Danielle Mackey with friends

Danielle Mackey
El Salvador

“We are all living a constant becoming…We act on information we’ve gathered from our lived experiences, which makes perceptions understandable, even if they’re absolutely deplorable at their worst.”

***

It began with a poetry game. The Salvadoran teenagers, ranging in age from 13 to 17, sat in my classroom number 202 for Conversational English. The air conditioning was on full-blast and the desks were in five rows of five and we were all pretty giggly. Each student jotted down her line and jetted it backward to the student seated directly behind, who did the same.  I invited the last student in each row to read the resulting hodge-podge of poetry lines. One young man started with his group’s piece, which began with a silly image of soda raining from the sky, suddenly turned into an unexpected meeting with an effeminate gay man on the street, and then morphed into a homophobic tirade which ended in the murder of the gay by-passer. A mere ten minutes earlier, the class had been in the thick of a conversation about violence in El Salvador, and the important role that youth play in making this country a place they want to live. Ten minutes ago they were filled with ideas about how they could create peace: practice a religion or a sport, for instance. Respect others, they said. I found myself cascading down from the high of seeing tomorrow’s leaders light up on empowerment, and slamming against the brute force of laughter about a joke whose punchline I didn’t share, to say the least.

A street scene in El Salvador

In my day-to-day schedule as a teacher and journalist in San Salvador I interact with people who have myriad experiences and viewpoints. Generally speaking, however, life in El Salvador is extreme in its poverty and population density and homicide rate, which together tend to produce extreme points of view. This is especially true when it comes to “normal” vs. “different” –or, to put those terms in the way that people seem to mean them, “right” vs. “wrong.”  It isn’t unusual to hear adults on the streets or in the media declaring the sentiments that my youth expressed as a crude joke. And the LGBT population is only one social whipping boy: materially impoverished people, young people in gangs, women who defy feminine stereotypes, and people who have skin that is dark brown or black often find themselves the main character in everything from a dehumanizing joke to a dirty look to a discriminatory government policy. Sometimes people pay the ultimate price for their difference, which was the case for the 12- and-14-year-old boys in a community where my friend works; they left school two days ago and were kidnapped and assassinated. (Their “difference” is their identity as young men in a marginalized community, where they’re always at the barrel-end of a gun, whether held by police or by gang members.) It was also the case in the torture and murder of 17 transgender women within the first 7 months of the year 2009.

I have spent three years hearing these extremes volleyed about, and thus my students’ bloody imaginations weren’t what most surprised me. What caught my breath was the endless chasm between their fire to build a beautiful world and their fire to banish particular people from it. I tried to mentally pause on the memory of their faces as they talked about a peaceful El Salvador: They genuinely want something good. Then I attempted to juxtapose that alongside their display of sexist homophobia. I could have used another long while to take the next step: to push myself into a critical reflection of my own unfair judgments, which I have “learned” throughout my experiences in life, and which have a similar alienating end.  But in that moment, the class had to go on.

A landscape in El Salvador

My students are — like myself and like most people in this world — unable to accurately use the words “I am” as a descriptor. We are all living a constant becoming.  I try to remember this as the emotions of their occasional discriminatory comments make my face red. We act on information we’ve gathered from our lived experiences, which makes perceptions understandable, even if they’re absolutely deplorable at their worst.  Furthermore, we too often forget to consider how pieces of the human condition inextricably connect us all. Even the fact that we all learn from where and how we live is universal. In that sense, my students were essentially laying the groundwork for me to give them a new experience —something to widen them, to encourage reflection about their assumptions, and hopefully to welcome them into a fuller awareness of the fact that they belong to a shared humanity.  To spit a few slapping words about their “ignorance” would have disregarded what I believe about our journeys, and our responsibilities to be present to and witness for each other. It would have been tantamount to a self-reproach, given our interconnectedness.

Unfortunately, there are days when those angry words wriggle beyond my control and slip out. As a lesbian and a woman, this moment with my students unleashed the baying of the inner bulldog reverberating loudly in my head. I was on the verge of spilling over. Over time, I have found that my best preparation for handling these moments is in meditation and writing. I meditate on the people in my life; on their unique energies, on how they empower and challenge me. I bear witness to our shared experiences, our collective story, through my writing. I believe that our stories are as sacred and essential to our understanding of human nature as Watson and Crick’s DNA.

Today, I meditate on my students. I call upon this deep space within us all where we are identical and lovely beyond imagination. I push myself to stay open to and learn from others. I choose to use that moment with my students — which I hated at the time — to try to grow in my understanding of human nature, and to focus on how this young, foreign lesbian woman is a vital part of building a world of peace. I take a deep breath. I question them in that post-poem moment: “Students, you were just talking about your dream of a peaceful El Salvador, and now this?” Silence. Perhaps a widening. Perhaps the future lines that my students write will also be influenced by the story we lived that day.

The views and opinions expressed by the author do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Peace X Peace.