Tuesday, May 8th

Ignorance is not bliss, sometimes it can just make the truth hurt that much more when it hits you.  Today, after saying our goodbyes to Centro Arte Para la Paz, our new friend Sister Peggy and all the wonderful people of our beautiful Sister City Suchitoto we visited the Memorial of Monsignor Romero and several other martyrs of the El Salvadoran civil war while in the capital,  San Salvador. We were guided through a long room explaining the assassinations of several priests and American nuns with the Catholic church in El Salvador during the war.  While the exhibit was shocking knowledge, nothing could prepare for the imagery that followed. In another room we were invited to examine police photographs of the assassinations.  We were certainly warned about the extremely graphic nature of photographs and were given the option not to view them.  Having visited the Killing Fields of the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia this past January,  I thought that I would be prepared for what I would see.  I was not. This hit home for me, Hard.  The initial shock for me was mere disgust at the gore of these photos, but it soon turned to disgust for the people who committed such crimes and the human capacity for such immense, pure hatred.  We were told several times about the US involvement in the suppression of communism in El Salvador during the Reagan era.  Even the suggestion that the US might have had some influence, directly or indirectly, on these killings made viewing these pictures even more disturbing for me.  Maybe I thought that the experience would prepare me for new realizations of cruelty, but the truth is that nothing can ever prepare you for so much senseless destruction of innocence. Numb with feeling, kneeling in the memorial’s chapel , we were left to reflect on the injustices of war, to ponder what might be happening in our world  right now without our knowledge, and ask the big, lingering question of why.

But as the waves continue to pound out a beautiful rhythm on this beautiful Salvadorian beach where we are as I write, I remember that these waves will always keep this rhythm, they always have and they always will. And injustices will continue to be committed, while the waves continue to pound. The world will continue to spin, and sometimes all we can do is understand and remember the past and do our utmost to make sure tragedies like the Salvadorian Civil War will never happen again.

-Kessie Fleischner