Transitioning Back 2 the States

Greetings fellow Network of Love Lovers!

This post comes to all of you a wee bit before 10 pm at night and after a long day of plane riding and feeling bummed about leaving El Salvador, a place that changed my life (and I hope continues to change my life in the coming future). I'm just starting to realize I am tired...but before bed, a post (think of it as a pre-bed post).


What I would like to do for the next ten days to help me remember my trip to El Salvador and to help others get a feel for what I experienced is to write a little post for each day I was in El Salvador. So, here comes ten posts. Do with them what you will (maybe read them or something), and feel free to post any comments, questions or otherwise. And without further ado...let's travel backwards in time to May 12, 2008. (Cue time travel music...whatever that means)...

El Salvador: Day 1

After our group landed, we ate pupusas, a most popular food in El Salvador. To make you salivate a little, it is a fried tortilla filled with frijoles and beans. They come out piping hot and gooey and tasty. YUM!

Later, we ventured to a church in a rural part of El Salvador where a priest was assasinated in 1977 for his words on Liberation Theology. The powers that be at the time of the killing couldn't stomach the priest's message of peace. So they shot him to death. Within only a few miles of the church, we visited the grave of the priest located on the side of the road next to a massive field. It was chilling to think that a non-violent person was murdered in a place so beautiful, so seemingly calm.

Dinner was wonderful. We stopped at a scenic cafe with an even more scenic view of mountains and a small river. I must also point out that during dinner, we were privileged enough to watch the sun set in the skys of El Salvador. The gorgeous end to the day and the wind filled, friend filled ride back to our guest house put a bit of closure to the confusing first day in El Salvador.

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I wish I could bottle up some of the distinct smells of this first day. The smell of burning fire characterized much of the countryside. I can't quite get the skinny cows eating from near grassless, littered fields, out of my head.

The contrast, nasty contrast, between the glimmer of hope Julieta (immersion leader) talked about regarding Liberation Theology and the hope inside of the church she preached in (she didn't really preach, but I almost felt like she had the inspiration and Spirit to do so), and the man stumbling outside the church, the officer with his gun stopping the bus driver for an unknown reason.

This really is a country desperately hoping, and in desperate need, in some places, of a sign that hope is working. Liberation Theology... from the little Julieta told us...means to be the protagonist of your own life. Julieta put it so eloquentely, and I'm not doing her justice when I try to paraphrase her explanation given to us in the church. We are called to realize that God is HERE and not far off in the heavens. This is a defining belief of the Christian person. We believe that our God is here with us...that the Good Spirit, in some mysterious way, breathes through my pen right now. May Christ and the peace he came to spread throughout the world be with everyone in our group (10 of us) as we venture on in slumber, anticipating day two. Amen!


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And so concludes the first El Salvador post. I'm sort of sleeping at the keyboard, so I best be off.

Peace to all of my friends.

with love,

bob.