Sunday, February 17

Before we got started building, we had a day to explore some of the heart of San Salvador.

We woke up to a wonderfully delicious breakfast of typical Salvadorian food--fried plantains, beans, eggs with vegetables, melon, and freshly squeezed fruit juice. It was a great way to wake up in the morning.

Since we were headed off to Sonsonate after our time downtown, we had to bid farewell to the people at Casa Concordia as we left. I stayed there for much longer when I was down there in August, and I was sorry not to be able to spend more time with "Mama Trini" and her extended family.

We had an escort for the day--Carlos, the HES Church Coordinator. He turned out to be an excellent person to have along, as he was able to answer many of our questions, both about El Salvador in general and the various buildings we were seeing downtown.

First stop was the National Cathedral. From the outside, it looks fairly plain (especially when you compare it to the cathedrals of Europe), and it has beautiful paintings along the outside of the doors.

There was a mass just finishing up, so we stood in the back and observed a bit as Communion ended. The presiding priest was actually the Archbishop of San Salvador. Technically he's only in charge of the San Salvador area, but because it's the national capitol, he is expected to have a national voice and presence. Traditionally it has been a position of great power and influence (see more below).

The inside of the cathedral is just beautiful. I'll let a few of our pictures do the talking for me:


Below the sanctuary is another very special place--the tomb of Archbishop Oscar Romero. He was Archbishop of San Salvador from 1977 until he was assassinated in 1980. When he was appointed, governmental and church officials thought that he would be a great friend to the rich and powerful. But once he got into the midst of the abject poverty in the middle of San Salvador, he quickly became an advocate for the people and economic justice.

This earned him both the loyalty and love of the ordinary people and many death threats from elsewhere. At a time when news was highly censored, Archbishop Romero would use his sermons, which were broadcast nationally, as a way to spread the true news about killings and other acts of violence. In 1980 he was celebrating mass when a gunman killed him.

A week later, hundreds of thousands of mourners packed the plaza outside the cathedral for the funeral mass. Carlos, who was 12 at the time, was there. He remembered being in the crowd when sharpshooters with rifles and machine guns opened fire on the crowd. In the end, between the shots and the panic, somewhere around 60 people were dead (exact details are not known because of the civil unrest at the time, and will probably never be complete). Now, Archbishop Romero stands as a powerful figure of liberation theology and almost a patron saint in much of Central America. He has been named a "Servant of God," one of the first steps for canonization in the Catholic Church.

From the cathedral we went to the national artesians' market for a bit of shopping. Right off the bat, we knew the place was special because of the great mural painted on the wall of a covered area off of the parking lot. We were the only ones there, so we were the center of attention for all the vendors.

Typical handicrafts in El Salvador tend to center around wood--carvings, paintings, etc. There are some textiles, but often the textiles are made in Guatemala and brought across the border. However, painted wooden crosses are a very typical art. Some of them have images that are significant, but often the idea is to use bright colors as a symbol of hope and joy.

We ate lunch at a cafe called El Arco, a combination nursery and restaurant. It was up on the side of one of the mountains surrounding San Salvador, and we had beautiful views of the city in the valley below, as well as the San Salvador Volcano. It was great to see so many growing and blooming things in the middle of February. There were flowers and blooming bushes ready to sell, as well as some beautiful orchids hanging from the covered dining area!

We had a little while to wander around the nursery before sitting down to lunch. The restaurant specializes in sandwiches and desserts. We didn't take the chance to sample the desserts, but the sandwiches were excellent. We were also joined by Dagoberto (Dago), the head of the HES Sonsonate office. He ate lunch with us, then rode with us to Sonsonate so that he could give us some specific information about our build in Sonsonate. He is also someone I worked with in August, and he took very good care of us all week.

Our hotel is beautiful! It's called an "eco parque"--just what it sounds like. The rooms are small cabins, up the mountain from the restaurant and main office. Each of the married couples had their own rooms, while the rest of us split up into men and women and had large "familial" rooms--a double bed and two bunk beds. We had two such familial rooms that were in the same cabin, just on different levels, and the women took the lower level while the men took the upper floor. The setting was beautiful--luscious forest all around, a fire circle (where we were able to have campfires every night), two pools, and lots of flowers (the hotel also serves as a nursery). There were also animals: roosters and hens, and three very large geese that had the run of the place and also like to attack any humans that got too close.

As it turns out, there was something wrong with the electrical pump system up on our end of the mountain, so it was very common for the water in the joint cabin (and Ron and Cappie's cabin, since they were right next to the joint cabin) to go out. Once we figured out how to fix it ourselves, however, it dramatically cut down on the amount of time we were without agua.

After dropping our stuff off in the cabins, we went down to meet our mason, the site supervisor, and the family for whom we were building the house. I'll write more about them later, but it was a very pleasant way to get to know a little bit about them and for them to meet us before we were faced with the construction work. Plus, everyone was quite a bit cleaner than they would be for the rest of the week!