Tag Archives: El Salvador

by nickharrop | December 17, 2012 · 10:40 am

El Salvador: Life is worth more than gold

Landscape of El Salvador

A reflection from El Salvador

Mining for precious metals like gold and silver presents El Salvador with a seemingly difficult dilemma. How do you choose between generating wealth and employment through mineral exploitation or protecting the environment in the interests of humanity?

By its nature, mining forces a choice between two distinct and opposing things: gold or life. In El Salvador they aren’t compatible. It is important to be clear about this, because some people are confused or hide the truth to promote their own interests. Continue reading →

Ordinary people being extraordinary

Pat, a Primary Advisor from Liverpool Archdiocese, Margaret, a retired Primary Advisor from Shrewsbury (now working in Faith development and doing some writing for CAFOD’s schools team) and our own Bridget Fenwick from the schools team are in El Salvador to experience CAFOD’s work and Romero’s legacy in that country.

This is the third of Bridget’s blogs:

On the 2 hour car journey through some of the most beautiful country I have ever seen, we were all rather nervous at what the next 24 hours would bring. We were driving to Guarjila to meet the community, to hear all about the community health project that CAFOD has supported for years and to stay with the community overnight. The health project originally began in a small house after the Salvadorans returned from a Honduran refugee camp in 1987. It has grown since then and as a result of delivering quality treatment, the government is now supporting it with trained professionals and with state of the art equipment that the clinic would otherwise not have.
But it is individuals I would like to tell you about. Continue reading →

World Youth Day 2011: Love one another, as I have loved you.

It’s been over a week since I returned from Madrid, and I’m still processing exactly what it was that I experienced out in Spain. The entire trip was such an energetic collection of encounters which started off in a small Church in Toledo and culminated in a gigantic open-air Mass on an airfield in Madrid. I was given the opportunity to try traditional foods, learn the Spanish lingo and meet people from particularly obscure countries many of us had never heard of before.

We met people from 46 countries

After setting myself the challenge of spotting CAFOD partner nations, out of the 40 possible, I only managed to meet people from nine of the partner countries – Brazil, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Kenya, Lebanon, Mexico, Nigeria and the Philippines – although I did meet people from a further 36 countries in total. My favourite had to be El Salvador, the nation whose national hero is a CAFOD icon and a strong inspiration of mine for speaking out about civil violence within the country which lead to his assassination in 1980.