Each person has a story….
Two wise and thoughtful friends gave me some good advice before I left for El Salvador in March of this year. They gave me a phrase to remember while I travel through life: “Cada person tiene una historia”….every person has a story. Now I hear many stories while I cycle through life. The previous thirteen posts on this blog contain some of the stories that were gifts to me from the people of El Salvador
They are: Jerder's Story
The Bishop's Story
The Nun's Story
Noah and Audrey's Story
Joel's Story
Elvira's Story
Ashley Nicole's Story
The Prison Director's Story
The Presidential Candidate's Story
The Orphan's Story
Manuel's Story
The Acolyte's Story
The Groundskeeper's Story
The listeners
Eleven of us traveled from San Francisco, California to El Salvador on March 5, 2008. We are members of four Episcopal churches in the Diocese of California episcopalbayarea.org that have a relationship with the Episcopal Anglican Diocese of El Salvador. (St. Aidan's http://www.saintaidan.org/. Holy Innocents http://www.holyinsf.org/, St. Gregory of Nyssa http://www.saintgregorys.org/, and St. John the Evangelist http://www.saintjohnsf.org/ Each year it is the great privilege of group from these four churches to travel to El Salvador, meet our brothers and sisters there, learn from them, observe work being supported by the Cristosal Foundation http://www.cristosal.org/ and hopefully take some of the spirit of the Salvadorenos back home with us.
We are Christians.
Some of us are younger, some us are older; some of us are men, some of us are women; some us are gay, some of us are straight. At home in the U.S. we are nurses, lawyers, priests, teachers, parents, children, volunteers.
In El Salvador we hike, and
sometimes fall....
We mill around...
some nights we are safely cocooned behind high walls in hotel compounds with material comforts available to very few Salvadorans...
We pray....
We listen...
We pose for photographs...
We shop...
We blog...
We work...
We eat....some of us get sick...
We make new friends
We pose for more photographs...
We laugh...
We goof around...
We talk late into the night...
We wonder...
We cry...
In El Salvador we are changed.
Gracias al pueblo salvadoreño por romper mi corazón para abrirlo a Diós
