“Ten times a day something happens to me like this – some strengthening throb of amazement – some good sweet empathic ping and swell. This is the first, the wildest and the wisest thing I know: that the soul exists and is built entirely out of attentiveness.” – Mary Oliver
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. When we walked into her home on one particular Wednesday, Nina was sitting in a white plastic chair crying silently – her face buried in her hands. When I approached her to ask if she was okay, she did not look up. I distanced myself in discomfort and disappointment that I could not help her. Hector approached her and after whispering to each other for a few moments he suddenly got up and went into the house. He came back carrying a large plastic bottle filled with cooking oil. Hector reverently knelt beside her, poured the oil into his hands as if it were holy water, and with tender and loving compassion, started to gently massage the bottom of her right foot. Nina Tancho instantly began to scream and moan in agony. Without hesitating, I ran over and knelt beside her chair. I fought through the boundaries of discomfort that had once paralyzed me, and reached out to grab her hand. As her fingers tightened around mine, I was hit with the realization that in that moment, nothing separated us. I was not sitting from a distance thinking about her lack of health care, and writing down ways to fix it that seem like simple solutions from my own privileged perspective. As Hector slowly lowered her foot to the ground, Nina turned to me as she wiped the tears from her eyes and said, “Gracias por sostener mi mano (thank you for holding my hand).”
Those simple words transformed my experience in El Salvador. As Mary Oliver describes, this was the empathic ping that left me so in awe of how utterly human both of us were in that moment. Although I could have chosen from hundreds of stories that are still so vivid in my mind, this one instance in Las Nubes remains my greatest lesson on presence and the beauty of being with another. For so long, I was convinced that I needed to do something while I was in Las Nubes, when the truth of the matter is, I simply needed to be there – fully present, fully vulnerable, fully myself. Through this action of vulnerability, and of dwelling in the unknown, love became palpable. The times when I would feel useless still occurred throughout the rest of my semester. Yet, everyday when I showed up at my praxis site, I was loved and accepted without condition. And everyday, people who had no reason to love me, allowed me to humbly walk alongside them. That is the root of accompaniment—to walk with those who suffer, and maybe even to hold their hands along the way. We enter into solidarity when we break the boundaries of separation that keep us from this connection. And it is in this understanding, that we touch the heart of the Gospel. Jesus was not a man for others, he was one with them.
The power of that touch was the transforming point of my entire Salvadoran experience. By holding Nina Tancho’s hand while she was suffering, I became completely lost in her reality. I thought I knew the Gospel, but in that moment, I began to read it in a different way. Jesus went to the margins and stood there. That was how he transformed the world. And so, he calls us to do the same. His resurrection continues to remind us that although we can say that we are followers of Christ, we are unable to reach the core of his message until we stand where he once stood. By my presence I was able to bear witness with great joy and simplicity to this Good News that I believe in. Solidarity is when we realize that our salvation lies in the love of one another—there is infinite beauty in that realization.
MEG STAPLETON SMITH is a second year doctoral student in Theological and Social Ethics at Fordham University.