2009 Mexico

Elena

Sometimes we are compelled to share a story, even though we know we cannot fully capture the experience.   The story is not unlike the photographer framing a shot in order to capture, remember and share the cherished moment.  No matter how you tell the story, no matter how far back you pull your camera’s wide-angled lens, you know that you will never be able to capture the experience in any re-created form.  Still, you feel compelled to tell the story, when it is a story of resurrection and hope. 

It begins with our Spanish immersion class, traveling to a barranca (ravine) at the edge of Cuernavaca, in the neighborhood called Altavista.  We walked for fifteen minutes down an almost vertical pathway to visit the home of Elena, a single mother.  She and her four children live in a one-room house that is about twice the size of my church office.  The house is made of cement and a corrugated metal roof.  The roof is new; only a few months ago the family lived under a roof full of holes that leaked whenever it rained.  It rains almost every day in Cuernavaca.

Elena was born in the neighboring state of Guerrero, one of the poorest states in a poor country.  She married when she was sixteen and gave birth to her first child in the first year of her marriage.  Three more children followed, nearly one every year for the first four years of marriage. 

Elena’s husband was abusive.  He threatened to kill her if she left him.  She would cry in the night.  Whenever she was asked what was wrong, she would only say, “nothing…nothing.”  Her own family counseled her to stay in the marriage because her vows are “sacred.”  One day she asked her husband if things could change.  He told her that “she was a woman and knew nothing; she was a woman and was worthless; she was a woman and was nothing without him.”  It was in that moment, she tells us, that she realized he would continue to abuse her.  She realized that she would continue to have more children who would only be sent to work from dawn until dark in the fields.  And so she decided to take her four children, one only three months old, and leave.

Elena had nowhere to go, except for an aunt she knew in Cuernavaca, a city far from her home.  Her aunt helped her find a job cleaning houses and secured a little patch of ground near the bottom of this ravine.

The lack of money makes everything more difficult.  In Mexico public education is free, but there is still a 500 peso (about $50 U.S.) registration fee for each child, due on the first day of school.  The children are also required to have uniforms, notebooks, pencils, and textbooks, none of which is provided by the school.  This family’s income is about 900 pesos (about $90) a week. 

In the face of all of these challenges, there is something impossible happening here, something as impossible as resurrection.  In this home there is new life, joy, faith, hope, dreams, laughter and love, mostly love.  And it is a firey love, the love that walks miles with four very young children, protecting them from death.  It is the kind of love that forbids the children from cursing their abusive father, so that it does not sow bitterness in their young hearts.  It is the kind of love that shares with others in the neighborhood, “who are worse off.”

Elena has been a little nervous as she tells us her story, often wiping away tears.  But she has a strength, which binds this family in love.  “Where did she find her strength?” one of our group asks.  Her answer was not in the abstract.  She talked about one of our teachers, who she met at church.  Our teacher had noticed that she always seemed so sad, often crying during the mass, but she noticed the tenderness Elena shared with her children.  They became friends, and our teacher’s small group began to help her in many different ways, offering encouragement, sometimes providing food or school supplies, always providing support and more encouragement.

As we are preparing to leave, one of our teachers tells us why we are here.  “You have not been brought here to feel bad for this woman, to think what a sad story it is, what a hard life she leads.  You have been brought here to understand that she is not the only one, that her neighbors have similar stories, that there are others throughout the country with stories like this, and that there are people in our communities back home who have stories just like this.  They are some of the hardest working people in the world who struggle to afford something as simples a notebooks and pencils for their children at the beginning of the school your.  Remember them.  You need them as much as they need you.” 

My journal entry for this night following our visit calls to mind the beatitudes, which are engraved on the cathedral door in Cuernavaca.  In Spanish the verb is “tienen” — so the beatitude reads, “Blessed are those who have the spirit of the poor.”  God bless Elena.  God bless the poor.  God bless those who work with the poor.  God bless all your children.  God bless us and our spirit.