One week can change your life. My life was forever changed in one week's time. And then imagine what the four months did....
Before El Salvador...
Before El Salvador, I had never left the country.
... I had a very limited and one-sided world view.
... I thought one of the most pressing moral and ethical issues of our day was abortion.
... I had never seriously thought about what it means to be a woman in the world.
... I had never seen a woman priest; I never thought women could be priests.
... I had never heard about liberation theology; I had never read The Struggle Is One
... I didn't know how to Be Peace, and see the interconnectedness of all life
... I didn't know if my Spanish was any good, if I could really communicate in another language.
... I had never met Isabel, the bravest woman I know.
... I had never heard first hand accounts of what it's like to fight a war, live through a war, on your own soil, in your own neighborhood.
... I thought I knew what it meant to love. I was wrong.
... I had never tasted a delicious pupusa
... I never heard of refugee camps from the personal account of a woman who lived in one, gave birth in one.
... I never understood the profound courage of a woman standing up for herself and her family in a machista society where she could have been killed.
... I didn't know how to make tortillas; although my sad attempt today cannot live up to my Salvadoran sisters and mothers
... I had a feeling there was something more out there. After El Salvador I knew there was.
... I had never stood on sacred ground where others had sacrificed their lives for their beliefs in something good, a better ways of being together and loving one another.
... I had never had to contemplate the profound horror of hundreds of innocent children slaughtered in a single place and a mother listening to the cries and pleas of her own children as it happened.
... I undervalued the power of women when we get together and share our stories
... I didn't know Oti, Lolo, Elizabeth, Karen, Oscar, and so many others...
... I only thought I knew what a broken heart was
... the world made some sense
... I thought I was old for my age
... I thought I knew a lot and was well informed
... I loved buying shoes and had a closet full of them
... I had rarely, if ever, shown my own brokenness, fear, sadness
... I was a different person
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| My host family in Ellacuria, El Salvador with Isabel, the bravest woman I know (Spring 2006) |
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| Casa Spring 2007 |