Sad days in San Juan Opico

San Juan Opico, site of our February medical mission this year, has been in the news this week for environmental and human catastrophes. I had learned before our mission that because of lead contamination to the environment, the Ministry of Health shut down the Record Battery Company in 2007. Just this past week, the Ministry of the Environment announced an environmental emergency in a radius of 1,500 meters from the former plant. Mobile water tanks have been installed for clean water in the area; corn and beans in the area have been tested, and show high levels of lead; wells and some houses have been closed. In one sad case, the foundation of a house, now closed, had been filled with soil carried from the factory.

What's not clear from the reports I've read is why it took three years to declare this environmental disaster, or what has happened to the people living in the area in the meantime. It's all too likely that they've been drinking the water, eating the corn, walking over the contaminated fields.

Another completely unrelated tragedy hit the Opico community this week, when three students - two girls and a boy - were killed when a tree fell on the schoolbus they were riding in. The other 13 students, the teacher and the driver were all wounded. A natural disaster from the unending rains of this long, wet rainy season. The natural disaster - but ultimately caused, perhaps, by the human contributions to climate change - and the unnatural disaster of lead contamination caused by negligence and greed. In both cases, the innocent suffer.

I wonder if any of those three students were among our patients in February's clinics. I wonder if any of the ill children our pediatricians saw were suffering the effects of lead poisoning.

Flo among the grasses

Last night, during halftime in the El Salvador - Honduras futbol (soccer) game, I went back to my room and startled a visitor who flew about while I shrieked. First I thought it was a bat, but she settled down, and I could see that I was entertaining the largest grasshopper I had ever seen. She (ah yes, an assumption, that) was about 6 inches long, brown, peaceable, and apparently very contented in my room. She settled on the edge of my night-table and Korla and I took photos. Then we suggested a move to her, and she flew around the room again while we both shrieked. Finally I enticed her into climbing on to a newspaper, which I put on the other side of the patio. And I closed the door.

After El Salvador's loss on overtime penalty kicks (the game itself was a lively 2-2 tie), I found our visitor lurking in the patio outside the bathroom door. "Goodnight," I said, "and go home." But when I woke up this morning to a shriek from Margaret Jane, it was clear that Flo, as we'd named her for her Flojo leaping legs, was still around. She'd tried an assault on Margaret Jane's room that led to upset coffee and Flo sitting peacefully at the foot of our stairs.

After such long acquaintance, we wanted to find her a safe home, far from our house. Korla trapped her in a box and took her to the Centro Arte para la Paz, where there will be actual grasses for her to lurk in. Or if that doesn't entice Flo, there are all the hostel rooms to visit...

Old and new friends

This week I haven't blogged much because Kathy and Victor Garcia have been visiting. Kathy's our PazSalud program manager and Victor, her husband, came down to help us in the process of looking for a newer car (the PazSalud '96 4Runner, a magnificent workhorse, is getting old enough that we began to worry about having to make major repairs). We found the car we wanted, but the owner decided he didn't want to sell, alas.

Meanwhile, we've been able to introduce Victor to many of our friends and helpers here - he met Sister Margaret Jane, of course, and Sister Bernadita, also a native of Honduras, at Hospital Divina Providencia (she is the tiny one in the photo). We took him to visit with Leslie Schuld at CIS, and with Dina Dubon at the Archdiocesis of San Salvador, and we had a splendid lunch with Hernan Merino , our indispensable motorist (Victor is on the left in the photo). Hernan was delighted to meet Victor in person, as they've often talked on the phone. Sister Peggy O'Neill gave us a special tour of the new skateboard park and the soon-to-be-opened museum of Suchitoto life and history at the Centro Arte para la Paz

Meanwhile, Victor was feeling bad because we didn't find a car to buy, so he and Hernan put their heads together and took the 4Runner to a shop Hernan knows where our dim headlights were replaced by much brighter lights, a huge improvement for night drives to Suchitoto. The 4Runner's engine has now been inspected in detail by all the experts and pronounced perfect. The 4Runner no longer has even a single squeak (Victor plus WD-40). Why, I wonder, did we even think about replacing it?

Meanwhile, he and Kathy and I have gone through our enormous collection of supplies and medications to organize things for our November, February and May missions and to figure out what we'll need to bring down here. And Kathy and I have proofread our 2011 calendar, which is going to be glorious. And we've eaten well, talked lots, and enjoyed a relatively cool week with lots of rain showers at all odd times of the day and night.

Bits of this and that

I'm almost off to the airport to pick up Kathy and Victor Garcia, here on a car-buying and mission planning trip, but first I want to introduce a new housemate, Korla Masters. Korla, who's just graduated from college, is here volunteering at the Centro Arte para la Paz until May, 2011, teaching English in El Sitio Cenizero and helping out at the Centro. She loves oranges, and was lamenting today, while squeezing oranges, that her attempts to eat locally in Minnesota will rule out oranges in her future diet. We agreed that this was a good reason to be here and now and revel in every Salvadoran orange that comes her way over the next nine months.

Korla told us about last night's concert at the Centro Arte, a combination of the Pop Ensemble of the El Salvador Youth Orchestra and the Coro de Manos, Choir of Hands, performing a combination of pop music and songs signed in Salvadoran Sign Language. Korla was especially delighted because her mother is the Pastor for a deaf community in Minnesota, and she grew up speaking ASL. SSL is different, she told us, but some of the sign interpreters also spoke ASL, so she was able to communicate, and was taped for a sign blog. It was an absolutely wonderful and uplifting evening, both because of the beauty of sign and because of the great stage presence and joyfulness of orchestra director Martin Jorge.

We also had the joy of greeting Pat Farrell, OSF, the newly elected vice-president of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, here to visit her old stomping grounds in Suchitoto (Pat lived here for 15 or more years, working with Peggy O'Neill to start the Centro Arte) with a group of Franciscans and Franciscan Associates. Pat will be an inspirational leader for LCWR, and I'm sure her many years in El Salvador will come in handy, perhaps in surprising ways.

Remembering Judith

A friend of mine died last week. Judith used to come by our house in Suchitoto and ask how we were and ask for some spare change for food. When we gave her 50 cents, she'd come back with some bananas and an avocado from the market - extras, I hope, as I know she often helped out there with cleaning or unloading. Some days she'd show up with flowers, and I'd worry a little bit about whose flower patch they might have come from. She brought me a huge bunch of beautiful red leaves, happened to bring them on the first day of my retreat, and they sat on my prayer table all through that time of quiet, filtering the sun.

She looked eccentric in El Salvador terms, wearing a loose man's shirt and pants, while most women of my age - which she must have been - wear dresses or skirts and tops. She kept an eye on us, and probably on pretty much everyone in Suchitoto. I think it's likely that she had trouble with alcohol, and last week, after a brief time in the hospital, she died of liver failure.

I remember Judith as a woman who was "counter, original, spare, strange" - to quote Gerard Manley Hopkins - someone who didn't fit very well into her world, someone who suffered and was kind. I wish I had a photo of her, but this photo of red leaves, like the ones she brought me, will help me to remember. Gracias, Judith.

Corny day

Today was Suchitoto's Festival de Maiz, corn festival, which began with a procession featuring kings and queens of maiz coming in to the church decorated with cornstalks. We had just one Mass today, at 9 AM, so the church was crowded, everyone in the pews sitting haunch to haunch and people standing in the aisles on both sides. The readings of the day were a great fit:

And people will come from the east and the west and from the north and the south and will recline at table in the kingdom of God. For behold, some are last who will be first, and some are first who will be last.

Or, as the Salvadoran hymn puts it, Vamos todos al banquete, en la mesa de la creacion - let's all go to the banquet at the table of creation, where the last are first and the harvest is celebrated. Here in Suchitoto, at least on this day and this feast - dreamed up years ago by Srs. Peggy O'Neill and Pat Farrell - we were all the sons and daughters of the corn. And we all ate:
riguas (completely delicious fresh corn pancakes cooked in banana leaves), atole, tamales, tortas, and corn on the cob. Even with the rain falling unseasonably early, it was a feast.

La casa de la abuela

This week I went with my godson, Alejandro, and his parents, Ani and Alex, to visit Alex' mother who lives outside the community of Santa Isabel Ishuatán, high in the hill country of the Cordillera de Balsamo. We had a fine time at la casa de la abuela, grandmother's house, eating our way happily through a continual feast of the best country life has to offer. Doña Francesca started us off with atole de elote, a soup of fresh sweet corn flavored with cinnamon and accompanied by ears of fresh corn. A little later Alex cut down some coconuts, and we enjoyed coconut water and meat. Almuerzo, the main meal, came at about 3 PM and featured a chicken who'd recently been running around, rice, vegetables, tortillas, a salsa de chile, and fresh cheese that Doña Francesca made as we watched.

Then it was time to make tamales de elote, fresh corn tamales, which are delicious. Doña Francesca is an old hand at these, and she taught Ani to make them. I tried the art, too, and feel a little sorry for anyone who got one of my understuffed and messy tamales. Along with beans and rice, the tamales were the centerpiece of supper. I fell into bed feeling like a stuffed tamale myself.

Doña Francesca's house and farm were full of flowers which attracted an amazingly diverse group of butterflies, fruit trees (mango, coconut, orange and many more), and fields - a small milpa for corn and a rice field. Like all the Salvadoran homesteads I've visited, her farm is a celebration of diversity where livestock (chickens, geese and a rabbit), grain crops, fruit crops and vegetables grow in happy abundance. According to the measurements of the U.S.A., Doña Francesca would be poor, and her life has been hard in many ways. But she has been a nurturer of life, both in her farm and in her family: 19 years ago, in her 50s, she adopted a baby whose mother couldn't afford to bring him up, an addition to her family of eight, and Wilson is now finishing his high school degree, hoping to study law at the University. That generosity of life and spirit, which I meet again and again in El Salvador, is a richness beyond economic price.

Oh yes, and I also had a wonderful time playing with Alejandrito, who likes nothing better than to go walking with someone holding his hands. Balancing: what a challenge! But he'll soon be off on his own.