I woke up in Suchitoto this morning and it felt natural. The only things that kept waking me from time to time during the night were lemons dropping from the lemon tree onto the tin roof over my tiny bathroom (sounds VERY alarming) and a cricket that sounds all too much like my alarm clock - by tonight, I'll be tuning him? her? out. Didn't hear the cocks crowing or the morning buses going by, woke up to the sounds of the doves (and roosters).

I talked to a lot of friends this morning, and so far have found only one, our friend Armando, whose home and crops were seriously damaged in the torrential rains and floods of October. Suchitoto was spared the worst of these rains, though I'm sure all the roofs were leaking after ten days of rainfall. The damage is very visible in the roads here, and I would expect that they are far worse in parts of the country where the rains were heavier.

I also learned that one friend from this area is on her way to the United States, and I am praying that she will get safely through the grave dangers that migrants face in Guatemala and Mexico and will make it through the border, though I'm also very sad to think of the damage and loss her going causes for the family she left here. I wonder if people who get angry about illegal immigration into the United States ever think about how desperate people become because of lack of money and lack of opportunity in their own countries. I wonder what they would do in similar circumstances?

An Unnatural Disaster

There's a superb post on Tim's El Salvador Blog about the human role in the disastrous rains and floods El Salvador has experienced this month. I don't think I've seen a better analysis of the complex ties between ecological damage and economic violence to the poor.

He quotes a fierce and superb statement by San Salvador Auxiliary Bishop Gregorio Rosa Chavez: the disaster caused by the rains demonstrated "the economic vulnerability, that is to say the poverty so many of our countrymen live immersed within, the social vulnerability, characterized by the structural injustice and the ecological vulnerability, for which the great fault lies in the wild ambition that rages against God's creation, this house of all of us which is deteriorating more each day."

I remember that in the 2008 Chapter of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Peace, we struggled to articulate the connection between climate change and the needs of the poor. Well, here it is, in the suffering of thousands of poor people displaced by rain and floods, an unnatural disaster that hardly touches the lives of the middle and upper classes in El Salvador. As Tim says, there are no photos of flooded mansions, no videos of Land Rovers swirling in the overflowing rivers. The land is "the house of all of us," and only the rich can hide from its devastation.

A letter from Comasagua

I got an e-mail today from Alex Hernandez, a friend and a great volunteer in our 2009 medical mission in Comasagua. Alex writes (and I translate, loosely) -

I want to tell you about the week of rains and the chaos in Comasagua because of the tropical storm. Twelve shelters have been opened for people in our municipality [municipalities in El Salvador include all the smaller communities around a central town] and I have been in one of them, caring for 50 people day and night, watching over the women, children and old people sleeping and making sure they get their three meals in the day. This has been a beautiful experience for me because you know that one becomes fond of the people and I feel a love for them as if they were my family. I don't know if you understand me, Sister Susan, it's something that it's not possible to explain.

I'm also working in the church with our priest, helping to organize the assistance that arrives for the people in shelters, and then sharing it out with them. I can tell you it was good to be helping my neighbors because they needed the help, but at the same time sad to see so much suffering, to see the faces of each of them, far from their lands, their houses lost, their crops ruined, exhausted after days of suffering. I'm glad, though, for all the work we have been able to do for them. Comasagua begins a new life.

I do understand, Alex, and I know that the help you're giving your neighbors, your new family, returns as a blessing to you. I thank God that you and so many others are working all over El Salvador to help the people first to survive, and now to begin to return to their homes and start the long hard work of digging out and starting again.

A long and terrible day of rain

Sixteen inches of rain - that's what's fallen in Sonsonate, in the west close to the border with Guatemala, in one long and terrible day. Three deaths have been reported, many homes have been damaged or destroyed, and 4,000 people have been evacuated. This disaster doesn't even get a name, unlike hurricanes: it's registered as Tropical Depression 12 E.

In addition to the communities in the west, all the coastal areas have endured huge downpours and are also endangered by flooding rivers. Here's a recent update from Voices from El Salvador on the current situation in the Baja Lempa area (where the Lempa, El Salvador's biggest river, rolls through flat coast lands on its way to the sea):

The Lempa River is currently flowing over the levee in the northern top of the Namcuchaname Forest and the levee in the community of El Marillo. The levee breech has sent a large current of water through the community and completely flooded the main road cutting off access to the communities downstream. As we reported earlier, the Lempa River has also breeched the levee in the Lotes and Babilonia communities. As of this afternoon, the focus of the evacuations is on the Lotes and Babilonia communities, which have been flooded since yesterday. However, the Civil Protection Agency and other government officials have called on ALL communities in the Lower Lempa, from San Marcos on down, to evacuate. Their plan is to move all residents to a shelter in San Marcos. When that is full they will take people to Tierra Blanca and then on to Jiquilisco. Civil Protection has set up a command post in Ciudad Romero where they are coordinating evacuation and relief efforts. According to our field staff, many government and international agencies are present, including the police, military, Red Cross, Comandos de Salvamento, the mayor’s office, and many, many others. The good news is that they are coordinating better than in past emergencies.

I'm worried about our friend Armando, a hard-working and ambitious farmer, whose farm lies in the area affected by these floods. I pray these floods will spare his house and family, his orchard and chickens and pigs. It's hard to be leaving for the United States tomorrow morning, before I can find out much about what's happened.

Here in Suchitoto, it's seemed like constant rain, but it's nothing in comparison - we had a little under three inches fall between October 11th and 12th. Still, all my friends have leaking roofs and sagging walls. In El Salvador, and in Central America, the people are so very vulnerable to disasters, and the disasters - storms, floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions - happen all too often. If you'd like to help people caught in Tropical Depression 12 E, the Red Cross and Catholic Relief Services are excellent places to send a donation.

photo from La Prensa Grafica

Terror on the roads

In the last three days, a rash of bus accidents have left more than 20 people dead, more than 100 injured in El Salvador. This is a story at least as familiar and as terrifying as the stories of extortion and intimidation by gang members.

In each case some of the bus drivers were going far faster than the speed limit, and in some cases the buses were jockeying with each other for the lead. The result - not surprising given the age and mechanical condition of many buses here - was a disaster for the people on the buses and for the overworked hospital system, but not for the owners of the bus lines. (photo from La Prensa Grafica)

I'm told that the owners of bus lines have no requirement to buy insurance or to indemnify people when they are injured by wild drivers or bad equipment. In other words, they have no serious financial interest in making sure that their buses are well maintained and driven by competent motorists.

Since most Salvadorans have no choice but to take a bus or one of the many pickups that provide para-transit around the country, it's a matter of justice to give the bus route owners some self-interest in safety. There's been a call to require owners to have insurance, which seems like an obvious next step, but that seems to be mired in a tug-of-war between those who favor a public insurance provider and the private insurance market. Meanwhile, the crashes continue.

A moment to remember

Last Sunday, the day after we heard the terrible news of the shootings in Arizona, I sat in Santa Lucia, waiting for the Noon Mass to begin. Two pews ahead of me was a family - a mother with a four year old boy and her mother, la abuela, holding a boy of perhaps a year and a half with Down's syndrome. A young man I've often seen in church - I think he may be part of the pastoral team for Santa Lucia - was sweeping the aisle, getting ready for Mass. When he came to their pew he looked, stopped, set down his broom, talked to la abuela - probably asking the little boy's name - and within a minute was playing with the child with the greatest delight. He sat and played with the little guy - who loved him right back - for about 10 minutes. The church may not have been so well swept for that Mass, but I don't for a minute doubt that Jesus Christ had just walked through in the loving person of that young man.

How good to set that loving act against the hatred and confusion that led to the Arizona shootings. May the love somehow be stronger.

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.

Deaths on a bus

Everyone in this country has been shocked by a massacre that took place Sunday night in Mejicanos, a suburb of San Salvador. At 7pm a bus full of people was boarded, almost certainly by gang members, who shot some people, then doused the interior of the bus with gasoline and set it on fire. Fifteen people have died, many remaining unrecognizable. Others who managed to get out are being treated in the hospital. Three other people were shot on a different bus in that area on the same night. Here, where everyone is used to the gang-related extorsions and killings, even to the frequent killings of bus drivers and conductors, this atrocity has shaken us all to the core.

What is the cause of such mindless and heartless violence? How can it be ended? There have been calls to institute the death penalty - as though fear of a death penalty would be likely to deter such an act, as though we could count on a police and legal system as finely tuned as that in the U.S. The violence last Sunday fell on the poor, as is usually the case here. God's beloved community here continues to suffer.

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!

Haiti

Tonight, with great sadness, we watched coverage of the devastation in Port-au-Prince and joined our prayers with those all over the world for the people of Haiti, who have suffered so much already and now are in such terrible chaos and need. May the help that's being sent with so much good will arrive in time to save those who can be saved.