Comité de Madres y Familiares de los Desaparecidos, Presos Políticos y Asesinados, Monseñor Oscar Arnulfo Romero

(Committee of Mothers and Relatives of the Disappeared, Political Prisoners and Assassinated, Monsignor Oscar Arnulfo Romero)

Wednesday, November 14, 2012

Writing a chapter and looking for a publisher

We are making progress on the book. It's slow but it's definitely progress. At the end of November I'm going to El Salvador to see if I can find a publisher. (??!!!!) Yet another task in a long list of tasks for which I have absolutely no experience. But, since every step of the way has been like that, I'm starting to get used to it. For some reason I'm not too worried. Maybe it's because the history of el Comite de Madres is so important, and the work of these women so influential, that it speaks for itself.

But in order for the work to be able to speak for itself, we had to have something to show any potential publishers. So.....we have a chapter written! It's still in the rough draft form, but it's something. Something very exciting, in fact.

Here's the first page,(which ends rather abruptly) in Spanish. I'll post the English version soon.

Capitulo 2  Recuerdos de Madre Alicia.Estos son sus palabras, pero pueden ser de muchas otras madres que experimentaron eventos iguales en sus vidas durante estos años que llevaron a la guerra.
 Yo recuerdo que Mons. Romero dijo, “A ustedes les toca hacer camino donde no hay camino. A ustedes les toca abrir brecha entre montes y zarzales. Se van a encontrar con muchos obstáculos en el camino. Van a tropezar con muchas piedras. Pero ustedes van a lograr vencer, porque el trabajo que han iniciado es un trabajo muy digno. Es la defensa de la vida.”
             Ya en el ’74 es que empezaron las personas desaparecidas. Yo tenía 32 años. Empezaron a desaparecer personas. Y con marchas de los campesinos empezaron a golpear a la gente, a los campesinos. Cuando venían a la marcha y cuando llegaron de regreso, la Policía de Hacienda y la Guardia los capturaban y los golpeaban, y los dejaban ahí. Para que no se pudiera meter a la marcha. Ese era una orden ya de los dueños de la tierra. 
            En ese tiempo, el ejército era bastante independiente. Ellos solo veían como su jefe principal el Ministro de la Defensa. El presidente no tenía control sobre el ejército. No, no. El Ministro de la Defensa era él que mandaba a los militares—a todos. La Policía de Hacienda, la Policía Nacional, la Guardia Nacional… ellos tenían poder de mandar todos los cuarteles. Y todavía lo hacen. 
            La Policia de Hacienda antes era para que quidar a las haciendas. Pero después se volvió una policía bien represiva, bien criminal. También la Guardia Nacional se hizo un cuerpo militar bien criminal. La Guardia Nacional en ese tiempo había recibido gente que venía a visitarlos de otros países como… Estados Unidos y Europa. Y decían la gente que de Estados Unidos venían asesores militares a ayudar a las autoridades de aquí. Después de la llegada de los extranjeros  la Guardia Nacional empezó esa práctica.  
           Bueno, la cosa es que había bastante descontento de la gente. Y ese descontento llegó a que la gente se organizara. Los sindicatos aumentaron la organización de los centros de trabajo, organizaron los trabajadores. Aparecieron muchas cooperativas, se organizaron las cooperativas.
          Después de eso vino la represión a la marcha del 30 de julio, 1975. En este año 1975, los estudiantes de la universidad realizaron una marcha donde ellos pedían mejores condiciones para la educación en la universidad. Pedían que se mejorara el plan de enseñanza. Y querían que se mejoraran las aulas de la universidad. Porque,  [por ejemplo,] habían muchas sillas destruidas. Entonces ellos querían mejor para todo. Para la enseñanza y para los lugares donde ellos recibían clases. Esa era la protesta, la exigencia al gobierno.[1]  
          Pero ya el gobierno tenía preparado un buen… un grupo de militares. Y ahí sí hubo como… un descontrol de todo. Ahí se descontroló todo porque con esa masacre, ya sí había


[1] El ejército se hizo cargo del campus de Santa Ana, de la Universidad de El Salvador en el 25 de julio, 1975. La protesta exigió que los cuerpos militares saliera de la Universidad. Por eso se realizó la marcha de 30 de julio, 1975.


I don't know if I'll be able to find a publisher in this one trip, but we've got to start somewhere. I'm making some contacts before I leave Minneapolis. Our transcriber, Heider, says that in Latin America connections count for everything. We are certainly thin in the connection department, but I'm working on it and we'll see how it goes.

Now if only we could figure out a title for the book.

Tuesday, September 4, 2012

[Ruby] Putting 30,000 civilian deaths into perspective, or be an ant

There were roughly 30,000 civilian deaths during the Salvadoran civil war. 30,000 is a lot of brothers and sisters, moms and dads, friends and neighbors, but it's still just a number. What does it really mean? In a country of 6 million, how big a deal was this? What does it compare to? I wanted to find a point of reference that would make this number seem real. Since a lot of us are familiar with the history of the Jewish holocaust during WWII, I decided to use this event for comparison. And then if that doesn't make it clear enough, I also compared it to the devastation of 9/11 in the U.S. 

El Salvador is a very small country. As I mentioned above, in the 1980's, it had a population of about 6 million. A conservative estimate of civilian casualties in El Salvador is 30,000. In comparison, at the start of WWII Germany had a population of 80 million. We all know that an unbearable number of Jews were killed during this war- nearly 6 million in all of Europe. In Germany alone about 192,000 German Jews were murdered according to About.com, published by the New York Times. Another source, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, says up to 180,000 German Jews were murdered. We know that this genocide was enormous, that huge numbers of people were murdered. That huge number amounts to .24% of the total German population. One out of every 400.

So keeping in mind the enormity of the impact of the Jewish holocaust, let's look again at El Salvador. Compared to 192,000 Jews killed in Germany, 30,000 deaths doesn't sound like a big number. But this number amounts to .5% of the total Salvadoran population. This is twice the number of German Jews killed in the holocaust, in relative terms. Or, one in every 200 people murdered- bombed, shot, burned, beheaded, tortured to death, disappeared. The United Nations Truth Commission puts the blame for the vast majority of these deaths squarely on the shoulders of the Salvadoran government. 


OK, if this hasn't made the situation clear, let's think about 9/11. If you're a U.S. citizen, you know the number of people killed on the 9/11; nearly 3000 in a country of 285 million (in 2001). 9/11 was a pivotal moment in our history, there's no denying it. Now consider this- 47.5 times as many Salvadorans died, percentage wise, during their civil war.

Can we imagine if 9/11 happened 47.5, ok let's just say 48 times over the course of 12 years? 48 times. 48 9/11's.

What would the United States be like right now if we had endured 48 attacks the magnitude of 9/11? Here's the next staggering thing to consider- my government funded most of this war, this death, destruction, and lasting trauma.

What can we do about this now? When I was feeling helpless in the face of the atrocities and impunity committed in El Salvador, a friend there told me to just be an ant. Each little ant carries a few grains of sand, a few morsels of food. No one ant builds a whole colony, but look at the marvelous intricacies of their homes. Just do my part, whether that's small or large. So I'm helping Co-Madres tell their story, so their testimony is not lost from Salvadoran memory. I also have a profound wish for the U.S. government to get out of the business of war. What ever our goals were, all these lives, all this trauma on a whole society cannot justify the means. There are many good resources available about ending war. Try starting with Friends Committee on National Legislation. Be an ant. Take a small action. See what happens, in your life and others' lives.



Saturday, August 11, 2012

[Inez] Two years

On this day two years ago, my family was at Mt. Rushmore as part of an extended camping trip to celebrate Ruby's 50th birthday. For much of the trip I didn't have cell reception, but I had reception at Mt. Rushmore. I was surprised when my phone rang and it was our friend Raul who lives in El Salvador, and has never before called me.

He was calling to tell us that Madre Alicia, co-founder and director of Co-Madres had died.

We had learned only a month or two earlier that Madre Alicia and Patricia both had uterine cancer and were undergoing extreme treatments. We had been planning Ruby's camping trip for months, but considered postponing it to make an emergency trip to El Salvador. We understood that they were both struggling and suffering a great deal from the cancer and the treatments. However, we convinced ourselves that surely they would both get through it and would hold on for at least another couple years if not more. We went on the trip anyway.

That's how I came to receive the news of Madre Alicia's death at Mt. Rushmore. When Raul told me I sank down onto the stairs I was descending in shock and sadness. What quickly followed was fury. When they had told us that Alicia and Patty were both sick with uterine cancer, they mentioned that it seemed to be fairly common among women who had undergone the types of sexual torture they had endured during the war and as a result of their work with Co-Madres. I don't know if this has been studied at all, but just based on the anecdotal evidence, it seems that perhaps uterine cancer is similar to cervical cancer in that it can be passed through a sexually transmitted infection. So when I learned that Madre Alicia had died from complications of this disease, I felt outrage that now, 20 years later, she had been assassinated due to her human rights work. I felt the deep injustice of the general amnesty granted to the perpetrators of abuse, threats, torture, rape, and killings. How could it be that Alicia, one of the shining stars of goodness in the world, could die when the men who did this to her suffered no [external] consequences for their actions?

I'm not sure how to conclude this post. I started writing it thinking it would be a reflection on the wonderful life of Madre Alicia, but that's not what came out. Perhaps in a week or two I will do that. For now, I'm reliving the anger and sorrow of two years ago, when a woman's life was taken before her time.

Thursday, July 5, 2012

[Inez] Getting famous!

I follow a few El Salvador-related blogs. I'm more likely keep up with blogs than one of the Salvadoran newspapers, so it's a good way for me to keep in touch with Salvador news and daily life when I'm not there. 


One of the blogs I follow is El Salvador from the Inside. It's written by a woman from the US who married a Salvadoran man and moved to El Salvador. She shares stories about her experiences as a "gringa in El Salvador" and like any transplant, is struck by things that may seem commonplace for a native. I appreciate this perspective, since of course I'm a "gringa in El Salvador" every time I go. We, perhaps, share a similar lens through which we view El Salvador and categorize our experiences.


I've never met Jenny in person, but today she was kind enough to share our CoMadres project with her readers. I encourage you to check out her blog (El Salvador from the Inside)! It's a great way to learn about some of the ins and outs of Salvadoran daily life.

[Inez] From 2008 (excerpt)

When I was in college I had the good fortune to receive a grant to support going to El Salvador to work with CoMadres. Part of the deal was that the program asked grant recipients to keep a blog about their trips or internships. Today I read through all my posts from that blog, written in 2008, for the first time since that year. Here is an excerpt from one of the posts about the day-to-day work we did:
Today we finally had a meeting with all the women to tell them what we wanted to do, and figure out a rough schedule. This is coming with 5 working days before Ruby leaves, but that’s how it is. By the way, I want to say something before I continue. I know I said I would put pictures up, but I think that probably won’t happen until I get home in a week and a half. I keep forgetting to bring my flash drive to the cyber cafe.

Anyway, we got a fair amount done today. I scanned about 15 pictures, and Ruby spent some time asking Alicia about them. I don’t know what Alicia told her because I was listening to Cloud Cult, but Ruby took a lot of notes, so we’re set. We also finished asking clarifying questions on the last transcription we have down here, so we’ve done as much as we can on that front. The next step is to reprint them (not sure where that will happen) and then go over what is okay to publish and what isn’t. For example, regarding one woman’s capture, they’ve told us that it’s okay to publish that the military was looking for a relative of hers, and when they couldn’t find that relative they took her instead; however, even though they told us the specifics of this incident, we’re not supposed to go into more detail in the book. I think we should spend some time talking to them about the situation today and how to protect them, because that’s the kind of thing that wouldn’t have occurred to me if Alicia hadn’t said, “But you’re not going to put that in the book, right?”

In other words, progress is slow, but existent. Tomorrow we’re doing an interview and making pupusas, and Thursday I think we’re going to a church that housed a refuge during the war with hopes that someone will still be there who was there in those days. We’re also going to go to the monument for the disappeared and assasinated. We visited it 2 years ago, but they’ve come much closer to completing it since then. Money is always a hang up.
Since this time they have completed the wall! CoMadres is a member of the Comisión de Trabajo en Derechos Humanos Pro Memoria Histórica de El Salvador (Commission of Work for Human Rights Pro-Historic Memory of El Salvador), the group that worked to make the monument become a reality. A large portion of the names represented on the monument are known due to the work that CoMadres did to collect and record denuncios (denouncements) of captures and assassinations.


The monument in 2006. They were raising money to complete the inscriptions.

Ruby and Madre Alicia (then Director of CoMadres; deceased 2010)

Tuesday, June 26, 2012

[Inez] Transcribing: Day ?

Do any of you like to sew? Have you ever tried to thread a needle that is just a little bit too small, or where the thread is just a little bit frayed? You keep poking at it and poking at it, trying to get the thread through the needle, perhaps stubbornly refusing to go find your scissors to cut the frayed end, or the beeswax to bring the micro-threads together. You keep poking at it, squinting to try to see the tiny hole of the needle, trying not to drop the millimeter of thread that finally pokes through before you can grab it and pull it all the way.

Transcribing is like this. Sometimes a sentence -- even a paragraph! comes easily. Sometimes the madre enunciates, no trucks drive by, and the neighbor's dog does not bark. Sometimes you thread the needle on the first try.

But sometimes she speaks quickly, her napkin over her mouth, and the neighbor's dog barks twice, loudly, in the middle of the phrase. Sometimes you have to poke the same thread through the needle for minutes and minutes, trying to capture that word. Before we digitized our recordings, when I was transcribing from cassette, I sometimes wore the tape thin from listening to the same 3 second segment over and over and over.

Sometimes as you stare at that tiny needle hole, trying to fit the thread through, there's a tiny hopeful image on the other side. Something went well, someone was released from their capture, someone successfully escaped the country. Something went well.

More often, though, the napkin to the mouth muffles the words being recorded because they are the most painful words. Sometimes the tiny picture just visible through the needle hole is a woman whose teeth were knocked out as she was hit repeatedly while being asked who paid her to become a guerrillera. How is she supposed to answer that question satisfactorily when she is not, in fact, a guerrillera? When everyone in the room knows the gun she was arrested with was planted on her?

Sometimes the tiny picture is a woman whose breast was slowly cut off, one cut to punctuate each question. One cut to punctuate each demand. Each one added up until today, she has no breast. It's gone. It went missing before she escaped, and she escaped without it.



Update: I was looking through my old blog about the project, from when I got a grant through my college for this work. It turns out I've been describing transcribing pretty much the same way for 5 years! Here's what I wrote in 2007:


Transcribing is so hard.


There are the obvious reasons– it’s in Spanish, it’s such a slow and tedious process, it takes so much concentration… I mean really, I don’t think I’ve ever concentrated on anything so hard for such a long period of time. It’s like when you’re trying to thread a needle, and there’s that one little bitty strand that’s [messing] it up and you keep trying and keep trying and it’s not working and you have to squint and get your face up all close because the needle is so small and the thread is so small and if anyone says anything to you you want to scream ’cause you were about to get it but they ruined your concentration and now you have to start all over… are you feeling sufficiently fidgety and drained? Okay, well it’s like threading the impossibly small needle, for hours and hours, every day.


Of course the other reason is that it’s just so damn depressing. Not only are you threading an impossibly small needle, you’re threading an impossibly small needle with a picture of someone being raped or tortured– and you have to keep looking at that little picture because if you take your eyes off the [freaking] needle, well then, how are you going to thread it?

Monday, June 25, 2012

(Ruby) Union suppression, US vs. El Salvador

Ever since the recall election in Wisconsin, my neighbor state, I've been thinking about Scott Walker and the state of unions in this country in general. As a public school teacher, I'm proud to be union member. While my union isn't perfect, I'm still grateful to have a union and to be part of it. It's sad and just plain crazy that unions are under attack, that our power of collective bargaining is being limited. People are being mislead to believe that we, as union members, are somehow the cause of the economic problems we're in today. As someone said on Facebook,

Remember when teachers, public employees, unions, NPR, PBS and Planned parenthood
crashed the stock market, took trillions in TARP money, spilled a crapload of oil in the Gulf of Mexico, wiped out half of our 401ks, gave their selves billions in bonuses and payed no taxes? Yeah...me neither.


I can get pretty worked up about the injustice of it, but our troubles are small in comparison to what happened in El Salvador in the 1970's and 80's. Not that we shouldn't be concerned, not that we don't need to act to prevent the further erosion of unions' power. We do. But in El Salvador, union leaders were imprisoned, tortured and killed for advocating for safer, more humane working conditions and livable wages.   Here's an excerpt from an interview with Alicia, the former head of CoMadres. Alicia died in August, 2010.

             In those days, in 1978, my oldest daughter, Marta Alicia, started to work in a factory that made men’s shirts. They sent the clothes up to the U.S. She was studying at the university, but started to work to help me out so I would have money for all the busses I needed in my searches. (Searching for missing family members.) So there in that factory, a union began. Because she was very active she was made to be a spokesperson for the union, part of the leadership team.
            When she was already involed in the union, the National Guard came to the factory. The boss had called the Guard because the women were meeting there. He didn’t want them to lose work time. He wanted them working, so he called the Guard. Well this day they just came to see what was happening. But three days later they returned and took all the women in the leadership team.
            When we knew that the National Guard had captured Marta, we went there, but no. They told us that they didn’t have anyone. They hadn’t captured anyone. That surely it was another branch, like the Police of the Hacienda or the National Police had done it, but they, the National Guard, had not. So we went again to the different quarters. It was the same thing all over again. They all said they hadn’t captured the union organizers.
            Fifteen days later, five of the young women appeared assassinated in a little town called Ilopango, close to Lake Apulu. But not my daughter. When they were found, these women had been tortured, murdered, they were without fingernails, without teeth, beaten. Their mothers retrieved them and buried them.
            At eighteen days, my daughter appeared, three days after the other young women. They left her, they thought she was dead, you know? They left her there just lying on the pavement. Just her. Just Marta. Naked. Some people saw her body. Vultures were coming, the ones that eat dead bodies were moving in. But she woke up and moved, and some people saw her. A taxi driver moved closer and he said, “This girl is alive!”


I'm writing this not to diminish our problems, but to try to understand how bad it would be if I had lived in El Salvador during the Civil War. And it's still bad there today, with unions being suppressed by the government and by multi-national corporations doing business there, including US corporations. I wish I had a positive note to end on. I'm not sure what that is, except to say that Marta survived and was helped to escape El Salvador.

Sunday, June 24, 2012

[Inez] Fundraising

As you know, Ruby and I have been fundraising on the website indiegogo.com to try to raise enough money to fund two trips to El Salvador this year. In addition to the price of the plane tickets, there is also food, lodgings, and daily transportation to consider. We are also asking for some money to help with transcription because that is the next step that needs to be completed in order for us to move forward towards completing the book. In total, we're trying to raise $3720.

So far we've raised $1525. It's an incredible amount of money. Most of this money has come in the form of $25 donations from people we know directly. Some has come in $10 donations, and we're incredible thankful for this level of support as well. a surprising amount has come in $100 donations which is absolutely thrilling every time it happens! I am mostly writing this to express how thankful I am for the support (emotional and financial) from these incredible people, including those who weren't able to give but spread the word among their friends who may be interested in our work.

I'm also writing the post to talk a bit about giving. If you're reading this blog, chances are you know Ruby and I personally. But just in case, let me give a bit of background information. Ruby and I are both Quakers (What's a Quaker?). Our Yearly Meeting (an organization that conducts business once a year with representatives from many regional Monthly Meetings) has a long-standing relationship with the Yearly Meeting of El Salvador, which means that we have several Quaker friends in El Salvador. One year when we were in El Salvador we went to a f/Friend's house to participate in their ministry to distribute food around the city to homeless folks.

Our friend gathered with several family members and a few other members of his Meeting and together they cooked up a few giant pots of food. They also made a large amount of coffee and a large amount of hot chocolate. They they loaded it all up in the back of a pickup, everyone piled in (three of us up front and the rest riding in the back with the food) and we set out into the dark streets of San Salvador. We drove around for a few hours, handing out food, coffee, and hot chocolate to people who were homeless -- some of them mentally ill, some of them business men who simply couldn't afford a place to sleep, some of them drug addicts. All of them grateful that someone took the time to bring them something hot to eat or drink.

This ministry isn't financially supported by their Monthly Meeting. We asked them later how much money they spent on the food each week, from their own pockets. It was an incredible sum of money, considering that none of them makes very much. Yet they feel honored to be able to do such work, not burdened.

So here's how I like to think about it when I'm trying to figure out how much money to give away: What don't I need? I don't really need to buy a $10 lunch out; a little foresight and I can prepare a lunch at home for a fraction of the cost.

I don't really need another $40 pair of shoes when I already have half a dozen. Instead, I could give $40 to a cause I believe in.

Or even longer term -- can I go two weeks without buying lunches out? If I had been buying lunch every day at an average of $8 per day, that's $80 saved over two weeks. Maybe I could give that money away.

If you're reading this, I would encourage you to take a couple minutes and think of something you want but don't really need. Maybe it's a new dress. Maybe it's dinner from a local restaurant you enjoy. Maybe its a six-pack of beer -- or a six-pack of ginger beer. How much does that thing cost? Consider donating it to our Indiegogo campaign instead, to help us write this history of an incredible human rights organization.

Tuesday, June 19, 2012

[Ruby] A glimpse of the aftermath of the funeral for Archbishop Monseñor Romero

When I was doing some research, I came upon a remarkable video of the funeral of Monseñor Oscar Romero. So I thought I'd share it here. But first, a little background.

Romero was skeptical at first of what role the Church should play in the political struggle that was heating up the second half of the 1970's. He eventually became convinced that the government was committing atrocities and he worked to try to bring an end to the human rights abuses. Many individuals sought his help to find their missing family members, or to seek the release of political prisoners. Romero urged a group of women to form a committee, and so in 1977 CoMadres was started. For the next few years, Romero helped the Committee of Mothers, CoMadres, enormously. One way he supported them and furthered their work was by weekly publicizing the evidence they collected of deaths, detentions, and torture on his Sunday radio broadcast. 


Monseñor Romero wrote to President Jimmy Carter, imploring him to stop funding the war. He even pleaded, then demanded that soldiers stop carrying out their orders to torture, mutilate, and kill innocent civilians. The governmentcontrolled by the oligarchy, could not abide these actions, and so he was assassinated. But this wasn't enough. When an estimated 250,000 people poured into the park and adjoining streets outside of the National Cathedral for his funeral in March, 1980, the military responded by firing smoke bombs and shooting on the gathering. The message was unmistakable; the government had complete power and total disregard for the lives of peasants, as it had for Archbishop Romero himself. This video shows film taken that day. 
The crowd gathered for Romero's funeral.

http://youtu.be/EN6LWdqcyuc

Saturday, June 9, 2012

[Ruby] A ten year old's impression of El Salvador

2006 was the first year that Inez and I worked with Co-Madres. That year I also took my then 10 year old daughter, Celeste, with me to El Salvador. A couple years later she wrote this poem. I think it sums it up pretty well. (Celeste is now 16.) Celeste also helped me make a video for our Indiegogo campaign. Well, she made the video, I watched her do it. (To see the video, go to  http://www.indiegogo.com/comadres)


It took me three days to get used to...

The smell
of filthy streets
Celeste, Alicia & I at memorial, Parque Cuscatlan
of the ocean big and wide
of the garden full of bright luscious flowers.

The sight
of the street side cooking
of men holding guns by every store
 of the people walking in the flow of the cars.

The taste
of a warm enchilada with gallo pinto every night
of the fired corn at the fair
of the coconut drink sold by the highway.

The feel
of loving for all
of fear of gun men
of happiness at the carnival.

The sound
of a million voices
of the madre telling us to eat more.
Of an unheard cry from memories of the past.

                        by Celeste Buss


Tuesday, June 5, 2012

[Inez] Support our work

We have recently launched a fundraising campaign to help fund our work on the book this year. You can find our web page (and contribute!) here: http://www.indiegogo.com/CoMadres

When I was in college I was fortunate enough to get a grant for two of the summers that we went to El Salvador. For one year, Ruby was able to get financial support from our Yearly Meeting (the body which organizes and helps govern our regional group of Quaker Monthly Meetings). However, this year Ruby has taken a leave of absence from her job in order to dedicate more time to this project. That means that not only is she paying out of pocket to make trips to El Salvador, buy necessary equipment, and hire someone to help us transcribe our recorded interviews, but she isn't making any income! I have kept my job and am helping out in my spare time, but I am similarly paying out of pocket for any trips, equipment, and to send money to CoMadres from time to time.

In short, we need your help. In order for this project to succeed, we need outside support. We intend to make two trips to El Salvador this year to meet new madres and fill in gaps in the organization's story. We estimate that these two trips will cost us a combined total of $3720. Can you spare $10? Or $20? Or $50?

Think about it this way:
$10 = A meal from a Chinese take-out place, a cocktail, or a sandwich and chips.
$20 = A produce run to the local farmer's market, a manicure, or four boxes of girl scout cookies.
$50 = Dinner out for two or three people.

Any amount will help. And if money is tight, please help by spreading the word.


Thank you.

Thursday, May 17, 2012

[Ruby] Poco a poco (little by little)

I want to talk a little about how what it's been like, recording the history of Co-Madres, or as they say, rescatar su historia. First of all, this kind of thing is not in my repertoire. I'm an elementary school teacher. I teach little kids how to speak English, and how to read and write in Spanish. Usually, though not this year, I'm surrounded by smiling children all day! I spend my time thinking about how to organize lessons, how to make learning relevant, how to show my students that they're important and smart. I'm troubled by how to help a student get it (what ever "it" is that day), or how to motivate another kid. I'm moving and talking and listening all day. I wore a pedometer at work for a while, and found I walk between 2 and 5 miles a day at school. I do NOT spend my time sitting, writing and doing research. Especially not the sitting part.

And as for Inez- when we started this, she was between her freshman and sophmore year at Haverford College. She was 18 for crying out loud! What was I thinking, dragging her into this project, when I myself had no idea how I what I was doing?! But I knew I couldn't do it alone and that she'd be a great partner. Besides, her Spanish was way better than mine. and she was a lit major. That might come in handy.

Maybe it's clear by now- we really had no idea how we were going to accomplish this or what we were getting ourselves into. I was following what Quakers call a leading, that is, a voice inside me telling me to do this thing, a voice I couldn't ignore. At many points in the process I've been terrified- how could I say I'd help these amazing women write their history? Or more precisely, how could I say I'd get their  history published? Before starting, I was terrified at the prospect of making a promise that I didn't know if I could keep, from a logistical point of view. But this leading... like I said, I couldn't ignore it. I had to try.

After we began, I think Inez and I both realized that the greater terror is in facing the content of the stories.

As we got to know some of the members of Co-Madres and began to hear more of their testimonies, I think this is when we began to realize how emotionally difficult this project was going to be. There have been so many times when I've had an image rumbling around and around in my head, an image of torture, an image of sorrow... I've woken up at night from a dream about a particular, painful moment in one of the madre's life. Usually when something is bothering me, I'll call a friend or talk to my partner about it. But when I can't get these thoughts out of my head, I don't know what to do. It seems unfair to burden anyone else with these images. I can hardly bear to even speak the stories out loud, let alone cause someone else the pain of hearing them. And then to transcribe and edit these stories- we have to listen or read, over and over and over again. Painful, unthinkable acts. There have been times when I've just had to stop, for a day or a week.

But the women of Co-Madres want, they need this history to be known. So we keep plugging away, slowly slowly, poco a poco. It's such an honor to be doing this with and for them.
"Demanding truth and justice for our children, disappeared, assassinated."


Wednesday, May 9, 2012

[Inez] Transcribing: Day One post-El Salvador 2012

On our trip to El Salvador last week we met six new madres and one lisiado (I am still not sure how to properly translate this; it means roughly "injured," "crippled," or perhaps "handicapped") of the civil war from the general population -- that is, he was not a member of the guerrillas or the armed forces. We recorded 9.3 new hours of interviews, more than doubling the amount of transcribing that remains to be done. In this one week we recorded approximately as many hours as we have in past trips of 2-3 weeks each. It was an extraordinarily productive trip.

I'm so thankful to have been able to spend a week with Pati/Patty, who has been suffering terribly from cancer for two years now. I am also extremely thankful to have had the opportunity to meet new members of the organization, who are not active on a daily basis due primarily to a lack of funds. Ruby is on her way back to Minnesota now, and I'm sure she will have a lot to say about the trip.

I've been home for a few days now, myself. I really want to work on transcribing these new interviews while they are still fresh in my mind. It will be easier to pick up hard-to-hear words, and I may be able to add some notes about body language and gestures that will be lost in the recesses of my memory in a couple weeks.

There was one testimony that affected me greatly. I felt physically ill as I listened to her story and in fact had to excuse myself to splash off my face and let the sweat that had broken out over my entire body dry a bit. I knew I wanted to start transcribing soon after I got back to the US and I knew I would have to transcribe this testimony. The question was whether I would start with this testimony and get it out of the way, or end with it and know that after I finished it I could take a break before tackling the older interviews. I decided to go with the rip-the-bandaid off method and started transcribing this particular testimony this evening. I hope you'll wish me well. The testimony is nearly 75 minutes long, which means it will likely take me at least 450 minutes (7 1/2 hours) to transcribe, if not (likely) longer. I'll be hanging out with this testimony for a long time. These stories need to be shared.


Friday, May 4, 2012

[Inez] Preparing for lunch

Yesterday I sat on the back step while Patty prepared chicken for lunch. She had a whole chicken, butterflied and minus organs in a bag. First she laid all the pieces on the left side of the pila and began to cut it into individual servings. Thigh, breast, drumstick -- each one a swift chop and a little wiggle with the knife. We talked about types of meat. She told me that some people raise rabbits here, but she doesn't like the meat. I told her my favorite is duck. She said it smells too much like duck for her. She asked me if I had had venado. "Venado?" I repeated back to her, my incomprehension on my face. "Bambi," she said. "Oh..." I wrinkled my nose. I don't like how it smells, I told her. She explained to me that you have to take guayaba leaves and cut them up really small, rub them all over the meat. Then rub it with lime. That takes away the smell, but it still tastes delicious. "Sabe rico," she told me, smiling.

With the chicken cut into manageable pieces, she began to cut off the fat. Cut, cut, cut, the little yellow blobs going into their own bag. Patty told me about one time during the war, they had gone to rescue a couple of orphans. It was night time, and they fell into a trap -- a large hole in the ground. My eyes went big, picturing a tiger in a hole standing on top of the palm leaves that had previously covered it. "We didn't carry armas, but we always carried a spoon or a fork. All night we dug into the side so there was a little space for us to hide ourselves. The next day, some soldiers came by. They passed a light over the hole to see if anyone was in there. We told the children to be very quiet and we held still." Thank God they weren't babies, I thought to myself, remembering their stories yesterday of mothers accidentally suffocating their babies as they held their hands over their mouths to keep them quiet. If one baby had cried everyone would have been killed. After the military passed by the mothers were left with the realization that their infants were dead in their laps.

"After two days in the trap we heard someone else come up to the hole. 'Is anyone in there?' we heard. 'You don't have to be afraid, we're here in peace.' 'Ah,' we said, 'are you blue or green?'" [Colors belonging to the military and to the police.] " 'Neither,' they said, 'we're red.'" [FMLN -- the guerrillas.] Patty today, cutting the fat off the pieces of chicken. I put the collected fat into the hanging grocery bag that collects the leftover food scraps they would prefer the stray cats not get into. She told me that the guerrilleros took them and the children to their camp. First they gave them a little bit of water. The guerrilleros had three monkeys with them, she said. They went to prepare some food for them and the children. In the distance they heard the monkeys screaming. "I wonder what's going on with those monkeys," they thought to themselves. Then the monkeys were quiet and they shrugged it off. Eventually the guerrilleros came back with soup for them. It was mostly vegetables but had some meat in it too, and they ate it gladly. Later on they went to the creek to wash the dishes and there on the bank of the creek they saw the heads of the monkeys, their skin, and everything. "We had eaten the monkeys," Patty told me, with a face of pure disgust.

She rinsed the chicken again and then rubbed it thoroughly with lime. She told me about another time they were en el campo and a woman brought them some rice with little pieces of meat in it. Patty said that she was very hungry, but the meat didn't smell right. She ate only the rice and a tortilla and avoided the meat completely. Another madre was there with her and asked her, "Aren't you going to eat the meat?" "No," Patty said, "It doesn't smell right." "Oh, in that case I'll eat it," said the other woman, and she ate it all. Afterwards the woman who had served them the food asked them if they had liked it, "Oh yes," Patty told her, "it was delicious." It turns out the meat they had been fed was snake meat. Another look of disgust from Patty.

A few stray pieces of fat -- cut, cut. "The chickens here are like us," she told me, "small and skinny." We both laughed. She rinsed the lime off of it and put it into una olla. "If you go to the super, though, they're a lot bigger." I said "Yeah, but they're full of chemicals and hormones. Even though they're smaller, I'd rather have this chicken that is natural." "That's true," she said, "that's true."

Tuesday, May 1, 2012

[Ruby & Inez] How we got started

The first year that we met with las madres, we spent time getting to know them and letting them get to know us. The women who we worked with that year were Alicia, the director, Patty, Transito, and Magda. They were so kind to us, took such good care of us- even cooked great lunches for us every day. One day we were treated to river crab.

That year we talked about how we might write a book of the history of their organization, we learned about El Salvador, and we saw some sights.

One of the things Alicia, who was the director then, showed us was the Monument to Truth and Memory.


This monument contains the names of the civilians killed and disappeared during the civil war. Monsignor Romero's name is included on this monument, as are the names of Alicia's son and nephew. They were both killed during the period after the civil war when the Truth Commission was collecting information about atrocities committed during the war.


Seeing this monument drove home the enormity of the injustice that the civilian population faced during the war that lasted from 1980-1992. All the names on this wall are civilians!


This first year was a mix of true delight in getting to know these incredible women, and also beginning to come to terms with the tragedy they and many others have lived through.