Last month, I had the privilege of spending a week in El Salvador as part of a group of Jesuit educators and administrators from universities around the country. We were partnered with CRISPAZ and the Casa de las Americas of the University of Central America (UCA). I think trips like these can be both impactful and problematic if not done with a spirit of witness and accompaniment. I found the experience beautiful and challenging. I’ll be sharing a few thoughts here in retrospection on the experience. Here is a shot of the volcano from our hotel in San Salvador to get started.

On our first full day in El Salvador, we visited several praxis sites – Tepecoyo and San Ramon.  The praxis sites are communities in and around San Salvador where UCA students in the Casa de las Americas program work several days a week as part of their program in addition to their regular slate of courses each semester.  These university students live together in community, cooking, cleaning, eating, and studying together.  The community at San Ramon provided powerful testimonies about the social reality in El Salvador and maintained a strong witness to its many martyrs.  I was struck by a map they had of the massacres that happened in the country during the civil war of the 1980s.  History can be a millstone around our necks, but it can also provide us with stories of endurance and perseverance through troubled times.  Choosing to remember those who suffered in those troubled times is a way to honor their lives and to find meaning in our own.

The photos below are from the community center in Tepecoyo, a poster commemorating some martyrs of the civil war, and a mural documenting the massacres during the civil war.

Tuesday morning we visited the University of Central America (UCA).  We met with the UCA administration and heard an informative, if sobering, presentation on the current state of El Salvador by Alvero Artiga, professor of Political Science at the UCA.  The visit to the UCA was a personally moving part of the trip.  On the morning of November 16, 1989, American trained soldiers entered the university and assassinated 8 people, 6 six Jesuit priests, a university employee and her daughter.  They were killed because they walked with the poor and in the midst of civil war dared to call for peace and an end to the suffering.  I was a senior in high school when this happened, and yet that event and my coming to learn of it when I was in graduate school has shaped my life in profound ways – my faith, my vocation, even my spouse are all tied back to that day.  I often think what it would mean to have an attack like that on my own campus, how it would mar the landscape at the same time as it made it sacred.  I also wonder about the dubious choices I have made and the shaky convictions I keep.  Ignacio Ellacuria, S.J. long ago became my patron saint.  I wonder what he would make of me.

The pictures below are of the (now) rose garden where the Jesuit were assassinated, the bedroom where Elba and Celina Ramos were killed, and the clothes Ignacio Ellacuria was wearing when he was killed.

They say that you need to mourn the dead and fight like hell for the living, an idea that kept recurring in my mind as we visited places like the rose garden and then also meeting with professors, students, and community organizers.  I was grateful to be able to talk and share meals with my colleagues both from the U.S. and the UCA, as well as the UCA students.  At these meals we talked in English and Spanish about American and El Salvadoran politics, our jobs, our families, what music we liked to listen to.  Topics both mundane and consequential.  At times, these conversations seemed exactly like conversations I have at Xavier University – there was a comfort in that, a sense of shared vocation.  At others, I was amazed at how much of my high school Spanish I retained to carry on a meaningful conversation for a half hour.  In the evening, we went out for pupusas in the neighborhood square.  The mood was festive in our large crowd of my colleagues and the UCA students, but I ended up sitting at a table with one of the UCA students, just he and I, me stumbling through my Spanish, he practicing his English.  I don’t think I could have done that when I was twenty – hold a conversation with an “adult” twice my age.  Let’s face it, dinner in a local restaurant is not the revolution, but it might teach you who you’re fighting for and along with.

The photos below are of the entrance to the UCA Jose Simeon Cañas – the full name of the university (Jose Simeon Cañas was instrumental in abolishing slavery in El Salvador) and the Pupuseria Bens in Antiguo Cuscatlan.