IDEALS

By Matthew Killby
Feb. 24, 2009

On Gary's morning walk we headed back down the street where we had found the man milking a cow earlier in the week. The dogs were excitable and numerous that morning. We even had a dog bark at us from a rooftop. We got to the end of the street, which was blocked by a large metal gate. We cut over to the next street where Gary started up a conversation with a man on the street. He told us we should go back to the gate and we would find a large set of soccer fields on the other side. We went through and found the fields straddling a forest and a large building. There were three horses on the soccer field. Two were tied up, a mother and filly, and a large white horse was wandering around untied.
All of a sudden, a pack of dogs came running from the street on a line straight towards the white horse. More dogs came running out of the forest to join the commotion. The horse tried to run, but it was surrounded, and the dogs harassed the horse, trying to get a clean bite. The horse managed to make it's way over to the other two horses, and the dogs backed off and wouldn't attack the group. We walked around the field and a couple of the dogs decided to make a move for us. Bending over to pretend to pick up a rock was all it took to get them to back off. There weren't very many rocks around, so when we did pass one, I picked it up and held onto it just in case I would need it later.
As we approached the building, we discovered it was a school. We went into the building and explored. It was a beautiful building, devoid of any furniture. There were no construction supplies around anywhere, so we concluded that they must have stopped building for some reason. The school looked ready to be used, the only thing missing was the furniture and the faceplates for the electrical sockets. We asked Sister Alejandra about it at breakfast and she found out from another nun that the government had decided that they didn't want to have a school in that area after construction was almost fully complete. So there it sits, unused and waiting for the classes that will never begin.
I had what we've been calling 'Lynne's stomach', because she was the first of us to get the dreaded travellers diarrhea, but I didn't pay much attention to it, thinking it minor.
We went to visit Gloria in Santa Maria. Gloria was born in El Salvador and went through some pretty tumultuous times. When Gloria was 14, a popular movement was growing within the church. Young people were getting excited about the bible and were discussing how to put it into practice. They lobbied for access to education in the rural areas. Their views differed from the conservative powers.
The movement grew outside of the church and became the Federation for Agricultural Farmers (FTC), whose goal was to petition for what they perceived to be basic human rights. In response, the government created the group called the Order, who opposed the FTC, and gave them all cards so they wouldn't be harassed by government officials.
In the beginning, the government would send 10 to 20 national guardsmen into the small rural communities to intimidate the population and to weed out the political leaders, usually by killing them and usually they were priests and teachers. People in the town took turns watching for the national guard so the leaders would be able to escape. Eventually, everyone had to escape the national guard, including the women and children. The army started going into rural communities simultaneously, with a hundred soldiers in each, so that there could be no escape to neighbouring towns.
One morning, when the guard at the gates of the city was changing, the soldiers entered the town. Since there was no warning, there was little time to escape and most of the women and children stayed behind to give the men time to escape. It was dangerous for the women, but less dangerous than it was for the men. One man in the village had devised a hiding place on his property. When the soldiers started to burn down his house he came rushing out of his hiding place and was shot dead. Gloria thinks he must have thought the soldiers had already left for him to come out of hiding. Another man wasn't found until 4 p.m. the next day, and only because of the ravens circling his dead body. In all the confusion, no one was really sure who had escaped and who had not. This man had been beaten to death as was evident from the bruises and swelling all over his body.
The Archbishop, upon hearing the news, sent a delegation to investigate and condemned the actions in his sermon, saying “In the name of God, I order you to stop the oppression.”
He was killed the next day.
The movement had never considered taking up arms before this point, but as Gloria says “If they can kill him then we're just like animals to the government.”
The movement began gathering arms, but only one out of five guns actually functioned. In the end, the government supporters turned neutral.
Gloria mentioned that we looked tired and offered to make us some coffee. We took a break while she prepared the coffee. I think it was as much a break for her to keep her composure as it was to make us coffee.
At this point, the people went to live in the mountains, but Gloria had one child with another on the way. So she went to live with some rebel supporters in the city. She had never met these people before, but had to entrust her son to them when she went into labour and had to be taken to the hospital. Her husband wanted her to leave the city and join him in the mountains after the birth, but she stayed.
One day, when she was home alone with her children, the army cordoned off the block and began searching homes. Gloria had no way to escape, so she had to play innocent when the army knocked on her door. As the soldiers were about to leave, they found a ruler that had FTC written on the back. The letters had been scratched out, but it was enough to arrest her and her children. The soldiers radioed that they had caught three guerilla terrorists and transported them to one of the army prisons. Gloria assumed that she was dead, so she didn't give the soldiers any information and stuck to her cover story. They tried to take away her children, saying that she was too young to be their mother and she must be covering for the rebel mother she was baby-sitting for. They finally let her keep her children when she breast-fed them in front of the soldiers. Then they told her that they had caught her co-conspirators and they had given her up so she better start talking. Finally, they said she was free to go. Gloria prepared to be taken to the courtyard and shot, but instead, she was released. Of everyone she met, none of them had ever heard of someone being released from the interrogation prison.
She met up with her husband, and since she couldn't join the rebel camps with two children, they decided to cross the border into Mexico. They obtained tourist visas, but couldn't get visas for her siblings. She wasn't going to leave them, but a pastor arranged for them to be housed in an orphanage and advised her to leave. So Gloria crossed the border, with just a change of clothes and a child in each arm, to start a new life in Mexico.
A few years later, Gloria returned to El Salvador, which was still at war, by herself, to retrieve her brothers and sisters. I think it shows tremendous strength that Gloria went into a country where she could be killed or arrested at any moment to bring her siblings to Mexico. Adding to this extraordinary accomplishment is the fact that women are treated, and on the most part accept subordinate status in the Latino culture, so as a woman she had to have an even greater strength to undertake this task on her own.
The missing part of the story is that of her husband, which is no doubt as extraordinary as Gloria's story.
The entire morning while Gloria was talking I was getting sicker and sicker. It turns out that we had been drinking unfiltered water. The nuns would bring filtered water for us to drink, but then we were re-filling the containers with water from a filter that we thought was operational, but in reality, was not. We discovered this fact about a week and a half later. It wasn't the nuns fault, they had been bringing us clean water and had never told us that the water from that particular tap was safe to drink, we had assumed it was. I progressively got more nauseous got more of a headache and got more and more chills throughout the day. I took a nap when we got home.
I woke to see Augustina, a liberation theologist. I didn't really hear much of the talk because I was trying not to throw up, but what I got was that liberation theology shares loose traits with feminism and the left wing of the church.
The rest of the group went off to visit a ravine community, but I stayed back to try and get better. I decided to sit on the patio, since I was freezing and had chills and the sun at least warmed my skin. Sister Alejandra saw me sitting out by myself and came over to ask why I hadn't gone with the others. After she apologized for me being sick, as if it was somehow her fault, she began to ask me all sorts of questions about Canada. She asked about the water, the seasons, the weather, our trees. I get the sneaking suspicion that she is far more interested in us then she lets on. Perhaps she thinks it would be rude, or it would inconvenience us if she asked her questions. Sitting alone on the patio, I provided her with the perfect opportunity to get some of her questions answered. Or maybe she was just trying to keep me company.