El Pilar
“There are certain things in life which seem to defy explanation, events you can’t imagine having fallen into place by accident, casually unrelated events that fall together in a deeply meaningful way.” That’s what Paul Darilek from Living Waters El Salvador calls a “God Thang”. A God Thang is the way that Paul describes the way that things came together to build two wells in the communities of Bendicion de Dios and El Pilar in La Libertad, El Salvador. I would say a God Thang is what happened to us one day when we visited those places in early 2008.
Trinity had been looking for a way to engage in meaningful ministry in Central America for some time. One day a Salvadoran woman living in Santa Cruz showed up in Pastor Karla’s office with her mother and grandmother who were visiting from a community in El Salvador called El Pilar. They told her about how desperately poor the community was and how they would like for us to be able to help them out. After hearing the tale, Karla invited members of the Outreach Committee to listen to their tale and to put their heads together with these women about how best to help them out. Karla remembered having met Paul from Living Waters while she was in El Salvador in 2003. After conversation with Paul, he was invited to speak at the church. The rest is history. A well was put in each one of these communities—one sponsored by Trinity Presbyterian Church and the other by a visitor to the church that day.
Two years after Trinity donated the money for those wells, Karla Norton and David Gomez joined the Santa Cruz al Salvador delegation to Guillermo Ungo. The trip found both of them and Mike Cruddas headed toward La Libertad in a truck searching for a clutch with an employee from Living Water who spoke no English. There was more than once that we thought this would be the day we would die.
The first thing that stood out for me on the trip to the communities of El Pilar and Bendicion de Dios were the richest homes I had seen in all of El Salvador off the side of the road guarded by armed guards on the road to La Libertad. We turned off the road shortly after the community of Zaragosa and headed up the road deeper into the campo. We pulled into El Pilar and tried to make a connection with the presidente of the directiva, who was not home.
We then pulled around to the well which had been dug with the money from Trinity, where a mother and her three daughters were busy filling up water jugs and emptying them into their pila for their daily water. Even the littlest child had a jug to match her size.
Our driver went up to a house on the hill and a woman came down to greet us. She was so excited to see us—the circle had been completed—it was one of the women who had been in my office three years before. I had completely forgotten the story of how that well had come to be in that place until that very moment.
The woman insisted that we come up to her house for refreshments. We were stunned by what we saw. Her property was quite lush compared to anything we had seen. She had her own watering system, a swimming pool, a two story house and a ranchito for her mother. In our broken Spanish we managed to communicate a little about the reality of their living situation.
The woman of the house took us to see an old man who lived out behind her house in the most desperate of living situations. He was 90 years old, without family and completely blind. He spent the entirety of his days in a hammock outside of his shack and relied upon her for his meals which she brought down to him. The contrast of the living situations left me feeling like there was a rock in the pit of my stomach.
That feeling only grew as we went from that place to another impoverished community called Bendicion de Dios where the other well had been dug. The desperation of the community seemed almost palpable. Most of the children of the community didn’t even have shoes to wear and did not go to school because it was too far away and too expensive.
In that moment we seemed to be very far away from the Cuidadela of Guillermo Ungo, which has become so organized over the last 14 years, bringing hope to the people through water and health services to the surrounding communities and education for some 600 young people.
When we left that day the three of us had been deeply affected by the poverty and the desperation we encountered. Where is the hope for these people? How is God working to bring a new creation into this part of the country? I’m not sure we will ever know. God certainly broke our hearts that day in the department of La Libertad, and maybe that’s a start.
In solidarity,Pastor Karla Norton
Comments (0) Added by Kent April 26, 2009 (10:52PM)
