**A shuttle will be provided for this service, leaving promptly at 8:15 from the Catholic Center in the UV.**

The Annual Catholic Olympics is taking place at UCLA on Saturday, April 21st .

Join other Catholic campus ministries from around the region as we face off in exciting sporting events, including volleyball, kickball, and ultimate frisbee.

Mass and dinner will follow.

To carpool, meet at the UV office at 2:30PM.

Contact Marguerite Bowen at margueritebowenjep@gmail.com to join Team Catholic Trojan.

Fight on!

Holy Thursday:
Mass of the Lord’s Supper @ 8pm, THH 202

Good Friday:
Tri-Lateral Liturgy of the Word and Veneration of the Cross @ 9pm, UUC

Holy Saturday:
Easter Vigil @ 8pm, SAL 101

Easter Sunday:
Easter Mass 10:30am (only), SAL 101

A note to our families and friends:

We’re so glad you’re reading about our trip! My apologies for our missing posts on the first several nights – we suffered some website and wi-fi glitches, but we’re online again now. Sadly, our photo files are too big and crisp to compress, so we’ll add those at home. See you soon!

Thursday, March 15

I’m writing tonight from our temporary home in San Esteban Catarina, an art-school classroom still filled with laughter close to midnight. Today was fabulous!

Delicious breakfasts are becoming a theme: today we ate scrambled eggs with tomato, bread, chicken tamales and beans. Then we  actually spent the morning with El Salvador’s Chancellor (comparable to our Secretary of State). Apparently he caught wind of our visit a few weeks ago and wanted to see the Forest of Solidarity. An assembly in San Esteban Catarina brought government officials and national news teams to the town for the first time ever. It was genuinely surreal, and I was shocked to realize that our presence – plain American students in smelly t-shirts – was significant enough to attract such important folks. Also, we made some news! (1, 2)

Our work this afternoon included planting our Forest of Solidarity and laying a cement path at Fundeartes (in which we signed our names, of course). Those of us taking breaks played Beatles songs and exchanged language lessons with the students. We went to Mass in a beautiful church in San Esteban Catarina. The town itself is gorgeous, full of brightly painted houses, leftover election signs and wide, rolling hills.

But after a long day, we needed a few minutes to realize what we’ve done this week: not only built houses and painted schools, but established a real, enduring connecting with a few dozen Salvadorian people. We’ve exchanged Facebook and e-mail contact information with many of our newest friends. We’ve also learned an enormous amount from our translators (four of our trippers who speak fluent Spanish, three of whom are Salvadorian) and hosts about the historical and present politics and culture of this country. I’m looking forward to sharing all these stories with friends and family, plus praying for and learning from the people here. They’re truly brothers and sisters. This is the shape solidarity takes, I think.

And again, Fundeartes students treated us to a night of salsa dancing (and we taught them to shuffle in proper Party Rock Anthem style, too!). I think I burned more calories laughing than dancing or even shoveling cement today. Let’s call it a success.

“The scribe said to him, ‘Well said, teacher. You are right in saying, He is One and there is no other than he. And to love him with all your heart, with all your understanding, with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself is worth more than all burnt offerings and sacrifices.’ And when Jesus saw that he answered with understanding, he said to him, ‘You are not far from the Kingdom of God.’”   (Today’s Gospel: Mark 12:28-34)

Wednesday, March 14

SPRING BREAK!

The images I remember most from today come together like a travel company ad: jumping into a natural swimming pond, hiking in 90-degree heat and dancing salsa and bachata as the sun set. But we’re still in El Salvador, I promise, and today was as illuminating as it was exhilarating.

Breakfast, as usual, was delicious – bread, fried eggs, beans, rice and hot chocolate. We left our home base in Amatitan for a hike around 8:00 a.m. Our guide, Don Simeon, led us to the site of the 1982 Masacre del Calabozo, where 6,000 soldiers killed about 200 townspeople as they tried to flee. Holes blown in cliffsides sheltered children and families. For ten subsequent years, Amatitan was deserted; the government denied the incident altogether. When families began returning to the village in 1992 – around the time most of our group was born – they rebuilt everything we saw today from scratch. Don Simeon even described students studying in trees before schools were built. For the first time this week, all 24 of us walked in silence.

Our climb along the riverbed ended at a shady, clear pond at a bend in the river, and immediately, half of us traded sweaty shorts for swimsuits and cannonballed in. We never started the chicken fight Greg pushed so adamantly for, but nonetheless (or maybe for the better), I can’t imagine a more beautiful way to spend the morning.

Lunch was wild chicken soup, Edwin’s favorite (and with good reason). Then, sadly, we bid farewell to our incredibly gracious hosts in Amatitan and boarded the coaster. We disembarked an hour later at Fundeartes, a school for the arts in San Esteban Catarina, which will be our home until Friday. The students here challenged us to a few rounds of ping-pong, most of which we lost; then the woodwind orchestra played us a concert including a Beatles medley and USC’s fight song!

We helped set up tents for tomorrow’s festival and started digging holes for our Forest of Solidarity. Dinner, again delicious, included beans, cheese, bread and delicious mugs of Salvadorian coffee. Finally, the students at Fundeartes treated us to a dance. I didn’t expect to learn salsa and bachata this week, but after a few hours (normally these nights go on until the wee hours, apparently, but we have an early morning tomorrow!) I think we’d nearly mastered it!

We’re blessed to be here, again – Christ is working! Keep us in your prayers.

Tuesday, March 13

Our first full day in Amatitan was full of heat, dirt and paint – and I promise, all these are good things! We woke up to the sound of real crowing roosters around 6:30 a.m. to eat a delicious breakfast of cheese, bread, beans and plantanes (like fried bananas). The sun was hot by 8:00 when we left the church for our work sites.

Our first stop was a house where neighbors were building one woman a room where she could have kidney dialysis. A five-person team dug the foundation and laid the room’s steel frame, and the afternoon group mixed and poured its cement. The neighbors were kind (and had great taste in music!), but we’ll be sore tomorrow!

The second group painted Amatitan’s youth center from top to bottom. At 8:30, the concrete walls were bare; by 5:30, they were coated in red and pink tempra paint. The kids who will use this center told us all about themselves and even helped us fill in the cracks.

Our third site was a soon-to-be-house with only walls standing. Our team dug into the hillside to create a staircase and leveled the ground inside for a floor. The homeowners even offered us a chicken for dinner, but sadly, we already had plans!

Before dinner, each of us took our first showers of the trip. Our church doesn’t have plumbing, so a tarp hung against the side of the kitchen created our shower space. We washed with a single hose and little bowls of water splashed from a pool – but boy, did it feel great.

Our evening included games of “Miko”(tag) with Amatitan’s kids, another round of pupusas, an enlightening question-and-answer session with town leaders about El Salvador during and after its civil war, and finally, an introduction to local folktales. Apparently Cipitillo, a little chubby man in a fishing hat who only eats ashes, occasionally falls in love with a local woman – however, he’s the ever-young son of a ghost woman and the devil, and pursues women with such intensity that he throws stones at them constantly. Eventually, they usually stop eating or develop a fever. Lesson: If a small man throws stones at you, ladies, get away. (Helpful – but mostly hilarious!) The neighborhood’s kids even performed a skit of the story for us.

We’re leaving Amatitan for neighboring San Esteban Catarina tomorrow, and we’re going to miss it! This community has truly become a home in the last 36 hours, and we’re blessed to call its people our brothers and sisters. Muchos gracias!

“Everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house upon the rock. The rains came down, the streams rose, and the wind blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock.”   (Matthew 6:24-25)

Monday, March 12th 

Hola from Amatitan, El Salvador! We’re happy to report that our travel day passed seamlessly: We all got to LAX on time and our four-and-a-half hour flight from LAX reached San Salvador, the nation’s capital, around 2:00 p.m. We felt the heat as soon as we stepped off the plane! After we each dug out a pair of shorts, representatives from the Ministry of External Affairs met us at our gate and guided us through customs to our buses (“coasters”) for the trip to the village.

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Our guides from the Ministry of External Affairs, Manuel and Jocelyn, welcome us to the airport in San Salvador

We traveled almost the length of the country over the next three hours – the airport is near El Salvador’s southern border, and Amatitan is in San Vicente, one of its northern departments. The drive, like most drives, included lunch, napping and a sing-along session with the radio (the latter is becoming a theme). After a long stretch of narrow countryside highway that introduced us to Salvadoran villages, cemeteries, volcanoes and wildlife, we paused for an ominous* announcement from Edwin:  “On this next stretch, the bus is going to begin jumping for joy – for the road.”

The unpaved stretch leading us up the mountain was definitely bumpy, but our drivers delivered us to Amatitan safe and sound!

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Dale meets Tonita, who prepared our delicious dinner of pupusas and hot chocolate in Amatitan

We were greeted not only by smiles and handshakes, but the town orchestra. Who knew?

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San Esteban Catarina’s orchestra welcomes us with a rendition of “Stand By Me” and the U.S. national anthem

Next, we coated ourselves in bug spray and indulged in pupusas and cups of hot chocolate made from boiling real cocoa beans – it’s never too hot for something so delicious! Erica even helped cook (and we’ll have to remember how well she did – we’ll need that skill when we get back to the States). Some orchestra members shared  a clarinet and guitar with Greg and Anthony, resulting in a long jam session that should be the postcard for how unifying music can be.

Amatitan, however, was also one of the areas hit hardest by El Salvador’s civil war. The war ended in 1990, but the gravity of figures like Archbishop Oscar Romero is still enormous. After dinner, we asked some of Amatitan’s adults about Romero’s role in their own lives. Generally, I think they agreed that here, he represents Christ better than anyone. We’ll get to talk again tomorrow, and I can’t believe how lucky we are – theirs are such important, incredible and painfully recent stories that are too easy to overlook from Los Angeles.

Tonight, we’re sleeping in Amatitan’s church on mattresses from their community house. Tomorrow, we start work on houses nearby. It’s going to be a hot one – keep praying for us!

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Jorge and the rest of our ASB team prepare for bed, ready to wake up for breakfast around 6:30 on Tuesday!

Alex and Sergio closed our evening with this reflection from the Letter of St. James:

“My brothers and sisters, believers in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ must not show favoritism. Suppose someone comes into your meeting wearing a gold ring and fine clothes, and a poor person in filthy old clothes also comes in. If you show special attention to the one wearing fine clothes and say, ‘Here’s a good seat for you,’ but say to the to the one who is poor, ‘You stand there’ or ‘Sit on the floor by my feet,’ have you not discriminated among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts? Listen, my dear brothers and sisters. Has not God chosen those who are poor in the eyes of the world to be rich in faith and to inherit the kingdom he promised those who love him?”   (James 2:1-5)

*By “ominous” I mean “absolutely hysterical and something we brought up for the rest of the ride”

Monday, March 5

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but we leave for El Salvador exactly one week from today – Monday, March 12! Since January, we’ve been studying the country’s history and discussing Catholic social justice teaching, and this weekend we watched a film called Romero (about the life of Archbishop Oscar Romero, d. 1980) and ate the first of many ASB pupusas. In our last week stateside, we’ll discuss trip logistics, finalize our travel schedule within the country and, of course, spend a great deal of time in prayer. Father Lawrence will give us his blessing at the CC’s 10:30 a.m. Mass on Sunday, and less than 24 hours later, we’ll be en route.

We’ll post pictures and stories on this page every day from our service projects, conversations and travels. As you read, please pray for our open minds, strong hands and willing hearts – it’s going to be a challenging but incredible week!

All Christ’s peace,

The USC Catholic Center Alternative Spring Break team

“The Church can be Church only as long as it goes on being the Body of Christ. Its mission will be authentic only so long as it is the mission of Jesus in the new situations, the new circumstances of history. The criterion that will guide the church will be neither the approval of, nor the fear of, men and women, no matter how powerful or threatening they may be. It is the church’s duty in history to lend its voice to Christ so that he may speak, its feet so that he may walk today’s world, its hands to build the reign of God. ”

(Archbishop Oscar Romero, Aug. 6, 1977).