Day 4: Tuesday, February 22

Today didn’t start with construction, which was perhaps a good thing, considering that we may have started a bit too quickly for our own good yesterday… Instead, we went to visit Villa Esperanza, the Thrivent community with 75 houses that was recently finished. Marti actually volunteered here before much of it was completed, so this was a chance for her to see the result of her hard work.

It was a really neat thing to see. Many of the houses, especially the ones that were completed in earlier stages of the development, had absolutely beautiful gardens. And, of course, so many things were in bloom! One of the homeowners was even generous enough to invite us in to see what the houses looked inside, and to see their backyard. They were growing all sorts of amazing things—pineapple, papayas, cashews, bananas, avocados, and beautiful geraniums!

In addition to the houses, Thrivent helped build a community center and a daycare center. We got to go into the daycare, where we watched them have a toothbrushing lesson before we had playtime! Kids are wonderful—there’s no need for any real language skills when playing with Play Doh!

When we returned to the site, the blocks were being delivered. We helped unload the truck, sorting the blocks by types and putting some of the blocks inside the house to be easily accessible as we build up the wall.

Following lunch, we got to laying the bricks! Don double-checked procedure with Saoul, and then we were able to have two crews working. This led to us being able to lay our entire first course of bricks before the end of the day, well ahead of the goal.

We also had a lot of fun with the kids today. Carolyn started yesterday quizzing the kids on basic math, but today we abandoned actual lessons for playing around with barnyard animal noises. There’s nothing quite like random clucking and crowing sounds throughout the day! Many of the kids have an amazing ability to whistle and then run their fingers over their lips, creating a parakeet-like sound. Carolyn and I are determined to learn how to do it!

Back at the hotel, we were relaxing, some of us were sitting out on a porch talking, when, at about 9:00, an earthquake hit! It was not very strong, but still rather disconcerting, especially for those of us who have never been in an earthquake before!

Day 3: Monday, February 21

Our first day of work wasn’t exactly easy, but we finished in grand style!

We had expected to be in a neighborhood of houses built by Thrivent, but it turns out that we are building on a single site in the middle of an existing community. For more information on the family for whom we are building and the community, please check out Cappie’s excellent write-up here.

Our house is at one of the earliest phases of construction. The foundation trenches are dug and the rebar installed, but we were in charge of pouring in the concrete to actually function as the foundation.Of course, there aren’t any automatic cement mixers around. Instead, we have shovels! The masons (Saoul, the head mason, assisted by his brother, Jose) gave us the desired recipe for the mixture, and then showed us their preferred method of mixing it. Basically, it involved shoveling into several piles and then back again, ensuring that all the ingredients are fully mixed together.

Then, you create a sort of volcano, add water in the middle, and gradually shovel all the dry ingredients into the middle. If you do it right, you wind up with a little compact pile, with the water all in the middle. Making a mistake results in water going everywhere! But by the end of the day, we had the technique down pat, which will serve us well the rest of the week!

Saoul is, of course, in charge. But with some help from Alex, Don was able to explain his construction experience, and Saoul became comfortable, after a short period of supervision, with letting him work on his own. This will come in extremely handy once we start laying brick!

We worked very well together as a group. In fact, we worked so well that we finished pouring the foundation well in advance of the end of the day. With our transportation not coming for another few hours, we were faced with several hours to kill. But then Pr. Tom noticed that we had used up the vast majority of the water that was designated for us to use during construction. He asked how the barrels would be refilled, and he learned that someone would have to travel a bit down the road to the community spigot, filling smaller water buckets, and then bring them back to the barrels. So we volunteered to take care of it.

Throughout the day (especially after lunch, once school let out), we had been attracting neighborhood children, especially the relatives of “our” family. In many of these families, the children are responsible for collecting the water and bringing it home as one of their daily chores. So we asked them to guide us and show us how it was done.

Thus began the parade of the gringos! Not only did we have the kids with us, but we attracted the attention of the rest of the neighborhood as we went, too. Some of the girls took charge of the spigot, turning the water on and off, and checking to see when our buckets were full. We’d then take the buckets back to the house to fill the barrels. While the rest of us were waiting, either for another of our buckets to fill or for another member of the community to get their water, we’d play with the kids, laughing and joking.

Of course, we also got huge laughs when several of the men decided to take the water back by carrying it on their head. This is a common method for carrying heavy or awkward items, but by women. Men usually carry the buckets over their shoulder. But the head is actually much easier and more comfortable!

Back at the hotel, the adventure was figuring out how to get hot water. Some cabins had a functioning hot water heater/showerhead (the heating coils are in the showerhead, heating the water as it flows), and others, well, not so much. Perhaps you might be able to see why…

Day 2: Sunday, February 20

This morning we attended church at the Lutheran Church of the Resurrection in San Salvador. This is the home church of Bishop Medardo Gomez, the Bishop of the Lutheran Church in ElSalvador. He has an amazing personal story, but more on that in a moment.

We were welcomed extremely warmly. On a personal note, I had a brief chance to catch up withMaria Trinidad, whom I have met on each of my previous trips. She runs both a homeless shelter and a sort of boarding house/hostel connected with the Lutheran Church, and she and her family are amazing.

But we were welcomed warmly by everyone, even by those who could not speak English. Pr. Tom was drafted to robe up andassist in presiding. As he tells it, he didn’t speak Spanish, and the pastor giving him directions didn’t have any English, so figuring out whatto do was pretty interesting… But they must have managed well, because Pr. Tom helped out through Confirmation and

Communion!

Carolyn also had the chance to read the Gospel. It was read in Spanish first, and then Carolyn read it in English, using a bilingual Bible that was provided by Carlos Avalos. Carlos is the Habitat El Salvador director of church relations, and he spent the day with us (at least until we left San Salvador).

At the end of the service, each of us was presented with a small wooden cross necklace and a hug by one of the children of the congregation. One little girl, in particular, was a most excellent hugger!

After the service, we all went back to Bishop Gomez’s office, where he spoke a bit about the work that the El Salvador Lutheran Church is doing. They are focusing a great deal on building communities, and most of their new members are people who are already familiar with Christianity, mostly Catholicism. It’s a small but growing church.

Bishop Gomez was also one of the voices that roundly criticized the government during the civil war in the 1980s. As a result, he had many threats on his life, and for a while had an international escort with him at all times. He was arrested several times, and his war experience sort of culminated with the story of the subversive cross.

After church we went for lunch at the El Arco Café, the place overlooking San Salvador where the group ate last year. We could tell there had been several new developments built (somewhat ruining part of the view), but the flowers were still beautiful and there were lots of clever and fun decorative items around.

From there we headed northwest, to the hotel that will be our home for the rest of the week. I have stayed here before, and it is a beautiful place—trees and flowers EVERYWHERE! We are staying in a series of small cabins, and then we head to the restaurant in the middle for breakfast and dinner. There are small porches in front of every cabin, and lots of open seating in the restaurant area where we can just sit and enjoy being with each other. It can get a little chilly at night since we’re so high up, but that’ll feel good after working in the sun all day!

We also met up with our last team member, Marti. She was vacationing in the time leading up to this, so she was only able to join us starting today. But we are all together now, and ready to go to work tomorrow!

Day 1: Saturday, February 19 (for real this time!)

Our flight left from DCA at 5:45, so it was a very early morning at the airport! But we all showed up in good time and made it through security in good order. When wearrived in San Salvador, we were greeted by throngs of people waiting to welcome their loved ones home.

We were met by Alex, who would be our guide and help for the week. He has been with Habitat for El Salvador for about a year, and he spends weeks at a time with teams of volunteers, working with them on the build site, translating, and generally acting as community relations for anyone that drops by the site.

From the airport we drove the 45 minutes or so to San Salvador, where we checked into ourhotel for the night, an extremely beautiful hotel called the Hotel Villa Terra. We settled in for a bit, and then a group of us went on a short walk around the neighborhood, just to check things out. We were too far to really get into the heart of downtown, but we enjoyed the ramble just the same.

One of the things we have noticed are the ever-present armed guards, at pretty much every store, and definitely at every hotel. We asked, and Alex told us that it was to guard against thieves and other forms of crime; we speculated that it was a case of a store having to hire a guard so as not to be more vulnerable than its neighbors. We kept being reassured that there wasn’t that much crime, but these pistol-grip shotguns didn’t really ease our minds. Still, every guard we met was super nice!

It’s also incredible to note all the flowers and trees in bloom. It’s mind-boggling to think that it’s the middle of February, and there are things blooming all over, even though this is the “dry season,” so the open areas are not as green as they are in the wetter times. Still, it is beautiful!

After the walk, most of the group found a small taco stand, where they had some drinks andlight food (we didn’t have any food on the planes, so we were quite hungry!).

For dinner, Alex took the group to a (very popular) restaurant, one of his favorites, which specializes in “typico” food—pupusas (stuffed corn tortillas—practically the national food of El Salvador), plantains, beans, tamales, fried yucca, and lots of other delicious food and drink! We also ate with another group in El Salvador at the same time. They were from Canada, and they will be building in a completely different area of the country.

While everything was so delicious, it had been a very long day, and it is time for bed!

A note about the upcoming posts

So, even though it has taken me way too long to get these up, I have tried to write them as if I were able to write and post every night on the trip. It may seem a little ridiculous, but I'll also be posting once a day over the same time period as our trip. Please enjoy!

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.