Community Life (Feliz Pascua!)

Throughout the whole SLM discernment process, including the application, phone interview, discernment weekend, and three-week orientation, the importance of community was stressed over and over again. I distinctly remember being asked during my phone interview my previous experiences with community life, and as I had never had a bad roommate situation during my time at Vanderbilt or my study abroad experience in Australia, my response was that community was great and helps to build you up. To this response, I was told by the director that community can also be and was one of the hardest things about his time as an SLM. I can now say after living for 8-and-a-half months inside the hogar where I pretty much exclusively interact with the same volunteers, staff, religious sisters, and girls day after day that I agree with him. However, although the negative aspects of community have been the most challenging thing about my time here, the positives have also made it the most rewarding.

                Living in community here is pretty much like living in a huge family, and if you think that there are people that don’t get along in your family (however big or small), think about how many different personalities there are with potentials to clash with 130 people! However, one thing I have noticed about the girls is in general the amount of solidarity they show for one another when they really need it, especially because all of them come from some sort of broken family background. For example, last week one of the girls’ moms came to visit her, and I was walking past the door where she was crying just after her mom left. I wasn’t sure if something specific was wrong, and I asked her if she wanted to talk about it, but she didn’t, so I just gave her a hug. We were standing there for a while, and three or four girls walked by and asked her what was wrong. When she didn’t respond, they didn’t just give up and go about their business, but stayed and started joking around trying to make her smile and then afterwards she started talking a little bit about her family.

                Another example of positive community within the hogar was during the feast day of Saint Joseph (or San José) a few weeks ago. All of the girls’ dormitories have different names here, and the dormitory of oldest girls is San José. So, to celebrate the feast day of the patron saint of their dorm, we took the older girls to a nearby resort for the afternoon, where there was a nice restaurant, pools, a sauna, and a lake with a couple of canoes! As part of the festivities, each girl was randomly assigned another girl to make a card for, and these cards were exchanged before eating lunch so the girls could show each other how much they mean to them. Of course, some of the girls complained about having to do them, but others put so much time and effort into these cards and were so heartfelt when giving them out.

Two of the girls exchanging cards

They wanted to take lots of pictures by the pool!

We found a really friendly baby deer (I think)

I accompanied some of the girls to dance and recite
poetry for their Father's Day celebration at school!

                I have seen examples of this sense of importance of community not just in the hogar, but in Montero in general. I would say that many people in the US think that your religion should be kept to yourself or at least in your church, but here the churches want to get the whole community involved. For example, during Lent, every Friday there was a Via Cruces, or Way of the Cross, which is very different from the Stations of the Cross that we do in the US. Instead of just staying inside the churches, everyone walked around Montero after Friday evening mass and stopped to pray at different homes and businesses that had prepared a station. This led up to Good Friday, when there was also a dramatization of the stations put on in the back of a flatbed truck that drove in front of us to all of the stations. It was really cool to see that whole community get involved, and I would say that we pretty much always grew in numbers as we progressed and people saw us passing!

The Good Friday Via Cruces

                I was also so blessed to have a member of my family community (my wonderful sister!) come visit the hogar during Holy Week. It was awesome to have her here to see and participate in my community. Just like our relationship, where we often have our disagreements but are always there for each other when we need it, community in general can cause a lot of problems, but can also be so rewarding and build you up when you really need it, which I have experienced myself and seen among the girls. I hope all of your communities had a blessed Easter Sunday and continue to have a blessed Easter season! J