Welcome

Dear family and friends,

Welcome to my blog!  For those of you I had talked with earlier about this idea (thank you, Shannon and Denise!) it has come to fruition.  While this may not seem like a huge commitment, or anything requiring serious discernment, it’s actually something I’ve been turning over for awhile.  I have a somewhat chronic aversion to journaling despite my clear and recurrent understanding of why it’s valuable.  So, making a commitment to journal not just privately but publicly is a bit of a leap!  However, since arriving in the country this past Wednesday, my desire to do so has only grown.  There are so many little moments, insights and anecdotes to be experienced here that to not share them would be a loss.  Additionally, there are always new levels of richness and texture to be discovered by writing things down, and Dios sabe (God knows) that in the jungle of El Salvador, there is no shortage of things to unearth.  I feel like I have let the opportunity to engage writing here slip by too many times before, and for some reason, have been granted another chance to try. 

For those of you who don't know, I am in ES this summer helping to run the Casa de la Solidaridad's (House of Solidarity) Summer Medical Program.  The Casa started as a study-abroad program based out of Santa Clara University, and offered students an opportunity to spend a semester learning about the reality of El Salvador.  Typically the Casa hosts around 22-24 students/semester, and now includes 31 becarios, or Salvadoran scholarship students, as well!  In a typical semester, students spend three days a week taking classes at the Jesuit Universidad Centroamericana, and two days a week in a marginalized community of San Salvador.  The latter is referred to as their praxis site, and is really meant as a segue into understanding lives and realities of most Salvadoran people.  Students aren't there to work or provide a service, though some communities do ask students to teach an English class, but really just to learn from the people who live there.  (I was a student here in the Fall of 2004, with a praxis site at the Martin-Baro Cooperative in the community of Jayaque/Los Sitios). The summer medical program I am working on now is somewhat similar to the semester program, just condensed into five weeks and focusing health issues.  Our students (who arrive in just over a week now -- yikes!) are nursing, pre-medical and pre-dentistry students from all over the United States.  Once here, they will be taking classes in Spanish and Public Health at the UCA, and attending their own praxis sites in the public hospitals and clinics of San Salvador.  Their praxis sites, as are any immersion experiences, are (hopefully) the core of their time here.  The students will be spending four mornings a week in one of five sites, then switching to a second site during the second half of the program.  Currently, the Casa works with four major public hospitals (one adult, one pediatric, one maternity and one general hospital) and one public clinic.  As these students are not yet medical professionals, their roles in the hospitals are simply as volunteers -- to spend time with patients, entertain children, and help with tasks such as feeding and bathing as needed.  For a lot of students Spanish is a major obstacle, and really calls on them to be creative communicators :)  It is an intense five weeks, but one that students really seem to get a lot out of.  

As a program coordinator for the summer med program, my role is varied, and depends mostly on what is needed in the moment.  This could range from taking in diarrhea samples to attending meetings with hospital directors ... both of which are just par for the course!  In a nutshell, the other program coordinator (also a Casa alum, and wonderful!) and myself will live with the students, arrange and visit students in their praxis sites, facilitate community living, plan health-related field trips, accompany students during their time here as listening ears and supportive shoulders, and basically try to hold tight to the big picture mission of the Casa in the little moments and decisions of our days.  I appreciate this job for the mental, physical, emotional and spiritual presence it requires.   None of this could happen of course without the great team which I am a part of, and includes our two wonderful co-directors, a Salvadoran doctor who helps coordinate the sites, five women who cook and help maintain the Casas, and a slew of other people without whom this program would not be possible.  All of these people, hopefully, I will talk about in turn as they are some of the most valued and committed individuals that I know.  

I counted while in the shower last night (something to take my mind off the buckets of water I was pouring over my head) and I have spent at least part of the year in El Salvador every year since 2003, minus 2008.  I wondered at this fact: Am I one of those strange ex-patriots that just can’t seem to move on with her life, so I stay?  There seem to be many floating around, and this is certainly one possibility.  But the last time I was here, at the end of the 2007 school year after working on staff with the Casa for the year (including that year's summer med program!), I was certain that it was time to leave.  I didn't really have any intention at that point of returning to work in El Salvador in a long-term capacity, but when this opportunity came up about a year ago, I was eager to say yes.  My reasons for coming back had changed some, which I will hopefully get to later on, but on a fundamental level it was easy to return to a place that has been so life-giving to me.  I was and continue to be overwhelmed with gratitude for the opportunity to do so.  

In conversations the past two days with other Casa students who have remained in the country, wherein they are discerning their own timelines abroad, I have quickly come to see the wisdom in knowing when your time somewhere is finished.  A supervisor of mine at the Lowell Community Health Center referred to this as “outgrowing one’s goodness” in a place.  I felt like I had outgrown my goodness the last time I left here, but am surprised to be discovering how much of that still remains, and perhaps more importantly, new ways to be good.  I think that blogging this summer is going to be one of those ways, so I hope you will check back from time to time and read along.  Any questions, comments or thoughts to share are more than welcome!  I look forward to sharing my time here with each of you in this way :)

En paz y solidaridad,

elizabeth