A Tale of Two Hospitals

This is a reflection about my visit to the private hospital and then the public hospital of El Salvador all in the same day with students on our delegation from Eastern Michigan University.

If you only went to the Hospital Diagnostico, you might not be able to relieve that a hospital like Rosales existed in the country and vice versa.

We went to the Diagnostico first and were given a tour by one of the young residents. Her English was quite good and she was incredibly friendly and helpful. We moved through the cool rooms with the artistic Salvadoran paintings, nice floors, and clean facilities. The hospital used to be a mall and you can see by the set up, do to this unique architecture, specialists are able to have their own offices. We were able to visit the room with one of the only MRI machines in the country and we peaked into the quiet ICU.

The patient rooms were individual rooms with private bathrooms, nice furniture and plasma TV’s. On the fifth floor where the rooms where oldest, the TV’s were not plasma but the view of the city from the balcony was amazing.

In the waiting room we watched as a small boy in overalls was whisked in by his nanny with a cut finger. He was immediately seen by the doctors. As we visited the emergency, the boy cried as they cleaned his finger. His young mother and father had entered and his father comforted him: “Don’t cry, this weekend we will go back Apaneca and you can ride horses again, wouldn’t you like that?”

We finished the tour, thanked our young doctor and headed to Mr. Donut for a quick lunch before arriving at hospital number 2.

It is hard to put the experience of Hospital Rosales into words, but I’ll try.

The chief of residents who took us around the hospital also spoke English. He had studied a semester in the hospital at Yale, so he must have had some concept of the vast ocean that existed between a private hospital and the one he worked at.

Rosales was various buildings. Many of which are the same as when they were build in 1904. The beds in all the wards were full. The first wards were giant high cieling rooms with about fifteen beds in each. We walked into the room for people with kidney failure. A resident was pumping air into the lungs of a patient for lack of a breathing machine. It was hot and there was no AC. Hospital staff moved around from one person to another. Some family rubbed the backs of their family who grimaced in pain.

The AIDS ward was similar.

The Emergency room was a horror. Full of people who looked as if they had come from the most remote corner of the country. Bent over, coughing, with homemade bandages. Some people leave their homes at 3am to arrive here the doctor said. They usually wait on average 4 hours before they are seen. People who need a bed sometimes wait three days. If there are no beds, they roll out towels on the floor while they wait for a doctor.

The OR had about 6 patients many of whom looked gravely, gravely ill. A man in a chair who was not able to have a bed do to the lack of them, explained to a nurse the pain in his chest that was probably a heart attack.

As we reached the nicer wards, the ones with air conditioning, but still very evident of Salvadoran poverty. We saw where the flu patients are kept. One girl in our group asked: why do you give the nicer rooms with AC to the people who aren’t as sick? This may be hard to hear, the doctor said, but we have very few resources, we have to prioritize. Many times we give priority to the people who are younger who have a better chance of living.

We walked on. This is one of the few public, full scale hospitals in the country, he told us. It is free, that is why people come all over. Most of them have to ask for a dollar to get back to their homes. We ourselves don’t have the resources to have enough doctors or enough medicine. We have a whole ward build by the government of Germany in disuse because we don’t have enough Money to pay the staff. When we do open it, we will give it to patients with renal failure, a very common illness here—it’s the farmers who get it, the ones who have been poisoned by the pesticides.

We walked on, sick person after sick person. We reached the end and thanked the doctor. He thanked us. Now you see, he said, the difference between private and public hospitals.

Like I said. Had I just gone to Rosales, I couldn’t have believed that a place like the Diagnostico existed. And vice versa.

Back pain

This is a reflection on the week in June that I spent as a medical interpreter at the clinic at Maria Madre de los Pobres Catholic Church in La Chacra, San Salvador. The medical professionals who I interpreted for come to El Salvador everyone on a SHARE delegation from Visitation Parish in Kansas City.

She was a street vendor who walked around carrying a giant tub of juice cans. The pain in her heals was unbearable.

He threw his back out six years ago. He still has horrible pain. He thought it was cancer. But really it was the fact that he lifted tires everyday and put more and more strain on his back.

She lost her arm during the war. Her husband just had a stroke and is paralyzed, she now does everything for him and work to support them. She can't sleep from back pain.

She was hit by a motorcycle two years ago. She and her daughter and grandson received death threats until the boy fled the community. They cried when they talked about being afraid. They both have knee and back pain.

She didn't know that there is no pill for her mother's alzheimer's. I explained it to her as best as I could.

His knees are shot from arthritus. But he needs the factory job, and so he continues to climb up steps and lift stacks of metal plates.

She can't afford the medicine for her Parkinson's. She came to see if we would give her a cane.

One by one, they sat down with us. Soy Laura y voy a traducir. Supposedly a translator is just a tool for the doctor, but the pain they carried stuck to me and I couldn't forget after they left. Everyone was carrying some kind of pain. We taught them leg, knee, back and neck exercises. To strengthen and stretch. To give some relief. Something that could possibly be more sustainable to a pill. We were able to give some of them canes. We hoped it would work. But we couldn't give them new shoes, new floors to walk on or beds to sleep on. We couldn't give them access to a swimming pool to do their exercises. We couldn't give them new jobs or new homes. We couldn't take them out of La Chacra and the poverty and violence. We could teach some breathing techniques but we couldn't take away the stressors.

On Friday, after all the patient visits, we went with the group to the UCA to see the sacred site. On the wall there was a drawing I had never seen on previous visits. Stick figures going through their day to day life. Working in construction, repairing cars, walking through the market. Each one was drawn with a cross on their back. The cross that the poor person carries as they go through their day. No one is going to give them a break, a win. The cross gets heavier and it weighs them down. No wonder they all have back pain.

A Romero quote

In El Salvador we go along with our daily lives and then are out of the blue sometimes hit with the reality of the violence that happens here or has happened here. Today while going through SHARE files, I came across a piece written about the 4 American Churchwomen who were killed and started to read it. At one point I stopped reading and realized that I was crying, I guess there are somethings that you can never be immune to, even after living here for a year and a half.

Shortly after I came across this Romero quote and decided to post it. The priest he mentions Alfonso Navarro was killed by paramilitary troops on May 11, 1977, about 1 week and twenty two years ago. He was one of many church leaders and community workers who were brutally assissinated during that time in El Salvador's history. I was most hit by the very last line. Here is it is:

"Who knows if the one whose hands are bloodied with Father
Grande's murder, or the one who shot Father Navarro, if those who
have killed, who have tortured, who have done so much evil, are
listening to me? Listen, there in your criminal hideout, perhaps
already repentant, you too are called to forgiveness."
December 18, 1977

December in El Salvador

I just posted a reflection about the church women and I mentioned a movie called "Roses in December," there is one part in the movie when Jean Donovan talks about the beauty of El Salvador and says "where else would you find roses blooming in December?" I hadn't paid too much attention to this quote until now when I am spending December in El Salvador and have discovered the same thing that she did which is: December is one of the most beautiful months in El Salvador.

December in Cincinnati can be a pretty depressing month because the winter season officially kicks in and you know that you will be really cold until about March. This is either helped or aggravated (sometimes both) by the overwhelming season of Christmas. While I can get a little sick to my stomach from too much Christmas cookies, music and mall shopping, there can be something calming and peaceful about a room lit only by Christmas lights and a fire as Carol of the Bells plays softly in the background and snow falls outside. That is not what Christmas decorations are like in El Salvador. They are usually very tacky and out of place, and (in my opinion) completely drowned out by the beautifully blossoming flowers and bright blue skies.

El Salvador December days can turn hot but not too hot and the nights are breezy. The rainy season is over but things haven't dried up completely yet. As you walk through the streets or drive through the countryside, you see brilliant flowers that are colored bright red, magenta, yellow, orange and white. So, today I actually walked through the streets in my neighborhood with my camera to document some of December's finest blossoms. Here are some of my favorites:

The neighborhood around my El Salvador homeThis is the bus I take to work (the yellow flowers are my favorites)

There are flowers everywhere you lookA house by where I work

And to show that I also can appreciate the beauty of December in Ohio, here is one more:

My home in Ohio

Remembering the Churchwomen

While I was at home, I watched the movie "Roses in December" with my mom. The movie tells the story of Jean Donovan, a Catholic lay missioner who was murdered along with three nuns by the Salvadoran army on December 2, 1980. I had seen the movie before when I was a student at the Casa but that was almost four years ago. The movie was made just a few years after the women were murdered so it is very dated but it was really good to watch it with my mom because it does a good job of putting the story into the context of the war. We watched it on December 1st which was the day before the anniversary of their death. I found a reflection written by a Sister on a delegation to El Salvador with the SHARE foundation and I want to share a part of it

"It was 23 years ago today that four churchwomen were found in a shallow grave in a farmer’s field, some raped, all dead-- each with a single bullet to their head.

The description of such violence was not at all uncommon in 1980 in El Salvador- a countryside desecrated by civil war, a people not at all defeated by the horrors they lived daily. A resurrection people, fed by the blood of the martyrs and the bread of daily struggle for a better life created the peace filled scene I witnessed today--a lovely pasture populated with a smart brick chapel, a beautiful white stone monument complete with a memorial plaque and a tree that is planted in the center of an area outlined with small white rocks. A lovely space- now filled with local folks and their living memory of war and peace accords; Latin American religious sisters revisiting the core of their passion, commitment and witness; and people from the North – standing in solidarity.

Aiding and abetting the enemy, the ‘subversive acts’ of the nuns and one lay missioner were caring for victims of war and war- orphaned children. Addressing the social, political and economic disparity between the rich and the poor, teaching methods of self-empowerment, and community development were direct threats to the power structure of the ruling class. In those times threats were eliminated. "

-http://www.share-elsalvador.org/reflections/usnuns.htm

As I read the reflection and as I watched the movie, I found myself tearing up at the images of the women´s bodies being pulled out of ditches, of people getting shot at while attending Archbishop Romero´s funeral mass, and of the children in the refugee camps. Sometimes I forget the horrorific history of this country during the civil war. This makes sense as I work with young people who were mostly born at the end of or after the war. But that does not mean that they are unaffected. A culture, a country, takes years and years to recover from such trauma.

As with the Jesuit vigil, I am reminded as to why I, a north american women, am in El Salvador. Jean Donovan gave up a very comfortable life in the states to work with refugees in El Salvador. I remember how inspired I was by this the first time that I heard of her. A woman who was inspired to walk alongside people who were being persecuted and ignored by the rest of the world. Granted, my life in El Salvador is very different than that of those lay missioners who came in the eighties. While still violent, El Salvador is not at war, and I don´t fear for my life much more than I did living in St. Louis (which is a little but not too much). But it is still good to remember who inspired me to be here, and that is all women and men from all over who gave up something comfortable and easy to fight for something that they believed was right. I will close with a quote from Ita Ford, one of the four women who was killed:

"I hope you come to find that which gives life a deep meaning for you. Something worth living for - maybe even worth dying for, something that energizes you, enthuses you, enables you to keep moving ahead."

The UCA Vigil

Every year on November 15th, the University of Central America (UCA) celebrates the anniversary of the death of six Jesuits and two women who were killed on its grounds in 1989.
They were:
Ignacio Ellacuria
Amando Lopez
Ignacio Martin Baro
Juan Moreno
Segundo Montes
Joaquin Lopez y Lopez
Elba Ramos
Celina Ramos


Here is a brief description of what happened:

"On November 16, 1989, six Jesuit priests - Ignacio Ellacuria, Segundo Montes, Ignacio Martin-Baro, Joaquin Lopez y Lopez, Juan Ramon Moreno, and Amado Lopez - were murdered by the Salvadoran military on the campus of the University of Central America (UCA) in San Salvador, El Salvador. Their housekeeper, Elba Ramos, and her daughter Celia Marisela Ramos, were murdered there as well. The Jesuits were labeled subversives by the Salvadoran Government for speaking out against the oppressive socioeconomic structure of Salvadoran society. Their assassinations were ordered for their unwavering defense of the poor.

The Jesuits were six of over 70,000 victims who died in El Salvador’s civil war which raged in the 1980’s and early 1990’s. The vast majority of these victims were civilians killed by El Salvador’s armed forces and paramilitary death squads. The death of the Jesuits brought international outrage and condemnation upon the Salvadoran Government and pressured them to negotiate an end to their country’s civil war."

-http://www.spc.edu/pages/1814.asp


The Vigil is really incredible. During the day people spend hours hunched over the walkway of the UCA creating beautiful "alfombras" or sand art. Designs relating to their group and or the memory of the Jesuits. Then at six at night, when all of the alfombras are finished, there is a candle lighting ceremony in which every person at the vigil (which were a lot) recieved a candle to carry through the procession and than lit the candle of the lights of others. At around six thirty the procession begun in which the crowd formed left the University gates and walked the distance to the other entrance where they then walked over the beautiful alfombras that had been created for just this. It was a very moving experience to see so many people honoring the memory of those who gave their life for what they believed in. Here is the picture I took of the procession:


After the procession their was a very big mass which was followed by all night festivities. A number of artisans were selling their crafts and a number of UCA groups were selling food. People had come from all over El Salvador and all over the world to be here the entire night. Different music groups played a mix of traditional folk music and newer "world music." I am told that the festivities go on until six in the morning when the sun comes out and the busses are running again. I left at 12:30 so I didn't stay to find out. I was so glad I went though, these type of events remind me as to why I am in El Salvador and thats good to do every once in a while.

Cristiani and others charged with war crimes for the death of the UCA Jesuits

Former El Salvador leader in war crimes case

• Story Highlights
• Case involves killing of 6 Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter
  
• 14 former Salvadoran military officers also accused of war crimes
  
• Most of the slain Jesuits were born in Spain
  
• One of the most notorious episodes of El Salvador's 12-year civil war

By Al Goodman CNN Madrid Bureau Chief

MADRID, Spain (CNN) -- Human rights groups from the United States and Spain filed a lawsuit in a Spanish court Thursday, charging El Salvador's former president, Alfredo Cristiani, with covering up crimes against humanity.

The case involves the killing of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her teenaged daughter nearly two decades ago during El Salvador's civil war.

In addition, 14 former Salvadoran military officers are accused of war crimes, murders and state terrorism in connection with the massacre dating back to November 1989.

Most of the slain Jesuits were born in Spain. They were killed at their residence at the prestigious Central American University, in El Salvador's capital, San Salvador. Reports at the time said they were tortured and then shot.

It has become one of the most notorious episodes of El Salvador's 12-year civil war that pitted leftist guerrillas against the U.S.-backed conservative government. Some 75,000 people died.

The case filed by two human rights groups in Madrid argues that justice was never done in El Salvador. Two military officers were convicted of murder in 1991 in the deaths of the Jesuits, but were pardoned in 1993 under an amnesty law approved by the national assembly.

The case was taken to Spain's National Court, because of its involvement in other high-profile human rights cases.

The same Spanish court issued an arrest warrant for former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in 1998, while he was in a London hospital. For the rest of his life he fought legal battles -- first in England and later in Chile -- to avoid convictions.

The Spanish court has also taken on human rights cases from other countries, including Argentina and Guatemala, testing a relatively new international legal principle known as Universal Jurisdiction.

It contends that if justice for human rights abuses is not served in the country where the crime occurred, then a court in another country can intervene.

The groups filing suits are the San Francisco-based Center for Justice and Accountability and the Spanish Association for Human Rights.

Family members from at least two of the slain Jesuits will join the lawsuit later, the groups said.

It could take the National Court weeks or even months to determine if it will accept the case.

Spain and El Salvador have an extradition treaty. But a lawyer for the Center for Justice and Accountability told CNN that the most immediate practical effect of the case might be an effective ban on Cristiani and the 14 former officers from leaving El Salvador, for fear of arrest.

If they were ever tried before a Spanish court and convicted on the charges, they could serve up to 30 years in prison.

In an interview with CNN a few months before he was killed, university rector Ignacio Ellecuria praised then-president Cristiani, whom the human rights groups now accuse of covering up the crime.

"We have to recognize that Cristiani is a man of his word, who keeps his promises," Ellecuria told CNN. "Personally I consider Cristiani an ethical, responsible person who will not offer to do what he can't or doesn't wish to do."

Ignacio Martin-Baro, another slain Jesuit, spoke at the time about the chilling effect of the long-running Salvadoran civil war.

"We have become used to violence," Martin-Baro said. "We have become used to living in a very dangerous world. We have learned to live, accepting death, extraordinary abnormal death into our lives."

For years, the extreme right in El Salvador had accused the Jesuits of siding with the leftist guerrillas, according to a CNN report shortly after the killings.

Uniformed troops were seen searching the living quarters of the priests at Central American University two days before they were killed, CNN reported.



Alfredo Cristiani in 1994 shortly after he voted during the country's second round presidential runoff.