We are busy busy down here: the anti-mining / environmental work we do has a ton of activities this month and this whole child migration crisis has us working double time. I would just like to share that, about the child migrants, it is often very hard to find hope here in El Salvador. That is something I have struggled with a lot this year, believing the hope I say I have, and i know that struggle is a thousand times stronger for the vast majority of people in this beautifully tragic country.  It’s because people don’t find hope here that they go looking for it elsewhere, even though it is scarce for those undocumented immigrants who do make it to the US.  How can we have hope when the same violence, corruption, and destruction keeps repeating itself?  How can we have hope when the people we must fear are our neighbors, our cousins, our sons…?  This is a heavy time in El Salvador, and while I’m really grateful to be in an organization that is doing something productive and improving conditions at least for some here in El Salvador, even that sometimes is not enough.  I know there are people in the Vox community who know hopelessness, and those are the people who I ask to pray for the hopeless here in El Salvador, that we could find real hope, and maybe then we can be so bold as to try for peace.

Catie is a Voxite who has been living in El Salvador for the past few years working with U.S.-El Salvador Sister Cities.

Photo by Pink Sherbet Photography @ Flickr