El Bálsamo

This past Saturday and Sunday morning I accompanied a class of students from the Catholic University on a trip to a remote village. As part of his class in professional ethics, Fr. Roel Mejía had his class visit this village to do a survey of the community.

Thirty some of us left at about 10:: AM on Saturday in three pickups. We drove about 15 minutes on the highway and then turned off onto a dirt road. We reached the town of Vega Redondo about noon and then walked about 40 minutes up hill and 20 minutes down hill to reach El Bálsamo.

El Bálsamo has about 45 households and 400 inhabitants, 80 of whom are students in the local school with classes up to the sixth grade. There is no electricity and the road is extremely poor, especially in the rainy season. Not all members of the community have access to water. Most are subsistence farmers, growing corn and rice mostly for their personal consumption, and many of these rent the little land they have for their crops. A few folks grow coffee.

The students were divided into eight groups which each visited 4 to 6 houses. They listened to the people talk about their lives and their communities. They people spoke of the lack of adequate housing, problems of access to water, the limited amount of land available for cultivation (since some of the best land is used by the land owning for grazing cattle). They told stories that revealed the precarious nature of their lives. A child had a bicycle accident and was taken to a nearby health center; but there was no surgical thread there to sew up the child’s wounds. The people were also honest about the situation of the community, about its conflicts and lack of unity. Some students also found some people resigned to their condition, without much hope of things changing. But they also found that the people welcomed them into their homes. One group noted that they had coffee and sweet bread five times!

The students’ interviews will help the local leadership team to begin to plan and prepare proposals for development which they will take to some international governments for funding of projects in the community. Two persons who had connections with development and funding agencies had accompanied the students.

Saturday night there was a cultural festival around the campfire with music and skits. One skit, which provoked a lot of laughter, was a commentary on the community and its experiences. Though I couldn’t follow all the dialogue, I did get the satirical portraits of abusive drunk husbands and politicians who promise everything before the next election (but deliver almost nothing).

After this the students shared heir reports with Fr. Roel and the local leadership team. Sunday morning we had Mass in the little chapel; Fr. Roel brought some of the insights into his homily to encourage the people to work together and overcome differences in order to meet the community’s needs.

There was one very interesting moment at the end of Mass when Fr. Roel invited the students and members of the community to share any reflections they had. The students expressed their gratitude as did the community members. Then, at the end, a community leader noted that there was a visitor from the United States – me. Here was someone who was interested in the good of their community. And, he said, it is good to know that there are Christians in the United States.

Aha!