Monday,  January 18, Val and I traveled to Centro Arte para la Paz (Center of Art for Peace), where we will conduct an AVP (Alternatives to Violence Project) facilitator training at the end of the week. The Centro is PLA’s (Peacebuilding en las Américas) primary partner in Suchitoto. Their activities include art, music and photography projects for youth and adults, neighborhood celebrations, parent education, and a variety of workshop on cooperation and peace.

Monday, January 18, 2010

The first 2010 PLA team, Val Liveoak and Margaret Lechner, arrived in Suchitoto, El Salvador. They traveled together from Florida to Guatemala, where they spent two days in Antigua team-building and laying the foundation for work with local facilitators, which will take place in March.

Margaret writes:

Since this is my first time on Friends Peace Teams, I am definitely following Val’s lead on day-to-day activities and planning. I have listened to her many phone calls, as she contacts FPT partners in Guatemala City and San Lucas Tolíman near Lake Atitlán. It turns out that none of them are available in January, so we will return to Guatemala in February or March to work with the active AVP communities.

I lived in El Salvador from August, 1986 to September, 1990. I worked on a Catholic parish team in a small town in the eastern part of the country, training village health promoters. Our town in northern Usulatán was very isolated, literally the end of the road, with nothing beyond it but mountains and the unpatrolled border with Honduras. But in November 1989, we joined the whole country in the time of fear and danger called the “Tope”—the “final offensive” of the FMLN, the rebel guerrillas.