The power of faith, story, and El Salvadoran women

Editor’s Note: YDS has a longstanding tradition of offering travel seminars to provide students the opportunity to add an experiential dimension to their academic coursework by traveling together to an international location. The following is an account by Jamilah George ’15 M.Div. of the trip her class made to El Salvador last spring as part of their course in Latin American liberation theology, led by YDS academic dean Jennifer Herdt and Alumni Board member Joseph Cistone, director of International Partners for Mission. This coming year, Cistone will lead a travel seminar to Colombia as part of the next iteration of the Latin American liberation theology course. YDS seeks to develop a robust rotation of travel seminars, offering one or more each year.  The travel seminar program at YDS is supported by the Letty Russell Travel Fund at YDS and the gift of an anonymous donor through International Partners for Mission.

A few months ago during spring break, I, along with my colleagues, traveled to El Salvador as a component of our Latin American Liberation Theology course. Interestingly, although it was an academic trip, we did not privilege the elite academic institutions; instead, we went deep into the rural communities where poverty is extreme, water is scarce, and animals mope in the heat, appearing to be too malnourished to take another step. We walked in the trenches with the local people. We heard their stories, and the brutal truths therein, which left them wounded by weapons of oppression, war, rape, gang violence, hunger, homophobia, endemic mental illness, sexism, poverty, and kidnapping, among many others.

Despite these, “God somehow always gives us the confidence to use our story,” one of the women said to us.

We prioritized the women and listened eagerly to their stories. We did not and could not pretend that anything we studied in the few months prior had greater power than anything they themselves had lived through and were confident enough to share with us. The women, for this trip at least, were the dominant voices.

These women poured out their stories to us with such passion and fervor that despite the language barrier we could understand every word. Their stories were emotive, demonstrating pain and endured oppression, but also strength, power, and determination.

For example, ACACCPAMU, one of the IPM (International Partners in Mission) partners we visited, is made up of women who have built and now manage their own mill and bakery as a means of income. They have also helped build a gigantic water well that provides their families and some 500 community members with access to clean water—a resource they had previously done without. During the telling of the story, one declared, “Water is a human right! We’re humans, so why shouldn’t we have access to it?”                            

It was fascinating to engage in such ethical and theological conversations with these women. They were not only doing the philosophical and theological reflection to produce theories, but also engaging the praxis and the process of said theories, in their own communities. Every theory they had developed seemed to operate only in conjunction with faith; faith was invariably the catalyst for the action taken in order to achieve social liberation. When describing the quest for water, one woman said, “We didn’t know if there was water beneath us or not, but we started digging anyway. Sometimes you’ve got to stick your shovel in the ground in the name of God.” In that moment, I remember thinking, “Wow, these are the REAL theologians!”

Although my colleagues and I had the privilege of meeting Jon Sobrino, one of the leading voices in liberation theology, I felt morally responsible to privilege the stories and experiences of the people who lived the reality that he wrote about and that we usually only read about. I felt the responsibility not only to privilege the stories, but to privilege the mouths from which they had come: the mouths of women that might have otherwise been shut, while the rich history trapped inside decomposed. These mouths deserved to be heard.

These women had radical faith, shaped by the Gospel of Jesus Christ and Monsignor Oscar Romero, who seemed to be almost as divine a figure as Jesus in their culture. Romero’s ministry is vivid in the living-out of his famous quote, “If they kill me, I shall be resurrected in the El Salvadoran people.” The “Romeristas,” as they are often called, made it clear they were determined to demonstrate just what this quote suggested.

I asked one of them, “What does it mean to be a woman carrying out Romero’s ministry?” She replied, “Through our teaching other women their rights, we carry out his ministry.” I gathered that it is important for a woman to know her rights so she can properly defend herself since she, by virtue of her womanhood, is frequently in danger.

Gender was often the elephant in the room, as it can be a sensitive topic. But one time, a woman addressed it boldly with us: While discussing the artistry of God evidenced by the creation narrative, she said, “… Finally, the savior was born, he just happened to be male!” In that moment, we all chuckled, but the women were very serious. They were not deterred from carrying out this work for liberation, despite being of a gender that might suggest that they should be.

This same woman went on to explain how being Romeristas and committing to Romero’s ministry required them to sacrifice being married, and to risk their lives. She explained how El Salvadoran women suffer gender violence regularly: some, in their own homes by their own husbands who disagree with their participation in Romero’s ministry, while other women suffer from the cultural patriarchy and social norms. “Many women are bound by marriage,” the woman said, but it was clear to me that she and the other women wanted to be free. They are clinging to Romero’s theology, and thus to the ministry of Jesus, to liberate them.

In the midst of their oppression, and through the power of their faith and stories, these women taught us to, “love life, struggle for life, and defend life.” As they put it, “We can’t be indifferent because this is what it means to feel the church.”

”Feeling the church” is not a motif that has been a reality for me while living in the United States. But because of the women in El Salvador, these God-talking, teaching, mothering, baking, resisting, preaching, warrior women, I will never forget what it should feel like.

Jamilah George is a Detroit native and 2015 graduate of YDS and the Institute of Sacred Music. She will begin working as a researcher in the Yale Department of Psychiatry in the fall and plans to integrate liberation and womanist theologies, music, and neurobiology in future academic and clinical pursuits.