Walking With El Salvador

Sonia patted the bed. "Join me," she said, with a gesture because words were too hard. She knew. I knew. It would be our last time together, for a while. We snuggled up like little girls, whispering final secrets, feeling each other's warmth.  Sonia spoke softly, "There's so much more to do." She worried about the Sunday School children, her little store, the women's groups in Tonaca, the new health center at the church, all the children she watched out for on her pasaje, and el taller . El taller -   the workshop  is the short name everyone uses to refer to the Days for Girls Women's Project in Los Héroes. Sonia was the heart, the motivator, the trained educator, and the business manager for the project. Most importantly, she believed in the rights of girls and boys to have access to accurate education about their bodies and was committed to giving girls what they need to feel confident and prepared for menstruation. "We will keep your work goi...

During the third week of January, students began the 2025 academic year. After the kids were settled in school, the Los Héroes Women's Project got things organized and started producing this year's batch of   Days for Girls kits.    It didn't take long for school directors and community leaders to start sending invitations to Pastor Sonia, the Los Héroes Women's Project coordinator, to come and lead education sessions and distribute the menstruation kits to girls who need them. If girls don't have access to hygiene products, they cannot attend classes. Teachers and directors recognize this need. School staff are interested in learning about the kits themselves so they can promote their use. Over the past 9 years, it has been most common for teachers and community leaders to gather groups of women and girls, not men and boys, to participate in the menstruation education classes. Guys were never specifically excluded, but they were not typically included in the target...

Twenty-five years ago, our nurse practitioner did pelvic exams and pap smears for women in our Salvadoran sister community. She brought glass slides, used hairspray as fixative and somehow got those test results back to the women. She diagnosed many infections. We brought medications for that. It was a bold move for one of our first activities as sister churches together.  Girls in a remote community learning about their bodies, 2024 Helping women and girls to learn about their bodies, to listen to their bodies, to have agency over their bodies, and to have access to what they need to care for their bodies: this has been a  twenty-five year ministry of our churches working together. Twenty-five years of making  steady steps and bold moves  together. In many families, frank talks about sex, reproductive health and menstruation are open and honest. In other families, these conversations include misinformation or don't happen at all. Through the years of doing Missions ...

Plan. Train. Go! In a nutshell, this describes the Mission of Healing 2022: Plan , Train , Go. If you are coming into this story in the middle, you really should take a moment to click on PLAN and then on TRAIN . This episode celebrates GO.  CELEBRATES!  Yup, that all caps shout-out is so all of you sister church relationship coordinators and international companion synod cheerleaders in the back row can enjoy a celebratory trajectory moment with our Mission of Healing North team. Whether you've been working on a ministry project with your companions for 3 years, 5 years or 25 years, we suspect you know the challenges of visioning mutually, adapting with time and circumstances, and developing local sustainability - sustainability not only (or necessarily) in terms of local economic independence, but in terms of local local leadership, local leadership development, local creativity, and local enthusiasm.  During the Teach the Teachers event, we collected names and WhatsA...

The pandemic brought lots of changes to the way we could do ministry together, locally and globally. In 2020, we put on the Mission of Healing North Family Wellness Fair just before COVID locked down the world. In 2021, we did a year-long, remote, community education event.  In 2022, we jumped into a new era of community health education in El Salvador and created a training event called "Formación de Formadores" (we used "Teach the Teachers" in English).  2022 Teach the Teachers Event Curriculum Development As I mentioned in the previous installment of the Teach the Teachers story, the Salvadoran Lutheran Church Health Ministries Coordinator, Pastor Conchi, suggested we develop curriculum for the Mission of Healing North Teach the Teachers workshop with a focus on each of 4 human body systems:  Digestive, Circulatory, Respiratory and Reproductive. We started by planning the general information charla for each system. We created big colorful posters and simple ...