I was told the other day by my mother that many of my blog entries were rather dark and depressing and I felt that maybe I was giving the wrong impression about my time here in El Salvador. I am having a great time. There is no doubt that many of the things I experience here are hard. The injustice, the lingering effects of the war in the minds of people, the harsh reality of people living with HIV-AIDS. The other day, in fact, I went to visit a woman named Blanca living with HIV-AIDS. And when I looked into her blind, bloody eyes and tried to speak into her deaf ears and listened to her slurred speech coming from her blistered, painful lips, I felt that I was looking at death itself. But not just death like the peaceful type that many old people go through, but the death that results from injustice and from inequality. That woman, as every other women in our HIV program and probably the vast majority of women with HIV in the world, was a loving, faithful wife who was given AIDS by her machista, unfaithful husband. And though AIDS is a controllable disease, because she is poor and dark skinned she is denied right to the drugs that could prolong her life and give her hope to see her three children grow old...
But alas, not all is dreary and sad. Because as I touched her hand, she squeezed it in friendship. And I played with her children and I met her father who is an example of a truly good man who loves his family and cares for them.
What is hope? I don´t like to have some false hope that my vision of what I want the world to be will come true. That type of hope leads to deception and depression because in the end this world is so fucked up that all the dark and hateful things that I want to see ended will never all come true. So, I don´t hope to change the world. Thus, I have two ideas of what hope is for me. One, as a person who believes in Jesus of Nazareth, I believe that he was killed by all the powers of evil who were threatened by his message. But his resurrection signalled the begining of the new Reign of God amongst the people. It is hope for the poor, oppressed, sad, and the rest of the Beatitudes. Thus, without being to ignorant, I do believe that the Reign of God is among us who choose to live it and that should bring us hope because the Reign of God is a future promise and a present reality. Two, I really like the Hindu-Buddhist idea of not being attached to the fruit of one´s actions. What I do, I do not do in order to see results. I am not working with people who have HIV because I believe that one day pharmaceutical companies will get their shit together and see that the lives of people are more important than their profit and make ARVs available to all. Thus, I am not set up for disappointment. And thus what is left is the day to day experiences filled with joys and sadnesses, relationships and struggles. And always, in this I find so much more joy and relationships amongst the poor. So thus, though I write about many dark things perhaps, I do so because it is my way of letting go of those things that I alone cannot change and accepting the little joys of building relationships amongst the poorest of the poor who every day I struggle to see the face of Christ in them.
So yes mother, despite all the struggles, I am happy....

Last weekend I had the privilege of being amongst a group of people dedicated to remembering the past. Perhaps I have commented before, or maybe not, I forget, but here in El Salvador people remember. They remember the war, they remember their lost ones, they remember their triumphs and their defeats. And most of all, they make it a case to remember those who the rest of the world want us to forget. Or better yet, they remember those who the powerful and the rich and the oppresors want us to never even believed existed.
Last weekend I went with a group from work to Mozote, El Salvador--a small, peaceful town nestled within the mountains near the Honduras border. Beautiful, yet tainted with blood. We were there to celebrate (or perhaps that is not the right word) the 25th aniversary of the massacre committed by the El Salvadoran armed forces in 1981 against the campesino population. 1,000 people, the majority women and children, were corralled into their houses and then all killed. The army was working under the stategy that if you get rid of the water, then the fish can´t live. Meaning to say that since the guerilla survived amongst the rural campesinos, if they could kill off all the campesinos, then the guerillas would be rendered impotent. An interesting strategy no doubt, learned by the army leaders taught at the School of Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia and trained and counseled by the U.S. army commanders in El Salvador at the time as purely ¨logistical¨help.
And obviously it should be found by all of as evil and sickening that people could do such a thing. But what brings me the most sadness is that 25 years later neither the government of the U.S. nor the government of El Salvador have admitted to the massacre ever taking place. One woman survived, and she was there last weekend as a lone voice trying to convince the world of what her eyes saw and of what so many want her to deny ever happening.
I always thought it was rather useless when I hear of governments this day in age apologizing for what they committed in the past. For example, when the U.S. government apologizes to the Native Americans for the largest genocide ever to take place or when any number of European governments apologize to the Jews, it seems so symbolic and useless. But I am realizing now that it is a first step. If one refuses to realize and admit to the reality of the past, then nothing changes. Santanya once wrote that those who don´t know history are condemned to repeat it. And I look at El Salvador, and I know that it is true because it continues to happen to this day. Perhaps the violence has changed. Perhaps now there is no opèn civil war for the whole world to see, but the government continues to oppress a large part of the population through economic, political, and social policies where the millions of dollars of the rich are seen as more important than the bread on the table of a poor campesino family. And the same thing is happening today. The government is refusing to acknowledge that their policies are bringing millions of people into the violence of poverty. Rather, they proudly announce that El Salvador and it´s new economy has lifted it out of the status of the Third World. And that does not only deny the reality that so many live, but it also directly hurts them. The Global Fund for HIV-AIDS is denying El Salvador needed funds to combat the growing HIV pandemic because of the government´s self published statistics as a modern country.
But within this country, the people refuse to forget. They refuse to let the powerful and the rich erase their history, and thus it is them and them alone who have the ability to not continue repeating the sad history that this country has lived. With them, hope resides, because they refuse to forget.