Tags
culture, El Salvador, LASP, learning, Rick Steves, speaking out, travel, Travel as a Political Act
Bear with me here but I couldn’t sleep tonight and here’s some of what was keeping me up. Sorry it probably doesn’t flow very well and rambles on for a while.
Strange, it’s 11:30pm and what thoughts are passing through my mind? No, not thoughts of tomorrow or this rapidly approaching summer, not thoughts of peace and comfort.
No, I have been spurned into writing by thoughts of well, garbage. In my mind all I can see is a vast garbage dump, bordered on one side by beautiful blue water, but all that you can see for miles is garbage.
There is all sorts of garbage here, plastics, glass, and metals all vieing for space among the animal bones and sludge that the dump trucks splash through to dump, that’s right, more garbage onto the mounding heaps.
But that’s not all. There are animals here, roaming on the heaps looking for scraps of something edible. What’s more there are people here to. Not just the workers, there are what appear to be houses on the horizon,
tiny plumes of smoke wafting into the sky above their roofs. Children pick around the garbage as well and I am reminded of Elmer’s words, his Spanish mixing with the English of the translator, making the poetry of his
words shock like bolts of electricity as he told us about growing up in such a place in El Salvador. He once ate a can of sardines that was expired by six months and enjoyed it, because it was food. However, thinking
of Elmer also reminds me of his early thoughts about the US. As a boy in a dump in El Salvador he once had a post card of a mountain in the states. He thought then that us estadounidenses must have it really good,
if we ever got hungry all we had to do was go outside and eat some snow, we never had to worry about food. But then, one day, after cheering on a US military helicopter flying over the dump he was told that, that one
helicopter could kill them all, not too long after that bodies started showing up at the dump; warnings to the poor not to rise up, not to ask why they were poor, not to ask for a better life.
I am always struck by the power of certain things to take me back to a place or time. Lately, I’ve been reading a book by Rick Steves. It’s kind of funny. This guy who, quite frankly, I always saw as this slightly prudish,
travel writer, expounding ways to see the beauty of Europe, has writen a throughly thought provoking book, “Travel as a Political Act.” I guess I never really expected Rick Steves to make me think about politics and my
worldview. Tonight, I read most of the chapter about his travels in Central America, specifically, in El Salvador. Now, I’ve never been to El Salvador, I’ve only heard a bit about it in my Spanish classes and from Elmer who
grew up there. Yet, as I read I could not help thinking of all that I learned in LASP about the politics of Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama. How can such a similar story be told so many times? I was instantly transported
back to Central America. As he explained a bit about Liberation Theology I was instantly back in the classroom in San Jose, drinking coffee and disscussing it with my classmates. I can remember vividly one of the profs asking,
“So, you can be free to do whatever you want, be whoever you want, but you would consign us to poverty because of where we were born?”
And then I was moved almost to tears, for I also remember Atton Solis telling us that if we did not let our experiences shape how we thought and acted we were being egotistical. Yet, that is what I have done. This whole winter,
has been an exercise in keeping quiet. I have sat through more Sunday School classes that have espoused ideals I find more than problematic and wrong and I have been, angry, upset, chagrined, and……….silent. I haven’t said
nary a word. Most of the time I have felt most like a fly on the wall, not really a member of the group and therefore just a traveler passing through. I mean, I haven’t always agreed with everything taught in every church I’ve
attended, but it doesn’t matter since it’s not MY church. Then, I am the youngest, usually by far, in the class, maybe I haven’t earned the right to speak anyway, and besides, these people haven’t known me since I was a little girl,
this isn’t my community, this isn’t MY church, why should I bother with what they think about life, war, politics, taxes, etc.
But then again, although my home community is not as small nor as secluded as the one in which I am currently living, these views are still held by many of the people there. This worldview is not so different than the one held
by the people back home, and well, in every sense that truly matters, these people ARE my people. I have chosen to live with them, for however brief a period of time that may be. This is my home culture, my home nation, my
home ethnicity, my home ideological system, and if not my home denomination at least my home religious background; they ARE MY people. And I have discovered that I can no longer remain silent. They may not ever agree
with me, they may not respect my opinion, they may reject me completely, but if nothing else they will know that there are people who see the world diffenently than they do. And perhaps my saying something will get them to
think a bit more about their position. How can I be silent when I know of the blood on my banana? That is to say, how can I remain silent when I know, in part, of the struggles and suffering of those below the border?
I suppose that LASP really doesn’t end when you leave Latin America. Just because you are no longer enrolled in the program doesn’t mean that you are no longer a student. The alternate acronym still holds true, Living Ackward
Situations Permanantly. Learning about the world in which we live will always present you with more ackward situations than you can imagine. And just as Learning Alternate Sanitary Procedures can be eye opening in more ways
than one, learning about different worldviews can be just as, sometimes, disturbing. Knowing, truly knowing, that the majority of the people on the planet do not live the way we live or see the world the way we do can be, well,
intimidating and terrifying. That is, until you realize that their way of seeing and living isn’t wrong, just different. I almost started crying tonight as I read Steves book and I can’t quite place why. Perhaps it was just all of my own
memories flooding back, maybe it was me realizing that other thought similarly, and perhaps I was remembering my host brothers, sisters, mothers, and fathers and all that they had been through in their lives.
Maya Angelou once said that travel cannot prevent bigotry; but perhaps by teaching us what we have in common with others, by seeing that all peoples feel, laugh, and love, we won’t see eye to eye, but we may become friends.
