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.

Barack Obama in El Salvador

I'm sad not to be in El Salvador today while President Barack Obama visits - not that I'd have been asked to the state dinner, but the television channels will have been full of images of every moment. The moment that will mean the most to many Salvadorans is captured here: Obama paying his respects at the tomb of Monseñor Oscar Romero in the crypt of the Cathedral in San Salvador. La Prensa Grafica, source for this photo, noted that a few days ago Obama had said that Romero is a point of social reference not just for El Salvador, but for all the world.

I'm sad not to be there today, but I'm proud and happy to be a U.S. citizen who lives and works in El Salvador on this day.

San Rafael Cedros

We had a wonderful week of clinics in San Rafael Cedros, and since a photo is definitely worth a thousand words in this case, I'll let a few photos tell the story. We were in the municipal kindergarten, a small building to hold our group of 28 plus our local volunteers and the patients we were seeing, but it worked beautifully - and coming up on the bus every morning we delighted in seeing Micky and Minnie and the crew.

The first photo shows Dr. Dale Heisinger, a great pediatrician, with Jen Cowan, his interpreter, and one of the many families they saw. While many of our providers needed interpreters, Trevor Moerkerke, a 4th year medical student working under the direction of Dr. Ron Stock, used his excellent Spanish to talk with this mother. Our pharmacists dispensed medications through the elaborate framed window - Moises Lucero, an ER nurse in his day job, patiently explained dosing instructions to each person. The last photo shows Iris Alas, our local coordinator (on right) with some of the great group of local volunteers who organized our patients and kept the lines moving smoothly every day.

We worked hard all day, and each night returned to the Santisima Trinidad Casa de Retiro, a retreat center (not retirement!) overlooking Lake Ilopango, where we enjoyed excellent and traditional Salvadoran food, followed by cribbage, bananagrams, dancing, and a good night's sleep. Today we're at the luxurious Hotel Novo in San Salvador, and I've been listening to our team talking about how important this week has been for them, and how it has recharged them for the work they'll soon be returning to. And that is the idea.

The cost of being safe

Every time I come back to the U.S. I have a few days of being stunned by the differences - the empty streets with no food stands, impromptu markets, funerals or parades ! the smooth traffic moving along the loops and lanes of elegant highway with no cars ever parked on the side! the shops with no gun-toting guard posted outside! This time I started thinking about the cost of all those miles of carefully maintained roadways and highways, all the required parking lots in front of stores, all the elaborate security kept carefully out of sight to make you feel safer.

You see, in El Salvador and elsewhere in Central America, the kind of space and speed and convenience we take for granted in the U.S. is simply too expensive. For example, you consistently enter and exit U.S. highways via exit lanes that end in overpasses, underpasses, clover leaves, each one enormously expensive to build and maintain. They're very safe, because they allow drivers to change direction and exit rapidly (except at rush hours) without colliding with competing traffic. In El Salvador, on most highways you change direction by using a paved U-turn space in the center. You enter the highway by turning right and merging with the traffic flowing in that direction. If you want to go the other direction you wait for 500 meters or so for the next official turning space; you slow down to turn into this, wait for a clear space in traffic going the other direction, turn in that direction and speed up again. As you can imagine, this system means a frequent slowing down and turning from what should be the fast lane, so it's both dangerous and congestive. But it is light-years less expensive to construct than a system of underpasses, overpasses, and one-way exits.

Think about what those choices mean. The U.S. choice is to make speed, flow, and safety hugely important at a huge cost which most U.S. drivers never think about. The Central American choice is to spend a great deal less money for roads that are slower and not as safe, but pretty adequate to move a lot of vehicles and people from one point to another. Which is the saner choice?

Un año y medio

A year and a half - that's exactly how long I've been living in El Salvador. Good time for an assessment. When I came here at the end of December, 2008, I thought I'd be fluent in Spanish at the end of a year. Alas, I still get the verb forms mixed up, I can misunderstand what someone's trying to tell me, and I'm sometimes misunderstood. I'm still a learner of this beautiful language, and the learning happens more slowly than I wish it did. I can and do carry on conversations, handle business, and even write formal letters in Spanish: I just wish it was elegant Spanish. Helps to remember that I don't expect immigrants to the United States to be fluent in English after a year and half!

On the other hand: I can zip around Suchitoto, San Salvador, and all the areas in between with ease. I know the locations of hospitals, government centers, historical sites, shopping centers, crafts markets, villages; I can do business with a variety of government authorities without sweating any more than is natural in this climate. I know all the thousand and one steps necessary to set up our mission clinics.

Best of all, I have friends here, people I care about who care about me, friends who come to dinner and invite me to their homes, friends who can give me good advice about how to live wisely here. I even have a thriving godson. And always, I'm aware of the community of my Sisters of St. Joseph of Peace, present here in the house through Margaret Jane and present in prayer and mail and e-mail messages. I'm sustained by the PeaceHealth community, by Kathy Garcia and our grand volunteers. And I'm sustained by the work, as worth the while as anything I've ever done, of connecting our PeaceHealth and CSJP volunteers with the Salvadoran people that I have come to love.

And the Spanish....well it gets a little better daily. And slowly. Primero Dios.

World Cup!

I'm in a country obsessed with Futbol (that's soccer in the US) and entirely consumed with the FIFA World Cup games playing in South Africa, so I decided it was past time for me to learn something about this beloved game, THE game in Latin America and in most of the world's countries.

This morning I decided to see which game might be on TV (I could hear the roar from the converted theater that backs up to our house and must be offering a big screen view of the games), and came on the Spain/Switzerland match which almost instantly had me riveted. I knew Spain was one of the heavy favorites going in, and they certainly seemed to be dominating with much more time in possession of the ball...........but, amazingly, the Swiss made the first goal, and even more amazingly the Spanish missed on a number of attempts in the second half and ended up the losers.

I've never been much of a sports fan (except for baseball, where I stubbornly and forlornly root for the Seattle Mariners), but futbol! What a game! I have a lot to learn about it, and happily there's many more World Cup matches to come.

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.

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!

My bags are packed, I'm ready to go

Our western area of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Peace held a Fall Assembly yesterday and today - a grand experience of community as it always is, a time to catch up with each other, and celebrate, and learn, and pray, and grow. Our main subject was vocations to religious life and how we can encourage them; we learned from Sister Charlene Diorka, SSJ, about studies of recent vocations and about some of the ways we can be welcoming and inclusive of seekers.

We also got a first look at a new CSJP website that will be unveiled in May - there's a photo of Jane Kortz, CSJP Associate, checking it out - and we heard about plans for a new home health center at St. Mary-on-the-Lake that will give better care and comfort to our most senior sisters.

We celebrated some of our existing and enduring vocations with a Jubilee dinner honoring this year's 10 Jubilarians, celebrating from 80 years (Sr. Cecilia Marie Gri) to 50 years in religious life as Sisters of St. Joseph of Peace. We ate well, we talked a LOT, we joined in the eucharistic liturgy, and we danced. As always, being with my sisters reminds me what fun it is to be part of a group of women that knows how to pray and how to celebrate.

Now it's time to go home, to my other home in Suchitoto. My bags are packed with vitamins and Titebond III glue and new stationery and Apostilles and dictionaries (gifts from Eleanor Gilmore to some Salvadoran friends), the wheelchair is wired together for the journey, and Eleanor is taking me to the airport in a few minutes. Sister Peggy will pick me up on the other end. I'll miss the hot water and sleeping under a quilt and seeing the sisters and at least some of my Seattle friends; I look forward to the heat and the lemon tree and the market and my Salvadoran friends. ¡Hasta pronto!

Springtime

Springtime in Seattle is glorious, a four-month-long extravaganza in which each week has its specialty and each bush and tree and flower finds its moment to unfold in splendor. A pleasure to be back for three weeks of this long season: we're in daffodil and forsythia and cherry blossom season, shortly to be followed by the tulips, magnolias, rhodedendrons. Lenten festivities of the warming earth.

Springtime and fall aren't part of the seasons of El Salvador. We go from the rainy season, winter (May through October) to the dry season, summer (November through April). I haven't figured out the rhythms of the plants yet, when different plants lose their leaves or put on new growth. The nance tree in our patio seems to lose leaves all the time, and puts out flowers and new leaves while it's losing the old ones.

Here, I understand the rhythms, and I can name the trees and I know which flowers to look for next. What a gift at this time in my life to be learning a new rhythm and order of this planet. And what a gift to come home to the familiar beauty of the cherry trees.

A year and a day

Yesterday a year ago I got on a plane in Seattle and flew to El Salvador. I meant to blog on that one-year anniversary, but Lita came to dinner and we ended up watching a TV discussion between two Catholics and two Evangelicals about the difference in these churches' response to the violence, alcoholism and drug addiction that are tearing the fabric of Salvadoran society. The whole evening was in Spanish, our conversation, the TV program, and I understood so much more of than I would have a year ago.

This year-and-a-day finds me feeling at home here in Suchitoto, able to navigate the roads and figure out the processes we need to go through for our mission trips. I've mostly figured out how to protect my bedroom from the bats, rats, cockroaches and scorpion that seemed to feel at home there (and only in my bedroom: I think it must have been la habitación de una bruja, a witch's room, in some previous time). I'm obviously a foreigner - a little girl of five in El Sitio called me la gringita on Christmas Eve - but my Spanish is at least adequate to the daily needs of life. I've found friends. I've become a godmother (though the godson is not entirely happy about this, as the photo shows). I know a bit about the history and present realities of this tragic and beautiful country, but have so much more to learn.

With Kathy Garcia's leadership, I've organized the El Salvador end of one mission trip, and two others are getting organized. I can find a parking place near the Junta Directiva de la Profesión Médica, the group that OKs our doctors. I love the two sides of our mission, bringing people from PeaceHealth and the Sisters of St. Joseph of Peace here to introduce them to El Salvador, bringing them here to offer some much-needed medical assistance to people of El Salvador.

Thanks to you, my readers, who've accompanied me on this journey. It's been good to know that friends and family and some folk who don't know me at all have been following along. The journey continues!

Panes con Pollo

It's almost Christmas here. Some things look very familiar - trees (mostly artificial) with lots of lights, images of Santa Claus, stores full of last-minute shoppers, brightly wrapped gifts. Some things are very different, though. All week the parish has been celebrating Las Posadas, with pre-teen Mary and Joseph and Angel and Shepherds going from neighborhood to neighborhood each evening, accompanied by all of us carrying our candles and blowing on the clay hen-shaped whistles that are, somehow, a sacred part of this story. Firecrackers, metalicos, are set off a few times every day, unpredictably.

Today at the Centro Arte para la Paz I got my first taste of the special Christmas food of El Salvador, panes con pollo. It turns out to be a chunk of chicken, many vegetables and sauce all enveloped by a long roll of bread - a little like a subway sandwich, only fuller and messier. And delicious. Like pupusas, panes con pollo is to be eaten with the fingers. I didn't get the technique right on my first try, but hope to improve tomorrow when I go with Peggy and Pat Farrell (Sister Patti) to El Sitio Cenizero. I am supplying beer and pop. Mercedes, who knows how to do it, will be making the panes con pollo.

And so we will welcome Jesus, becoming flesh for us, coming to birth among us.

In time of need

Yesterday we asked Dina Duvon de Garcia, long-time friend of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Peace and one of the Caritas staff at the Archdiocese, how we could help in this time of emergency (there are 14,000+ people in emergency shelters all over central El Salvador at the moment). Today we got an answer: buy basic foods and clean water and diapers and deliver them to the Archdiocese. So we are off on this mission of mercy: we'll use funds from the Sisters and from PeaceHealth to fill the car. It feels wonderful to be delivering some concrete assistance!

Storm and flooding damage many

A tremendous rainstorm and damaging floods caused great damage in central El Salvador Sunday morning. There was a huge rainstorm, caused by a low-pressure system linked indirectly to Hurricane Ida, that stalled over El Salvador and let loose an unbelievable amount of water - President Funes said that San Vicente, the community worst hit, had as much rain in four hours as had fallen in four days during Hurricane Mitch. There were terrible floods and landslides, many people were killed (at present more than 130 are reported killed, with 90 people listed as missing) and others are now homeless. The photo above is from La Prensa Grafica

We are all fine in Suchitoto and there was no damage to our house or to the Centro Arte para la Paz, but the nearby city of San Martin was hard hit. I was in Morazan for the weekend with my friend Pat & we waited over until today (Monday) because so many roads were closed. As we came home today, we saw lots of damage - collapsed houses, giant flood plains, trees toppled, rocks and earth spilling out onto the highway. When we got back to Suchitoto, Margaret Jane and Pat and I put together a couple of big piles of towels and sheets and clothing and took them down to the Mayor's office here to help those who are left homeless.

If any of you would like to help, a cash donation will help relief organizations provide the supplies and food and medicine so badly needed. Organizations doing good relief work include:

Caritas

International Red Cross/Red Crescent

Lutheran World Relief

World Vision

For links to other reports, photos, and maps, go to Tim's El Salvador Blog, always an excellent source of up-to-date information here.

It has been very sad to see on television the faces of those who've lost family memebers or houses and all their possessions. As you can imagine, and as is always the case here, it has hit the poor communities hardest.

Leaving home and going home

Time to go home! I leave on the red-eye special tonight, get in to the Comalapa airport tomorrow morning, where Roberto will pick me up (he'll be holding a sign saying "Hermana Susana, Suchitoto"). Peggy, who usually gives me a ride home, is flying to the U.S. today for three weeks of talks and fundraising for the Centro Arte para la Paz. I'm looking forward to seeing Margaret Jane and Pat and Martha and Berty and Yanira, to the heat and the end of the rainy season, to the time when the toads go underground until next May when the rains begin again.

Time to leave home. It's raining furiously right now and the days are getting shorter and shorter. I won't miss the winter rains, but I'll miss my Sisters and my sister, my friends and family here. And Thai food, kale, red leaves, neighborhood coffee shops. And being able to open my mouth and talk without having to think about how to say what I want to say.

Time to go home and continue the Spanish studies!

Fortune

This has been an extra-beautiful fall in western Washington: something (a sharp cold spell? hot days in the summer? wind from the south?) has made the autumn colors more vivid than usual. I've walked around St. Mary's, happily taking photos.

I've been thinking today, while I took those photos and talked to friends - including Patti Moore, who visited me in El Salvador this summer - how undeservedly privileged I am, able to come up here a few times each year and return to El Salvador with no difficulties. I'm particularly aware of this because a good friend has been having a hard time getting her visa back to the United States from Kenya approved, though she thought all the paperwork was in order, and she has lived lawfully in the U.S. for the past many years. She's about to make her third visit to the embassy there.

Just before I left El Salvador, a new friend, Blanca, told me about the four trips she had made to the U.S. Embassy there to get a visa so she could attend a family wedding. Each time she had to pay a large sum of money, in Salvadoran terms, for her interview - I think about $190 - and each time she was told to bring additional information and come back again. After the fourth trip she was denied a visa, but none of her money was refunded.

By contrast, my paperwork to get a resident visa for El Salvador was reasonable and fairly minimal.

Why do we, as a country, believe that we have the right to treat people from other countries, particularly developing nations, so badly?

Rain and eagles

I woke this morning to two sounds that told me right away where I am: gentle rainfall and an eagle calling. Rainfall here in the Pacific Northwest is entirely different from the rapid downpours in El Salvador: raindrops shift into and out of mist, not enough for an umbrella, just enough to get you damp. And we've been blessed by the presence of bald eages here at St. Mary-on-the-Lake: they perch in our tall Douglas Firs and send their wild warbles into the morning light.

When I come back to the Northwest, it seems to take a few days before I wake up knowing where I am, though the quiet here should be a clue. In Suchitoto, dawn and the hours before dawn are announced by many roosters, birds, and the big buses rolling past our house on the way to the capital. Here the freeway noise is far enough away to be a background hum of white noise, and the morning's hymn to creation is led by the king of birds. Rain falls and will be falling here, on and off, for the next five months. In El Salvador, the rainy season is about to end, and everyone's favorite months, sunny and cool, begin in November.

Fufurufo and other wonderful Salvadoran words

Fufurufo (or fufurufa if you're describing a woman) is a Salvadoran word that should be widely adopted, because it so perfectly fits. Think for a minute what fufurufo sounds like - that's right, fancy, wearing-four-inch-heels-and-a-cocktail-dress-to-the-supermarket fancy, a little too fluffy and a little too much and a little too delighted with yourself fancy.

This and other splendid Salvadoran words appear on a T-shirt I found in La Palma, and Pat and I have been working our way through it with Martha's help. Puchica I already knew as an all purpose exclamation, something in between "good heavens" and "I'll be damned." But chucho for a dog was new, as was patachucho, which is how you describe a guy who's out at the bars and hot spots when he should be home ("out catting around"?). Hediondo means stinky, and peche is the word for the last child in the family - the last one on the breast (breast is el pecho, and yes, it makes no sense that this word is masculine, but there it is).

Two of my favorite Salvadoran words don't appear on this shirt, probably because they're not at all uniquely Salvadoran, but they have a special flavor here. Cabal means "honest" or "exact" or "complete" according to my dictionary, but here it's used the way we use "right on" or "great!" in English. It's a beautiful word with a good full sound that makes a splendid exclamation point: ¡Cabal! And va, which means "it goes" is an all-purpose response here, meaning "OK," or "good" or "yes."

I'm a little hesitant to write about Salvadoran Spanish when I'm still so far from fluency - it's so easy to get it wrong and sound like a fake know-it-all, you know, fufurufa. If the word fits, use it!

Rain

This is the rainy season in El Salvador, or it's supposed to be, but we haven't had rain for about four days, which is a very serious matter for the crops on which most of the rural economy depends. The situation is worse in Guatemala - read Sheila McShane's blog to understand some of the devastation that this weather is creating there. And please - pray for regular rains to return to the countries of Central America.

The first day of winter

Think I'm crazy? No, this really is the official "first day of winter" in El Salvador, April 15th, the beginning of the rainy season. Now the real rains aren't expected until about mid-May, but this lead-up month is supposed to be a transition time - showers and thunderstorms, worries from the officials about lightning fires and plugged drainage canals. This is the time the toads come out from their underground dry season holes and begin to make music. This is the time of cloudy skies and hazy days and - maybe - rain.

And sure enough, as I was working on the computer this evening I heard a loud rattling, something more than the wind, and looked out onto (and then went out and danced in) a good, energetic half-hour downpour accompanied by a little thunder and lightning, the first serious rain I've seen since I arrived here on December 27th. The first rain of winter, and it's a great relief in April, the hottest month on the Salvadoran calendar. So welcome, winter!