|
Table of Contents |
Here and Now in El Salvadorby Marta Benevides |
|
|
Everyday is a here and now. Today the sky is blue, the birds sang cheerfully their morning song. . . "They get up to thank Nature and Creation", my mother taught my sisters and me when we were young. There is a vine falling from over the neighbor´s wall into my parents yard. It is bright orange, as if a real and beautiful fire were hanging from the wall. My heart looks at this fire and looks up to the sky, thanking the Spirit Creator, thanking life, in spite of it all. Yes, we must look at the blooming orchids, so fresh and tender they look. I must look at the two dark red lilies in full bloom, for I must nourish my Spirit, and send this beauty and love around the world. Yes, we must think of our loving friends and family, and all the people of the world. Let them feel us and receive our love. For, today . . . is the sixth day. Last Saturday, January the 13th, just before noon, at 11:34 a.m. to be exact, a terrible quake shook our lives. I hurried among the L A S T I N G tremor, battling against my aching feet, to embrace my 91 year old father, whom I am taking care of, who was almost ready to fall into the emptiness of many surrounding steps. He was shaking, trembling to his bones. This is a place of tremors and quakes we have been told as we were growing up. In school they taught us how to protect ourselves -- something that has been lost in the modernity of learning to produce to export. Our children do not know about this anymore. But that day it was not business as usual; the tremor that hurt our knees and souls, also hurt the whole of El Salvador. This quake, we are told, was not only intense and of high magnitude in the two scales of measurement -- Richter and Mercali -- it was a special type, one that the world sees only once in a hundred years. Two underground submarine plates hit against each other, the one from the Pacific Ocean, Cocos, collided against the Caribbean one. This, just a few kilometers from the Salvadoran coast. It was hard. It was heavy. It left our whole country in shambles, literally on its knees. Complete towns fell to the ground. The souls of our people knew, from one instant to the other, the anguish of the hundreds of houses that fell, crumbling walls, flying tiles, a whole mountain that had looked so beautiful and majestic minutes before -- the Cordillera del Balsamo -- falling in a landslide, covering hundreds of houses, the people, the dogs, the parakeets, the bicycles, the cars, the trucks, and any passersby. All of a sudden at 11:34 a.m. we have a new hill in the neighborhood. All we see is a brown naked hill of compacted soil. No trees. . . and the people running, screaming, wailing, calling their loved ones' names, screaming for help. The emptiness. . . impotence, tears, wailing, all over our PATRIA, afflicting OUR NATION. This quake affected many other nations in our Central America and Southern Mexico region -- the same area which not too long ago was devastated by Hurricane Mitch. The people everywhere were terrified, and in some cases, some houses fell and some people died. That is hard. Nicaragua was hit, but there were not many communities in those areas. And we give thanks for this. How can we wish such tragedy on anyone at all? We are grateful that they were spared. But El Salvador was visited by death. We still do not know how to count or account. We were told last night that maybe we will never know how many caserios -- small villages -- houses, people, buses and trucks were buried by the falling Cordillera. We can only see the landslides. Maybe we will never know their ages, nor their names. Then we will never know their dreams, their smiles or their intelligence. Now we can see the new grooves that have been opened on top of the mountain, and we are scared of the rainy season to come and the rain water filling these cracks. There are new hills in the middle of the Panamerican Highway, which is supposed to unite all of the Americas on the Pacific side. Now it has divided our territory and buried some of us. There are few survivors rescued from the landslide. One lived for three days with the help of experts and friends, but he died yesterday. His father said he was thankful for the struggle for his son's life and for all that people did. His mother cried, and quietly covered her face. Many have been buried in common graves, no close by relative to identify them. Now we have refugee centers, one with more than 7000 persons and more arriving. Yet the people try, everyone lending a hand: feeding, holding, bringing blankets and emotional support. And the government? They did try. They immediately met together with private enterprise persons. They said they had learned from the crisis of Hurricane Mitch. They met for hours and at 7 p.m. they announced to the people the creation of a sophisticated NATIONAL COMMISSION OF SOLIDARITY, which was to receive the international aid&emdash;preferably money, they requested -- and it would be distributed to the needy by their sub-commissions, it said. And do not worry, they assured, there will be two big international companies that will be monitoring and auditing. Never mind that one of them is the one that provides such services to the Salvadoran State, and to important members of the solidarity commission. And they said, the most important thing is to save lives, now! But after hours of battling the rocks and landslides on the roads, I walked over the naked hill that buried even some of my friends. I had to remind myself that this was not just a hill, under it hundreds of people were buried. Asphyxiated. Gasping. Praying. Hoping. Rolando, my friend and partner at work, had been shoveling to locate people the whole time since the landslide. It was now 6 p.m. The sun had set. People were running; some were standing with empty eyes. There were hundreds of people and a few soldiers and police. They were digging, digging, digging, with a few shovels, picks, pieces of wood, anything for digging, but mostly with their bare hands. But the National Commission of Solidarity was being formed. To be in solidarity: I remember, with pain, the people being killed during the 1980s for saying the word. Now the very ones who did not like the word, use it freely. Now, later on, they promise to save lives! Today we hear the helicopters, just like during the war. Today we feed each other, take care of the refugees, tell stories to the children to see them smile again. Today we bury our dead, yet make the demands: for safety, for education, for jobs and for healthcare. Today we learn about mutuality and we learn to dream again. Today we monitor the government and acknowledge that the recently imposed law of monetary integration is called Dollarization, which we rename Dolor-ization and greet it with the firmness of a NO! But the people are surviving, and we are taking care of our lives. We are learning that we are El Salvador. That we'll dig it with our fingers and nest it within our souls. There is hope and endurance, and also the determination to take care of each other, to love our land, to make Patria and to make Nation, in spite of those who see us only as instruments of their enrichment, and tools for their products. Thanks be to life that gives us so much.
Reflections for the XXIII Century By Marta Benavides of El Salvador - Ferias Siglo XXIII - committed to social transformation and development through culture.
|