Home Again

It has been a few days now since we've returned to our families and homes. What a wonderful scene in the airport -- hugs from my husband and children, and a chance to meet each other's families. I am inspired to post a Top 5 list of things that I am savoring at the moment, knowing that the experience will continue to change and evolve as time passes. Here's what's on my mind:

1. I love that David has had a chance to Skype with Erika and Alex, connecting in a personal way about ideas that have been generated around how we might best be able to help the community there.
2. I cherish telling stories to my boys about the experience, showing them photos from the trip and answering their questions. Nick, my 8-year-old, is anxious for me to come to his classroom to share a slideshow.
3. I bought the right sizes of soccer jerseys for the three of them, and Joe, my four-year-old, recogized someone in my photos wearing the same El Salvador soccer jersey he received. They have been wearing their new shirts all day, and have been sleeping in them!
4. Everyone at my office has been so supportive and kind, asking good questions and honoring the magnitude of the trip.
5. I received a recommendation for the best papusas in town: Gloria’s Secret Café in Beaverton. I look forward to checking it out.

Still marveling at the wonderful people I met -- both on our delegation and in El Salvador. Incredible blessings and much to be thankful for as we enter the holiday season.

There is one piece from Archbishop Oscar Romero that, for me, captures much of the spirit of the experience. Let me share it with you:

In general, education in our Latin American countries is directed toward the desire to have more, whereas today's youth demand rather to be more, to realize themselves through service and love.

Let us not develop an education that creates in the mind of the student a hope of becoming rich and having the power to dominate. That does not correspond to the time we live in.

Let us form in the heart of the child and the young peron the lofty ideal of loving, of preparing oneself to serve and to give oneself to others.

Anything else would be education for selfishness, and we want to escape the selfishness that is precisely the cause of the great malaise of our societies.

The church must propose an education that makes people agents of their own development, protagonists of history, not a passive, compliant mass, but human beings able to display their intelligence, their creativity, their desire for the common service of the nation. Education must recognize that the development of the individual and of people is the "advancement of each and all from less-human to more-human conditions."

Amen.