Experiences in El Salvador: Presented by Chava Redonnet

When: Friday, March 23 at 7 pm
Where: St. Joseph's House of Hospitality located at 402 South Ave.

Come out and hear Chava talk about her experiences visiting El Salvador.

Buen Pastores: a Visit to Shekina

By Chava Redonnet, from the current issue of the
Rochester Catholic Worker

On January fourth I boarded a plane for El Salvador, not knowing what I would do when I got there, but knowing that I needed to go. In December 2005 I had been there with a class from the Divinity School, and met a Baptist pastor named Alex, who invited me to come back and work with some children. I had left, saying I’d be back in January – but never heard back from Alex. The word from El Salvador was that he was ill, and not likely to be able to do the work he’d been doing with the kids. There was a point when I wondered if I should really go back… and then I read something Gustavo Gutierrez wrote in A Theology of Liberation, that in the parable of the Good Samaritan, “The neighbor was the Samaritan who approached the wounded man and made him his neighbor. The neighbor, as has been said, is not he whom I find in my path, but rather he in whose path I place myself, he whom I approach and actively seek.” I figured that was for me, and knew then that I was going back to be in community with our neighbors to the South. I bought my plane ticket before I heard back from anyone in Santa Ana, and trusted that God was calling for a reason, and it would all work out.

While I was letting go of worrying about exactly what I would do there, and deciding that the reason I was going was to build community and be in relationship, the community of Shekina Bapist church in Santa Ana was deciding the same thing: that I was coming to build community and be in relationship… that seems like a sign, to me. They planned a week for me that involved spending time with as many people as possible, having dinner with a different family each night, talking, talking, talking, becoming friends, discovering how similar we are. The night before I left I spoke to the community (in Spanish! I found you learn really fast when you have no choice!!) and told them, “now I have three communities: my church, the Catholic Worker, and Shekina.” Heads nodded, and before I left they gave me a blessing. I promised to return in December, hopefully with some other dreamers, to discover together how this relationship might grow.

I want to tell you about some of the people I met in Santa Ana.

Alex and Ruth Orantes are Baptist pastors; Ruth pastors tiny Shekina church, which split from the larger First Baptist Church in Santa Ana about fifteen years ago over women in leadership and other justice issues. For years they met in living rooms, before building the church on the site of a former garbage dump at the end of a rutted road where they now worship. They have purchased land behind the building, and want to build a community center there, to reach out to the poor of the neighborhood. It would have educational and health care opportunities, as well as offering elder and child care. Ruth leads this community with love —- and there is a lot of love in the community – love for God and for each other, and awareness that such love is meant to be shared.

Alex pastors a community called Shalom, out in the country, without a church building. He introduced me to some of the people his community helps – “small farmers,” he calls them – struggling families whom the church has supplied with chickens, which become the livelihood of the family. I met Idelona Aguirre and her six children, who together raise and sell their chickens, and together walk each day down a very long and dusty road, carrying cooking equipment, to cook and sell pastilitos by the roadside. Their faces reflect both the palpable hope in a family that sees a way to the future –– and the delight of a surprise visit from Alex, whose love for his parishioners is clear. Un buen pastor.

I went with my friends Eduardo and Abel to the memorial to the 75,000 killed or disappeared during the war in the 1980’s (In Cuscatlán park in San Salvador). These young men were children during the war. The stories come out slowly, of the uncles who disappeared, the father tortured and killed when Alex was ten. That night at supper with Eduardo’s family, he offers to show me a movie called “Innocent Voices,” telling the story of the war from the point of view of a child who lived it. On Sunday, Eglantina tells me of walking to work in those days past dead bodies in the street, how one would distance oneself from it, for survival.

The day before I was to leave, Alex asked if I would meet with some leaders who had been jailed recently for their work in support of the campesinos. There were seven of them, but only one would come to speak, Maria Ana Calles Ramos, a courageous woman with a horrifying story of being taken away by police and soldiers, with no warrant or explanation. In jail, necessary medication was taken from them and destroyed. Female prisoners who asked to use the restroom were thrown in with men, who were told to use and abuse them as they pleased, then taunted by guards when at Maria Ana’s plea they gave the women safe passage to use the restroom, and did not rape them. They were later taken to a women’s prison where the food had been mixed with cockroaches and animal feces, and were kept for a while in an underground prison where there were animals. Alex and another pastor with help from a government official were able to get them released after a few weeks. Maria Ana wants her story told, but I have not been able to interest the North American press in it, so I tell it here. While I was in Santa Ana, there was a riot in the jail there in which 21 inmates were killed. – it was in the news in England, but not here. As terrible as are the conditions in the jails, there is also the fear that this is the beginning of a resurgence of the repression seen in El Salvador in the years leading up to the war.

We know the problems of the poor. Sanitation, heath care, education, housing - in a country like El Salvador, where the average income is five or six dollars a day, it’s overwhelming. If you are feeling a pull to work on dreaming about how we in Rochester might partner with the people of Shekina, and work for life and growth and health and education in El Salvador, come to St. Joe’s on Friday, March 23 at 7 pm. I’ll show you a powerpoint presentation the people of Shekina put together about the community center they want to build, and we can talk and dream together. I’d like to form a coalition of local churches that would together be in relationship with Shekina. Long term, I’d like to see people from here going there to work in their center (in exchange, they want to teach us Spanish) - and to bring some from there, here.

Let’s start dreaming and doing, and building a relationship. There’s lots of work to do!