Jun
Education, News from Communities, Sister Cities
Solidarity workshops in CRIPDES’ regions
Every two months, SALVAIDE, The SHARE Foundation and Sister Cities meet with the sistering representatives of the five regions of CRIPDES and some CRIPDES board members. These are the sistering meetings. During these meetings, we talk about the current context, hear reports about the regions and share ideas or proposals.
During one of these meetings, we discussed the current political landscape in El Salvador. Our country and our communities are facing lots of division and uncertainty, fueled by the Trump-like actions of our new president, already acting like he’s above the law and cozing up to the U.S. government. Furthermore, we recently faced the turmoil of the internal elections of a fractured FMLN.
We realized people needed to remember our history. We were once able to come together for a greater good, despite political or religious differences. We were and should be able to put “organization” first.
We decided to bring this reflection to the already-existing spaces in CRIPDES’ regions, such as the CCR sistering meetings or the scholarship recipients’ meetings in San Vicente, CRIPDES SUR, PROGRESO, UCRES and even in ARDM, in Cinquera.
Miguel Mejía, Isabel Hernández, Zulma Tobar and Mario Guevara got together and designed a workshop that could spark such conversations. We decided to focus on three aspects: talking about CRIPDES’ history to remember where we come from and the challenges we managed to overcome; talking about “solidarity” and discussing cases of solidarity among salvadorans and with international allies, and, finally, talking about the distinction between “support” and “assistentialism”.
We wanted to emphasize our interest in “community organizing”, not “assistentialism” because this is “not concerned about the eradication of the root causes of social ills (…) assistentialism maintains that nothing can be done, in terms of structural reforms, reducing all social action to the application of palliatives” (x). We needed to acknowledge that mistakes were made several times in the past when, in trying to help, U.S. groups ended up creating chaos and division among communities. We need them to be able to clearly identify when something is not really helping their own organizing efforts and how damaging this can be.
This weekend we had the opportunity to meet with our friends in Chalatenango with great attendance at the CCR and also meet with the youth and board members of the CRIPDES SUR region. It was a great opportunity to make them reflect upon this and, hopefully, it will encourage them to have these conversations in their own communities and maybe even with their own sistered cities.
We are eager to see how these workshops will unfold in the rest of the regions. This is our humble contribution to a much larger and complicated issue.
