Rick Dixon

YEAR JOINED MKLM: 2011

Country: El Salvador

City: El Cedro and La Esperanza

MINISTRY: Family Literacy/Libraries/Small Christian Base Communities.

MINISTRY AREA: Justice and Peace / Education

GOAL OF MINISTRY: To promote family literacy, education, and community organizing.

Nonviolence Focus:

Prevention and education. The children and families with whom I work have often experienced a deep sense of alienation and fear. To welcome them and give alternatives to dire situations through listening and concrete help — libraries, family literacy, scholarships, and basic food security —enhances the possibility for peaceful solutions.

Ministry Context:

The library engages parents and children in forming stronger relationships through activities for the entire family, for example, we have recently read Peace is An Offering, which explores the many ways we experience peace in our lives. Our reading list also includes Oscar Romero, Chico Mendez, Martin Luther King Jr., Caesar Chavez, Mahatma Gandhi, Dorothy Day, Harriet Tubman, C.S. Lewis, J.R. Tolkien and many others. The library’s goal is to build reading and communication skills, giving kids and their parents a wider vision and choices of what their community and our world can

be, or as Carl T. Rowan wrote: “Reading has liberated more people than all the wars in the world.”

Context: The community center in El Cedro, La Casa del Cipote (The House of the Children), is run by the Sisters of Saint Vincent de Paul. The area is underserved and very poor. Many families live isolated in the jungle, and Monday through Friday mornings more than a hundred people come to the comedor to pick up food prepared by Santos, the cook. Once a month, the children of these families are weighed at the center to make sure they’re getting enough protein and are adequately nourished. Many of these children attend the kindergarten program from 8 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. Monday through Friday, and participate in our library programs.

The community of La Esperanza where I also work dates back to El Salvador’s Civil War (1980-1992). People from the central highlands fled to many areas where railroad ran; this infrastructure, destroyed early on in the war, became prime land to take shelter due to locations closer to urban areas, which provided more security from fighting. These communities to this day are still marginalized, railroad tracks still poke up from the dirt roads of La Esperanza and much of the housing is substandard and employment is difficult to find.

Current Ministry:

What can I say about the children and my work in these communities? I could tell you about reading stories with the children in the library and about the tutoring programs, meals served and the formation of Small Christian Base Communities that organize locally to reflect, reach out, and share with the poorest in the community. But what I most want to share is the spirit of the children and what they have taught me.

More than a few kids in El Cedro, as in La Esperanza, live only with a mother or grandparents. Many fathers, and sometimes mothers, have gone north to the United States to search for work and never return—never heard from again. I often think how these kids would give anything to wrap their hand around even the little finger of their fathers or absent mothers, and hold it as the most valuable treasure in the world. Sometimes a child will look at me and reach out a hand or arms with a great burst of hope and joy. I stare into their faces, and it’s like looking into the heavens that declare the glory of God—God speaking through these little ones: “Behold and see, the moon and the stars, the work of my fingers.”

It makes me feel very small, so I reach out to hold a child’s hand, knowing we are one in this immense universe—knitting together the dust and tears of our hearts.

Personal Data:

I am originally from Orange, California, but also lived in New York City, where I worked for the Queens Library in their adult learning center. I have a bachelor of arts degree in English literature from Azusa Pacific University, California, and a California Teaching Credential from California State University, Fullerton.

I served with Maryknoll Lay Missioners previously in El Salvador from 2012 to 2021, working with small Christian base communities and developing a library and literacy programs in the community of La Esperanza in the town of Cojutepeque. From 2022-2025, I served with Maryknoll Lay Missioners in Mexicali, Mexico assisting the migrants and internationally displaced people traveling through the region.