Sarah facilitates a senior citizens class themed on memory of childhood play.

What do you do every day?

I ask this of myself frequently with the arrival of the rainy season, where even the best-laid plans are postponed by a deluge of rain. Maintaining patience and flexibility in this soporific season can be more challenging than carrying out a class, running embroidery group, or evaluating a project. The muggy season adds sluggishness to an already glacially-paced village life.

What do you do? Cling to patience. Attempt flexibility. Model a simple life. Fail. Try again.

On patience. Time runs elastic here. Oftentimes, the Salvadorans know best, but my one-way gringo mentality keeps me attached to the clock instead of attached to the subtle influences of village life.

It’s not that Salvadorans are lazy. Their approach to time is not medieval or outdated. It’s that they view time not as something fixed and measurable, whereas we in the US attach significance to schedules. Salvadorans are not driven by time, but by people, by the personal relationship attached to an event. A community meeting with a start time at 2 p.m. might begin at 3 p.m. The hour of waiting is their hour for important social pleasantries. While I fret, they strengthen the community’s social fabric.

On flexibility. During the rainy season, the deluges wash out the dirt roads, and the potholes damage a dwindling fleet of dumpy school buses spray-painted violent purple. Sometimes, the bus passengers wait for hours until a pickup truck driver relays the memo: “the bus isn’t coming after all — need a lift?” On more than a few occasions, I am that poor sop who waits for the bus that never shows. Last week, it took over an hour before a neighbor’s truck trundled down the road.

Patience in the rainy season. Patience as buses break down. Patience as programmed activities are pushed back weeks. I recently met with a religious congregation that invited me to attend their programming, under the caveat of “well, we’ve scheduled it in August, but it might be in September.”

El Salvadorans wave from the bus.

When faced with the rains, the temptation is to pull back. If everyone expects the senior citizens class to be cancelled, why program it in the first place? This is where being a missioner really sticks: we can never obligate, but we can nudge. Nudge, nudge, nudge. We plan events as if there were no rain to cancel them. You need to animate people to attend no matter what. To encourage, to nudge, and to show by example.

That’s what mission is after all. Mission life is the practice of a life of service and cultivation of virtue, without any breaks.

It means giving up your seat on the bus, even when you want to sit down. It means showing up at rosaries, even when you don’t want to attend. It means being unselfish with your time, resisting a real temptation to simply float along like an aloof bachelorette. It demands really caring, really loving, even if an intervention with that person is limited. It means visiting houses to remind senior citizens about upcoming programming, and it means being willing to be delayed again and again.

Let me tell you, that can be hard work. Sometimes, it is more challenging to constantly give up your seat on the hot, bumpy bus ride than it is to manage an NGO’s multi-thousand-dollar project. Yet, that quiet, simple example serves a deeper point: to give testimony to small acts of kindness, which Salvadorans do every day without noticing their own generosity; to encourage those habits into practices; and to encourage those practices into a life.

This is the testimony we as Maryknollers make for nonviolence and for integral human flourishing: that in small acts of kindness, patience, and flexibility, we show that such a life is possible, and not more difficult than a life of creature comforts or material gain, but simply an ordinary life, one that many Salvadorans are already living.