rain, goldfish, fireworks, and kites

So, when I last left you, I was leaving to walk home in the rain. It was raining harder than I thought, so I ran. I first ran to Casa Romero, seeking refuge until the rain let up, but I rang the doorbell to no avail. Then I ran to Casa Silvia, where I finally realized that no one was answering the doors because the power had gone out. (Of course it didn´t occur to me to just knock.) So I just ran all the way home, much more wet than I would have been if I had just done that in the first place. I ran waving `hola!´ past Esteban, the vigilante outside of our gate, who just threw his head back and laughed at me. I have never seen any Salvadorans running through the rain. They look at you like you´re crazy if you do. `Look at this gringa! Running through the rain like a child!´ I can´t deny it. And that image and description of myself in a way gives me peace. It´s who I am. I love the rain.
Anyway, when I got home, I took off my wet clothes and went to the bathroom, putting a drop of soap in my hands only to realize that the sky had stolen all the water. So in naught but me skivvies, I stepped out onto the balcony and washed my hands in the rain. Jamie was with me, taking pictures of the downpour, in absolute fascination of the rain here. It´s different, she said. And I responded, `Yeah, it´s like the sky really had to pee.´ She laughed and told me she really didn´t like that image. I don´t know why I said it, it´s just what came to me. But certainly there are better metaphors.
But the rain really does feel different here. And the lightening and thunder is much much louder, and echoes in your body. You feel it all over. There was a lake forming outside our house, and I thought `Shit. My laundry.´ Thankfully, Franny (our house cook) had moved it in for me, but that doesn´t get rid of the damp mildew smell.

On September 15, independence day in El Salvador (`supuestamente´says Lolo. They are still not free from my dear country...), I walked through the street with a tupperware dish holding two goldfish and staring up at a sky of fireworks. The goldfish were found in our Agua Cristal (the bottled water we drink here) - a prank played on our house by Trena´s daughters. I was on my way to Trena´s to return them, and assure the girls that we will get them back.

Kites here are made with string wrapped around giant hexagon-shaped wooden boxes. Much easier to release. In the late afternoons at Mariona, all the children run through the streets flying kites. I would like to paint this image. In a couple weeks for community night, we are going to have a painting party. I suppose I will paint it then.

I met a woman on Wednesday named Niña Mari. She was about seventy years old, and didn´t even come up to my shoulders. She shared a piece of her story about the war, thanked God more times than I could count, shed a few tears, and talked without taking a breath for about an hour. She was wearing a blue dress and an apron, and served us Pepsi.

Some thoughts.

no basta rezar

Just returned on Sunday from a weekend visit with my praxis site family in Mariona. The things we carried: 2 gallons of bottled water, and a roll of toilet paper each. Vital and humbling. There are 3 families we spend time with in Mariona. Family numero uno: Oti, her husband Roberto, and their son Oscar (4 yrs old, named after Oscar Romero, without a doubt). Numero dos: Oti´s nephew Lolo, his wife Aida, and their daughters Maria Jose (3 yrs) and Karen (5 yrs). I `teach´English to these three lovely children...Um, still trying to figure that out. Anyway, family numero tres: Lolo´s brother Lydio, his wife Keny, and their daughter Jasmin (2). I stayed with the third family. Details seemed necessary.
To continue, this past weekend brought back a lot of memories and feelings about Costa Rica, about what it was like to live alone with a family, to be completely dependent on an entirely different reality, language, bed, food, etc. My Casa community, as all communities to some degree, has the tendency to be rather insular here. So, this past weekend carried a healthy discomfort, necessary if I expect to grow at all here. The first night was so beautifully awkward. I was sitting there with so much pena, struggling to speak, express myself, be myself, pass the time. A small house, with no doors save one for the bathroom. Simple cloth partitions strung in front of the two bedroom doors facing the common room. A hammock draped across the length of the room. A refrigerator, a small table, some white plastic chairs, and a television filled the rest of the space. A plastic Winnie the Pooh poster and a small Salvadoran-made cross hanging on the wall. Though I offered to help, Keny cooked dinner alone. While she cooked, and while we ate, the television was on and the sounds of our evening were Avril Lavigne, Brittany Spears, and Smallville. I cannot help but smile in light of such circumstances. So awkward. Keny´s daughter Jasmin was fascinated and extraordinarily confused by my presence. I would even distract her from eating. She never took her eyes off of me. At one point, I was sitting in one of the chairs, and Jasmin was standing in front of me. One finger in her mouth, looking up at me with her giant deep brown eyes, she just started to pee all over the floor. No tears, no looking down to see what happened, no smile, just incredibly focused on my presence. Mama just mopped it up, changed her underwear, and went back to cooking. Diapers are for special occasions. For dinner: beans, platanos, some kind of egg pancake, and tortillas from next door. After dinner, washing in the pila - including dishes, clothing, face, and teeth. As I fumbled around in the pila, trying to figure it all out, Jasmin just stood and stared at me the entire time, ignoring constant pleas from her mother to leave me alone. Precious. After washing, I went to bed, but without a door, Jasmin was free to peek around the corner every few seconds, and ocassionally climb into my bed, content to just look. So I drew pictures with her, of rainbows, and ice cream cones, and cats, and hearts, and whatever easy cheesy happy things came to mind. After each picture I drew, she expressed some kind of sound akin to laughter, but more closely related to a monkey grunt. She was happy. And we are both left-handed.

On Saturday, we visited the Pequeña Communidad, a Christian base community in which Oti worked throughout the war, for about 17 years, mainly working with refugees and those in poverty. Oti often cries, relfecting on `the martyrs,´ friends of hers that were threatened, tortured, killed. In bits and pieces, she retells her experience to a new group of Casa students every semester, and I wonder what this means to her, why she is willing to relive it all, what sort of healing is found in sharing, if any at all. The other day in theology class, we talked about living with 'radical uncertainty.' Lolo talked about this, saying that even if they could not promise tomorrow, everyone working in the Pequeña Communidad committed to the struggle. This is their faith: ´No basta rezar; hacen falta muchas cosas para conseguir la paz.´ It´s not enough to pray; many things are lacking in order to achieve peace. Another song we´ll have to sing when I get back. I will deeply miss the music here.

Later in the afternoon, Oti taught us some massage techniques, and we all spent the afternoon doing a little liberation theology Bible reflection/meditation and giving each other massages. What? Kind of surreal. And not the experience people in other praxis sites are having, though no more or less beautiful. Oti is sort of my hero. She has suffered much and suffers still, but there is nothing holding her back from a good massage, afternoon reflection, and some sweet bread. She gets really excited about organic coffee, and calls her son `my sky.´ Lolo is equally wonderful. That afternoon, after our massage time, he said, `how marvelous, our hands!´ Everyone there is always encouraging us to share our lives, interested in where we come from just as much as they want to show us their reality. They are always saying how we are family now, and that borders do not exist for them. Solidaridad.

Lolo´s father, Moncho, was also in town this weekend. He and Lolo have identical smiles. But Moncho´s eyes are deep blue. Throughout dinner on Saturday night, Moncho sat in the doorway, swinging his keys in his hand, looking at the floor and occasionally looking at me. Everything was tinted blue, and on the wall of the street behind him was this giant mural of Che Guevara. And it´s hard to refrain from romanticizing everything, from taking mental photographs of images like that, and holding on to them as if they were reflections of pure truth. But it´s still here in my head, and it means something to me, and I thought it was beautiful. And knowing some of Moncho´s experiences throughout the war, every time I looked at him and he smiled, it made me want to cry. Not sure yet if that feeling is sadness. But I´m not in Kansas anymore. And never was. Not sure where I came from or how I got here. But I´m in love.

It´s raining now. Time to roll up my pants and walk home.

Peace.

my life is a spiderweb

Hello friends. family. neighbors. lovers.

I love spiderwebs, but I don't understand them. Twice I have watched spiders make a web, and literally stood immobilized in fascination. Once was in the corner of my living room at home looking through the bay window. I saw the whole thing, and kneeled there on the chair for about an hour. The other was in Chicago on the Fullerton platform waiting for the train. There was orange light somewhere.

Spiderwebs are strange and strong and intricate. They are vulnerable and sticky and simple. They catch, cling, and withstand. In the process of making a web, the spider continously has to move back to the center. Webs are beautiful, yet designed by creatures towards whom I often react rather violently.

My life here is beautiful. Everyday something connects. Sometimes its painful, sometimes its funny; always absurd. So much is speaking to me right now, and things often feel unbearably light and beautifully heavy in the same moment. It's like when Harold asks Maude if she prays, and she says, 'Pray?...No, I communicate.' Harold: with God? Maude: with LIFE! I'm communicating with both; you can't separate them here, or anywhere really. In El Salvador, God is horizontal, living deeply within everything - incredibly close, rooted, in constant communication, flux, flow. People often tell me stories about the war, about living in poverty, living through earthquakes and floods...Pause: water here is so interesting. There is a community that we visited called Las Nubes (the clouds) on the slopes of the San Salvador volcano, fairly near to Antiguo Cuscatlan. They have no running water, and praise God when it rains. Without the rain, they have to climb the hill with water on their backs, a nearly impossible feat. There is a community nearby in San Ramon that is currently working to improve this situation. But when it rains, it pours, and floods. And it immobilizes everything. Like snow. Like buckets and buckets of rain and mud. So it is a blessing and a curse. We have run out of water before in my house, several times, but we also have the resources to get the problem fixed in no time. I wash my clothes by hand, and there are no dryers. It is the rainy season, which means that everything feels and smells wet all the time. Water. ...So, as I was saying, people tell me stories. And God moves in their eyes, feet, hands. I say God, not because I understand it or see it clearly, but because at the end of each story, Salvadorans thank God, for everything, and especially the present moment. If I say to someone, 'see you later,' a Salvadoran will typically respond, 'God willing' (primero Dios). And it doesn't make sense really, for people who have suffered so much to have so much faith. Maybe it makes sense. I am currently exploring those questions.

The air here is thick, ripe, saturated, and dense. Salvadorans often speak of pain in terms of weight. They carry so much. So many memories, so many vivid images. Food - on their heads and backs, often uphill. Children - there are so many children. In general, my Spanish has been pretty good here. I can understand most everyone, except for two kinds of people: children and old people (most of whom lack teeth). A lot of what these people in particular have to say, though, is not expressed in words.

So what am I doing here? I mean that literally; answering that question philosophically is, well, not really something I feel like writing about today. But even answering this question literally is not easy. So much has happened within and around me that I hesitate to write or think or pray or reflect. In many ways it is too much, and there is a great temptation to table all of it, save it for later, to look back on it all at once. But I remember my one regret from last year: not writing enough, not sitting each day deep within my thoughts (I suppose Ignatian spirituality has already creeped its way into me. Vamos a ver.) And, I am afraid of coming back and having one of you lovely people ask me how things went, and me staring at you blankly, depressed because I wished I would have shared bits and pieces along the way. So I am forcing myself to remember - to put into my heart again - all that I have seen, heard, tasted, smelled, and felt. So, the senses I suppose.

I have seen...a lot. green mountains. rain clouds. fruit trees. flowers. The trees on my campus look like water color paintings - like sunsets and rain have seeped into the bark. They are dripping with color, layered and peeling, but smooth to the touch. Tall and skinny, lime green, deep red, awkward purple, all at once. So many colors. A spider in the shower. A spider in the living room. Ants on my desk. A giant brown moth. What appeared to be a bat flying through the kitchen. Lots of bugs and critters in general. Trash. So much trash, just dumped in random places, cluttering dirt roads. Graphic photgraphs of the women and priests that were killed at the UCA (University of Central America, the school I am attending here) in 1989. The clothing they were wearing. The rose garden to remember them by. I've seen the altar where Archbishop Oscar Romero was killed in 1980, the pictures, his clothes, his bed and car and half empty/full tube of toothpaste. That's what really got to me. Even more than than the bloody pictures and clothes, it was that damn tube of half-used toothpaste. Lots of tears and smiles. Missing teeth. Purple, veiny meat. Kevin and Trena's chickens and children and new puppy. A million buses with Jesus messages all over them.

I've heard a lot of songs here. Let's sing them when I get back. We always sing before each meal, and yesterday, Edith - one of my Salvadoran roomates - played the guitar as we sang. Eight beautiful women singing in Spanish. Lovely. Birds, and so many birds. Car alarms, sensitive even to thunder. And of course, a mountain of Spanish. More exhausting than I thought.

I eat meat now. I figured that would happen, and aside from the purple veiny serving (I didn't even try), I have been quite pleased with the flesh-eating.

Everything is damp. Thus, a lovely mildew accompanies our house and beds and clothing throughout most days. Shower, sweat, rain. Shower, sweat, rain. On Fridays the cooks make sweet bread and I have smelled that, too. One day I stepped in something horrific and mysterious, and there was no cure for my right shoe save two thunderstorms and some sunshine.

I was sick the first week. In fact, nearly everyone was sick. No need to pass along the details, but it has since passed, and I hope to never feel such shivers or rumbly in my tumbly again.

My life here thus far. Perhaps you can imagine it more clearly. Still, these are bits and pieces.

Paz y solidaridad,
Abi