Profiles of our lay missionaries

Dan Ferguson- El Salvador

Dan from Derry on assignment in El Salvador writes

"Thinking on the last 13 months in El Salvador it is hard to sum it up in a few words. We live in a village called Arambala in the north east of El Salvador. The village was virtually destroyed in a 12 year long civil war between 1978 and 1991. It is estimated that during the war 75,000 people were killed and 15,000 people disappeared. In 1992 the people returned to Arambala and began to rebuild the town and today around 2000 people live in Arambala and the surrounding area. Arambala has been identified by the Salvadoran government as one of the poorest areas in the country. Many of the families live on less than a dollar a day. Most families survive by trying to grow their own crops and relying on remittances sent back by family who are living undocumented in the United States. In our municipality almost 70% of the people do not have access to running water, 65% do not have access to proper toilet facilities and 60% do not have access to the electricity supply.

One of the biggest challenges I faced this year was when I got involved in a civil rights case being brought against the El Salvador government by the community of El Mozote a nearby village that is part of our parish.

In December 1981 the Salvadoran army entered the village of El Mozote and surrounds and systematically massacred almost 1000 people. My job has been to create a database which contains a list of the victims with links to their surviving relatives. To date we have collected the details of 987 victims of which almost half were children under the age of 12, some of the children were only days old. This list has been sent to the Inter-American commission on human rights as part of the legal case. What we have to do now, is to find proof of the relationship with the victim for each surviving relative. This is not an easy task as virtually all such documents were destroyed during the war.

Just to give you an idea of the horror that has been visited on these people, a few weeks before I travelled back to Ireland for Christmas a man named Orlando received a grant to rebuild his house. When he started to excavate the foundations he found human remains. They decided to continue to exhume the rest of the remains and it was not until he found a set of false teeth that he realised that he had uncovered the remains of his parents, aunt and sister who lay buried in his back yard for 29 years and he did not know they were there. Obviously Orlando and his family were very upset. We were informed of these events and we visited the family and liaised with the various authorities to have the remains exhumed properly so that they can also be used as evidence in the legal case. Undoubtedly there are many more cases like this.

Along with the work on the El Mozote legal case I am also delivering computer skill classes to the people in the local area. What has amazed me is the enthusiasm that the children have for the classes. Sometimes they arrive almost thirty minutes early. This enthusiasm is so refreshing and makes it a privilege and a joy to spend time with children eager to learn.

My first year in El Salvador has been difficult in terms of learning a new language but it has given me many moments of happiness. The people have welcomed me, shared their culture and shown me their generosity. Through that generosity I have found a passion inside me that makes me want to do all I can to share the skills that I have.

We have just helped set-up a football school for the children in Arambala. Up to now the focus was on the adult football and the children were often overlooked. Ronan is doing some great work liaising with the local villages to set up other schools and we hope to get a small league up and running later in the year".