Dependence

Visiting the Christian base community of the Pueblo de Dios en Camino in San Ramon at the end of July and beginning of August afforded me some opportunities for travel.  It is a time of year for local celebrations, memorials of martyrs, and reunions among the networks of Christian base communities.  For one such celebration, some dozen or so of us packed into a van and headed up to Alta Vista, a beautiful drive of maybe an hour.  Even as we started, I had misgivings about the van.  At the anniversary celebration of the Christian base community in Alta Vista, a round of storms only mildly dampened the proceedings.  As people milled around towards the end, Don Chepe, our driver, looked nervously at the skies, and then herded us into the van for the ride home.  The windshield wipers on the van, he said, did not really work right, so he wanted to be home before the next round of storms.  Also, he mentioned to Hector, his eyes weren’t as great at night as they used to be.

Naturally, by the time we reached Soyapango, the skies had opened, and streets were beginning to flood.  Negotiating a roundabout in front of a service station, we SLAMMED into a pothole hidden by the flow of water.  The axle was bent, the van rendered undriveable.  Adults and kids piled out of the van and sheltered under the overhang at the Shell station.  Several pickup trucks pulled in as well, beds crowded with identically-clad young women.  They were an evangelical Christian group, they told me, and their spirits clearly were undimmed by the downpour they’d just driven though.  I noticed that they were riding in Datsun trucks.  Readers, correct me if I am wrong about this, but I believe it was about 1983 or so when Nissan stopped putting the Datsun brand on their trucks.

While we tried to straighten the axle by, well, basically pounding on it with stones, it struck me how calmly everyone was handling the delay.  While I worked hard to suppress my impatience and frustration, even the children in our group waited patiently or looked for little things they could do to help.

Transportation delays are an expectation in El Salvador.  Indeed, this was hardly the only transportation glitch of my visit.  I was tired of unreliable, overcrowded, unsafe transportation, but that, said Hector, was simply a normal experience of community transportation.  It was one of those experiences that, in a small way, reminded me of the “utter dependence” of which my Salvadoran friends can only be all too aware.  Crowded into microbuses, needing rain but fearful of flooding, slamming into potholes, waiting for repairs, hoping for buses to arrive, this is a community that is dependent. 

Of course, therein lies one of the great mysteries of the spiritual life – whether we can live in abundance and yet still be spiritually dependent.  I hope it’s possible, that we can have good roads and reliable cars and still understand that we are utterly dependent on God.   I kind of doubt it, though.  At least sometimes we need to experience frustration and helplessness to remind us of that dependence.

Magdalena and Vickie taking the Nuestro Ahora van to the auto mechanic school for some repair advice.