Eye surgery week begins

Getting our franquisia - to import our medications and equipment without paying customs duties - was more of a cliffhanger than ever, as the folk at Customs invented a new twist, requiring an extra seal and signature from the Archdiocese, and by the time we got back to the Archdiocese, those who could sign officially were nowhere to be found. Somehow Licenciada Angela Vasquez, who's charged with getting franquisias through the process, located a signator, and the papers are complete.

I don't know who has the main seal-and-stamp making business in El Salvador, but that would be a very prosperous enterprise here. Every organization has to have its seal, and every transaction has to be stamped, often multiple times.

Soon I'll be off to the airport to pick up our eight volunteers and Kathy Garcia. On Monday we'll begin our surgery week at Hospital San Rafael, in Santa Tecla. I'm told that the Centro Loyola, where we'll be staying during the week, has wireless internet available, so hope to be able to post some photos and stories.

Beginning the day right

We were up early this morning to get everything ready for breakfast, then walked over to Peggy's house, where Archbishop José Luis Escobar Alas met us at 6:00 AM (which mean leaving San Salvador at 5:00 AM). He said Mass for the three of us in Peggy's tiny chapel, thanking us in his homily for the gift we had given in leaving family and security to accompany the people of El Salvador.

Then Monseñor Luis and his driver and Peggy joined us for a good breakfast. It was a pleasure to tell him a little about our work here, and especially to thank him for the excellent assistance we've received from the Archdiocese. And it was a pleasure and honor to hear him talk with deep feeling about the longings of the people here, about their need for justice and hope.

A fine way to begin the day!

Running-around week

I haven't posted for a while, because I've been running around this week, getting ready for our cataract surgery group, arriving Saturday AND for a visit from the Archbishop of San Salvador tomorrow morning. Monseñor Luis Escobar Alas, the Archbishop, has been visiting all the religious communities in his Archdiocese - tomorrow he's visiting the Sisters of Charity (Peggy O'Neill) and the Sisters of St. Joseph of Peace. He's arriving at 6 AM to say Mass for us in Peggy's home chapel and then all will come to our house for breakfast (orange juice, coffee, omelets, toast).

It will be an honor to meet Monseñor and to tell him that it has been a joy to work with his staff in the Pastoral de Salud and Pastoral Social, who've been our very effective community organizers on many medical missions.

It has crammed the week a bit, though, to be working on housecleaning and breakfast menus, as well as on last minute purchases and arrangements for the surgical mission. At this point, almost everything is ready, packed, organized - except that, as usual, we are waiting to the last minute to receive our franquisia (permit to import the medications and instruments without paying customs duties). I hope and trust that it will come through, probably tomorrow. But, as everyone says in El Salvador, "Primero Dios," - God first, God willing.

Clean water for Las Granadillas

During our February Medical Mission I spent a day translating for Dr. Anne Welch, one of our excellent pedia-tricians. We saw family after family where the baby at breast was round and rosy, but the children who were no longer nursing were thin, pale and listless. Anne diagnosed likely cases of parasites or water-born bacteria, and it made her mad. Why didn't these families have access to clean, safe drinking water? She told the Mayor of San Juan Opico how important it would be to improve the water systems. Clean water is hard to come by in El Salvador generally, not just in Opico, and the children are the ones who suffer most. I came away wanting to find something we in PeaceHealth could do to help families with this basic need.

When I came back to Bellevue, WA in March, I talked to Sr. Andrea Nenzel about the need for clean water in Salvadoran communities. In one of God's minor miracles , she had just heard about Sawyer Water Filters and encouraged me to look them up. I was impressed with what I read about them and ordered one for a trial. Dina Dubon de Garcia, a longtime friend of the CSJP community and our main contact for San Juan Opico, tried out the filter in her house and discovered that it worked well, filling a 5 gallon jug in about 20 minutes.

Today we took the filter to the community of Las Granadillas, located in a coffee finca in the hills at the southern end of the San Juan Opico municipality. Dina and Reyna, the local health promoter, called together a group for training, or "capacitacion," as it's called here, and did a magnificent job of community education. People in the group knew that you could clean the water by boiling it, but, they said, it didn't taste right after being boiled. They were curious to learn how this system new operates - and how the water would taste.

It's a very easy-to-understand and easy-to-follow system, using gravity flow to pull dirty water from an upper bucket through the small filter into a lower, clean water bucket. The Sawyer filters are cleaned by back-washing when they get full of gunk, and are guaranteed for 1 million gallons, enough to last a community for quite a good long time. It filters out bacteria, protozoa and cysts, filters water fast enough to be used by a small community, and the price is quite reasonable.

Dina showed the community how the system is assembled, and we were ready for the first test: water from the community tank was poured into the top bucket, and quickly passed through the filter into the bottom bucket. And then we all took a drink of the clean, fresh water, and everyone said it tasted just the way water should taste: "rica," said one man, the ultimate compliment for food or drink here.

They decided where the system will be placed and which family would be responsible for back-washing the filter. We'll be following up with a test of the filtered water and gathering the experience of the Las Granadillas community as they use the filter. And if it works, as we hope it will, we plan to provide more filters for more of the communities in San Juan Opico, thanks to the generosity of our donors. It's been a happy day.

Don't Pay the Rent!

I've been wondering about a poster that recently appeared, draped modestly over the front of El Salvador's famous "La Chulona" statue on Boulevard Constitucion (La Chulona is a statue of Justice, portrayed as a beautiful naked woman carrying a sword and scales. There's also an El Chulón elsewhere, but that's another story). The image of this wild-eyed man saying "I'm not paying the rent" was a puzzle until I read Tim's El Salvador Blog, and realized that this is an initiative to get people to refuse to pay extorsion money (known here as la renta). I won't retell the story, but recommend you follow this link to Tim's telling.

It's a beautiful grassroots movement, and it's what is most necessary for a change from the violent conditions of today - may Don Ramon's face and this slogan be the beginning of a new day in El Salvador.

How sweet the Cross

Monday was the Day of the Cross here - as I learned last year, on this festival Salvadorans display a wooden cross in their house, green wood from a tree grown in the Suchitoto area that can sprout again. The cross is decorated with flowers and fruits and sweets - as Peggy O'Neill pointed out to me, the message is "how sweet the Cross"! The photo here is of the cross we decorated in our patio, not an outstanding example of the practice.

This celebration has its roots in pre-Columbian traditions: this is the time when the rains are supposed to begin, and the fruitful wood is a symbol of the land's fertility, a call for the blessing of rain. This year the rains have already begun. We've seen rain every day since I returned from New Jersey a week ago - an early start to the rainy season which more typically begins in middle or late May. Farmers will be out planting corn in the milpas, hoping that the rains will continue to bless the crop each day until harvest. May there be an abundant harvest!

The feast of St. Joseph the Worker

The first of May, Inter-national Workers' Day, is a holiday here as it is in most countries, though not in the United States, where we continue to insist on celebrating Labor Day in September. The Catholic Church long ago put its stamp on May 1st by designating it as the feast of St. Joseph the Worker - and so it's a feast for my Sisters of St. Joseph of Peace (CSJP).

May Day is always celebrated with a giant parade in San Salvador, but we had a small and special celebration in Suchitoto today - Estela Garcia and her daughter Susy Solis Garcia came for lunch, their first time to visit this house. Estela has been a friend of the CSJPs for more than 20 years, since the happy day when she came to work at El Despertar, the Jesuit Refugee center where Sisters Eleanor Gilmore and Margaret Byrne were helping people from the country get medical care. My sense, from hearing Eleanor tell the story, is that they were overstretched and desperately needed help to keep the house clean and the meals prepared. They asked at the local parish, and along came Estela - and soon everything was in beautiful order.

Susy was a little girl then: now she's an accomplished young woman, working at a preschool and leading catechetics in her local parish while she finishes her degree. We talked and told stories and ate pasta and enjoyed the leisure of the day. Margaret Jane kindly took a photo of this happy feast day.