Let Your Heart Be Open

Subtitle: 

     Between March 23-30, Father Isaiah Mary led a group of 12 students through a spiritual adventure in the depths of El Salvador.  This was a week where they would hear the stories of the Salvadoran people, their civil war, and their way of life.  This trip was aptly named “Project El Salvador: Let Your Heart Be Open” and indeed, their hearts were opened, broken and knitted together by the grace of the Risen One.  These are their stories, which they give to you.  May your hearts be broken.  Shalom.    

~Father Isaiah Mary OP

Date: 
Sunday, April 15, 2012
Quarter: 
Spring 2012

     My state of mind when I left the dorm in the dark hours of the morning to board an SFO-bound Super Shuttle was mostly that of an exhausted post-final haze. Even in my more awake hours on the long flight to El Salvador, I couldn’t have really said what my expectations of this country would be. It was my first time to El Salvador, my first time to Latin America, and the first time I had chosen not to go home on a Stanford break. Given my attachment to home, choosing to travel to El Salvador and stay away from home for over six months was a big decision for me.  I even had a mild panic attack about going right before, almost backed out, but ultimately decided to take a chance on this small, Central American country.

     What I literally found in El Salvador ranged from the exciting (colorful buildings, delicious food, and good music), to the frightening (barbed wire, military assault weapons, and one night of our group being followed and targeted), to the beautiful (the hills and volcanoes of the countryside, a stained-glass masterpiece of a church, and a small, clean river running through our rural homestay town). These are the sights, sounds, and sensations of El Salvador, things that, as a tourist, I had access to because of the kindness and generosity of our hosts. What for me was really the most unexpected, though, and what was without a doubt the most impacting, was less tangible than the architecture, landscapes, and food . . . It was the stories. Hearing a man speak about the death threats that were at that moment piling up in his home, just because he was an anti-mining activist, or listening to a woman recount how she and her siblings took turns clinging to their father to keep men from gunning him down, or hearing about the moment when Oscar Romero fell dead behind his altar – these stories struck me with their tragic immediacy. They came to me directly from people who have experienced them, been affected by them, and continue [to] live with their realities every hour of every day. They aren’t newspaper headlines. They’re what life is like when you wake up in the morning: no drama, no music, no fancy title page. Just your normal life.

     El Salvador and its stories haven’t vanished simply because I’m safely back in the United States. My head is full of them, and, yes, they do need to get out and be told. In fact, every time our group spoke with a Salvadoran, the direct appeal from them was always the same in the end: go back to America. Let your people know about this, about us. Tell my story. I only hope I can do them justice.

~Andrea Acosta, 2014

 

     Living comfortably in a first-world country can make you extremely complacent. Though it is a cliched story that a student will witness the poverty in the third-world and be radically changed, devoting the rest of his life to these new issues and working tirelessly to fight the injustice he sees, there is a great deal of truth in the call to action, and this call may be best realized by trips that physically take a person to the countries facing the greatest problems. The trip to El Salvador not only put me and other students face-to-face with poverty and obvious injustice, but more importantly reminded us that we were in a unique position to help all of the people we saw around us. As members of the first-world, as Americans, as students at an elite university, we had potential to participate politically in a country responsible for a great deal of what is happening abroad, we had the potential to get grants, do research, connect with professors, all in order to come down to El Salvador and work on concrete issues such as women’s rights, exploitation of mine workers, gang rehabilitation.

     The cinch for me came during a talk on the actions of a transnational mining corporation against the labor movement in El Salvador, on the deaths that had befallen activists working to protect the environment and the health of those in the regions affected by mining. The speaker conveyed the general situation, the tragedies that had occurred, and the steps that still needed to be taken, but then he told us, quite frankly, that we had great power to help, that as American students we could easily influence the corporations doing this damage or get support from our universities to help their cause in a concrete way. And he was right. There are dozens of ways that we can help this issue, and there are dozens of issues facing the country of El Salvador, and there are dozens of countries like El Salvador. This realization, directed personally at me as a university student, shook me out of a complacency that I had been in for some time, and reminded me of the call to action I had, and made me feel guilty. And this guilt is extremely useful; we can learn to use it to abandon our easy-living as first-world citizens and to remind ourselves of the moral obligations we have as human beings to other human beings, no matter where in the world they are located. The trip to El Salvador did this for me and for others on our team, and I am grateful for the guilt and uncomforable feeling I have received from the excursion; such exposures keep us from ignorance of the world’s problems.

~Joe Rivano Barros, 2014

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