BOSTON COLLEGE | THE CHURCH IN THE 21ST CENTURY CENTER
THE BEAUTY OF BEING WITH THE POOR
SERVICE
By Meg Stapleton Smith Before leaving for El Salvador, I had set high expectations for how I would spend my time there. I had crafted in my mind images of helping those whom I had not yet met and waited in hopeful anticipation for a transformative semester. I had come to hold a firm belief that service for the poor was an essential aspect of my Christian faith. Yet, I was unaware that I had an enormous lesson to learn about what it really means to be a disciple of Christ. The Salvadorans taught me the art of presence and brought me to an understanding on the beauty of being. I lived in El Salvador in the spring of my junior year of college and studied with the Casa de la Solidaridad program. The study abroad experience is uniquely structured—three days a week are spent in class while the other two days are spent accompanying an impoverished Salvadoran community. Every Monday and Wednesday two other students and I were led by our praxis site coordinator, Hector, up a volcano to a community called Las Nubes. The community is comprised of 24 homes, made up mostly of tierra (land), tin, and wire. The families do not have access to running water, electricity, or garbage collection. Despite the ever-present reality of extreme poverty, life in Las Nubes is simple and beautiful. Relationships are paramount, and conversations are held as sacred space where the Divine dwells.
We spent our first few weeks in Las Nubes going to each family’s home, introducing ourselves, and talking for hours over un cafecito. As we sat in the hot Salvadorian sun drinking coffee, my mind drifted to thoughts about all of the things that needed to be done in this place that I was slowly learning to call my home. I could not be present with the very people who were with me in that moment because my heart was filled with an unnerving anxiousness and a grave frustration. Not only was I discouraged by my inability to fully comprehend the Salvadorans, but I had an unremitting desire to do something to fix the poverty that I was encountering daily. I began to carry around a small notebook and would fill the pages with plans for fundraising money for a new community center or checklists of steps to urge the government to bring water to the community more often. With all that needed to be done in Las Nubes, I could not conceive any possible reason as to why we were just sitting around and talking. My mind and heart were overburdened with sights of extreme poverty, and I had succumbed to feeling powerless in the face of such systematic oppression. Over the course of the first month or so, we developed a routine of stopping first at Nina Tancho’s home. Nina Tancho was about 80 years old, 4 feet tall, and had only one tooth that stuck out from her bottom gum.
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