children have graduated from high school - in itself a considerable accomplishment in rural El Salvador - and one wants to continue at the university. Her youngest daughter is in 9th grade and will soon be studying for the Bachilerato (equivalent to a high school diploma).

Two of the grown children are working, one in the family fields, but don't make much income. Hilda has worked for a rural development organization call UCRES (sorry, I don't remember what that stands for) for sixteen years, but like many in non-profit organizations around the world, she has been laid off as funding dwindled. She's looking for work, she says, but meanwhile she has been selling milk (but the cows aren't yielding much this year, and the farmer has cut back the amount she receives). She buys medicines wholesale, sells some, and gives them free to those who can't afford to pay. She has a milpa and some hens. She sells extra corn and beans, keeping enough to feed her large family through the year.

With all of this going on in her life, Hilda is coordinator for Huisisilapa's chapel and in charge of catechesis and she's been studying the Pastoral de la Tierra - learning ways to restore the land and the communities who depend on the land. She's implementing some of that in her own house, planting chiles and huisquil (it's unique - looks like a pear, has about the consistency and flavor of a zucchini and is beloved here) to add a little extra nutrition and variety to the corn and beans that are her family's staples.

I've visited Hilda at home, where there are 10 or more family members living in her house at any given time and the inside is mostly beds. But outside, along with the corn and beans and chiles and huisquil, are beautiful flowers, lovingly grown in small pots.

I'm in awe of the burden Hilda has carried for so many years, of her daily hard work, of her determination that her children will be educated, and of her dedication to her community. And I am so glad for the flowers.