Transfiguration

If you are not a parent or a donor, please feel free to skip to the next paragraph...Parents and donors, I simply want to say thank you. Thank you, parents, for trusting your beloved child enough to allow him or her to go on this trip. Thank you donors for making this experience possible. By your love, prayers, and support they had the opportunity opportunity to serve, but more importantly to have their hearts enlarged by the love they encountered.

In my three years on this trip, each has been significantly different both on a personal and on a group level. One of my favorite things to do on these trips is to take a step back and watch the students grow and flourish in ways they could not have even imagined. 

I am so proud of each of the 34 wonderful students for their willingness to be both a Martha, by serving, and a Mary, learning from the hospitality and love of the people we encountered. For me, some of the most precious moments on this year's trip are simple but profound moments, such as Tuesday's dinner when the camaraderie told us we no longer just a group from Benedictine on a mission trip but now a group of friends.

When I asked some of the students what they got out of the trip, a number of them expressed how clearly they saw Christ through the love and care of the people Unbound serves. Fittingly today's Sunday Gospel tells the story of the transfiguration. Peter, James and John saw Jesus more clearly. They heard how much the Father loves Jesus. Peter even said, "Lord, it is good to be here." And after those precious moments, they continued their journey, allowing that experience to strengthen them.

In the people served, in the Unbound staff, in one another, we had the special opportunity to see God more clearly and to hear God call each one of us his beloved. It truly was good to be there, to experience our own transfiguration moment. But, like the apostles, we must continue the journey. Please pray that we may not forget what we have learned. May the instruction we received about love, joy, and care of one another inspire us to a deeper love of God and to a deeper charity with those God places in our lives. 

God bless,

Prior Jeremy

Back in Atch

Well, we made it back to Atchison! Thank you all for your prayerful and financial support of this trip. The blog doesn't even begin to do justice to the experiences we've had and the people we've met, but I hope you've enjoyed this little glimpse into how our lives were changed this spring break. Here is a small sample of some of my favorite photos from El Salvador, because a picture is worth a thousand words. God bless! ~Kathryn Hermes

No Skills For Us!

Hi! My name is Meredith and I am a sophomore studying accounting. Today we traveled to Ataco! So much happened that opened my eyes.
    For starters we met a group of scholarship students that are studying to become all sorts of different professions. It is truly inspiring. We were able to ask questions and they were so grateful in their responses, and one of the students spoke to us in English, now that was an inspiration! He loved any opportunity to use his skills, and that made me want to speak Spanish so I could just have a conversation with any of them.
 After our gathering was over we had small groups that were able to visit the houses of some of the students. I had a wonderful talk with the girl and her family while sitting in her home. Again questions were exchanged about each others lives. She is going to go to school in a couple weeks to study to be a bartender so she can provide more for her family. At the end of our talk we could walk around and see her house. She showed us her bedroom which was separated from the other room by a sheet. The room consisted of two small beds where she shared with her family members. Four people total were in a small room squished together. This made me realize what I take for granted. I have my own room at home with a queen bed and too many pillows for my own good. I am thankful, but I just don't realize everyday when I crawl into a comfortable bed, that I am blessed.
  We said our goodbyes, and took this experience as we explored more of Ataco, leading us to a beautiful church where we could see the handcrafted altar and climb up to the bell tower. It amazes me how open the strangers in Ataco were to us, compared to strangers back home.
 Walking from the church to the soccer stadium every single person in our group was welcomed by a cheering crowd of locals waiting for us to get beat in soccer! First, we enjoyed coffee straight from El Salvador, probably to give us the energy to play against the kids in Ataco. Well one thing is for sure, we do not have the skills they do! It helped to laugh because the crowd was loving every minute of it! It was entertainment for sure! Even though I speak very little Spanish, the boys on our team understood when I told them just to take the ball from me and shoot it themselves! We might not be as good, but we all had a blast!
   There is something about the laughter in the crowd that makes it that much more enjoyable to play. Even if we don't understand each other, we can laugh together!
  We ended the night with a talent show where the BC students sang, rapped, changed Frozen lyrics to fit our trip, or even impersonations of the guys. So much laughter from the staff and students! It was an inspiring day filled with lots of joy.
  Goodnight to our last night at the complex.
Buenos noches,
Meredith

Dimples Are Universal

I have done hard things this week.

On our first work day, I sawed through tons of rebar (that is steel, my friends) and mixed bag after bag of concrete by hand with a shovel. On our second day, while ankle-deep in water, I crouched for over an hour while plastering the inside of our cinderblock structure. I lugged bucket after bucket of sand, filled block after block with cement, and all under the relentless El Salvadoran sun.

But none of these hard things compare to the difficulty of what I did yesterday:

Yesterday, I said goodbye to Nayeli.

The first thing I noticed about Nayeli was her dimples. Beautiful, beautiful caverns in her brown cheeks, deep and cradling a smile that seemed to hold all of life's secrets. This probably sounds strange, but her dimples surprised me, as if somehow I just didn't realize that the El Salvadorans, so foreign to me, could have anything so simple as dimples in common with us Americans. But they do. And they have so much more. In fact, the similarities far outweigh the differences.

So, it didn't take long for Nayeli to open up to us. She is spirited, she is brilliant, she is joyful, she is sassy, she is so ready to love and be loved. I really can't explain it, but this little 8-year-old girl stole my heart. Love is such a powerful thing. It just sweeps over you. Hardly two and a half days was all it took for the Lord to fill me with a love so great for this girl that saying goodbye to her this morning tore me to pieces and brought me to tears.

Nayeli is forever a part of me, a part of my heart.

An El Salvadoran teenager we encountered while playing soccer yesterday afternoon said something that caught my attention. In reference to the English language, he said:
No puedo hablarlo, pero puedo entenderlo.
I can't speak it, but I can understand it.

It's true. As for speaking, Nayeli and I could barely speak more than two words to each other at a time, but honestly, it didn't matter. Because we understood each other perfectly. You don't need words. Anyone can understand giggles and holding hands and hugs and making farting noises and playing "hot potato."

Dimples are universal.
Love itself is a language that transcends all difference.

The Unbound staff told us a story about a very grateful elderly El Salvadoran man who told a sponsor who was visiting from another country, "Thank you for everything you do. Heaven is waiting for you." The sponsor replied to the elderly man, "You are my heaven."

In El Salvador, I have found the kingdom of heaven on earth. An endless, colorful collage of tarps and tattered cloths form holy tabernacles in which the Savior, El Salvador Himself, dwells in the souls of the people. Here, His Sacred Heart beats to the rhythm of the rain tinkling on the tin rooftops.

Nayeli is my heaven. She is Christ, El Salvador, to me.

I held her tight one last time, kissed her head, and said some of the only Spanish I know:
Te amo.
I love you.
She replied,
Yo tambien.
I love you, too.

And where there is love, what else is there to be said?



Marie Brinkman
Class of 2016
Secondary Ed, English, & Theology Major

Houses are Complete!

Hola! My name is Leanne Bergsieker, and I am a sophomore at Benedictine studying Theology and New Evangelization. This is my first "official" mission trip and I am so excited to be here in El Salvador and spend the week with some amazing friends, while meeting many new ones!

Over the course of the past few days, my group and I have been building a house for a mother, her four children: Giovanni (18), Marta (14), Ishmael (6), and Ana (4), and their grandfather. After three long days, we finally finished the house! Prior Jeremy and some others from the group came to our work site for the house blessing, and we presented the family with housewarming gifts. We continued down the path to bless the remaining houses and latrine. My group thought that we would be able to go back to the house to collect our tools and say goodbye, but the Unbound staff collected our things for us. As we were finishing the blessing at the third house, we turned and saw our family running down the dirt path towards us. The mother began to speak to us with tears in her eyes and said something along the lines of "This feels like a dream. I could have never imagined having a house like this. Thank you so much." For me, that was the greatest moment of the trip thus far. Although we could not understand each other, the love and gratitude she displayed for us was so evident. We all exchanged hugs and goodbyes and went back to the Unbound compound for lunch. I left for El Salvador knowing that the lives of the families we would be serving would be transformed, but I did not know how great of an impact the families would make on my life. What a blessing it is knowing that the families we have served will sleep soundly tonight and will have a future full of hope. Praise be to our Lord for his graciousness and love for us!

 Ishmael (left), Ana (center), and me (right). These cuties stole my heart, especially Ishmael. We shared many laughs together and bonded over our love for playing catch with a ball that he owned! Ana is sponsered, and I pray that one day Ishmael will be as well.

 This was at one of the house blessings! Prior Jeremy blessed the house and we nailed a medal of St. Benedict onto the doorway.

 I didn't catch this boy's name, but he was too precious and he loved to have his picture taken. He walked around without shoes a majority of the time, because the shoes he owned had large holes in the bottom of them. It was such a great reminder how blessed I am to live the life I do.

In the afternoon, we traveled to downtown Santa Ana to play soccer with the Unbound staff. While we were there, we met some local teenagers. They watched us play and cheered us on, and weren't shy about laughing at our terrible soccer and Spanish-speaking skills.


Please continue to pray for the remainder of our trip, and know that we are keeping all of you in our prayers!

May God bless you always,
Leanne

El grupo de caca (The Poop Group)

Hi! My name is Andi Heither. I'm a sophomore Catechesis and Spanish major. I decided I'd better write a post, because my group of five is doing something different than everyone else - we're building a latrine. Yup, a latrine. Not a house. The other thirty missionaries (because yes, if you are on a mission trip, you are a missionary) have given us the name "grupo de cacas" or "poop group." Nice, huh?

We work with cement and bricks, not wood and aluminum. We have no shade in the morning. We get DIRTY. We're in a rather closed off location, so the only people we ever get the chance to see are the family who live in the house (which was built by a group like BC back in August) and each other. We use bricks to sand and bricks to level, no fancy instruments. So yeah, it's really different. But it's good. The *cough* products of the latrine will now be able to be used as fertilizer, so the family can plant and sell produce.

So far, this experience has taught me that people need so much to live. The houses that our friends are building, to us norteamericanos, aren't much better than sheds. Some people wouldn't let their dogs live in these conditions, and these are human beings. People. That are in every single way exactly like us. The same desires and dreams.

And yet, my new friend Nayeli, the most intelligent and joyful child I've ever met, throws a stone back and forth and calls it her pelota (ball). She worries about getting dirty, because while the floor in her house is dirt, who knows when her next bath would be.

Trash lines the streets and meadows of the beautiful terrain because they don't have a recycling system. The government provides uniforms for schools, but not education. The average income where we are working is $120 a month, minus "deductions" and minus all the ridiculous daily expenses the poor have to pay because they can't afford to invest for the long term - water, cell phone minutes, shoes, clothes, food, etc.

But the people are so happy. I was in the truck on the way to the work site this morning and made eye contact with a little boy who was sitting by the road. He gasped and shrieked, "Gringa" (white girl). I'm pretty sure we just made his day just by driving by.

I guess I don't know how to conclude this because there wasn't a thesis. All I can say is that the animals here are weird. Most of the birds here are new to me - they make the most beautiful songs. The dogs are everywhere. Horses feed by the road and cows stand in the road. And that's all I have to say about that. :)

Hola! My name is Erica. I'm a junior and am having the best time of my life in El Salvador! Before now, I've never even been on a plane, to the ocean, or out of the country. Cross off all 3 of those now! My group and I are building a house for this little girl, Daniela, and her super awesome Grandma!

 

We just met Daniela today, but we've been playing with the other little kids in the house. Here I am with 6-year-old Michelle and 7-month-old Daniel (I think that's how they're spelled, just pronounce them as Spanish-y as you can :)

Michelle was super excited to use my camera and to get her picture taken; here's some of the results of our little break from work:

 

I have fallen in love with the people of El Salvador and am so blessed to have the opportunity to be a part of this trip. You'll never find such happy, helpful people, and the language barrier doesn't even matter. Case in point: here's a school boy posing for a photo:

This is one of the very best experiences of my life and has totally changed how I view the world. Please remember to pray for the people of El Salvador and for all in poverty.

 Adios from El Salvador!
Erica Johnson