Valle Nuevo, Part IV

The next day we went to the Rio Lempa. We drove a windy road past other small villages. Then we had to walk. It was a short distance, but steep downhill and hot. I slid and scraped the palm of my hand, which bled. Now the scar is a rosy pink oval in peeled skin.

Salome, Pedro, Rosita, Pastor, Juana, Juana's daughter and baby granddaughter came with us. The river was brown-green and unimpressive. The slopes on either side were jungle green and stone. We looked from our side onto Honduras. They looked the same.

Where is the cross? the Valle Nuevo folks wanted to know. They walked up the river and found it. We followed. The cross was long metal piping painted yellow, red, and blue. It marked the spot where the people had crossed the river in 1981. Most did not know how to swim, so they had strung a rope across.

Salome stared at the water. It was the first time he had been back in 30 years. He told us about his brother who had been one of the few who could swim. His brother had crossed the Lempa many times, helping children get to Honduras. Finally, when he was too tired, he walked up the Honduran side and was shot by the Honduran military. They killed many of the men ages 15-40 because they assumed any man that age was a guerilla soldier.

The memories of the Valle Nuevo folks came mostly in fragments, hard to translate. They spoke them to each other in the shorthand of old friendship. They did tell us that the water had been much higher, much faster. The soldiers had let open the dams. Later they showed us further down the river, to a little inlet where shot or drowned bodies had washed to calmer waters.

“God was always with us,” Salome told me later, repeating a refrain I had heard at Valle Nuevo many times. “Always, always.” The intellectual dilemma of the problem of evil does not exist here. The question, “where was God?” never gets asked. God was crossing the Rio Lempa. God was living in a tent in Honduras. God was suffering with them.

We washed one another's feet below the cross in the river water. "This is how you redeem a place," David Janzen said. Juana and Anali cleaned my feet. The water was free of blood.

Valle Nuevo, Part III

The directiva met again on Tomasa´s porch. This time, instead of with the lawyer, they were with the Shalom Missional Communities delegation. We all introduced ourselves in Spanish and said a few words. Even the delegation members who spoke no Spanish had had their introduction translated on paper. They spoke them courageously in haulting syllables.

The directiva updated us on the issue of the land. They had decided to go forward without the engineer. They had divided the land up themselves. Still, the process of legalization would take roughly another year, they told us, nodding their heads and rocking quietly in their chairs. They hoped our relationship would continue after the process was through. Of course, we assured them. This was not a project, but a relationship.

Afterwards, we gathered in to pray for Tomasa, who was sick. A few people prayed out loud; I prayed silently as I touched her shoulder lightly. Tomasa began to shake with all the intensity of an earthquake or an army inside her. ¨Gracias a Dios, gracias a Dios.¨She moaned her thanks to God into Nancy´s chest as Nancy tried to hold on to her. Then she fell back into David´s arms, completly limp. He lowered her onto the patio floor. She lay there for a few minutes, on her back, with her knees bent sideways, and her left arm over her forehead.

I stood over her not thinking one thing. In the U.S., I had seen people slain in the Spirit and it always arroused my suspicion or fear. But here, I felt neither of those. It only seemed like one more thing which I couldn´t explain, one more thing that did not need my explanation.

Valle Nuevo, Part II

I watched Felipa make tortillas. Her husband Salome had already grown and harvested the corn and this morning Felipa had boiled it and ground it into a paste. Now she took the long smooth stone and used it to pushed some of the paste thin against the rectangular stone with the curved depression. She did this several times until she had some of the paste separated. Then she took some in her hand and smacked it into the palm of her other hand and patted it in a circular motion. Then she spun it with one hand and smoothed its edges with the other until it was perfectly round and just the right thickness. She patted it twice more and flipped it onto a round iron sheet sitting over a wood fire. It was beautiful. The fluid motions were entirely natural and unselfconscious, as if she were playing a musical instrument.

She gave me a little bit of the paste and I tried to imitate her motions. I felt like a child. When did you learn to make tortillas? I asked her in Spanish. When I was little, she answered, holding her hand to the height of her waiste. Your mother taught you? Si, mi mama. She died in the war. Was it the soldiers? Si, the soldiers. She flipped my first tortilla onto the iron plate and gave me another small portion of the paste. My father too, she said. Before or after you went to Honduras? I asked. During, she said. In the Lempa River.

The Lempa River forms the border between El Salvador and Honduras in the area. In March of 1981, the soldiers came to the villages and 5,000 people fled to Honduras on foot. They were met at the river with gunfire from U.S. helicopters. 50 people died.

I didn't know what to say to Felipa, so I said nothing. Look, how beautiful, she said of my second tortilla, lightly browned. You are getting better, she said, though I saw no difference between the two. Then she smiled into the creases of her beautiful brown skin.

Valle Nuevo, Part I

**This is the first in a series of blogs about my trips to Valle Nuevo, a rural community of people in El Salvador who suffered greatly during the country's civil war and who have been rebuilding their lives ever since.***

The directiva of Valle Nuevo met on Tomasa's covered patio. The men wore cotton slacks or jeans, a collar shirt unbuttoned at the top, and a straw hat. Tomasa, the only woman, wore a brown dress with a dirty white apron. She was petite. Her whispy hair was pulled back in a bun; she had dark rings around her eyes, and a kind face. Below her feet, a kitten was breastfeeeding on a cat not much bigger than it. The directiva talked for awhile about tabacco and plastic and potatoes, which they had heard were the tortillas of Bolivia. Then the lawyer came. He wore slacks with a shirt unbottoned at the top and a gold cross around his neck, no hat. After he sat down by the others in a plastic lawn chair, a chicken pooped one inch from his shoe.

They were meeting about the land. Eight years ago, with the help of Shalom Missional Communities, the directiva had bought El Piyachu (the mountain that the people farm), and for eight years they had been trying to divide it legally into family plots. Family plots would mean that they could develop the land in long term ways--grow fruit trees, enrich the soil. It meant they could more easily obtain visas to visit the US. It meant a sense of security--no one could legally kick them off. They were stalled because the engineer who had divided up the plots was witholding the family names that went with each one. He wanted more money up front. It would be difficult to assign plots themselves, since some would necessarily be better than others. They began to talk through it together.

I am learning from the people of Valle Nuevo that the struggle continues always. The night before, Pastor and Rosita talked to Nancy, Gabriela and I over pupusas. They ripped off a piece of the tortilla; steam rose from an exposed edge of the beans inside. They told us about las minas. Two years ago a local journalist had been marytred for opposing Pacific Rim, a Canadian mining company that is polluting water sources in the area. "He was disappeared?" we asked. "No, they found his body five days later. His wife was killed too." They rubbed the piece of pupusa in a thin salsa. Then Rosita added, "Es otra guerra, las minas." Another war.

On Tomasa's porch, the rain started. At first I could not see it, only hear plinks on the tin above us. Four scraggly white pullets ran for cover. The rain got louder. Mical and Tomasa moved their lawn chairs closer in. Tomasa waved the chickens away from the kitchen with a cross between a hiss and a tsk.


The struggle continues, and the people of Valle Nuevo face it with the patience they have learned from long suffering. Maybe it was that patience, or maybe only the rain and the lazy meander of the animals, but I felt a sense of peace on that porch in Valle Nuevo. I felt as if I too could continue to struggle, and that the struggle, if not the suffering itself, could enrich my life.

The rain got louder. The meeting became a movie with the sound turned off. They gestured in the air and wrote things down and moved their lips, but I heard nothing. Streams poured down from the edge of the tin roof. The yard filled with brown puddles pocked by craters, the ephemeral imprint of each drop.

The Problems I Don´t Have on Monday in San Salvador

On Mondays all the museums are closed, so I headed off for El Boqueron, a park inside a volcano outside of town. I caught the first bus, route 101D on Bulevar de los Heroes, the wide street with a mall and a KFC and several Mister Donuts. El Salvador is where old US school buses go to live again. They are painted bright colors and often still have the signs in English: ¨You must stay behind the white line.¨ Anywhere in town costs 20 cents. I was supposed to transfer to the 103 at the second park in Santa Tecla. There are no signs for the bus stops. Signs are for strangers. Everyone here seems to operate by instinct. They congregate on the side of the road and moments later a bus comes. A man told me to get off where there was no park, but no bus came. Someone else told me, at the stoplight. No bus. Around the corner, said another. Eventually, I found the second park. People were selling yucca tostada, four apples in a plastic bag, medicamentos of dubious benefit. Here, here, the bus will come, they said. I waited an hour, got stung by a bee. The 103 finally came, but did not stop. I ran after it, hoping it would get caught it traffic. But I lost it around a corner. Here, here someone else said. I did not believe them. I began walking away from the park, my hand swelling from the bee. And that´s when, under the large gray trees, without a plan, I remembered: I have no problems. I was not late for work. I had no chores to do or conflicts to work out with my housemates or essays to grade. I felt a sense of peace.

I went instead to El Arbol de Dios, which houses paintings by Frank Llort. He paints a world where nature and people and the things people make are all equal in size and bright color. He paints a Salvadoran sliver of the Kingdom of God.

***

That evening, I finally began meeting people. I met Sal who is Salvadoran but a naturalized citizen of the US. He came to the States in 1980 at the start of the war, and now estimates the cost of tree trimmings for rich people in San Jose. He has returned to San Salvador to get a divorce.

I met Alfredo, who works the night shift at Jimena´s Guest House, where I am staying. He was in the army for two years, but is too young to have fought in the war. He says he wishes he had fought because war is full of passion and heats the blood.

I met Juan, a cook at the Cafe de ¨T.¨ He used to be an ecology student at the university but he couldn´t afford to continue so now he is learning to make delicious meals. He is part of a Christian community in the city called Ruta 3:16. I may visit them on Sunday.

I met a man whose name I can´t remember; he lives in New York but is originally from of Grenada. He says he once biked around the whole island in eight hours. He told me I should visit Grenada, but only for one day. He said if I went for three days I would spend all three of them on the beach. I didn´t think that sounded bad.

El Salvador and the World

The land here is as beautiful as my Salvadoran neighbor said. I saw it first from the airplane, a dark brown punctuated by volcanos. (The earth has its own occasions of violence, from which mountains are made.) The dark brown earth turned dark green as we descended. It turned into uneven clumbs of leaves and unraveled into Pacific blue. Then the leaves belonged to trees, some of them with gray trunks so thick I could not have gotten my arms around them had my arms been twice as long. On the highway, two cars out of three were crumpled and beltching thick black clouds. Billboards every 100 feet announced that you could buy whatever you wanted on ebay or that the bank HSBC was ¨El Salvador and the world.¨ Shacks made of corrogated tin walled in the road. People went in and out of them and walked beside the traffic.

My first stop was in Juayua, a village in the mountains about an hour and a half from the capital. There were very few other tourists. I had the dorm at Hotel El Mirador to myself. The buildings, like most in El Salvador, were made of cinder blocks painted bright colors. The few roads seemed to lead straight into the mountains; on either side stood canopies where people sold clothes, shoes, crafts, fruit, bread. The trees in la plaza were painted white halfway up their trunks. They surrounded a fountain with a blue bottom.

Juayua holds a food fair in the afternoons on weekends. People grill exotic meats under outdoor canopies. In a basket on display at one of the canopies was a skinned frog corpse with its limbs splayed one in each direction. When I ordered rana a la plancha, the woman wordlessly picked up the frog body with tonges and threw it on the grill. The grill hissed obediently. It was good. More tender than chicken.

Besides frog, the highlight of Juayua was a trip to las cascadas, the waterfalls. They were beautiful, but not spectacular. The exciting part was getting there by mototaxi along a hilly dirt road with deep crevices. I had to brace myself to the seat to keep from hitting my head on the ceiling or my knee on the bar infront of me.

After Juayua, I went to the Barra de Cobana on the recommendation of Manuel, the manager of Hotel El Mirador. It was a tiny, dirty beach town full of Salvadoran families. The water was warm. I kept telling myself it was the Pacific. And so it was: blue liquid out to the sky. I stood in the arch of the waves and let them wash me to the sand. Fat grains stuck to my skin.

I went back to my room: heat, high white walls, and a matress. No shower. I used the bottom of a two litter soda bottle to pour water from a communal sink over my head, arms, legs, feet. Then I tried to walk through the town. But there wasn´t one. I had seen it all from the beach, just a few open-air restaurantes. I was the only tourist. Everyone else was walking arm in arm or calling to their children. I could not stay, not even one night, in Barra de Cobana. I caught the next bus to San Salvador.

My New Room

My old room was on the second floor of a big, old house in North Portland. It was a corner room with two windows. Out one window I could see Forest Park, the largest forested park within city limits in the U.S. Out the other were the three rose bushes of the back yard, and a large tree that had one of its branches broken off and caught in a power line. I loved the feeling that I was hovering above the city, between the backyard trees and the hills of Forest Park. I would go into my room, open the blinds and feel that sensation while I read or wrote or prayed.

The house, called the Ritz, belongs to Church of the Servant King. I lived there with ten other people, including two kids and a baby. When I first came there, it was to visit the community for a week in August. I stayed for five months.

My new room is in the basement of a house in the Laurelhurst district of NE Portland, one block from the dividing line between NE and SE. The room has checkerboard black-and-white tiles on the floor. The house is owned by my friends, David and Jenn, who both teach high school English, and are so cute I want to throw myself out a window (but not really). They took me Céilí dancing (which is a type of Irish social dancing) on Monday night. David's tight blond curls bounced up and down and Jenn's thick brown braids and black skirt swirled.

My room (the whole house really) has shelves and shelves of David and Jenn's books. Here is a sample:
Anne Sexon-- A Self Portriat in Letters
Stephen King-- It
Poetry Therapy
Sigmund Freud-- The Interpretation of Dreams
The Ramayana
Harrius Potter et Phiosophi Lapis (that's right, Harry Potter translated into Latin!)
A History of Medieval Islam
I.Q. Puzzles
Sylvia Plath-- The Bell Jar
A Field Guide Manual for Amature Geologists
1,003 Great Things About Teachers
Harper's English Grammar

On the wall are historical maps of England, posters explaining systems of heraldry, reprints of paintings by Rockwell and M.C. Esher, and a map Portland.

The room is cold. I have a space heater which will warm the room quite nicely after about four hours of continuous use on high. I am using the coffee table as a desk. It has a wooden edge and it is all glass in the middle. I sit on a pillow on the checkerboard floor and write.

It seems that I go from goodness to goodness here in Portland. Church of the Servant King was such a good gift. I learned so much from them, from people who have learned to love each other well by commiting to one another and sharing the same space. And now here I am in David and Jenn's house-- English family crests looking down at me from the wall, evenings spent dancing a jig or talking about our favorite books. And that's not even to mention how close I am now to my other friends who are all planning on starting a community together. I only have to walk a few blocks to find someone to share a meal or a chat.

Still, transitions jar the soul, and I have been transitioning for awhile now with many more ahead. Sunday night I couldn't figure out why I was so depressed. I took my dirty clothes across the basement to the laundry room and in my head it was all gripes: at the Ritz they had two washing machines; at the Ritz the lighting was better and it wasn't so cold. Then I realized that Sunday night was the night after the church service that we'd all sit around talking and laughing. I'd run down and throw my clothes in the machines and come back up and continue laughing or listening to someone's funny story. It was always the best night of the week. My soul had gotten used to that, expected it at a certain time, the way our bodies expect sleep when we go to bed at the same time every night. David and Jenn were both focused on preparing for the next day's lessons, the first day after Christmas break. My lessons were all planned so I read a book and felt like everything was wrong with the world.