Walking With El Salvador

A Brief Introduction  If you have been following the story of the Mission of Healing 2021 with the northern micro-region churches of the Salvadoran Lutheran Church, you know that this year we went virtual! Each month we are producing video and printed education materials related to a particular theme. You can dive right into the month of May, or if you would like a little background first, you might like to explore these stories. Mission of Healing 2021: What's the Plan?  Mission of Healing 2021: Personal Hygiene  Mission of Healing 2021:Community Hygiene Mission of Healing 2021: Nutrition and Family Gardens Opening up Safe Spaces for Difficult Conversations More than 20 years ago, during my first visit in El Salvador, a Salvadoran Lutheran pastor in a rural community asked my friend and me if we had any resources which address domestic and sexual violence - resources which she could use with the women in her community to help them and to teach them. We did not have resou...

El Salvador has a trash problem.  This is not a new situation. This is not a new story. If you walk around El Salvador, you spend a fair amount of time walking over stuff like this. I have been thinking about trash, storm drains, rain. I cleaned out the storm drains near my church in the US this weekend - always needed after a windy day. Our alley sometimes floods, and it's better to be proactive than to mop up water in the church kitchen.  Storm drains along paved roads in El Salvador are no joke. They are gigantic openings where curbs should be and are never covered by grates.  In a rainstorm, a small cow could literally be swept down into one of those things. Naturally, as a convenient hole that goes to who-knows-where, people see the storm drain abyss as an excellent place in which to sweep street trash, especially along the busy thoroughfares in San Salvador. (Someone told me once that this is actually illegal, but I still see people do it.) In small communities tras...