Red Alert

Over the past six days El Salvador has gone from a green alert - Wednesday - to orange - Friday - and today to a red alert. So much rain has fallen that all the country is super-saturated. Rivers are overflowing. Villages are cut off. The new fields of just-planted corn are washed away. Six days of torrents, six days without sunshine - we're living in the back-wash of Agatha, the first named Pacific tropical storm of the season.

At least this week there was time to evacuate villages in danger and to help people cross the raging rivers (see the photo from La Prensa Grafica). Some lives have been lost - I think I heard of seven fatalities - but many less than in last November, when a month's worth of rain fell in one terrible night.

Here in Suchitoto, we're doing OK, but more than a little damp. When you wash something out in this weather, 100% humidity, it just stays damp. Saltshakers clog. The drainpipe above our washing machine is leaking copiously. Small problems, indeed. Our spirits have been lifted today because we were invited to share the Trinity Sunday Eucharist with a visiting Jesuit and students from Canisius College in Buffalo, NY (they've spent their whole week here in the rain and the mud, and still seemed to be loving it). We're also hopeful because it hasn't rained in Suchitoto for about 10 hours and maybe, just maybe, the weather is going to change. Primero Dios!

A necessary gift

When I got back to Suchitoto after the eye surgery mission, I learned from Margaret Jane that one of our Suchi friends was going through a hard time. She's a young woman - I'll call her Maria - who works in a local restaurant, and she had come to ask if we could give her a loan for medical tests her mother needed. We have a special fund for local needs donated by some of our Sisters and Associates, and Margaret Jane gave her what she needed, and told her it was a gift. A couple of days after I got back, Maria came over to thank us and tell us what was going on. Her mother will need a hysterectomy - and the surgeon may remove her gall bladder at the same time. The surgery will take place at a national hospital, and so will be free - but the tests to show what she needed were not, as often is the case.

We learned more about Maria's life as she talked with us. She has two children of her own - like many women in El Salvador, she is a single mother - and adopted her brother's two children after his wife died from uterine cancer at the age of 27. The four range in age from 6 to 16, and they are all in school, though she herself never went to school. She grew up far out in the country, and learned to read from a book her father brought her. She and her brother support this family from what she earns as a waitress (working 12 hour days, 6 days a week) and what he earns fishing.

We were so happy that we could help this brave and cheerful woman with one part of her heavy load of family obligations. And we know that Audrey Kettell, CSJP-A, our UK Associate who sent the dollars that went to help Maria, will be glad as well. How glad I am that we were able to help - and how I wish that help were not so desperately needed by so many here.

Rain in abundance

Yesterday I got up well before dawn to take Kathy Garcia to the airport, and drove through a lot of fog and rain - no fun in the dark - to get there. All week, the sky overhead has been gray, and we've had heavy rains every day. The country is on a "green alert" because of the rains, rivers are overrunning their banks, and huge waves are reported on the coast.

Heavy rains are normal enough here, at this time of year. But five days of gray skies with no relief in sight? That never happens here. It almost feels like Seattle (but lots warmer). I have two weeks worth of clothes waiting to be washed, but until the sun comes out, it will be pretty hard to dry them.

The people who suffer in this weather - or any weather - are the poor, people whose houses have roofs of plastic or cardboard, people who can't afford to fix the roofs, people who live under earth banks that may collapse in the rains. The United Nations Development Program in El Salvador recently issued a two-volume study of areas of urban poverty and social exclusion in the country ("urban" is a bit misleading: the study mapped all areas with more than 50 dwellings, so only the truly rural areas are excluded). It's downloadable and fascinating for those who know a bit of El Salvador and like maps; it should be a great guide for the government's plans to build additional low-cost housing. Sadly the amount of poor housing is far greater than the government's resources for building new housing. Most of the poor, it seems, will continue to suffer in the heavy rains.

Full of the Holy Spirit

Today, Pentecost, the church celebrates the gift of the Holy Spirit to the first apostles and to us today. The Spirit speaks through beautiful images of the great wind, the tongues of fire that appear over the heads of the gathered community, and the power that burst forth from them as they proclaimed the Good News in many languages. That's the Good News that Jesus proclaimed when he read from Isaiah in the synagogue: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring glad tidings to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free." (Luke 4:18)

We've been about that work this week, helping the blind recover sight, and it has been a joyful experience for everyone on our mission team - and for our patients, who will be seeing this Sunday with new eyes. Come, Holy Spirit, Ven, Espiritu Santo, send us your light.

The gift of sight

Today, Thursday, our doctors did cataract surgeries for nine patients and a pterygium surgery for one (for those who don't know a pterygium from a hole in the ground, it's a fleshy growth over the eye that can fairly easily be surgically removed). The two top photos show patients after surgery, with the eye bandaged, and after their post-op check the morning after surgery, with just a plastic shield protecting the eye (they wear this for two weeks). Our optometrist, Dr. Bob Davis, has also been offering free vision checks and reading glasses (where needed) to hospital employees, and we've had many people waiting patiently in long lines for their chance to get free glasses. Yesterday Bob, with some assistance from our surgeons, did 75 eye exams; today we held the line at 40, but only with great difficulty. We were happiest when people showed up from the laundry and maintenance and kitchen - these were people who really can't afford reading glasses. The third photo shows the long line forming yesterday.

People kept thanking me, and I kept saying that it was a blessing for us to be here and to help them, and indeed it is. When we get together at night before and during dinner, you can feel the good energy and delight of all our team - Bruce and Vincent, our surgeons; Bob, the optometrist; D.J. and Silvia assisting in surgery; Mitch taking photos and managing the sterilizer; Nelson translating our folk into impeccable Salvadoran Spanish; Cindy, our nurse; Kathy holding the whole enterprise together; and me, out in the waiting room with our amazing volunteers Reyna and Rosa and Gumersindo. It's an unbeatable high, to be spending a week giving the gift of sight to others. It's we who should be saying thanks.

Mission and vision

On Saturday afternoon, Hernan, our great bus driver, and Alcides, a Suchitoto friend, moved a small mountain of bins and boxes and bottles of water from our storeroom to Hernan's microbus, and we took off to meet our mission team. They came in right on time, even though they'd lost three hours on the takeoff of their Seattle-Houston flight, and while we had to wait two hours in customs, we got through without any difficulty, perhaps thanks to the elegance of our new burnt orange duffles (see photo).

We set up the operating suite at Hospital San Rafael in Santa Tecla on Sunday, and bright and early on Monday morning the patients showed up, a wonderful group of hopeful seniors. So, happily, did our community volunteers, Reyna and Gumersindo, and Rosa, who started volunteering with us in Comasagua in 2009, and seems to have made it a habit - for which we're more than grateful. Rosa and Reyna and Gumersindo help everyone get dressed in their hospital gowns and booties (see photo).

Rosa and Reyna and Gumersindo and I are the outside crew, getting the patients ready for surgery and taking them to their beds for the night afterwards. The inside crew - our two ophthalmologists, optometrist, operating room staff, nurse, interpreter, and photo-journalist - quickly found the rhythm of a successful team. We did ten surgeries on Monday, nine today, and it's all gone very smoothly. In the evenings we gather at the Centro Loyola in Antiguo Cuscatlan, not far from the hospital, for talk and a good meal. And we all remember the beautiful faces we've seen in the day. The final photo shows one of them.

Talk about mission and vision - what a great combination!

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.