http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3g63TWwtq0M
you can watch it big here! ...be sure to click on HQ (high quality)
:)
31 May 2009
Remember. versions 1 and 2
Remember.
Remember what it feels like to
be free,
to lie in the grass while the sun
kisses you, while the wind
caresses you. Knowing you are
created
alive
loved
blessed as you close your eyes, breathing
in all of this life and you
sneeze. Oh! How
human you are, little one. How
wonderfully human
Remember?
Remember what it feels like to
be human?
To curse and hurt and cry and rage
at this, betrayal, pain so deep that
you are lost. lost
lost
lost until you find the courage
to weep
lost until someone holds
you close, weeps with you, your
head on their should and
you know
freedom.
**above is the rewrite as i lost the original, which i just found so here is the first one:
Remember.
Remember what it feels like to
be free.
To lay in the grass while
the sun kisses you, while
the wind caresses you and you,
you know you are
alive
created
loved
blessed as you sneeze into the grass.
How human you are little one,
how
wonderfully human.
Remember.
Remember what if feels like to be human.
To rage and curse and cray
against your insignificance, against
a pain and betrayl so terrible
you are lost. lost.
lost.
lost until someone
calls your name out of
love. out of love calls you
back as you cry into their shoulder
and are freed
Remember what it feels like to
be free,
to lie in the grass while the sun
kisses you, while the wind
caresses you. Knowing you are
created
alive
loved
blessed as you close your eyes, breathing
in all of this life and you
sneeze. Oh! How
human you are, little one. How
wonderfully human
Remember?
Remember what it feels like to
be human?
To curse and hurt and cry and rage
at this, betrayal, pain so deep that
you are lost. lost
lost
lost until you find the courage
to weep
lost until someone holds
you close, weeps with you, your
head on their should and
you know
freedom.
**above is the rewrite as i lost the original, which i just found so here is the first one:
Remember.
Remember what it feels like to
be free.
To lay in the grass while
the sun kisses you, while
the wind caresses you and you,
you know you are
alive
created
loved
blessed as you sneeze into the grass.
How human you are little one,
how
wonderfully human.
Remember.
Remember what if feels like to be human.
To rage and curse and cray
against your insignificance, against
a pain and betrayl so terrible
you are lost. lost.
lost.
lost until someone
calls your name out of
love. out of love calls you
back as you cry into their shoulder
and are freed
29 May 2009
wild geese, carm, campo...home?
carm and me in the campo walking the looong walk home after one of the many easter week masses. over it is a poem by mary oliver, whom i love.
i don't know. coming home is hard. this picture and poem together say something i don't really have the words for
05 May 2009
quilt of liberation
hello!
so this one is less of a blog and more of a request to each of you to take about 5 minutes to be part of my final project for my liberation theology project. The assignment is to in some (creative) way represent how we have been liberated during our time in El Salvador. For me, in so many ways my time here has been a time of Liberation. So many boxes have exploded: my faith, my view of myself have both expanded through my relationships while I have been here and with this expansion and liberation I have been able to be in relationship, in friendships in a more complete way. In particular one way I have been liberated has been how I value myself. I realized here that when I think of myself I often think of all my mistakes, all of the things I could have done better or differently first. I have been learning to see the good in myself... and through that, have been able to see that my thoughts and feelings have more value than I tend to give them, and so I am (learning!) to speak from myself, to see the good in me to value myself enough to then be able to share my uncomforts with others.
so in the end, this really has been a circle, that through my relationships I have been able to see, to value myself, more and so then to be able to be more fully in relationships with the people who have been walking this journey with me.
Each of you reading this has been walking this semester with me and so you too have been a part of the process for me ... though maybe you didn't know it until now! So I would like to invite you to be a part of my project. Here it is:
I am making a quilt of squares, one square for each person who has been part of my liberation. In EL Salvador, this means I give you a square and you get to draw or write your answer...for you my friends back to home, it means please respond to the following in a message or email and I will write (or draw if you tell me to!) on the square for you.
in the center will be: what do you love about yourself? what about you makes you the most you?
on one side will be: please write me a short message about what you love about me
on another side: i will write a short message about what I love about you (and tell you in a replying email so you can know what i put)
much thanks and more love!
christy
so this one is less of a blog and more of a request to each of you to take about 5 minutes to be part of my final project for my liberation theology project. The assignment is to in some (creative) way represent how we have been liberated during our time in El Salvador. For me, in so many ways my time here has been a time of Liberation. So many boxes have exploded: my faith, my view of myself have both expanded through my relationships while I have been here and with this expansion and liberation I have been able to be in relationship, in friendships in a more complete way. In particular one way I have been liberated has been how I value myself. I realized here that when I think of myself I often think of all my mistakes, all of the things I could have done better or differently first. I have been learning to see the good in myself... and through that, have been able to see that my thoughts and feelings have more value than I tend to give them, and so I am (learning!) to speak from myself, to see the good in me to value myself enough to then be able to share my uncomforts with others.
so in the end, this really has been a circle, that through my relationships I have been able to see, to value myself, more and so then to be able to be more fully in relationships with the people who have been walking this journey with me.
Each of you reading this has been walking this semester with me and so you too have been a part of the process for me ... though maybe you didn't know it until now! So I would like to invite you to be a part of my project. Here it is:
I am making a quilt of squares, one square for each person who has been part of my liberation. In EL Salvador, this means I give you a square and you get to draw or write your answer...for you my friends back to home, it means please respond to the following in a message or email and I will write (or draw if you tell me to!) on the square for you.
in the center will be: what do you love about yourself? what about you makes you the most you?
on one side will be: please write me a short message about what you love about me
on another side: i will write a short message about what I love about you (and tell you in a replying email so you can know what i put)
much thanks and more love!
christy
27 April 2009
more campo!
so more stories from campo...
the second day there we played soccer...divided up so first the women playe and then the men so the women woudn´t have pena... it was a blast, and surprisingly (we were expecting to be cruchsed) we tied, empate!
about half way through julia and i taught eduardo how to play crazy eights (or crazy eights). i think we started wednesday night. i lost everysingle game...and we played probably about 10 or something. the next morning we hiked to the top of the mountain. steep hot dusty. but then we just hung out up there for over an hour, played crazy eights some more. and eduardo brought cucumbers (5 rather large ones) lime and salt. so after a couple rounds of losing i asked for a cucumber. i peeled it with his machete and i ate it, holding the whole thing in my hand, putting lime and salt on top, and just taking huge bits out of it...lik it was a banana but not. the rounds we played while i was eating my pepino i won. so for the rest of the week we talked about my lucky pepino and esuardo would say "cris, va perder por que no tiene su pepino" ... you are going to lose because you don´t have your cucumber. and i would respond... nope, i still have it, it is still in me...
and lets just talk about that for a second. and just a preface, we talk about poop a lot here. it is just part of life, and an important part because if you poop normal it´s kind of a big deal... and if you are not, well it´s nice to know everyone else here understands and shares your pain. so anyway, i´m inviting you to http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=42197join this conversation about the poop side of life: here we go. i pooped twice the whole week we were in the campo. once teusday and once sunday morning (easter --such a good gift! .. though a part of me wished i could have waited til i was back to a flushing toilet instead of a latrine... but you know asi es la vida...). so my luckjy pepino was with me wednesday on, though honestly it didn´t do me much good and i my losing streak started up again. and the toilets: they had a special kind of latrine that was two "toilets"so you use obne until the hole beneath it gets filled up, switch to the other, wait a year i think and then mix it up and use it as fertilizar. now the things is that only poop is good for fertilizar, the pee would mess it up. htis means that the "toilets" look pretty funny... i really meant to take a picture, but i never remembered to take the camera with me to the bathroom. but so the latrine is made of cement and the back half goes straight down like a normal porta potty thing (though much less smelly cause you put like sand and lyme in after every time you poop) and then the front half was like a ement cylinder into a plastic black tube that took the pee to another little bit different place... so proabably more than you wanted to know, but part of life. it´s probably funny but just about everytime i use the bathroom (especially when it is actually in a toilet...) i just think of my interreligious dialogue class and how rabbi white said part of one of the traditional jewish prayers thanks God for the ability to go to the bathroom, and i do the same.
and back to easter! holy week traditions here are beautiful. there´s the traditional holy thursday last supper washing of the feet. on friday there are stations of the cross and then a mass, and then an easter vigil on sautrday night. but there´s a huge difference, especially in the campo: everything is at least an hour walk away. 4 cantones (hamlets) celebrate the easter season together and so each canton hosts a different day. carasque where i was this year had palm sunday, which was before we got there, so everything else was a quite a walk. my favorite parts. we did live stations of the cross, walking outside in the hot dust, with a pick-up driving behinf the whole crowd with a megaphone, the readers speaking into wireless mikes at each station. and for each station they had a little poster on a tall stick (i might have a picture... i´ll see) and they would tell the story of the station and then they would prayer these beautiful prayers. the one i remember the best is the one where the strip Jesus of his clothes and they prayed, Lord we too have been stripped of the little we have. OUr jobs, money food... even our human dignity (plus a little mre) Lord Here our prayer... and then the would continue: Lord at times we have taken the dignity and the little of other, Forgive us Lord forgive us. Abnd some of the women who walked an hour to walk an hour and half in the stations were old and would kneel in the dust at each station.
saturday day we spenet at the river. this tradition on hoy saturday to go to water and just have fun. we played and plashed and it was so fun. lydia brought tamales for lunch, chicken tamales. and they were good except they don´t take the bones out of the chicken before putting the chicken in the tamales! and so the inside of one of my tamales was a whole chicken foot! wacala (yuck)! ..i quitely took it out and his it under a rock in the beach. i may be soemthing less than a fan of chicken tamales...
my other favorite part was on the way to the easter village it was dark and it´s el salvador and the mass was supposed to start at 7 so of course we left the house at 7 and were walking and we take a short cut of the road through the trees and brush and walk and walk and walk and walk and we get finally down to the river, a little bit before the bridge and we see these flashlights behind us. it was so beautiful: ileas (who is about 6 and lived in carasque and just shines really...) and matt (a jesuit novice) and several families and we just all met up crossed the bridge, left the road again and are walking single file along the river with four flashlights, some times in silence and soemtimes laughing and sometimes running to catch up, in the night with these four lights bobbing around. and i felt so at peace to be in the procession, and completely unatease thinking that this is what it was like during the war when they had to abandon their homes and take to the mountains to avoid being slaughtered by the army. this is like that... but at the same time this is completely different: we hve light and we can laugh and talk and we are not walking in fear. and so it was peaceful and ghostly. and how ppropriate that those deaths and that fear should be remembered and walked in the night after Christ died. Marcel says that hope only is when despair is possible. the image of those four lights in the safe darkness i can still see when i close my eyes ... and how corny does that sounds, but they talk corny here, and it´s true.
more pictures...
oops... i don´t have my campo pictures on my flash drive so instead i´m going to put up some pictures of my kids and me ! (all of these are my kids except the third from the bottom which is a picture of the youth group that meets every daturday evening... but it´s the room where we have engish class...)
the second day there we played soccer...divided up so first the women playe and then the men so the women woudn´t have pena... it was a blast, and surprisingly (we were expecting to be cruchsed) we tied, empate!
about half way through julia and i taught eduardo how to play crazy eights (or crazy eights). i think we started wednesday night. i lost everysingle game...and we played probably about 10 or something. the next morning we hiked to the top of the mountain. steep hot dusty. but then we just hung out up there for over an hour, played crazy eights some more. and eduardo brought cucumbers (5 rather large ones) lime and salt. so after a couple rounds of losing i asked for a cucumber. i peeled it with his machete and i ate it, holding the whole thing in my hand, putting lime and salt on top, and just taking huge bits out of it...lik it was a banana but not. the rounds we played while i was eating my pepino i won. so for the rest of the week we talked about my lucky pepino and esuardo would say "cris, va perder por que no tiene su pepino" ... you are going to lose because you don´t have your cucumber. and i would respond... nope, i still have it, it is still in me...
and lets just talk about that for a second. and just a preface, we talk about poop a lot here. it is just part of life, and an important part because if you poop normal it´s kind of a big deal... and if you are not, well it´s nice to know everyone else here understands and shares your pain. so anyway, i´m inviting you to http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=42197join this conversation about the poop side of life: here we go. i pooped twice the whole week we were in the campo. once teusday and once sunday morning (easter --such a good gift! .. though a part of me wished i could have waited til i was back to a flushing toilet instead of a latrine... but you know asi es la vida...). so my luckjy pepino was with me wednesday on, though honestly it didn´t do me much good and i my losing streak started up again. and the toilets: they had a special kind of latrine that was two "toilets"so you use obne until the hole beneath it gets filled up, switch to the other, wait a year i think and then mix it up and use it as fertilizar. now the things is that only poop is good for fertilizar, the pee would mess it up. htis means that the "toilets" look pretty funny... i really meant to take a picture, but i never remembered to take the camera with me to the bathroom. but so the latrine is made of cement and the back half goes straight down like a normal porta potty thing (though much less smelly cause you put like sand and lyme in after every time you poop) and then the front half was like a ement cylinder into a plastic black tube that took the pee to another little bit different place... so proabably more than you wanted to know, but part of life. it´s probably funny but just about everytime i use the bathroom (especially when it is actually in a toilet...) i just think of my interreligious dialogue class and how rabbi white said part of one of the traditional jewish prayers thanks God for the ability to go to the bathroom, and i do the same.
and back to easter! holy week traditions here are beautiful. there´s the traditional holy thursday last supper washing of the feet. on friday there are stations of the cross and then a mass, and then an easter vigil on sautrday night. but there´s a huge difference, especially in the campo: everything is at least an hour walk away. 4 cantones (hamlets) celebrate the easter season together and so each canton hosts a different day. carasque where i was this year had palm sunday, which was before we got there, so everything else was a quite a walk. my favorite parts. we did live stations of the cross, walking outside in the hot dust, with a pick-up driving behinf the whole crowd with a megaphone, the readers speaking into wireless mikes at each station. and for each station they had a little poster on a tall stick (i might have a picture... i´ll see) and they would tell the story of the station and then they would prayer these beautiful prayers. the one i remember the best is the one where the strip Jesus of his clothes and they prayed, Lord we too have been stripped of the little we have. OUr jobs, money food... even our human dignity (plus a little mre) Lord Here our prayer... and then the would continue: Lord at times we have taken the dignity and the little of other, Forgive us Lord forgive us. Abnd some of the women who walked an hour to walk an hour and half in the stations were old and would kneel in the dust at each station.
saturday day we spenet at the river. this tradition on hoy saturday to go to water and just have fun. we played and plashed and it was so fun. lydia brought tamales for lunch, chicken tamales. and they were good except they don´t take the bones out of the chicken before putting the chicken in the tamales! and so the inside of one of my tamales was a whole chicken foot! wacala (yuck)! ..i quitely took it out and his it under a rock in the beach. i may be soemthing less than a fan of chicken tamales...
my other favorite part was on the way to the easter village it was dark and it´s el salvador and the mass was supposed to start at 7 so of course we left the house at 7 and were walking and we take a short cut of the road through the trees and brush and walk and walk and walk and walk and we get finally down to the river, a little bit before the bridge and we see these flashlights behind us. it was so beautiful: ileas (who is about 6 and lived in carasque and just shines really...) and matt (a jesuit novice) and several families and we just all met up crossed the bridge, left the road again and are walking single file along the river with four flashlights, some times in silence and soemtimes laughing and sometimes running to catch up, in the night with these four lights bobbing around. and i felt so at peace to be in the procession, and completely unatease thinking that this is what it was like during the war when they had to abandon their homes and take to the mountains to avoid being slaughtered by the army. this is like that... but at the same time this is completely different: we hve light and we can laugh and talk and we are not walking in fear. and so it was peaceful and ghostly. and how ppropriate that those deaths and that fear should be remembered and walked in the night after Christ died. Marcel says that hope only is when despair is possible. the image of those four lights in the safe darkness i can still see when i close my eyes ... and how corny does that sounds, but they talk corny here, and it´s true.
more pictures...
oops... i don´t have my campo pictures on my flash drive so instead i´m going to put up some pictures of my kids and me ! (all of these are my kids except the third from the bottom which is a picture of the youth group that meets every daturday evening... but it´s the room where we have engish class...)
24 April 2009
campo!
finally, here we go: campo! .... and i only have about 10 minutes, so this one may come in installments :)
so i spent holy week in carasquem which is a little cantón (hamlet) outside of arcatao in the department chaletenango. we were right on the border of Honduras. I spent the week with a beautiful family, Lydia and Beto were the parents and Eduardo (20), Hector (19) and Marina (18) were the kids you still ived at home --the have three older siblings who have already moved out.
Lydia had planned a very special dinner for our first night: crab and fish soup. New this is nothing like what you would think. Are you ready? So clearly it still had to be prepared when we arrived and so the first thing I did in "my" house was "help" Lydia get everything ready. This meant tearing the claws off live crabs, then ripping the top part of the shell off, and putting everything in a small wachal (small tupperware-ish plastic circle container). Then, the fish: they were about the size of my thumb and cleaning them entailed slicing open their bellies, squeezing out the guts and fish poo, and throwing them into the same wachal. Now, innocent that I was, I figured some further cleaning was going to take place before all these mariscos (sea food) were put in the soup. Absolutely not. So eating this soup meant fishing around (hehe) in the soup and when you got a fish, the fins had to be removed, and the "espinas" (spines - bones) removed, the head... and scales and the little meat that there was eaten ... and let me tell you i am fairly certain that there were more bones then fish in those little guys! then the crabs...oh cangrejos (like how i´m slipping in all this spanish? just getting you guys ready for when i come back! lol)... the bones were everywhere and the meat was in hidden pockets... i got a little bit and then i got tired of getting crab shell in my teeth and i kind of stopped... oh my goodness. and Lydia was so cute and soo excited to be having crab.
and i have to be running so just a hint of what is to come (and a reminder to me...;)
-ochos locos y pepinos
-the bathroom
-soccer
-the river
-chicken tamales
-the hike
-mangos and pineapple
- motorcycles!
oh and some pictures here too...
a picture of the mountains
the girls (us girls and carasque girls) playing soccer and just hte beautiful view the mountains behind
my "brother" eduardo and I after he taught me how to ride his brother´s motorcycle!
julia (the other woman from my program who stayed with me) and hector in front of the sunsetting behind the mountains or our walk back home one evening.
and our family´s chicken house --they had a chicken farm and 700 chickens are in that little house!
so i spent holy week in carasquem which is a little cantón (hamlet) outside of arcatao in the department chaletenango. we were right on the border of Honduras. I spent the week with a beautiful family, Lydia and Beto were the parents and Eduardo (20), Hector (19) and Marina (18) were the kids you still ived at home --the have three older siblings who have already moved out.
Lydia had planned a very special dinner for our first night: crab and fish soup. New this is nothing like what you would think. Are you ready? So clearly it still had to be prepared when we arrived and so the first thing I did in "my" house was "help" Lydia get everything ready. This meant tearing the claws off live crabs, then ripping the top part of the shell off, and putting everything in a small wachal (small tupperware-ish plastic circle container). Then, the fish: they were about the size of my thumb and cleaning them entailed slicing open their bellies, squeezing out the guts and fish poo, and throwing them into the same wachal. Now, innocent that I was, I figured some further cleaning was going to take place before all these mariscos (sea food) were put in the soup. Absolutely not. So eating this soup meant fishing around (hehe) in the soup and when you got a fish, the fins had to be removed, and the "espinas" (spines - bones) removed, the head... and scales and the little meat that there was eaten ... and let me tell you i am fairly certain that there were more bones then fish in those little guys! then the crabs...oh cangrejos (like how i´m slipping in all this spanish? just getting you guys ready for when i come back! lol)... the bones were everywhere and the meat was in hidden pockets... i got a little bit and then i got tired of getting crab shell in my teeth and i kind of stopped... oh my goodness. and Lydia was so cute and soo excited to be having crab.
and i have to be running so just a hint of what is to come (and a reminder to me...;)
-ochos locos y pepinos
-the bathroom
-soccer
-the river
-chicken tamales
-the hike
-mangos and pineapple
- motorcycles!
oh and some pictures here too...
a picture of the mountains
the girls (us girls and carasque girls) playing soccer and just hte beautiful view the mountains behind
my "brother" eduardo and I after he taught me how to ride his brother´s motorcycle!
julia (the other woman from my program who stayed with me) and hector in front of the sunsetting behind the mountains or our walk back home one evening.
and our family´s chicken house --they had a chicken farm and 700 chickens are in that little house!
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