As I sit here being annoyed at the noise the dryer is making, I was thinking about washing the clothes in Rio Lempa, El Salvador. There, I was not alone. In fact, it was the one time when women's solidarity was the strongest. As the day got heating up, we carried our dirty clothes down to the river. Women with small children brought their kids. The babies slept in the shade, the older kids played in the river.
We each were washing our own stuff, often sharing a sliver of soap. But as we pounded and rolled and rinsed and spread out on the rocks, we talked. It was so different from formal meetings. The women told their heart's secrets. They told of their pain and suffering. They told of their joys, their yearnings. The conversations often drifted away with the dirty water. Conversation isn't exactly the right word. It didn't center around responding to each other. Our job was to hear, to open our hearts.
One woman had had to drown her crying baby in that river when the army was killing everyone in the village. Most of the people were hiding in the river, breathing through reeds. If the soldiers had heard her child crying, everybody would have been killed. I found it hard to breathe through some of the stories. But we kept pounding and rolling and rinsing and ringing.
As the tasks got finished, there was laughter and splashing and playing with the kids and singing. We talked about the new cow the village had gotten recently. We talked about how wonderful it would be for everyone if they could breed her and have more cows. I had a talisman with me which mostly insured my gaining trust from the women. The Peace Abbey had given me Archbishop Romero's eye glass case. He isn't yet a saint in the official Catholic Church (although the new Pope was there last week having discussions about the possibility), but he was a saint and a martyr to the peasants of El Salvador.
The thing that struck me so strongly today was the isolation of our modern lives. We have the wonderful appliances which make our lives so much lighter, but then we have to join the gym or go to class to reach out and be with other people.
About thirty five years ago, I was in the Artist in the Schools project in New Hampshire. I was a weaver. I was assigned to do a project in an impoverished rural school. I brought gorgeous wool and we made a huge wooden frame and stated an old fashioned, hand made tapestry. On the lower levels of the work, about 6 kids at a time sat on the floor, weaving the picture. They also began to talk almost in the same way the women of El Salvador had. Their hands were busy. Their hearts opened up. There was almost something sacred about the space. I now understand my grandmother's joy in quilting bees, and women getting together to spin wool.
I think we miss something having machines doing our work and then going out for entertainment.
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