of the Great Volcano Chaparestiki By Chris Dodd |
As long as you can remember, your spouse, your five children and you have been living in Sonsonate, El Salvador, about an hour drive from the capital city of San Salvador. You work at a nearby maquiladora (factory) cutting and assembling clothes for export to the United States. Your spouse has been working for ten years at the Izalco Sugar Company, which is owned by one of the wealthiest families in all of El Salvador.A single bullet killed him, and with that one bullet, much of the hope of the Salvadoran people—most of whom are devastatingly poor—was shattered. Archbishop Oscar Romero was dead at the age of 63, and with his assassination the country plunged into a brutal civil war that raged for 12 long years.The working conditions at your job are bad, but those at your spouse's are even worse. No job safety, low wages (a skipped meal occurs all too often) and no health benefits.
“We help reinforce hope within a lot of people in these communities. We let them know there are people who think about them, who care about them. In some ways that inspires them to care about their own lives.” It's sometime in the fall of 1978, and the 1,700 workers at your spouse's job decide to go on strike, refusing to leave the plantation. When security forces arrived to break it up, they separate out 22 of the workers and let the rest go. As you feared, since your spouse was active in organizing the strike he or she was one of the 22. They took your spouse to National Guard Headquarters and held him or her incommunicado for four days, culminating in a military tribunal and a six-month prison sentence. At first, you did not know where your spouse was being jailed but, after finding out, you went to visit him or her in Santa Tecla Prison. Your spouse told you how he or she had been tortured and beaten repeatedly, then hung from the ceiling and beaten again, a torture described as "the airplane."
After your spouse is released from prison you both decide it would be unsafe to remain in Sonsonate, so you move the family to San Salvador. After getting settled in the capital, people begin to tell you about a Catholic priest who is not like all the others in the country who rarely, if ever, speak of the horrible injustices that have become a regular part of life in your Central American nation. His name is Oscar Romero.
Father Romero was recently appointed the Archbishop of El Salvador (1977). Your family's life is hard, but each Sunday you look forward to hearing the Archbishop give Mass.
This beautiful moment of lunchtime at the kinder in Estancia was captured by photographer Ilille Sawady. Archbishop Romero regularly confronts the growing violence in the country, specifically addressing the plight of the poor, contradicting much of what you have always heard from other priests. He teaches that it is not God's will that you should live in suffering.
Then on Sunday, March 24, 1980, a beautiful day in San Salvador, your family is seated in the pews of San Salvador's Divine Providence chapel listening to Archbishop Romero saying Mass. Just yesterday, he had made the following appeal to the men of the Salvadoran armed forces:
"Brothers, you came from our own people. You are killing your own brothers. Any human order to kill must be subordinate to the law of God, which says, 'Thou shalt not kill'. No soldier is obliged to obey an order contrary to the law of God. No one has to obey an immoral law. It is high time you obeyed your consciences rather than sinful orders. The church cannot remain silent before such an abomination. ...In the name of God, in the name of his suffering people whose cry rises to heaven more loudly each day, I implore you, I beg you, I order you: stop the repression!"Today, he is speaking of the parable of the wheat, "Those who surrender to the service of the poor through love of Christ will live like the grain of wheat that dies. It only apparently dies. If it were not to die, it would remain a solitary grain. The harvest comes because of the grain that dies. We know that every effort to improve society, above all when society is so full of injustice and sin, is an effort that God blesses; that God wants; that God demands of us." Just as he finishes this sentence you hear a gun shot blast, and you realize that the Archbishop has fallen to the floor.
It was in the aftermath of the civil war that Lanny Smith, a Georgia-born recently trained internist, decided to journey to war-torn El Salvador to explore the possibility of a 'Health as Reconciliation' project. He was under the guidance of the founder of the modern-day health and human rights movement, the late Dr. Jonathan Mann, whose life was cut short by the tragic Swiss Air plane crash in 1998. Dr. Mann taught the world that there is "an inextricable link between health and human rights," and spent his professional life advocating for human rights all around the world.
So, in 1992 Lanny arrived in El Salvador, and began to work with the French organization Médicins du Monde (Physicians of the World). Lanny thought it would be a great idea to bring the groups that had just recently been at war with each other together under the common goal of promoting health. The site Lanny decided on was the isolated, very war-torn and minimally organized community of Estancia, in the northeastern department of Morazán.
What was to be a one-year project turned into six years. The communities of Estancia told Lanny that they needed health care and education, and after a lot of hard work by all they got that and much more. When Lanny left Estancia, four early childhood development centers had been built, as well as a health clinic, a pharmacy and a bridge over the River Chiquito, which had been an impediment to accessing school, health care and commerce for many residents.
And the work continues. Lanny had this to say about the work: "I think we help reinforce hope within a lot of people in these communities. We let them know there are people who think about them, who care about them. In some ways that inspires them to care about their own lives. I've been incredibly lucky in my time there to work with an incredible people. People who have taught me a lot about suffering and not complaining; about having a positive attitude even when your family has been killed; about not giving up."
It was out of his work in El Salvador that Lanny created Doctors for Global Health (DGH). Lanny often speaks of the work he does as that of Liberation Medicine, which he defines as "the conscious, conscientious use of health to promote human dignity and social justice." He explains that Liberation Medicine has the potential to inspire medical students, physicians, lawyers, public health professionals and others. Once inspired, DGH can offer them a clear, concrete and manageable way (community by community) to accompany the many peoples around the world (including in the US) who have difficulty making their voices heardÑthe "voiceless" as Archbishop Romero called them. And indeed, many physician and student volunteers from El Salvador, the US, and other countries have had their vision changed about what their role is in the world as a result of their time volunteering with DGH.
Indeed, I learned a lot during my short time in Estancia. How to shuck corn with speed and grace. To manipulate the outer husk of the corn to create the envelope for the tasty tamale. I made my first home visit in nearby Colon to see a woman who had been sick in bed for more than three weeks with what is likely the beginnings of a stomach ulcer. It was a humbling experience to empathize with her and imagine what it must feel like to live in an isolated area where there really is no doctor. It validated in me the necessity of becoming the best doctor I possibly can. It also reinforced my understanding of just how vast the inequity is in our world. Where was the nearest x-ray machine I felt was necessary to diagnose a potential abdominal aortic aneurysm? Some two plus hours away. Anger surfaces. Something must be done.
It was clear to me, however, that while the people of Estancia do not have much in the way of material possessions, they have something that helps them survive: a community that knows how to share. Archbishop Romero would be proud. Now if only the government of El Salvador and those entities that support it, including the US government and the 300 American Corporations currently operating in the country, could learn to do the same.
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