Back in December, Amy Van Buren, my friend from the Psychology department called me and said she was going with the El Salvador delegation over spring break. A faculty spot had opened up, and she wondered if I happened to be interested. I said yes right away, without really thinking things over. It just seemed like such an important opportunity that I could not turn it down, even when the doubts and fears began to creep in when I started to think about what I had just volunteered to do.
I started to feel better when we started to have some informational meetings about the trip and I met some of the students who were participating. Everyone involved was so dedicated and earnest about their desire to go and make some sort of difference that I was inspired to think more about my own reasons for going on the trip. Like most of the others, I found my motives coming from two different directions. On the one hand, I felt the urge to give some of myself to others, to help out people who enjoy fewer advantages than I do. On the other, I felt the need to push myself, to test my limits by moving outside of the cozy little zone of comfort that I had built up over the years.
The first shocks of the trip were relatively easy to deal with. When we landed at the airport outside of San Salvador, the tropical sun shone fiercely on our pale New England skins, but we were ready to soak up some of that warmth after the deep freeze of Connecticut February. Slathering on sunscreen, we piled into the back of the cattle truck that would drive us to Tierra Blanca where we would be staying and working. Coming from the land of seatbelt laws and injunctions against riding in the backs of open trucks, we were thrilled by the prospect of roaring down the highway buffeted by the wind, and the novelty of this mode of transportation never wore off during our week there.
The first thing we did after settling in to our new home at the Romero Cultural Center was drive around the area and see the sites where we would be working. Loaded once again in the back of the truck, we bounced over rutted, rocky dirt roads to a small chapel nestled in some trees. The chapel was old and tiny, with roots from one of the huge trees pushing up through the dirt floor. The area of ground next to it was set aside for a newer chapel, and we would be digging the foundation hole. After watching a group of men chop down a huge tree that was in the way of construction, we drove a few miles away where another clearing met us and where we would dig another chapel’s foundation.
The work was hard, physically demanding, and done under the glaring sun. Nevertheless, we all pitched in, swinging our picks and hauling away wheelbarrows full of dirt and rocks. The Salvadorans working beside us laughed good-naturedly at our clumsiness with the tools and showed us how to use them better. Although many of us didn’t speak any Spanish much beyond “gracias,” we managed to communicate with a lot of signs and smiles and help from those on the trip who did speak the language.
Our work was not all physical. Most of our time, in fact, was spent traveling to different communities to visit the people and listen to their stories about the horrors and difficulties of the civil war years and the continuing economic and social hardships they face.
One afternoon we drove up a winding rural road along a river, up into the foothills to visit La Quesera, the site of a massacre of civilians in 1980. We sat in the shade of several large trees, hearing the river burble quietly below us, while survivors of the civil war told us their stories. One woman told of stumbling down the hillside behind us with her child in her arms as bullets flew overhead. An old man, his face set rigidly, recounted seeing warplanes strafe his village, and told us that he never saw his wife and six children again.
In a more somber mood, we went to the memorial built at the location of the massacre. The memorial is an arching wall, the roof formed by the protecting wings of a dove. It stands on a small, flat area on a bluff jutting out of the surrounding hills. As we wandered around the area, dark clouds blew through, casting dramatic shadows and making the scene even more touching than it already was.
The trip, though, was not all melancholy. On our last full day, we took a trip to the beach and invited several families from the surrounding communities to go with us. We ate, we lounged in hammocks, we played soccer on the sand. Because the ocean waves were as warm as a bath, we had to splash around in the water. As I stood in ankle-deep water, one of the little girls from La Gracia, a community near Tierra Blanca, grabbed my hand and pulled me into the waves. I hefted her onto my shoulders and waded into even deeper water, laughing and shrieking with her as the waves hit us.
Here is where you can get more information on the El Salvador trips, and even donate money if you are so inclined: http://www.sacredheart.edu/pages/2627_el_salvador.cfm
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