Celebrating Life 3.24.11

I miss my family back home. My family back home is my mom and dad, my brothers, Joe and Patrick, my sister-in-law, Mary, my many aunts, uncles and cousins and my beautiful Grandma Erb. My family is also my close friends and mentors in Chicago, my friends across the U.S. who are studying at their respective colleges, and my dear friends studying in foreign countries this semester. And if all I could do is hold them each in a hug right now, I could rest content. Instead I hold them in my heart during this Easter season. Instead I honor the love that they have taught me by seeking out family here in this country.

For it is a strange place in which to stand, nearly four months passed. All at once there is this desire to soak up every last experience that I can encounter during my time in El Salvador. Staring longer at the mountains, breathing in deeper the air, noting the people, the places, the sounds, smells and moments that I love most about this country and these people. Attempting to relive the presence of mind that I walked with during my first weeks in this new place. Yet at the very same time, the very same time, four months feels like a long time. I feel physically so very far away from those that I love most in this world, and I can feel my heart tugging in their direction.

But that tugging, necessarily, could not lead me back home to Minneapolis quite yet. Instead it led me to my Praxis site and to the house of another Salvadoran friend. As Easter approached, all I could think of was family, family, family, family. My mind and heart were preoccupied thinking of all of those that I love.

Here in El Salvador, I have grown into another family. I have two in Mariona, with three little children. And humbly, if not uncertainly, these families took me in on Good Friday. I called on Thursday, stumbled awkwardly over asking if I could sleep in their home, and felt a great relief when they welcomed me happily. And the visit wasn’t exactly perfect, Holy Week does not exempt these families from their reality. I still worried them when I lingered too long by the taxi cab outside their door, attracting questions from little children who seemed a little too curious to know the name of this foreign white woman in their neighborhood. I knew better than to attract attention to myself like that, and so did my driver. These worries are constant. So necessarily we moved on, carrying them with us the rest of the night, eating dinner and playing card games.

After dinner, we reflected with the Gospel for Good Friday, starting with the reflection of their young six-year-old son named after Archbishop Romero. When it came to me, I was able to express honestly what it meant to me to be with them, to be with family. I felt this great lifting after sharing my thanks, now they understood why I had come. They understood and the mother of this family took my hands in her familiar way and looked again into my eyes. After the reflection, we stayed like that for a while, holding hands. We talked about simple things, still holding hands. Like my mother back home, this Salvadoran woman knows the power of that loving touch. She shared it with me generously.

That night I slept in the meditation room above their home. Made primarily of tin walls and tin roof, it is a sacred place. This is where we practice meditation every Wednesday. This is where the mother practices meditation with her friends and family when we North Americans are not around. This is the space she intentionally uses to recall the memories of the martyrs during the civil war and the daily struggles and traumas she and her family live today. This is where I was able to fall asleep during a rain storm that night, with the heavy sound of rain pouring down on the tin, sitting with God, recalling the sacred memories in that space.

On Saturday I traveled with the Salvadoran student who lives down the hall from me in our community. We went to the house where his family lives in the mountains to the West of us. We had visited his house one other time and I immediately fell in love with his home. Not only do they live close to a flowing river under canopies of mango trees, but he also has two little brothers that love to play soccer and go searching for crabs under rocks in the river. And again it wasn’t a perfect visit. My Spanish often fails in the more rural areas of El Salvador where the accents are different, the words are cut shorter and North Americans are few and far between.

I struggled to communicate with my friend’s parents and felt heavy in my strangeness as a foreigner, but content nonetheless just to be with his family, just to be near to his parents who worried about my cough, just to be near to his brothers who stared at me curiously most of the time and took care to show me every last page of their homework and drawings. And still Holy Week does not exempt this family either from their reality. On the radio we heard over and over again of the murders throughout the country, as crime seemed to spike during the week of vacation. As my friend had told me of his country, so many people head to the beach and murders rise, therefore there is not more peace during this week but less. And so in the safety of their home I celebrated Easter. We did not read the Bible but we walked through rivers, greeted cows and played soccer. We did not talk of Jesus but we celebrated life.

My life here is different from my life at home. This is obvious. But I am reminded of it in almost every moment. Even among family here, life is different, therefore we celebrate it differently. And one of the gifts that comes with that change is a whole new perspective on practicing Lent and celebrating Easter. If there is meat to eat on Ash Wednesday or Fridays here, we eat meat. These families sacrifice meat most other days of the year because their pockets can’t afford it. If there is a week of vacation as Easter approaches, with that vacation comes more crime, more murders. And so sometimes it is enough to be together, even if not at a mass or attending the processions at night when the walk home is less safe. Life, sacred as it is, is celebrated here in being together. Whether reading the Gospel or searching for crabs, either way, we are alive and celebrating with family.