KWRU Travels to El Salvador to Build Relationships with Poor

[March 14, 2000] Day 5:

On Wednesday, we visited a shantytown in San Salvador. Community members were shocked to see our pictures of homelessness and tent cities in the United States that look just like the conditions in their community. We toured the clinic, pharmacy, store, child care center, school, church, community center and library organized by neighborhood residents belonging to the parish of Maria Madre de los Pobres (Mary Mother of the Poor). We heard about how the only way they have been able to develop these projects of survival is because the people and their priest, Father Daniel, have been organizing and developing political consciousness in the community for fifteen years. Now, the community is fighting to be able to keep what little it has, as the government wants to kick them off the land to build a factory there and to break up their organization. Father Daniel agreed to spread the word about the Poor People's World Summit to End Poverty to other representatives of shantytowns and Christian Base Communities throughout Central America in an effort to link up the poor of Central America with the poor of the United States and the world in a movement to end poverty.

Wednesday night we joined our friends from the SHARE delegation for our goodbye party before heading back to the US. After listening to songs of the struggle of the poor in Latin America, Mariluz Gonzalez, a representative of the KWRU's Human Rights Choir, sang two songs, one in Spanish and one in English. Everyone was very excited as she taught our new friends from the US and El Salvador one of the choir's favorite songs: I Went Down to the Rich Man's House and I Took Back What He Stole from Me.

Inspired by this last song, we left El Salvador knowing that the only way we could help to end the misery in El Salvador, in the United States and around the world is by organizing a massive movement in the United States and linking up with movements of the poor around the world to take back our countries and reclaim what they've taken from us.