El Salvador: Looking for God on Lake Ilopango

December 2018

Looking for God on Lake Ilopango

             I was a member of a Witness for Peace delegation to El Salvador in 1991. It was a scary trip into the heart of darkness. At airport immigration control, a member of our delegation, a UNC graduate student and Ethiopian citizen, was detained and never seen again by us, although she turned up safe in Miami two days later. We knew the stories of the thousands of students, labor organizers, clergy and political opponents who had “disappeared” in El Salvador prior to our arrival. There was still low scale insurgency occurring and the Peace accords were still a year away (1992)

We visited the Lutheran Bishop Medardo Gomez, the successor to the late Oscar Romero of the human rights movement. The walls of the rectory were covered with slash wire and he greeted us by showing us his bulletproof vest that was a gift from his American friends in Milwaukee. After conversation with him about the current situation, he thought that we should visit a local refugee camp to hear their stories.

In 1982, the Lutheran Church in Salvador opened Fe y Esperanza (Faith and Hope) Refugee Camp, located on the shores ofLake Ilopango. This camp was for internally displaced persons from the civil war. As we crossed the lake by boat, we saw a Salvadorian Air Force plane strafing a nearby hillside. It was an amazing moment of seeing the war in action. At some point, I complimented the driver on his new boat. He replied that the air force had blown up his previous boat several months earlier. There I was, putting along in open water, suddenly realizing, that the pilot of the plane was not a friend of the boat owner or the people that we were going to visit. Reflectively, I shifted to a prayer mode, promising to God, all types of personal pledges of improved personal conduct, if I was delivered safe to the other side of the lake.

We made safely it to the makeshift camp and tried to interact with this community of survivors. The social worker was helpful, but people there were too traumatized and distrustful of strangers to share their stories.