Dinero, Fronteras, y Maneras de Vida (Money, Borders, and Ways of Life)

Fronteras, Dinero y Maneras de Vida

(Borders, Money and Ways of Life)

“In the United States people earn $7 an hour. In El Salvador they earn $7 a day..” Lucy, mother of our host family

It’s stunning to think that $7 an hour here is so much when its so little back home. Some things in El Salvador like food and some clothing cost a lot less. Many things, however, like brand name clothing, gasoline, and electronics, cost as much or more. I’m not talking relative prices here but actual dollar for dollar comparisons. (El Salvador uses US currency, making this easy.). That means that a pair of brand name sneakers that would cost a minimum wage worker in the US about two days worth of work would mean over two weeks worth of work for the same worker in El Salvador. But given the cost of basic living, it also means that things like brand name sneakers are just out of reach for the average Salvadoran.

What this means is that everyone has a lot less stuff. Also, economies are much more local and small business/ owner-operator oriented. For instance there were two family owned popsicle-stick making businesses in San Ignacio, a municipal area of 8,000. (Almost every kid at every school buys three choco-bananas a week). The number of overall businesses in El Salvador is stunning. Everybody’s selling something everywhere. When we went to Puerto de Diablo and hiked up the mountain there were vendors selling food, water, or handicrafts every 50 feet. It puts the US concept of hard-work, self-starting entrepreneurship to shame.

In small rural communities like San Ignacio this seems to work well. Families help each other out economically. Less stuff seems to mean that everyone spends more time together. In San Ignacio church is a huge part of daily life. There are well attended services (over 100) several nights a week, plus Friday, Saturday, and Sunday evenings. Here in Soyapango (a community adjoining San Salvador)  it’s different. Families still spend more time together and help each other out economically. But there are also many folks with marginal or no housing. Many church members live in suburbs a good 45 minutes from the church and school. TV (and internet, to a lesser degree) seems to fill in for church time when it’s not Sunday. 

Due to the economic disparity everyone here has one or more relatives in the states, commonly known as “usa” pronounced as one word like a conjugation of the Spanish verb “to use” or as “Uniteds.” Many don’t have the papers to work legally. Its odd to realize the extent of the connectedness between El Salvador and the US. It’s much clearer here, as one watches US shows, uses US money, and hears about the many distant relatives, than in the US. But for those of us who are US citizens, it’s important to understand the impact of our government's policies.

Worship

This is public art in La Palma. To see the outside of the church here in San Ignacio, see my first blog post.

Adoración is the word for worship in Spanish. And its the adoration part of worship that’s really touched my heart and soul. There’s LOTS of singing, which is wonderful. It’s a bit reminiscent of black churches in the US in content, though with the addition of electric guitar and a drum set, and minus the fabulous harmonies. It can quickly and deeply renew one’s connection to Spirit.

Her voice and message moved the congregation. Behind her in the band are Danny, son of our host family, and Esau, one of the English teachers we've been working with.

This weekend is a weekend of evangelization in the church. Members are bringing as many new folks to services as they can. There’s a visiting minister from Honduras, who is also staying with our host family, and an evangelical singer and her husband from Guatemala. The theme is Joshua 24:15 “In my house, I will worship the Lord.” I was struck by the minister’s message on Friday night that we can’t make anyone accept Jesus Christ. That each person must accept Christ for him/her self, including children. He preached at length about integrity and how a parent’s job is to model and make explicit his/her relationship with God. He said that then the children are likely to follow. I know children don’t always follow their parents, even with this kind of modeling. But it made me think about the importance of integrity, modeling and explicitness in parenting once again. 

Kids we worked with at the school singing as part of the father's day celebration.

There are also many quotes from the bible. The general emphasis is on praise and gratitude. Regularly praying before meals (grace) and at the end of classes has been good for me. I like how “habits of gratitude” are part of the fabric of life here. Church services here also emphasize how much God is in charge.

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There’s a way in which the God is in charge messages resonate with me deeply. Much of the preaching emphasizes our free will to choose God’s path and our tendencies to disobey. I don’t believe that there is a God moving us around like chess pieces, or Barbie dolls as my first Christian friend explained it to me. But at the same time, it’s also clear to me that we’re not in control— or that our circles of control and influence are limited. I from the United States, and I have a personal/cultural bias towards making the most of that control. But I’m also experienced enough to know its limits.

Here everybody goes to church and there's lots of intergenerational mingling.

About ten years ago my friend Christopher shared me with the concept of having a God-centered identity. It both confused and intrigued me. I’ve been thinking about it a lot since being here. What it means to me now is not being too attached to a certain view of ourselves, but being open to Spirit’s leadings, and keeping Spirit at our center. 

Education Here and There

I’m buying a bag of yuca chips at the school snack store. The soccer ball from the ever-present teen game knocks the chips out of my hand and they go flying. A very embarrassed high school student comes over, apologizes, and insists on buying me a new bag.

“I have a niece in the United States. She’s in school from 7am to 5pm. She is so advanced!”—Danny, our host

“The education in the US is amazing. I keep telling my daughter how lucky she is and how she needs to work hard and take advantage of it. The books!! The materials!! And it’s all free! It’s nothing like school in Mexico.”— a parent of one of my students this year

In El Salvador, unlike Mexico, the public schools pay for everything—notebooks, uniforms, and food. In that way the public schools are similar to those in the  US. (Though in the US we do ask parents to pay for notebooks and uniforms, so its not even as generous). The education itself is very different. School here is just four hours a day. There are separate morning and afternoon sessions for different sets of students taught by completely different teachers. 

We got to visit one of the public schools with Goti, the sister of our our host Lucy, and her daughter Sofia. Goti teaches at the school and Sofia went there and then switched to the Friends’ school where we’re working.  I asked Goti if it was possible to live on the salary, especially given that it was just four hours a day. She said yes, but not really enough to support a family. I asked if anyone worked both morning and afternoon. She looked at me like I was kind of thick and said, “No, other teachers need to work then.”

Also, at least this week, there aren’t even five full four hour days. Tuesday there was no school for Father’s Day. And today was Teacher’s Day, so no classes again. Instead there was a lovely program organized entirely by the oldest students in which all students participated.  The oldest students walked the teachers in one by one to great applause. Every grade did some kind of presentation. There were silly skits in which teachers and students imitated each other. At the end of a two and a half hour program, during which the assembled student body of just over 100 only had to be shushed twice, all students filed out hugging each of the teachers. All students then went home except for the oldest, who then had a piñata for the teachers, helped set up and serve a teacher lunch, and then did all the clean up. The degree of love and appreciation expressed, and the degree to which it was all student-led,  was really moving.

Classroom time consists of a lot of workbook and notebook time. No discussions. No question-generating. Few student engagement techniques. No discussion of strategies. And little differentiation for students of different abilities. Nothing for students to move on to once they get done. I knew most of this would be true going in. But just how different it would be I didn’t really understand. Also, there are no books besides student workbooks. No fiction. No non-fiction. No discussion of reading anything except the Bible. Actually, that’s an exaggeration. All the kids at the school do read one book together in the older grades. I know this because there’s a big poster about it in the office. But I’ve yet to see a book in a classroom.

Yet what I do see is a love and kindness I don’t see in the U.S. US readers, can you imagine the  chips scenario taking place in the US? A teacher appreciation like the one I just experienced? And I’m torn on the education piece. I believe in having books in classrooms. And teaching students how to think and become life-long learners. But its also true that we’ve designed a system that serves the advanced well and the rest not so much. Take the student I had this year whose mom raved about the opportunities in the US. This student had some learning difficulties. Or at least they looked that way in a US context. The student couldn’t have been any harder-working. But, nonetheless, she wasn’t making typical progress. But I’m sure than in a Mexican school this kid would have been doing just fine. So is her US education a plus or a minus? She’ll end up knowing more, but she may feel like a less competent person that she would have in a different setting.

One thing that seems to be the same are the differences between public and private schools. The public school we visited was beautiful. Colorful murals covered the walls. Yet when we talked with Sofia we found out that there were serious discipline/safety problems and racism. She was quite relieved to be at the Friends’ school where she felt safe and said more learning was taking place. Our kids briefly went to a private high school. I don’t know if more learning was taking place but it was certainly safer and calmer. Kids from varied racial backgrounds mixed a lot more than seems to be the case in the public schools and the whole student body (which included many students of color) was college-bound. I say this not to indict the pubic schools (I think there are many things that make this the case that are not the fault of public schools) yet it is a reality. 

Which gets me to thinking about poverty, and Jesus’ call to be with the poor, and the irony that private Christian schools are able to provide things that public schools can’t. But that, my friends, will be the subject of another post. If I don’t get carried away by something else first.

Starting School and Returning to Church

Monday was our first day in the school—Colegio De Los Amigos de San Ignacio. Sunday we spent in church. Three churches to be precise. One in San Salvador with Raul and Glenda and their families, one in Soyapango with Leslie, our first host, and then an evening service in the church here in San Ignacio, a municipal area of 7,000 about an hour north of San Salvador.

People continue to go out of their way to welcome us. Pastors greeted us from the pulpit in the churches, Raul (a key member of the El Savlador/NYM partnership whom I got to meet and start getting to know at Northern Yearly Meeting) introduced us to his congregation during the service, and Danny (our host in San Ignacio and who I believe is also president of El Salvador yearly meeting) introduced us during the service here.

On Sunday evening the school’s board and school director Juan Miguel had a meeting to welcome us. On Monday we had a lovely late start to our work at 9am. Freddy, one of the school’s board members, met us at Danny’s and walked us into to school. We had an orientation to English classes by the English teacher before leaping in. After observing and participating slightly in her two middle school classes we had a delicious lunch at the home of Juan Miguel and his family. Not to mention the chocobanana and coffee break a little later. Let me tell you, this is the good life.

The first sermon last Sunday was on God’s call to strengthen ourselves through Him. The pastor then invited Raul to speak. Raul and his wife Loyda recently had a baby who has holes in his heart. The open heart surgery he needs costs thousands more than they can possibly pay. Their faith has been sorely tested. Raul stood crying as he talked about their struggles last Sunday. Then we laid our hands on them and prayed. The depth of love and faith and trust was palpable. The fact that the real and present challenges to faith were shared made the service profound. 

On our first day Juan Miguel, the school director, spent some time asking us about education in the United States. It was fascinating for me, just having returned to teaching. Education in the US has changed a lot in the five years I’ve been away from the classroom. As I was teaching this year, I kept thinking about what I’d want for a mid-sized urban district (aka Minneapolis) if I got to make the decisions. Talking to him today got me thinking about it again. How would I keep the good parts of the changes (e.g. much more attention to individual student progress), eliminate the bad (high stakes testing and accompanying anxiety), and enhance the education of the whole student. Education is always swinging from one end of the spectrum to the other, and it seems we always throw out the baby with the bathwater, abandoning the good aspects of one approach for something totally different.

Education in the U.S. has become very data-driven. In some ways I like this. I see value in being extremely clear on what we’re teaching and expect students to learn. I think explicitness about what and how we learn is especially important in a multicultural environment. On the flip side, there’s a question about what kind of data we collect, the time spent collecting it, and what it means for the long term. Sarah recently read a study showing that the earlier students are introduced to algebra the higher the high-school dropout rate becomes. Nothing we measure now in the classroom would tell us this. I worry that we now focus so much on specific skills that we don’t support students in making larger connections and retaining what they learn. The biggest danger, I think, is focusing so much on where a child is in comparison to benchmarks that we take the joy out of learning. 

Conversations with friends at here and at home have me thinking similar thoughts about religion. Congregations and denominations rarely swing from one worship approach or set of beliefs to another, They are more likely to splinter. The FGC branch of Quakerism that Savannah and I come from and the evangelical approach of friends here are, in a sense, on  opposite sides of the Quaker tree. Friends here are more able to talk about their faith than most Friends at home are. I think this may come from frequent Bible reading, prayers and the expectation to be vocal. During our time at NYM Raul and Glenda commented on how our annual gatherings are open to all and include time for relaxation and reflection, how clearness and support committees can be profound, and how our style of silent worship combined with vocal ministry was a deep way to experience worship. Raul talked about how he’d incorporated times of silent worship after his time with Friends in the U.S. I know I’ll bring back lessons in hospitality. I think the fact that this exchange and relationship has been building over 10 years helps it be the opposite of the swings in education and the debates over interpretation and doctrine that can split denominations. A slow but steady opening to new ways of experiencing Spirit with a slow but steady tug on our individual and corporate spiritual lives.

For more frequent updates and another point of view on the same experiences, check out Savannah's blog at http://savannahbug.blogspot.com.

Our First Day

We're here! Happily snacking on mango in the home of Leslie, David and Ryan David.  On the left is Ryan David, 2 yrs old, lover of soccer balls and his family. On the right is Savannah, my travel and teaching buddy. And between them is fresh mango which grows everywhere.

We arrived last night. We're here through our Friends (Quaker) meeting, courtesy of the generosity of Upper Midwest Friends. Northern Yearly Meeting (upper midwest) Friends have had a relationship with Salvadoran Friends since 2002 with many visits back and forth. Right now we're staying with Leslie and David for the weekend at their home in a suburb of San Salvador. It's hot and somewhat humid--along the lines of Minneapolis or DC in August. On Sunday we'll head north to San Ignacio and spend two weeks helping to teach English in the Friends school there. Then we'll return to San Salvador and teach at another school in the city in the neighborhood of Soyapango.

Raul and his wife Loyda picked us up at the airport last night and drove us here. Everyone has been incredibly welcoming and generous-- Leslie and David spent much time welcoming us last night, assuring us that their home is our home, cooking delicious platanos y frijoles for us, and orienting us to their neighborhood.

On the way in the airports I really missed my family. The delight Tajah and Da'Jon show whenever we go to Jamba Juice or any food in airports (that delicious junkie stuff we never buy at home). The joy of exploring new places and cultures with Sarah. I'm glad to be able to maintain a connection to home and all of you through this blog.

One of the gifts of this experience is a chance to reflect on, share and explore my faith with friends whose style of worship is very different from my own. For me God as a person is a concept more than a reality. A way of describing and being able to get our small human minds around the deep connectedness between all humans, the earth, and the universe. I find myself using God language because sometimes it conveys concepts that I don't know how to convey otherwise. But at times I feel lacking in integrity because God is not El Senor for me-- or more, accurately, El Senor is only a small slice. 

I've been thinking about faith and what it means to be faithful. At Northern Yearly Meeting Tajah commented again about how Friends truly are friends in a different way than she experiences in the rest of her life. Another friend commented about how the spiritual work and the learning is that we create that community--and we can create it anywhere. For me faith is the ability to truly trust in connectedness. To know that it exists regardless of my ability to perceive it. And that being faithful, now, seems to mean accepting hospitality and being the best friend I can.

Savannah and I are posting these blogs both to share our experiences and to help raise money for the schools in which we'll work. I'll have more info. about how to contribute if you wish later. You can also check out Savannah's blog at http://savannahbug.blogspot.com.