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Grassroots Weekly Update
Maria Madre de los Pobres
A Visit with Padre Luis, the new Priest at Maria Madre de los Pobres
Yesterday, I had a very nice visit with my friend Padre Luis Salazar, and got to see him in his natural element as well- a truly wonderful experience.
We met at the Cathedral in downtown San Salvador to talk about my ongoing quest to attain missionary status here in El Salvador- through the generous support of Padre Luis and his urban parish Maria Madre de los Pobres (Mary Mother of the Poor), as well as Steve Engler and Father Pat Rush of Visitation Parish in Kansas. After getting ourselves on track with that process over a cup of coffee, as well as catching up on what has been going on in our respective adaptation processes (Padre Luis adapting to a new parish that has a "mystique" that he is only now beginning to understand after having been to the states and visiting the parishes there who have historical relationships with Maria Madre, and mine of adapting to living in El Salvador) we headed to the place where we would catch the bus to go to Maria Madre to eat lunch.
No sooner had we exited the cathedral and walked through a crowded marked area, did we hear a voice over the commotion: "Padre, Padre!" It was one of Padre's parishioners from his former parish in Soyapango. This woman operated a small vending booth and obliged us to sit down and drink some water. She and Padre Luis were overjoyed to see one another and commented on how much weight each had gained in the last year. She then sorrowfully told of her aching and overworked body, and how she is only getting by because of her son who recently went to the states. Padre listened attentively and comforted her and encouraged her to keep going- adelante siempre. She was noticeably heartened by the encounter, and sent us on our way seemingly a new woman.
And that was just the first one. When we got on the bus, Padre saw another member of his former parish. They also exchanged news, stories of friends and family members, and thankful joy at having seen one another. Once we entered La Chacara, the community where the parish of Maria Madre is located, we could not go ten feet without Padre stopping to talk to someone, or someone stopping him to talk. We talked to an old man who only had one leg, and diabetes, and lived alone in a tin shack right on the street- but of course just about everyone there lives in tin shacks right on the street. But this man could not stop holding onto Padre Luis's arm as they spoke and shared. Padre laid his hand on the man's head, said his goodbyes and we moved on.
We went past rabid dogs in the street, which Padre managed to steer me clear of. We saw the wall on one side of the street literally crumbling as workers on the hill above made a levee type of structure to try to mitigate possible landslides. We saluted the barefoot children walking and playing in the street. And everyone smiled and said hello as Padre passed. We talked to another woman who was limping along with a swollen foot, and a nasty open gash on her big toe that she had unsanitarily covered with the strap of her sandal. She raspily explained to us how she was waiting for money to come from her husband in the states so that she could go and get her foot checked out. Padre told her to come to the clinic at the parish the next day and get it taken care of- that if she didn’t have enough money then, she could pay it later. She seemed visibly relieved. If there were a few common threads that ran through La Chacara, they seemed to be that everyone had some type of ailment that wasn’t being taken care of properly, and that they had family members in the states that were helping them to barely scrape by.
We soon stopped in a little house and sat down with three women and a small army of young girls. In that house, we laughed and joked like it was our sole purpose on earth. These women, and Padre Luis with them, were so full of life and joy that I couldn’t help but be taken along with them, to a higher level of consciousness of God, and of the good in the world. It is often hard for us to understand how the poor can be so full of happiness, but I think it has to do with their gratitude. They are thankful for food, for shacks on the street, for their friends, for family, and for people coming to visit them. They are thankful for life, something that we all too often take for granted. Even when one of the women began talking about a group of families that she knew that were forced out of their houses in a different zone by the extortion of gang members, it was followed by bouts of hearty laughter when she added that the families had heard that they could get free housing in La Chacara- "as if houses materialized out of the dirt here!"
Then the little girls took me out to their back balcony and showed me the tiny 10 square foot cement pool that was down the hill from their house. It was full of little, wet, shouting bodies, and looking down upon it, it was surrounded by aluminum roofs that were held down by rocks, cinder blocks, and pieces of wood. In the distance there were beautiful green hills, and I almost commented on how wonderful of a view they had at their house, but their smiling little faces seemed preoccupied with pride in their pool.
As we crossed the bridge over the contaminated and stinking drainage ditch known as the Acelhuate River , which runs through the center of La Chacara, I commented to Padre, "All the people seemed really happy to see you and to have you come be with them for a little while." He responded "Well, we cant be hypocrites can we?"
I looked back to where we had come through- the crumbling hillside, the tin houses stacked on top of one another, the concrete and dirt, the obese women, drug addicts and alcoholics who had accosted me for money, the little kids playing on piles of slate and rocks, and the smell of garbage and feces permeating everything. And then I had the strangest thought: "Maybe this is the promised land."
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