El Salvador Delegation 2025: Day 2

 June 18, 2025

I slept GREAT! Except for the car alarm across the street that went off 3 times in the night. I woke up about 6:00am to my bed shaking back and forth. I panicked a moment thinking that my alarm didn't go off and someone was shaking my bed to wake me. I looked around and there was no one standing there. It was a 5.4 earthquake 5 miles off the coast of El Salvador (and 21 miles, as the crow flies, from Berlín) that woke me.

I'd been asleep for about 9 hours and figured that was enough, so I got up and tried to get out of the room quietly. LuAnn was already awake but I think Natalie was still asleep.

Downstairs, Kathy was up and in the hammock on the patio. I went to the kitchen to get hot water for my tea then took a chair on the patio. Eventually, all the others came downstairs and we had breakfast in the dining room...scrambled eggs with onions and peppers, fresh mixed fruit, toast, beans.

Alfredo picked us up around 8:00 and we started our day of touring around San Salvador.

We started at the National Cathedral. Saint Oscar Romero is entombed in the basement, which is where we started. Back at the time of the civil war, the basement was dirt floored and very rudimentary. It's where the poor people would go to listen to the Mass upstairs. Now, it has been finished with tile floors, a small chapel area with pews and altar, and stations of the cross out in the large open area. 

The chapel in the basement of the National Cathedral in San Salvador. Romero's tomb is between the altar and the back wall.

Behind the altar area is the tomb of Saint Romero. Romero was assassinated March 24, 1980 while saying Mass. More on that later. His funeral mass was held in the cathedral upstairs. So  many people wanted to attend his funeral that the cathedral was packed and the crowd filled the plaza outside. His casket was at the top of the steps so that it could be seen. Then the military, who had been stationed all around the plaza, opened fire on the crowd and panicked people tried to press into the church. Romero's casket was passed overhead, hand to hand through the cathedral to the crypt below, for protection. And there it stayed. The tomb was built and installed in the late 1990s.

The tomb of Saint Romero, designed by an Italian artist in bronze. Every part of the imagery is symbolic of something. The 4 corner characters are Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, for example.

 

I think this was the first time there wasn't something going on when I was at the Cathedral. I'd never been able to actually enter the sanctuary upstairs before. We walked through the sanctuary to the doors that open onto the plaza. I'd heard about the funeral crowd and the panicked people in the plaza, but actually seeing the plaza from the church doors somehow made it much more real.

The altar area of the main sanctuary upstairs.

 

The plaza where huge crowds of people came to see Romero's funeral.

From the cathedral, we went to Divina Providencia...the cancer hospital run by the Carmelite order where Romero lived when he was Archbishop. We went to his modest home where a young nun named Reina told us about his life and work there while showing us his house. Then we went to the chapel where Romero was assassinated while saying Mass for the mother of a journalist. 

The altar where Romero was saying Mass when he was assassinated.

 A car pulled into the compound, turned around, then stopped in front of the chapel. A sniper aimed a rifle out the window and put a single bullet in Romero's chest. The car then sped away. The bullet was designed to enter cleanly and then blow shrapnel out the back. It missed his heart but immediately destroyed his aorta. Given that the chapel was full of journalists, it's probably the most well-documented assassination in history. There are many eye-witness accounts and photos of what happened afterward, but since Romero was the only one facing the door, he's the only one who saw the car. 

From Divina Providencia, we went to the UCA (University of Central America, but everyone calls it the UCA, pronounced like "ooka"). This is one of the massacre sites, where the military came in, shot 6 Jesuit priests, the housekeeper, and her daughter, then set fire to buildings and destroyed various items like portraits of Romero, bibles, books, etc. The garden where the priests were executed is now a rose garden, planted by the husband of the housekeeper to memorialize all of them.Our guide for this part was Manuel, as current student at the UCA. His English was very good but he talked very fast and kept moving, not giving us much time to absorb what we were seeing and hearing. But he really knew his stuff. We also spent some time in the chapel where the Stations of the Cross on the back wall are rather brutal, black-on-white line drawings from the artist's memories during the war. The artwork on the wall behind the altar were in a traditional, colorful style that symbolically tell the Salvadoran story of before, during, and after the war.

With that, our history lessons for the day were done and we headed to an artisan market for lunch and shopping. The lunch is sort of cafeteria style. They make a number of items each day and you tell them which foods you want. They put it on a plate for you, you select a drink, then take your tray to a table. We all went to the outdoor tables under a roofed area to eat.

After eating, we had some time to peruse the shops and get any souvenirs we wanted before heading to Berlín at 1:30. it's about an hour and a half drive, most of it on the Pan American Highway. Despite being the major highway in El Salvador, it's not exactly speedy. The road winds through mountains so it's steep and/or curvy in spots. It also carries many types of vehicles and the shoulders are covered with pedestrians and vendors. You also have to deal with turning traffic, school zones, etc.

We arrived at Casa Pastoral, the house where we will be staying for the rest of the week. Cecilia and Margarita were there to meet us. We unloaded the van and settled into our rooms.

The stairs leading up to the room where I stayed at the Casa Pastoral.

We had supper of cheese stuffed tortillas, casamiento (a traditional rice/bean dish), baked plantains stuffed with a different cheese, and cooked salsa for the tortillas. 

After supper, I did the dishes and taught Flossie the protocol for it. Then we all shared impressions of the day with  "high - low - buffalo" where we all shared a high, a low, and a what-the heck?!? from our experiences so far. My high was just being back in El Salvador. My low was the very hard history...the massacres, atrocities, and unbelievable cruelties of the war. My buffalo was that, according to my FitBit, I did over 3,000 steps while sitting in the van from San Salvador to Berlin. To be fair, I was in the back and the ride was really rough.