El Rey de las Burbujas

A couple of days ago I picked up Richard Stanley and his mother, Mari, at their home in San Rafael Cedros and drove them in for Richard's appointment with a pediatric cardiologist in Hospital Bloom.  Mari and I were both on edge because the cardiologist had said that Richard might need a pacemaker, and we didn't want this little guy to have surgery again, just a year after he got his new heart valve.  Richard, on the other hand, seemed to be having a great time, observing every car, motorcycle, pickup, dumpster, truck with the passionate attention of a four-year-old male. 

At the Bloom, Richard had an X-ray and an EKG, and he got a prize for being a prize patient: a little bottle and wand to blow bubbles with.  And as only a four-year-old can be, he was completely absorbed by blowing bubbles and trying to catch bubbles and dunking his wand into the bottle for more bubble soap.  Somewhere along the way, he forgot to be afraid of me (I think the fact that I can drive a car and drove a car that he rode in did much to make me an acceptable person) and passed me the bubble wand.  So we blew bubbles at each other happily for about an hour and a half.

Richard even forgot that he's camera-shy and enjoyed seeing this photo of a bubble that he successfully caught on the wand.  Clearly, he's the Rey de las Burbujas, the King of the Bubbles.  And, as you can see, he's also Spiderman, El Hombre Araña. 

I had to leave before Richard had his time with visiting pediatric cardiologists, but it was a joy to hear later from Mari that the visitors checked all the tests, looked at Richard, and concluded that he doesn't need any interventions, either surgical or medical.  I can blow a bubble or two to celebrate that news!

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.

It's about time

I'm in New Jersey for 5 days this week, for a meeting of the editorial board of Living Peace, our Sisters of St. Joseph of Peace magazine, and I can't help noticing that everyone here is on the same time.  Check the clock in my room: 1:50.  And my cell phone: 1:50.  And the computer: 1:50.  And so on and on...we are always clear about what time it is in the United States.  You might say we're as obsessed by it.

It's not that way in El Salvador.  I don't quite understand it, because I always assumed that all the electronics set themselves automatically to some electronic beam of perfect timing sent out from Greenwich, but there if my cell phone shows 1:50, the computer is likely to say it's 1:58, while the clock on the wall says 1:49, the iPad claims 1:53, and the clock in the car pushes ahead to 2:03.  Every once in a while, I try to reset everything so it's all pointing to the same time (blindly choosing one of those possibilities as the correct, true, Greenwich, gringo time).  Works for a few days, and then they drift apart again. 

Time is just a more flexible concept in El Salvador.  The electronics know it.  After about a year in El Salvador, I stopped apologizing if I was 5 or 10 minutes late for a meeting, because I slowly realized that the meetings usually started about half an hour after the stated time.  Here, as in so much, for Salvadorans relationships matter more than efficiency.  It's hard for a gringa to accept, but I've come to like it that way.  Whatever time it may be in El Salvador, it's always time for a greeting, a conversation, a connection.  In the U.S., it's too often time to run off to the next urgent event.

Chepe y Chui y Chincha y Chita y Chana

I love nicknames here.  To my (gringa) ear they have even less relation to the original name than is usual in English.  For example: the nickname for José is Chepe (or Chepito); Jesus is Chui (sounds to the gringa like Chewy); Geovany is Chincha; Felicita is Chita, and I was delighted to learn that Susana is Chana.  You'd notice a preference for the "ch" sound - and somehow that makes sense to me, all those "ch" names sound friendly.  Of course there are nicknames like Rosy and Mari, and if some of the popular English-sounding names, like Marvin and Nelson and Wilson have standard nicknames, I haven't heard them yet.   I'm tempted to try Charvin or Chelson, but that's probably wishful thinking. 

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.

Checking in

I've been too long away from the blog, not because there's nothing to report, but because so much has been going on.  Last week Kathy Garcia was here and she and Darren and I did a lot of visiting, preparing and talking.  The preparations included a good visit to Estanzuelas, where we'll have our 2013 general medical mission, and then a visit to the hospital at Santiago de Maria, where we hope to have our eye surgery mission.  At the hospital, we all put on scrubs and booties to get a tour of the surgery suite - which looks great for our work.  As we got ready to leave, I stuffed my scrubs in my bag and picked up another set, which I assumed were Darren's.  The next day I pulled them out and discovered to my horror that I'd run off with someone else's scrubs, and furthermore that there was $3 in the pocket - someone's lunch money.  I imagine this poor soul cursing the gringos!  So this week I had to make the long trip back to Santiago de Maria (it's more than 2 hours from Suchitoto) to hand in the scrubs and confess.  It was the nun who did it!

Among the pleasures of Kathy's week here were visits with two scholarship students who were outstanding volunteers in earlier missions: Walther from Panchimalco, now in the 4th year of his engineering program:

and Alex from Comasagua, who's in his first year, studying psychology at the Pedagogical University:

They are both great guys, very deserving of the opportunity.

Fiesta de Maíz

Here in Suchitoto, and in many other towns in El Salvador, we celebrate the first corn harvest with a Fiesta de Maíz, which is also a celebration of the many farming villages and communities that are part of the Suchitoto municipality.  Kings and Queens of Maíz from the villages and women carrying baskets of fruit on their heads are part of a joyous procession that winds its way through the town to the church for the main Sunday Mass, after which we all pour into the parque central to stuff ourselves with elote, or fresh corn: tamales de elote, atole (hot corn drink), roasted corn-on-the-cob, elote loco (cooked corn-on-the-cob with decorations of, I think, ketchup and mayonnaise (among others), and riguas, my favorite, corn pancakes wrapped in banana leaves and grilled. 

A glorious party, and a festival that speaks to the central importance of corn - hard, white Salvadoran corn - in everyone's life here.   From the daily tortilla, which is the daily bread of every Salvadoran, to these festival foods it's clear that corn is the staff of life, as it was for the Mayan ancestors centuries ago.  ¡Que viva la Fiesta de Maíz!