Pray for us, pray with us, Dorothy

One of our great Sisters and a great friend died last week - Dorothy Vidulich, CSJP, a passionate, engaged woman, writer and journalist, justice seeker.  She wrote a biography of our founder, Margaret Anna Cusack, Peace Pays the Price, that attracted many of us who've since become sisters or associates. 

I will always remember meeting Dorothy at a Call for Action (I think) meeting in Albuquerque - must have been about 1993 - and the way she welcomed me like a friend she'd known for ages.  It was a time when I needed a friend, so her welcome touched me deeply.  I suppose we may have met four or five times since then - not often, as she lived in Washington D.C., and then in New Jersey, while I was in Seattle/Bellevue and then El Salvador.  But each time, it was the amazing experience of stepping into a deep friendship that didn't need any light conversation.  I can only imagine how many friends Dorothy must have left remembering her with love, as I do!

Dorothy led an amazing life - you can find a good summary here from Susan Francois, CSJP, and another, with a sample of her writing, from Arthur Jones, her colleague at the National Catholic Reporter.  She will continue to pray with us from the community of saints, and people who never met her will find two new friends, Margaret Anna Cusack and Dorothy Vidulich, when they pick up Peace Pays the Price. 

On the way

I'm in SeaTac Airport on the way home to Suchitoto from home in Bellevue.  The retreat week was a huge gift - time to slow down and pay attention, to enjoy silence and eagles crooning, to pray and meditate, to pick blueberries in the Mercer Slough, to delight in Alexandra Kovats' insights into our Sisters of St. Joseph of Peace Constitutions (that might sound like a dull subject, but our Constitutions are amazing, a real gift of the spirit.  And then the fun of talking again at the end.  Yesterday, the day after the end of retreat week, we had our annual picnic at St. Mary-on-the-Lake, trees and flowers and people all at their best:

A good northwest summer day - gray, with occasional gleams of sun, a few sprinkles of rain, but nothing serious, temperature somewhere between 65 and 72.

And now I head south and east, back to the rainy season, tropical heat in the Central American season of winter, the corn growing, back to my other home in another world.

Vacation into Retreat

We had a lovely week, my sister Kathy and I, driving down and up the west coast with Robert Caro's Passage to Power on the iPod, visiting cousins, and revisiting our childhood days at the Hahn family vacation home in Dutch Flat, California (it's on the road to Lake Tahoe).  Our cousins Margie and Mike Jager and Dowrene Hahn welcomed us to a home that looked very much as it had when we were all young, right down to the exact shade of dark green paint.  The town hasn't changed much either: the store is still where it's always been, the old hotel, now restored, looks ready for visitors, and the swimming hole, which was really a hole in our days, is now properly concreted and tiled and chlorinated, but it still keeps the old irregular shape.  What a rare satisfaction!  I'm far more used to trying to remember what used to be on a familiar corner that's suddenly sprouted a 10-story building.

Dutch Flat is an old mining town set into a dry Sierra forest of Ponderosa pine, western red cedar and fir, a spare and beautiful landscape that in summer is reliably sunny - a pleasure for northwesterners who'd been going through the usual Seattle soggy June.  Here we are in the forest, visiting the grave of my uncle and aunt, George and Dot Hahn.

We managed to visit other cousins, Margaret Rooker and Emilie Sturges Hance, along the way, and we had a grand family time.

Tomorrow I begin the other much-anticipated week of my U.S. time, the Sisters of St. Joseph of Peace community retreat here at St. Mary-on-the-Lake.  A week without all my electronic toys will be very good for me, and a week of silence even better.  Even the weather is cooperating, as a sunny wave began on the 4th and will - in theory - last through the retreat week.  I'll be back to blogging afterwards.

Vacation pause

I haven't blogged much these last couple of weeks because I've been working hard on our PazSalud report to our donors (done, printed and mailed!) and connecting to my CSJP Sisters.  I've been blessed to be present when our Sister Cecilia Marie Gri went home to God at 98, dying as she lived with clarity, grace and the deepest faith.  I was delighted to join the community yesterday in celebrating our 7 Jubilarians, who've given a collective 395 years of ministry.  And today I head south, driving to northern California with my sister Kathy to visit cousins and have a vacation.  So I'll be back in July, and meantime here's a couple of Suchitoto photos:

From the Corpus Christi procession -

and from a celebration of art and artists at the Centro Arte para la Paz -

A dash of tropical color as I set out on a rainy Northwest June morning.

New clothes for a hard day

Just before I flew north from San Salvador to spend 5 weeks in the U.S. I learned that the husband of a new friend had been picked up by the U.S. ICE Border Patrol and is being held in a Texas detention facility.  Last night she e-mailed to ask if I could buy and mail some clothing for him to wear on his flight back to El Salvador - apparently the clothes he'd been detained in were pretty awful, and the alternative is either to return home in a prison uniform or to have someone supply a going-home outfit. 

Juan had trusted himself, and no doubt his and his family's hard-won cash, to a coyote who said he was a trustworthy Evangelical.  Not so, apparently: the journey was brutal and he witnessed his "trustworthy" guide raping a woman.  He was picked up almost immediately on the U.S. side of the border and whisked off to detention, where at least he's safe and my friend has been able to talk to him a couple of times.  

I called the facility and found out that what I could send for a going-home outfit is quite specific: 1 pair pants, 1 shirt, 1 pair underpants, 1 pair socks.  Shoes could also be sent, but apparently Juan has those.  So today I went shopping for the clothing, which I'll send tomorrow.  Challenging to buy clothes for someone you've never met, especially when it comes down to figuring out whether you think the guy would prefer boxers or briefs.  An odd assignment for a nun, but I enjoyed it.  And I picked boxers, on the simple grounds that they were less expensive.

So Juan will be able to take the long flight home in new, clean clothes, a scrap of dignity for a hard day. 

Sandra

Sandra was born with arthrogryposis, a rare congenital disorder characterized, as Wikipedia says, by multiple joint contractures, muscle weakness and fibrosis.  She's 11 years old, part of a large and loving family in San José Villanueva, and in spite of the family's poverty, her grandmother has been taking her to FUNTER, an El Salvador rehabilitation foundation, three times a week for physical and occupational therapy.  She has a good and lively mind, but hasn't been to school - the family told me that the nearest government school wouldn't take her. 

It's one of those God moments: a couple of weeks ago, I told my friend Rosy Melara about Sandra.  I know Rosy as a nurse (she has volunteered as a surgery scrub nurse for our eye surgery missions), but in that same conversation, I learned that she also has a degree in Special Education.  One thing led rather quickly to another, and Rosy volunteered to teach Sandra the basics of reading and writing - we're hoping that after a year of tutoring she'd be able to enter the parish school in Villanueva.  There's a bonus to this: Sandra's grandmother, Ynes, can't read or write, and she would like to learn.  So Rosy has two pupils. 

Here's a photo from the first class.  Sandra's two-hands approach to the pencil was quite effective, probably something she's practiced in occupational therapy - she traced shapes easily and smoothly.
I'm looking forward to seeing what she's learned when I come back from my June-July vacation.  Meanwhile, PeaceHealth is providing the bus and taxi fares that will help to make this God moment a reality. 

Lookin' good

One of the joys last week was visiting with all our eye surgery patients as they came to Dra. Ana Vilma de Burgos' office for their final post-surgery checkups.  Most of them were doing beautifully and were delighted to let me take their photo in their new reading glasses:

A few patients had to go through more processes: one woman had an eye infection that had developed after the first post-op and needed surgical cleaning; one man's interocular lens had moved and had to be replaced; three needed minor laser treatments.  A couple of others will have to continue using glaucoma medications.  Eyes are complicated!  And to be seeing clearly once more - what a gift, thanks to our talented ophthalmologists, all our dedicated team, and Dra. de Burgos.