Getting Down and Dirty

Today, we had our fourth and last lecture at UCA. Because of the day's events, and what is upcoming, I have decided to take a brief break from politics to talk about our service.

Our lecture was by a Jesuit Priest who works at UCA and also in a rural community north of San Salvador. The community is much like Altos de Jardines (AdJ), but also includes a sizable special needs population that is largely ignored by the Salvadoran government. To best support the youth, their families, and the community as a whole, the priest listens to what they need and tries to help them with whatever he can.

One of the biggest lessons of the day was that religious organizations and NGOs are doing more in El Salvador to support marginalized communities and defend human rights. Based on our work in AdJ and with Circulo, this has been very apparent to me. What I also took from the Father's lecture was that the best way to help any community is to be a part of it and to learn from the people and hear them out.

In translation, my favorite statement of his was: "to accompany someone, you have to get your feet dirty."

I believe this to be true, and even in a small way, I believef that is what we are doing in AdJ. We only have a small amount of time, but our time there is very important.

Today, we were supposed to do a cleaning campaign across the community to further the envrionmental education led by the youth. Unfortunately, because of the trash collection schedule, we may have missed our opportunity. Hopefully the campaign will continue regardless.

Still, we are developing strong relationships with the youth and the children and we will be staying with host families in AdJ tomorrow night. Not only will we have the opportunity to learn from our families in their homes, we will also be joining them early Thursday morning to pick coffee, a job that many in the community rely on for income.

It may not be picking up trash, but if that's not down and dirty, I don't know what is. I'm very excited to grow closer with the community and really take advantage of the opportunity while we have it.

The lesson most meaningful to me plays out in our work with AdJ every day: by being a part of this community, we are best able to understand it and support it with whatever resources we can. Hopefully, after Dec. 19, we'll still be able to help AdJ, and maybe we can look back and know that we left the community with a people motivated to continue to make change.

Four weeks is a short amount of time, but just enough time to realize the importance of service and community.

~MJ