1. I didn’t know what I was looking for when I went to El Salvador. Now I know. I was searching for a machete.
2. Dostoyevsky’s early description of Alyosha: “he was a young man of his time – honest, demanding the truth, with an unfailing desire to sacrifice everything, even life. But, to sacrifice five or six years of his life to hard, difficult studies, to learning, in order to increase tenfold his strength to serve the truth - such sacrifice was beyond his strength.” Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, p. 26. (A first dichotomy: the sacrifice of a life through death and the sacrifice of a life through disciplined study.)
3. A popular quote of Quaker origin: “Speak truth to power.” (A second dichotomy: power and truth.)
4. Our group prepares for our trip by watching the movie Romero. In the movie, members of the church hierarchy talk among themselves: “He (Romero) is a good compromise choice (for Archbishop). He'll make no waves. He's a bookworm. The whole country would be running wild and he would not even notice it.” (Bookworms, in spite of disciplined study, have neither truth nor power. Their life is not a sacrifice. They fall outside the dichotomies.)
5. We visit the church, El Rosario. Gabriela Gatlin points out that statues of Christopher Columbus and Bartolome de las Casas stand side by side in the courtyard. We remember Columbus for his deeds, including the exploitation and the brutal form of slavery he brought to indigenous peoples. Bartolome de las Casas O.P. (1484-1566) was the first resident Bishop of Chiapas and the first officially appointed “Protector of the Indians.” We remember him for his words; he wrote books, including “A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies,” and he was responsible for establishing Spanish laws which outlawed slavery in 1542. Here they stand as contemporaries on the same ground, but Bartolome de las Casas’ statue stands a little taller.
6. We visit the Universidad CentroAmericana (University of Central America) (UCA), San Salvador’s version of Loyola University. We view gruesome pictures of the bodies of six priests and of the house-keeper and her daughter, who were murdered 17 November 1989 by the government of El Salvador. Our drivers, Manuel and Jesus, join us in the rose garden which marks where it happened. They remember that night. Manuel was ten years old, and he hid under his bed as guns fired and helicopters flew over their house. This is their first visit to the garden, and they are pensive. They don’t have words.
7. All of the campesinos carry machetes; the machete is a farmer’s tool. Pastor, who fought the government during the war, shows off his machete to us. He leads us to his bench where he shows us how to sharpen it on the sharpening stone. (Two opposing principles, the sword and the plow, meet in the machete.)
8. On the day our group went to visit the Lempa river, where the government massacred the peasant farmers of Valle Nuevo on 18 March 1981, I stay behind, sick. I don’t speak Spanish; my hosts don’t speak English. Children, home from school, come by in the afternoon. I play songs for them on my harmonica. I teach them how to yo-yo. They learn fast. We have fun, even with our limited vocabularies. I leave the yo-yos with them.
9. We host a supper for about fifteen students from Valle Nuevo and Santa Marta. Directly across from me sits the vivacious Anna Maria who is in her last year of university studies and majoring in history.
I ask her the same question my philosophy students are constantly asked: “What are you going to do with a history major?” (i.e., What power does a history major give you? Can it give you the power to make money?) She says that maybe she will work in an archive somewhere. I have a hard time imagining this.
“What do you like about studying history?” Here she gives me the real answer to my first question: “Official history, the history they teach small children, is history with make-up on. Here at the university they teach us true history. I want to teach the country about our true history. They need our true history.” She repeats and emphasizes “true” each time. She will be a fantastic teacher. (She begins from a different place than did Dostoyevsky’s Alyosha.)
10. We attend the popular mass at the National Cathedral. It is held in the basement with people seated in the round. (The upstairs mass seats people in traditional rows, with the priests and the sacraments up front on an elevated platform.) The popular mass commemorates Oscar Romero. It is also the two-year anniversary of the murder of Marcelo Rivera who spoke out against Pacific Rim mining company’s gold mining plans. (This is a church of martyrs. This is a country where words can have the power of truth, the gun the power to silence.)
11. At UCA, I note that one of the martyrs, Arnando Lopez, was a philosophy professor. While standing at the rose garden David Janzen explains the priests’ teaching methods. They did not just tell their students what to think. Instead they sent them on research projects that revealed the corruption and brutality of the government. Their methods and the truths their students discovered through their own “difficult studies” had the effect of turning the students against their parents. That is why these priests and teachers were silenced.
12. In my bags to return home, I pack a book, The Violence of Love, authored by the fourth Archbishop of San Salvador, Oscar A. Romero. Romero held a position of power, and he gave his life both to difficult study and to martyrdom (15 August 1917 – 24 March 1980). They still call him the voice of the voiceless.
13. In their bags to return home, Nati, Sam, and Micah, pack machetes. Having been introduced to “the way of the machete” by Pastor, they purchased their own during our last days in El Salvador. We worry that the machetes won’t be allowed into the country, even in checked baggage. In the U.S., where Catholic campesinos look like communists, machetes look like swords rather than plows, and young Ethiopians seem to merit extra scrutiny. But we all pass through customs without trouble. And now we have tools to carve new paths on our own mountains.
