What happens next - Saturday

In the gospel reading for Saturday, the Sadducees proposed to Jesus the dilemma of what happens in the afterlife when a woman has had seven husbands due to their sequential death. The purpose of the question appears to have been to catch Jesus in a logical conundrum of the future. Jesus' response suggests that the Sadducees would be better off focusing on the concerns of today. For all of us, Saturday was a day reflecting on the previous week, and the future of what will come in El Salvador.


We began the day with a visit to Centro de Intercambio y Solidaridad (CIS) (see link top right). CIS has a variety of programs, ranging from forming and guiding small business cooperatives to running a Spanish language school with the mission of promoting solidarity and cultural exchange between Salvadorans and their american neighbors. We met Friday night with Leslie Shuld, the director of CIS, who shared insights and experiences from working in El Salvador with CIS for 16 years. She shared with us that although coffee replaced indigo as the primary export of El Salvador in the 1870's. indigo is making a comeback as a natural dye to the point where local cooperatives have a hard time buying it affordably. In our visit to the CIS office in San Salvador, our goal was to find presents for friends and simultaneously support grassroots cooperatives with fair prices.


After this stop, we visited a more typical artesan (read tourist) market where goods were many and Maestro Mateo demonstrated his haggling acumen. Across the parking lot was our lunch stop, yes, a pupuseria. After this we visited the Contrasida (Against AIDS) Foundation, and met with one of their health educators who gave us a sense of HIV/AIDS in El Salvador. This was dramatically illustrated with a story of Juan and Miguelito and... well, let's just leave it at that.


To close the week, we made a pilgrimage of sites associated with Oscar Romero, the Salvadoran archbishop, who was murdered on March 24th, 1980 after being archbishop for only 3 years. If you enter any Salvadoran church, you are more than likely to see an iconic image of the man who was transformed from a shy and bookish scholar to the chief voice and inspiration of the poor in El Salvador during the government repression of the late 1970's. A 1993 report by the United Nations identified Roberto D'Aubuisson, founder of the ARENA party, in ordering the death of Romero by a death squad. The murder was the spark which ignited the 13 year long war between the government, let by the ARENA party and the FMLN. 1993 marked the end of the war, but ARENA has remained the dominant party for the last 16 years.


We visited the home of Archbishop Romero, a very small one bedroom house, near a small chapel called "Divine Providence". We saw the garments he wore while celebrating mass. One can clearly see the hole made by the single bullet which struck his heart while holding up the eucharist. We had a chance to meditate in the chapel and consider the deeper meaning of his assassination in the conscience of El Salvador. Lastly, we drove to the Cathedral of San Salvador which houses his remains in a crypt below the church. In 1997, John Paul II declared Romero "blessed" (first of three steps to become a saint).

At the end of the day we sat down for a debriefing session of the week, discussing what worked, what could be changed, and future possibilities for Providence in El Salvador.