Wednesday, August 7, 2013

Aug. 7

Today we woke up to pancakes, beans, bread, coffee, and cereal. We left for our trip to Contrasida (Against AIDS) which is an agency to help educate young people and their families about the dangers of contracting HIV. Here we met with Daisy and Mercedes and Angel who all work for the agency and bring education and workshops to different schools and parishes. Most people in El Salvador contract HIV through heterosexual contact and are very much discriminated against both by their families and society as a whole. Mercedes talked to us a bit about how she does the workshops for young people and how she gets very frank with them about the ways one can get the disease as well as the myths prevalent in society about those who have the disease. They are working to change the perception of those with advanced HIV or AIDS. Contrasida also has a spiritual component to its mission in that it relays to people that God does not want people to suffer from HIV. In July during national testing day, 30,000 people in El Salvador were reported with HIV, and more than half were ages 15-20. Mostly husbands bring HIV to their wives because they live in a society of machismo in which men are considered manly if they have more than one partner. The clinic currently serves 130 people. Their resources are very limited and many of their donors are from other programs in other countries, usually in the form of grants. Fourteen people work at the agency. Two of the fourteen are vigilantes, or guardsmen/women. After the presentations, we divided into three groups and went into the homes of those who are infected with HIV. We traveled in a cramped truck with Mercedes and Angel to Aguilares to meet Sara Isabel and her five little boys. All five children have different fathers and Sara is pregnant again with a sixth child due in 5 months. At her home she was water for two hours a day two times a week from the city. She sells mangos on the side of the highway to support her family. Today her distributor had bad mangos on the load, so she lost about eight dollars in sales. She also grows corn and melons on the property that is owned by someone up in the hills from her home, but he does not use it for anything. This is very hard labor for her in her condition. She washed clothes in the nearby river, which she claims is clean. As we spoke to her about how she got her house, we found out that only her mother knows that she is HIV positive. Not even her children or other family members know. Due to discrimination, she has to be very discreet about coming to the clinic. She also just found out that her six year old, Victor, is also HIV positive, so he does not go to school with the other three older boys. He stays home with his four year old brother Jeramias. Her other three boys came home from school during our visit and we got a chance to talk with them a bit. They showed us the grades that they had received on some of their papers today at school. They are doing well in school. Before leaving, the other group member and myself each left Sara a little bit of money to try to make up for the mango sales she lost today. She was appreciative, of course. After a quick snafu of the truck we took to Sara's house getting stuck in the mud (and Max and Tony's muscle strength), we pulled away waving to the family. We returned to Contrasida for lunch which was a vegetable base soup with corn, greenbeans, and wiskil, as well as corn tortillas and cantalope juice (jugo de ensalada). Max seems to be having a very hard time with the vegetarian diet here. He did, however, scoot on down to the farmacia with Debbie, our guide, to pick up a Gatorade and a candy bar - hardly the nutrition he needs at this point! After lunch we went to visit Divina Providencia where Archbishop Oscar Romero lived and was assassinated. It's a hospital with a small church. He lived in a small apartment right near or adjoining the property of the church and hospital. Here a short little nun gave us our 1st tour in English! She told us about his living quarters. We were able to see his car and a small memorial garden where his heart is still burried today. He was shot in the heart. We learned that once the heart was exhumed a few months after his assassination, it was found in good condition and not decomposed as expected. This is considered to be the first miracle towards his canonization for sainthood. He needs just one more miracle - so bring on the miracles! We walked over to the chapel to see the altar he was behind when he raised the chalice for consecration when his murderer walked in and shot him in the heart. At his house you can see the vestments he wore stained with his blood. One priest that we had met on the trip, Father John, was one of the priests who hoisted Romero's casket on his shoulders the day of Romero's funeral when a bomb detonated near the cathedral funeral procession and everyone crammed into the cathedral for safety. No one could move in the cathedral because it was so crowded. They had to keep Romero held high to accommodate for space. It was amazing to meet a man who had direct contact with Romero in this way. Another interesting thing we saw among his collection was the watch he was wearing at the time he was assassinated. It had stopped at that moment and still shows the time of day of his murder.

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