More from my travel journal about my recent trip to El Salvador to investigate the work of Compassion International:
DAVID’S HOME:
David hasn’t said a word on the trip to his house. His face is round. His hands stay hidden away in the pockets of his red project uniform fiddling with marbles. We met David at his project in San Salvador, an after school program run by a church with the support of, and oversight from, Compassion International. The program is like all other projects, serving a good meal and glass of milk, tutoring students in math and reading, teaching skills like computer science or sewing to those with more initiative or interest.
In the crowd of children at the project today David didn’t stand out. He blends in. He stays quiet. But not because of melancholy. No, David looks as if he’s always thinking, his mind running far away from this place, maybe dreaming of a life different from his own. Something is being turned over in his mind and when he bothers to speak to the rest of us, the people in the real world, he is well spoken and obviously intelligent.
Roberto, our guide for the day, warns us to watch our step. He pulls the chain on the flap of scrap metal posing as a door and David bounds past us and down the stairs into his home. This is where David lives, part of what he escapes each day at the project, where he plays marbles, sleeps and dreams of something else perhaps.
Two dozen steps made of dirt and pieces of pipe take us down ten feet into a small tent made from mud and fragments of metal, plastic and large sticks. A wall of root-riddled earth is his front yard and his roof is cardboard and corrugated metal, full of holes and held down by rocks.
Beside his house is an area with no roof, a side yard I guess, the wall of earth still blocking the outside world from view and maintaining the closed in and safe feeling of this place. It’s there under the large trees that David’s grandmother drags two plastic chairs into formation, shoos arthritic scraggly chickens from her path with a wave of her bare foot, and motions us to have a seat. Her face is round like David’s but she is not as quiet. Her voice belongs on the radio, low and sonorous, hearty and expressive – almost as expressive as her face. Her eyebrows rise almost to her dark brown hairline when excited and bow almost to her cheeks when her lips pucker into disgust or denial.
“Do you go to church?” Roberto asks.
“No. No,” she puckers, “I do laundry so we can eat. I would like to go sometime but how would we live. I must work.”
Roberto turns his questions to David. “What are your dreams, David?” And David lights up, lifts his hands from his pockets and, gesturing as if holding a gun, says, “I’d like to be a soldier.”
His grandmother interrupts, “I don’t want him to go to Iraq.” And Roberto explains that some men in David’s town have died in Iraq. Many men from El Salvador are fighting with the American led allied forces. And may boys long to follow in their boot steps.
The United States, Roberto will later explain to me, funded El Salvador’s government forces in the country’s war from 1979 to 1992 with it’s own people. El Salvador is a democracy. A democracy ruled by twelve wealthy families who own coffee plantations, car dealerships, shopping malls, and other businesses of enormous riches. Members of these families intermarry in a monarchy-like fashion and from this pool of elite citizens is elected politicians and presidents. The revolution began when the poor, later funded by the Soviets, assassinated wealthy aristocrats. The wealthy retaliated by sending “death squads” into the poorest areas to torch every structure and every peasant regardless of gender or age. Their tactics were supported and financed by the United States and the eventually negotiated peace with the poor leftists. Neither side was innocent. Both were brutal.
And today young men like David dream of being soldiers, not caring which side they fight on or what they fight for, because a soldier eats and gets paid. If a soldier lives he’s better off than before. That is David’s dream.
Grandmother wants something more for David. She’s grateful he’s going to the project and learning how to use a computer and to read and write. She’s hopeful that he’ll be better off without risking his life. She says her dream for him is that he’ll be a good man and work hard and live a long time.
“That’s what we all dream for our children isn’t it? Good people living a long life?” I ask.
“Si,” she smiles.
We spend a few more minutes at her house talking about David and his sponsor in the States, about Soccer and praying for her and her family, huddled in a circle, our arms wrapped around each other like friends. One God. One Church. We love our children more than ourselves. And we want them to live.
We hug and say good-byes and make our way towards the steps and up to the outside world again. It’s been nice here, in the shade - palpable love and acceptance from a grandmother doing her best to replace a father and mother who abandoned their son.
I bet David misses this small house when he’s gone - and his grandmother’s big smile and bobbing eyebrows, the safety of a refuge hidden from view and filled with so much adoration. David has a good life, family and faith leaving him better off in the wake of war than some of his neighbors.
I say a prayer to myself as we leave. I pray his life will be long and spent taking the love his grandmother and the project lavish on him to others who dream of a life without poverty. I pray he loves them the way his grandmother loves him.
Even now, she wishes she could do more for us strangers. “I did not know you were coming. I would have cooked. The next time you come visit me,“ his grandmother promises, “I will kill this chicken for you and make a soup. I promise you.”
A bent bird scrambles away from her club of a bronze foot. I believe her.
From my journal. More from day 1 of my trip to El Salvador to observe what Compassion International is doing and how they do it:
SANTIAGO’S HOUSE:
Less than ten feet from a railroad track stands a small mound of wavy metal resembling a collapsed shed more than someone’s home. But it is a home. Santiago’s. We just toured Santiago’s Compassion International project. We visited his classroom where he’s learning how to read. He beamed with pride showing us how well he can write and giggled at how poorly we spoke his language. In fact, Santiago giggled at just about everything today.
I’m told he’s poor, his family being clothed and fed by the church Compassion partners with in his neighborhood, one of over a hundred in El Salvador. But it’s hard to believe. He looks like an ordinary eight year-old, just with an extraordinary charisma.
Santiago walked quickly with us from his Compassion project, eager to show us the way. But we took our time, our guide watching out for gang members that patrol the neighborhood. We passed a small witchcraft operation a hundred feet from Santiago’s home. The hand-pained sign draws the downtrodden to the “temple”, a house concocting a brew of Catholicism and magic spells promised to smite enemies and protect anyone willing to pay. Everywhere we turn it seems like good and evil, despair and hope, live next door to each other in San Salvador. And both have growing armies of converts.
Past trash heaps. Past the same breed of “third world dog” again and again. Past shoeless children and open fields shadowed by brooding clouds. Thunder warns us from a distance.
We open the door to Santiago’s house, peeling back one five foot tall rectangle of tin with no handle, and walk across the dirt and rock floor. “Hola,” I say to his aunt and take her hand. Roberto, a local administrator from Compassion, knows this family but asks them questions for our benefit, translating into English as he converses.
“Who here takes care of you, Santiago?”
“Just my aunt.”
“Where is his mother? His father?” he asks the aunt.
“His mother is with a gang and his father is a drug dealer. They aren’t together and left Santiago when he was small. They don’t care for him.”
The families we meet here talk about cruel realities in front of children like I ask my wife to pass the salt.
“What about his grandfather?” Roberto motions towards a shadowed man across the small room buttoning his shirt and leaning hard on a pole that holds up one corner of this plastic quilted house. The grandfather I assume. He laughs to himself but doesn’t look up.
“No,” the aunt answers, “I take care of Santiago alone.”
“Who pays? Who works here?”
“Santiago does odd jobs when he can find them. I do laundry for people.”
“How much money are you able to make?”
“$4 this week. It’s been good,” she grins.
“Good. Good. Santiago, what are your dreams?”
When we stepped into his home Santiago’s demeanor immediately melted, his frame bent, his steps shuffled, his eyes drawn to the floor. The happy child at the project devolved into a slumping boy doing his best to disappear. Something tells me he isn’t safe here. He isn’t at ease here. There’s tremendous fear or embarrassment or something weighing him down under this roof. But this question about dreams resurrects him.
He smiles and looks up again.
“Come on, Santiago! Tell us your dreams!” Roberto lifts Santiago off the dirt floor and sets him on a stump. And Santiago confidently and quickly answers, “I want to be a policeman. I want to help people.”
“Bueno. Muy Bueno, Santiago,” I said. And praise pours from the other white faces who came with me. “Muy Bueno.”
“What is a good thing about your project, Santiago?” Roberto asks.
“I play with my friends. I eat. I read.”
We talk more with his aunt and his cousins, all living in this small space with few walls, one bed and rusted tin roof balanced on sticks and bent poles someone threw away once. They tell us they’re grateful for the Compassion project and say we can pray for them. Roberto asks grandfather to join our circle and we take each other’s hands.
“Will you pray for us, Shaun?” he asks me. And I agree but don’t know where to start. Words, even words to God, seem trite and inadequate in this place. And after a long pause, longer than any I may have ever taken in my life, I pray. Small words. Simple. Love. Protect. Feed. Clothe. Teach. Thank You. Roberto translates. And we all say, “Amen”, then hug one another and I look at every set of eyes trying to nail these faces to the walls of my mind. I hope they never come down and I never stop talking with God about them, asking big things with small words.
From my journal. My first thoughts upon arriving in San Salvador, capital of El Salvador, on my trip to observe Compassion International:
SAN SALVADOR:
McDonalds. Shopping malls. Sherwin Williams. This looks like North America. This looks like a place blossoming with the fruits of capitalism and democracy. And it is.
Prostitutes. Broken glassed storefronts, graffiti. A passed out bearded man on a sidewalk. This looks like North America too. This looks like a place choked by the weeds of selfishness and politics. And it is.
San Salvador, Central America perhaps, is just North America fast forwarded or under a magnifying glass. The disparity between the haves and have nots is here in different proportions, in exaggerated contrast. The living and the dying share the smallest nation in Central America, splitting it in half. Fifty percent of El Salvador’s people are impoverished, living on less than the equivalent of $1 a day. The other fifty percent have more. They are living somewhere between getting by and luxury.
And that is what makes the Americas so much more frustrating to me than some other impoverished nations. In parts of Africa exist tribes in which poverty is the norm. There is no wealth, no getting by, no other kind of life within view to compare oneself too. There is no hope down the street. No one to plead with, no neighbor to help. It is easy in such places to believe that such a neighbor, one that was blessed with more, would share if he only existed. And maybe he does in some far away land. Maybe he’ll arrive on an airplane and save us – they might wonder.
But in the Americas the neighbors with more than enough exist in abundance and every poor person knows it. I was slapped today by this realization that in the Americas help IS down the road and needn’t arrive from a far away place by plane. If only the houses we passed on the way to the Compassion International projects today would look beyond their own front doors. If only the patrons of the malls and fast food chains and home improvement stores would keep just enough and spend the rest on fighting poverty next door. If North Americans would look at their daughter’s dance costume as three Salvadorans that could be saved, at their new stereo as six stomachs that could be filled, at a church sound system as ten thousand bodies clothed, fed and revived by the love of God – If only.
If only the Church, in every nation it lives in, would stop and stoop and dress the wounds of it’s own members and then it’s own countrymen and then those beyond it’s borders.
If only I could do this. Only enough. But what does that look like?
I have only a few minutes to pop in on SHLOG.COM and give a quick update about our trip. Everyone is well and aside from losing our luggage (we have it now) there haven´t been any hitches in our travels. We tour the homes of children sponsored through Compassion International everyday and play with the children at Compassion´s ¨project¨ sites. I´m slowly learning Spanish, enough to ask where the bathroom is, and learning that tickling and falling down to get laughs are international forms of communication all kids understand.
I´m accumulating stories, journaling daily, and will have a lot to share when we get back. The moral of every story I´ll tel though is that the Church is a global politic, a powerful alternative to the parties and presidents of nations, able to reach into souls in ways that policies and administrations cannot, able to care for the whole person in ways that no one else is able. I´m seeing that proven here in El Salvador where half of the nation is living on less than $1 a day, 80% of little girls are sexually abused before age 12 and gangs rule the country side. Even here, in poverty that makes prayer and words feel trite and insignificant, chidren smile and eat and learn and mothers and fathers have hope. Doctors, teachers, policemen, pastors, singers and painters, lovers of other peeople are born at these orojects daily. People are being transformed and seeds are being sown for a future with less hunger and sickness. And it is the Church reaching through the arms of Compassion International to the people we´ve been with here this week.
To everyone who has sponsored a child through Compassion, please be encouraged. The children treasure your letters and ask us if we know you (they have no idea how many Steves there are in America). You are solvingreal problems for real people and God is getting the attention and credit for it. Thank you for loving children. By doing so you are loving Jesus. And I´ve seen him smile back at us this week. I´ve heard him say ¨Gracias.¨
More when we land.
Thanks for the prayers,
Shaun
My pastor is a keen communicator but today his message on the tenth commandment bidding us not to “covet” was overshadowed and outgunned by Sarah McLaughlin. Her music video for “World On Fire” prefaced his message and created compulsions in me that three points on a screen and thirty minutes from a pulpit just didn’t. Amazing how powerful the duo of song and sight is for some of us, especially when tied to the lived example of giving.
I leave town tomorrow for El Salvador, where I’m promised I’ll walk through poverty like none I’ve seen before, and today’s plea from a rock star to take less in order to give more was a sobering preparation of my heart and mind for all that waits for me this week.
Thanks, Sarah for your inspiring sermon this morning.
In the crowd of children at the project today David didn’t stand out. He blends in. He stays quiet. But not because of melancholy. No, David looks as if he’s always thinking, his mind running far away from this place, maybe dreaming of a life different from his own. Something is being turned over in his mind and when he bothers to speak to the rest of us, the people in the real world, he is well spoken and obviously intelligent.
Two dozen steps made of dirt and pieces of pipe take us down ten feet into a small tent made from mud and fragments of metal, plastic and large sticks. A wall of root-riddled earth is his front yard and his roof is cardboard and corrugated metal, full of holes and held down by rocks.
Grandmother wants something more for David. She’s grateful he’s going to the project and learning how to use a computer and to read and write. She’s hopeful that he’ll be better off without risking his life. She says her dream for him is that he’ll be a good man and work hard and live a long time.
