Our “Los Buenos” Family and Community

Today's guest blogger: Cappie!

First Trinity’s Habitat team worked in the "Los Buenos" neighborhood on the rural outskirts of the city of Ahuachapan in Northwest El Salvador (about 2 hours from the Capital, San Salvador). "Los Buenos" translates to "Good Things," possibly implying "A Great Place To Live." No surprise that this wording comes from the last name of our family: "Bueno." (Good).

We don't really know how far "Los Buenos" stretches along the winding, steep, one-lane rutted roads that took our team to the work site each day, but we do know that most everyone in the small homes near the house we were building were siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, and other direct and indirect members of the (very) extended Bueno family.

The house in which “our” family was living when we arrived is a partial cement-block structure with corrugated-metal covered space added over a hard-packed dirt floor. In this “extra” space the family cooks in the rainy season, keeps household supplies, and slings hammocks for little ones. The homes in the neighborhood have electricity, but, as far as we could tell, little or no running water during the dry season, which is when we were there. Water for cooking, washing, as well as for our construction work was drawn from a communal water spigot about a quarter of a mile up the rocky road. The work of filling large plastic jugs with water and lugging them home falls mostly to women and girls, although the men of our team amused children and grownups alike by balancing these jugs on their heads to bring water to our work site in order to fill huge oil drums from which we drew water to make the cement and mortar we needed to lay blocks for the new house. Here, the girls with us are helping to fill the jug of a neighbor, waiting to carry it back--on her head!

Maria del Carmen Bueno is the grandmother and matriarch of the family with which we worked. She said she was born in this same community, as was her husband, Juan Bautista Bueno. Juan Bautista looks to be in his sixties, although he seems older, yet for two days he worked quietly but hard alongside our team lugging earth, making “chispa” and “mescla” (cement and mortar) to strengthen and hold the cement blocks together, and pounding down the floor of what is to be his daughter's new home.

Heidi Ruth Jimenez is Maria del Carmen and Juan Bautista's second daughter. She was born in her parent's home some 20 years ago. She and her husband, Gabriel Jimenez, are the couple for whom we were building our Habitat home. Gabriel works as a policeman in a nearby town like Sonsonate, which is more than an hour’s distance by bus away. This means that he gets back to his small family only on his days off. Yet it is because of his regular salary that the Jimenez family has enough income to qualify for Habitat's help in building a home.

Heidi and Gabriel have a little daughter named Abby, 18 months old. When we arrived, Heidi was very pregnant with their second child due in mid March. On Thursday of our work week, February 24, a Habitat truck heading into nearby Ahuachapan offered Heidi a ride to her regular doctor’s checkup and it turned out that just then she went into labor and Gabriel's and Heidi's second child, a son, was born. If all continues to go well with building the Jimenez’ family’s home, this little boy will be the first in his extended family and neighborhood to grow up in an earthquake-proof home that has an indoor bathroom.

Heidi's younger brother, Juan who is about 15, also lives in the family’s current home, which adds up to seven people and three generations living in that one structure. Just up the hill from the house we were working on, beyond the outhouse and through banana trees lives Heidi's older sister and her husband, Cesar. Their three children, Cesar, Jr., about 10, Jasmine, about 7, and Henry, 4. (That's Cesar, Jr. back row on right, Jasmine in center front, Henry on the far left in the front row.) They were constant companions to our work team. Cesar Sr. works as a guard in Santa Ana. Since it is over an hour's ride on several busses to get to his work, Cesar, like Gabriel, comes home to Los Buenos just on his days off.

Extended family members who came to help us on the work site were Don Guillermo and Don Jose, both nearby neighbors in their fifties or sixties. They appeared for a day or two, worked quietly alongside us, often doing the heaviest tasks, then disappeared. Even though they had no English, they gave us the feeling that they supported with their "sweat equity" the home-building task we were doing for Heidi's family.

Across the rutted road from where Heidi’s and Gabriel’s home is growing lives Dona Rosa, the "engine" of the community according to Tania Mesa, our Habitat site coordinator. Dona Rosa met us as our work team first arrived and introduced herself as the "presidente" of the community. She is the one who made the connection to Habitat that has resulted in Heidi's and Gabriel's home being built. She also turned out to be one of the many cooks for our final "thank you" celebration meal on Friday afternoon, making all sorts of Salvadorean specialties on several outdoor fires.

Since there is no mail service (just as there is no garbage pickup) in the community, we are hoping that we can get photos of our team members and especially of “our” family as well as of the community’s many children to Dona Rosa via Habitat's Tania as our First Trinity team wants the people of Los Buenos to remember us just as we will remember Heidi, her extended family, and especially the children of Los Buenos.

The Story of the Subversive Cross

While I am still gathering pictures to be able to properly do daily journals, I thought I’d share the story of the “Subversive Cross,” which we saw when we worshiped in San Salvador our first Sunday in El Salvador. The story itself is powerful enough, but we were incredibly blessed to hear it in first person from Bishop Gomez after the service.

In the fall of 1989, both the government and guerilla forces were gearing up for a final battle in San Salvador. Bishop Medeardo Gomez led his congregation in a ceremony whereby a cross, painted white, is then inscribed with the sins of El Salvador and prayers for the country and its people.

A few weeks later, on November 16, the situation had gotten even worse. Bishop Gomez learned that government forces were coming to arrest and possibly even to kill him, and he took refuge in the German embassy. Sure enough—shortly after he left his church, the Lutheran Church of the Resurrection, soldiers appeared, seeking the Bishop.

At the same time, soldiers were headed to the Central American University. There, six Jesuit priests were murdered execution-style.

But at the Lutheran church, the soldiers only found an international group of witnesses, holding a vigil. They arrested 15 people, along with the cross, saying that the church was using the cross to teach subversiveness. The cross was taken to the jail, where individuals were interrogated (and possibly tortured) in front of it. Bishop Gomez eventually had to flee the country to save his life.

When the war ended and Bishop Gomez returned, the American ambassador worked to get the cross returned; it had, somewhat miraculously, not been destroyed. The cross was brought to the house of the President of El Salvador, who then personally presented it to the Bishop. The “subversive cross” now resides in the Lutheran Church of the Resurrection as a reminder of the war and all that happened.