Social Justice and Struggle

The school year in Peru starts next Monday, so life is finally settling into more of a pattern here in the Mountain House. Last Saturday, we sat down as a JV (Jesuit Volunteer) community to check in about each of our understandings of the four pillars of JVC: community, spirituality, simple living, and social justice. We reflected on both our current understanding of each value as well as our hopes for how those values might be lived out in our community over the next year.

When the conversation turned to social justice, I thought at first that I wouldn’t have much to say. I’m still only just beginning to understand the social reality of the community in Andahuaylillas. I can’t yet name many of the issues of social justice present here, and the ones I am aware of I’ve learned second-hand. I have so much still to learn, and so, as one of my communitymates expressed, most of what I think of when I reflect on social justice as a value is my role as a student here in Peru. I’m sure I will have many teachers in the next two years that will teach me in many different ways about what it’s like to live in Peru.

But in reflecting more on these first three months living in Andahuaylillas, I’ve realized that I have learned a lot about what social justice means in this context, though that understanding has come in unexpected ways.

In many ways, the past three months has been a time of a lot of frustration. The process of becoming a resident of Peru has involved multiple 24-hour bus trips, long lines, much confusion, and a seemingly endless and jumbled array of bureaucratic hoops to jump through. We never seem to be in the right place with the right documents, and I swear one of the immigration officials savors the task of telling us that sorry, we need to come back again with yet another change in our paperwork. Aside from that, I’ve been sick a couple of times and haven’t necessarily received the same quality of care that I would have access to in the US. I’ve struggled with feelings of isolation that come from living in a small rural town where the ways I look and speak mean that it’s easy for people to identify me as an outsider.

What I’ve learned about social justice so far can be directly tied to all of the ways that I’ve struggled so far in this experience. There have been more than a few instances during my time here that have made me feel something along the lines of, “oh shit, what have I gotten myself into?” But it’s those same times that have provided the most occasions for reflection and ultimately (I hope) have fostered an increase in my capacity for empathy and invited me into greater solidarity with this community. I understand just a tiny bit better what it might be like to go through the immigration process in the US, the injustice of unequal access to quality healthcare, and the experience of being a visible minority within a particular community.

Perhaps more significantly, those same experiences of personal struggle and frustration have shed light on the enormous amount of privilege I bring with me to my time as a JV. This is a reality that I’ve chosen to participate in for a finite amount of time, and I hope to experience it as deeply and whole-heartedly as I can, but I also have to recognize the immense privilege present in that choice alone. The immigration process here has been kind of like a long, drawn-out trip to the DMV—but ultimately I’m confident that once all of the paperwork is sorted out I’ll be approved to stay, which is more than a great many migrants can say. I also know that I have a safe place to return to at the end of my time in Peru, unlike many refugees going through the same processes. The annoyance of intestinal infections and subsequent visits to the clinic is bothersome, but as a JV I have excellent health insurance that allows me to access medical care whenever I need it, as well as any medication I might need. And although the standard of care may be different from what I’m used to back at home, it’s also far beyond what many of the people in my current community and the global community have access to. It’s made me especially aware of what a privilege it is to have access to clean, safe drinking water both here in Peru and in the US, and to be able to take steps to improve the quality of that water when necessary. The isolation and loneliness I’ve sometimes felt here are real and valid feelings, but I will never know what it’s like to face systemic injustices based on the color of my skin. If anything, being white and from the US in this community means that I’m often given special treatment, like being told to skip lines at the clinic or being entrusted with more responsibility at the parish.

The pillar of social justice in my time as a JV so far has been an exercise in keeping things in perspective. When issues of justice affect my life here, while I want to honor the feelings and struggles that surface for me, I’m also trying to continuously remind myself of the broader picture. What does that issue of justice look like on a greater scale, and who might it be impacting more than it’s impacting me? How can I turn that frustration into an occasion to enter more deeply into an understanding of both my own privilege and the reality of the community I’ve entered into?

When I really reflect on my struggles in that way, I’m grateful for the opportunity to better understand both my own reality and that of the people whose community I am slowly becoming a part of. An expanding capacity for empathy and increased understanding of self and the world—God is totally at work here, through all of the growing pains. And isn’t that why I came here in the first place?     

Patient Trust

I’ve been in Peru for a month now. I had thought that by this point I’d be feeling fairly immersed in the community here, but so far it’s been a slower start than I expected. The school year ended the first week of December, which also means that the parish is running fewer programs than usual. I was supposed to go stay with a host family for two weeks, but my host mom ended up getting sick, so I stayed at home during that time instead. Everyone was off for the Christmas holidays, and now Erin and Ben are gone spending time with their families, so it’s just been Rachel and me in the house. Andahuaylillas is a small town and we don’t know a lot of people yet, so we’ve spent a lot of days cooking, reading, and watching movies at home. Anda is a beautiful place and I’m enjoying getting to know my communitymates, but I often feel restless, like I’m still waiting for my time with JVC to start.

Throughout my time in spiritual direction at Fordham, the prayer my director most often sent me home with was “Patient Trust” by the French Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin. He writes,

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something
unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability—
and that it may take a very long time.

And so I think it is with you;
your ideas mature gradually—let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today what time
(that is to say, grace and circumstances
acting on your own good will)
will make of you tomorrow.

Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give Our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.

Impatience has been a common theme for me, especially during the last six months. I like to be busy, and I tend to overcommit myself. I knew that the time between graduation in May and my departure for Peru at the end of November would be challenging, so I tried to make myself as busy as possible with things I enjoyed. When I tore my ACL at the beginning of June, I had just joined an ultimate Frisbee team, was playing soccer, working at the pool again, and had big dreams for running, climbing some fourtneeners, and spending as much time in the Rockies as possible before I headed off to Peru. All difficult things to accomplish with only one functioning anterior cruciate ligament.

Recovering from a torn ACL is a long, slow, and tedious recovery process and it forced me to start reflecting on what it means to be patient and still. I waited two months to get my surgery. After the surgery, I was on complete bed rest for a week (during which I thought I was going to go insane; God bless my poor mother who was on bed rest for the majority of her pregnancy with me. I am so sorry). When I was finally allowed to move around again, I could only do simple exercises, most of which were frustratingly difficult. Now I’m over four months out from surgery and I know that it will still be quite a long time before my knee has fully healed. I’m thankful for the progress that I’ve made, for access to good medical care, and for the knowledge that I will eventually heal completely, but I’m bored to tears with my PT exercises. I just want to run and climb and play soccer again, but there’s nothing I can do to speed up the healing process. All I can do is continue to complete the small tasks of bending, straightening, and strengthening, every day.

I’ve arrived in Peru and I feel the same impatience that I’ve been feeling with my knee. I’m impatient to start my job at the parish, to have a consistent schedule, and to feel like I have something constructive to do with my days here. I’m also anxious to leave the time of discomfort and newness behind me. I want to not have to think about words in Spanish before I say them, to remember people’s names, to know how to do things and get places. As Teilhard de Chardin says, I’d like to skip the intermediate stages, where I feel unsure and out of place. As anxious as I am to feel more comfortable and at home here in Andahuaylillas, though, I’m trying to remind myself that it’s the uncomfortable moments that sometimes foster the most growth. That last line of the prayer, “Give Our Lord the benefit of believing that his hand is leading you, and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete,” has been echoing in my mind for the past few weeks. As much as I dislike that feeling, I’m trying, in JVC-speak, to “lean into the discomfort” that comes with being in a totally new place, and to allow myself to learn and grow from it.

Although I feel like I haven’t been doing much, I do know a lot more about Peru and the community of Andahuaylillas than I did before I got here. I’ve gotten to speak with people at the parish about some of the realities of life for people in the community. I’ve spent a lot of time hanging out and getting to know my three communitymates, goofing around with them and beginning to hear their stories. I’ve had the opportunity to start working on creating habits of self-care that will hopefully sustain me when things do get busy—to focus on prayer, journaling, exercise, writing letters to friends, and getting enough sleep for the first time since before high school. Small steps, but steps nonetheless. There will probably come a time when I’m much busier than I am now and I miss all of the down time. For now, I’m trying to recognize the small graces of each day, to allow them to form and challenge me, and to accept the anxiety and discomfort of feeling myself in suspense and incomplete.

Poetry

For Praxis class we had to make a final project that captured how our praxis site impacted us over the semester. For my project, I wrote a poem about Las Nubes and added pictures of the people I met there. 

Las Nubes

In a village with no water

I learned to drink in

The glimmer of an evening

To bathe in the hope of a suffering people

To wash the disenchantment and apathy

From my searching heart

To let the glow of flowers at dusk

Quench my thirst

For beauty

In a world in drought.

In a village where electric lights newly shine

I learned to look for light

In dark places,

To see a hint of dawn

In a new duck pen,

A job at a hardware store,

A small house made of earth.

I found Northern stars in

Unexpected teachers and guides,

Illumination by a single glowing bulb.

In a village where many are illiterate

I learned to read the faces

Of a forgotten people

To find in them

An unwritten history

Of sorrow and resolve

Domination and immense faith.

I received an education on the courage

In unapologetic tears

The injustice of impossible choices

The unshakeable, infectious joy

That lives on in spite of it all.

In a village where women are overlooked

I learned to see the special brand of strength

Of mothers, grandmothers, aunts

Of women who speak, who worry, who survive

To comprehend a new language of love

In a cooked meal, washed laundry, a chastising word.

In realities of oppression

I learned what it is to be liberated.

In a village where few are Catholic

I learned the true meaning of Communion

As I experienced a love so pure

It could have poured itself into bread.

I learned to celebrate Mass with dreams for the future,

Hot chocolate and fried plantains,

To recognize a soul

Feeling its worth.

In a world where people climb to success

The tail feathers of the torogoz

And the vines of the ceiba tree

Like hands reaching down

To the mother earth they have never forgotten

Taught me a lesson in downward mobility.

There in the clouds of the San Salvador volcano

I encountered Las Nubes.

And I will never, ever

Be the same.

Praxis Week

About a month ago I spent a week in Las Nubes and San Ramon for praxis week. It was simultaneously one of the most difficult and most impactful experiences I have ever gone through. Rachel and I spent the first two days together in San Ramon. The first day we spent with Gustavo at his art center, and the second we spent in San Ramon going to the Celebration of the Word, talking to people from the community, and then climbing the volcano to go to one of the community meetings in Las Nubes. For the rest of the week, Rachel and I separated to live with different families in Las Nubes. I spent the first two nights at Delmi’s house with Delmi, her 10-year-old son, her 26-year-old daughter Iberica, her husband, and their daughter Tatiana; and her daughter Patti, her husband, and their kids Stanley and Daniela. Then I went to Ester’s house with Ester’s husband and three kids as well as Ester’s sister, Marta Elena, her husband, and their son.

So much happened during the week that it’s been difficult to process, which is why it has taken me until now to write anything about it. These are some of the events that have impacted me the most out of my time there. So many other things have hit me, and I’m sure I’ll continue to process and write about some of them, but here’s what I’ve been thinking about lately.

One moment that sticks out to me is the second evening when we were walking down the volcano with Gustavo at dusk after the community meeting about the water tanks. The light was at the perfect dimness to illuminate the flowers and the trees, and the air was crisp and cool. We never have the opportunity to see Las Nubes at that time of day, and so we walked in silence for a while, taking in the beauty of the scenery. In the middle of the silence, Gustavo, casually dropping wisdom on us in his own peculiar way, took a breath and breathed out, “Those meetings are Mass for me. That is the true meaning of Communion. The work we do here is evangelization.”

What a beautiful way to look at this work. Sister Peggy, my liberation theology professor, said in one of our first classes that we have domesticated the sacraments—we have defined and regulated them to the point where they are limited. There was something holy about seeing people from the rural community of Las Nubes gathered together, lacking basic resources for so long but finally believing that they have the ability and the right to advocate for themselves. They’ve found their voices. It reminds me of a story told by Greg Boyle, a Jesuit working with gang members in LA. He talks about the moment when “the soul feels its worth.” The Base Community here is helping to facilitate the souls of Las Nubes to feel their worth—to see that although they live in extreme poverty and have constantly been oppressed, forgotten, and looked down on, their voices and their lives are invaluable in the eyes of God. How could that not be evangelization?

Another moment came from Delmi’s house. I was initially really excited to go to Delmi’s. The women are really sweet, the two older kids, Josué and Daniela, were really energetic and excited every time we had visited them, and the two little babies, Tatiana and Stanley, are adorable. I was excited to be with them and to get to know them better. The first day I stayed down in San Ramon at Delmi’s daughter’s house waiting for Josué and Daniela to finish school. Schools here don’t have enough resources to allow kids to go for a full day, so half of the students go in the mornings and half go in the afternoons. After we walked back up the volcano, Daniela asked me if I wanted to go play house with her. We climbed up the hill a bit and got to a place where two drain covers served as rudimentary tables, well balanced sticks functioned as a make-believe stove, and someone had hung a rope from the tree to make a swing. At first everything was fine. The game was simple. I was Daniela’s third grade daughter, and every “morning” I would wake up, Daniela would feed me breakfast, I would walk down the hill to school, walk straight back up the hill, Daniela would feed me more of the rocks and dirt “soup” that she had made, I would go back to bed, and we would do the whole thing over again. As the hours passed, though, I started to get tired. Daniela speaks incredibly fast Spanish, and although I had explained to her that Spanish wasn’t my first language and I needed her to slow down, she would get mad at me when I asked her to repeat things. At one point she even left me and told me she wasn’t coming back until I could answer her correctly. She was just being an 8-year-old, but after three hours of this it started to get to me. After a while all I could think of was the scene from the movie Frozen when the guy looks at the reindeer after he’s been making grumbly reindeer sounds and says, “I can’t understand you when you talk like that.”      

Something that we’ve talked about a lot at Casa has been the idea of feeling useless, or allowing yourself to simply be and observe difficult situations while understanding that you can’t fix them. Believe me, I felt useless during my time at Delmi’s house. When the kids left on the second day, Patti and Iverca watched the babies, washed dishes, cooked and cleaned, but anytime I went out to the porch with them to try to make conversation, I just felt awkward and in the way. I offered to help and they’d shoo me back inside to go relax. I spent the morning reading and journaling, but mostly sitting and thinking, “I am a useless lump.” By some miracle, Trena came to check on Rachel and I that day. Almost as soon as I saw her I broke down into tears. Trena is so good at connecting with people. She had no trouble at all making conversation with these women that I had been awkwardly spending time near that morning. That day I had started to feel like there was something wrong with me because I couldn’t connect with them in the same way. Looking back, I realized from that experience that I had to find a way to be okay with feeling useless while simultaneously believing that I am not useless, and recognizing the huge difference in those two ideas.

After Delmi’s house I moved next door to Ester’s house. I was apprehensive at first. Marta Elena, Ester’s younger sister who lives with her, is fifteen and has a one-year-old son named Angel. Her husband is forty-five and unemployed, which means that he spends most of the day lying in bed while Marta works to cook, clean, and care for their son. It was really hard to be around him and understand that he was the husband of a girl who had been thirteen when he impregnated her, barely older than my baby sister. I think my brain just refused to accept the reality of the situation.

I had been struck by the poverty at Delmi’s house, but when I came to Ester’s I realized that I had had no idea what poverty could look like. Being at Ester’s house was physically difficult and overwhelming at times. I had to continue to remind myself that as hard as it might be for me, these were the conditions that they lived in every day. I got to go home at the end of the week, but they might always live like this. They were so generous while I was there, but their generosity often made me feel guilty. I felt guilty for taking a whole bed to myself when the other beds each had three or four people in them, for using the only eating utensil and the only table area to eat my meals, and for all of the fruit that offered me when it was clear that fruit was not something that they could eat often. I felt guilty in my physical discomfort. Looking back, I’m trying to take that guilt and be grateful instead, to learn from their incredible generosity and strength.  

What breaks my heart is that this is normal for them. It’s normal to have tarantulas in the house and to wake up with cockroaches on your legs. It’s normal to fish insects out of your food and then continue eating it. It’s normal to go to the bathroom in a hole in the front yard, to be kept awake by the noises of the other eight people sleeping in the room, to not have the water to bathe or brush your teeth, to have a roof that keeps nothing out, and to be constantly surrounded by the smoke that floods through the single window from the front porch. I want so badly for them to know that they deserve so much more than this.

On the first night everyone was sitting around the little TV watching soap operas and I was sitting close by reading Pedagogy of the Oppressed for my praxis class. Marta Elena came over and asked me what I was reading. She asked me what it was about, and I told her that it was about teaching the poor and oppressed about their own dignity and about the knowledge that they gain from experiencing the world in their own way, even if they haven’t had the opportunity to go to school. She was quiet for a while, thinking, and then she said softly that she’d like to read it. Marta Elena has the most education of anyone in the house, but after reaching only second grade she had to drop out because she was pregnant. She is the only person in the house who can read. Choking back tears, I told her I would find a copy of the book for her in Spanish. What is heartbreaking is that I know the book is about her situation and contains so many things that she needs to hear, but after only second grade, it’s unlikely that she will ever be able to read it.

Later on that night, Marta was making soup for Angel and her husband. I asked her if she liked being a mother. She looked at me with a tired expression and said, “It’s hard. It’s difficult working so hard every day, and it’s even harder when Angel gets sick. Life is very hard as a mother.” Then she got really serious and turned to me, waving her wooden spoon and said, “Do you go to Church?” Before I could answer, she said, still waving the spoon, “Go to church, read your Bible, and take other people to church with you. God puts you exactly where he wants you, and only God can get you through the struggles you’re up against.”

I don’t think I’ll ever forget that moment. On one hand, I am so thankful that Marta Elena has her faith and the comfort of knowing that God is with her in everything that she is facing. I am confident that God is with her for every second of every day, and I’m inspired by her amazing faith even in her horrible situation. However, I refuse to believe that it is God’s will for a fifteen-year-old child to have a son with a forty-five year old man and to live in absolute poverty. Marta Elena’s situation is the work of society and of the choices of humans. I believe that God wants so much more for her, and it’s hard to think that Marta Elena believes that a God who loves and cares for her would want this life for her. I hope that someday she will know that she deserves so much more than that. I hope that good people will continue to do the work of God by trying to bring justice and prosperity to people while they are living, rather than making some people feel like their time on Earth must be spent waiting to earn those things in Heaven.    

In the end, though, I connected much more with this family than I had with the previous one. There was laughter and joy. I had wonderful conversations about life and God with Marta Elena, Ester, Kevin (Ester’s oldest son) and Nicolas (Ester’s husband). I played with the younger kids and helped Marta take care of Angel. I experienced their generosity, strength and faith. I love this family, and during the week and the weeks since them, they have shown me time and again that they love me too.

As hard as praxis week was for me, I am so unbelievably thankful for the opportunity. Since praxis week, I have felt so much more connected to the community of Las Nubes. Last week I went to praxis to find that Marta Elena, Angel, and her husband were able to move into one of the small, unoccupied buildings on Marta’s brother Daniel’s property. Daniel found a job for Marta’s husband at the hardware store where he works, and he is making more money there than he had been at his old job in the coffee finca. The change has brought good things for Ester’s family as well. The house looks spacious and much cleaner now, and they were able to build a little pen for their ducks and clean some of the trash and debris from the front yard. Ester’s husband no longer has to support all eight of them, which allows them to buy more water. Last time I went there, little Estercita had just gotten a bath. They’re all little things, but I wanted to jump up and down with excitement for them. It’s encouraging to know that life can improve for them, and hope that things continue to get better.