On September 19, the youth of St. Thomas hosted 100+ El Salvador “stockholders,” serving them dinner and presenting them with reflections on their pilgrimage. The evening concluded with an exciting question-and-answer session.
Back in July, during the week our youth were in El Salvador, I posted this 2008 piece from Lily Moodey. Lily was one of four 2008 pilgrims who returned to El Salvador in 2010. By way of comparison, I’d like to share her reflection from this year’s trip as well.
The most striking part of my second experience in El Salvador came not from culture shock, the surprising lack of digestive problems, or even our detention, but from the realization that a mere two years’ difference in perspective could change my experience of the country in such an intense way.
A rising senior in high school, I feel myself suddenly faced with the breathtaking prospect of opportunity. With college applications in my immediate future, adults are perpetually telling me that I’m entering the prime of my life. Left and right people ask me what I aspire to be, assuring me that I’m allowed to change my mind, telling me this is what youth is all about … except not everybody is given that luxury.
While I face an array of choices and exciting experiences, the youth I’ve met and become friends with in El Salvador live in a different, more daunting reality. With ridiculous living costs and wages that don’t match them, it is nearly impossible for anyone to battle poverty without getting involved with the rising gang presence and, in turn, drugs, violence and danger. For them, this is not a desire or even a choice, but an inescapable trap.
Bishop Barahona talked to us about the church’s approach to the situation, trying to offer youth a way out, even when the prospective laws make any association illegal. It was hard to imagine, as I kicked the soccer ball around with new friends from Santa Maria Virgín, or exchanged email addresses with a boy named Francisco, or played with Jennifer and Abél, our cook Mercedes’ kids, that while they have the same passion, energy, excitement, drive, insecurities, faith, and love that I do, they could be facing such a different, scarier future. To me, the difference in our futures was ten times as disturbing as the differences in our material situations and lifestyles that had hit me so hard last time I visited the country.
This trip, however, was not about comparing what they have to what I have and feeling bad about it. Too often, I see something horrible and I stuff my guilt away to deal with later. There’s a lot more that I can learn from the people I’ve met than what I get from merely comparing our situations. I will undoubtedly go about my future questioning who I am to take the opportunities given to me, but I plan to do so using what I’ve learned from the people I met in El Salvador.
The tour guide at the Romero museum brought up a point that resonated with me through the rest of the trip. She affirmed that our ability to stop the injustices in El Salvador are limited, just as much injustice and need exist at home in our community. But by simply respecting the people around us—be it the people who pick up our trash or immigrants who come to our country—we are helping move toward the justice craved by those who are denied it.
I plan to take this advice, along with the patience I learned from a man willing to talk to me in Spanish for an hour despite my difficulty in communicating, the kindness I learned from Mercedes and the other people who welcomed us into their communities, and the strength I learned from the youth of El Salvador as I face whatever comes next. All the while, I will pray that they are given the chance to follow their own dreams.
- Lily Moodey
You can read the entire El Salvador 2010 retrospective here. (Be patient after you click; the file is huge.) My thanks go out to the pilgrims and to the stockholders for their commitment to this very important project.
